Posted on 11/21/2003 7:44:30 PM PST by Centennial
Ex-agent refuses to toe party line on JFK slaying
GRAND JUNCTION - Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone when he killed President John F. Kennedy' a retired agent said Wednesday. Instructions were given to lie. Evidence was destroyed.
(Excerpt) Read more at WWW.rockymountainnews.com ...
The CIA pulled the story. Then they used a neuralizer to
By Ellen Miller, Special To The News
November 20, 2003
GRAND JUNCTION - Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone when he killed President John F. Kennedy, a retired agent said Wednesday, and the president died because Secret Service agents failed at their jobs.
"Officially, the answer to Oswald when somebody asks - because we were ordered to say it - is that the Warren Commission found that he acted alone," retired agent Jerry O'Rourke said. "But was there more than one gunman? Yes, personally I believe so. And my personal opinion about Jack Ruby is that he was paid to kill Oswald."
O'Rourke grew up in Telluride and attended Western State and Regis colleges, then spent 22 years in the Secret Service. Now retired and back home, he spoke Wednesday to the downtown Grand Junction Rotary Club.
O'Rourke said his group of agents, about 10 of them, had protected Kennedy the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, at a breakfast speech in Fort Worth. Then the group left by air for Austin, the next stop planned for the president's Texas tour.
"We got the word (of the assassination) in the air, and we didn't believe it at first," he said. "We were joking. But later, most of the agents had tears in their eyes. Agents believed in Kennedy, and we knew we failed our job in Dallas."
After his White House tour ended during Johnson's presidency, O'Rourke spent a year in the Secret Service intelligence division, which offered him glimpses into the investigation of Kennedy's death.
Those glimpses, and the accounts of other agents, have convinced O'Rourke that Oswald didn't act alone. He cited several reasons:
• Kennedy had a number of enemies, any of whom could have plotted against him. They included Southerners angered by his insistence on civil rights; organized crime; labor unions unhappy with investigations of them by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; Cuban dissidents angry over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion; and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
• The shots were impossible to make. O'Rourke learned to shoot as a boy and trained as a marksman in the military. He said his visits to Oswald's perch at the Texas Book Depository convince him that no one could have fired a rifle three times so quickly, hitting the president and Texas Gov. John Connolly.
• The trajectory of one of the shots could not have been made from a gunman on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. The shot entered Kennedy's body at his lower back and traveled up, to exit near his throat.
• The circumstances of the autopsy were irregular. Texas law requires autopsies to be done in state, but agents, acting on the orders of White House, took Kennedy's body back to Washington, D.C. The autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center under secrecy that prevails to this day.
• Evidence was destroyed. O'Rourke said that on the day of the assassination, one agent was ordered to clean out the cars used in the motorcade, getting rid of blood and other evidence. The agent told O'Rourke that he found a piece of skull, asked the White House doctor what to do with it, and was told to destroy it.
• Instructions were given to lie. The agent in charge of motorcade protection told O'Rourke that he was told by the Warren Commission during his testimony that he did not hear a fourth shot and he did not see someone running across the grassy knoll. But the agent insisted that his account was accurate.
• Evidence about the shots is in conflict. An open microphone on a motorcycle in the motorcade picked up four shots, not three.
"In my opinion, Hoover wanted the commission to find that Oswald acted alone," O'Rourke said. "The complete file won't be released until 2027, and the reason for that is most of us will be dead by then."
MORE: mcadams.posc.mu.edu/organ1.htmThe Oswald Agenda
By Jerry OrganIt's interesting to speculate on how much of Dealey Plaza would have survived if not for the assassination. The old Art-Deco Bryon Colonnade might have been deemed an eyesore and replaced with a strip mall. The Depository would have been just another worthless and antiquated warehouse, long-ago demolished in favor of a parking lot.
The saviour of Dealey Plaza wasn't a committee of cultural elitists and architectural experts. No politicans or businessmen saw potential in such a cause. Even the saviour didn't have preservation on his mind when he approached the Depository early on the morning of November 22, 1963. Destruction and mayhew were his goals.
Oswald had no Motive?
Over the years, critics have made much of the Warren Commission's "failure" to assign a specific motive to Lee Harvey Oswald. However, the Commission acknowledged it "has functioned neither as a court presiding over an adversary proceeding nor as a prosecutor determined to prove a case, but as a factfinding agency committed to the ascertainment of the truth." The Commission differentiated itself from a court with a prosecutor advancing a motive for the accused. Suggesting a singular motive would have meant speculation, which was not in the Commission's mandate of strict factfinding.A review of Oswald's background and writings comprise Chapter VII of The Warren Report called "Lee Harvey Oswald: Background and Possible Motives." The Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979 noted the conclusions of this chapter, adding: "Politics was the dominant force in his life right down to the last days when upon being arrested for the assassination, he requested to be represented by a lawyer prominent for representing Communists."
Socialist to Revolutionary
Oswald was a self-proclaimed Marxist since adolescence who deflected to the USSR in 1959 on his own initiative, offering to trade on his military experience with the Marines. Oswald's ideal of a Soviet utopia was immediately soured by bureaucratic indifference, causing Oswald to adopt revolutionary Marxism as opposed to institutionalized Leninism, perhaps inspired by some Cuban students he befriended while living in Minsk. By the time Oswald and his Russian-born wife Marina leave the USSR in June 1962, Oswald sees in the Castro revolution a truer form of socialism -- one not corrupted by Soviet Communist Party Officials and their perks.Ironically, Oswald, as he planned the assassination of Dallasite General Walker -- an outspoken critic of Castro -- might have been expecting the act would ensure for him a prominent position in Havana, where he planned to eventually defect. The nighttime attempt on Walker on April 10, 1963 failed when Oswald's bullet was deflected by a window frame.
That summer, while living in New Orleans, Oswald was very active in defending Castro through leafletting and debating on radio. Oswald apparently tried to infiltrate some anti-Castro elements, perhaps to gather intelligence to impress Havana. All this effort turned out to be for nothing when Oswald was rejected at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City in early October -- a dejected Oswald wrote the Soviet embassy in Washington about the episode in a letter mailed November 12.
Oswald may have read David Harker's September 1963 interview with Castro that appeared in major US newspapers, quoting Castro as saying: "United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe."
Jean Davison, in the 1983 book Oswald's Game, suggests Oswald could have read in The Militant -- the Socialist Workers' newspaper which he subscribed to -- of Castro's suspicions of US -- sponsored assassination attempts against him by the US, and acted in retaliation. Oswald would show Castro what a great revolutionary he missed out on.
Ilya Mamontov was a Russian immigrant to this country. Among other things, he taught Russian history at SMU. He was also very close with the Russian community in Dallas. He was close friends with a lot of the people in Dallas who were interviewed about Oswald because they were friends with Oswald's wife, Marina. Ilya knew her, also.
I think he read the entire Warren report, word for word. When he learned that nothing he had said had been reported correctly, he figured the whole thing was a lie, and maintained that opinion until he died a few years ago. BTW, Ilya was a strict conservative and loved being an American, FWIW.
this isn't Murder on the Orient Express
LOL....nevermind
And so is JFK.
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