4um: NY Times: Is the CIA still hiding JFK assassination secrets?

[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help]

Status: Not Logged In; Sign In

The Attack on the USS Liberty (June 8, 1967) - Speech by Survivor Phillip Tourney At the Revisionist History of War Conference (Video)
Â‘I Smell CIA/Deep State All Over ThisÂ’ Â— RFK Jr. VP Nicole Shanahan Blasts Sanctuary Cities,
we see peaceful protests launching in Los AngelesÂ” - Democrat Senator Cory Booke
We have no legal framework for designating domestic terror organizations
Los Angeles Braces For Another Day Of Chaos As Newsom Pits Marxist Color Revolution Against Trump Admin
Methylene Blue Benefits
Another Mossad War Crime
80 served arrest warrants at 'cartel afterparty' in South Carolina
When Ideas Become Too Dangerous To Platform
The silent bloodbath that's tearing through the middle-class
Kiev Postponed Exchange With Russia, Leaves Bodies Of 6,000 Slain Ukrainian Troops In Trucks
Iranian Intelligence Stole Trove Of Sensitive Israeli Nuclear Files
In the USA, the identity of Musk's abuser, who gave him a black eye, was revealed
Return of 6,000 Soldiers' Bodies Will Cost Ukraine Extra $2.1Bln
Palantir's Secret War: Inside the Plot to Cripple WikiLeaks
Digital Prison in the Making?
In France we're horrified by spending money on Ukraine
Russia has patented technology for launching drones from the space station
Kill ICE: Foreign Flags And Fires Sweep LA
6,000-year-old skeletons with never-before-seen DNA rewrites human history
First Close Look at China’s Ultra-Long Range Sixth Generation J-36Jet
I'm Caitlin Clark, and I refuse to return to the WNBA
Border Czar Tom Homan: Â“We Are Going to Bring National Guard in TonightÂ” to Los Angeles
These Are The U.S. States With The Most Drug Use
Chabria: ICE arrested a California union leader. Does Trump understand what that means?Anita Chabria
White House Staffer Responsible for ‘Fanning Flames’ Between Trump and Musk ID’d
Texas Yanks Major Perk From Illegal Aliens - After Pioneering It 24 Years Ago
Dozens detained during Los Angeles ICE raids
Russian army suffers massive losses as Kremlin feigns interest in peace talks — ISW
Russia’s Defense Collapse Exposed by Ukraine Strike

History
See other History Articles

Title: NY Times: Is the CIA still hiding JFK assassination secrets?
Source: http://rawstory.com/2009/10/ny-times-is-the-cia-still-hiding
URL Source: http://rawstory.com/2009/10/ny-time ... ing-jfk-assassination-secrets/
Published: Oct 17, 2009
Author: Muriel Kane
Post Date: 2009-10-17 15:59:39 by Kamala
Keywords: None
Views: 228
Comments: 14

NY Times: Is the CIA still hiding JFK assassination secrets?

By Muriel Kane

Friday, October 16th, 2009 -- 10:14 pm

Share on Facebook Stumble This! Email This Post

The CIA is fighting to prevent the release of hundreds of documents involving its funding of an anti-Castro group in New Orleans that engaged in well-publicized clashes with Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1963.

The New York Times reported on Friday that the files "involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations -- but never told the committee of his earlier role."

Joannides was the deputy director for psychological warfare at the CIA's Miami station, JM/WAVE, which was the center of anti-Castro activities in the early 60's and served as a spawning ground for figures who would later be involved in covert operations in Vietnam and in Iran-Contra. In 1963, Joannides worked closely with leaders of the the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil and exercised a significant degree of control over the group's leaders.

Former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley has been engaged since 2001 in a battle to learn move about the dual role placed by Joannides, which has raised suspicions that he was part of a coverup. "I know there's a story here," Morley told the Times. "The confirmation is that the C.I.A. treats these documents as extremely sensitive."

In December 2007, a Court of Appeals panel ordered the CIA to reveal its files on Joannides, and some documents were released last year confirming Joannides' role in New Orleans. However, the CIA is still withholding or even refusing to confirm the existence of hundreds more.

Story continues below...

This past July, Morley wrote, "Last week, I did my part to hold the CIA accountable. I filed my sixth (!) declaration in connection with Morley v. CIA, my ongoing lawsuit against the agency seeking records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. ... The Joannides file, say a diverse group of JFK authors, are part of the assassination story and should be made public. For six years, the CIA has refused, alleging their release would harm 'national security.'"

Morley's quest has gained prominent supporters, including even anti-conspiracy assassination scholar Gerald Posner, who believes that the CIA's secretiveness is feeding into conspiracy theories.

G. Robert Blakey, who served as staff director to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, told the Times, "If I’d known his role in 1963, I would have put Joannides under oath -- he would have been a witness, not a facilitator. ... How do we know what he didn’t give us?"

Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread

Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest

#1. To: All (#0)

October 17, 2009
C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior.
For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.
The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his earlier role.
That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about C.I.A. activities. The agency’s deception was first reported in 2001 by Jefferson Morley, who has doggedly pursued the files ever since, represented by James H. Lesar, a Washington lawyer specializing in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.
“The C.I.A.’s conduct is maddening,” said Mr. Morley, 51, a former Washington Post reporter and the author of a 2008 biography of a former C.I.A. station chief in Mexico.
After years of meticulous reporting on Mr. Joannides, who died at age 68 in 1990, he is convinced that there is more to learn.
“I know there’s a story here,” Mr. Morley said. “The confirmation is that the C.I.A. treats these documents as extremely sensitive.”
Mr. Morley’s quest has gained prominent supporters, including John R. Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota who served in 1994 and 1995 as chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, created by Congress to unearth documents related to the case.
“I think we were probably misled by the agency,” Judge Tunheim said, referring to the Joannides records. “This material should be released.”
Gerald Posner, the author of an anti-conspiracy account of the Kennedy assassination, “Case Closed” (Random House, 1993), said the C.I.A.’s withholding such aged documents was “a perfect example of why nobody trusts the agency.”
“It feeds the conspiracy theorists who say, ‘You’re hiding something,” ’ Mr. Posner said.
After losing an appeals court decision in Mr. Morley’s lawsuit, the C.I.A. released material last year confirming Mr. Joannides’s deep involvement with the anti-Castro Cubans who confronted Oswald. But the agency is withholding 295 specific documents from the 1960s and ’70s, while refusing to confirm or deny the existence of many others, saying their release would cause “extremely grave damage” to national security.
“The methods of defeating or deterring covert action in the 1960s and 1970s can still be instructive to the United States’ current enemies,” a C.I.A. official wrote in a court filing.
An agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the C.I.A. had opened to Judge Tunheim’s board all files relevant to the assassination and denied that it was trying to avoid embarrassment. “The record doesn’t support that, any more than it supports conspiracy theories, offensive on their face, that the C.I.A. had a hand in President Kennedy’s death,” Mr. Gimigliano said.
C.I.A. secrecy has been hotly debated this year, with agency officials protesting the Obama administration’s decision to release legal opinions describing brutal interrogation methods. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, came under attack from Republicans after she accused the C.I.A. of misleading Congress about waterboarding, adding, “They mislead us all the time.”
On the Kennedy assassination, the deceptions began in 1964 with the Warren Commission. The C.I.A. hid its schemes to kill Fidel Castro and its ties to the anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, or Cuban Student Directorate, which received $50,000 a month in C.I.A. support during 1963.
In August 1963, Oswald visited a New Orleans shop owned by a directorate official, feigning sympathy with the group’s goal of ousting Mr. Castro. A few days later, directorate members found Oswald handing out pro-Castro pamphlets and got into a brawl with him. Later that month, he debated the anti-Castro Cubans on a local radio station.
In the years since Oswald was named as the assassin, speculation about who might have been behind him has never ended, with various theories focusing on Mr. Castro, the mob, rogue government agents or myriad combinations of the above. Mr. Morley, one of many writers to become entranced by the story, insists he has no theory and is seeking only the facts.
His lawsuit has uncovered the central role in overseeing directorate activities of Mr. Joannides, the deputy director for psychological warfare at the C.I.A.’s Miami station, code-named JM/WAVE. He worked closely with directorate leaders, documents show, corresponding with them under pseudonyms, paying their travel expenses and achieving an “important degree of control” over the group, as a July 1963 agency fitness report put it.
Fifteen years later, Mr. Joannides turned up again as the agency’s representative to the House assassinations committee. Dan Hardway, then a law student working for the committee, recalled Mr. Joannides as “a cold fish,” who firmly limited access to documents. Once, Mr. Hardway remembered, “he handed me a thin file and just stood there. I blew up, and he said, ‘This is all you’re going to get.’ ”
But neither Mr. Hardway nor the committee’s staff director, G. Robert Blakey, had any idea that Mr. Joannides had played a role in the very anti-Castro activities from 1963 that the panel was scrutinizing.
When Mr. Morley first informed him about it a decade ago, Mr. Blakey was flabbergasted. “If I’d known his role in 1963, I would have put Joannides under oath — he would have been a witness, not a facilitator,” said Mr. Blakey, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. “How do we know what he didn’t give us?”
After Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “J.F.K.” fed speculation about the Kennedy assassination, Congress created the Assassination Records Review Board to release documents. But because the board, too, was not told of Mr. Joannides’s 1963 work, it did not peruse his records, said Judge Tunheim, the chairman.
“If we’d known of his role in Miami in 1963, we would have pressed for all his records,” Judge Tunheim said.
No matter what comes of Mr. Morley’s case in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Tunheim said he might ask the current C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, to release the records, even if the names of people who are still alive must be redacted for privacy.
What motive could C.I.A. officials have to bury the details of Mr. Joannides’s work for so long? Did C.I.A. officers or their Cuban contacts know more about Oswald than has been revealed? Or was the agency simply embarrassed by brushes with the future assassin — like the Dallas F.B.I. officials who, after the assassination, destroyed a handwritten note Oswald had previously left for an F.B.I. agent?
Or has Mr. Morley spent a decade on a wild goose chase?
Max Holland, who is writing a history of the Warren Commission, said the agency might be trying to preserve the principle of secrecy.
“If you start going through the files of every C.I.A. officer who had anything to do with anything that touched the assassination, that would have no end,” Mr. Holland said.
Mr. Posner, the anti-conspiracy author, said that if there really were something explosive involving the C.I.A. and President Kennedy, it would not be in the files — not even in the documents the C.I.A. has fought to keep secret.
“Most conspiracy theorists don’t understand this,” Mr. Posner said. “But if there really were a C.I.A. plot, no documents would exist.”

Home World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Automobiles Back to Top Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Mark

If America is destroyed, it may be by Americans who salute the flag, sing the national anthem, march in patriotic parades, cheer Fourth of July speakers - normally good Americans who fail to comprehend what is required to keep our country strong and free - Americans who have been lulled into a false security (April 1968).---Ezra Taft Benson, US Secretary of Agriculture 1953-1961 under Eisenhower

Kamala posted on 2009-10-17 16:01:09 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#2. To: All (#1)

Jefferson Morley
Posted: December 13, 2007 01:35 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index

Court Orders CIA to Search for JFK Records digg Huffpost - stumble reddit del.ico.us ShareThis Read More: Abu Zubaydah, Cia, Jfk, JFK Assasination, Missing CIA Torture Tapes, Politics News

Last week, the CIA admitted that it had destroyed key evidence in the case of al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubudaya, triggering denunciations from congressional leaders and legal authorities who said the agency was behaving lawlessly.
Two days later, a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals ordered the agency to search for long-suppressed files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The judges said the CIA had to search the files of a deceased Miami-based intelligence who hid what he knew about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald from investigators.
"The CIA has not changed its ways since JFK," said author Gerald Posner, a Huffington Post contributor, who has written about the Abu Zubadayah case. He is also the author of a book on Kennedy's assassination.
The appellate court ruling marked an unusual setback for the agency. "FOIA decisions against the CIA are relatively rare," notes Secrecy News.
"To paraphrase Ricky Ricardo," said the FOIA Blog, "it looks like the CA has "lot's of 'xplaining to do."
That was the gist of Judge Judith Rogers' 31-page decision in my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking records of George Joannides, a career undercover officer. At the time of Kennedy's murder, Joannides served as chief of psychological warfare operations in south Florida. He also served as the CIA's liaison to congressional JFK investigators in 1978. He died in 1990.
Rogers, joined by two colleagues, rejected the CIA's argument that it had no obligation to search for documents about Joannides in the files of its secret operations in 1963. During oral arguments in October, the judges had grilled Agency lawyer about this claim. In their decision, the judges ruled that the law required a search of sensitive operational files, something the agency almost always resists.
The judges also said that the Agency had not adequately explained the whereabouts of monthly reports filed by Joannides in 1963.
In August 1963, Joannides was secretly funding a Cuban exile group whose members clashed repeatedly with Oswald, an ex-Marine and supporter of Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro. When Kennedy was killed in Dallas, apparently by Oswald, three months later, the group used CIA funds to publicize these contacts and blame the assassination on Castro.
The CIA did not reveal Joannides' financial relationship to the accused assassin's antagonists to the Warren Commission, which investigated the crime and concluded Oswald acted alone. Joannides' reports on his actions in 1963 have never surfaced.
"On remand the CIA must supplement its explanation" of why the reports cannot be found, the court ruled.
The judges ordered lower court Judge Richard Leon to supervise the implementation of its order, a process that is expected to take several months.
"The CIA has constantly been an active leader in hiding, distorting, and sometimes destroying evidence on key issues affecting our history and lives," Posner said in an email.
That's a harsh judgment but it is more plausible today than it was before the Abu Zubadayah revelations and the Rogers decision

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jefferson-morley/court-orders-cia-to-searc_b_76683.html?view=print

Mark

Kamala posted on 2009-10-17 16:04:18 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#3. To: All (#2)

Will the CIA obey the law?
July 20, 2009, 8:47AM

Last week, I did my part to hold the CIA accountable.
I filed my sixth (!) declaration in connection with Morley v. CIA, my ongoing lawsuit against the agency seeking records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
My case is far removed from the House Intelligence Committee's investigation of the mysterious assassination program recently canceled by CIA director Leon Panetta. It has nothing to do with Attorney Eric Holder's controversial consideration of whether to prosecute CIA officers for illegal interrogation methods. It is irrelevant to what Rep Rush Holt (D.-NJ) has proposed: a congressional investigation of the CIA as "intense and comprehensive as the probe conducted more than 30 years ago -- in the wake of the Watergate scandal -- by a special committee headed by U.S. Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat." (Hat tip to Spencer.)
But my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, now in its sixth year, is a microcosm of the same basic question facing the White House, Congress and the American public: can the CIA be made to obey the law?

In my experience, the answer is: not easily. In this latest submission to the court, I did not bother offer a JFK conspiracy theory because I don't have one. Rather, my bone-dry 28-page declaration refutes a number of CIA claims made in a sworn affidavit submitted last year to Judge Richard J. Leon last November.
Who was George Joannides and why does his story matter? At the time of Kennedy's murder in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Joannides, using the aliases of 'Howard' and 'Walter Newby,' served as the chief of the CIA's psychological warfare programs in Miami. His assignment was to mount covert operations to confuse and confound the government of Fidel Castro so as to hasten its overthrow.
Joannides's duties, according my declaration and declassified CIA records, included guiding and monitoring an anti-Castro student exile group which was harshly critical of JFK's Cuba policy. The group made headlines within hours of JFK's murder by denouncing accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as a Castro supporter. The Warren Commission was not told of Joannides' involvement with the group. Fifteen years later, Joannides served as the agency's liaison to the congressional committee re-investigating JFK's assassination. Congress was not told of Joannides' actions in 1963. Joannides died in 1990, having never been questioned by investigators about his knowledge of Oswald's contacts with the group he handled.
(If you want to know the Joannides story in detail, read here, here and here, then watch this video where I explain how the CIA at first tried to disavow any knowledge of Joannides' actions in 1963 and then had to backtrack.)
The Joannides file, say a diverse group of JFK authors, are part of the assassination story and should be made public. For six years, the CIA has refused, alleging their release would harm "national security."
In the sworn affidavit, Delores Nelson, the agency's chief information officer, downplayed the CIA's and Joannides' connection to Oswald's anti-Castro antagonists in 1963. Nelson stated that Joannides did not file the standard monthly reports on the group, known as the Cuban Student Directorate, in 1963 because of funding reductions and "policy differences." In fact, I showed that senior CIA officials preserved funding for the group up until one week before Kennedy was killed and that Joannides' boss credited him having it under control at the time that the group used CIA funds to link Oswald to Castro.
Nelson's affidavit, I noted, had relied on two error-filled CIA memoranda written in 1998. Those memos served to conceal from a civilian review panel the full extent of Joannides' contacts with anti-Castro Cubans in the weeks and days before Kennedy was killed, according to Judge John Tunheim who chaired a civilian review panel that declassified thousands of JFK records in the 1990s. "We were lied to about Joannides for a long time," said Tunheim, former head of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).
The agency has 30 days to file a response to my declaration with Judge Leon. That response will be a useful measure of whether the CIA is responding to the spirit and letter of President Obama's executive order on the Freedom of Information Act.

Mark

Kamala posted on 2009-10-17 16:06:11 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#4. To: Kamala (#2)

The only thing that .gov does really, really, well is lie.

Iran Truth Now!

Lod posted on 2009-10-17 16:12:27 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#5. To: All (#3)

Mark

Kamala posted on 2009-10-17 16:14:09 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#6. To: Kamala (#0)

Morley's quest has gained prominent supporters, including even anti-conspiracy assassination scholar Gerald Posner, who believes that the CIA's secretiveness is feeding into conspiracy theories.

Gerald Posner is a powerful Jew trying to defuse speculation about Jew complicity in the JFK killing.

your_neighbor posted on 2009-10-17 16:27:35 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#7. To: your_neighbor, Kamala, all (#6)

The only guy who hasn't been mentioned in connection to this murder is Joe DiMaggio.

Iran Truth Now!

Lod posted on 2009-10-17 16:32:03 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#8. To: Lod (#7)

I suspect Oswald had something to do with it.

Cynicom posted on 2009-10-17 16:45:04 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#9. To: Cynicom (#8)

Before he was silenced, Oswald said, "I'm a patsy."

Iran Truth Now!

Lod posted on 2009-10-17 16:50:37 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#10. To: Lod (#9)

Before he was silenced, Oswald said, "I'm a patsy."

I remember that.

As usual jew buried hip deep in such, Rubenstein was so grief stricken, he just had to kill Oswald.

That perhaps was an indication Oswald was not the master mind, just the shooter.

Cynicom posted on 2009-10-17 16:54:40 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#11. To: Lod (#9)

www.playboy.com/magazine/features/jfk/jfk-page01.html

Mark

Kamala posted on 2009-10-17 17:13:06 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#12. To: Lod, all (#7)

The only guy who hasn't been mentioned in connection to this murder is Joe DiMaggio.

Joe DiMaggio killed JFK

"The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so." ~ Josh Billings

wudidiz posted on 2009-10-17 17:45:44 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#13. To: wudidiz (#12)

lol - it's all out there on the web.

Thanks.

Iran Truth Now!

Lod posted on 2009-10-17 17:53:52 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

#14. To: Lod (#13)

Did Joe DiMaggio order John F. Kennedy killed? :-)

"The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so." ~ Josh Billings

wudidiz posted on 2009-10-17 18:15:08 ET Reply Trace Private Reply

Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest

[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help]