New York Times Acknowledges CIA Deceptions
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15752
by Prof. Peter Dale Scott
October 21, 2009
The New York Times, on October 17, published a page-one story by
Scott Shane about the CIA's defiance of a court order to release
documents pertaining to the John F. Kennedy assassination, in its
so-called Joannides file. George Joannides was the CIA case officer
for a Cuban exile group that made headlines in 1963 by its public
engagements with Lee Harvey Oswald, just a few weeks before Oswald
allegedly killed Kennedy. For over six years a former Washington Post
reporter, Jefferson Morley, has been suing the CIA for the release of
these documents. [1]
Sometimes the way that a news item is reported can be more newsworthy
than the item itself. A notorious example was the 1971 publication of
the Pentagon Papers (documents far too detailed for most people to
read) on the front page of the New York Times.
The October 17 Times story was another such example. It revealed,
perhaps for the first time in any major U.S. newspaper, that the CIA
has been deceiving the public about its own relationship to the JFK
assassination.
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.
That the October 17 story was published at all is astonishing.
According to Lexis Nexis, there have only been two earlier references
to the CIA Joannides documents controversy in any major U.S.
newspaper: a brief squib in the New York Daily News in 2003
announcing the launching of the case, and a letter to the New York
Times in 2007 (of which the lead author was Jeff Morley) complaining
about the Times' rave review of a book claiming that Oswald was a
lone assassin.
(The review had said inter alia that "''Conspiracy theorists'' should
be ''ridiculed, even shunned... marginalized the way we've
marginalized smokers.'' The letter pointed out in response that those
suspecting conspiracy included Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Robert
Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover.)
The New York Times has systematically regulated the release of any
facts about the Kennedy assassination, ever since November 25, 1963,
when it first declared Oswald, the day after his death, to have been
the "assassin" of JFK. A notorious example was the deletion, between
the early and the final edition of a Times issue, of a paragraph in a
review of a book about the JFK assassination, making the obvious
point that "MYSTERIES PERSIST." [2]
Apparently there was similar jockeying over the positioning of the
Scott Shane story. In some east coast editions it ran on page eleven,
with a trivializing introductory squib, "Food for Conspiracy
Theorists." In the California edition, headlined "C.I.A. Is Still
Cagey About Oswald Mystery," it was on page one above the fold.
One can assume that the Times decision to run the story was a
momentous one not made casually. The same can probably be said of
another recent remarkable editorial decision, to publish Tom
Friedman's op-ed on September 29 about the "very dangerous" climate
now in America, "the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel
on the eve of the Rabin assassination."
Friedman did not mention JFK at all, and his most specific reference
was to a recent poll on Facebook asking respondents, "Should Obama be
killed?" [3] Four days later the Wall Street Journal expressed
similar concern, adding to the "poll on Facebook asking whether the
president should be assassinated, a column on a conservative Web site
suggesting a military coup is in the works." [4]
Friedman's column broke a code of silence about the threats to Obama
that had been in place ever since two redneck white supremacists
(Shawn Adolf and Tharin Gartrell) were arrested in August 2008 for a
plot to assassinate Obama with scoped bolt-action rifles. Andrew
Gumbel's story about them ran in the London Independent on November
16, 2008; of the fifteen related news stories in Lexis Nexis, only
one, a brief one, is from a U.S. paper.
It is possible to take at face value the concern expressed by
Friedman in his column. The Boston Globe, a New York Times affiliate,
reported on October 18 that "The unprecedented number of death
threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a
new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret
Service." [5]
But there may have been a higher level of concern in the normally
pro-war Wall Street Journal's reference to a military coup. Such talk
on a conservative web site is hardly newsworthy. More alarming is the
report by Robert Dreyfuss in the October 29 Rolling Stone that Obama
is currently facing an ultimatum from the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs:
either provide General McChrystal with the 40,000 additional troops
he has publicly demanded, or "face a full-scale mutiny by his
generals...The president, it seems, is battling two insurgencies: one
in Afghanistan and one cooked up by his own generals." [6]
One can only guess at what led the New York Times to publish a story
about CIA obstinacy over documents about the JFK assassination. One
explanation would be the similarities between the painful choices
that Obama now faces in Afghanistan to escalate, maintain a losing
status quo, or begin to withdraw and the same equally painful
choices that Kennedy in 1963 faced in Vietnam. [7] More and more
books in recent years have asked if some disgruntled hawks in the CIA
and Pentagon did not participate in the assassination which led to a
wider Vietnam War. [8]
Six weeks before Kennedy's murder, the Washington News published an
extraordinary attack on the CIA's "bureaucratic arrogance" and
obstinate disregard of orders... "If the United States ever
experiences a `Seven Days in May' it will come from the CIA..." one
U.S. official commented caustically. ("Seven Days in May" is a
fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the U.S.
Government.) [9]
The story was actually a misleading one, but it was a symptom of the
high-level rifts and infighting that were becoming explosive over
Vietnam inside the Kennedy administration. The New York Times story
about the CIA on October 17 can also be seen as a symptom of rifts
and infighting. One must hope that the country has matured enough
since 1963 to avoid a similarly bloody denouement.
--
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at
the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and
researcher. He was born in Montreal in 1929, the only son of the poet
F.R. Scott and the painter Marian Scott. His prose books include The
War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in
collaboration, 1976), Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the
Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977), The Iran-Contra Connection (in
collaboration, 1987), Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in
Central America (in collaboration, 1991, 1998), Deep Politics and the
Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Deep Politics Two (1994, 1995, 2006),
Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003),
The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007),
and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War
(Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008).
--
Notes
1. "C.I.A. Is Cagey About '63 Files Tied to Oswald," New York Times,
October 17, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/us/17inquire.html.
2. Jerry Policoff, The Media and the Murder of John Kennedy," in
Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The
Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1976), 268.
3. Friedman, in decrying attacks on presidential legitimacy, recalled
that "The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1
with the bogus Whitewater "scandal." It is worth recalling also that
the public outcry about Whitewater was encouraged initially by a
series of stories by Jeff Gerth, since largely discredited, in the
New York Times. See Gene Lyons, "Fool for Scandal: How the New York
Times Got Whitewater Wrong," Harper's, October 1994.
4. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125452861657560895.html.
5. Bryan Bender, "Secret Service strained as leaders face more
threats Report questions its role in financial investigations,"
Boston Globe, October 18, 2009,
6. Robert Dreyfuss, "The Generals' Revolt: As Obama rethinks
America's failed strategy in Afghanistan, he faces two insurgencies:
the Taliban and the Pentagon." Rolling Stone, October 29, 41. Several
other articles entitled "The Generals' Revolt" have been published
since 2003, including at least two earlier this year and a number in
2006, when retired generals' pushed successfully for the removal of
Rumsfeld over his handling of the Iraq War.
7. Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the
Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2005), 266.
8. See for example James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He
Died & Why It Matters (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008).
9. Washington Daily News, October 2, 1963; discussed in Peter Dale
Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War
(Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008),
.
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