Merry Christmas!I will be back January 2.
Ned Touchstone's Investigation of the Assassination
Our first real break in the case came as the result of a tip to the Dallas District Attorney's office to the effect that Oswald in applying for a job in New Orleans once gave Jack Ruby as a reference. A Mississippian, Elmore Greaves, had heard this in a casual conversation and passed it on.
Someone--I don't know who--told the Dallas DA that Ned Touchstone was studying the assassination and would be a good man to run down the rumor. An assistant district attorney phoned me, and twenty minutes later Courtney Smith (my Watson!) and I were on the way.
We learned in New Orleans that federal agents had jealously and zealously erased parts of Oswald's trail. We picked up a potful of fresh leads an an awesome regard for the way key evidence disappears behing the iron curtain of federal bureaucracy.
More people were working to cover up the facts than were trying to sincerely unmask the assassination plot.
At the state employment service in New Orleans we sought a list of firms at which Oswald had applied for work, and other useful information about his work record. A Mr. Messina showed a handwritten "receipt" dated Nov. 26, 1963, and signed by John B. Lee, a federal who grabbed extensive state records on Oswald.
(If those records are in the Warren Report, I haven't found them.)
Ned Touchstone, David Ferrie, and Jim Garrison
As everyone who saw Oliver Stone's JFK knows, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, acting on a tip that David Ferrie might have been involved in some way in the assassination of the President on November 22, 1963, had him picked up and held for questioning by the FBI--who promptly let him go. Garrison assumed that they knew what they were doing and and didn't give the matter another thought until he had a conversation with Senator Russell Long, in late 1966, if memory serves. In his book On the Trail of the Assassins, Garrison sums up the interval between these two events in three words: "Nearly three years passed." But is this the whole story?
Journalists Sandy Hochberg and James T. Valliere went down to New Orleans to see what Jim Garrison was up to and also interviewed the District Attorney. They published the results of their inquiry in Win magazine, a publication of the War Resister's League, in February 1969, in a special issue called "The Conspirators." I quote from their chronology:
I recently received a 46-page manuscript from the Noel Memorial Library, at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. The untitled manuscript is written by Ned Touchstone, the editor of a rightwing publication The Councilor. Regular readers will recall my earlier posts concerning the correspondence between Touchstone and Joseph Milteer, who so eerily predicted the assassination. I will quote a few excerpts:
Tomorrow: Ned Touchstone's investigation of the assassination.
As everyone who saw Oliver Stone's JFK knows, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, acting on a tip that David Ferrie might have been involved in some way in the assassination of the President on November 22, 1963, had him picked up and held for questioning by the FBI--who promptly let him go. Garrison assumed that they knew what they were doing and and didn't give the matter another thought until he had a conversation with Senator Russell Long, in late 1966, if memory serves. In his book On the Trail of the Assassins, Garrison sums up the interval between these two events in three words: "Nearly three years passed." But is this the whole story?
Journalists Sandy Hochberg and James T. Valliere went down to New Orleans to see what Jim Garrison was up to and also interviewed the District Attorney. They published the results of their inquiry in Win magazine, a publication of the War Resister's League, in February 1969, in a special issue called "The Conspirators." I quote from their chronology:
Fall, 1964 Without fanfare, Garrison reopens his investigation into events in New Orleans leading up to the Kennedy assassination.
November, 1966 This is the date Garrison uses as the "official" beginning of his investigation. Actually, he has been working on the investigation for almost three years and has questioned many of its important figures.
I recently received a 46-page manuscript from the Noel Memorial Library, at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. The untitled manuscript is written by Ned Touchstone, the editor of a rightwing publication The Councilor. Regular readers will recall my earlier posts concerning the correspondence between Touchstone and Joseph Milteer, who so eerily predicted the assassination. I will quote a few excerpts:
He [Garrison] knew about David Ferries part in the Kennedy killing by early March, 1964--THREE YEARS AGO. His files on March 1, 1964 already contained more volatile information about the killing than the soup-thin oupouring to the public in the Clay Shaw hearing.
Garrison continued to gather information about the Kennedy assassination--after I learned in 1964 what he had. I kept pace by turning over the same headstones he looked under watching David Ferrie's actions, and using some of the same sources Garrison doubtlessly used.
We scheduled a giant rally [Summer of 1965] on the steps of the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge, only a few feet from where Dr. Carl Weiss assassinated Senator Huey Long almost 30 years earlier. Were were determined that the facts of the JFK murder would not be successfully swept beneath the rug as were the facts of the Huey Long death.
Speaking with me that day were General Edwin Walker and Judge John Rarick. (Rarick was later elected to Congress.) Nearly 8,000 people were on hand to hear that talk.
Whether any of this had an effect on Jim Garrison is anybody's guess. Jim never indicated one way or another but apparently he had his assistant gathering tidbits of information through most of 1965.
In October of 1966 Garrison's investigation of the Kennedy death was renewed.
Tomorrow: Ned Touchstone's investigation of the assassination.
Clay Shaw was the only person ever put on trial in the case of the Kennedy assassination. This CIA document reveals that he was a "highly paid CIA contract source."
104-10428-10104 (02/10/92): MEMO FOR: SURVEY OF CIA'S RECORDS FROM HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS INVESTIGATION pg 3
Since the National Security Agency is in the news today I thought I would post some material relating to the NSA and the Kennedy assassination. The NSA is so secret that its very existence was classified for years, and thus NSA is said to stand for No Such Agency. The first reference to the NSA in print, although not by name, may have been by Captain Edward Ruppelt in his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956), where Ruppelt refers to the "puzzle palace", later the name of a book by James Bamford on the NSA.
The document above can be found on the website of The Mary Ferrell Foundation, and was posted recently on John Simkin's JFK Forum by Steve Thomas. It says, in part, that:
It has been determined by the military task force, as a result of the NSA--watch list case study--that Oswald, Jack Ruby, and Earl C. Ruby, Jack's brother, were targeted. An NSA spokesman reported that Oswald's name "appeared" in the rhyming dictionary on the day of the President's assassination.
Oliver North is a fixture on Fox News and host of the program War Stories. He has always come across to me as a self-righteous, self-aggrandizing character. To really illustrate what is wrong with the state of our country, one need only note the fact that Gary Webb, a real reporter who documented the Contra/cocaine connection, was professionally ruined, and Oliver North, who was at the center of the whole thing, went on to be a highly-paid "journalist." Americans like Gary Webb are the real patriots.Jack Blum, an investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, testified that “The Contras moved drugs not by the pound, not by the bags, but by the tons, by the cargo planeloads.” Oliver North knew what was going on. To cite just one entry from his personal notebooks (July 9, 1984):
Call from Clarridge- Call Michel re Narco Issue- RIG at 1000 Tomorrow (Q0384)- DEA Miami- Pilot went talked to Vaughn- wanted A/C to go to Bolivia to p/u paste- want A/C to p/u 1500 kilos- Bud to meet w/ Group (Q0385)The paste referred to was, of course, cocaine paste. Clarridge was Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, a senior CIA official.
For more see The Oliver North File: www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB113/
Over the last few years the Freeway Blogger has put up over 2,500 signs over freeways in California. Now he has an online blog: http://freewayblogger.blogspot.com
