On “Killing Oswald”–a quasi-quasi-documentary film by Shane O’Sullivan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVCv3Yha4xw

by Larry Rivera (with Jim Fetzer)

“If all anyone knew about the assassination was that someone was impersonating Lee in Mexico City, they would know enough to know that this was a conspiracy”–Jim Fetzer
The film by Shane O’Sullivan, “Killing Oswald”, premiered 17 November 2013, at the Texas Theater in Dallas, where Lee Oswald was arrested on 22 November 1963, in order to commemorate the 50th observance of the assassination of JFK. While the film includes some fascinating footage, it recounts the railroading of Lee Oswald and does not justify its choice of its own title, since there is little about the death of Oswald–and completely ignores the most important research on the medical, ballistic, film and photographic record.
In our view, the inclusion and prominence in the narrative of David Kaiser, who goes well out of his way to advocate the well-repudiated and dismissed notion of the mob (mafia) as the primary perpetrators of the assassination, raises additional serious questions. Kaiser names the usual suspects, including Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello and, with particular interest, points to John Martino as a major player in the deed, whom he claims has actually confessed about his organizational role in the plot (1:45:19).
Kaiser establishes the metaphor of three so-called “churches” regarding various theories about who killed JFK:

1. The Lone-Nut Church, which is led by Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi
2. The CIA/Joint Chiefs Conspiracy Church, which is led by Mark Lane and Oliver Stone
3. The Middle-Ground-the-Mafia-used-Oswald Church, which is led by David Kaiser and Robert Blakey

The question becomes whether this approach is “fair and balanced” or requires the suppression or distortion of evidence in order to make “The Middle-Ground”, in particular, remotely plausible, which “The Lone-Nut Church” most assuredly is not, as Jim Fetzer, for example, has explained, most recently in “JFK at 50: The Who, the How and the Why”. Indeed, the introduction is the worst part of this film, since it presents virtually no evidence to support “The Middle Ground” and much that substantiates “The CIA/Joint Chiefs” alternative. Consider the following.

John Simkin endorses the film

John Simkin, who founded The Education Forum, regards “Killing Oswald” as “the best documentary I have seen on the assassination of JFK.” According to him, it comes over as “a rational and objective view of the assassination”, where Shane uses historian David Kaiser, to take you through the evidence. Simkin regards this as “a masterstroke as Kaiser makes it clear that he thinks Oswald was involved in the assassination. However, he also addresses the evidence that shows that the FBI and the CIA were officially or unofficially, probably involved in the assassination and definitely played an important role in the cover-up. Most documentaries make it obvious that they have a theory they want to promote”, where this one overcomes that problem.
The problem with Kaiser’s stance, which was well established by Oliver Stone in “JFK”, is that Kaiser cannot address the problems of a military-controlled autopsy for all the obvious reasons, including the alteration of the body and “patching” the X-rays. To this, we must add the fabrication of crucial photographic and film evidence–such as the “backyard photos” and the Zapruder film–an investigation controlled by the FBI and last, but not least, the corrupt and biased Warren Commission with its battery of crooked lawyers, who paved the way for the railroading of Lee Oswald as the lone nut and sole perpetrator of the assassination of the 35th President of the United States.
The mob, for example, could not have extended its reach into Bethesda Naval Hospital to alter X-rays under the control of medical officers of the US Navy, agents of the Secret Service and the president’s personal physician. Pro or anti-Castro Cubans could not have substituted the brain of someone else for that of JFK. And the KGB, even though it had an ability to revised photos and films comparable to that of the CIA, could not have obtained the Zapruder to subject it to alteration. Nor could any of these things have been done by Lee Oswald, who was incarcerated or already dead. So how can anyone take “The Middle Ground” seriously? This is the very kind of rubbish that has been promoted by key figures in the mass media, up to and including the 50th observance of the death of JFK.

The Man in Mexico City

Even though the documentary is supposed to be about Lee Oswald, the fact of the matter remains that we cannot get into the intricacies of his story without mentioning these connections to the case. Other problems with Kaiser are his implicit endorsement of Oswald in Mexico City–which is refuted by the CIA’s own photos of the man at the Cuban Embassy (below)–that Lee shot at General Walker (53:00) and the Odio incident, where he identifies Loran Hall and Larry Howard as the men who accompanied Oswald. It is entirely too plausible that Kaiser is sowing disinformation in this documentary.

With that said, O’Sullivan has also chosen Dick Russell, John Newman and Joan Mellen as his JFK experts in the case, who speak about different aspects of Lee Oswald’s life. Each of them, of course, march to the beat of their own individual research and books they have written, with Newman providing the best synopsis of Oswald as a creature of the CIA, being manipulated by “handlers”, specifically David Atlee Phillips (Maurice Bishop).

Antonio Veciana and David Atlee Phillips

While we are on the topic of Phillips, the figure of Antonio Veciana (1:17) appears as an irrefutable pillar of truth that has established for many decades the fact that Phillips had a very close relationship with Lee. Veciana admits that Kennedy was taken out by “people who worked for the CIA at that time that were very angry with the President of the United States.”

Veciana also gives a great example of Phillips degree of manipulation and propaganda in the story of his cousin Guillermo Ruiz, who worked for the Commercial Attaché at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico, where Phillips had offered him money to endorse Oswald’s supposed Mexico City appearances and that Castro was behind the entire plot. Newman does an excellent job in tying up these loose ends for the documentary. Also, rare footage of Win Scott’s wedding in Mexico is shown with very good images of Phillips as he appeared in that era.

Dick Russell’s contribution to the documentary are his well known Richard Case Nagell research, his Oswald “double” theories and a very interesting conclusion about Lee Oswald being a “Trotsky-ite leftist” who “was really working for the other side”. (1:01)
Joan Mellen, of course, tells about her specialty, Lee in New Orleans, and offers a different interpretation of the identities of the Odio visitors, giving us the names of Angel Murgado and Bernardo De Torres, both Cubans who were heavily involved in the anti Castro movements of the 1960s. De Torres, as we all know, at one point infiltrated Jim Garrison’s team on behalf of the CIA. This obviously clashes with Kaiser’s identifications.

Eugenio Martinez and George DeMohrenschildt

We cannot fail to mention the figure of Eugenio Martinez, ex Watergate burglar and Cuban activist of the 1960′s, who gives a different perspective of the Cuban attitude, where he is sympathetic to JFK’s dilemma of having inherited the Cuban problem and therefore brings the Military into the picture, whose faulty plans were already in place when JFK was inaugurated. He mentions his nearly 300 operations inside Cuba while working for the CIA, and how Castro never allowed his parents to leave Cuba. (31:14)

This rare George DeMohrenschildt footage sums up the “official account” best: “As it stands now, Oswald was a lunatic who killed president Kennedy. Ruby was another lunatic who killed the lunatic who killed the president – and now we have the 3rd lunatic, supposedly Garrison, who tries to investigate this whole case. I think it is extremely insulting to the United States, the assumption, that there are so many lunatics here.”

Raymond Burns as Lee Oswald

O’Sullivan presents Burns reciting monologues purporting to represent the workings of Lee’s innermost thinking, politics and philosophies. In trying to re-enact Lee Oswald, he puts an enormous amount of trust in the following documents and/or speeches attributed to Lee Oswald:

a. The Oswald Diaries (33:08), which serious researchers have dismissed as having been written in a single sitting and are of no historical value other than as evidence of the fabrication of evidence, probably by CIA.
b. LHO’s so-called “Political Writings”, which are contained in The Warren Commission, Vol. 16 CE97.
c. Speech at the Jesuit House of Studies, Mobile, Alabama, 27 July 1963, Ibid CE93 (1:04)

One of the most fascinating parts of this documentary are the sequences of complete Oswald videos presented, where Lee Oswald is paraded around the DPD on his way to being presented to the media. On his way, he asks for legal representation no less than five different times as nobody seems to pay attention to his claims. In this image, the fourth time he insist on a lawyer in the span of a couple of minutes, he even bends over to speak into the microphones and speaks slowly to enunciate the term “legal representation”. Could this have been some kind of code?

Oswald being railroaded

In addition, the documentary shows these sequences of Lee Oswald on his way to witness lineups sans his brownish/orange tweed over-shirt, with him protesting how rigged this process was because he was only wearing a tee shirt, when he had been wearing a long-sleeved, richly-textured shirt when he was arrested.

The New Orleans footage

Shane O’Sullivan should have given more careful consideration to David Kaiser and the stories we have noted above. Unfortunately, even though sometimes he contributes good information, he persists in promoting the thesis that Lee was the shooter but was acting at the direction of the Mafia. This paradoxical approach initially seems perplexing. We have also noticed that footage of Oswald passing out leaflets in downtown New Orleans has been altered, with the face of this individual in the foreground being obliterated.

Why? That is Chauncey Holt at right in the sunglasses and short sleeved shirt (at least that is what he claims in his book). We will take a wild guess at who could the person in the foreground be: How about Michael Paine? This in itself proves the leafleting in New Orleans was a setup to sheep dip Oswald as an agent for Castro. Indeed, he seems to be walking with someone else who is also trying to avoid the camera.

The Content vs. the Theme

Since we already know that the “magic bullet” theory is false, provably false and not even anatomically possible, there have to have been at least six shots from three different directions. Oswald was captured in a famous photograph by AP photographer James “Ike” Altgens and cannot possibly have been a shooter, much less “the lone assassin”. He appears to have been recruited by the ONI as a Marine recruit, defected to the Soviet Union on behalf of the CIA, and served as an informant for the FBI. Since there was a better film to be made about Oswald, why did Shane O’Sullivan, who has done brilliant work on the death of RFK, allow it to be warped by David Kaiser?
That the X-rays were “patched” and another brain substituted for that of JFK has been in the public domain since David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., and Bob Livingston, M.D., presented their findings on the 30th observance in Dallas in 1993. They were published by Jim Fetzer in Assassination Science (1998), which shattered the cover-up and exposed the complicity of the US military in the death of JFK, which Douglas Horne, Inside the ARRB (2009), has confirmed. The fabrication of the home movies has long since been established. Even if we could excuse Shane O’Sullivan for being unaware of these developments, John Simkin is another matter entirely, where he manages one of the most active JFK assassination forums in the world.
He has to know that this quasi-documentary, which mixes some excellent interviews with Dick Russell, John Newman, JFK and others–where the clips with Allen Dulles are classic!–with historic footage of Fidel Castro entering Havana, the Bay of Pigs disaster and photos and clips of Lee Oswald, distorts and suppresses what is known about the cover-up and those who were responsible for the assassination. Even George DeMohrenschildt observes that Lee admired JFK and bore him no malice, as Marina herself also confirmed, which Joan Mellen supports. If all anyone knew about the assassination was that someone was impersonating Lee in Mexico City, they would know enough to know that this was a conspiracy, which the medical, ballistic, photo and film record–when properly sorted out–substantiates.

JFK at 50 The Who, the How and the Why

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As Marin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us (1996), has observed, disinformation is not meant to convince the public of one side or the other but to create enough uncertainty that everything is believable and nothing is knowable. With regard to the assassination, however, we know about 95% of what there is to know–where more recent discoveries only serve to confirm the depiction that Oliver Stone presented so brilliantly in “JFK”. It was too simple by half, since there appear to have been six shooters rather than three. And he did not know that the Zapruder film had been revised or that Lee was in the doorway. When you focus your attention on its contents rather than its theme, “Killing Oswald” has a great deal of merit, which confirms the role of the CIA in the death of JFK.
Larry Rivera, the son of a career military man who served as CID officer in the Army and a Certified Network Engineer, has made a lifelong study of the JFK assassination. He has given interviews on the assassination to Spanish media and has the most complete dossier on Billy Nolan Lovelady ever done.
Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

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