Ockham’s Toothbrush
It was the truth that died on November 22, 1963, along with President John F. Kennedy, and it stayed dead; bullet wound to the head and a botched autopsy on top of it.
Secrecy is no secret. We trust the government to lie. Everybody knows that, but as a consequence, nobody much cares. It’s just a tidbit in our busy lives, and that adds to the hurt.
There is so much to say about that event and its aftermath. Entire books have been written on those six seconds in Dallas. All I can do is scratch the surface.
I won’t get into Lee Harvey Oswald’s dyslexia, his gonorrhea, his mastoidectomy scar, or his bad eggs at Dobbs House, though those are all important things.
No, I don’t have the time to discuss the lone-nut honor role: not Arthur Bremer, John Hinckley Jr., Mark David Chapman, James Earl Ray, or Sirhan Sirhan; the brainwashed loser archetype of the month club (“Squeaky” Fromme was the only legit nut out there – and she missed).
I won’t mention Sam “Momo” Giancana, Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, or Raphael “Chi-Chi” Quintero.
Not Pepsi-Cola or United Fruit.
Not the Babushka Lady or the Umbrella Man, Frank Sinatra or Frank Sturgis, C2766 or CE 399.
I won’t go into E. Howard or G. Gordon, James Jesus Angleton or Mohammad Mossadegth, MK/ULTRA or ZR/RIFLE, Operation 40 or Alpha 66, PT109 or SX-100.
Not the Nash Rambler or the New Frontier, Rummy’s Raiders or Harvey’s Hole.
We won’t go to Oak Cliff or Hickory Hill.
No Dal-Tex or Permindex.
No microdots. No Minox.
No Sasha. No Sheba.
But I will say this (to the deafening roar of my inner bullshit-detector):
Uncontested evidence of Lee Harvey Oswald’s presence at the Queen Bee in Tokyo and 544 Camp Street in New Orleans just do not make sense if he truly acted alone.
Meaning that if the assassin of the president was involved with people at those locations, then he had an active role in undercover government work (also supported by his time in Russia and Mexico City, which I will not detail here) that was suppressed by government committees investigating the assassination because Oswald’s background revealed connections between government agencies and organized crime in a way that embarrassed all sides of the political landscape.
Let’s start there as I argue Oswald had connections to military intelligence and organized crime in a way that implies that the assassination of President Kennedy amounted to a coup d’état; part of the ongoing dirty work of a corporate shadow government that dominates the world to this day.
Whoa. That sounds crazy.
But doesn’t the cover-up imply guilt on the part of those who suppressed this incriminating evidence? Why hide that this “lone nut” went to those places, unless he communicated with others at that location?
Maybe, to protect myself and my family, I should conclude that the assassin of our 35th president was just a crazy guy who wanted to be somebody, and that to say otherwise is paranoid and unpatriotic.
God bless America, and please don’t hurt me.
Based on an interview Oswald gave to a Russian journalist in 1959, his wife Marina’s inconsistent and incomplete story, and an unnamed intelligence source, popular author and Warren Report apologist Gerald Posner infers that Lee Harvey Oswald may have had contact with Japanese Communists at Tokyo’s expensive nightclub The Queen Bee when he was stationed there as a Marine, admitting that an evening at the Queen Bee cost anywhere from $60 to $100. Oswald only made $85 a month.
From Posner’s description of Oswald as tight with money and uncomfortable with people, it would seem that Posner should explain how Oswald could afford to frequent this establishment or be seen in the company of women employed there, but Posner just drops the issue without resolution.
According to the Warren Report, Oswald told a newspaper correspondent, Aline Mosby, in Moscow that he had saved $1,500 out of his Marine Corps salary to finance his defection. Both Warren and Posner leave the question of how Oswald paid for his evenings at this expensive nightclub unanswered, while researcher Jim Marrs sees the possibility of Oswald being paid by military intelligence to collect information on those very communists that Posner acknowledges. Of course, Marrs also thinks aliens walk among us.
The crucial difference is presenting Oswald as a misguided young man or as a spy for the US government. The problem is that spies for the US government are not lone assassins, but hired assassins, and if Oswald was managed in any way, then the assassination he is accused of committing was plotted by more than one person.
A free and democratic nation can handle that, but a treasonous and hidden power structure cannot; so, Oswald is simply a misguided young man. To have that theory established, the Warren Commission and Gerald Posner must ignore all evidence to the contrary, which is exactly what they do.
But to admit that he spent time with expensive Japanese communist hookers without explaining how he paid for it is a glaring omission big enough to drive a Nash Rambler station wagon through (oops, I said I wouldn’t mention that).
Posner works himself into knots trying to explain away all traces of weirdness in Oswald’s totally weird non-defection defection.
So long as everybody who knew him calls him a loser, from a guy who knew him in first grade to his upstairs neighbor in Minsk, the story holds. And the story must hold, or else treasonous murderers took control of our national destiny that November day. The Queen Bee holds some answers to this riddle, but an office building in New Orleans also provides a clue.
It is well documented in photos, film, and handbills (so well documented that it seems prearranged) that Oswald distributed flyers in New Orleans stating “Hands off Cuba! Join the Fair Play for Cuba Committee” with 544 Camp Street as the branch location.
Due to its odd location, this same office building had the address 531 Lafayette Street, which was the office of Guy Bannister Associates. According to Marrs Banister was a former FBI agent, with connections to the John Birch Society, anti-Castro Cubans, and organized crime.
Guy Banister is someone Oswald cannot know if he is to remain unconnected to a coordinated plan.
This is another crucial point in an assassination conspiracy that must be obscured for the story of a lone gunman to be established. Warren claims that “extensive investigation was not able to connect Oswald with that address… has not been able to find any other indication that Oswald had rented an office in New Orleans.”
I should point out to the Commission that Oswald’s name does not have to be on the lease in order for him to have used that office or known the people who did. To call this inference an “extensive investigation” is not incompetent but untrustworthy.
To mislead the public on this crucial piece of evidence is to deceive American history of the full truth of this event and the planning behind it.
When Sam Newman, the owner of the property at 544 Camp Street, says he has never met or rented office space to Oswald, Warren infers that Oswald never went there and concludes the official report on the address stamped on the Hands Off Cuba flyers Oswald distributed, nullifying any connection to Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, and Carlos Marcello.
No connection to FBI, CIA, or organized crime. Case closed, as Posner titled his book.
Though Posner admits the House Select Committee on Assassinations firmly established an Oswald-Ferrie connection as part of the historical record, Posner dismisses the connection to David Ferrie by alluding to his homosexuality, claiming New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison drugged witnesses (Ferrie not being one of them), and that the residents of Clinton, Louisiana (mostly black) can’t be trusted. These points are largely irrelevant and based on conjecture masquerading as journalism.
Oswald can’t be there, and so it never happened. To admit that Oswald knew David Ferrie and Guy Banister, with their black-ops backgrounds, is to all but admit that there was an organization behind the assassination of JFK. But the organization behind that assassination can’t have that, hence an “extensive investigation” by Kennedy-haters and people with something to hide, all with sterling credentials, is quickly put in place.
However, an “extensive investigation” such as this should not just dismiss the evidence; it should also destroy the reputation and lives of those who would disagree with its predetermined findings, to prevent others from coming forward in the future.
Banister’s secretary at the Camp Street building, Delphine Roberts, like many women in the Warren Report, is made to seemingly contradict her own statements of seeing Oswald in places he shouldn’t be. Posner goes to lengths to establish Roberts as Banister’s mistress as well, and then goes on to even greater length to paint her as a psychotically unreliable person who would accept money for an interview.
He does not mention those whose testimony he relies on who also got paid for interviews, or disclose who paid him to write his validation of the Warren Report. These inconsistent standards damage the credibility of both the official report and Posner’s popular regurgitation of it.
Posner dismisses the connection of Oswald to the FBI, the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, and organized crime who were known occupants of that space by saying the owner never saw Oswald, that Banister’s partner, Jack Martin, was an alcoholic, and the secretary was a crazy mistress. While Banister was also a drunk and the instigating half of the adulterous relationship Posner attacks. This is a shameful distortion of the evidence and of the reputations of innocent people who were unlucky enough to know some of the people involved.
He also says Oswald stayed with his aunt in New Orleans at this time, neglecting to mention that his uncle, who also lived there, worked for Mafia Godfather Carlos Marcello. Such an omission is willful and dishonest, at best.
Posner maligns every woman in the report, especially Oswald’s mother, with the exception of the saintly Quaker Ruth Paine who took in Marina Prusakova, that poor Russian woman. There is no mention of easily obtained information from The Encyclopedia of the JFK Assassination, such as her husband’s intimate family ties to Bell Helicopter Corporation, CIA agent Cord Meyer’s New Federalists, or that her father, William Avery Hyde, worked for the Cooperative League in both Vietnam and Latin America as a contract agent of the CIA, as did her sister, Sylvia Hope.
It seems strange to me that a woman has all of those intelligence and defense industry connections is the one who provides a hiding place for the incriminating Manlicher-Carcano rifle and the hotly contested backyard photos of Oswald posing with it, and that it is just some weird fate that she took in that woman who barely spoke English and her baby (introduced to each other by CIA oilman George Demohrnschildt who killed himself right before he was scheduled to testify before the HSCA) and became innocently wrapped up in all of this crazy stuff. The women are certainly maligned in the investigation and treated poorly in this piece of history, but Ruth Paine is no victim.
Posner speculates on many reasons why Banister’s address in on Oswald’s pamphlets, from seeing a for rent sign on the building, to trying to “embarrass his nemesis” because the Cuban Revolutionary Council was headquartered there a year before Oswald moved to New Orleans. He never mentions how Oswald would know who had an office in that building a year before he was there.
Even if one concedes that Oswald was acting alone, the disrespect paid to key pieces of evidence has tarnished the public trust for fifty years in our country with effects that have been and will be felt worldwide for generations, yet rarely acknowledged for more than a passing thought.
Oswald was involved with intelligence forces in the US; Central Intelligence, Military Intelligence, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to such an extent that all involved had to disavow knowledge of his activities lest they be implicated in an embarrassing way. By consequence, this made a sham of the official investigation led by Earl Warren at the request of our new president, Lyndon Johnson.
The American people felt they had been lied to without knowing the extent of the lie, which has in the following decades, alienated citizens from our electoral process, making it easier for moneyed interests to consolidate their power, and for average citizens to have little but amusement or paranoia to occupy themselves with.
As a long-term consequence, 50 years later young people are more apathetic, as a result of distrust, disengagement, and disinformation, and neither our leaders nor the media who report on them are to be trusted, which makes it easier of a shadow government to gain ascendancy. Perhaps we are all overwhelmed by the extent of government incompetence and corporate manipulation of a broken system of democracy.
Just because so many benefitted from Kennedy’s death does not mean in any way that they were involved; however, suppression of evidence could be seen as protection of the conspirators, making those who botched this important investigation accessories after the fact.
The policy of corporate interest over national interest violates the openness which is essential to the operation of actual democracy. We cannot change policies if we do not know about them. When military contractors like General Electric and Westinghouse own news media like NBC and CBS, don’t be surprised if you don’t get the full story when you watch the news.
People know this without understanding the details, and tune out. This disillusion and distrust leads to easier manipulation of the system by moneyed power, which perpetuates the disillusion, and on it goes. The funny thing is, the more there are cameras everywhere, the less I trust anything I see. Ockham has finished shaving, but has yet to brush his teeth.
I can’t tell you if there really was a George Washington. I’d heard for years that he denied lying about chopping down a cherry tree only to hear that there never was a cherry tree, and I don’t understand if the story about not lying is a lie or if Washington lied about not lying, or if I’m being lied to about the president not lying about the lie he says he didn’t lie. All I know, basically, is that I have been lied to and continue to be lied to, and nothing I do seems to change that.
It doesn’t matter who you or I think shot the president.
What matters is that we don’t know and don’t trust those who say they do.