In Response to Fred Litwin on CBC and Brian McKenna

IN RESPONSE TO FRED LITWIN’S CHAPTER ON THE CBC AND BRIAN MCKENNA

BILL KELLY NOTES: 

This is not important enough to post on my main blog JFKCOUNTERCOUP.blogspot.com 

So I will deal with it here. Snce the mainstream media will generally not publish serious articles on the assassination, we have to take advantage of every opportunity to respond to the BS that they do publish and post, as I have previously responded to Phil Shennon's BS book "A Cruel and Shocking Act" and Thomas Powers London review of Jeff Morley's bio of James Jesus Angleton. 

And be forewarned, while I am just back from Dallas and my head is still spinning from what I learned there, I will take note of any and all published and posted references to the assassination that are off base, and set the record straight as far as I know it. And I will be getting other CAPA - Citizens Against Political Assassination (CAPA-US.org) members to do the same. 

While I have yet to read Litwin's book, this gives me a good idea where he is coming from, and I have it on good authority that he has been a serious Lone Nutter for decades and didn't just have a sudden epiphany, struck by lighting to suddenly see the light and see that Oswald was guilty by himself after all. It is entrenched in his soul, and he can't help being anything else, just like other converters and True Believers. 

I also refer you to what Jim DiEugenio wrote about Litwin's chapter on Jim Garrison at his Kennedys and Kings web site, which is one place where you can get some good and honest book reviews on the subject. 

Instead of writing a rebuttal to Litwin's allegations - I have annotated the text with my own comments, and as I ask at the end, I really would like a real researcher or journalist to step forward and try to document and follow up on the real Canadian leads that should be looked into more deeply and followed, instead of doing with Litwin is doing, and investigating McKenna to try to defame him. And in doing so Litwin only defames himself. 

Now I want someone to do to Litwin what he is trying to do to McKenna, and that is compile all the info he can on him in order to attack and debunk him. McKenna isn't the enemy, those who killed the President are. 

Who is Fred Litwin, and why does he have a bug up his arse over Brian McKenna and the Kennedy conspiracy theorists? 

TPM Exclusive - Did the CBC solve the JFK assassination?

An excerpt from author Fred Litwin's latest book "I was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak"

 by Fred Litwin

 November 22, 2018

https://www.thepostmillennial.com/did-the-cbc-solve-the-jfk-assassination/ 0

Fred Litwin is the author of “I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak” which is available on Amazon, Kindle, Kobo and iTunes. For further information, please visit conspiracyfreak.com

A CBC memo from 1983 attached a “strange message” from a Ouija board session that communicated with President John Kennedy. Associate Producer Maxine Sidran sent Producer Brian McKenna the transcript from a 1976 session where they asked Kennedy “who killed you?” The answer to her question was Karsland. When asked to repeat the answer, Kennedy again responded “Karsland.” When asked “Who is Karsland?” Kennedy answered, “Secret Service.”

The memo claimed that “the people who used to take part in these sessions often had better than average results.”

Kennedy also told the participants that the truth would soon come out via an informant and that he had been killed because of “secret plans to take over the country.” The text of the session was attached with “no editing” because that is what you do if you are a “good researcher.”

The best news of all? Kennedy was asked, “How are you feeling?” and the answer was “a [sic] peace.”

BILL KELLY NOTES: The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) should be a responsible outlet for serious journalists, especially as to how unresolved leads litter the Canadian landscape – Air Force Chief of Staff flew back to Washington from a Canadian airfield in the hours after the assassination; Canadian Sir William Stevenson (INTREPID) owned a paramilitary training camp in Canada that was utilized by the OSS during World War II and where a Soviet defector (Golotzin) was kept secure as his bonifides were being evaluated; an Oswald impersonator handed out FPCC leaflets at a political rally at the start of the Quebec to Guantanamo Peace March, that was witnessed by a RCM Policeman, and which included another Oswald impersonator at the Peace March in Philadelphia and and Washington, D.C.; a Canadian citizen overheard suspects at a Canadian airport lounge discussing the assassination and their role in it (See: MacLeans Magazine); US Army undercover operative Donald Norton and suspected Oswald impersonator fled New Orleans during the Garrison investigation and surfaced in Canada where a newspaper quoted his experience of meeting Oswald in Mexico and delivering secret packages for him to Canada; and finally, I can’t wait to learn what the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) obtained from the Canadian authorities from their records on the JFK Assassination, as they were required to do. I would also ask the Canadian equivalent of the US National Security Agency (NSA) to see if they have a copy of the Air Force One ratio transmissions from November 22, 1963 since our government has seemed to have lost ours.

The CBC was also on hand with a camera crew to interview former British Navy Commander Ian Fleming on the one very day that Fleming met American ornithologist James Bond, author of the Birds of the West Indies, and from whom Fleming appropriated the name for his 007 spy.

I believe CBC has also interviewed former Canadian diplomat and dean of JFK Research Professor Peter Dale Scott, one of the most respected deep political thinkers on the planet, who invented the Deep Politics term, now universally used.

So important things related to the assassination of President Kennedy took place in Canada or concerns Canadians, and none of the items above have been investigated and resolved by serious journalists, but they could be answered by the CBC or even Litwin, if they took the time to do so.

There are some fine JFK assassination researchers from Canada, especially Len Osanic, who runs BLACKOPRADIO – an online streaming program where Osanic interviews those who are seriously researching and investigating the assassinations. Litwin is not considered serious by anyone, except perhaps the Ouiji board participants.

BUT LITWIN DOESN'T WANT TO GO THERE OR ANYWHERE I MENTIIONED, HE'S JUST AFTER THE ASS OF BRIAN MCKENNA. 

LITWIN CONTINUES:

Welcome to the world of The Fifth Estate, the CBC’s premier investigative documentary series. In the fall of 1983, they were busy working on an upcoming episode, “Who Killed JFK?” Unfortunately, even though Kennedy told the Ouija board participants that “soon everybody will know” the truth via an informant, it wasn’t in time to make it into the documentary.

Who Killed JFK? would be Producer Brian McKenna’s fourth documentary on the JFK assassination. It would be the most-watched Fifth Estate episode ever, with more than two million viewers. He went on to produce two more and also write articles on the assassination for the Montreal Gazette, opinion pieces for Rabble.ca, and book reviews on Amazon.

Brian McKenna isn’t just any CBC producer. In 2007, he received the Pierre Berton Award for “distinguished achievement in popularizing Canadian History.” At that point, McKenna had been with the CBC for 37 years and had won Geminis for the Pierre Trudeau’s memoirs and for the controversial series, The Valour and the Horror. That three-part series, about the bombing of German cities in World War II, aired in 1992 and was attacked by veterans’ groups for presenting a biased negative portrayal of Canadian military actions. The CBC ombudsman found that the documentary was “flawed and fails to measure up to CBC’s demanding policies and standards.”

McKenna’s next big achievement was the Pioneer Award from JFK Lancer, a Texas-based organization predicated on the belief that the U.S. government has conspired to hide the truth from the world regarding the JFK assassination. McKenna was honored in 2010 for his “lifetime of searching for the truth” about who killed JFK.

In his acceptance speech, McKenna laid out the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. It was a “sophisticated coup plotted by the U.S. military and CIA with support from Hoover’s FBI and Kennedy’s bodyguards, the Secret Service.” In addition, “the Mafia were co-conspirators as well as the world’s richest man, the right-wing billionaire H.L. Hunt.” And Vice-President Lyndon Johnson “supported the coup which made him President.”

BILL KELLY NOTES: I don’t know McKenna and am not familiar with his work, though I too am a recipient of the Mary Ferrell Pioneer Award (2013) for my work on the Air Force One radio transmission tapes, and I know how difficult and special that is, so we like brothers and I must defend him against nitwits like Linwin, whose “I Was a Teenage JFKConspiracy Theorists” is not to be taken seriously, and neither should this article. [      ]

LITWIN WRITES:

A large conspiracy was necessary because McKenna had to give significant meaning to JFK’s death.'

BILL KELLY NOTES: That’s not true, JFK’s MURDER has significant meaning without McKenna giving it any more. That significant meaning bullshit was made up by those, like Litwin, contend that JFK’s sole assassin was a disenchanted, loner, loser and wife beater who couldn’t hold a job, rather than the former Civil Air Patrol Cadet, Russian speaking USMC radar and communications specialist stationed at a super secret U2 base and Soviet defector who supported the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), was arrested with DRE anti-Castro Cubans and engaged in a radio debate with them, and visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City before killing the President – all by himself. Instead, Litwit wants us to believe Oswald was a loner and loser rather than the well trained, efficient and successful sniper and assassin he had to be if he killed the president all by himself. And Litwit says that because Oswald was a loser and loner, conspiracy theorists have to make up a conspiracy to give the murder significant meaning. Wrong, it already has significant meaning.

LITWIT WRITES: (According to McKenna – JFK) …..He was killed because he “tried to change the world” and “over and over he chose not to go to war, over Laos, over Berlin, and twice over Cuba.” Kennedy was “going to be pulling out of Vietnam” beginning “with a 1963 order to start withdrawing troops.” McKenna claims, “This was the last straw for his generals and the CIA. They accused him of treason.”

All of this was just nonsense. Kennedy only wanted to remove troops because of supposed progress in training the South Vietnamese Army. He never contemplated pulling out of Vietnam. Kennedy was a Cold Warrior, period. None of these facts mattered to McKenna.

BILL KELLY NOTES: Wait a minute, these aren’t facts. It’s an honest reading of the government’s own records, as quite clearly demonstrated by Professor Dr. John Newman, a former US Army officer and document analyst whose “JFK and Vietnam” is the state-of-the-art review of the JFK-Vietnam record, not like the opinion of someone with a serious political bent who has not read the records. And if you talk to the anti-Castro Cubans who were arrested with Oswald or any Cuban alive at that time, they will accuse JFK of treason, as did the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top echelon of the CIA. So McKenna certainly does know more than the nonsense Litwit is shitting.  

LITWIN: 

He (McKenna) was a man on a mission and that mission was to find proof of the massive conspiracy. And it didn’t take him long. The CBC press release for McKenna’s first documentary, Dallas and After, which aired in November, 1977, heralded “New evidence showing that Lee Harvey Oswald may have been the victim of a faked photograph which was an important piece of evidence in the John. F. Kennedy assassination.”

The backyard photos of Lee Harvey Oswald have long been a staple of conspiracy theorists ever since he told Dallas police that his head was “pasted” onto somebody else’s body—despite the fact that his wife Marina admitted taking the pictures. Now McKenna had Canadian military officials confirming that conspiracy buffs had been right all along. It also raised the question—if these incriminating photos were faked, wouldn’t that mean that Oswald was framed?

One of three pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald in his backyard taken by his wife.

It was all too good to be true.

The press release for The Fifth Estate documentary said they consulted “phototechnologists at the Department of National Defense in Ottawa. They told us that this photo and another shot at the same time bear the earmarks of having been faked. They noted that the shadows fall in conflicting directions. The shadow of his nose falls in one direction and that of his body in another.”

The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which was already in the middle of their investigation when the Dallas and After aired, contacted Major J.M. Pickard of the Canadian Forces, a Commanding Officer of the Canadian Forces Photographic Unit. Pickard wrote the Committee a letter (see below) stating that he performed “No scientific analysis of the transparencies” that he was given and that they were “very poor copies.” He did “perfunctory measurements” and then offered an opinion. He said his “total involvement with the CBC was less than one hour.”

The HSCA photographic panel ultimately concluded there was no forgery and that the photos were legitimate.

BK NOTES: The famous Backyard photo of Oswald with the rifle and pistol and holding two communist publications is what I call "The Mission Photo" whether real or faked, it is the type of photo military men take before they go on or after an important mission. There are more than two versions of the photo and Marina says she only took one. Besides the photo found in Mrs. Paine’s garage, another surfaced years later when Oswald’s best friend in Dallas when he returned home from the USSR George deMohrenschildt found a copy among items Oswald had given him. Enscribed by Marina in Russian is “Hunter of Fascists, Ha Ha!” This certainly supports what Volkmar Schmidt told Oswald that General Walker was a fascist like Hitler and should be killed before he gets more powerful, and that Oswald took a shot at him. While everyone, including Litwit, wants to talk about the alleged tampering, and Life Magazine certainly touched up the photos they published, I am interested in the two publications Oswald is holding – the Communist Party paper The Worker and the competing Trotkysite Party’s The Militant. Both publications included articles about the CIA’s maritime commando attacks against Cuban industrial sites, and oh yea, Oswald’s patron Michael Paine’s father was a founder of the Trotkysite Party in the United States. So why can’t we talk about these other issues the photo brings up? And not just whether it’s Oswald head on someone else’s body, as Oswald himself claimed.

LITWIN:

Over the years, the Fifth Estate would get all the basic facts of the assassination wrong. They claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald was a poor shot; that no single gunman could fire three shots in 5.6 seconds; and that the fatal head shot came from the grassy knoll in the right-front of Kennedy. None of these claims were true, then or now.

BK NOTES: I guess all of the Parkland doctors were wrong in that the throat wound was one of entrance, and all of those Parkland doctors, Secret Service Agent Gerald Hill and the two autopsy technicians and funeral parlor attendant were wrong in seeing a large baseball sized exit hole in the back of the President’s head, and some saw and the funeral home attendant patched up a small entrance wound to the temple at the hairline that was not noted on any of the three autopsy reports. And oh yea, most of the ear witnesses said they heard reports from the Grassy Knoll, and the last two shots came on top of each other, less than a second apart, as the HSCA Acoustical Study confirmed, and has yet to be refuted by similar tests. The CIA’s National Photo Interpretation Center analysis of the Zapruder film concluded there were more than one gunman, a fact reported to RFK by CIA director John McCone (See: Schlesinger Journal).  So the idea that Oswald was not the Sixth Floor Gunman, that more than one gunman shot more than three shots, and at least two came from the front is plausibly true, was then and is now, and is believed by the majority of people, who can’t be fooled by people like Litwin.

LITWIN: 

In November, 2017, McKenna and The Fifth Estate were back with a new documentary, The JFK Files: The Murder of a President. This time, the focus was on newly-released documents which included tidbits about CIA schemes to kill Fidel Castro and the FBI’s dim view of Martin Luther King but nothing particularly revelatory about the Kennedy assassination.

BILL KELLY NOTES: Woa, there Nelly, pull back the reigns for a minute, as we have found many dozens of new and important documents released under the JFK Act of 1992, as that was the subject of my presentation at the JFK Lancer Conference in Dallas that I will post at my blog ASAP. As I said, while the most significant JFK assassination records have been kept out of the government’s JFK Collection at the Archives, destroyed, missing or wrongfully withheld, and there are no “Smoking Guns,” there are “Smoking Documents,” and I gave my Top Ten Records Released under the JFK Act in my Dallas presentation and will repeat it at my blog. There have been many – MANY particularly revelatory documents about the Kennedy assassination in the recently released records, as I will shortly demonstrate, and has been demonstrated by John Newman, Malcolm Blunt, Russ Baker, Dick Russell and others who have been ploughing through them.

LITWIN: 

Some documents were withheld by the Trump administration in the name of national security. That was enough to inspire McKenna to recycle some hoary old myths about the “truth” and the “cover-up.”

BILL KELLY NOTES: The law that was unanimously passed by Congress and signed by then President George H. W. Bush in 1992 required ALL of the government’s records on the assassination of President Kennedy be released to the public IN FULL by October 17, 2017, twenty-five years after the passage of the law. Despite President Trump’s repeated tweets that he would release all of the records in full as required by law, President Bush included a rider to the law that gave the president the power to continually withhold records for reasons of national security, and the CIA and his chief of staff – US Marine Corps General Kelly convinced him to continue to withhold all or part of tens of thousands of records for another three years, totally subverting the spirit and letter of the law.  Now that’s recycling the hoary old truths about the continuing cover-up. If the President was killed by a deranged loner all by himself, then there’s no reason whatsoever to continue to withhold any records in the name of national security, and since it is a matter of national security TODAY – we should all be concerned about this.

LITWIN:

But, once again McKenna had some big news—a document dated two days after the assassination in which FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is quoted as saying: “The thing I am concerned about is having something issued so that we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.” This was presented as new evidence confirming the belief held by “many” that “Lee Harvey Oswald was the U.S. government’s patsy in JFK’s death.”

But the document was not “new” at all. It was written by Walter Jenkins, an aide to President Lyndon Johnson, and it was published 38 years ago by the HSCA. All it confirms is Hoover’s concern that “the public needed to be settled down” as FBI inspector James Malley, in charge of the investigation in Dallas, explained to the House Committee.

There was much concern about public reaction in the wake of the murder. Gossip about an international conspiracy was rampant because Oswald was a communist who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. Hoover and Lyndon Johnson wanted to stop the rumours from escalating into a full-blown Cold War panic.

BILL KELLY NOTES: Yes, almost all of the “newsworthy” reports from the Mainstream Media over recently released records concerned documents that we have had for years. In fact, as Russ Baker (Who What Where Why ) pointed out in his detailed and illustrated demonstrations at the JFK Lancer conference in Dallas, many dozens of the documents released with redactions in the last few batches had previously been released in full years ago, so by comparing them we can get a good, clear picture of the types of stuff they are redacting today. And this also clearly indicates that the censors and redactors are themselves unfamiliar with the JFK record collection and what has already been released. While they “settled down” the public in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, and they didn’t recognize what happened at Dallas as a covert intelligence operation, in the post Watergate era we can more easily see how they killed the President and got away with it. Now most of the people 80% - don’t believe those like Litwin who avidly promotes the idea that one man alone killed the President. Now there’s no need to panic really knowing what happened. Just acknowledge the truth, and then, as Dan Ellesburg says, you have to decide what to do about it.

LITWIN:

And while The Fifth Estate was upset that President Trump was withholding some documents, they don’t mind keeping their documents secret. I filed several Access to Information requests about McKenna’s various documentaries,

BILL KELLY: Here Litwin reveals his true agenda – not to get to the truth about the Kennedy assassination, but to pinch McKenna’s ass. Why won’t a real Canadian journalist look into the dozen of items I listed at the beginning and get the records on those items and really follow the evidence and leads to where ever they go? Why won’t even Litwin, with a lifelong interest in the assassination, pursue those leads, discover the truth behind them, and tell the rest of us what he finds? Because it won’t confirm his long entrenched beliefs – that Oswald killed JFK alone, something he has been professing for decades despite his attempt to portray himself as an CT.

LITWIN:

and the CBC either claimed an exemption to the Act or said they could find no files. In one filing, I just asked for a list of documentaries on the JFK assassination produced by Brian McKenna for The Fifth Estate, and the CBC replied that “no records were found to respond to your request.” All of the cases are under appeal.

I did manage to find a transcript of the 1977 documentary from the Harold Weisberg Archive on the web. McKenna had corresponded with Weisberg and had sent him a transcript. So, a researcher in the United States can get a transcript but a Canadian can’t?

BILL KELLY NOTES: Will some Canadian researcher with time on his hands please look into each of the items that I listed and get the documents that relate to them? And be as determined as Litwin is to gather all the goods he can get on McKenna to roast his ass.

LITWIN: 

The 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder is coming up in November, 2023. Set your clocks. My bet is that Brian McKenna and The Fifth Estate will be back with yet more “responsible sensationalism.”

BILL KELLY NOTES: I can’t wait until 2023, and nor do I have the time to do a background check on Fred Litwin, which would be a waste of time. But I do appreciate it whenever Litwin, Phil Shennon, Brian Latell, Max Holland or any of bullshittes of this business get published like this, because it gives me a chance to set the record straight, and I will do that.

And I would suggest that now that Litwin has called our attention to it, we should pay attention to Brian McKenna’s extensive documentary work on the JFK Assassination, watch his back productions, and decide for yourself if he is more serious than the Ex-Teenage Conspiracy Freek.