Thursday, May 2, 2019

Dr. James Kelleher in Irish Echo on TRC

By Dr. James Kelleher

Back in January, on Martin Luther King Day, members of the Kennedy and King families called for new investigations into the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The family members are part of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee which is comprised of authors, researchers, scholars, attorneys and celebrities.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and Dr. King’s nephew, Newton Farris Jr., were joined by David Talbot, Jim Lesar, Dr. Cyril Wecht, Daniel Ellsberg, Oliver Stone and a number of other prominent Americans in demanding that Congress reopen investigations into the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X.

Why should these investigations be reopened?

Andrew Kreig, an attorney and the director of the Justice Integrity Project in Washington D.C. stated: “All four assassinations are iconic events in American history that have generated intense controversy in part because the implications remain important for world affairs.”

Kreig, a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, pointed out that all four investigations reached flawed conclusions and that there was solid evidence that contradicted the findings in all four investigations.
Kreig was hopeful that official opinion on the RFK and MLK assassinations was changing and cited two recent articles in the Washington Post. One article covered Robert Kennedy Jr.’s belief that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill his father. An additional front page story covered the King family’s doubts concerning who killed Dr. King.

Both articles suggested a major change in direction for the Washington Post which has a long history of endorsing the official conclusions put forth in the Kennedy and King assassinations. For those interested in researching the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations, the Justice Integrity Project maintains up-to-date booklists on all three assassinations on its website.

The former chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, G. Robert Blakey, supported the committee’s call for the release of all the documents involved in the Kennedy assassination required by the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992. Blakey is not supportive of the call for new investigations, but said that the document release is his main concern.

The HSCA reached a totally different judgment about the assassination of President Kennedy than the Warren Commission, citing strong evidence of a shot from the grassy knoll and that a conspiracy was behind JFK’s murder.

Blakey pointed out that the Warren Commission was unable to prove that Oswald was on the sixth floor of the Texas School Depository when the shots were fired. He said that President Johnson pushed the investigation along to its lone assassin conclusion because he wanted to get the assassination out of the way and concentrate on running for president in 1964.

Blakey emphasized that almost all of the witnesses are dead and that the documents are the only source left to obtain information about the assassination.

Dr. Cyril Wecht, a well-known forensic pathologist and a member of the HSCA forensic pathology panel, stated that the conclusions rendered in the JFK, RFK, and MLK investigations are scientifically invalid and intentional cover-ups. For Wecht, the chief concern was that it was possible to carry out far-reaching cover-ups involving the murders of a president, senator, and civil rights leader.

Yet, despite the government’s cover-ups, Dr. Wecht emphasized that the majority of the American people rejected the conclusions of the official investigations into the murders of JFK, RFK, and MLK. Dr. Wecht has long argued that the Warren Commission Report should be moved to the fiction section in every library in the country.

There is little doubt that the foundation of public trust in American government was rocked by the JFK assassination and the subsequent murders of RFK and Dr. King.

A detailed study of the Warren Commission Report reveals a total reluctance to pursue any hint of a conspiracy. The commission claimed that there was no credible evidence of a shot from any place in Dealey Plaza other than the Texas School Book Depository, despite the fact that no less than 64 witnesses stated that a shot came from the knoll or knoll area.

The commission, as Bob Blakey points out, never explained why these witnesses were not credible.
The commission also ignored Ruby’s mob connections and his stalking of Oswald before he finally killed him on November 24, 1963.

Allen Dulles, the former CIA Director fired by President Kennedy, never informed the commission of the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro in cooperation with Mafia members.

Warren Commission attorneys, Senator Arlen Specter and Judge Burt Griffin, admitted while testifying before the HSCA that they would have conducted a totally different type of investigation had they known about the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro.

The Warren Commission’s findings have been attacked by a chorus of critics over the years that have succeeded in destroying the credibility of its conclusions.

The critics were joined by official government bodies such as the Church Committee that  criticized the role of the FBI and CIA in conducting the investigation into JFK’s murder. At LBJ’s behest, Attorney General Ramsey Clark assembled a panel of experts to examine the medical evidence and discovered major errors in the location of Kennedy’s head and back wounds.

Despite the successful attack on the Warren Commission’s findings, the CIA continues to hold back documents related to the Kennedy assassination on national security grounds.

Dr. Wecht, in an earlier interview, said that the Warren Commission concluded that the Soviets and the Cubans were not involved in JFK’s assassination. Wecht asked, “If the Soviets and the Cubans weren’t involved, how is it possible for the CIA to make an argument to withhold documents based on national security?”

Maybe, we should pay more attention to the conclusions of those most affected by the tragedies generated by the assassination of the Kennedys and Dr. King.

Their relatives, as well as the majority of the American public, do not believe the official conclusions. Those who want to support the effort to reopen the JFK, RFK, MLK and Malcolm X investigations can go online to [ https://www.americantruthnow.org/ ] and sign the Ten Points of Agreement and “Call for Congress to Reopen Assassination Probes.”

Dr. James Kelleher is professor emeritus at the College of the Canyons, in Valencia, California and the author of “He Was Expendable: National Security, Political and Bureaucratic Cover-Ups in the Murder of President Kennedy." He is also a member of Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA.org) 

From Irish Echo April 10-16, 2019 www.irishecho.com

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Page 11 / Irish Echo / APRIL 10 - 16, 2019 / www.irishecho.
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