Well, the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination
is almost here, and loads of new books on this yet not-fully-understood subject
are being published.
Always having been interested in the subject, I will be
reading some of the new or updated books. This is necessarily a risky task
because the Kennedy assassination literature has consisted of about five-percent
genuine books, with the rest an ugly swamp of disinformation, quick-buck
products, and just plain stupidities.
I know that we can never fully understand the event while so
many vital documents remain buried in classified government files, especially
those of the CIA and FBI, but clever researchers do sometimes manage to piece
together interesting new conclusions in sorting through the mounds of public
evidence.
You try the best you can to not trail again into the swamp,
but unless you can actually page through a book in a store, sampling its logic
and writing quality – and who does that now very often with the convenience of Amazon?
- you are bound to land in the muck a few times. Amazon’s reviews provide a
helpful device, but experienced readers know they are larded with meaningless
praises from relatives, friends, colleagues, or unscrupulous publishers trying
to gin up sales. Humans do have a tendency to abuse every good thing. You really
must read a number of any set of reviews with a critical eye, but then
information has never been free.
I had some reason to think there might be a new approach in
this book, and indeed there is, a new approach to abusing readers. Not only is
the author embarrassingly uninformed, but the publisher employs a new sales gimmick:
this book is incomplete, virtually ending in midstream, and you must buy volume
two (and who knows after that, volumes three or four depending on sales volume?)
to let the author finish.
Well, I finished with the author before he finished with me.
What can you say about a writer/researcher who doesn’t know so basic a fact as
that Oswald never renounced his American citizenship in Russia? The fact is
that In front of State Department official (and ex-CIA employee), Richard
Snyder, Oswald made a big show for possible witnesses about renouncing at the
Embassy, even handing over a legally-meaningless, scribbled note. Snyder
explained that the only method of renouncing citizenship involved a standard
form to be sworn and witnessed. Oswald never pretended to do so. Further,
Anthony Summers, in his second book on the assassination, tells us that Oswald
at one point during this whole little stage play for any KGB watchers was
admitted to a restricted area behind closed doors.
Yet Mr. Albarelli asserts twice that Oswald renounced his
citizenship, contradicting the testimony of everyone involved including Richard
Snyder, and contradicting plain logic, too, because had Oswald actually signed
the papers and taken the oath he would certainly not have been entitled to return
to the United States. Swearing off your citizenship is not a game, it comes
with real consequences.
Albarelli pooh-poohs the idea of some highly-informed researchers
that Oswald himself never did travel to Mexico City – an idea supported at
least in part by the CIA’s never supplying a photo of Oswald (the Cuban Embassy
there being under constant photo-surveillance) and claiming telephone-recording
tapes of calls Oswald supposedly made were routinely destroyed. No, Albarelli
claims Oswald went to Mexico City three times, a bizarre claim I have never
come across before.
Albarelli is immersed in notions about the use of drugs and
hypnotism to interrogate people and to possibly set them up for carrying out
ordered acts. While it is true that the CIA did a huge number of illegal and
unethical studies on uninformed people and even hospital patients - killing
some of them - it is difficult to see what application this has to the Kennedy assassination.
A drugged and/or hypnotized Oswald would have been no more suitable a candidate
for assassin than a not-drugged, not-hypnotized one. The man was certifiably a
poor shot, and the rifle he supposedly used is a ridiculous piece of garbage.
We can surmise that
many pro-Warren Report books on the assassination - Gerald Posner, Priscilla Johnson,
or Edward Epstein in the last book of his trilogy come to mind - were generated
(either wittingly or unwittingly on the part of authors) through CIA contacts
and assets. After all, many who do work for CIA assets and cut-outs never even understand
the truth behind their paychecks. But I suspect many of the more outlandish
anti-Warren Report books also owe their genesis to CIA assets, it being an effective
method of discrediting critics to publish silly or lurid stuff that supposedly
represents their views – the precise method used to discredit Jim Garrison’s
investigation.
Avoid this book and its sequel or sequels because you will
learn nothing worth knowing from it/them.
