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The New York Times reported on Friday that the files "involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations - but never told the committee of his earlier role."
Joannides was the deputy director for psychological warfare at the CIA's Miami station, JM/WAVE, which was the center of anti-Castro activities in the early 60's and served as a spawning ground for figures who would later be involved in covert operations in Vietnam and in Iran-Contra. In 1963, Joannides worked closely with leaders of the the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil and exercised a significant degree of control over the group's leaders.
Former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley has been engaged since 2001 in a battle to learn move about the dual role placed by Joannides, which has raised suspicions that he was part of a coverup. "I know there's a story here," Morley told the Times. "The confirmation is that the C.I.A. treats these documents as extremely sensitive."
This past July, Morley wrote, "Last week, I did my part to hold the CIA accountable. I filed my sixth (!) declaration in connection with Morley v. CIA, my ongoing lawsuit against the agency seeking records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy ... The Joannides file, say a diverse group of JFK authors, are part of the assassination story and should be made public. For six years, the CIA has refused, alleging their release would harm 'national security.'"
Morley's quest has gained prominent supporters, including even anti-conspiracy assassination scholar Gerald Posner, who believes that the CIA's secretiveness is feeding into conspiracy theories.
G. Robert Blakey, who served as staff director to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, told the Times, "If I’d known his role in 1963, I would have put Joannides under oath - he would have been a witness, not a facilitator ... How do we know what he didn’t give us?"
update: blasts at jakarta ritz, marriott kill 9, wound 50 from ap: Bombs minutes apart ripped through two luxury hotels in Jakarta Friday, killing nine and wounding at least 50 more, ending a four-year lull in terror attacks in the world's most populous Muslim nation. At least 14 foreigners were among the dead and wounded. The blasts at the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels, located side-by-side in an upscale business district in the capital, blew out windows and scattered debris and glass across the street, kicking up a thick plume of smoke. Facades of both hotels were reduced to twisted metal.
Before retiring in October 2007, Myers worked as a Europe analyst in the State Department's intelligence agency, known as the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The arrests followed a three-year investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the State Department's security outfit. In April an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence officer persuaded the couple to meet with him. Upon request, the couple agreed to provide information on US officials responsible for Latin America. They also acknowledged receiving encrypted messages via shortwave radio from Cuban intelligence agencies, and travelling abroad to meet with Cuban officials. If convicted, the charges carry up to 20 years in prison.
censorship on tiananmen anniversary cripples chinese net from threat level: June 4 isn’t just the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, it’s also known as Chinese Internet Maintenance day. That’s because many Chinese services are facing so much pressure from the government to keep their users from talking about that bloody day, they are just shutting down comment boards, or claiming their services are closed for unspecified upgrades. For instance, FanFou.com, a popular Twitter-like service, shut its doors for the week, and says it will re-open on June 6. Meanwhile, the so-called Great Firewall of China is blocking Twitter, human rights groups’ websites and blogging services hosted outside of China. At a well-timed panel at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington, D.C., Thursday, Hu Yong, a popular Chinese blogger and an associate professor at Peking University, quoted EFF co-founder John Gilmore’s famous saying that the “internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it... If he lived in China, he could not say this,” Hu said.
uk admits use of controversial 'enhanced blast' weapons in afghanistan from guardian: British pilots in Afghanistan are firing an increasing number of "enhanced blast" thermobaric weapons, designed to kill everyone in buildings they strike, the Ministry of Defence has revealed. Since the start of this year more than 20 of the US-designed missiles, which have what is officially described as a "blast fragmentation warhead", have been fired by pilots of British Apache attack helicopters. A total of 20 were also fired last year after they were bought by the MoD from the Americans last May.
gates warns north korea from telegraph: Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, delivered a stark warning to North Korea on Saturday, declaring that America would not "stand idly by" while the regime threatened to "wreak destruction" with nuclear weapons. Instead, Mr Gates urged "tough sanctions" against North Korea and pledged that Washington would not accept its possession of a nuclear arsenal. Kim Jong-il's regime was, he said, starving its own people in order to develop weapons of mass destruction. Mr Gates's unequivocal message came during a conference of Asian defence ministers in Singapore. In his audience were representatives of the countries most threatened by Mr Kim – South Korea and Japan – and a delegation from China, North Korea's only ally. "Dependent on the charity of the international community to alleviate the hunger and suffering of its people, North Korea's leadership has chosen to focus the North's limited energies and resources on a reckless and ultimately self-destructive quest for nuclear weapons," said Mr Gates. "The policy of the United States has not changed: our goal is complete and verifiable denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, and we will not accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state."
from huffington post: Asked to reflect upon the coming end of Fidel Castro's time and regime in Cuba, longtime ABC newsman Sam Donaldson had one last request: to be beside Castro's bedside to ask if he was responsible for John F. Kennedy's assassination. "You mentioned the assassination," Donaldson, appearing on ABC's This Week on Sunday [apr19] said in reference to early conversation about the shooting of JFK. "In his dying breath I'd like to be at [Castro's] bedside and say, did you do it? Meaning November 22, 1963." A few co-panelists expressed playful shock with Donaldson's conspiratorial yarn. "Oh, my goodness," said Peggy Noonan, sifting her fingers through her hair. "Come on, Sam," added Cokie Roberts. "Wait a moment," Donaldson responded. "I think it is still open."
3 new books offer competing versions of jfk's assassination from new york observer: What can we hope to gain from a new book about the J.F.K. assassination? Surely not that it reveal some definitive truth about the events in Dallas, since with every passing year, with each frustrating release of declassified information, it becomes clear that no such revelation will ever be forthcoming. Rather, the best such a book can offer is a narrative that is plausible and in some way resonant; a story that provides the consolations of fiction rather than fact. If we can’t have the truth, then at least give us a myth we can believe in, a story with villains and heroes, with tragedy and some sense of redemption.
Perhaps sensing this, the publishers of Brothers in Arms claim that it depicts the events surrounding the assassination “in a narrative non-fiction format, using … techniques of the most highly readable novels.” Written by veteran investigative reporter Gus Russo in collaboration with novelist and screenwriter Stephen Molton, this elegantly composed book depicts those few seconds in Dallas as being the culmination of a blood feud between two sets of brothers, the Castros and Kennedys...
Legacy of Secrecy proves, in many ways, to be a mirror image of Brothers in Arms. Written by veteran Kennedy investigator Lamar Waldron (assisted by Air America host Thom Hartmann), it asserts that Oswald was in fact an anti-Castro agent involved in a C.I.A. plot to overthrow the Cuban leader, which was slated to take place just days after Kennedy’s killing...
For its part, James W. Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable puts forward a scenario in which J.F.K. was cut down by a C.I.A.-administered plot that used Oswald as a patsy. Mr. Douglass, “a longtime peace activist,” believes Kennedy was murdered by shadowy forces because he was in the process of renouncing the cold war and all its toxic legacies: the arms race, Vietnam, the anti-Castro campaign, even predatory capitalism in the form of Big Steel
fema: gustav to be category 5 from ap: The government's disaster relief chief says Hurricane Gustav is growing into a monster Category 5 storm. The storm that hit Cuba Saturday could reach landfall along the Gulf Coast by early Tuesday. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief David Paulison told reporters several times at a briefing Saturday that the storm was strengthening into a Category 5 hurricane.
global hawk may be called for storm duty from sun herald: Something that's being manufactured in part right here on the Coast could forever change the face of hurricane predictions, hurricane monitoring and even hurricane relief. But whether it's detecting land mines in a faraway country or monitoring contraflow in a hurricane evacuation, it's all the same equipment, officials with Northrop Grumman said Wednesday. And if Gustav becomes enough of a threat, the Global Hawk's capabilities might get a hurricane test run.
mandatory evacuations to begin sunday morning in new orleans from cnn: New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city beginning 8 a.m. Sunday but urged residents to consider escaping "the mother of all storms" before then. "You need to be scared," Nagin said of the Category 4 hurricane tearing along Cuba's western coast. "You need to be concerned, and you need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now. This is the storm of the century." The city's west bank is to evacuate at 8 a.m.
from miami herald: Grayston L. Lynch, a hero of the anti-Castro movement for his leadership in the Bay of Pigs invasion, where fired the first shot of the battle, died at 85 on Aug. 10... In his 1998 book, Decision for Disaster: Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs, Lynch detailed his role as CIA case officer in charge of the April 16, 1961, operation. He fired the first shot of the three-day assault - at a Jeep shining its headlights on Brigade 2506 frogmen landing at Playa Giron - then returned to his ship and shot down two Cuban fighter planes. Despite the invasion's disastrous failure, Lynch continued to direct clandestine assaults on the island from Miami until 1967. His anger at the Kennedy administration's decision to cancel air support never abated.
from hollywood reporter: "Red Dawn" will be redone. Screenwriter Carl Ellsworth has been hired to recraft the ultimate homeland invasion story about a new generation of besieged high schoolers... "The tone is going to be very intense, very much keeping in mind the post-9/11 world that we're in," says Ellsworth, who was 11 when the original was released. "As 'Red Dawn' scared the heck out of people in 1984, we feel that the world is kind of already filled with a lot of paranoia and unease, so why not scare the hell out of people again?" ...
The original "Dawn" was the Cold War brainchild of writer-director John Milius, who devised a World War III invasion of America by the Soviets and Cubans. The film followed the scrappy insurgency of a group of Midwestern teenagers who take on their high school mascot name -- "Wolverines!" -- as a rallying cry of resistance. The 1984 action drama was the first film released in theaters with the newly devised PG-13 rating because of its intense subject matter and violent content.
nyc wants more bioweapons sensors from washinton post: City officials last month quietly activated some of the nation's newest generation of early warning sensors to detect a biological attack, turning on a limited number of filing-cabinet-size air filters in sensitive, high-volume areas of Manhattan. But city officials say their effort to expand the program has run into surprising resistance from the White House, which is not widely deploying the machines.
philip agee, cia whistleblower, dies in cuba at 72 from ap: Renegade former CIA agentPhilip Agee, whose naming of agency operatives helped prompt a U.S. law against exposing government spies, has died in Cuba, his wife said Wednesday. He was 72. Agee quit the CIA in 1969 after 12 years working mostly in Latin America at a time when leftist movements were gaining prominence and sympathizers. His 1975 book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," cited alleged misdeeds against leftists in the region and included a 22-page list of purported agency operatives.
bush met with plunge protection team from rogue government: George W. Bush on January 4th, 2008 met with the President's Working Group on Financial Markets otherwise known as the Plunge Protection Team. The group which consists of the SEC Chairman, Treasury Secretary, Federal Reserve Chairman and Futures Trading Commission Chairman was formed following the stock market crash of 1987 commonly referred to as Black Monday. It is interesting to see Bush meet with a group that was formed to prevent future stock market and economic crashes yet at the same time make claims that the economy should do better later in the year. Obviously with oil at around $100 a barrel, the mortgage crisis, massive losses in the banking system, gold over $870 an ounce and the plunging value of the U.S. Dollar, the economy is in the process of unraveling. Bush is merely attempting to put a positive spin on an increasingly more horrifying economic situation by admitting there are problems but that they are not as bad as everyone thinks they are.
"Lawyers for the Central Intelligence Agency faced pointed questions in a federal court hearing Monday morning about the agency's efforts to block disclosure of long-secret records about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."
Morley filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the CIA for failing to disclose records about a CIA officer named George Joannides. Joannides was responsible for running the DRE, an anti-Castro CIA front group that had extensive interactions with Lee Harvey Oswald in the months leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy.
The CIA has consistently refused to release Joannides' records, even though they are mandated to by the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act.
What's at stake here matters greatly to all historians. If the government can simply choose which records to release, and which to withhold, they can pervert and deliberately misshape history to serve their purposes.
In this particular case, the CIA appears hellbent on undoing the will of the people. The JFK Act came into being due to an enormous outcry from the public when they learned, at the end of Oliver Stone's film JFK, that many records relating to the assassination were still classified.
Congress passed what became known as "The JFK Act," which mandated the creation of a board to declassify records and, if necessary, seek out new and pertinent records and make them public.
The Board, officially named the Assassination Records and Review Board, put Joannides on the JFK assassination story map when it declassified five personnel reports of his in 1998. In addition, researchers learned that it was Joannides who had helped shut down an early investigation of the CIA's possible involvement in the assassination...
If the CIA was involved in the Kennedy assassination, wouldn't that change entirely our understanding of events from that time forth, and wouldn't that call into question much of the reporting on the case, and the credibility of the media from that time forward?...
Even anti-conspiracy authors Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi have sided with the law, calling for the documents to be released.
If our government can simply choose which laws to support and which to break, is it really our government anymore?
related: 'oswald's ghost'
from american experience: The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 left a psychic wound on America that is with us still today. Few Americans then or now accept that a lone, inconsequential gunman could bring down a president and alter history.
In that breach, a culture of conspiracy has arisen that points to sinister forces at work in the shadows. Drawing upon rarely seen archival footage and interviews with key participants, Oswald's Ghost takes a fresh look at Kennedy's assassination, the public's reaction to the tragedy, and the government investigations that instead of calming fears lead to a widespread loss of trust in the institutions that govern our society.
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Welcome to New World Next Week - the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
Visit NewWorldNextWeek.com to get previous episodes in various formats to download, burn and share. And as always, stay up-to-date by subscribing to the feeds from Corbett Report here and Media Monarchy here. Thank you.
