In the current edition of Fair Play appears an article entitled "Garrison's
Case Finally Coming Together" by respected assassination researcher Martin
Shackelford. Below are quotes from the article, followed by my comments.

"Perry Raymond Russo, the key witness who described conspiratorial
conversations including the defendant Clay Shaw and the deceased David Ferrie,
maintained the veracity of his testimony until his death in 1995."

This is not a fair accounting of the story of Perry Russo, who expressed doubts
about aspects of the story to several people over the years.

"As late as 1993...Garrison's critics were denying that David Ferrie was in the
Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans at the same time as Oswald (the mid-1950s)."

Well, one of Garrison's critics was, Gerald Posner. Long before the appearance
of the John Ciravolo picture of Ferrie and Oswald at a 1955 CAP bivouac,
serious researchers (myself included) had concluded that 1963 FBI documents
established that Ferrie had been a volunteer instructor for the Moisant Airport
CAP squadron "during the summer months of 1955", at the same time Oswald was a
member.

"Former Deputy Counsel Robert Tannenbaum of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations has stated that his staff located a film showing Oswald and
Ferrie at an anti-Castro training camp near New Orleans in the summer of 1963."

Are we really to believe that the HSCA located a film of such significance, and
not only failed to publish it, but also failed to mention it? Where is the
film? Has anyone but Tannenbaum ( a conspiracy advocate) seen it? How can
Martin cite as evidence a film he has not seen?

[Shaw] "had a working relationship with former FBI agent Guy Banister"

Where is the evidence for this?

"Many of [Banister's] former employees now confirm that Banister employed
Oswald in the summer of 1963."

Delphine Roberts failed to come forward with this info, and did not mention it
in her interviews with Garrison's staff or her early HSCA interviews, and
expressed something less than certainty to at least one interviewer. Jack
Martin's statements are filled with demonstrable errors. Joe Newbrough has
given conflicting statements. Here he is less than certain: "I don't think it
is unreasonable that Banister knew Oswald." Neither Newbrough nor Dan Campbell
mentioned seeing Oswald to Garrison's investigators. Decker and Brengel are
only repeating hearsay from Roberts. The eyewitness testimony of Garrison's
former staff is less consistent than Martin lets on.

"Shaw had a 'covert security' classification for a top secret program called
QKENCHANT."

First, we don't know what QKENCHANT was. Second, Shaw was an "unwitting"
participant in it. Misleading.

"New Orleans CIA office Chief Lloyd Ray wrote...[that] the Garrison
investigation...is under a discreet and sensitive investigation by the FBI."

It reflects well on the FBI that they DID consider Garrison's evidence, even if
they did come up with a different conclusion.

"A September 1977 memo written by HSCA staff counsel Jonathan Blackmer
concluded: 'We have reason to believe Shaw was heavily involved in the
anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and possibly one of the
high-level planners or 'cut-out' to the planners of the assassination.'"

This is Blackmer's opinion. Where's the evidence? Keep in mind that some of
those involved with HSCA (Fonzi and Groden come to mind) were and are
conspiracy believers.

The upshot is that Martin says this (and a few unquoted points) show that
"Garrison's case [is] finally coming together". With the release of various
documents, some people feel that Garrison's case has been weakened. Some
examples:
* A chronological reading of the available Garrison documents shows that,
indeed, all Garrison had at the time of the arrest of Shaw was Russo's story,
and a suspicion that Shaw was Andrews' "Bertrand".
* Lou Ivon's recent claims that Ferrie "partially confessed" to him is in
direct conflict to Sciambra's contemporaneous memo of the conversation.
* The initial Clinton witness statements contradict each other, and contradict
some of their later statements.

Martin Shackelford is a serious and responsible researcher who has made
valuable contributions to the case. He is intelligent, articulate, honest, and
not reluctant to acknowledge information which conflicts with his sincere
beliefs. I was very surprised that this article overreached in it's
conclusions.

oo
David

****************************************************************

Dave Reitzes responds:

Ferrie, it would seem, was actually involved with two different CAP units that
year, one of which -- I believe the Moisant unit -- was actually based on a
fraudulent charter. There is reason to believe that Oswald was involved with
both groups, although there is nothing to indicate any sinister connotations
about this -- necessarily. Dave, I've been trying to figure out more about
these two CAP units, as the issue is extremely poorly documented in the
literature (not excluding the HSCA report). Can you tell me anything about
them?

******************************************************************

*******************************************************************

Dave Reitzes re-posts:

Robert Tanenbaum had been the original Deputy Chief of the House Select
Committee on Assassinations, appointed by the original Chief Counsel, attorney
Richard A, Sprague. Tanenbaum had studied law at the University of California
at Berkeley and went on to work for District Attorney Frank Hogan in New York
County. While there Tanenbaum served as Bureau Chief of the Criminal Courts of
the Felony Trial Bureau, and Deputy Chief then Acting Chief of the Homicide
Bureau, where he tried several hundred cases to verdict. When Sprague -- who
Tanenbaum had never met -- called him out of the blue one day in 1976 and
offered him the position of Deputy Chief Counsel leading the Congressional
investigations of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther
King, Tanenbaum didn't know a thing about these events except what he'd read in
the papers. He had only one question -- he "wanted assurance from the Committee
that whatever the facts were we would be permitted to tell the American people.
. . . The focus was to deal with these cases as homicides." Sprague, a highly
successful and rigorous prosecutor himself, assured him that was the case; he
was mistaken.

Tanenbaum resigned soon after he'd watched Sprague forced out by interests that
clearly feared the result of a thorough and honest investigation. "I wasn't
going to participate any longer when I found out that the Congress was not
going to tell the truth," he told the Assassination Records Review Board in
1996. "I didn't want to participate in a historical fraud. . . . My daughter,
when I was in Washington, was three years old. She is now a junior at UCLA. And
I did not want to look at her years later and [have her know that I] put my
rubber stamp on a report that I knew was a fraud."

Board member Dr. Kermit Hall asked, ". . . about what other materials might be
where -- You didn't speak to the question of the film that you were, that deals
with anti-Castro Cubans. . . . So I wonder if you could speak to that
particular matter."

". . . As far as where the film is, again, I can only tell you that all of the
material, I assumed was . . ." He laughed bitterly. " . . . in the same place.
. . ."

"And that film had been obtained from the Georgetown University Library?" Dr.
Hall asked.

"That is my best recollection. . . . Investigators and researchers found it in
the Georgetown Library archives."

"And just for the record, the significance of this film if it were recovered,
would be . . . ?

". . . On the one hand it shows a lot of anti-Castro Cuban players with CIA
contract people in a military setting. There was some speculation, somewhat
unclear, as to the direct identities of some of these people. And as I stand
here now, I am not going to tell you exactly who they were, but there were some
of the major players in this whole case."

The film was an 8 mm "home movie" from the summer of 1963. It vanished into
thin air, while in the HSCA's custody, sometime after Tanenbaum's departure.
Here is Tanenbaum's description of what the film contained, condensed from his
novel based in part on his HSCA experiences, Corruption of Blood. The plot of
the novel is fictionalized; the evidence discussed is not.

. . . The small square screen showed a shadowy landscape, some bushes and
trees, then a road. The film was black-and-white and grainy, or perhaps the
graininess was just an artifact of the ground-glass screen of the editing
machine. In any case, the film seemed to have been shot in bad light, at dusk
perhaps, or in moonlight.

The camera panned across dark woods that seemed vaguely tropical -- palmettos,
Spanish moss, and hanging vines -- past an open field, and onto the road again.
A line of two-and-a-half-ton military trucks appeared, moving slowly, their
headlights cut to thin slits. The trucks stopped and soldiers leaped out and
lined up on the road. They were dressed in fatigues and soft caps. Most carried
rifles, but there were some with machine guns and mortar components, and . . .
one with a folded bazooka.

The film now cut jerkily to maneuvers: the soldiers rushed across the field and
flung themselves down, while others provided covering fire. The film was
silent, but you could see the pinpoints of fire from the rifles and the
shimmering gouts of muzzle blast from the machine guns. It cut to a mortar team
firing, dropping the shells in odd silence down the tubes and shielding their
ears from the blasts. . . . they seemed well drilled.

. . . Now the camera was obviously in a vehicle of some kind, an open vehicle
because the camera could pan around 360 degrees. A jeep: the well-known square
hood flashed by and then the backs of the heads of two men with military caps
on. A white road sign loomed up and started to whip by. . . . The road sign had
the shape of Louisiana and a number.

This is by Lake Pontchartrain, near New Orleans. The jeep ride ended and the
camera cut to a group of five men standing around a jeep, talking, as troops
filed by in the background. There were two unidentified Cubans. There was a
"stocky guy with the round face" -- Antonio Veciana of the CIA-backed
anti-Castro squad, Alpha 66. There was a "tall, ugly guy" -- Guy Banister, the
notorious right-wing extremist whose 531 Lafayette Street office had a side
entrance at 544 Camp Street, the address stamped on a number of Lee Harvey
Oswald's PRO-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee literature. There was a figure
wearing civilian clothes, "a tall man with dark hair, a prominent nose, and
deeply impressed wrinkles under his eyes . . . turning away from the lens as
the shot opened, as if more interested in some background object than in the
conversation the men were having; that, or he had a predisposition to avoid
being the subject of photography. He resembled CIA officer David Atlee
Phillips.

"In the treacly movements of slow motion, the camera's view moved to another
group of men standing by a truck. One of the men in the group turned around and
smiled at the camera. It was actually more of a smirk than a smile, the famous
smirk. . . . Lee Harvey Oswald." There were several unidentified men.

". . . The screen brightened. It was full day. Some men were shooting pistols
at a crude outdoor firing range, firing at man-shaped targets nailed to trees."
Antonio Veciana appeared in civilian clothes now, "holding an .45 and smiling.
The view moved unsteadily at each soundless explosion. Two men, grinning, held
up a well-punctured target. A man in a black T-shirt and ball cap sat at a
table loading bullets into pistol magazines. He looked up for an instant,
frowned, spoke briefly, and lowered his head again so that the bill of the cap
obscured his face. He resembled Oswald, but not identically. Tanenbaum thought
it was Oswald, but it would have had "to be some time later than in the first
scenes, because his sideburns [had] grown longer. . . . More shooting, men
posing with weapons, then a close-up of a round-faced man with a fright wig and
patently phony, impossibly thick eyebrows. . . David Ferrie . . . nobody else
looked like Ferrie."

The film cut to a shot of the man who looked like Oswald in the ball cap and
black T-shirt. "The shot was taken from the rear and showed him standing,
aiming at a target twenty-five yards downrange and firing off seven shots
rapidly. . . . The camera moved in ...

read more »

Dave B.:

        I appreciate your comments. The Garrison piece was written in a
short period of time as a newsgroup post, primarily from memory, late at
night. John Kelin asked if he could run it, and I agreed. Clearly, I
should have gone over it more carefully before agreeing to publication.
       As for the CAP photo, Posner continued to claim no evidence of an
Oswald-Ferrie connection after he was on the same "Frontline" program
that first showed the photo!
       As for the anti-Castro film, I wasn't citing the film as
evidence, just noting Tannenbaum's statement. He apparently feels that
the film was "lost" during the Blakey period of the HSCA, along with
other early discoveries and reports (anyone seen the Fenton Report on
New Orleans activities yet?).
       The evidence for a working relationship between Oswald and
Banister is at:
gopher://freenet.akron.oh.us:70/00/SIGS/JFK/Only/MS/Posner-Series/individua l-posner/05.bannister

        How do we know that Shaw was "unwitting" with regard to
QK/ENCHANT. And why don't we know what it is, if it was inconsequential?

        Thanks again, Dave.

Martin

--
Martin Shackelford

"You're going to find that many of the truths we
  cling to depend greatly on our own point of view."
   -Obi-Wan Kenobi

"You must unlearn what you have learned."  --Yoda

In my prior post, I missed the "Shaw-Banister" reference, assuming it to
be a reference to Oswald-Banister. I may have referred to my Review
Series (on Assassination Web)--one of the original sources was probably
Davy, but I used others as well. Unfortunately, as the series was
written for a local bi-weekly newspaper, it wasn't footnoted.

Martin

--
Martin Shackelford

"You're going to find that many of the truths we
  cling to depend greatly on our own point of view."
   -Obi-Wan Kenobi

"You must unlearn what you have learned."  --Yoda

****************************************************************

Dave Reitzes responds:

Martin,

You've said at least three or four times that there were no sources required or
used for your original article. Fine. Now, what exactly is stopping you from
telling us what they are NOW?

Dave

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * \8^)
For my series on John Armstrong's Oswald research, please see:
gopher://gopher.freenet.akron.oh.us:70/11/SIGS/JFK/Only/JA/DR

The loss of such a film as the one described here is extremely
aggravating.

James MacRyland Crary

You're confusing several things:
*Ferrie served with the Lakefront Airport squadron from 1952-April 1955, when
his commander declined to renew his membership.
*Ferrie then went to the Moisant Airport squadron for the summer months of 1955
on an unofficial basis.
*In 1958, Ferrie weaseled his way back into the Lakefront squadron
*In June 1960, he was again forced out of the Lakefront squadron
*In September 1960, he formed his own group, the Metairie Falcon Cadet
Squadron, which was unaffiliated with the CAP, but for which he obtained a
state corporate charter.
*The Falcons folded, to all intents and purposes, after Ferrie's arrests in
August 1961

There is evidence that Oswald attended a meeting of the Lakefront squadron
before settling on the Moisant squadron, all in 1955.

I'll reserve judgement until the film surfaces.

Delphine changed her story. Her stuff is interesting, but I am not completely
confident about it.

In context, this was Martin's erroneous belief that Oswald had been a member of
the Falcons in 1960-1

I have the Garrison stsements, the trial testimony and the HSCA statements. I
see substantial inconsistencies.

oo
David

Martin:
I meant what I said, that I have a great deal of respect for your work. I think
we agree on some things and disagree on others. I am neither a CT or an LN, I
am just committed to trying to refine the research to weed out the marginal
stuff to focus on the real stuff. And as I have said, my focus on New Orleans
has made me feel that a lot of little inaccurate nuggets are repeated over and
over, to the point where it confuses most observers.

I don't agree with many of Posner's assertions or his methodology. (There is a
very different thrust in info presented by an advocate, like Posner, than info
presented by an objective party. Maybe I'm too anal about it.) When I saw the
Ciravolo photo, it merely buttressed what I and others had deduced from FBI
documents. But Posner is the only one I know who flatly denied what was
provable, even before the photo.

Besides not having a lot of faith in "lost" evidence of a sensational nature
(the alleged Oliver film and the Nagell tidbits, for example), I find
Tannenbaum just a littletoo far over the line into advocacy. He seems to enjoy
being the ultimate source for CTs.

Oh...I misunderstood. I thought you said Banister and Shaw, which is
specualtive, as I see it.

John M. Has cited a document (which I don't have) which uses the phrase. I
guess I shouldn't be too sure without the doc in my hands. Sorry.

In retrospect, some CIA cryptonymed programs seem significant, and others
don't. I just think we are regarding QKENCHANT with suspicion when it could be
either something or nothing. I can think of benign reasons why CIA would not
want to disclose info about it (compromising sources and methods, embarrasment,
etc.), but you make a valid point: They've released a lot of stuff, important
and unimportant --- why can't they release this?

Maybe Dave R. can ask his case officer about this...JUST A JOKE, DAVE !!!

Thanks again, Martin. Keep up the stimulating research, and Merry Christmas to
you and yours.

with respect
David

: Martin:
: I meant what I said, that I have a great deal of respect for your work. I think
: we agree on some things and disagree on others. I am neither a CT or an LN,

What a liar. Color this guy Langley. I saw what you did re Arcacha.
You can pose all you want, but you are a here with an agenda that has
nothing to do with telling the whole truth.

--
                                Lisa Pease

                "Human history becomes more and more a
                race between education and catastrophe."

                              - H. G. Wells

            Real History Archives: www.RealHistoryArchives.com

                      Probe/CTKA: www.webcom.com/ctka

But others must have seen it.

Have you talked to Fonzi or any other HSCA people who might corroborate
this claim?

Bob Harris

gopher://freenet.akron.oh.us:70/00/SIGS/JFK/Only/MS/Posner-Series/individua l-posner/05.bannister

--
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http://www.c-works.com/jfk/

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