("Quid coniuratio est?")
RESOLVED: President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy.
[Continuation of my transcription of a radio debate which took place in the Fall of 1993 between Peter Dale Scott and Gerald Posner. Today, Mr. Scott gives his rebuttal to Mr. Posner's opening remarks.]
MODERATOR: Thank you, Mr. Posner. Mr. Scott, you have 6 minutes for rebuttal.
PETER DALE SCOTT: Our audience has just heard the kind of people that Mr. Posner believes in: The KGB and (I'll come back to this later) Marina Oswald.
Marina Oswald, for whom, by the way, I have great compassion at that time, was being so obviously coerced by the very people who were interviewing her at that time, that she changed her stories repeatedly at that time. It was quite obvious she was trying to tell what the government wanted her to tell in order to avoid being deported. The Warren Commission knew this, and wrote a memo in February of 1964 saying, "Marina has repeatedly lied on matters of serious concern to this commission." And it's very revealing, I think, that when they knew this in February, when they came to write their report in June and July, they had such trouble linking Oswald to the gun and to the act of shooting anyone -- let alone General Walker -- that they had to rely on the testimony of a liar. And uh so, unfortunately, does Mr. Posner.
Mr. Posner believes in the KGB. Let me tell you, the readers, that he believes even more in the CIA. And, in fact, [he] tells us that he got certain things from the CIA. He says, for example, Mr. George De Mohrenschildt (a friend of Oswald's with obvious intelligence background -- although he had other aspects to his background as well), he says, "had no intelligence connection to the CIA." How do we know? Mr. Posner says, "Because the CIA has told us so."
But if Mr. Posner would do what I do, which is to look at the documents, he would see that despite what he [De Mohrenschildt] told people, when he left Dallas in '63, he went to Washington. He took part in a meeting with CIA agents and more importantly, Army Intelligence agents, before going to Haiti as a business... whatever it was... but certainly about Haiti. Since then, a CIA contract agent has said it was about the overthrow of the government in Haiti. And this is the sort of thing you won't find in Mr. Posner's book.
I object very much to that long quote from my book, which was about how many enemies Kennedy had in 1963. I certainly did not say that they all killed the President. I said on the contrary that... You know, so many people think that I'm saying the President was killed because of his Vietnam policy. And I was trying, on the contrary, to "open it out," to say that there were many coalitions that were angry with Kennedy in 1963 -- the joint chiefs and the military being an important one. But organized crime, the teamsters, (and you've heard the list) also... But I'm certainly not saying that they all killed the President. I'm saying don't misread me to think that I have named the killers. And I said, in fact, at the beginning of the book, Mr. Posner (if you'd started on page 1), that I do not in this book try to say who the killers are!
So now, finally, General Walker... I have written about General Walker in all of my preceding books. And the bullets that you and I have both talked about -- which were too mangled to be identified in April when it was shot at General Walker, but somehow has become identifiable in November of 1963 and was identified as having been shot from Lee Harvey Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano [Italian rifle]. You didn't mention, Mr. Posner, that (I hope I get this the right way around), that in April it had been identified as copper-jacketed but by the time it was November it was now steel-jacketed. So that that bullet is just one example of the kind of things that "happened" to evidence that were kept in the hands of the Dallas police or later, in the FBI, and which are, for me, a major part of the case that this was a conspiracy involving people both outside the government shooting the President, and also people inside the government guaranteeing an absolutely sure-fire case. That the truth would be so explosive and the "phase 1" stories, as I call them, of communist conspiracy would be so threatening for an unnecessary war, that all kinds of people would be coerced to accept what I call the "phase 2" story -- that Oswald acted alone. A story equally false, but not as likely to lead to the death, unnecessary death, of thousands of lives.
So, it is true that you focus on the life of Oswald. I believe if you were to write a book about the murder of Trotsky, you would probably write a whole book about the character and the personality defects of the gunman who killed Trotsky! But surely it's important to go back from the case and look at the links between that gunman and Stalin back in Moscow.
And I'm not, I think by nature, someone who begins with a conspiracy theory. But having looked for so long at the Kennedy assassination -- and particularly at the anomalies in the relationship between Oswald and the FBI, between Ruby and the Dallas police, and then the concerted effort to say that these people were "loners" when if we know anything, that's exactly what they weren't. That we absolutely are forced to look beyond the personality of Oswald in this case, and try to fit together... And it's more than a conspiracy. It isn't a lot of people who could have been identified, it's a...
[Moderator interrupts and tells Mr. Scott that his 6 minutes have expired.]
MODERATOR: Thank you, Mr. Scott. Mr. Posner, you have 6 minutes for your rebuttal.
(to be continued)
I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."