Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 1 Num. 19

("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 and Mr. Posner exchange questions.]

MODERATOR: You are listening to "The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, A Formal Debate," with Gerald Posner and Peter Dale Scott.

Each of you will now ask alternating questions of the other participant. Mr. Scott, you have one minute to ask a question.

PETER DALE SCOTT: Mr. Posner has dug out of Warren Commission archives an Oswald chronology that is in part faked, and at times faked by Oswald himself. In August, 1963, there was a raid on an arms cache on Lake Pontchartrain. Now Mr. Posner says that news stories talked about an armed training camp, but it's important that this was never mentioned in the news stories. And yet, Oswald went to a man called Carlos Bringuier of the DRE [Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil(?)] -- it had been a DRE training camp whose arms cache was raided. But there was nothing about this in the press. And Oswald asked... offered to be a trainer. Bringuier said, "He [Oswald] must have been an agent, because no one else knew." And not only that, Oswald asked about organized crime, about La Cosa Nostra. It took us 12 years for the rest of us to find that they were involved.

How did Oswald know these things?

MODERATOR: Mr. Posner, you have 2 minutes to respond.

GERALD POSNER: I'm surprised at that, Mr. Scott. Because, in fact, there had been extensive newspaper coverage (as you know) of the raid across the river. [Mr. Scott says something, off microphone. Inaudible.] Absolutely. There had been extensive coverage in the Times-Picayune.

And... very important point: Although I'm not here to defend Carlos Bringuier, one of the things that you do have in your book (as I'm sure you have issues with statements that I've made)... In your book you have him [Bringuier] as a member of the DRE, this anti-Castro group. I just spoke to Bringuier again the other night on this very issue. It's absolutely not true that he was a member of the DRE. And he takes great offense at that, because he was not. It's stated in the book a number of times that he is. But that is not the organization that he was associated with.

And Oswald, at the time that he went in to see Carlos Bringuier, in August of '63, in Dallas, was playing what I call, "the poor man's intelligence agent." What does Marina tell us? (Although I know you don't like to hear Marina, because you say she's a liar.) She tells us, in fact, that even at the time he was in the Soviet Union he said, "I'd love the life of a spy." The Russians, the White Russians [anti-communist] who were near him in Dallas, remember a book that said, "How To Be a Spy." He was, as Warren DeBrueys tells me (one of the FBI agents in New Orleans), somebody he had seen many times, who had this tendency to want to be, as he said, "a poor man's intelligence..." He thought he was intervening in actually being able to get inside his great foes at this time, the anti-Castro Cubans. His love of Castro was running high. He was committed to the cause. And by getting inside Bringuier's group he would enhance his credentials when eventually he wanted to go to Cuba. By August of '63, Oswald was committed to going to Cuba because it had been, for him, the "new nirvana." The Soviet Union was [his dream] when he was 19. And he left in '59 to find happiness. And the Russians told him, "Leave," before he killed himself -- something else, of course, I didn't see in the book [Scott's book] -- but when he tried to slash his wrists.

He now is ready to go to Cuba to find happiness. But the difference is that he doesn't. He's not able to get into Bringuier's group; he's arrested a few days later. It's all on the record. And I must tell you that it's very clearly on the record. So that I find very little question about what happened in the summer of '63.

MODERATOR: Mr. Posner, you now have one minute to ask Mr. Scott a question.

POSNER: The... Uh, in Mr. Scott's book, it seems to me that the "deep politics" that he talks about, what in essence is (and he'll correct me if I'm using not the right terminology)... but what I view as almost the second government. This secret government that essentially runs, with a combination of government officials and intelligence organizations and drug traffickers and a host of others, um, is almost so powerful that it's able to do things like the Kennedy assassination and maintain it as a massive cover-up -- no matter how many people are involved.

Uh, you say it's not conspiratorially minded, you aren't, when you approach these subjects. But what I wonder is, is there any assassination, or attempted assassination, that you think was really done by a lone assassin, in recent American history? Uh, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, George Wallace, Huey Long... Would those all be conspiracies, in your view, or were any of those lone assassins?

MODERATOR: Mr. Scott, you have 2 minutes to respond.

SCOTT: Well very quickly, let me say that I haven't studied those other assassinations as much as this one. My mind is open to it, on the basis of what I have learned. But I really haven't any idea.

Uh, I'd like to clarify... because you didn't quite get what I meant by "deep politics." I actually had a section in which I said, "No. It is not the same as 'invisible government' or 'secret team.'" It is the constant, everyday interaction between the constitutionally elected government and forces of violence, forces of crime, which appear to be the enemies of that government. But in fact, on a workaday basis -- whether it's City Hall in a city, or the CIA and the Mafia plotting against Castro -- are, in fact, part of the governance of this society.

And I agree that an external conspiracy, whether it was Cubans or Nazis or even organized crime itself, could never have killed the President and gotten away with it.

But we have ongoing, working relationships between, for example, organized crime and the police in Chicago. Which meant in a 30- year period there was not a single organized crime murder [that] was solved in that city. And I'm saying that this sort of thing, which people know about and really accept, locally, should be seen as part of the way in which our country works: that our country uses violence, and the forces in power use violence. And although it is a very rare event for people inside the bureaucracy to use violence against their own president, that is what I do believe happened in 1963. And the reason that it was -- they got away with it -- is that they have shared so many other crimes that they got away, with part of the ongoing system.

MODERATOR: Mr. Scott, I have to caution you to try and use your time better. But, you have one minute to ask Mr. Posner a question.

(to be continued)


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