Posner's credibility is very much the issue. Although you have to hand it to Posner, as with Karzai's brother, he has always had incredible access...
How Gerald Posner Got Rich and Famous...Robert Loomis sponsored Case Closed for Random House. He apparently knew Posner through an earlier effort of his entitled Hitler's Children. As one can clearly discern through reading the footnotes, Posner's Kennedy assassination book was a rush job that was done in the wake of the furor surrounding Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK. Posner told Jim Marrs after a debate in Dallas that Loomis approached him about the book at that time and told him he would have the cooperation of the CIA on the project. This explains how Posner got access to KGB turncoat Yuri Nosenko, who was put on a CIA retainer in the late seventies. The book was timed for release on the 30th anniversary of JFK's death which explains why it was such a clear hurry-up job. (See attached articles for a chronicle of only some of the many, many errors is this hapless book.) Loomis also commissioned Norman Mailer's concoction of a book Oswald's Tale, done with longtime FBI informant on the Kennedy case Lawrence Schiller. Mailer tried to make the case that the book was warranted by his access to some of the Russian files on Oswald that he had access to from the newly formed government of Belarus. Yet, according to John Tunheim of the ARRB, there is an approximately five foot high stack of documents that no one has seen on Oswald. Not even the ARRB. Mailer got nowhere near the majority of these files. Predictably, Mailer's book presented the probability of the case against Oswald as the lone assassin.
Further on into the nineties, Posner came out with another book on an infamous assassination of the sixties. This one was on the Martin Luther King case. It was called Killing the Dream and also made the same single-minded case against James Earl Ray as Posner did against Lee Harvey Oswald. He told one interviewer: "There is no question. Ray was the shooter. That's how I see the evidence, how anybody objective has to see the evidence." To put it mildly, this is a rather gross overstatement as can be seen by reading any credible book on the King murder, like say Harold Weisberg's Frame-Up or Ray's own Who Killed Martin Luther King? Let us not forget that in the only two real trials of this case, the jury decided for conspiracy; namely the HBO mock trial in 1993, and the civil trial held in Memphis by the King family vs. Loyd Jowers in 1999...
If one calls Loomis' office one will learn from his secretary that he spends a lot of time in Washington D.C., even though Random House's main offices are in New York. This probably began because his former wife Gloria had once worked for the CIA. She was the personal secretary to none other than James Angleton, the legendary counter-intelligence chief of the Agency for 20 years. He is also the man who many writers and researchers, like John Newman and Lisa Pease, believe was handling the Oswald file in the CIA. This undisclosed fact would then explain how Posner got the CIA clearances to talk to people no one has access to. It also helps explain why Loomis does what he does. But wouldn't it have been more honest to the reader of Posner's book if he would have explained that it had been commissioned by someone whose former wife had worked for the man who was probably running Oswald as an intelligence agent?
Did Posner make a Faustian deal with Loomis? A quid pro quo in political parlance? Consider the similarities between these two quotes dug up by attorney and longtime Kennedy researcher Roger Feinman: "All the conspiracy theories have undermined the public's belief in the government, and that, to me, is a crime." (Bob Loomis, Publisher's Weekly, 5/3/93) "But I also think that the conspiracy theorists have made us lose faith in government." (Gerald Posner, Dallas Morning News, 11/21/93).
Gerald Posner, the CIA, the Karzais, and a warning to Keith Olbermann...Has Posner always been this chummy with the Agency?
Um, yeah. Where have you been?
One of his earliest books was a novel called "The Bio-Assassins" and featured a Cold War CIA oldie fighting a bureacratic newbie in the changing CIA. Guess who wins? I don't really have to answer that, do I? The old fart, the one willing to break any law to do what needs to be done, in his view.
Another of his early books was about Mengele. He received wide praise for this, but some not so widely distributed criticism. Essentially, the book is an apologia that attempts to explain why the poor ol' CIA just couldn't find Mengele to bring him to justice. It reads like the cover story it probably is. If the CIA really wanted to find him, they could. They found Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle, for Chrissakes. They cold have found Mengele, if they had the will. They could have found Bin Laden, long ago, too, if they had the will...
POSNER in New Orleans Posner's efforts to keep Oswald away from 544 Camp Street have a touch of the ludicrous about them. He tries to discredit the reliability of every witness that places Oswald there: Delphine Roberts and her daughter, David Lewis, Jack Martin, Oswald himself and the HSCA. He portrays Roberts as off her rocker and says she now states she lied to Tony Summers in the late 70's about Oswald being in Banister's office. She says today that Summers gave her some money to appear on camera for a TV special and this is why she said what she did. Posner ignores the following: 1.) Roberts told her story to Summers before he even mentioned anything about a payment 2.) On her own and without any promise of money, Roberts told essentially the same story to Earl Golz of the Dallas Morning News in a story that ran in December of 1978 3.) Her story about seeing a "communist" outside the office leafletting the area, telling Banister, and him laughing and saying that he was one of them is partly corroborated by an interview with a third party in Banister's office at the time. Again this is in the Garrison files that Posner says he had access to.
In his desperation to discredit anyone associated with either the Garrison or HSCA investigation of the New Orleans part of the conspiracy, Posner occasionaly winds up swinging at air. On page 138, he writes that Gaeton Fonzi was the HSCA investigator on the issues of Banister, 544 Camp Street, and David Ferrie. He smears Fonzi and the validity of these reports by saying "he was a committed believer in a conspiracy." Fonzi's name does appear on the reports in Volume X of the House Select Committee appendices. But in those reports related to the New Orleans part of the investigation his name appears along with the names of Pat Orr and Liz Palmer. If Posner would have talked to any of these people before smearing Fonzi, he would have found out that Fonzi only edited the New Orleans reports. Orr and Palmer did the actual field investigations and original writing in these sections, something that Fonzi has no problem telling anyone. I know of no books, articles or interviews by Orr or Palmer which would show them to be a "committed believer in a conspiracy." In fact, both have reputations for reserved judgment and objectivity.
Posner's depiction of the Clinton episode in the late summer of 1963 and which connects Shaw, Ferrie and Oswald epitomizes his stilted, fundamentally dishonest approach. He obtained some of the original memorandums made by the Garrison probe into the incident and attempts to show that since the eyewitness testimony does not jibe, then the witnesses are lying and therefore Garrison coached them into telling a coherent story at the trial. First, let us note that it is Posner in his section on Dealey Plaza writes that eyewitness testimony to the same event often differs (funny how his standards constantly shift). Second, I would like to know if Mr. Posner asked Shaw's attorneys - lrvin Dymond and Bill Wegmann - how they got these memos. But more to the point, Posner either doesn't know or doesn't think it important to inform the reader that the incident under discussion took place in two different towns. Oswald was first seen in Jackson, about 15 miles east of Clinton. Two of the witnesses who testified at the Shaw trial saw Oswald, or a double, in Jackson and in a different car than the one that appeared in Clinton later. Henry Palmer, one of the witnesses who talked to Oswald in Clinton - and it was Oswald there - interviewed him away from the voter ralIy - and did not get a good look at the car which contained Shaw and Ferrie. Oswald's last appearance in the area was at the hospital back in Jackson where two personnel secretaries took his application for a job.
What Posner does with all this is worthy of a cardsharp. By implying that all the elements - the car, the passengers, the rally, the witnesses - are in one place at one time, he tries to cast doubt on the witnesses and aspersions on Garrison's use of them. It would be the equivalent of having a couple drive a different car into a service station, having a different car leave and go to another station, and then the original car returns with only the husband driving. Would we expect the two sets of witnesses to see the same thing? On the contrary, if they did we would have doubts about them. If this tactic would have seemed effective, wouldn't Dymond and Wegmann have used it at the trial? Posner lists the transcript of the Shaw trial in his bibliography. If he really read it he would say that Dymond's cross-examination of these people was quite gentle, he barely touched them. And when he tried to get tough, it backfired...
http://www.assassinationweb.com/issue1.htmincredible access indeed.
Amy Goodman: Access of Evilhttp://www.thenation.com/doc/20060703/goodman
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