Lee Harvey Oswald was never found guilty of the murder of President John Kennedy by a grand jury, pursuant to the US Constitution.
Even after Oswald was killed by Jacob Leon Rubinstein, who called himself Jack Ruby, he should have been posthumously tried, before being condemned by history. He and his heirs had the right to ensure he got a fair trial.
Instead he was “pronounced” guilty by a ‘commission’ whose members were handpicked by the murdered president’s successor Lyndon Johnson, who was actually under investigation by the Attorney General’s office headed by Bobby Kennedy. The commission members included Alan Dulles, Kennedy’s nemesis who had been sacked by him as director of the CIA. John McCloy was another member. He had been chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, and the Council on Foreign Relations, President of the World Bank and Assistant Secretary for war. Nice move Johnson.
Colonel Fletcher Prouty was convinced that Oswald was a government agent and was framed.
Prouty was a very high-level insider. He lectured at Yale and was tasked with writing the Air Force’s text books on aeronautics, and on missiles and rockets. In 1962 he was personally appointed by Kennedy’s Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara to head a Special Operations Unit, answerable directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to oversee all global operations of the CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency. He was Kennedy’s top intelligence man.
In a video interview Prouty says that he immediately became suspicious of the murder when he saw pictures of the school book depository windows open, and when he discovered that a military unit that had always beefed up presidential security on trips, had been ordered not to do so in Dallas.
Prouty tells us that as a marine, Oswald had been stationed at Atsugi naval base in Japan, which was a top CIA base. He states categorically that “I can tell you that a marine assigned to Atsugi was a selected CIA man”. He also declares: “I had no doubt that the murder was a carefully planned job, that Oswald was a patsy, no question about it,” and that “it was a major, controlled coup d’etat that was absolutely effective.”
The following year in 1964, Colonel Prouty resigned from his high-powered job under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and dedicated his life to research, writing about government operations and investigating the Kennedy assassination.
Tom Howard was a lawyer for Rubinstein, who had murdered Oswald. The day Oswald was killed, Howard had met with two investigative journalists on the night of the November 24, 1963, Bill Hunter of the Long Beach Independent, and Jim Koethe of the Dallas Times Herald.
In April 1964, Hunter was shot dead by officer Creighton Wiggins in the press room of a Long Beach police station. Wiggins claimed that his gun had gone off. Yeah, it sure did!
Koethe was working on a book on the JFK assassination. He was killed with a karate chop to his throat in his apartment on September 21, 1964, our Independence Day.
Attorney Howard died mysteriously in March 1965, apparently of a heart attack. His friends had however said that they had seen him highly disoriented in his last days, as if he had been drugged.
Acclaimed investigative journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who had interviewed Ruby, was about to publish a book on the assassination, which she said was to be “the scoop of the century”. She was found dead in her home in November 1965. Her file on Ruby was gone. Her book was never completed.
Ruby was to be retried in February 1967, but he died in Jail in January.
Researcher Grover Proctor revealed that when in custody, Oswald tried to make his one phone call to a certain John Hurt, a former army officer in counter intelligence, and that government agents ordered the phone operator to lie to Oswald and tell him that the call went unanswered.
Why? Was Hurt Oswald’s handler, and was this being covered up?
The day after the assassination, a released memo signed by FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, said that no fingerprints were found on the alleged murder weapon. However two days later FBI agents said they had established a 32 point match with Oswald’s palm/finger prints on that same gun.
Lee Oswald was never given a trial at all, let alone a fair one. Will the voices in his defence ever reach the mainstream?
So who was lying, the FBI agents, or their own director in a secret memo now declassified?
Investigative journalist Jim Marrs stated in a public symposium that he had tracked down the director of the funeral services where Oswald’s cadaver lay. The director said categorically that he had witnessed government agents entering the funerary home with a rifle, and placing the hand of the dead Oswald onto it.
This would tie in with the fact that a police gunshot residue test on Oswald concluded that he had not used a firearm that day.
Furthermore the alleged murder weapon had an offset lens, and no FBI expert marksman could perform the feat of firing three shots in seven seconds, and hitting the moving target from the book depository building.
Well, well, well! Like oil, truth does have that niggling habit of eventually rising to the surface. These three facts alone would show that Oswald was clearly framed.
Thinking out of the box, there is another issue that has, to my knowledge at least, never been raised all these years. Oswald got a job in the school book depository on October 15, 1963, just after being turned down elsewhere.
There was absolutely no way at the time that any citizen could have known the route of the presidential motorcade. Kenneth O’Donnell started planning the Texas trip from the Whitehouse on October 20, while the Dallas motorcade route was only decided and publicised on November 18.
So what possessed Oswald to get a job in October at the school book depository, along the motorcade route decided five weeks later? Was he psychic?
This point has been totally missed by investigators, as far as I know.
Oswald used a pseudonym, Alek J Hidell. Jim Marrs said that several officers in the Dallas police had told him that their precinct had received a letter signed by Alek J Hidell, warning of a plot to assassinate Kennedy in Texas.
Had ‘undercover agent’ Oswald got wind of the plot and tried to warn the police?
These officers told Marrs that on the Monday after the assassination the FBI mysteriously raided the Dallas Police Precinct and literally stripped it down completely. Why?
The Hidell letter was never seen again.
Officers also revealed that the fingerprints of notorious hit man and convicted killer Mac Wallace, a Johnson employee, had been found in the room of the school book depository where Oswald’s wonky $30 rifle was “found”.
J Edgar Hoover, who had confirmed the lack of fingerprints on the gun, had followed up with another memo, now declassified, just two days after the assassination, stating at the very outset of the investigation, that he wanted “to convince the public of Oswald’s guilt”.
Why?
The Warren Commission mysteriously failed to call up key witnesses, like eventual House Speaker Jim Wright, who was in Houston Street driving in the direction of the school book depository. He stated that he had heard gun shots from behind him around the Grassy Knoll. Bill and Gayle Neumann had declared the very same thing on television. None were ever called up.
Why? Lee Oswald was never given a trial at all, let alone a fair one.
Will the voices in his defence ever reach the mainstream? Will the official version ever be changed? Will his name ever be cleared?
Or will the real history of Oswald’s involvement in the JFK assassination be confined to, and forever buried under, thousands of pages of researched material, and archived and declassified documents that hardly ever see the light of day?
Rodolfo Ragonesi is a lawyer and researcher in history and international affairs.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece