We few, band of doubters

by Bernard McCormick Tuesday, November 21, 2017 No Comment(s)

The release of the long-sealed files on the murder of President Kennedy has produced little new information. Those of us (we few, unhappy few band of doubters) who have been following this cover-up of a presidential assassination for the last 50 years, were not actually expecting to find a file labeled: “How We Knocked Off A President and Got Away With It.” The people who committed this crime have had ample time to make sure no incriminating documents survive.

However, one interesting detail long known to those who have studied the crime was reinforced. Documents make it clear that within days of the assassination Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House and Robert Kennedy’s attorney general’s office wanted to be sure that Lee Harvey Oswald alone be blamed for the crime. They may have had different motives, but for both, it was a priority that any talk of a conspiracy be immediately squelched. The Warren Commission’s job was to do exactly that. And it did. 

Still, it is puzzling that some parties still object to releasing all the documents relating to JFK. And those they have released are teasers. They tend to have crucial parts missing, especially references to the CIA and other aspects of our intelligence network. Researchers think those withheld documents may confirm that Oswald was both a CIA and an FBI operative, which shatters the Warren Commission portrait of him as a pro-Castro communist sympathizer. It also supports the principal conspiracy theory: Oswald was a “useful idiot” whose role was to take the blame (and a bullet) as part of a high level government hit.

If one thinks the refusal of government sources to give up documents to the public is something of the past, think again. And listen to Dan Christensen. Christensen (above) is the founding editor of Florida Bulldog, an independent news organization whose work is often picked up by local papers. He is a former Miami Herald reporter. Florida Bulldog celebrated its eighth anniversary last week with a party at YOLO on Las Olas Boulevard.

For six of those eight years Christensen has been waging a campaign to get the FBI to release what it knows about a Sarasota Saudi Arabian family that was visited by some of the 9/11 hijackers prior to the 9/11 attacks—perhaps the only event to compare to the Kennedy Assassination, and infinitely greater in the death toll.

The Sarasota Saudis were connected to the Saudi royal family and disappeared in a hurry (they left their cars and other belongings) shortly before 9/11. The obvious questions: Were Saudi royals behind the 9/11 attacks? Does our government know it? Did they conceal it?

The FBI never told the 9/11 Commission about the Sarasota Saudi connection, which has angered former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a member of the commission who has been working with Florida Bulldog to find out why such dramatic information was concealed. Slowly, and only with constant legal pressure, has it been revealed that the FBI had a report on the matter, but never told the 9/11 Commission, and has for six years resisted the efforts to make it come clean. Christensen likens it to the Kennedy Assassination files.

“It’s worse, if that’s possible,” Christensen says. “Say what you want, one thing the Warren Commission did was they laid everything out. There were 26 volumes of evidence, and nothing was blocked by black tape. It was all there. But now (on the Saudi matter), very little is laid out, and there is no documentation. Much of it is being held for a variety of reasons. It’s a completely different ball game.”

“We see that lies have been told,” Christensen adds. “It’s what Bob Graham calls ‘aggressive deception.’ They [The FBI] are actively lying to us since 2011. First, they said they notified Congress [about the Sarasota Arabs]. Well, we have demolished the argument that they told Congress. We found documents in their files that showed there were many connections between the Sarasota Saudis and the hijackers.”

Florida Bulldog has lived up to its name with its dogged legal efforts, resisted by the government at every turn. Bulldog has been seeking information, which is redacted in the FBI files that have been released, especially those concerned with funding for the 9/11 terrorists. Christensen thinks that ties in with the Sarasota Arabs and their contacts with the hijackers.

There is an interesting connection between Florida Bulldog’s quest and the JFK assassination researchers. The Sarasota matter first came to Christensen’s attention through an Irish investigative reporter, Tony Summers. That’s the same man who was friendly with our late colleague, Gaeton Fonzi, whose The Last Investigation is regarded as one of the best books on the Kennedy Assassination.

Summers, who wrote his own book on the assassination, was influenced by Fonzi’s work in the early 1980s. It was after Fonzi’s book first appeared as two long magazine articles in Gold Coast magazine.

Fonzi was in contact with Summers until his death in 2012, and his widow Marie continues that connection.

She and Summers are among the more prominent of the club of "we few, unhappy band of doubters."


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