Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

# Why Congress Should Reopen th.

# investigation

BY ROSE AT HEATH KANER

I. A WATCH & COMMISSION MEMBER

CALLS TO ROOF IN THE CASE

At long last, one of the members of the Warren Commission is willing to stand up and say he thinks the time has come to reopen an official inquiry into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The man is Burt W. Griffin now a judge on the state trial bench in Cleveland, Ohio. "The case ought to be reopened," he says. "It's still an important public issue. It's not at all clear to me how to approach it. But the public is concerned and it's all tied in with everything that's been happening in our government for the past ten years."

What's been happening is a trend toward "Big Brother government and the implicit threat this represents to the freedom of the people," says Senator Frank Church, who heads a congressional committee about to plunge into an investigation of the entire U.S. intelligence community.

Judge Griffin's forthright stand—the first time any member of the Warren Commission has dared suggest the commission didn't get all the answers should come as no surprise to the majority of Americans who, as early as 1966, according to a Gallup poll, did not accept the conclusions the Warren Report: that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated President Kennedy and that nightclub owner Jack Ruby, acting alone, killed Oswald two days later in the Dallas police station.

And Judge Griffin's reasons for reopening the case should come as no surprise to longtime critics of the Warren Report. Says Judge Griffin: "I don't think some agencies were candid with us. I never thought the Dallas police were telling us the entire truth. Neither was the FBI. I wrote a memo in late August of 1964 to the director of the commission [J. Lee Rankin], in which I laid out a whole series of evidentiary questions. We only got answers on two or three of them."

Judge Griffin didn't keep copies of his own memo and the original of that memo isn't where it ought to be in the National Archives in Washington. But

one of the evidentiary questions Griffin recalls had to do with fingerprints other than Oswald's on the packing case in a sixth floor room of the Texas School Book Depository. After some delay the FBI finally confessed to the commission that the other prints belonged to an FBI agent. "We accepted the answers we got," says Judge Griffin, "even though they were inadequate and didn't carry the battle any further. To do so, we'd have had to challenge the integrity of the FBI and the CIA. Back in 1904, that was something we didn't do."

Another staff lawyer on the Warren Commission confirmed Judge Gridlin's view, if somewhat less courageously. Asked whether he got everything he wanted from the FII, he paused for about 15 seconds and said, "Oh the record?" Why would he want the obviously negative reply off the record? "Because of possible reprisals from the FII," he said. "Though I'm worried about that less now than I was when Hoover was the director."

The informal testimony of Judge Griffin and his colleague confirms the findings of the independent critics of the Warren Commission.

These critics have dramatic new documentation which proves that the Warren Commission investigation was never the free and independent inquiry we'd been told; that the FDI concluded, too soon, there was no conspiracy and then in an effort to justify its early conclusions did a grudging reinvestigation whose only purpose was to prove its own premature conclusions.

The critics' most important piece of documentation: a longtime top secret transcript of an executive session of the Warren Commission on January 27th, 1984, which was declassified only last year (after a long and expensive Freedom of Information suit filed by Harold Weisberg). That transcript suggests the FBI and other intelligence agencies may possess significant information they withheld from the commission. The information may still be available in some agency's files or in the "OC" (official and confidential) files moved to J. Edgar Hoover's home at the time of his death in 1972.

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that Judge Guild's comments and the documentation of the cases help narrow the scope of any inquiry and make it possible for a congressional committee to ask questions that have answers. They can subpoena Dallas postmen as well as key figures like Marion Oswald, they can subpoena the likes of U.S. intelligence agencies which were aware of Oswald long before November 22nd, 1961.

Peter Dale Scott, a Warren Commission critic who teaches English at the University of California at Berkeley, insists that abundant clues point to a conspiracy "demonstrable from the very procedures which it used to cover its traces" à la Watergate.

The time is right for reopening the case in another sense. The assassination seems to dominate the national subconscious. A majority, as polls show, have always had their doubts. Watergate, White House horrors and high-level coverup have only deepened doubts about America's ugliest murder mystery. Recent news stories only serve to intensify them.

A 1960 memo from J. Edgar Hoover to the State Department surfaced in 1975. It is a warning from the director that someone posing as Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia might try to get Oswald's U.S. passport. In itself, the memo may not be significant: Oswald's mother had complained to the FBI that she'd sent a birth certificate to Oswald in Switzerland and he'd never received it. But, linked to other reports that "a second Oswald" left traces in New Orleans, Miami, Dallas and Mexico City in 1963 and that some (even members of the Warren Commission) speculated that Oswald may have worked with the FBI as an undercover agent, the memo is a startling clue that Hoover and the FBI knew something about Oswald they