6-17-07
Norman Mailer et al. say JFK conspiracy believers aren't all nuts
Breaking NewsNot so, of course. Most of them were close to the events and people concerned, and some had privileged access to evidence and intelligence that threw doubt on the ''lone assassin'' version. That doubt remains today. Bugliosi himself this year joined us, Don DeLillo, Gerald Posner, Robert Blakey and two dozen other writers on the assassination in signing an open letter that appeared in the March 15 issue of The New York Review of Books. The letter focused on a specific unresolved lead, the discovery that a highly regarded C.I.A. officer named George Joannides was in 1963 running an anti-Castro exile group that had a series of encounters with Oswald shortly before the assassination.
This is obviously pertinent, yet the C.I.A. hid the fact from four J.F.K. investigations. Since 1998, when the agency did reluctantly disclose the merest outline of what Joannides was up to, it has energetically stonewalled a Freedom of Information suit to obtain the details of its officer's activities. Here we are in 2007, 15 years after Congress unanimously approved the J.F.K. Assassination Records Act mandating the ''immediate'' release of all assassination-related records, and the C.I.A. is claiming in federal court that it has the right not to do so.
And now your reviewer, Burrough, seems to lump together all those who question the official story as marginal fools. Burrough's close-minded stance should be unacceptable to every historian and journalist worthy of the name -- especially at a time when a federal agency is striving vigorously to suppress very relevant information.
Jefferson Morley
Washington
Norman Mailer
Provincetown, Mass.
Anthony Summers
Waterford, Ireland
David Talbot
San Francisco
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