A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, Jfk's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History

Edit of 11 Dec 07: Since I wrote this review, another book has come out, Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History and it conclusively documents two points: 1) JFK was assassinated by a Cuban exile team trained by CIA to assassinate Castro, that used their training against JFK, ostensibly for the Bay of Pigs mess. CIA then covered this up. 2) JFK was warned by Bobby that there were strong indications of a plot to kill him, and JFK himself blew it off, entrusting his safety to a Secret Service with no idea a professional CIA hit team was coming in. As a former clandestine case officer for the CIA who served in Latin America and also lived in Viet-Nam during the ten coups, one of which killed Ngo Dinh Diem, I picked this book up with some trepidation. It is an exhausting review, a truly incredible accomplishment for a single human being without any visible corporate resources for doing machine processing or visualization of all of the information. Here's my bottom line as a 54-year old with over 30 years government service: 1) The Warren Commission, like the 9-11 Commission, blew it and mis-served the nation. They are retrospectively impeachable for dereliction of duty. 2) The Central Intelligence Agency, and Ted Shackley in particular, have a lot to answer for, and continue to lie and withhold key documents from the American people. We need the moral equivalent of a truth & reconciliation commission on covert action--I thought the Church Commission had done some of that, but clearly there is more to be done. 3) We clearly do not have a government that is capable of being consistently honest, at the same time that we have thousands of dedicated government employees who have no idea what the "cowboys" are doing. The recent outrage over CIA renditions and torture are all too familiar for those who have studied the Phoenix assassination program in Viet-Nam, or the JMWAVE efforts against Castro that blew back against John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy. 4) The time has come for the people to arm themselves with open source intelligence. I want to cut the spines off all these books that are creating new revelations and new detail, put it all in a machine, and makes some sense out of it. We are a few years away from that point, but the day is coming, and when that day comes, we need to hand down some public indictments, including posthumous indictments, and begin to set the stage for honorable governance and ethical intelligence. This book may not be completely accurate--it tends to assume the worst of CIA at all points--but it is assuredly enough to persuade me that US intelligence has much to answer for, and the Warren Commission *should* be retrospectively impeached. For those who under-estimate the value of history, see Robert Parry on Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'(Ted Shackley played a big role there as well, alleg

After having read Ultimate Sacrifice, Joan Mellon's book was a joy. It is by far the better written book literarily and offers a superior balance of investigative research. By contrast, Ultimate Sacrifice comes off as more CIA apologism and disinformation, trying to sell out and blame the Mafia while continuing to conceal their own involvement. Mellon's book will suffer from the vast character assassination that the CIA aimed at her subject, Jim Garrison and his criminal investigation into the murder of John Kennedy. Owing to CIA and FBI efforts, many people failed to take Mr. Garrison seriously. Mellon thoroughly rehabilitates Garrison, proving him to be the leader of a courageous group of state law enforcement people who took on the federal government and particularly the CIA in their attempt to identify and bring to justice the real murderers of JFK. In the process of writing about Garrison and his investigation, Mellon covers some of the same ground and furthers the evidence against the CIA. She examines Garrison's witnesses (called and uncalled in the trial of Clay Shaw) and then takes his research a step further with followup revelations from those and others. With some key witnesses, they later admitted that their testimonay to Garrison were lies, under pressure from the CIA. She also links numerous people to that organization and develops a sound thesis that mid and high level CIA personnel were the decision makers and implementors of the assassination of the American President. She details their extensive attempts to cover up their crime through later congressional investigations right up to the present. Where Ultimate Sacrifice contends that the plot to kill JFK was strictly a Mafia affair, Mellon demonstrates that it was primarily a CIA operation. She admits that, because the Mafia participated in CIA covert operations, and wanted JFK dead for their own reasons, that they were involved and the CIA kept them informed. However, the prime mover was the CIA and related intelligence agencies. Like Ultimate Sacrifice, she agrees that Oswald was a patsy but shows more convincingly that it was the CIA who set him up over a long period of time, as well as others as a backup plan. One piece of information that Ultimate Sacrifice missed which Mellon cites is evidence that Oswald was also in the pay of U.S. Customs. All in all, this seems to be the more accurate expose' of the JFK assassination. I highly recommend it, far more so than Ultimate Sacrifice. The latter is worth reading for the research it presents but A Farewell to Justice seems to have gotten the whole pitcure and gotten it right.

That Joan Mellen's remarkable new book detangling the myriad CIA threads weaving through the fabric of the Kennedy case has drawn the occasional rebuke is about as surprising as Bush spokesman Scott McClelland's having rebuked the suggestion that the Vice President's indicted chief of staff, Scooter Libby, had played any role in outing CIA operative Valerie Plame. The VP's chief-of-staff, McClelland sneered, was, simply, "not involved." [google "McClellan, Plame"] The quip, "Consider the source," about sums it up. That advice, I submit, is useful when considering Mellen's detractors, at least one of whom happens to be the author of an anti-conspiracy book. The superiority of her work over the weak rejoinders from Warren Commission loyalists offers a glimpse of why I wrote a plaudit that appears on the flap cover of her book. One critic, rallying to the defense of a former Miami Herald reporter who Mellen said was "CIA linked," quoted a complaining email from the man: "(I) never took a cent from the CIA," reporter Donald Bohning apparently wrote, "and was outraged by the implication - along with the terms `writer asset' and `utilized' ... Top editors at the [Miami] Herald were well aware - and approved - of my contacts with the CIA during the 1960s." But said critic omits the most incriminating part of the story. Even if money never changed hands, and Mellen nowhere suggests it did, Bohning's relationship with The Agency was far from the routine and casual relationship reporters have with government insiders. As Mellen points out, Bohning was apparently so useful to The Agency it gave him his own, unique cryptonym, "AMCARBON-3." Bohning "had received his Provisional Covert Security Approval as a CIA confidential informant on 8/21/67," Mellen wrote (p. 253), "then Covert Security Approval itself on 11/14/67." And no less than the CIA's Deputy Director of Plans himself "approved the use of Bohning in the CIA's Cuban operations." For those who have forgotten Carl Bernstein's cautionary tale about the corrosive effect of such relationships on honest journalism [google "Bernstein, CIA and the Media"], or the New York Times's Christmas week 1977 mea culpa for having compromised itself and its readers by similar unhealthy relationships with the CIA, recent events have given us a reminder of the potential dangers of such entanglements as Bohning's. Judy Miller, the recently disgraced New York Times reporter, was such a darling of the Bush Administration and the military that she was granted a security clearance not unlike Bohning's. [google, "The Mystery of Judy Miller's `Security Clearance' Deepens."] Her bogus, prewar scare stories about the imminence of the Iraqi threat on the front page of the "leftist" New York Times gave a big boost to the strategy of Bush's neocons to manufacture consent for war. That Bohning's higher-ups at the Miami Herald knew and approved of his cozy relationship only compounds the impropriety. At least The New Yor

Truth is an absolute necessity for societies and peoples to function, and even more so to flourish. In reviewing Joan Mellen's epic, A Farewell to Justice it is virtually impossible to adequately express the significance of her work, and at the same time ignore, or to remain mute of the implications that Farewell to Justice has for America, even 43 years after the assassination of the nation's thirty-fifth President, John F. Kennedy. As a person who has researched the subject, the book will hold special appeal to those who have studied the assassination throughout the years. Joan reveals for the first time, the utter savagery that the government, the print and news media employed in attempting to discredit Jim Garrison, as strange deaths happened to a select few who "knew too much." Jim Garrison is vindicated not only as far as his assertions about the plot, but as far as his indictment of Clay Shaw, and David Ferrie; had Ferrie not died mysteriously before the Shaw trial. Garrison was simply a man who was too intelligent to accept the fallacies of the Warren Commission. Joan, who has written several other significant biographies, depicts "Big Jim" Garrison as those who knew him, warts and all. Ms. Mellen eloquently and poignantly reveals a man who was, and is a patriot, in spite of a lifelong effort by the powers-that-be to prove otherwise. A man who knew there was more to the story, than a lone nut with the aid of a magic bullet. Garrison would sacrifice his life, his family and his future in a Herculanean effort to "uncover the truth" of November 22 in Dallas. Contrast that to the hate-filled venom of the indictments of America's 1960's media, political and intelligence structure towards Jim Garrison and you get a bird's-eye view of a government (or at the least, a considerable portion of it, getting the shakes about what Big Jim was unearthing about Shaw, Ferrie and others in the Big Easy.) You can say that Jim Garrison did not succeed in revealing what really happened on November 22, in Dallas, but I say he did in a way that speaks about the heart of America, and the heart of Americans. Because "Big Jim" inspired Joan Mellen and, Joan in turn spent seven years of her life on this work and interviewing over 1,000 individuals in a quest for truth, one that delivers, both factually in regards to the real story of the assassination and as a literary work. Without Jim Garrison, there would be no Joan Mellen, at least in the context of the Kennedy assassination. A Farewell to Justice settles incontrovertibly, once and for all the divide between the Warren Commission believers and the "conspiracy theorists," and the result is that the apologists for the Warren Commission need to find another line of work. I hope a certain high-profile prosecutor/writer is reading. Indeed, if a person based their perception of Jim Garrison based on a great portion of the entire media apparatus of the United States virulent attacks on him, one would have to belie

The United States of America has never truly had its equivalent of Zola's "J'Accuse!" Until now. While the Dreyfus Affair is a joke compared to the far-reaching PERMANENT effects of the National Security State execution of President John F. Kennedy(don't think they're permanent? -- pick up the damn newspaper), quite a few books on the crime have been labeled Zolaesque: "Rush to Judgement", Weisberg's "Whitewash", Sylvia Meagher's "Accessories After the Fact"(a worthy forerunner of "Farewell to Justice" -- Meagher and Mellon are sisters of heart, toughness and understanding), Anthony Summers's "Conspiracy" and, of course, Gerald Posner's "Case Closed"(just kidding). But they weren't. Not even close, because they couldn't be. The cover-up of the crime continued well into the 1990s and -- like the film or not -- it was Stone's "JFK" which caused the break in the dam. The wave of the past 10 years, beginning with the publication and media-embrace of the malignant "Case Closed", has been intensely anti-conspiracy. As all of U.S. society has seemingly moved toward the worship of power for power's sake, leading to the establishment of the Bush Reich, anti-conspiracy ideology has become its own form of totalitarianism. In the power-saturated universe of Millennial America, seething with plots, anti-plot pronouncements have become as necessary as squeals in a slaughterhouse. But, there has been a counterwave. And it's now tidal. More fresh evidence regarding 11/22/63 has become available these past years than was available to the Warren Commission, Jim Garrison or the House Assassinations Committee when they were conducting their investigations or cover-ups. We have had to be patient, and now it's pay-off time. Christopher Lawford on the family, Gareth Porter on JFK and Vietnam, Bradley Ayers and Richard Whalen on Kennedy and Cuba, Gerald McKnight on the Warren Commission, and David Talbot's coming book on Bobby and the murder(`though the Mellen book may have made that release somewhat compromised). "Farewell to Justice" is the book we have all been waiting for, since the day the music died. Joan Mellen has always been one of the world's best film critics, a magnificent biographer(Kay Boyle, Marilyn Monroe & Bobby Knight!), and a great writing teacher. Now she has broken the case. There's no guessing here. No theoretical chapters on the validity of the Zapruder Film, the DalTex Building vs. a sewer drain opening, no jacket holes or bullet fragments. Just the moment-by-moment narrative of what happened to Jack Kennedy 42 years ago. And, best of all, why. The names are all here: the initiators, the designers, the middle-managers, and the mechanics. Mellen is also overwhelming in her recapturing what was really happening in the early 1960s United States. Not only those who care not about history relive it. As Americans, all of us relive Dallas every day of our lives. Everywhere we look, we can see the ghost of John F. Kennedy - and the shadows of the men