Founder's Page - ASSASSINATION ARCHIVES

AARC Board of Directors Honors James H. Lesar with an Unprecedented Appointment

AARC Founder, James Lesar

“An every day American hero, Jim Lesar is a legal legend.”

AARC founder, James H. (Jim) Lesar is an attorney of consequence in service to the cause of freedom by challenging the forces of secrecy and obstruction. In a distinguished career which spans more than 50 years, he has initiated, managed or participated in case filings with over 200 reported opinions, perhaps the most of any lawyer in practice. When one researches FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) law, most of the reported cases are his cases. He has provided pro bono legal representation to many people who could not afford lawyers. His personal and professional example is profound and inspiring.

“The purpose of the AARC is to obtain, preserve, and disseminate information on political assassinations. The founding fathers of this country were profoundly interested in history and its impact, and they understood that in order to be their own governors a people must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives. We have been, and are being, deprived of that power.” Jim Lesar

Jim is properly deserving of an award for public service by the Bar Association.

We are pleased to announce that the AARC has voted Jim Lesar to a position of ultimate distinction within the organization, Founder.

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AARC founder, Jim Lesar’s letter of 16 October, 2000 to the Journal of American History

Editorial Office
Journal of American History

To the Editor:

For five years I represented James Earl Ray, the alleged assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his attempts to get a trial. I was the attorney principally responsible for presenting the evidence at the two-week long evidentiary hearing on his peti-tion for a writ of habeas corpus that was held in 1974. I also represented author Harold Weisberg in his 1976 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which resulted in the public release of some 60,000 pages from the FBI’s MURKIN file (“MURKIN”) being the FBI’s acronym for its “murder of King” investigation.

Ralph E. Luker’s review of Gerald Posner’s Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. is deeply flawed. As a result, Professor David Wrone took vigorous exception to the review and, in a letter which you printed, pointed to some of the evidence which indicates that Ray was not Dr. King’s assassin, and that there was a conspiracy to murder him. Mr. Luker’s reply, which you also printed, ignores the evidentiary questions raised by Prof. Wrone and resorts to gg hominem attacks. In his most egregious and reckless charge, Luker likens Wrone and “conspiracy theorists” to those who deny the Holocaust. Knowing Prof. Wrone as I do, I am sure that he finds this charge outrageously offensive.

Nor is it offensive just to Prof. Wrone and “conspiracy theorists.” Most Americans believe that Dr. King was killed as a result of a conspiracy, and an overwhelming percentage of blacks do. In 1979 a Congressional committee found that there was a very high probability that there had been a conspiracy to kill Dr. King. Are they all to be dismissed as wretched “Holocaust deniers?

Mr. Luker says that it II is worse than misleading” to claim, as Prof. Wrone did, that “Ray was exonerated in a 1974 trial.” He wants to know why, if Ray was exonerated, “he remain[ed] in prison until his death?” This sounds logical but actually betrays an unawareness of the history of the Ray case that is especially dismaying when it is found to inhere in the mind of a reviewer of a book on the King assassination.

As noted above, in 1974 a federal court held a two-week evidentiary hearing, which is a kind of a trial and is sometimes referred to as such. The evidence which Ray presented was subject to cross-examination, and in the view of Prof. Wrone and others who have reviewed the transcript, presented such clear evidence that the crime could not have been committed by Ray that he was, in effect, exonerated. Unfortunately, the trial judge considered that the central issue was whether Ray’s 1969 guilty plea was voluntary or not, thus evidence bearing on guilt or evidence or whether there was a conspiracy was irrelevant. That is why Ray remained in prison all his life despite evidence that the shot which killed Dr. King was not fired from the the alleged murder weapon, nor was it from the bathroom window by Ray–or anyone else–as claimed.

The root problem with Luker’s review is that Posner’s book affords no basis for a reviewer not intimately familiar with the complicated circumstances of the crime scene evidence to evaluate questions of whether Ray was a conspirator, a patsy, or killed King all by himself. Regardless of where one stands on these issues, a serious book on the subject would necessarily have to discuss at length Ray’s 1974 evidentiary hearing. It was, after all, the only time in the three-decades history of the case that evidence was tested by cross-examination. As Posner did not do this, it is not surprising that Luker would be insufficiently versed in it to be able to critically evaluate Posner’s book.
Luker praises Killing the Dreamer as an “exceptionally careful, fully documented … study of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.”

Even a quick glance at Posner’s sources shows that this claim is risible. Posner repeatedly cites “MURKIN” as his source. But the MURKIN files are gargantuan. It’s as if a Shakespearean scholar writing a controversial thesis about the bard had been praised for his careful and fully documented scholarship when his footnotes repeatedly referenced only “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare” as his source. Posner’s lack of proper source citation undermines his claim, such as it is, to be taken seriously as an historian.

Finally, I note Luker’s assertion that “Wrone, Weisberg and the conspiracy theorists have yet to offer any evidence that government agencies conspired to assassinate [Dr.] King.” (His emphasis) Since neither Weisberg nor Wrone has ever made such a claim, this is a straw man and a vile canard.

Sincerely yours,

James H. Lesar

Lesar Letter to Journal Of American HIST. 161000(1)

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WARREN COMMISSION EXPERTS REVEAL SECRETS OF JFK MURDER AND COVER-UP AT 50^TH ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE

23 May, 2015 | James Lesar

On the eve of the 50^th anniversary of the Warren Commission Report, the AARC held an unparalleled conference featuring forty-four prominent authors, medical doctors, academics, lawyers and expert researchers. Held September 26-28, 2014, the conference presented strong evidence markedly at odds with the 1964 Warren Commission Report that ascribed President Kennedy’s murder to an isolated, crazy “lone assassin.”

The conference produced stunning disclosures that rebut that conclusion:

— A furious controversy raged for decades about whether Antonio Veciana, the leader of the CIA-sponsored Cuban exile group called Alpha 66, had accurately identified the mysterious figure he knew as “Maurice Bishop.” The identification was critical because Veciana claimed he’d seen “Bishop” meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas before JFK was assassinated.

— This controversy led to a split between Prof. G. Robert Blakey, the Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) and his investigatory staff, led by Gaeton Fonzi. Mr. Fonzi believed that Veciana had identified “Bishop” as CIA agent David Atlee Phillips. Prof. Blakey did not.

— At the AARC Conference Mr. Veciana finally broke his 36-year silence and resolved the controversy by publicly revealing that CIA Agent David Phillips was, indeed, the man he’d known as “Maurice Bishop.” Going further, Veciana declared that he had known that CIA employees had been involved in Pres. Kennedy’s assassination. While defending the CIA’s efforts to counter U.S. enemies, Mr. Veciana stated that he had studied Kennedy’s presidency and he’d concluded that JFK was a great president.

— Prof. Blakey and his two leading living investigators, Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez, reported on problems they’d unearthed that impacted the very integrity of HSCA’s 1978 investigation into President Kennedy’s assassination. The three revealed in detail how both the CIA and FBI subverted the HSCA efforts to investigate President Kennedy’s assassination.

— In 1994, 15 years after the HSCA finished its investigation into the Warren Commission, President William Jefferson Clinton appointed the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to oversee implementation of JFK Records Act, which mandated release of JFK-assassination-related records. This forced out a large volume of documents previously kept secret from the public.

— These Conference presentations provided telling details that proved the integrity of the last official investigation into President Kennedy’s assassination had been undermined.

— Journalist/author Jefferson Morley forced the CIA disclosure that George Joannides, the CIA case officer running the Cuban exile group DRE when Lee Harvey Oswald approached them in August of 1963, had been called out of retirement to serve as liaison with the HSCA. In his capacity as liaison, he had a duty to inform HSCA investigators that he was the DRE case officer they were looking to identify — and he should have provided the records detailing Oswald’s pre-assassination relationship with DRE that HSCA was requesting. He did not.

— From the day of JFK’s assassination in 1963 to today, the public has been suffused with persistent refrains that Oswald was a “loner” and sole assassin of President Kennedy. The AARC conference presented two eyewitnesses who knew Lee Harvey Oswald personally: Prof. Ernst Titovets, a close friend of Oswald’s in Minsk, Belarus; and Buell Wesley Frazier, who knew Oswald well in Dallas and Irving, Texas. Both men stated that Oswald was friendly, sociable and family-oriented, the very opposite of the public picture presented in the Warren Report. This mischaracterization continues to be promoted in 2015 by acolytes and assets of various government agencies and their associates in the news media.

— The conference included a number of special events that were comprised of panel discussions by well-known authors and filmmakers that focused on why, on the 50th anniversary of the murder, most mainstream newspaper and broadcast media continued to promulgate theories that Oswald, alone and unabetted, achieved the crime of the 20th century.

— A very special conference event was the dramatic reading by Brian Connors, John Heard and other well-known actors, of the transcript of the emergency Executive Session of the Warren Commission held January 22, 1964. The transcript reveals that the Commissioners discussed startling reports that Oswald was an FBI and/or CIA agent. They concluded that the FBI had not investigated the possibility there had been a conspiracy. However, Allen Dulles, the former head of the CIA until he was discharged after the Bay of Pigs disaster, pushed the “lone assassin” theory.

— A major goal of the conference was to induce the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to speed up disclosures of JFK Assassination-related records. Under the JFK Records Act, unanimously passed by Congress in 1992, all but a very few records were to be promptly released. And, all have to be released by October 26, 2017 — unless disclosure is further postponed by the President himself. But, in the years leading up to the 50^th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, it had become clear that a substantial number of JFK Assassination records were still being withheld without explanation. AARC invited National Archivist David S. Ferreiro to address the pertinent issues including, specifically, how many records are withheld and what justifies their continued withholding in light of the passage of more than five decades. The National Archivist declined to appear at the AARC conference. Nevertheless, it is now clear that the pressure placed on NARA at that conference has forced it to make a new public accounting of the unreleased records. This April, a NARA representative appeared at a public forum held by its National Declassification Center and gave a confusing and erroneous description of the extent of the withholding.

— Subsequently, in response to questions raised by a member of AARC’s Board of Directors, the NARA representative made the astonishing admission that more than 36,000 documents remain withheld — partially or wholly — until 2017. The actual number of pages remains unknown.

In sum, the AARC conference demonstrated the importance of the work that has been done, and what should be done now and in the next few years. AARC has taken the role of explaining the complex aspects of political assassinations to the public — in order to develop the means to push the existing records out of classified secrecy and into accessible view.

Those who watch the videos of the conference, and/or purchase DVD sets containing the 44 conference presentations, are urged to further aid and support AARC actions to extricate the remaining records — tens or hundreds of thousands of them — that remain hidden and unreleased. Please support AARC efforts to free them by making a tax-exempt charitable contribution to: AARC.