FIFTY YEARS IS ENOUGH!
FREE THE FILES – FIND THE TRUTH

COPA is currently planning our 20th annual conference in Dallas which will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy and the 45th anniversaries of the murders of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Our theme is: “50 Years is Enough! Free the Files – Find the Truth” and we will hold our events from November 22-24, 2013 in Dallas. We will have the leading researchers, authors, ballistics, forensic and medical experts who have worked on these cases over the last five decades and the best documentary films. We plan to hold our Moment of Silence on the Grassy Knoll at 12:30 pm on November 22 as we have for the past 49 years.

Among the confirmed speakers are Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, JD, MD (our founding president), Mark Lane, Walt Brown, Peter Dale Scott and Jesse Ventura.

Also, Dr. Gary Aguilar, Robert Groden, David Talbot, Dick Russell, Russ Baker, Joan Mellen, Dr. Ernst Titovets (Oswald’s best friend), Jefferson Morley, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, Rex Bradford, Joseph Palermo, Ed Tatro, Baba Zak Kondo, Bill Kelly, Bill Simpich, Andrew Kiel, Chris Pike, Kenn Thomas, Stan Weeber, Wayne Smith, Ben Rogers, Edward Curtin, Michael Calder, Bill Holiday, Mel Barney and many others. Please plan to join us for our most important conference to date.

The conference will run from Friday night November 22 to early Sunday afternoon November 24. We will also arrange a trip for those interested to the Baylor University Poague Library collection of JFK researcher archives (Penn Jones, Jr., Robert Cutler, John Armstrong and others) in Waco, Texas for those who can stay late. Please let us know if you are interested in going there.

Pre-registrants have filled the rooms available at the Hotel Lawrence. We have arranged for additional rooms at a discount rate at Aloft, an upscale hotel near Dealey Plaza. We will also have a banquet on Friday night, November 22, followed by our keynote speakers. We need to know now how many people plan to attend, and if they will attend the banquet and other events.

We have set a special discount early registration rate of $125 and a banquet rate of $45 for those who register with us by mail or email by June 30. Payment for early registration can be made any time before June 30, 2013, and can be done at this website as a donation or sent by check or money order to COPA. After that the rate will go up to $150.

We need to know whether you plan to be there. We can seat up to 150 people at our special banquet dinner, but we have to know as soon as possible if you plan to attend.

We have also arranged for you to stay at the Aloft Dallas Downtown 1033 Young Street, Dallas, near Dealey Plaza, at a special discount rate of $99 per night, single or double. You must make the hotel reservations separately, after you register. Rooms are at a premium so email us for the discount code when you register.

Please fill in the new form below and return it as soon as possible to copa@starpower.net or mail it to COPA, P.O. Box 772, Washington, DC 20044. DO NOT RESPOND WITH A COMMENT HERE.

COPA 2013 EARLY REGISTRATION – 50th ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE

50 YEARS IS ENOUGH! FREE THE FILES – FIND THE TRUTH
DALLAS, TEXAS, NOVEMBER 22-24, 2013

_____ – I WILL ATTEND THE COPA CONFERENCE THIS YEAR ($125 EARLY REG)

_____ – I WANT TO STAY AT THE ALOFT HOTEL ($99/SINGLE)

_____ – I WILL ATTEND A BANQUET DINNER ($45/PERSON)

I WANT ROAST BEEF ____ OR PRIMAVERA ALFREDO PASTA ____

_____ – I WANT TO VISIT THE JFK RESEARCHER ARCHIVE ON SUNDAY

NAME:

EMAIL:

PHONE:

ADDRESS:

CITY/STATE/ZIP:

PLEASE LET US HEAR FROM YOU SOON! SEE YOU IN NOVEMBER!

DO NOT RESPOND WITH A REPLY COMMENT HERE, PLEASE. EMAIL OR MAIL THIS FORM BACK TO COPA.

JFK Assassination Researchers Will Commemorate 50th Anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Commemoration Speech at American University Calling for an End to the Nuclear Arms Race and the Cold War

(Washington, DC) The Coalition on Political Assassinations, national network of forensic, medical and ballistics experts, academics, authors and independent researchers will hold our annual commemoration on June 10 at 12:30 pm, including a reading of parts of his commemoration speech given that day at American Univeristy. We will gather at the plaque that memorializes the speech at the south end of Reeves Athletic Field, west of the Media Production Center (radio tower). American University, 4800 Nebraska Ave. NW in Washington. DC. See the campus map at

http://www.american.edu/aumaps/

This critical and seminal speech, given 50 years ago, and written with Kennedy by Theodore Sorenson, put him at odds with the Cold War Pentagon and intelligence agencies who did not want to move towards detente and disarmament or lasting peace. Kennedy had enraged members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis by his refusal to escalate to full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and China. In our view, this speech was a factor in the events that led to his assassination in November of 1963 in Dallas, Texas.

COPA has held annual commemorations of this speech for over a decade at the site. A luncheon will follow for researchers.

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/05/who_died_and_made_the_sixth_fl.php

Last night the history group called Preservation Dallas gave a special award to Lindalyn Adams, one of the people who created The Sixth Floor, the Kennedy assassination museum downtown.

That’s great. She deserves it. Now I want to know why The Sixth Floor got Robert Groden thrown in the slammer.

Groden is a best-selling author whose books argue that the killing of the president in Dallas a half century ago was a conspiracy. On weekends, when tourists, including plenty of assassination buffs, flock to downtown to visit Dealey Plaza where it happened, Groden sets up a table there and lectures and sells books and videos. After ticketing, arresting and jailing him on multiple occasions over the years, the city of Dallas has backed off, apparently agreeing with Groden’s lawyers that he was never breaking the law in the first place.

But Groden still has a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city plodding its way slowly through the court system. I hope someday the lawsuit will answer my question.
In today’s Dallas Morning News story about the award for Adams, the executive director of the museum, Nicola Longford, makes a statement that is quite telling, if you’re as close to this stuff as I have been. It’s your typical Morning News party-pix happy-talk everybody’s-just-GRAND-GRAND story, in which Longford says, “The Sixth Floor has a collective responsibility to maintain the landmark district site.”

PHOTO
Robert Groden is suing Dallas, but it’s the museum that’s doing the city’s dirty work.

Oh, is that right? When exactly did that duty get assigned to the museum? Is that responsibility the reason security personnel from the museum asked the Dallas PD to go arrest Groden on June 10, 2010? That was the city’s version later, under oath, when they responded to Groden’s lawsuit. The cops told the court they popped Groden and threw him in the Lew Sterrett jail because a security guard from the museum told them to. This is after Longford told me the museum had nothing to do with it — apparently not a truthful statement, if the city is to be believed.

Listen: Adams and curator/designer Connover Hunt did the city a huge solid by saving the School Book Depository Building and turning the sixth-floor “sniper’s nest” into a museum. Had it been up to the usual powers that be in Dallas, the building would have been imploded and the site turned into an animatronic Biblical theme park.

But the mission of the museum has been perverted in recent years. It has become a kind of enforcement arm for the ilk of people in Dallas who can’t stand controversy about the assassination. Their official line, as purveyed by the museum, is that some lone nut named Oswald did it, that’s it, forget about it, it wasn’t Dallas’ fault.

For all I know that’s true. But it’s also true that a whole bunch of people disagree, and the intensity of that debate is higher this year because of the impending 50th anniversary of the event. The city has gone to absurd lengths to control that anniversary, giving itself permits that will effectively lock down Dealey Plaza and bar the general public during the entire week of the event.

Why? Who? Who wants this done? Who is afraid of what being said? And why is the museum, which touts itself as a center for scholarly research, out there in the plaza with the gendarmes getting somebody who disagrees with them about history hauled off to the slammer? Who told Longford it was any of her damn business what goes on in Dealey Plaza?

Right now, as the anniversary approaches, the fact that somebody in Dallas is still this touchy about it is the most interesting thing about the anniversary. Otherwise I’m not sure many people would pay attention. But apparently somebody with a lot of stroke in this city wants the bolts screwed down tight on free speech in Dealey Plaza that week. Why?

“When I was interviewed by the History Channel in October 2012 for the TV show they plan to present in November 2013, they told me about a professional survey they had commissioned. 2200 people were interviewed re the JFK Assassination and the WCR. [Warren Commission Report]
“85% said they did not accept the WCR’s conclusion that LHO was a sole assassin. Other related questions elicited similar negative responses re the WCR.” – Dr. Cyril H. Wecht

Poll: Belief in JFK conspiracy slipping slightly
Associated Press
4:05 p.m. EDT May 11, 2013

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/11/poll-jfk-conspiracy/2152665/

59% of Americans still believe there was a conspiracy
24% think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone
This November marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination

A clear majority of Americans still suspect there was a conspiracy behind President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, but the percentage who believe accused shooter Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is at its highest level since the mid-1960s, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll.

According to the AP-GfK survey, conducted in mid-April, 59% of Americans think multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president, while 24% think Oswald acted alone, and 16% are unsure. A 2003 Gallup poll found that 75% of Americans felt there was a conspiracy.

As the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death approaches, the number of Americans who believe Oswald acted alone is at its highest since the period three years after the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination, when 36% said one man was responsible.

Among those who believe Oswald acted alone is Pat Sicinski, a retired school employee in Houston. She and her husband recently visited the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. Looking out the sixth-floor window from which Oswald allegedly fired on Kennedy’s motorcade helped reaffirm her faith in the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman.

PHOTO
This image provided by Warner Bros. from Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie “JFK” shows Kevin Costner as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison demonstrating the “magic bullet” theory. Critics say Stone’s film has done more than anything to shape the public’s perception of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.(Photo: AP/Warner Bros.)

President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the Warren Commission on Nov. 29, 1963 to investigate both Kennedy’s assassination and the killing of Oswald days later.

“Some skepticism is always justified,” said Sicinski, 68. “I just think when people take it to extremes, they lose me.”

On the other hand, Cheryl Casati said she’s “extremely sure” there was a conspiracy. The killing of Oswald just days after the assassination is part of the reason why.

“There’s too many holes in explanations,” said Casati, 62, who retired from the Air Force after 20 years. “That just could not have happened easily in that time and place. And (Jack) Ruby shooting (Oswald) could not have happened as easily as it did.”

Those who were adults in 1963 were almost as likely as younger Americans to say that Kennedy’s killing was a conspiracy involving multiple people — 55%, compared to 61%.

The Associated Press-GfK Poll was conducted April 11-15, 2013 by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cellphone interviews with 1,004 adults nationwide. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points; it is larger for subgroups.

http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/2013/05/legendary-dallas-cop-james-leavelle-who-escorted-lee-harvey-oswald-honored-at-police-headquarters.html/

Several among the current generation of Dallas police officers have
earned celebrity status with appearances on reality television programs that glamorize their profession.

But when it comes to their place in history, none of them will ever
touch the legendary retired homicide Det. James Leavelle. That’s why,
this morning, Dallas Police Chief David Brown honored the man who was
handcuffed to accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald when Jack Ruby shot him in the basement of Dallas police headquarters on Nov. 24, 1963.

Brown presented Leavelle with the Police Commendation Award and
officially renamed the department’s Detective of the Year Award after
Leavelle.

“This is an honor for me personally, being a Dallasite, knowing the rich history of Dallas,” said Brown, who was 3 years old at the time of the Kennedy assassination. “Being able to recognize such an iconic figure is just special.”

The moment of the Oswald shooting two days after President John F.
Kennedy was gunned down was captured in an iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photo in The Dallas Times Herald.

“To say I’m surprised is putting it mildly,” said Leavelle, who joined the force in 1950 and retired in 1975. “I can think of so many other officers who should be standing here, receiving this award.”

The honor for Leavelle, 92, months before the 50th anniversary of the
Kennedy assassination follows a long overdue permanent commemoration of another legendary Dallas police officer. In November, a state historical marker was unveiled at the Oak Cliff street corner where Oswald fatally shot Officer J.D. Tippit 45 minutes after the Kennedy assassination.

Leavelle was there for that commemoration and Tippit’s widow, Marie
Tippit, was among those in attendance on Tuesday morning at Jack Evans Police Headquarters.

Following the ceremony, Leavelle met briefly with reporters and signed autographs.

He was asked what was going through his mind as Ruby fired on Oswald.

“I’ve been asked that question many, many times,” Leavelle said. “And
I’ve often wondered — maybe you can answer it for me — what goes through your mind when you ask me that?”

“You don’t have time to let things go through your mind, you react,” he said. “You do what you got to do. You don’t stop to think.”

He recalled spotting Ruby with the pistol by his leg and said none of
the news reporters or other officers appeared to see it.

“I looked down and I saw that,” Leavelle said. “I tried to jerk back on him and put him behind me,” he said of Oswald.

But the men were too close together and all Leavelle managed to do was turn Oswald’s body. He died at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

In the decades that have followed, Leavelle has granted countless
interviews. He started telling his story, he said, because
schoolchildren inquired about it and he wanted them to know what really happened.

“It’s like starting a wildfire,” he said. “It kept going and now you
can’t stop it. But I don’t mind doing it because I know that the people asking are interested.”

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2013/05/14/flamboyant-texas-swindler-billie-sol-estes-dies/MhHiFtMMcZPTajKO0cNUCO/story.html?camp=newsletter

PHOTO
Billie Sol Estes arrived at court in El Paso, Texas, to face myriad federal charges.

NEW YORK — Billie Sol Estes, a fast-talking Texas swindler who made millions, went to prison, and captivated America for years with mind-boggling agricultural scams, payoffs to politicians, and bizarre tales of covered-up killings and White House conspiracies, was found dead Tuesday at his home in Granbury, Texas. He was 88.

His daughter Pamela Padget said he died in his sleep and was found in his recliner.

Nonexistent fertilizer tanks. Faked mortgages. Bogus cotton-acreage allotments. Farmers in four states bamboozled. Strange ‘‘suicides,’’ including a bludgeoned investigator shot five times with a bolt-action rifle. Assassination plots. Jimmy Hoffa and Fidel Castro. Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald.

The rise and fall of Billie Sol Estes was one of the sensations of the postwar era: the saga of a good-ol’-boy con man who created a $150 million empire of real and illusory enterprises that capitalized on his contacts in Washington and the gullibility and greed of farmers, banks, and agriculture businesses.

He was a Bible-thumping preacher who gave barbecues for governors and senators, rode his bike to work in Pecos, Texas, and his airplane to Washington, and was named one of America’s 10 outstanding young men of 1953 by the US Junior Chamber of Commerce. Later, autographed photos of John F. Kennedy, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and others lined his walls.

As his empire crumbled in 1962, the notoriety of Billie Sol, as nearly everyone called him, might have been passing had it not been for the bodies that kept cropping up, for the bribery scandals, and for Mr. Estes’ lurid accounts of how it all happened and who was involved.

Many of his statements were self-serving and never proved — particularly allegations about Johnson. Mr. Estes said he had given millions to Johnson, and that Johnson, while he was vice president, had ordered seven killings and then set up the assassination of Kennedy in 1963 to become president.

The Estes chronicles filled newspapers and magazines, inspired books and songs, created lines for comedians and conspiracy theorists, and played out politically in myriad ways. Scandal-loving Americans lapped them up. Mr. Estes’ smiling, dimpled moon face — with a liquid fertilizer tank in the background — was on the cover of Time magazine on May 25, 1962, then its all-time best-selling issue.

“This government is staying right on Mr. Estes’ tail,’’ a harried Kennedy said at an overflowing news conference as he, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Agriculture Secretary Orville L. Freeman were thrown on the defensive by almost daily revelations in the serpentine scandal.

Administration officials were fired. Congressmen who had taken favors were mortified. Scores of FBI agents were dispatched to Texas to investigate suspicious deaths. Richard M. Nixon, then running for governor in California, called it ‘‘the biggest national scandal since Teapot Dome.’’

Born near Clyde, Texas, Billie Sol Estes showed early promise as a financier. At 13, he received a lamb as a gift, sold its wool for $5, bought another lamb and went into business. At 15, he sold 100 sheep for $3,000. By 18, he had $38,000.

In the late 1950s, he launched a bewildering array of interlocking enterprises involving liquid fertilizer, grain elevators, illegally borrowed money, secret payments, and sham mortgages. It leaned heavily on government programs that compensated farmers for storing surplus grain.

The cover was blown in early 1962, when The Pecos Independent and Enterprise published an expose on thousands of mortgages for nonexistent fertilizer tanks. The articles, which did not name Mr. Estes, won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and led to an avalanche of investigations.

Mr. Estes was arrested in frauds that reached from farms in Texas to the halls of Washington. Three agriculture officials were fired for taking bribes. An assistant secretary of labor who took $1,000 resigned.

Soon after the indictments, however, Mr. Freeman, the agriculture secretary, disclosed that a key investigator on the case, Henry Marshall, had been found dead — bludgeoned on the head, with nearly fatal amounts of carbon monoxide in his bloodstream, and five chest gunshot wounds. Local officials ruled it suicide, but the body was exhumed and the cause changed to homicide.

Six other men tied to the case also died. Three perished in accidents, including a plane crash. Two were found in cars filled with carbon monoxide and were declared suicides. Mr. Estes’ accountant was also found dead in a car with a rubber tube connecting its exhaust to the interior but no poisonous gases were found in the body.

In 1963, Mr. Estes was convicted on federal charges and sentenced to 15 years. After exhausting appeals and serving six years, he was paroled in 1971. In 1979, he was convicted of tax fraud and served four more years.

In 1984, in what he called a voluntary statement to clear the record, Mr. Estes told a Texas grand jury that Johnson, as vice president in 1961, had ordered that Marshall be killed to prevent him from disclosing Johnson’s ties to the conspiracies. He said a Johnson aide, Malcolm Wallace, had shot him.

The Justice Department asked Estes for more information, and the response was explosive. For a pardon and immunity, he promised to detail eight killings arranged by Johnson, including Kennedy’s.

As with similar allegations in books, articles and documentaries, none of the Mr. Estes claims could be proved. Johnson had died in 1973, and everyone else was also dead.

Legendary Texas con man Billie Sol Estes dead at 88
Dallas Morning News
BETSY BLANEY
Updated: 14 May 2013 02:02 PM

http://www.dallasnews.com/obituary-headlines/20130514-legendary-texas-con-man-billie-sol-estes-dead-at-88

GRANBURY, TX — Billie Sol Estes, a flamboyant Texas huckster who became one of the most notorious men in America in 1962 when he was accused of looting a federal crop subsidy program, has died. He was 88.

Estes, whose name became synonymous with Texas-sized schemes, greed and corruption, was found dead by a caretaker early Tuesday in his home in DeCordova Bend, a city about 60 miles southwest of Dallas, said Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds. A local funeral home confirmed it would be handling the services.

Estes reigned in the state as the king of con men for nearly 50 years. He was best known for the scandal that broke out during President John F. Kennedy’s administration involving phony financial statements and non-existent fertilizer tanks. Several lower-level agriculture officials resigned, and he wound up spending several years in prison.

At the height of his infamy, Estes was immortalized in songs by Allan Sherman (in “Schticks of One and Half a Dozen of the Other”) and the Chad Mitchell Trio (in “The Ides of Texas”). Time magazine put him on its cover, calling him “a welfare-state Ponzi … a bundle of contradictions and paradoxes who makes Dr. Jekyll seem almost wholesome.”

“He considered dancing immoral, often delivered sermons as a Church of Christ lay preacher,” the magazine wrote. “But he ruthlessly ruined business competitors, practiced fraud and deceit on a massive scale, and even victimized Church of Christ schools that he was supposed to be helping as a fund raiser or financial adviser.”

Estes’ name was often linked with that of fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson, but the late president’s associates said their relationship was never as close or as sinister as the wheeler-dealer implied.

Johnson, then the vice president, and Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman came under fire during the scandal, though the scheme had its roots in the waning years of President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, when Estes had edged into national politics from his West Texas power base in Pecos.

Estes was convicted in 1965 of mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud. An earlier conviction had been thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court over the use of cameras in the courtroom. Sentenced to 15 years in prison, Estes was freed in 1971 after serving six years.

But new charges were brought against him in 1979, and later that year he was convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy to conceal assets from the Internal Revenue Service. He was sentenced to 10 more years but was freed a second time in 1983.

A go-getter since he was a boy, Estes was one of the Junior Chamber of Commerce’s 10 most outstanding men of 1953 and became a millionaire before he was 30. Many of his deals involved agriculture products and services, including irrigation and the fertilizer products that later led to his downfall.

Before his release from federal prison for a second time in 1983, Estes claimed he’d uncovered the root of his problems: compulsiveness. “If I smoke another cigarette, I’ll be hooked on nicotine,” he said. “I’m just one drink away from being an alcoholic and just one deal away from being back in prison.”

One of the strangest episodes in his life involved the death of a U.S. Department of Agriculture official who was investigating Estes just before he was accused in the fertilizer tank case.

Henry Marshall’s 1961 death was initially ruled a suicide even though he had five bullet wounds. But in 1984, Estes told a grand jury that Johnson had ordered the official killed to prevent him from exposing Estes’ fraudulent business dealings and ties with the vice president. The prosecutor who conducted the grand jury investigation said there was no corroboration of Estes’ allegations, though a judge ruled that it was “clear and convincing” that the death was not self-inflicted.

In 2003, he co-wrote a book published in France that linked Johnson to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, an allegation rejected by prominent historians, Johnson aides and family members.

A 2007 search for correspondence between Johnson and Estes found a 1953 form letter and only sporadic correspondence during Johnson’s Senate years, said Claudia Anderson, supervisory archivist at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin. In a 1962 memo prepared by longtime Johnson aide Walter Jenkins, Johnson recalled meeting Estes once and said he had never talked to him on the phone.

While he admitted to being a swindler, Estes also portrayed himself as a “kind of Robin Hood” and hoped to be remembered for using his money to feed and educate the poor. He was an advocate of school integration in Texas long before it was fashionable.

Estes’ wife Patsy died in 2000. He later moved to Granbury, a picture-postcard town southwest of Fort Worth, and remarried.

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To order your shirt ($23.95) use this link:
http://skreened.com/occupythegrassyknoll/indivisibility-in-dallas

You can pick from a range of sizes but do not change the color, since we all want to be easily identified as one group. Please let us know that you have ordered or if you have any problems at copa@starpower.net

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOpje8kixcV-skbCZOOiNIw

This important event was held on the anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X to put his life, politics and death into historical context. Our livecast is now available online on YouTube and will soon be archived at this site as well.

Use these updated links for a video recording of this recent and important event -

Also hear an interview about the forum at

http://www.voxunion.com/?p=6774