Electronic Assassinations Newsletter

Issue #1 "Case Closed or Posner Exposed?"


 

The Posner Follies - Part 2

by
Wallace Milam

LEE HARVEY OSWALD AND GUY BANISTER: THE REAL STORY



1. All assassination researchers are familiar with Guy Banister, the right-wing New Orleans private detective and anti-Castro zealot who operated out of 544 Camp Street and rubbed shoulders with a variety of Marcello associates, anti-Castro exiles, and CIA operatives.

2. All except Gerald Posner, that is.

3. In his efforts to distance Lee Harvey Oswald from any conspiratorial relationship, Posner chose to ignore glaring evidence that Oswald and Banister were associated. This failure to acknowledge that there was credible evidence of a Banister-Oswald association is perhaps the most obvious and blatant example of "managed evidence" anywhere in the pages of CASE CLOSED.

4. And here, as in so many other cases, Posner chose to ignore evidence found on the very pages of sources he had used for quite another purpose, revealing once again his bias and his agenda.

5. On page 141, Posner wrote: "There is simply no credible evidence that Oswald ever had an office at 544 Camp Street, or, much less, that he knew Guy Banister." [emphasis added]

6. But later, on pages 168-169, Posner has to deal with the sticky issue of William George Gaudet, the man who obtained his Mexico tourist card just before Oswald did. Posner acknowledges that Gaudet was a source for the CIA's domestic contact division until 1961, but that states that he had no relationship with Oswald and that the "House Select committee reviewed Gaudet's CIA file and determined he had no clandestine relationship with the Agency." As a source for this assertion, Posner cites HSCA Report, p. 219.

7. When one turns to page 219 of the HSCA Report, one finds this assertion, well enough, but one also finds something else, something which should have jumped out at Mr. Posner:

Gaudet noted that on one occasion he observed Oswald speaking to Guy Banister on a street corner.
As we have seen, Posner clearly read this page, since he cited it as a source, yet Posner still wrote, "There is no credible evidence that Oswald ever had an office at 544 Camp Street, or, much less, that he knew Guy Banister."

8. As if this were not bad enough, there is further ignoring of his own sources: "He [Gaudet] was able to testify that during the trip [to Mexico] he did not encounter Oswald whom he had observed on occasion at the New Orleans Trade Mart." Gaudet also added that he had seen Oswald distributing literature near his Mew Orleans office.

9. Had Posner, in the course of re-reading and re-indexing the Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, the HSCA Hearings, the Sears Catalogue and God knows what else, taken the time, he might have viewed a Canadian TV documentary from the 1970's, part of a series called "The Fifth Estate," in which researcher Peter Dale Scott conducted an interview with Gaudet at his home in Waveland, Mississippi [Gaudet has died since.]. Gaudet told Scott that he did indeed observe Oswald though he never spoke to him, that he did not think Oswald capable of the assassination, that he thought Oswald was being manipulated by anti-Castro Cubans and others, and that Oswald had gotten in over his head and was a fall guy.

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