There is nothing new to learn about the assassination of JFK.
Words like these have become almost a mantra among sanctimonious media pundits and complacent publishers.
The problem is that they're not true.
In this book, Ed Haslam takes our knowledge of the dark underpinnings of the 1960s to a new level by offering a whole new look at events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
He focuses on activities in New Orleans during 1963, reaching far beyond Lee Harvey Oswald's leafleting or his contacts with anti-Castro Cubans, government agents and mobsters.
Anyone who has seen the Oliver Stone film JFK or has read one of the many books on the assassination knows of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's ill-fated prosecution of International Trade Mart Director Clay Shaw.
We know of Guy Banister, the ex-FBI agent who was connected to the CIA, antiCastro Cubans and the accused assassin Oswald.
We know of David Ferrie, a defrocked priest who was connected to the Mafia, the CIA and Oswald.
Shaw was able to successfully argue that he had never met Ferrie or Oswald.
Today, we know that claim is simply untrue.
It is now well-accepted that officials within the federal government of the United States of America took steps to effectively block and derail Garrison's probe.
It seemed the New Orleans investigation was at an end.
But what if all that activity in New Orleans had nothing to do with the assassination?
What if there was some other reason for sabotaging Garrison's investigation?
After all, there is not one hard piece of evidence linking the Shaw-Ferrie axis to the events in Dealey Plaza. Ferrie, the man connected to Oswald, the Mob and the CIA, never got closer to Dallas than a Houston phone booth, and there was never any serious accusation that Clay Shaw went to Dallas.
Could there have been a deeper secret reason why the Garrison investigation had to be shut off?
And could that reason have had more to do with contaminated polio vaccines and the secrecy of a deadly biological weapon experiment than any plotting against President Kennedy?
In his 1995 book Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus, Haslam opened a whole new can of worms when he revealed the medical experiments that had taken place in David Ferrie's apartment in 1963.
He was one of the first to bring to the public the now well-documented story of how the polio vaccines of the 1950s was adulterated with a cancer-causing virus derived from monkey glands.
Federal certification officers were aware of the possibility of the polio vaccine being defective but were pressured into approving the vaccine by powerful medical interests, including Dr. Alton Ochsner of New Orleans.
Once the magnitude of the cancer-causing viruses in the polio vaccines became known, a massive covert effort was undertaken in an attempt to find a cure or preventative.
All this was clandestine work, very hush-hush.
No one wanted the American public to know that the polio vaccines inoculated into millions of our citizens were contaminated with dangerous monkey viruses, perhaps causing the cancer epidemic of recent years.
But then the story took an even darker turn: the CIA began to take an interest in the work.
After all, this was a time when documented efforts were under way to find a subtle way of assassinating Fidel Castro.
Military and intelligence eyes sparkled at the prospect of somehow injecting Castro with cancer.
His death would appear natural, and there would be no accusations from the Soviet Union.
But what was Oswald’s role in all this activity?
The evidence of Oswald’s intelligence work for the U.S. Government is overwhelming.
Did he become involved in a biological weapons experiment so monstrous that its secret had to be maintained at all costs?
Diligent researchers know that Oswald was playing intelligence games in New Orleans in the summer of 1963.
One day he was handing out pro-Castro literature on street corners, some of it stamped with the same address as Banister’s antiCastro office at 544 Camp Street.
Another day, Oswald was offering his services to anti-Castro militant Carlos Bringuier.
Oswald’s duplicity resulted in what appeared to authorities as a staged fight between Oswald and Bringuier on a New Orleans street.
Oswald was arrested for disturbing the peace.
While in jail, he did not ask to see a lawyer but instead someone from the FBI.
Despite being outside normal business hours, FBI Agent John Quigley arrived and spent more than an hour with Oswald, who commenced to detail his activities since arriving in New Orleans, almost as though he was making a report to superiors.
Yet Oswald made no public mention of David Ferrie or his work at Ferrie’s cancer lab.
According to information gathered by Haslam, Oswald also was much more closely connected to his uncle, Charles *Dutz" Murret, and New Orleans crime lord Carlos Marcello than previously suspected.
But Haslam's primary focus is on the strange and horrible death of Dr. Mary Sherman, whose charred body was found in her home in July 1964.
She had been stabbed multiple times.
Her body exhibited the effects of extreme scorching and heat, yet there was only superficial fire damage to her bed and home.
He also delves into Oswald's work with Ferrie in the covert cancer lab and its fatal results.
His research provides a plausible explanation for the caged white mice reported in Ferrie's apartment, Oswald's missing time at the Reily Coffee Company, and for the never fully understood trip to Clinton, LA, by Oswald, Ferrie and Shaw.
Readers of Haslam's previous book, Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus, will recall the author's suspicion that Dr. Sherman's death may have been the result of an accident involving a linear particle accelerator used in the cancer research.
In this updatedaccount, Haslam lays out strong evidence that just such a device was in use on the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital grounds near Tulane in the 1960s.
His previous work was embraced by the late Mary Ferrell, that indefatigable Dallas JFK assassination researcher.
When asked her opinion of Haslam’s research, Mary replied, “Based on what we know today, I think it’s totally accurate.”
In this new volume, Haslam brings the one thing missing from his earlier work — a living witness.
The importance of this new testimony was summed up by consummate conspiracy debunker John McAdams, who stated, “If Judyth Vary Baker is telling the truth, it will change the way we think about the Kennedy assassination.”
Ed Haslam’s research may indeed change the way we think about the assassination, about Lee Harvey Oswald and about the greatest health scandal in history.
The tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy may come to be seen as a mere bump in the road of a series of national scandals and conspiracies which have plagued the United States right up to today.
Jim MARRS, SPRING 2007
