Robust inquiries are the only way to give the lie to conspiracy theories

We should learn from those developments. At the moment we have some investigations in train that could have enormous historical significance

MOST people in their mid-50s, or older, remember the day John F Kennedy was shot. It was frightening to think during the week that it was 44 years ago.

There is still controversy over who shot Kennedy. Vincent Bugliosi — who was famous as the prosecutor of Charles Manson in 1970 and later wrote Helter Skelter, a brilliant bestselling book on the whole Manson saga — has just published a detailed investigation of the Kennedy assassination in which he concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Bugliosi knows that most Americans no longer subscribe to that belief.

President Lyndon Johnson knew there would be major questions about the killing, so he promptly ordered that it be examined by a presidential commission under the chairmanship of the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor of California who had been appointed to the Supreme Court by another Republican — President Dwight D Eisenhower.

Johnson also prevailed upon another Republican — the future President Gerald Ford — to serve on the commission, along with the former head of the CIA, Allan Dulles.

The bipartisan commission came to the unanimous conclusion that Oswald killed President Kennedy, acting on his own. When the Warren Commission report was published in 1964, it was widely accepted by the American people, but in the following years many people began chipping away at the foundation of the report and Mark Lane published his famous deconstruction of the findings in his book, Rush to Judgment.

The problem was that too many questions were later raised that should have been answered by the Warren Commission. Many people in Texas were convinced that Johnson was implicated in the assassination. He was the one who had most to gain from the killing.

The US Senate committee was actually investigating Johnson for kickbacks on the day that Kennedy was killed. Those were the same grounds on which Vice-President Spiro Agnew was later forced to resign in 1973. But once word came through of the events in Dallas, the Johnson investigation was scrapped.

The night before the assassination Johnson was in Dallas at a party at the home of one of his main financial backers, the oil magnate Clint Murchison. Other people at that party included FBI director J Edgar Hoover, his partner Clyde Tolson, future President Richard Nixon and Jack Ruby, the man who days later would murder Oswald on live television.

At the time Ruby was depicted as a small-time nightclub owner, but he actually controlled prostitution in Dallas. He was long-time Mafia with ties going back to Al Capone. There were so many unanswered questions that most Americans lost faith in the Warren Commission; they came to believe there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

Why did Johnson appoint Ford to the commission? He was known to be very critical of Ford’s mental capacity; he used to joke that Ford, a famous college footballer, had played too much without a helmet.

In his own colourful way, Johnson added that Ford was so stupid he could not fart and chew gum at the same time.

Another moment that most people remember was the news of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001. Last year an academic argued at a UCC debate that the Twin Towers were blown down by explosives on behalf of George Bush to provide a pretext for intervening in Iraq.

Most people have probably seen the film of the second airliner crash into the tower, so it would seem to be stretching credulity to believe that this crash was to provide cover for an internal implosion designed to bring the building down.

The argument has even been made that Bush family involvement went back to the Kennedy assassination. There is supposedly a photograph of George WH Bush, the future president and father of the current one, standing at the doorway of the Texas School Book Depository building from which Oswald fired the shots.

That photograph is now on the internet. There is a similarity, but it is far from convincing. Yet some people seem ready to believe just about anything when it comes to such conspiracies.

The same thing happened after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Many Americans are still convinced that President Franklin Roosevelt knew the attack was coming but did not warn the people in Hawaii because he was wanted Americans so roused that he could lead them into the war against Germany.

The way conspiracy theories grow demonstrates the need for investigations to be seen to be thorough and impartial. We should learn from those developments.

At the moment we have some investigations in train that could have enormous historical significance.

The Mahon Tribunal has undoubtedly been dragging on, but there are some who would like people to believe it is engaged in a rush judgment against poor Bertie. It is important, therefore, that it should seen to be impartial.

Elsewhere, however, there was a staggering development this week with the news that the review of the misdiagnoses at the Midland Hospital in Portlaoise of the mammograms of women suffering from cancer is being conducted by a consultant who was a member of the panel that selected the consultant at the centre of the controversy.

This is grossly unfair to everybody involved — the patients who were wrongly told that they were clear of cancer, the doctor whose work is being reviewed and the doctor conducting the review.

THE dictates of justice demand that any investigation should not only be impartial, but should also be seen to be so. There should be no grounds whatever for any suspicion of a conflict of interest.

Dr James Reilly, the Fine Gael spokesman on Health, contended in the Dáil that Dr Ann O’Donoghue, the consultant conducting the review, has a “conflict of interest” that will undermine confidence in the review because she was a member of the interview panel that appointed the consultant radiologist who is currently on administrative leave while her work is being reviewed.

There is no doubt at all about the integrity or competence of Dr Ann O’Donoghue conducting the review, but she has been placed in an invidious position. There should be no grounds whatever for any suggestion of a possible conflict of interests. Is somebody bucking for a judicial tribunal to investigate the whole thing next?

What happened in Portlaoise was a tragic mistake. But it involves at least nine women, and in any self-respecting republic that should be seen to be many times more important. Hence the necessity to ensure that there could be no question of any conflict of interest in the review should be all the more apparent.

If the Government does not recognise this, we are in deep trouble.