TV Actor Defends Claim About Deaths of JFK Witnesses
Richard Belzer, the TV actor who famously played Detective John Munch on NBC鈥檚 鈥淟aw and Order: Special Victims Unit鈥� and other shows for some 20 years, is standing by his claim that nearly 50 people were murdered to hush up the facts about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
In an E-mail to the Intelligence Report, which late last year published an article examining Belzer鈥檚 conspiracy theories and his appearance as a guest on the radio show of conspiracist Alex Jones, a representative for Belzer provided a response in Belzer鈥檚 own words. In that response, Belzer insisted that 鈥淸n]o one who examines the facts thoroughly can doubt the murders of witnesses about to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, not to mention the dizzyingly astronomical odds of so many people dying mysteriously (yes, mysteriously) who were involved in one way or another.鈥�
However, as the Report story said, the people who were allegedly murdered typically had their deaths officially attributed to illness, accidents and suicide. In addition, the story pointed out that a large number of people who did testify to the committee have had normal life-spans, just as many reporters who were skeptical of the Warren Commission account of the assassination were not murdered.
Regarding Jones, Belzer noted that he 鈥済raciously allow[ed] my books to be sold through his website.鈥� Belzer continued: 鈥淭he New York Times won鈥檛 review my books and yet they make their best sellers list. If not for The Alex Jones Show, ironically, my books would not have made their list.鈥� Belzer said that he and Jones 鈥渄on鈥檛 agree on everything but I believe he loves his country as I do and we are both disappointed in some of the more than questionable acts that the military industrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about and that President John F. Kennedy took more than seriously.鈥�
Jones is known for using his radio show and two websites to promote a series of baseless claims about government involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing, the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Boston Marathon bombing and any number of other terrorist events. Jones has also pushed the theory, central to the antigovernment 鈥淧atriot鈥� movement, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has secretly built a complex of concentration camps in America.
The Report repeatedly sought comment from Belzer when it was preparing the story, but Belzer鈥檚 press representative, after initially promising to see about an interview, stopped responding to the magazine鈥檚 telephone messages. Through a representative, Belzer contacted the Report more than two months after the story was published in November.
Belzer also was bothered by the fact that the story about him, together with his photograph, was presented above the masthead on the cover of the Report, because the cover also presented a separate story below the masthead that used the image of a crumbling swastika. He wrote: 鈥淎s a Jewish person whose grandfather represented Israel at the United Nations before it was a state and an uncle who, as a member of the Resistance, fought the Nazis in World War Two, I am deeply hurt and offended.鈥�
聽Mark Potok, editor of the Report, said, 鈥淚 have to disagree that the crumbling swastika used on our cover in connection with a story about the neo-Nazi group Volksfront was or appeared to be in any way connected to the headline about the Belzer story. The two stories were clearly separate and distinct.鈥�
