Also, see:
The Kennedy Casket Conspiracy
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger184.html
The J.F.K. Flap
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard147.html
==========
JFK and the Unspeakable:
Why He Died and Why It Matters
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/curtin1.1.1.html
by Edward Curtin
November 28, 2009
Despite a treasure-trove of new information having emerged over the
last forty-six years, there are many people who still think who
killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable
questions. There are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald
"lone-nut" explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. Both
groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, it has no
contemporary relevance but is old-hat, history, stuff for
conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general
thinking is that the assassination occurred almost a half-century
ago, so let's move on.
Nothing could be further from the truth, as James Douglass shows in
his extraordinary book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why
It Matters (Orbis Books, 2008). It is clearly one of the best books
ever written on the Kennedy assassination and deserves a vast
readership. It is bound to roil the waters of complacency that have
submerged the truth of this key event in modern American history.
It's not often that the intersection of history and contemporary
events pose such a startling and chilling lesson as does the
contemplation of the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed
with the situations faced by President Obama today. So far, at least,
Obama's behavior has mirrored Johnson's, not Kennedy's, as he has
escalated the war in Afghanistan by 34,000. One can't but help think
that the thought of JFK's fate might not be far from his mind as he
contemplates his next move in Afghanistan.
Douglass presents a very compelling argument that Kennedy was killed
by "unspeakable" (the Trappist monk Thomas Merton's term) forces
within the U.S. national security state because of his conversion
from a cold warrior into a man of peace. He argues, using a wealth of
newly uncovered information, that JFK had become a major threat to
the burgeoning military-industrial complex and had to be eliminated
through a conspiracy planned by the CIA "the CIA's fingerprints are
all over the crime and the events leading up to it" not by a crazed
individual, the Mafia, or disgruntled anti-Castro Cubans, though some
of these may have been used in the execution of the plot.
Why and by whom? These are the key questions. If it can be shown that
Kennedy did, in fact, turn emphatically away from war as a solution
to political conflict; did, in fact, as he was being urged by his
military and intelligence advisers to up the ante and use violence,
rejected such advice and turned toward peaceful solutions, then, a
motive for his elimination is established. If, furthermore, it can be
clearly shown that Oswald was a dupe in a deadly game and that forces
within the military/intelligence apparatus were involved with him
from start to finish, then the crime is solved, not by fingering an
individual who may have given the order for the murder or pulled the
trigger, but by showing that the coordination of the assassination
had to involve U.S. intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA.
Douglass does both, providing highly detailed and intricately linked
evidence based on his own research and a vast array of the best scholarship.
We are then faced with the contemporary relevance, and since we know
that every president since JFK has refused to confront the growth of
the national security state and its call for violence, one can
logically assume a message was sent and heeded. In this regard, it is
not incidental that former twenty-seven-year CIA analyst Raymond
McGovern, in a recent interview, warned of the "two CIAs," one the
analytic arm providing straight scoop to presidents, the other the
covert action arm which operates according to its own rules. "Let me
leave you with this thought," he told his interviewer, "and that is
that I think Panetta (current CIA Director), and to a degree Obama,
are afraid I never thought I'd hear myself saying this I think
they are afraid of the CIA." He then recommended Douglass' book,
"It's very well-researched and his conclusion is very alarming."
Let's look at the history marshaled by Douglass to support his thesis.
First, Kennedy, who took office in January 1961 as somewhat of a Cold
Warrior, was quickly set up by the CIA to take the blame for the Bay
of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. The CIA and generals wanted
to oust Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban
exiles to invade Cuba. Kennedy refused to go along and the invasion
was roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly
blamed Kennedy. But it was all a sham.
Though Douglass doesn't mention it, and few Americans know it,
classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had
discovered that the Soviets had learned of the date of the invasion
more than a week in advance, had informed Castro, but and here is a
startling fact that should make people's hair stand on end never
told the President. The CIA knew the invasion was doomed before the
fact but went ahead with it anyway. Why? So they could and did
afterwards blame JFK for the failure.
This treachery set the stage for events to come. For his part,
sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired
CIA Director Allen Dulles (as in a bad joke, later to be named to the
Warren Commission) and his assistant General Charles Cabell (whose
brother Earle Cabell, to make a bad joke absurd, was the mayor of
Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed) and said he wanted "to splinter
the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." Not the
sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within a
government whose power was growing exponentially.
The stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, in opposition to
nearly all his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in
U.S. foreign policy.
In 1961, despite the Joint Chief's demand to put troops into Laos,
Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman,
his representative at the Geneva Conference, "Did you understand? I
want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don't want to put troops in."
Also in 1961, he refused to concede to the insistence of his top
generals to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in Berlin and
Southeast Asia. Walking out of a meeting with top military advisors,
Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, "These people are crazy."
He refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the
Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Afterwards he told his friend John
Kenneth Galbraith that "I never had the slightest intention of doing so."
Then in June 1963 he gave an incredible speech at American University
in which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the
end of the Cold War and the "Pax Americana enforced on the world by
American weapons of war," and movement toward "general and complete
disarmament."
A few months later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev.
In October 1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263
calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from
Vietnam by the end of the year and a total withdrawal by the end of 1965.
All this he did while secretly engaging in negotiations with
Khrushchev via the KGB, Norman Cousins, and Pope John XXIII, and with
Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French
Journalist Jean Daniel. In an interview with Daniel on October 24,
1963 Kennedy said, "I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in
the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and
especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further:
to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a
number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to
pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in
agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly
clear." Such sentiments were anathema, shall we say treasonous, to
the CIA and top generals.
These clear refusals to go to war and his decision to engage in
private, back-channel communications with Cold War enemies marked
Kennedy as an enemy of the national security state. They were on a
collision course. As Douglass and others have pointed out, every move
Kennedy made was anti-war. This, Douglass argues, was because JFK, a
war hero, had been deeply affected by the horror of war and was
severely shaken by how close the world had come to destruction during
the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout his life he had been touched by
death and had come to appreciate the fragility of life. Once in the
Presidency, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual
transformation, from Cold Warrior to peace maker. He came to see the
generals who advised him as devoid of the tragic sense of life and as
hell-bent on war. And he was well aware that his growing resistance
to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those
generals and the CIA. On numerous occasions he spoke of the
possibility of a military coup d'état against him. On the night
before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, "But, Jackie, if
somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can
stop it, so why worry about it." And we know that nobody did try to
stop it because they had planned it.
But who killed him?
Douglass presents a formidable amount of evidence, some old and some
new, against the CIA and covert action agencies within the national
security state, and does so in such a logical and persuasive way that
any fair-minded reader cannot help but be taken aback; stunned,
really. And he links this evidence directly to JFK's actions on
behalf of peace.
He knows, however, that to truly convince he must break a "conspiracy
of silence that would envelop our government, our media, our academic
institutions, and virtually our entire society from November 22,
1963, to the present." This "unspeakable," this hypnotic "collective
denial of the obvious," is sustained by a mass-media whose repeated
message is that the truth about such significant events is beyond our
grasp, that we will have to drink the waters of uncertainty forever.
As for those who don't, they are relegated to the status of conspiracy nuts.
Fear and uncertainty block a true appraisal of the assassination
that plus the thought that it no longer matters.
It matters. For we know that no president since JFK has dared to buck
the military-intelligence-industrial complex. We know a Pax Americana
has spread its tentacles across the globe with U.S. military in over
130 countries on 750-plus bases. We know that the amount of blood and
money spent on wars and war preparations has risen astronomically.
There is a great deal we know and even more that we don't want to
know, or at the very least, investigate.
If Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to the intelligence community, the
FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not "a
lone-nut" assassin. Douglass marshals a wealth of evidence to show
how from the very start Oswald was moved around the globe like a pawn
in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated in the
Dallas police headquarters.
As he begins to trace Oswald's path, Douglass asks this question:
"Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the
government he betrayed?"
After serving as a U.S. Marine at the CIA's U-2 spy plane operating
base in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher than top secret but a
fact suppressed by the Warren Commission), Oswald left the Marines
and defected to the Soviet Union. After denouncing the U.S., working
at a Soviet factory in Minsk, and taking a Russian wife during
which time Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane is shot down over the Soviet
Union he returned to the U.S. with a loan from the American Embassy
in Moscow, only to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by a
man, Spas T. Raikin, a prominent anti-communist with extensive
intelligence connections, recommended by the State Department.
He passed through immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted,
moved to Fort Worth, Texas where, at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA
Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was met and befriended by George
de Mohrenschildt, an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset. De
Mohrenschildt got him a job four days later at a graphic arts company
that worked on maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy
missions over Cuba.
Oswald was then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt
who, in 1977, on the day he revealed he had contacted Oswald for the
CIA and was to meet with the House Select Committee on Assasinations'
Gaeton Fonzi, allegedly committed suicide.
Oswald then moved to New Orleans in April 1963 where got a job at the
Reilly Coffee Company owned by CIA-affiliated William Reilly. The
Reilly Coffee Company was located in close vicinity to the FBI, CIA,
Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence offices and a
stone's throw from the office of Guy Bannister, a former FBI agent,
who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence
services, supplying and training anti-Castro paramilitaries meant to
ensnare Kennedy. Oswald then went to work with Bannister and the CIA
paramilitaries.
During this time up until the assassination Oswald was on the FBI
payroll, receiving $200 per month. This startling fact was covered up
by the Warren Commission even though it was stated by the
Commission's own general counsel J. Lee Rankin at a closed-door
meeting on January 27, 1964. The meeting had been declared "top
secret" and its content only uncovered ten years later after a
lengthy legal battle by researcher Harold Weisberg. Douglass claims
Oswald "seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI," as a
provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and
Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960 to 1964,
in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said, "It was
common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency."
When Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963, de Mohrenschildt
exited the picture, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly
given a $285,000 contract to do a geological survey for Haitian
dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier, which he never did, but for which he
was paid. Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the picture on cue.
Douglass illuminatingly traces in their intelligence connections.
Ruth later was the Warren Commission's chief witness. She had been
introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In September 1963 Ruth
Paine drove from her sister's house in Virginia to New Orleans to
pick up Marina Oswald and bring her to her house in Dallas to live
with her. Thirty years after the assassination a document was
declassified showing Paine's sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her
father traveled throughout Latin America on an Agency for
International Development (notorious for CIA front activities)
contract and filed reports that went to the CIA. Her husband
Michael's step-father, Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell
helicopter and Michael's job there gave him a security clearance. Her
mother was related to the Forbes family of Boston and her lifelong
friend, Mary Bancroft, worked as a WW II spy with Allen Dulles and
was his mistress. Afterwards, Dulles questioned the Paines in front
of the Warren Commission, studiously avoiding any revealing
questions. Back in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently got Oswald a job
in the Texas Book Depository where he began work on October 16, 1963.
From late September until November 22, various Oswalds are later
reported to have simultaneously been seen from Dallas to Mexico City.
Two Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theatre, the real one taken
out the front door and an impostor out the back. As Douglas says,
"There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald
than the Warren Report could use or even explain." Even J. Edgar
Hoover knew that Oswald impostors were used, as he told LBJ
concerning Oswald's alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico
City. He later called this CIA ploy, "the false story re Oswald's
trip to Mexico…their (CIA's) double-dealing," something that he
couldn't forget. It was apparent that a very intricate and deadly
game was being played out at high levels in the shadows.
We know Oswald was blamed for the President's murder. But if one
fairly follows the trail of the crime it becomes blatantly obvious
that government forces were at work. Douglass adds layer upon layer
of evidence to show how this had to be so. Oswald, the mafia,
anti-Castro Cubans could not have withdrawn most of the security that
day. Sheriff Bill Decker withdrew all police protection. The Secret
Service withdrew the police motorcycle escorts from beside the
president's car where they had been the day before in Houston; took
agents off the back of the car where they were normally stationed to
obstruct gunfire. They approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry
run on November 18) where the car came almost to a halt, a clear
security violation. The House Select Committee on Assassinations
concluded this, not some conspiracy nut.
Who could have squelched the testimony of all the doctors and medical
personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in
his neck and head, testimony contradicting the official story? Who
could have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first
African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the
White House detail by JFK, who warned that he feared the president
was going to be assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden seven
times and his evidence on the aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago on
November 2 a story little known but extraordinary in its
implications is riveting.) The list of all the people who turned up
dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched,
distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up clearly point
to forces within the government, not rogue actors without
institutional support.
The evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the
intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in
such depth and so logically that only one hardened to the truth would
not be deeply moved and affected by his book.
He says it best: "The extent to which our national security state was
systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we
absorb and think in a system. We lack the independence needed to
judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points
toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we
all live, as the source of Kennedy's murder and immediate cover-up."
Speaking to his friends Dave Powers and Ken O'Donnell about those who
planned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, JFK said, "They couldn't
believe that a new president like me wouldn't panic and try to save
his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong."
Let's hope for another president like that, but one that meets a different end.
.
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