Recently I got caught up in a futile debate with a bunch of right-wing nut jobs on a neo-fascist discussion board called Haloscan. I am sharing portions of it with you here, to give you an example of how the far right makes it almost impossible to have a sensible, logical search for the truth in the murder of JFK. These fanatical ideologues cling rigidly to their positions regardless of the facts. For example, the most vulgar of the blowhards (who goes by the internet pseudonym Stogie...in homage to Limbaugh?), asserted that there were no technical facts or lucid testimony to prove the case for conspiracy. And in the 45 years since the murder, no one has come forward to expose the conspiracy. Here was my response:
It never ceases to amaze me how invested in proving there was no conspiracy to murder JFK the far right is. Why does it mean so much to you? As far as "technical facts," how do you explain the technical fact that more lead was removed from Connally (in fact, remained in Connally) than was missing from CE 399 (the magic bullet)? I suppose you'll dismiss the eyewitness accounts from Dealey Plaza which indicate shots from the knoll. And what about the Dallas Parkland doctors who saw an ENTRANCE wound in the front of the president's throat and fist-sized EXIT wound at the back of the president's head in the occipital-parietal area. And I suppose the violent backward movement of the president's head was caused by a bullet which did a U-turn in mid-air? I don't have time or space here to educate you; one of the hard facts of the American right is that it will choose to believe what it will despite reason, facts, common sense and absolute proof. Nothing will convince you that Kennedy was murdered by the military-industrial-intelligence complex, not even if Zapruder had filmed Allen Dulles firing a rifle from the grassy knoll. After all, you elected a moronic, criminal, Bible-thumping, sociopathic, daddy's boy twice, despite an abundance of evidence of who he really was. Still, I'll do what I can...Have you heard of a man named D.H. Byrd? Didn't think so. He was a Texas oil millionaire/businessman, financial supporter of LBJ and radical right-wing friend of Hunt, Murchison, Richardson, Bush, Phillips, Mallon, and the right-wing Dallas cabal. Byrd, with the help of his great friend, Curtis LeMay (Air Force chief of staff and profound Kennedy hater), formed the Civil Air Patrol. CAP members included Lee Harvey Oswald, James Bath (drug-running buddy of W), John Liggett, David Ferrie, and others, all of whom were recruited into the CIA. Byrd also owned Ling-Temco-Vought, which built fighter planes. After LBJ became president and started the Vietnam War, Ling-Temco-Vought got a huge defense contract to build fighter planes for the Air Force. Oh, and did I mention, Byrd also owned the Texas School Book Depository building (you've heard of that?). Oswald was steered to the job at the TSBD by his CIA handler, Ruth Paine, the Oswald family landlady. Ruth was married to Michael Paine, engineer at Bell Helicopter of Dallas/Fort Worth, another big Vietnam defense contractor. Bell made a fortune off its Huey helicopters. Michael's boss at Bell was one Walter Dornberger, ex-Nazi V-2 rocket engineer who should have been hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes. He was saved from the hangman's noose by Allen Dulles and the CIA (OSS at the time) in 1946 through Operation Paperclip which evacuated Nazi scientists, doctors, spies, and engineers to the US. (I'm sure you righties have no problem with this; you seem to love a neo-fascist state.) It was Dulles who placed Dornberger with Bell, under the auspices of the CIA and the military-industrial complex. Dulles's mistress, Mary Bancroft, was best friends with Michael Paine's mother. I could go on and on...but I don't know why I bother. What I'm trying to tell you is Kennedy was murdered by people who wanted not only to win the Cold War, by whatever means necessary, but also profit mightily from it. Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War. Kennedy, practically alone, stood in the way of the huge military-industrial-intelligence complex taking over America. But I'm sure you, and all other right-wing zealots, hated him for that...and so somehow it is necessary for you to prove that Oswald acted alone. By the way, who were all those people flashing Secret Service credentials in Dealey Plaza right after the shooting? The Secret Service itself admitted it had no one on the ground in the Plaza that day. And why would Dallas policeman Joe M. Smith say he smelled gun powder behind the picket fence and encountered someone flashing Secret Service credentials in that area? And why would Roger Craig say he saw Oswald getting in a Nash Rambler at 12:40 pm when Oswald was supposedly on a bus six blocks away at the time? And on and on...My god you lone nutters sure have to explain away a lot of strange circumstances and expert testimony and appearances of impropriety and incredible timing and stunning coincidences to believe what you do. How do you do it?
From Best Evidence, by David Lifton, pp.61-62: "White House transcript 1327-C makes the debate concerning what Dr. Perry said about the throat wound on November 22 academic. The matter came up three times. Each time, Perry said the throat wound was an entrance."...[Dr. Perry speaking]'There are two...one of the neck and one of the head.""QUESTION: 'Where was the entrance wound? 'DR. PERRY: 'There was an entrance wound in the neck. 'NEXT QUESTION: "Which way was the bullet coming on the neck wound? At him? 'DR.PERRY: 'It appeared to be coming at him...the wound appeared to be an entrance wound in the front of the throat...'"From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story of Dec. 18, 1963, by Richard Dudman, "...the question that suggests itself is: How could the President have been shot in the front, from the back?...Dr. McClelland said, 'It certainly did look like an entrance wound...we are familiar with wounds, we see them everyday--sometimes several a day. This did appear to be an entrance wound.'"
From Best Evidence, pp. 14-15: "Sixty-four known witnesses indicated that shots originated from forward of the motorcade, from the grassy knoll. This amounted to approximately two-thirds of the ninety witnesses whose accounts appeared in the twenty-six volumes...who expressed an opinion as to the source of the shots."
From JFK And The Unspeakable, p. 308: "Twenty-one out of twenty-two witnesses at Parkland Hospital--most of them doctors and nurses, trained medical observers--agreed in their earliest statements that JFK's head wound was located in the right rear of his skull, demonstrating a fatal head shot from the front."
From pp. 294-298: "T.F. White was a sixty-year-old, longtime employee of Mack Pate's garage in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. While White worked on an automobile the afternoon of the assassination, he could hear police sirens screaming up and down Davis Street only a block away. He also heard radio reports describing a suspect then thought to be in Oak Cliff. The mehancic looked out the open doors of the garage. He watched as a red 1961 Falcon drove into the parking lot of the El Chico restaurant across the street. The Falcon parked in an odd position after going a few feet into the lot. The driver remained seated in the car. White said later, 'The man appeared to be hiding.'...White walked across the street to investigate. He halted about ten to fifteen yards from the car. He could see the driver was wearing a white t-shirt...[White] paused, took a scrap of paper from his coveralls pocket, and wrote down the Texas license plate number of the car: PP 4537.
"That night, while T.F. White was watching television with his wife, he recognized the Dallas Police Department's prisoner, Lee Harvey Oswald, as the man he had seen in the red Falcon." Wes Wise, a Dallas reporter, heard of White's story and, realizing that the real Oswald had already been arrested by the Dallas police at the time White saw the fake Oswald, decided to investigate. Wise asked White for the license plate number and submitted it to the FBI. The FBI reported that the license was issued to a Carl Amos Mather, 4309 Colgate Street in Dallas. "The FBI also discovered that Carl Amos Mather also did high-security communications work for Collins Radio, a major contractor with the Central Intelligence Agency. Three weeks before Kennedy's assassination, Collins Radio had been identified on the front page of the New York Times as having just deployed a CIA raider ship on an espionage and sabotage mission against Cuba. Collins also held the government contract for installing communications towers in Vietnam. In 1971, Collins Radio would merge with another giant military contractor, Rockwell International. In November 1963, Collins was at the heart of the CIA-military-contracting business for state-of-the-art communications system.
"Carl Mather had represented Collins at Andrews Air Force Base by putting special electronics equipment in Vice-President Lyndon Johnson's Air Force Two plane. Given the authority of his CIA-linked security clearance, Carl Mather refused to speak to the FBI. The FBI instead questioned his wife, Barbara Mather, who stunned them. Her husband, she said, was a good friend of J.D. Tippit. In fact, the Mathers were such close friends of Tippit and his wife that when J.D. was murdered, Marie Tippit phoned them. According to Barbara, Carl and Barbara Mather drove to the Tippit home, where they consoled Marie Tippit on the death of her husband (killed by a man identical to the one seen a few minutes later five blocks away in a car bearing the Mathers' license plate number)."
From JFK And The Unspeakable, p. 103: "Abraham Bolden joined the White House Secret Service detail in June 1961 [where] he saw increasing evidence of the president's isolation and danger from the standpoint of security. Most of the Secret Service agents seemed to hate John Kennedy. They joked among themselves that if someone shot at him, they'd get out of the way. The agents' drunken after-hours behavior carried over into lax security for the president...Abraham Bolden spoke up. He complained to his superiors about the president's poor security. They did nothing."
In TV news film footage of the motorcade leaving Love Field, Emory Roberts, Secret Service shift leader in Dallas, can be seen ordering Henry Rybka off the side of the president's car. Rybka throws his hands up in dismay and disgust.In Dealey Plaza, as the shots are fired, Roberts orders his Secret Service agents to stand down. Most could not move quickly anyway because they are hungover from a night spent drinking and carousing at a mob-connected hangout in Dallas.
From page 170 of JFK And The Unspeakable: "Ruth Hyde Paine, Michael's wife and Marina Oswald's caregiver, was the daughter of William Avery Hyde. From October 1964 to August 1967, Hyde was the AID (Agency For International Development) Regional Insurance Advisor for all of Latin America. Hyde's job description was to provide technical assistance from the US State Department to insurance cooperatives being launched in south and central America. A later AID director, former Ohio governor John Gilligan, admitted that 'AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. It was pretty well-known in the agency who they were and what they were up to...The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.'"
Ruth Hyde Paine was also the younger sister of Sylvia Hyde Hoke...[a declassified] CIA Security File memorandum...noted that Sylvia Hoke was identified as a CIA employee."
From Plausible Denial, by Mark Lane, pp. 293-4: "A Novemeber 29, 1963, memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover entitled 'Assassination of President John F. Kennedy November 22, 1963' stated that on November 23, 1963, while Oswald was in police custody and available for interrogation about his affiliation with agencies of the United States government, FBI Special Agent W.T. Forsyth and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency briefed 'Mr. George Bush of the CIA' about potential problems related to the assassination. A source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the Agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine opertions."
From pg. 705 of Best Evidence: "Dr. Jones testified to the Warren Commission that he thought Kennedy was shot from the front, with the bullet exiting the rear of the head."
George H. W. Bush still denies being with the CIA before 1976.From the introduction to Plausible Denial, p. xiii, "It has been clearly evident for years that the American public, and the people of the world, do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy...the evidence is on their side. It is the side of the truth...this truth was borne out in a courtroom on February 6, 1985, in the US District Court for the Southern District in Florida, where as lawyer for the defense in the case Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby, [Mark] Lane won a verdict from a jury of our peers that upheld, against a claim of libel, a news story that E. Howard Hunt, a long-time CIA employee, was in Dallas on the day the president was shot. The testimony at that trial gave more credibility to the notion that the CIA was involved in the assassination."From the transcript of that trial (Plausible Denial, pp. 295-297): Lane's direct questioning of witness Marita Lorenz:
Q. Did Mr. Hunt pay Mr. Sturgis sums of money for activity related to the transportation of weapons?
A. Yes
Q.Did Mr. Sturgis tell you where you would be going from Miami, Florida, during November of 1963, prior to the time that you traveled with him in the car?
A. Dallas, Texas.
Q. He told you that?
A. Yes.
Q. Did you arrive in Dallas during November of 1963?
A. Yes.
Q. After you arrived in Dallas, did you stay at any accommodations there?
A. Motel.
Q. While you were at the motel, did you meet anyone other than those who were in the party traveling with you from Miami to Dallas?
A. Yes.
Q. Who did you meet?
A. E. Howard Hunt.
Q. Was there anyone else who you saw or met other than Mr. Hunt?
A. Jack Ruby.
Q. Tell me the circumstances regarding your seeing E. Howard Hunt in Dallas in November of 1963.
A. There was a prearranged meeting that E. Howard Hunt deliver us sums of money for the so-called operation that I did not know its nature.
Q. Now, can you tell us in relationship to the day that President Kennedy was killed, when this meeting took place?
A. The day before.
Q. Is it your testimony that Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald is, to the best of your ability to identify him, the person who was in the motel in Dallas with you, E. Howard Hunt, and Frank Sturgis the night before the president was killed?
A. Yes.
Q. Is it your testimony today, that today's testimony is consistent with waht you said before the House Select Committee?
A. That's right.
From p. 320-22 of Plausible Denial: "Verdict as of February 6, 1985. We, the jury, find for the defendant, Liberty Lobby, and against the plaintiff, E. Howard Hunt."
"...The reporters gathered around [jury foreperson] Leslie Armstrong. What had caused her to vote for the defendant she was asked time and time again. Patiently she explained that at the outset she was, as were all the jurors, absolutely objective. None of them had any fixed opinion about either or the facts surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy."And why had she found against Hunt, she was asked...The evidence was clear, she said. The CIA had killed President Kennedy [and] Hunt had been a part of it..."
From the HSCA report, "Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy...the Committee believes that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."
Dallas Police officer Joe Marshall Smith told Texas Observer reporter Ron Dugger, "I was approached by a woman who was yelling, 'They're shooting the president from the bushes.' When I reached the railroad yard, I caught the smell of gunpowder...I could tell it was in the air. I stopped a suspicious looking man in the area, but he presented Secret Service credentials, and I let him go. Later I regretted it, because it just didn't ring true. He was dressed like an auto mechanic, and he had dirty fingernails."
According to the Secret Service, there were no Secret Service agents on the ground in Dealey Plaza. From pp. 190-191 of Best Evidence, by David Lifton: "I talked to a nuerosurgeon friend of mine...I told him I had an unusual request. I wanted to read him a description of the damage to Kennedy's brain, because I had found it puzzling. I then read [Dr. James J.]Humes' testimony regarding the 'parasagittal laceration.' The doctor replied that he could see why I was puzzled, because I was not describing a gunshot injury...I was reading from a description of the brain after it was sectioned. His exact words were: 'That brain's been sectioned...cut into as part of the standard autopsy procedure, cuts are made in the brain to expose the interior and facilitate inspection.'"I assured the doctor that was not so, that what I read to him was the way the brain was before the autopsy [according to Dr. Humes]."'Just use common sense,' he replied...'how could a bullet create that kind of damage? You're telling me that something entered the skull at the rear, and then exited somewhere on the right-hand side. And none of it stayed inside the head? How could a missile which travels a path so that it exits on the right-hand side still create the practically straight-line damage you're describing to me, which goes all the way to the front of the head?' My doctor friend said emphatically that the damage sounded like it had been made with a knife."
Finally, I got so frustrated with the Haloscan nuts that I resorted to sarcasm: What follows is my word-for-word post:
"It must be comforting to you to believe in lies, misinformation and CIA propaganda, but that also means you're living a fairy tale...a sort of Pollyanna existence. And that is not very manly. I thought all you right-wingers were gun-toting, macho, bring-it-on types who prefer the wild-west vision of America, where the most ruthless and violent prevail. Well, that's what happened. The macho, flag-waving, take-it-or-leave-it types like you should be proud to lay claim to the CIA/military-industrial complex methods and bravado. After all, they won. They removed the president, and all their greedy, conscienceless, sociopathic defense contractors got rich on the blood of dead soldiers in Vietnam. Just like in Iraq. Halliburton KBR and Blackwater got their billions and the ruthless warmongers got their bloodlust fix. That's the American establishment you're so invested in defending; why not admit it? Frankly, it's a little bit sissy-ish of you to so stridently deny that the MIIC took over America in 1963. A real man, or at least the right wing's version of a real man, would take pride in such an achievement. The most violent should prevail. The most ruthless win. Greed is good. Bullies rule. Kennedy got what he deserved. He was a communist appeaser who wouldn't bomb Cuba, tried to get out of Vietnam, and refused to launch a nuclear first strike against the USSR. Why do you shy away from admitting this is what happened? You're bearing false witness to your fundamental precepts when you blame it all on silly little Oswald. You make the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs look like passive pantywaists, who rolled over and took Kennedy's resistance like a bunch of little schoolgirls. Come on, be a real gunslinger; grow a pair like your right-wing brethren did in '63. Don't be a pansy. Be proud of your heritage. It was people who believed the same things you do who pulled this off."
This, of course, merely incensed them further, and they became more entrenched than ever in their misguided beliefs. I've said it before, and I'll repeat it here. Those who believe Oswald acted alone are either paid disinformationists or nitwits. They spout their lies in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and they will not change their minds, even if a film of David Atlee Phillips, Edward Lansdale, Lucien Sartin, David Morales, George Joannides, and Curtis LeMay firing in unison from the grassy knoll surfaces.
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36 comments:
Great job, Tim. But there's no arguing with the far right. Once they latch onto a misguided notion, there is no dislodging them from it. Fact and reason mean nothing to them. They are the most stubborn, ignorant, and infuriating people in the world, and we'll go mad trying to change them. But being honest, good hearted types, we'll keep trying anyway...
Jack--
So many ignorant people on the planet...so little time.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/9/205251/2950
More on Moving the Overton Window on my Links page under a section by that name. It is possible to win a discussion and lose a confrontation.
http://my.opera.com/oldephartte/links/
I accept your use of "right wing nut jobs on a neo-fascist board called Haloscan" as a literary device that you have used to unleash a torrent of standard assassination information. Some of the best work was done, indeed, by Lifton in Best Evidence. What ever happened to his follow-up?
But all of the evidence amounts to a mountain confusion unless you can accept some information that makes it appear as though bad people acted with good intentions.
The CIA did not assassinate Kennedy. He gave them no reason. The CIA would assassinate your grandmother if she shoplifted, but they did not do this one. Feels good to go after them - read Chalmers Johnson - he'll give you much better fodder.
In fact, the CIA was on the outs with Kennedy, but there were bigger fish to fry - an invasion of Cuba scheduled for 12/1/63, using Mafia elements. But these Mafioso's were incensed at their treatment by Bobby Kennedy, and using CIA assets who were intended to be patsies for the murder of Castro, they turned on the CIA, and used one of these patsies to take the fall for the murder of Kennedy.
CIA, Johnson, Bobby, all realizing what had happened, worked together to cover it all up. Bobby was tormented, feeling responsible, since he had arrogantly goaded the Mafia - when he died, it was almost as if he exhaled a sigh of relief. Probably Mafia that killed him too, with CIA covering up once again.
Much at stake there - war with Russia, exposure of the p;anned Cuba invasion. The Warren Commission knowingly covered it all up, and not because they were implicated. They thought it the lesser of many evils. Were they right? Don't know. It could have been handled better. It all looks like a domestic government conspiracy. It was not. Kennedy was no reformer. He was a Cold Warrior. Bay of Pigs and disgruntled Cubans aside, he was not the enemy of the establishment. He was simply a man, smart, educated, charismatic, weak, and caught in cross currents he could not control.
An interesting patch of history. Read Waldron/Hartmann. Hartmann especially went into his 17 year investigation thinking it was a CIA plot. So did I. I came away feeling a bit relieved. Our government is comprised of patriots and thugs. But it was not government thugs that killed the Kennedy's, or MLK. It was thugs outside of government.
Mark T--
All due respect, but to believe that the Mafia pulled off something of this size, and others knowingly covered it up to protect the coming Bay of Pigs II, is simply incomprehensible. I believe Waldron and Hartmann had their hearts in the right place, but they somehow miss the scope of this thing. My guess is they got bogged down in one of the many CIA disinformation blizzards (i.e., we had to cover it up to save the world, blah, blah). And before you pass final judgment on the thing, you should read "JFK And The Unspeakable," by James Douglass. It is meticulously sourced and stunningly plausible. JFK the Cold Warrior had become JFK the Peace Seeker. He wanted to end the Cold War and move away from the Pentagon/CIA/Joint Chiefs determined march into the nuclear madness. Read his address at American University, on June 10, 1963. It is as daring and revolutionary as any presidential speech in the 20th century.
Back to the Mafia did it. Are you trying to convince me that the Mafia got the Secret Service and military intelligence to stand down in Dallas? Are you trying to convince me the Mafia intimidated the Dallas doctors? The Mafia altered the body between Parkland and Bethesda on November 22? (You can't reconcile Lifton's discoveries with Hartmann's assertions. They are mutually exclusive.) If the Mafia did it, why were CIA Operation Mongoose operatives (Lucien Conein, Ted Shackley, Rip Robertson, David Morales, Gerry Patrick Hemming, Charles Rogers, etc.) photographed all over Dealey Plaza that day? Are you saying that Bobby was in cahoots with the Mafia but was also afraid of the Mafia? Huh? Why, then, did the Justice Department convictions of Mafioso skyrocket during his tenure? Why did he deport Carlos Marcello? Why did he antagonize Hoffa?
If JFK was so chummy with the CIA, why did he want to splinter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind? Why did Allen Dulles wanted to protect JFK's legacy, when it was JFK who fired him? Why did Dulles say afterwards, "That little Kennedy thought he was God"?
The most preposterous part of the Waldron theory is that the Mafia was able to send Oswald to Russia as a fake defector and then get him back without the State Department lifting an eyebrow. (Did Santos Trafficante hold a gun to Richard Helms' head?) After Oswald returns home, the Mafia, then, of course, must pass him off to his handlers George DeMohrenschildt and Ruth Paine, who just happen to be CIA. And I guess the Mafia strong arms D.H. Byrd (owner of the Book Depository) into hiring Oswald, and then the Mafia arranges the parade route to pass by Byrd's building. Leading up to the crime, the Mafia has its Oswald double spotted all over Dallas doing suspicious things to frame Oswald. Then the day of the crime, it has phony Secret Service men protecting the shooters in Dealey Plaza. (Where did the Mafia come up with those dead-on credentials, coded with color of the day?) Did the Mafia instruct Emory Roberts to order his agents not to move when the shots were fired? Did the Mafia get William Greer to stop the limo on Elm Street for the kill shot? Also, the Mafia directs the Oswald double to shoot Tippit and then proceed to Oak Cliff where he's spotted in a car with license plates traced to a CIA contractor, Carl Amos Mather. (Mather just happens to be best friends with Tippit.) Then the double escapes when the Mafia has him flown out of Dallas on a military transport plane, provided courtesy of the CIA.
Meanwhile, somehow the Mafia steals JFK's corpse aboard Air Force I and pirates the body for wound alteration (performed, I assume, by one of the Mafia's many skilled surgeons/morticians). And, of course, the Mafia is in the autopsy room at Bethesda controlling what Humes et al can see, do, and photograph. How did the Mafia's ambulance driver manage to throw off the military guard long enough to make the casket switch in DC?
I could go on forever, but you get my drift. The size and scope of the thing was beyond the Mafia. They could barely manage the Vegas skim, much less the murder and cover up of the most powerful man in the world. (I'll grant you that Ruby was mobbed up, and his hit of Oswald certainly implicates the Mafia at a lower lever. But that's it.) The JFK Assassination was a covert operation from beginning to end. No other explanation makes any sense. Any serious investigator must consider all the evidence, not just selective memos and obscure CIA-falsified documents.
Well, that's a whole lotta stuff that went on, some of it contradictory, much of it not. The Mafia did not send Oswald to Russia. The CIA did. Oswald, according to Waldron, was CIA, but very low-level. He was being used, set up to be a patsy in another assassination, but he could not get into Cuba. He tried, but the Cubans rebuffed him. But he was not a trusted agent, but rather a small man with big ideas, and unaware of the even bigger men around them and how much power they wielded.
Waldron posits, but cannot prove, that elements of the CIA were involved in the plot, but that it was not an agency action. Rather, it was disaffected elements, like Hunt, who used their connections to be sure that everything went smoothly. The CIA "agents" in Dealey that day could have been anyone.
I spent far too much time worrying about this. I found Best Evidence to be a turnkey - everything that Lifton described could well have happened, and still fit in neatly with Waldron's theory. I once had the arrogance to assume that if I could figure out what changed, before and after the assassination, that I would be able to know who did it and why. But I came away from it all disappointed - nothing changed, pre and post assassination. Nothing. Vietnam, Cuba, Laatin America ... nothing. Vietnam, before death, was not a large matter - 17 people had died up until then. To say he was going to keep us out of the quagmire is also to say that he was omniscient - that he knew what was coming down the pipe there. Not hardly.
I've read all the theories - none besides Waldron explains Bobby's behavior. The Warren Commission for sure covered up, but their actions could be seen as either wise or foolish, but well-intended in either case. The deaths of witnesses in the aftermath could be either government or Mob - or both. As I said, there were (are) plenty of thugs in government too.
Think back to a time when the Soviet Union was seen by most as a real threat, and their presence 90 miles off Florida as a real and present danger. Invasion of Cuba was still under consideration, and would be for years to come. An assassination of an American president, if seen to be done by Castro, as it was designed to appear, could have caused a confrontation between the US and USSR.
Cooler heads prevailed, but they left in their wake one of the greatest murder mysteries of all time. It has absorbed much of my time. I've wrestled with it from every angle - no explanation explains everything. But Waldron explains more than anyone else.
Mark T--
Again, the central hypothesis of Lifton's work is that JFK's body was altered postmortem to make it appear as if he was shot from behind, not in front. How did the Mafia get access to the body after it left Parkland and before it arrived at Bethesda? The question is ridiculous because the Mafia had no such power. The answer is that only those at the highest echelons of government could have accessed the body. The Secret Service, military intelligence, military hierarchy under the direction of the Joint Chiefs or the Commander-in-Chief himself. This screams covert operation, not Mafia plot.
You obviously do not understand what was going on pre-assassination in the JFK White House. He signed NSAM 263 and was going to pull completely out of Vietnam by 1965. Post-assassination, we were up to our ears in Vietnam by 1965. LBJ committed 100,000 gorund troops by then and we were well on our way to 58,000 US casualties. In this regard, THE CONTRAST BETWEEN PRE-JFK DEATH AND POST-JFK DEATH COUOLD NOT BE STARKER. What part of this do you not understand? That's a HUGE change from before to after the assassination. JFK did not have to be a visionary to keep us out of Vietnam. He knew long before that a land war in Asia was un-winnable. MacArthur told him so, and 15 years of French futility told him so. But once LBJ got into office, the war machine got greased. They phonied up the Gulf of Tonkin, and the reward money started flying. His rich Texas buddies and CIA assets, like Ling-Temco-Vought, Halliburton/KBR and Bell Helicopter got huge defense contracts in the run-up to Vietnam. This is what changed also. The money.
How could Oswald be in Mexico City trying to get a visa to Cuba when he was also spotted in Dallas?
Allen Dulles covered up the truth to save his own hide. He hated the Kennedys, and he knew it was CIA assets who were involved in the murder.
"The CIA agents in Dealey that day could have been anyone"??? Afraid not. You have not examined the photos closely enough, and you obviously have no idea what Operation Mongoose was. Would you recognize Ed Lansdale if you saw him? Or Ted Shackley? Or Hemmings? Or Conein?
"Cooler heads prevailed"?? Ha, that's a laugh. The military/industrial/intelligence complex BEGGED AND PLEADED for a war with the Cubans and the Soviets before the assassination (e.g. during the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs). But you say that, all of a sudden, after Dallas they did not want a war with the communists? Funny.
You apparently will not read Douglass's book or JFK's peace speech at American U. Until you do, you will remain woefully misinformed and misguided about these matters. There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.
It sounds more and more like you are a secret Kennedy hater, and are just one step removed from those whack jobs who say he deserved to die, or America is better off that he died, or that he knowingly brought about his own death. Who knows...maybe it was JFK who altered his own wounds postmortem.
How did the Mafia get access to the body after it left Parkland and before it arrived at Bethesda?
They didn't. What Lifton stumbled upon was indeed a plot to make it appear is though Kennedy was shot from behind, and that it was done by Oswald. That is not nearly the linchpin you think it is. The decision had been made at that point to cover up, to create the lone gunman scenario. Here's the part you cannot explain - Bobby was part of this. He supervised the autopsy from his room above in Bethesda.
The "cooler heads" did not want a war with Russia. They were willing to risk killing Castro, but were going to make it look like a Russian, or a Russian sympathizer did it. Hence Oswald - but he wasn't the only one who had "defected". The Mobsters merely took the CIA plan and used it against JFK.
I've read "Brothers" - you might have too - it's sappy romantic. But JFK was no sappy liberal. I've talked to some who believe that Bobby really did change his views on Cuba and Vietnam before he died, and that might indeed present a motive to the military for his death. But more likely, it was just the Mob covering it's tracks - if Bobby is elected, he will find out who killed JFK and exact revenge.
I did not say that there were no CIA people in Dealey - what I said was that it was not an agency action. Anyone could have bluffed CIA credentials that day - in fact, it's kind of a brilliant stroke.
I know about Mongoose. The Fish Is Red was a very important book - I have it in its original title. I'm not a wandereing fool - I first read Mark Lane when I was in high school in 1967 or 68, and have been following and wondering ever since. I took it up in earnest in 1989, and that is when I came across Lifton. But I've read tons of other stuff too. None of it too helpful. Too many facts is as bad as not enough.
I am not a Kennedy hater. I cried when he died, cried when bobby died. It left a hole in my heart. You're taking this much too personally. It's almost as if you are invested in evil government moles pulling this off. I understand that. There are some really evil people running this country. they've done awful stuff, killed millions of people all around the globe.
But they didn't do this crime.
"I did not say that there were no CIA people in Dealey...what I said was that it was not an agency action."
You admit there were CIA assets in Dealey, but the assassination was not an agency action? What were they doing there, then? Just trying to get a good view of the president's head getting blown off? That would require foreknowledge. Wow, what a coincidence that these spooks were all there at the very spot of the crime of the century but had nothing to do with it.
"Bobby was part of this." You actually expect me to believe that Bobby was complict in his borther's murder and cover-up? Nonsense.
"The 'cooler heads' did want a war with Russia." Who, exactly, are these 'cooler heads'? The Joint Chiefs? Curtis Lemay? The CIA? Cahrles Cabell? During the Cuban Missile Crisis these fanatics actively sought to implement a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the USSR. But after the assassination (when they had the perfect excuse for a first strike, and when their main antagonist had been removed), their 'cooler heads' prevailed? Absurd.
CIA credentials were not bluffed in Dealey. Secret Service credentials were faked, and the plotters had to know the color of the day in advance. No way the Mafia had access to that information.
You still have not explained how Oswald was maneuvered into position at the TSBD and who handled him pre-assassination. How did the Mafia manipulate the parade route? Come to think of it, how did the Mafia convince JFK to visit Dallas and Dealey Plaza? And I assume from your lack of response to it, that you have conceded the huge Vietnam policy difference between JFK and LBJ (NSAM 263 vs. NSAM 273).
I am "invested" in the truth. You are not.
"I did not say that there were no CIA people in Dealey...what I said was that it was not an agency action."
You admit there were CIA assets in Dealey, but the assassination was not an agency action? What were they doing there, then? Just trying to get a good view of the president's head getting blown off? That would require foreknowledge. Wow, what a coincidence that these spooks were all there at the very spot of the crime of the century but had nothing to do with it.
"Bobby was part of this." You actually expect me to believe that Bobby was complict in his borther's murder and cover-up? Nonsense.
"The 'cooler heads' did want a war with Russia." Who, exactly, are these 'cooler heads'? The Joint Chiefs? Curtis Lemay? The CIA? Cahrles Cabell? During the Cuban Missile Crisis these fanatics actively sought to implement a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the USSR. But after the assassination (when they had the perfect excuse for a first strike, and when their main antagonist had been removed), their 'cooler heads' prevailed? Absurd.
CIA credentials were not bluffed in Dealey. Secret Service credentials were faked, and the plotters had to know the color of the day in advance. No way the Mafia had access to that information.
You still have not explained how Oswald was maneuvered into position at the TSBD and who handled him pre-assassination. How did the Mafia manipulate the parade route? Come to think of it, how did the Mafia convince JFK to visit Dallas and Dealey Plaza? And I assume from your lack of response to it, that you have conceded the huge Vietnam policy difference between JFK and LBJ (NSAM 263 vs. NSAM 273).
I am "invested" in the truth. You are not.
You admit there were CIA assets in Dealey, but the assassination was not an agency action? What were they doing there, then? Just trying to get a good view of the president's head getting blown off? That would require foreknowledge. Wow, what a coincidence that these spooks were all there at the very spot of the crime of the century but had nothing to do with it.
I'm not being clear, I guess. There were probably some CIA assets involved in the murder, but it was not an agency-sanctioned action. They were rogue, probably pissed off about the Bay of Pigs.
"Bobby was part of this." You actually expect me to believe that Bobby was complicit in his brother's murder and cover-up? Nonsense.
Upon seeing that it was mob-inspired, he was overwhelmed by guilt and grief. He felt responsible. The cover-up, but not the crime, was high-level. He participated. The object of the murder was to neuter Bobby, and it succeeded. He had to wait for another day, for his time. In the meantime, he commissioned his own investigation.
People around him speculate that he suffered from a death wish after JFK's death - so guilty did he feel. He ignored security precautions, was brazen in his public appearances. A modicum of professional security would have saved him in 1968.
"The 'cooler heads' did want a war with Russia." Who, exactly, are these 'cooler heads'? The Joint Chiefs? Curtis Lemay? The CIA? Cahrles Cabell? During the Cuban Missile Crisis these fanatics actively sought to implement a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the USSR. But after the assassination (when they had the perfect excuse for a first strike, and when their main antagonist had been removed), their 'cooler heads' prevailed? Absurd.
There are always "wild me in the wings", just as there were after 9/11. They don't usually get their way.
CIA credentials were not bluffed in Dealey. Secret Service credentials were faked, and the plotters had to know the color of the day in advance. No way the Mafia had access to that information.
1) They didn't need to be accurate - the people to whom they were flashed would not know the correct color for that day. 2) There were plenty of Mafia-CIA connections. That's the hole through which the plot materialized. The CIA was using the Mafia to take down Castro.
You still have not explained how Oswald was maneuvered into position at the TSBD and who handled him pre-assassination. How did the Mafia manipulate the parade route? Come to think of it, how did the Mafia convince JFK to visit Dallas and Dealey Plaza?
Waldron offers evidence of two other attempts - Chicago and Tampa, each involving an Oswald-like patsy. Dallas was their last chance. Each hit had to take place in a mob-controlled city. Chicago was Giambini. Tampa was Trafficante. Dallas was Marcello, who ultimately confessed.
Oswald's "defection" to the Soviet Union was a part of a larger operation where quite a few moles were sent over there. He was watched closely by the Soviets, and never had access to anything or anyone useful. When he came back, he was assigned a low-level role, and was one of several they tried to smuggle into Cuba to act as a patsy for the Castro assassination. He didn't make it. The Cubans were suspicious of him.
How did he get the job at the book depository? Those kinds of connections, in a town run by the Mafia, would not be hard to obtain. Oswald himself was easy to manipulate, as he thought he was secret agent man.
And I assume from your lack of response to it, that you have conceded the huge Vietnam policy difference between JFK and LBJ (NSAM 263 vs. NSAM 273).
You're reading far too much into the NSAM's - there was going to be some pullback - some thought this was JFK's way of poking a stick in Eisenhower's eye - "look - I handled it. You couldn't." You're saying that people foresaw the immensity of the war. Nah - imperial arrogance ran amok. They thought it was contained, and would continue to delude themselves until Tet. JFK was no visionary. He had no knowledge of the future.
I am "invested" in the truth. You are not.
Well screw it then! The last 21 years of my life have been wasted. People can look at the same evidence and reach different conclusion. I was stumped for years, and find that Waldron/Hartmann explain more variables than anyone else. They don't own the truth, we will never know the absolute truth. I'll go with them until something better comes along, or we get some more deathbed material.
"...some thought this was JFK's way of poking a stick in Eisenhower's eye..."
Who thought this? Gus Russo? Some guy on the street? CIA disinformationists? I went to the sources to get my information. The people who there and who knew better than anyone were JFK's advisers and confidantes...those are the sources that James Douglass uses. JFK was actively seeking detente with Cuba and the USSR, and actively planning to pull out of Vietnam. Period. Waldron and Hartmann got it wrong. JFK did not give one shit about Eisenhower. JFK, according to several sources who knew his intentions (and not CIA liars), was going to pull completely out of Vietnam by 1965. LBJ: full-blown land war by 1965.
"How did he get the job at the Book Depository? Those kind of connections, in a town run by the Mafia, would not be hard to obtain."
This is laughable. Ruth Paine is on record (she testified to this under oath) that she was the one who got Oswald the job at the TSBD. This makes Ruth Paine a significant figure in the pre-assassination planning. I suppose Waldron/Hartmann's myopia ignored her, as well as other obvious CIA connections. Ruth was married to Michael Paine, who worked at Bell Helicopter in Dallas. Paine's family had well-known CIA connections. His mother was best friends with Allen Dulles's mistress, Mary Bancroft. Dulles, of course, ran Operation Paperclip which evacuated Nazi rocket scientists to America after WWII. These scientists, owing their lives to the CIA and Dulles after being saved from a hnagman's noose at Nuremberg, were at the mercy of the CIA. They were placed in our military/defense/intelligence complex for use in the Cold War. One of these Nazis, Walter Dornberger, was referred to Bell Helicopter by Dulles. There, Dornberger worked closely with Michael Paine. (This connections are expanded on in my book.) The Paines and Dornberger were CIA, so was George DeMohrenschildt, who handed off Oswald to Paine sometime in 1963. Once JFK was dead, Bell was rewarded with a war and huge defense contracts.
Dallas was not controlled by the Mafia. It was controlled by rich oil men--H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, and D.H. Byrd. Nothing happened in Dallas without their say-so. Byrd owned the TSBD. He also owned Ling-Temco-Vought which built fighter planes. Once JFK was dead, LTV was rewarded with a war and huge defense contracts.
Defense contractors, of course, need security clearance and intelligence connections.
So CIA operatives place Oswald in the TSBD, a building owned by Texas oil. What does the Mafia have to do with this? And remember, it's not enough to get the patsy in place...someone had to convince the president to drive right by the building. It's presposterous to believe the Mafia could do this. LBJ manipulated Kennedy into this trap. That was his part in the covert op. That, and to get JFK's protection stripped. Emory Roberts was his boy for that.
We agree on the Chicago plot, and so does Douglass. It was eerily similar to the Dallas thing. Patsy in a high building. But Abraham Bolden blew the whistle on that. If you have not read his story, you should.
We also agree that CIA rogue elements were involved, but also those who were employed full-time by the agency assisted in the planning and cover-up (read Richard Helms, David Atlee Phillips, David Morales, George DeMohrenschildt, Ted Shackley, E. Howard Hunt, etc.).
I never said the entire CIA, as an institution, was involved...just black ops or covert ops.
Speaking of deathbed confessions...have you read E. Howard Hunt's?
Let honest men disagree. You are not stupid, nor un-observant. We take all of the massive data base involved: I conclude that JFK was no man-above-men, but simply a man subject, as Obama is now, to the pressure brought about by real power. No one within that power structure sought to murder him. It was an aberration.
CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, played a role. So don't be surprised to see them involved.
I see your mind swirling. It is natural. I am not your teacher. I know no more than you. I respect what you are doing. I simply am not as willing to subscribe it all to what Khrushchev called "dark forces". Shit happens.
"I conclude that JFK was no man-above-men, but simply a man subject, as Obama is now, to the pressure brought about by real power. No one within that power structure sought to murder him."
Your logic is backwards. Only real power can murder a president and cover it up. That power structure sought to murder JFK because he challenged it and refused to be its "man subject." And that DID make him a man above men, a president above presidents.
The American power structure murdered and removed duly elected leaders around the globe, and then plausibly denied the deeds. Why is it so hard for you to believe it murdered its own? Shit, on this scale, does not just happen.
I am compelled to honor the memory of the last real president we've had, and I will scream the truth of what they did to him with my last breath.
Well written, Tim.
You presume that JFK was not carrying out the regular agenda, advancing US corporate interests. He was.
Only real power can murder a president and cover it up.
Or, just cover it up. I'm no stranger to this stuff - John Wilkes Booth's body was sunk in a river so that people would not see it was really not JWB. There was a large conspiracy around Lincoln. There was also a large conspiracy around JFK. You have simply misplaced the perps.
"You presume that JFK was not carrying out the regular agenda, advancing US coporate interests. He was."
Mark T, maybe you should tell this to US Steel...I guess they (and you) did not get the memo on this. I'm not going to take the time to educate you on all the details of the US Steel management/labor crisis in 1962. All you need to know is that JFK intervened strongly on labor's side and made US Steel back down. Big business despised him for this. The Wall Street Journal and other right-wing rags harshly criticized him for this. In one of his press conferences during the crisis, a reporter asked him if big business had him where they wanted him. JFK got that twinkle in his eye and responded, "No...I don't think big business has me where they want me (meaning in the White House)..."
You really are misinformed about his presidency and what was going on in that era. Probably because of all the CIA propaganda and disinformation that has been disseminated about that era over the last 45 years. The presumption you have of his presidency is the one the military-industrial-intelligence complex wants you to have. Have you ever heard of Operation Mockingbird...the CIA's systematic subversion of the free press in America? There were assets at CBS (Bill Paley), Life/Look (CD Jackson), the Washington Post (Katherine Graham), the New York Times (AH Sulzberger), and on and on. Frank Wisner, CIA operative, ran the program in the 1950s. He once boasted that Mockingbird was like his own personal "...mighty Wurlitzer. I can play any tune on it and America will follow along." William Colby, CIA head for a time in the 1970s, admitted, "The CIA owns everyone of significance in all major media." Some of the sources that Waldron and Hartmann use are Mockingbird assets.
What you fail to grasp is that the CIA was more powerful than our own public government. It ran its own shadow government, free of any congressional, media or presidential oversight. Until JFK came along. They deceived him about the Bay of Pigs and made him look foolish. He was determined to never let it happen again. So, as head of our public government, he went to war with the shadow government. You see who won. Perhaps Jack Ruby said it best to Earl Warren, "A whole new form of government is going to take over the United States."
All of this is laid out (with impeccable sources in nearly 100 pages of notes and documentation) in James Douglass's book, "JFK And The Unspeakable." I know that I have recommended it to you several times, but, apparently, you refuse to read it. You are limiting your own knowledge when you fail to at least give others, besides Waldron and Hartmann, a fair hearing. Waldron and Hartmann ignore, or are oblivious to, most of the facts exposed in Douglass's book. They are hindered by, in David Lifton's words, "an inferior contact with reality."
Speaking of Lifton (you said you read and admired his book), his Chapter 32 is devoted to his belief that the assassination was the result of a covert operation, quote--"...the best evidence convinced me that the proper way to view the assassination was as covert operation...covert operations are not new to the US government."
I'll take your silence on the Ruth Paine/Michael Paine/Walter Dornberger/Allen Dulles/Oswald connection as your way of saying you have no rational explanation for how the Mafia placed Oswald in the TSBD and JFK's car in front of it on Nov. 22, 1963.
Silence? We are pages deep into this. I have not been silent. I only come by now and them. I am trying to get across to you that there was CIA involvement in the assassination - I am not blind to this, and that Oswald was a low-level CIA asset. So it was natural that he would have contacts that were also CIA. None of that is upsetting, nor does it undo Waldron.
Dallas/New Orleans was Marcellos territory. Yes, the oil men are strong down there. To this day. But in terms of "organized" crime, it was Carlos' playground. Oswald was indeed knee-deep - he was being manipulated by two forces, CIA and mob. CIA wanted him in Cuba to take the fall for Castro as a supposed Russian agent, and they tried to get him into Cuba for that purpose. The Mob had other plans for him, wanting him to take the fall for JFK. The Mob and the CIA were working closely together at this time, unknown to JFK, who was also attacking the mob through Bobby. The Mob had CIA contract, and was privy to details and knew to turn a plot to kill Castro and retake Cuba back for American corporations on its head.
You place too much emphasis on Oswald - as if he was the prime player in a clever scheme, when he was but one of many, watched, to be sure, manipulated, but not a prime time player. If you take in the whole of Paine and DeMohrenschildt's activities during that time, you'll probably find that they were running a number of agents, doing a lot of CIA-related work. Your mistake is to reverse-engineer it to make it look as though that were their prime purpose.
And Vietnam, please. Nowhere in the record will you find any intention to do a complete pullout. You'll only find the NSAM drawback - they thought it was under control. LBJ may have liked the idea of a big war there, but again you reverse-engineer it to make him the prime suspect in a nefarious plot to get JFK out of the way so he could make war. I don't know what JFK woudl have done about Vietnam - maybe, once he got Cuba back under control through this planned invasion on 12/1/63, he would also have gone after Ho. The man was a cold warrior.
There are differences between Republicans and Democrats in many areas - treatment of unions in the 1960's was one. (Now now.) But in foreign policy, then as now, it was bipartisan. Foreign policy is seen as too important to be tinkered with every four years due to the impulses of an ignorant and emotional American public. SO now you might note that it goes forward under Obama just as under Bush. In 1963, it went forward under LBJ just as under JFK. Real men of courage come along who really want to change things. They never manage to become president. The media won't let them have enough exposure.
I stumbled on JFK's assassinataion, and it was my portal into the big world, far more complex than I can manage in my mind, far too mcch so to reduce to a plot that depends on the president being in charge of foreign policy to be true. 20 years later I understand that presidents don't rule, they follow. They are the mirror in which we look at ourselves and fantasize about who we think we are. In the meantime, the business of government, which is also the business of business, goes on unimpeded.
Mark T--
I don't want to sound condescending or demeaning, but you're statement that JFK planned to invade Cuba on 12/1/63 gave me and my wife a huge laugh. We howled. I know you mean well, but for Chrissakes, to believe something so foolish is to number yourself among those who know little of the history of that time period...or among those who concoct outsized prevarications about that period, to intentionally keep the truth from the masses. I assume you are the former.
If you weren't so misguided, you would be funny. But I will not let you defame the only real president we've had since the CIA came into existence. This time, I will defend his memory by citing his own words, from June 10, 1963:
Speaking, quite publicly, at American University's commencement ceremony, of his intentions to end the Cold War, he said, "What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do I seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living...Total war makes no sense in an age, when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe...we must reexamine our own attitude...every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward--by examining his own attitude toward the possiblities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the Cold War, and toward freedom and peace here at home. No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue...we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage. Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war...We are both devoting to weapons massive sums of money that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweaopons. In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race...if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the sasme air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." Yep, spoken like a hard-line Cold Warrior! Yeah, right.
The origins and derivations of this speech are covered at great lengths in Douglass's book (the book you refuse to read). It was meant to send a strong signal to Kruschev that Kennedy was committed to a continuance of their back-channel detente. Thus, the many complimentary words about the Soviet Union and its citizens.
The record of JFK's commitment to a complete withdrawal from Vietnam is contained in Doouglass's book. These sources have been withheld from us for years by the CIA and the military-industrial complex. They did not want motive exposed.
But back to Dallas. The who, what, how, and why of the murder are in the details. You gloss over the connections between Paine, DeMohrenschildt, Dulles, and Oswald, by saying the CIA was running many agents. Yes, but Oswald was the patsy selected for the JFK operation. They did not just stumble upon Oswald after the fact. Oswald got the job in the TSBD many weeks before the assasination. The parade route was chosen many weeks before the assassination. The mechanics had to be chosen and given itineraries and pay and covers and escape routes many weeks in advance of the event. This was a well-planned covert operation. So you're conceding that Paine (CIA) got Oswald the job in the TSBD...and then the Mafia coordinated/manipulated the parade route to pass right in front of the TSBD?? WHAT A COINCIDENCE. Two groups of conspirators working independently of one another actually have their patsy and their target within feet of one another on Nov. 22, 1963. MY GOD, WHAT LUCK! Maybe Carlos Marcello was just psychic.
By the way, do you consider JFK's American U. speech treason? After all, he was making nice with the rotten, godless commies. My suspicion is that you do think it was treasonous. Or maybe you deny that he did not actually say those words. It's all a lie. I don't want to presume, because if you think his words were treasonous, that puts you in league with the Joint Chiefs, the Pentagon, the CIA, and all the other rabidly anti-Red warmongers in the 1963 power structure. But you claim to abhor their stance. What's your real position?
If there is some forged cable or memo revealing JFK's purported intention to invade Cuba (E. Howard Hunt admitted it was commonplace to forge documents implicating JFK in all sorts of false scenarios, in order to deflect attention away from the CIA's plot to murder him), why didn't JFK just go ahead and order airstrikes and bomb Cuba into the Stone Age during the Bay of Pigs...or the Cuban Missile Crisis? He certainly had some provocation then. No...according to you and H&W, he wanted to wait until, he had no provocation/justification. A sneak attack, unassociated with communist aggresssion...that's the ticket. You cannot be blissfully unaware of this illogic.
And if JFK were going to invade Cuba, why did he have his emissary, French journalist Jean Daniel, meeting with Castro just one week before Dec. 1, 1963, in an ongoing effort at accommodation?
Bottom line here: I will not permit you to spread your lies about President Kennedy on my blog site. I will not permit you to dishonor his memory. You can make your case that all presidents since have been the pawns of a shadow government, and I will listen. It was the entire point of the assassination. But know this, I will not let your lies about him go unrebutted.
Now I'm liar? I admit it - though I was thirteen years old at the time, I was the guy in the Grassy Knoll.
Why was Oswald working in the book depository? Obviously the people who wanted to pin the assassination on him wanted him to be there. Furthermore, the people who planned the assassination had to do so weeks in advance, and have influence over the motorcade route. Oswald had to be put in place. This could be CIA, or it could be people with Mafia connections. JFK's trip to Dallas was announced on September 13, Oswald started work there in October. Ruth Paine told him about the job "at the suggestion of a neighbor". Interrrrrresting …
Her CIA connections are speculative at best. There doesn't seem any reason for her to be connected to the CIA, unless they were interested in employing liberals at that time. Her husband? A pacifist? Could be a cover, I suppose. He did work for Bell. But that is really stretching a point.
Everything is explained by your CIA theory, everything by the Mafia theory, except motive. Here's Carlos Marcello, unknowingly speaking to an FBI informant while in prison in 1985:
"Yeah - I had that son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself."
That's on tape.
I suppose that is a CIA planted confession. But then explain to me why the Mafioso were the one's taking the hits around the time of HSCA?
You haven't read Waldron/Hartmann, have you?
Synopsis, Barnes & Noble
"Cuba's number three official today — Commander Juan Almeida — was secretly working with JFK in November 1963 to overthrow Fidel. The U.S. government recently revealed Almeida's work for JFK, allowing the updated trade paperback of Ultimate Sacrifice to tell the full story for the first time (complete with new photos and documents). The authors obtained the story from almost two dozen associates of John and Robert Kennedy, starting in 1990 with JFK's Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Their accounts are supported by thousands of newly-released files at the National Archives. Almeida's "palace coup," set for December 1, 1963, was to be backed up by U.S. forces "invited" in by Commander Almeida, then Chief of the Cuban Army. However, three Mafia bosses being targeted by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy used several CIA assets to infiltrate the secret plot and murder JFK. This resulted in cover-ups by officials like RFK and LBJ, to prevent the exposure of Almeida and a possible nuclear confrontation with the Soviets. The new edition explains why Almeida was not a double agent, why Fidel suspected Almeida's ally Che Guevara, and what Fidel did in 1990 when he finally found out about Almeida's work for JFK.
Synopsis: Publishers Weekly
"There has been a long hiatus in significant books on the JFK assassination since Gerald Posner's Case Closed argued in 1993 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Posner took the CIA's lack of involvement for granted, and that, according to this mammoth and painstakingly researched account, was a big mistake. It is Waldron and Hartmann's (The Edison Game) contention-bolstered by access to many previously unavailable files, and interviews with little-known as well as prominent figures-that the CIA knew a great deal about the assassination. But the agency couldn't admit what it knew because that could uncover the existence of a U.S. plan for a coup in Cuba, run by JFK's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The assassination, say the authors, was carried out by hired gunmen on the orders of three noted Mafia dons whose lives were being made miserable by RFK's ruthless pursuit-and these Mafia men knew about the planned invasion because they had worked with the CIA on previous efforts to topple Castro. Oswald, long a hidden CIA agent, was set up as the patsy, and it had always been Jack Ruby's job to eliminate him if he wasn't killed at the scene of Kennedy's shooting. How do the authors make their case? With a relentless accumulation of detail, a very thorough knowledge of every political and forensic detail and the broad perspective of historians rather than assassination theorists. They spend perhaps too much time with people they admire, like the late Enrique Ruiz Williams, who was a crucial early source for them. They also cannot resist chasing stories of only marginal relevance to their principal one, like what really happened to Che Guevara in Cuba. But no future historian of that tormented period in American history will be able to ignore their very convincing presentation, even if a lay reader may feel overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the evidence."
Your theory regarding Vietnam is riddled with holes, as JFK may indeed ordered a partial pullout, may have intended a full pullout - who cares? You could fax the documents to me and it would not influence my opinion. Barack Obama just got done announcing a pullout from Iraq. Problem: He's not pulling out. He's just posturing. Anyway, 1963 was quite a different story from 1964 - JFK was focused on Cuba, and LBJ elected to ignore Cuba and focus on Vietnam. Both were fervent anti-communists.
That's a nice speech you quoted, by the way. If you think that foreign policy is transmitted to us via presidential speeches, I have a bridge I want to sell you.
Anyway, you've got your theories, your heroes - it all lines up for you. But there is so much you have to ignore to be right. Same is true of me. I doubt we know enough or ever will. Keep in mind, we still don't know what ever happened to John Wilkes Booth.
Other information, like the Castro interview, merely indicate that JFK was president, and that the executive branch even then was very large with many people involved, many not knowing of the activities of the other. The 12/1/63 invasion of Cuba and assassination of Castro? Not widely broadcast.
Your denigration of JFK's speech is flippantly dismissive, and easy to do 46 years after the fact. Delivered in an era when people were building bomb shelters in their backyards, the speech crackled with new paradigms that shook the military-industrial complex to its core. And if JFK's intention was not to initiate the dawn of a new peaceful era with the Soviets, what was its purpose? Empty rhetoric to to piss off his powerful enemies? Magnify the bullseye on his back? That's all he needed--H.L. Hunt printing up more "Wanted For Treason" posters; Curtis Lemay screaming for his head on a platter; Congress calling him soft on the Reds in an election cycle; and giving Dick Helms justification for sharpening his knives.
You would not believe me, even if I faxed the documents to you? How open-minded and objective of you. By admitting this, you diminish your credibility.
Ruth Paine's CIA connections are speculative at best? You, obviously, know very little about Ruth Paine and her associations. Yes, the CIA did employ leftists in order to infiltrate leftist organizations which they considered dangerous. They did this at campuses, state houses, rallies, demonstrations, and movements throughout the land in the 1960s.
I did read Waldron and Hartmann's book and found it lacking in many areas. Quoting from reviews of the book is unpersuasive; reviewers, unversed in assassination fact, draw their only knowledge of the event from the book. Thus, they are relying on flawed sources for their assessments. Waldron and Hartmann make the mistake a lot of writers/researchers have. They start with a single supposition and try to build an entire scenario around it. To get at the truth, one must look at all aspects. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle, the event's solution requires thousands of disparate pieces to come together...not one memo jimmied up by Operation Mockingbird assets.
Jean Daniel was not sent to Cuba by someone in the executive branch's labyrinth. He was sent by JFK as his personal emissary. Public acknowledgement of which would have been political suicide at the time.
Now you don't care if JFK wanted a complete pullout from Vietnam? In previous posts, it was the linchpin of your theory--to wit, he could not have been the avowed enemy of the Cold Warrior hardliners because he was one of them. Now, this does not matter to you?
The Mafioso were the ones taking the hits around the time of the HSCA? I did not know that George DeMohrenschildt was in the Mafia. I did not know that the FBI's Sullivan was Mafia.
I can believe that Marcello had conversations with CIA operatives concerning the hit. I can believe that he might have supplied a team of assassins in Dealey Plaza. I can believe that he was informed that Oswald was "being constructed" in New Orleans...for New Orleans was Marcello's turf. And he did hate the Kennedys, and he probably helped fund or supply anti-Castro militias in Louisiana. He probably lost casino money, like Trafficante, Roselli, and Giancana, when Castro nationalized the gaming industry. But when he says, "....he killed the sonofabitch..." he doesn't mean he planned it, put the patsy in place, ran a second Oswald, got the Secret Service to stand down, stripped JFK's protection, flew in a military transport to whisk military/intelligence operatives out of Dallas, altered the medical evidence, highjacked the corpse, botched the autopsy, forged the x-rays and photographs, and controlled the Warren Commission and the HSCA. He means he put up some money, or supplied a shooter (maybe Jim Braden or Eugene Hale Brading) and had Civella order Ruby to hit Oswald.
The CIA was protecting Bobby Kennedy by not revealing what it knew about the assassination? You can't seriously believe that.
You know what "Ultimate Sacrifice" sounds like? The latest in a series of CIA "hangout" admissions. The first one was, allright, we'll admit E. Howard Hunt was in Dallas that day. The next was, allright, certain rogue elements of the CIA may have been involved...but the plot was limited to a very few and they've since died or been purged. The next was, we had to cover it up to avoid a nuclear war. Now, it's the Mafia did it by infiltrating the CIA. The CIA operatives in Dallas had no idea why they were there. They were just carrying out orders from the Mafia.
I don't have to ignore any genuine facts to be right. I do have to dismiss disinformation and CIA propaganda. How do I know the difference? 40 years of research has left me with fine-tuned antennae and a bullshit sniffer next to none. If it walks like the CIA and talks like the CIA, it is the CIA.
Are you implying that Ruth Paine's neighbor was a made guy in the Dallas Mafia. Not sure what the "interrrresting" comment means. Ruth Paine said what her case manager told her to say...probably David Atlee Phillips. What did you expect her to say? "Yes...my CIA handler ordered me to call Roy Truly and suggest he hire Oswald so that he could be set up as the patsy." (This was perfunctory anyway. DH Byrd owned the TSBD, and he was going to make sure the patsy was wet up in his building no matter what.) Paine has been lying for 45years.
And yes, her husband Michael worked at Bell. Michael was descended from American royalty, the Forbes family, on one side...and from the inventor of the Bell helicopter on the other. He worked at Bell under Walter Dornberger, Nazi inventor of the V-1 missile and V-2 rocket. Together, they came up with the Huey which was used extensively in Vietnam. In fact, once the war got going full throttle after JFK's death, Bell made a massive fortune off the defense contract.
Dornberger did not wind up at Bell by accident. He came to America under the auspices of Allen Dulles, who ran Operation Paperclip for the CIA. Paperclip evacuated thousands of Nazi scientists, spies, rocket engineers, doctors, etc., for use against the Communists in the Cold War. Dulles knew the Paine family very well. His mistress, Mary Bancroft, was best friends with Michael Paine's mother. While serving on the Warren Commission, Dulles, of course, mustered all his resources to cover up the truth. Ruth Paine's father was William Avery Hyde. Ruth told the Warren Commission that he was an insurance underwriter, but that was a laughable understatement. Mr. Hyde received a lucrative contract from the Agency for International Development, a CIA front. In the 1970s it was revealed that AID was riddled with CIA operatives. Ruth's sister, Sylvia Hyde Hoke, and Sylvia's husband, John Hoke, also worked for the CIA. John, like his father-in-law, was employed by AID. Sylvia was a secretary for the CIA. John and Sylvia Hoke lived in Falls Church, which adjoins Langley, Virginia, home to CIA headquarters. Ruth visited her sister in Falls Church in September 1963. Though there is no definitive evidence that Ruth went next door to CIA headquarters during this time, any functioning brain can make this likely assumption. The salient point here is that Ruth Paine was CIA and so was her family. We know Allen Dulles was CIA...and here he was with direct connections to the patsy's handler, the defense contractor which reaped billions off LBJ's war, and the commission which whitewashed the assassination. This makes Allen a key operative in the planning and aftermath. I don't think Marcello ran Allen Dulles.
Waldron and Hartmann make the mistake a lot of writers/researchers have. They start with a single supposition and try to build an entire scenario around it.Actually, Hartmann went into it thinking it was a CIA coup d’état. He and Waldron spent 17 years investigating, and went where the evidence took them. They did not know what the finished product would be. Nor are they starry-eyed about the CIA. They are not fools - they know about the coups and murders and drugs - everything. But they found the so-called evidence of CIA involvement in the JFK hit unpersuasive over time.
Regarding Vietnam, all I am saying is that your position is reverse-engineered. You are looking for evidence, just as Oliver Stone was, that it all centered around Vietnam. After all, if it was done by the government, then there must have been a government reason. I would bet that if you broadened your scope, you'd find evidence aplenty that JFK had other intentions for Vietnam. For instance, Noam Chomsky claims that JFK was secretly bombing Cambodia during his term. That doesn't sound like a dove. We punished people on that peninsula mercilessly, it was a huge crime, but one partially of mere indifference to lesser peoples - that is, we presumed that we would prevail, kept ratcheting up, and yet the resistance stiffened. might makes right. The ratcheting did not happen on JFK's watch because he was preoccupied with Cuba. Nothing more.
Ruth Paine strikes me as a dilettante more than an agent. She had time on her hands, and more education than she knew what to do with. Common among aristocrats. I don't read much else into it. She did say that a "neighbor suggested" the book depository to her to pass on to Oswald. That stands by itself. I don't think it is necessary for her to be a liar for your ideas to prevail, but you have made her one nonetheless. Interesting.
Your denigration of JFK's speech is flippantly dismissive, and easy to do 46 years after the fact.No - I'm saying much more than that. You're not gonna like it. 1) Presidents don't make foreign policy. They carry it out. 2) Foreign policy may change as tactics and strategies necessitate, but not in response to elections. 3) Presidents don't announce foreign policy in speeches because it is not a matter that is left open for discussion. Speeches are designed for certain ears to hear. Whoever wrote that speech had the audience before him that night in mind. I don't think it is terribly significant, any more than I think it terribly significant that Obama was "opposed" to the war when he ran for office. He can be anything he wants. He doesn't make policy. He carries it out, putting new pain on old tractors.
You would not believe me, even if I faxed the documents to you? How open-minded and objective of you. By admitting this, you diminish your credibility.Because I don't think the documents are conclusive. They may be real, they may have carried out short-term intentions, they have have reflected a belief that the matter was in hand. I just don't think they are conclusive.
Yes, the CIA did employ leftists in order to infiltrate leftist organizations which they considered dangerous. They did this at campuses, state houses, rallies, demonstrations, and movements throughout the land in the 1960s.And which did Paine "infiltrate"?
To get at the truth, one must look at all aspects. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle, the event's solution requires thousands of disparate pieces to come together...not one memo jimmied up by Operation Mockingbird assets.You have to decide what is significant and what is not. Otherwise, you're lost.
Jean Daniel was not sent to Cuba by someone in the executive branch's labyrinth. He was sent by JFK as his personal emissary. Public acknowledgment of which would have been political suicide at the time.He was carrying a message - stop subverting other countries. Others have commented on this - Kennedy seemed at odds with himself at time, but mostly he was smart enough to keep all options before him open. I read no more into it than that.
The Mafioso were the ones taking the hits around the time of the HSCA? I did not know that George DeMohrenschildt was in the Mafia. I did not know that the FBI's Sullivan was Mafia.So you know who killed them? Share, please.
I can believe that Marcello had conversations with CIA operatives concerning the hit. I can believe that he might have supplied a team of assassins in Dealey Plaza. I can believe that he was informed that Oswald was "being constructed" in New Orleans...for New Orleans was Marcello's turf. And he did hate the Kennedys, and he probably helped fund or supply anti-Castro militias in Louisiana. He probably lost casino money, like Trafficante, Roselli, and Giancana, when Castro nationalized the gaming industry. But when he says, "....he killed the sonofabitch..." That's not what he said. He said he "had" him killed. Very important word.
...he doesn't mean he planned it, put the patsy in place, ran a second Oswald, got the Secret Service to stand down, stripped JFK's protection, flew in a military transport to whisk military/intelligence operatives out of Dallas, altered the medical evidence, highjacked the corpse, botched the autopsy, forged the x-rays and photographs, and controlled the Warren Commission and the HSCA. You're being sloppy here. First, you don't know that Secret Service stood down. They could have just screwed up. They could have been compromised in some fashion by whoever did this deed. You are reverse engineering again.
But more than that, you are convoluting deed with cover-up of deed. All of the body switching, forged records - all of that is as well explained as an essential government cover-up to pin the assassination on Oswald. Marcelo (who was once deported by Bobby, dropped in the middle of nowhere and forced to walk to civilization) could have done everything up to the deed, CIA and Bobby everything after. Marcelo and the CIA were working together, he was privy (probably due to rogues agents pissed off about the Bay of Pigs - this would be Hunt and others) to plans underway to use Oswald, a low level agent, (or someone else)in the murder of Castro.
The immediate problem was the wild men in the wings. It was made to look like Castro did it, and a retaliatory invasion was not out of the question. A confrontation with Russia was likely. Cooler heads prevailed.
The CIA was protecting Bobby Kennedy by not revealing what it knew about the assassination? You can't seriously believe that.Everyone was covering their ass. Once CIA realized that Oswald was one of their own, they ran for cover, got the shredders working. "Protecting Bobby" was likely way down the list.
You know what "Ultimate Sacrifice" sounds like? The latest in a series of CIA "hangout" admissions. The first one was, allright, we'll admit E. Howard Hunt was in Dallas that day. The next was, allright, certain rogue elements of the CIA may have been involved...but the plot was limited to a very few and they've since died or been purged. The next was, we had to cover it up to avoid a nuclear war. Now, it's the Mafia did it by infiltrating the CIA.I don't think they ever admitted to Hunt being in Dallas. His son said it was him, but it never got beyond that. And again, you don't know that those "operatives" in Dallas that day were real or fake. Why could not the mob have put them there? That's what I would have done.
Strategic retreat is a possibility - hang outs, as you call it. But no one of any gravitas is threatening. If they want, they can stonewall forever. There's no reason for beating a retreat.
The CIA operatives in Dallas had no idea why they were there.Again, it's you saying they were the real thing.
They were just carrying out orders from the Mafia.
Or, they were impostors planted there to throw police on the scene off the scent. That is, after all, what they did.
40 years of research has left me with fine-tuned antennae and a bullshit sniffer next to none. If it walks like the CIA and talks like the CIA, it is the CIA.I was invested in the theory too. It was an emotional release for me, as I hate the CIA and all it stands for. But your "40 years" doesn't stand up against Gore Vidal, Kennedy's friend and a serious man, who said "Finally, someone figured it out." And he wasn't talking about you.
Are you implying that Ruth Paine's neighbor was a made guy in the Dallas Mafia. Not sure what the "interrrresting" comment means. Ruth Paine said what her case manager told her to say...probably David Atlee Phillips. What did you expect her to say? "Yes...my CIA handler ordered me to call Roy Truly and suggest he hire Oswald so that he could be set up as the patsy." (This was perfunctory anyway. DH Byrd owned the TSBD, and he was going to make sure the patsy was wet up in his building no matter what.) Paine has been lying for 45years.
And yes, her husband Michael worked at Bell. Michael was descended from American royalty, the Forbes family, on one side...and from the inventor of the Bell helicopter on the other. He worked at Bell under Walter Dornberger, Nazi inventor of the V-1 missile and V-2 rocket. Together, they came up with the Huey which was used extensively in Vietnam. In fact, once the war got going full throttle after JFK's death, Bell made a massive fortune off the defense contract.
Dornberger did not wind up at Bell by accident. He came to America under the auspices of Allen Dulles, who ran Operation Paperclip for the CIA. Paperclip evacuated thousands of Nazi scientists, spies, rocket engineers, doctors, etc., for use against the Communists in the Cold War. Dulles knew the Paine family very well. His mistress, Mary Bancroft, was best friends with Michael Paine's mother. While serving on the Warren Commission, Dulles, of course, mustered all his resources to cover up the truth. Ruth Paine's father was William Avery Hyde. Ruth told the Warren Commission that he was an insurance underwriter, but that was a laughable understatement. Mr. Hyde received a lucrative contract from the Agency for International Development, a CIA front. In the 1970s it was revealed that AID was riddled with CIA operatives. Ruth's sister, Sylvia Hyde Hoke, and Sylvia's husband, John Hoke, also worked for the CIA. John, like his father-in-law, was employed by AID. Sylvia was a secretary for the CIA. John and Sylvia Hoke lived in Falls Church, which adjoins Langley, Virginia, home to CIA headquarters. Ruth visited her sister in Falls Church in September 1963. Though there is no definitive evidence that Ruth went next door to CIA headquarters during this time, any functioning brain can make this likely assumption. The salient point here is that Ruth Paine was CIA and so was her family. One more link, and you can bring Kevin Bacon into it. Honestly, there are links everywhere among powerful and rich people. They do, after all, own and run this country. But not every link goes back to Dallas.
We know Allen Dulles was CIA...and here he was with direct connections to the patsy's handler, the defense contractor which reaped billions off LBJ's war, and the commission which whitewashed the assassination. This makes Allen a key operative in the planning and aftermath. Or an essential part of the cover's operations. His role seems to have been to guide the Warren Commission to the correct conclusions. That doesn't make him complicit in the murder. Only the cover up.
I don't think Marcello ran Allen Dulles.No, but he sure surprised him
Noam Chomsky walks, talks, and acts like a CIA disinformation agent, probably a Mockingbird asset from way back. He is still actually spewing the sludge of Oswald acting alone.
JFK was not secretly bombing Cambodia. Again you are regurgitating CIA-inspired lies about President Kennedy.
Your assessment of JFK's peace speech is uninformed and off-base because you have deprived yourself access to the best sources and documents pertaining to it. These, of course, are contained in "JFK And The Unspeakable," the book you refuse to read. I used to think your ignorance on this matter was astounding, then laughable, then sad (like so many others who don't know their history); now it's just boring me. It's like arguing with a child about the shape of the world. If you believe it's flat, reason, intellect and centuries of scientific advancement will not convince you otherwise.
I did not say I knew conclusively who killed Sullivan and DeMohrenschildt. I am certain they did not kill themselves. I was merely responding to your assertion that Mafioso were being killed in the mid-1970s (as opposed to any other period in our history??). Please share...name them, and name their killers.
There's a film of Emory Roberts, SAIC in Dallas, ordering Henry Rybka off the running board of JFK's limo at Love Field. Rybka, had he remained at his post, would have been in the line of fire. Why is it that my evidence is inferior to yours? Maybe because you arrived at your solution after reading one book, and now you have closed off the portion of your brain open to reason and persuasiveness and proof? When Roberts arrived at Parkland, he screamed at Jackie to lift JFK off her lap, so he could see the damage done. Realizing JFK was dead, Roberts exclaimed, "I am going to protect the president," and ran immediately to LBJ's side.
There you go again, with your "cooler heads prevailed" nonsense. The same "cooler heads" who wanted to invade Cuba and launch a preemptive strike against the USSR. One more time: The real Cold Warriors and nuclear hawks wanted to do Castro and Kruschev in October 1962. Only Kennedy stood in their way. This contradicts your entire hypothesis that Kennedy wanted to annihilate the world, but the doves in the Pentagon and the CIA stopped a world war when their nemesis was out of the way. Preposterous!
My god...your lack of knowledge about Hunt and those in Dealey Plaza knows no bounds. Dick Helms and the CIA leaked a story in the late 1970s to Liberty Lobby, a right-wing rag, about Hunt being in Dallas that day. Hunt denied the story and filed a lawsuit for libel and defamation against Liberty Lobby. He won a judgement against the mag, but the mag appealed. On appeal Liberty Lobby won. It was a jury trial in Florida in 1985. The jury found that there was sufficient evidence of Hunt's presence in Dallas. The foreperson said, "We believe the CIA killed President Kennedy." (Read Mark Lane's "Plausible Denial" for a thorough examination of this trial. He took some interesting depositions of CIA operatives. Of course, this would mean abandoning your current assumptions.)
Fake CIA in Dealey? Why, for Chrissakes??? You mean the Mafia would plant fake CIA in Dealey? How? No one knew who these assets were at the time anyway. Look closely at the photos...if you're perceptive, you'll see Lucien Conein, Ted Shackley, Rip Robertson, Gerry Patrick Hemming, Ed Lansdale, and David Morales. There were covert operatives running around with fake Secret Service credentials.
I've given you the benefit of my extensive knowledge of this case. You choose not to buy it. There are none so blind as those who will not see. I can't help but wonder, what makes you so hell-bent invested in the CIA's innocence? Why do you align yourself with Allen Dulles. And why do you insist on spreading the same lies about JFK that the CIA has invented and promoted? If you think that your disinformation will persuade me, you are tragically wasting your time. I'll turn away from the truth when hell freezes over. And I don't want hell to freeze over because Dulles, Hunt, Cabell, George & Herman Brown, HL Hunt, Clint Murchison, Emory Roberts, William Greer, DH Byrd, and LBJ are still burning there.
Round and round we go.
Noam Chomsky walks, talks, and acts like a CIA disinformation agent, probably a Mockingbird asset from way back. He is still actually spewing the sludge of Oswald acting alone.That's ludicrous - if they are not with you, they are against you? Chomsky doesn't say Oswald did it. That's Cockburn. Chomsky says that it is a mere diversion, not historically significant, and not worth the time spent. I agree, but I am still drawn into it because I love a good murder mystery.
JFK was not secretly bombing Cambodia. Again you are regurgitating CIA-inspired lies about President Kennedy.He not only bombed Camboida, but South Vietnam as well. Had South Vietnam been allowed to solve its own problems, it would have replaced its US-appointed puppet government with a unified country ruled by Ho Chi Minh. Kennedy knew this and was dedicated to blocking that from happening, as was LBJ after him.
I used to think your ignorance on this matter was astounding, then laughable, then sad (like so many others who don't know their history); now it's just boring me. It's like arguing with a child about the shape of the world.Yeah, that always wins an argument. Adopt a condescending posture. What next - you gonna throw silly putty at me?
There's a film of Emory Roberts, SAIC in Dallas, ordering Henry Rybka off the running board of JFK's limo at Love Field. Rybka, had he remained at his post, would have been in the line of fire. Why is it that my evidence is inferior to yours? Never said it was. I have only said there is a lot of it and it's hard to know what is important, what isn't. That could mean something or nothing, it could be true of false, it could have been inspired by other events going on, he could have been part of it ... all is possible, yet it is not conclusive as to the points that Waldronn/Hartmann make.
Maybe because you arrived at your solution after reading one book ...I've read most of them. They all point to a conspiracy. No question about that. House Assassination Committee concluded it was mob, but then backed off. I still like Lifton's the best in that he was dedicated and came up with some truly new stuff. It made sense to me for years and years that CIA would try to divert researchers by pointing at mob. But what confounded me most was that the CIA had no reason to kill him. He was a Cold Warrior. Factions within CIA? For sure. Agency sanctioned? No. I don't beleive that anymore.
The same "cooler heads" who wanted to invade Cuba and launch a preemptive strike against the USSR. One, but not the other. The Castro Assassination was set up to make it look like a Russian did it, or an American defector who was in Russia had done it. That would turn the Cuban people against the Russians, and deflect any confrontation between the superpowers. It was risky, maybe even foolish. But that was the plan.
One more time: The real Cold Warriors and nuclear hawks wanted to do Castro and Kruschev in October 1962. Only Kennedy stood in their way. This contradicts your entire hypothesis that Kennedy wanted to annihilate the world... Say whaaaa? Kennedy only wanted to retake Cuba. He was not a world-annihilator.
...but the doves in the Pentagon and the CIA stopped a world war when their nemesis was out of the way. Preposterous!Who said they were doves? As far as I know, there were no doves in Washington in 1963, any more than there are now. There were simply people who thought it foolish to risk war with the USSR in that it would cost us more than it would benefit us. Cold calculation. I doubt these people knew about the Cuba plans. That was compartmentalized.
My god...your lack of knowledge about Hunt and those in Dealey Plaza knows no bounds. Dick Helms and the CIA leaked a story in the late 1970s to Liberty Lobby, a right-wing rag, about Hunt being in Dallas that day. Hunt denied the story and filed a lawsuit for libel and defamation against Liberty Lobby. He won a judgement against the mag, but the mag appealed. On appeal Liberty Lobby won. It was a jury trial in Florida in 1985. The jury found that there was sufficient evidence of Hunt's presence in Dallas. The foreperson said, "We believe the CIA killed President Kennedy." (Read Mark Lane's "Plausible Denial" for a thorough examination of this trial. He took some interesting depositions of CIA operatives. Of course, this would mean abandoning your current assumptions.)I vaguely remember that now. I believe that Hunt was in Dallas that day. I've said that. He never admitted it. I don't beleive he was ordered to be there - I have said repeatedly that he was probably rogue, pissed off about BofP, but there is no proof of that. We can only speculate.
Fake CIA in Dealey? Why, for Chrissakes??? I meant, if I did not say, fake Secret Service agents. There were real CIA agents there, Hunt for one. That doesn't mean it was an agency plan. That doesn't necessarily follow.
You mean the Mafia would plant fake CIA in Dealey? How? No one knew who these assets were at the time anyway. Look closely at the photos...if you're perceptive, you'll see Lucien Conein, Ted Shackley, Rip Robertson, Gerry Patrick Hemming, Ed Lansdale, and David Morales. There were covert operatives running around with fake Secret Service credentials.Highly speculative. People have read a lot into photos. The ones of Hunt are very clear. That's why I believe he was there. It would be very foolish for people high in the agency to be there if they were part of it.
I've given you the benefit of my extensive knowledge of this case. You choose not to buy it. There are none so blind as those who will not see. I can't help but wonder, what makes you so hell-bent invested in the CIA's innocence? Why do you align yourself with Allen Dulles. And why do you insist on spreading the same lies about JFK that the CIA has invented and promoted? If you think that your disinformation will persuade me, you are tragically wasting your time. I'll turn away from the truth when hell freezes over. And I don't want hell to freeze over because Dulles, Hunt, Cabell, George & Herman Brown, HL Hunt, Clint Murchison, Emory Roberts, William Greer, DH Byrd, and LBJ are still burning there.I'm only trying to bring a little balance into your world. You're way off-kilter. As I grew up, as I learned more about the world, I learned that most people want to be good, but can't due to circumstances. I don't know whether Kennedy was a good person - he certainly wasn't a good husband. I do know this - one does not become president by means of idealism. It takes practical politics, connections, press and corporate support. It is assumed that Democrats, when running for office, will speak differently than the other party, but also that once elected, they will behave the same. We say that with Clinton, are seeing it with Obama, and as well with JFK.
Frankly, you're a little off the deep end for Kennedy, and don't understand that. While it is possible to be a liberal when you have no power, it is not possible when you are in power. There are too many countervailing forces at work. Only a very few have ever prevailed even at the congressional level - none have ascended to the presidency.
That's how the world works. All your knowledge is of precise details that has led you to precisely the wrong conclusions. It was, as Chomsky said, an aberration that in the long course of history was not that important. Didn't change anything.
The identity of the murderer of the president of the United States is not historically significant? You expect me, or anyone, to take you or Chomsky seriously? Am I misreading your statement, or did you really admit to that? If you consider the shooters and plotters unimportant, why are you making such a big stink about H&W and their damn book?
Ho Chi Minh was not the leader of the South Vietnamese government. It was the Diem brothers and Madame Nhu. JFK tried to adopt a hands-off policy toward them, but the CIA and his own ambassador (Henry Cabot Lodge, a terrible Kennedy appointment which he rued as soon as he did it) undermined him because they wanted Diem out. The CIA instigated the coup of Nov. 1, 1963, and years later, E. Howard Hunt fabricated cables which implicated JFK in the coup. Hunt admitted to these false cables under oath in 1985.
You're lying about my president again; you called him a Cold Warrior. You have not read Douglass's book nor Mark Lane's "Plausible Denial." Until you do, you have no credibility. Stop slandering JFK.
W&H believe that the CIA/Mafia wanted to assassinate Castro in order to start a war between the Soviet Union and Cuba? I gotta admit, that's a whopper. So the plan was to turn the commies against one another?? Haha. I can just see Colonel Jack E. Ripper, from "Dr. Strangelove," dreaming that one up. And it's just as funny as the movie.
Do you deny, then, that the Joint Chiefs, the Pentagon, and the CIA wanted to invade Cuba and launch a nuclear strike against the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Please, please, please--answer this question. WHY DID COLD WARRIOR KENNEDY RESIST THEM IN 1962?
Kennedy only wanted to retake Cuba??? Huh??? What do you mean re-take it??? It was never ours. And if he wanted to take it, why didn't he do it in October 1962, when all around him were begging him to do it? Even you, secret JFK hater that you are, must admit that it took great courage for JFK to stand alone against the military-industrial-intelligence complex and resist invasion. For that, he was branded a coward by the right-wing nut jobs who then planned his demise.
The Pentagon did not think it was foolish to risk a nuclear war in October 1962...but according to you they suddenly wised up in 1963?? Absurd. This is really where your hypothesis falls apart, and you are not open-minded enough to admit it.
You doubt these people knew about the Cuba plans?? To what people are you referring?? The Joint Chiefs?? They would have been gleeful to learn of such plans. Why would Kennedy hide such a plan? The cold warriors were begging him, almost threatening him to overthrow Castro in '62.
No proof of Hunt being part of the plan...no proof of his presence in Dallas? No proof he hated JFK? How much proof do you want? Marita Lorenz testified under oath...in a court of law...in front of a jury...that she met him at a hotel in Dallas on Nov. 21, 1963. Depositions taken by the defense lawyer support Lorenz. This is all in the book ("Plausible Denial") you have not read. The CIA paymaster confirmed that Hunt took vacation during that period. And his own son said Hunt admitted he hated JFK. Hunt's exact words were "Everybody wanted him dead. Thanks God, we got him." You need to re-read St. John Hunt's interview.
It may have been foolish of Conein, Shackley, Hemming, Lansdale, Robertson, and Morales to be in Dealey, but they were there (or their identical doubles were). Perhaps hatred of JFK got the better of their intelligence. Perhaps they wanted to witness their hated enemy "get it." Perhaps they assumed they would never be recognized. No one knew who they were anyway, except those in the Agency. Shackley, for one, was called the "Blond Ghost" because he took pride in never having his picture taken.
Ahh...I knew it was inevitable...you played the infidelity card on Jack Kennedy. Besides being completely irrelevant to the matters we are discussing, what happened in his marriage was between him and his wife and no one else. It is possible to be a man of great character and courage and still cheat on your wife. Allen Dulles cheated on his wife too, remember. He was screwing Mary Bancroft (close friend of Ruth Paine's mother-in-law) high in the Swiss Alps, as WWII was coming to an end. While Allen was busy diddling his mistress, he was also evacuating mass-murdering Nazis to safe haven in the US.
Chomsky is a stooge, irrelevant to all meaningful things in this life,
an aberration in the long course of history. He has changed nothing. On the other hand, the murder of JFK was the seminal moment of the 20th century, for it is when the ruling oligarchy, using the CIA as its excecutive action arm, took over the country and insured that the presidency would never be open to one such as Kennedy--a free-thinking iconoclast, who stood up for us (you too, Mark T) against the dark forces which run America for their own benefit--again.
No - it's not that the identity of the people who killed him and ordered his killing is not important. It's a very important footnote.
But it did not change history.
I knew, for Chrissakes, who was the president of Vietnam back then - the Vietnamese people wanted Ho Chi Minh as their leader - that is why Cold Warriors like JFK and LBJ had to fight them. As Ike said in 1956, had he let them have an election, 80% of them would ahve voted for Ho.
Nuff said.
The epitome of American arrogance and imperialism: "If we'd let the South Vietnamese have an election..." Let another sovereign nation duly elect its own leaders? LET?? Do you know how that sounds to the rest of the world?
I had no idea that history did not change after the JFK assassination. I thought we had committed to an all-out war in SE Asia. I've been reading the wrong history texts. I did not know that we had but 16,000 advisors and no ground troops and no bombings and no massive casualties in the mid-1960s-mid-1970s. I have got to start reading better history books. Here all along, I thought we lost 58,000 troops there and bombed that little country back to the Stone Age. Domestically, there were no campus protests and draft resistance? How about that? So America entered into a peaceful era of love and brotherhood and no war. We continued detente with the Soviet bloc nations and Cuba? The Cold War really ended? Please, please, give me the names of those history books so I can read them too.
Okay...enough of the sarcasm...One more time, though I'm sure it will not sink in. Pre-assassination: NO ground troops and 16,000 advisors in Vietnam...and the advisors were to be pulled out by 1965. Post-assassination: 50,000 ground troops committed to Vietnam...and hundreds of thousands on the way. More bombs dropped on SE Asia than in WWII, 58,000 dead, and defense contractors who got fat and rich before it was all over...including D.H. Byrd's Ling-Temco-Vought, KBR Halliburton, and Bell Helicopter. The CIA's primary obstructionist was in the grave, and Agency black ops were untouchable and all-powerful.
Even though A followed B, it does not necessarily follow that A caused B. I know what happened pre and post assassination. You've committed a primary and flawed point of logic - you've presumed cause and effect. I say there's nothing in the record to indicate that events would not have unfolded as they did.
You also presume 1) that people knew the future, and 2) that the cold warrior that was threatening Cuba would turn soft on Vietnam.
No one knows the horrors of Vietnam better than me - it's what turned me from Heritage-reading right winger to a more thoughtful person who leans left. You've got years of reading behind you, and a fatal flaw - you set out to prove what you believed, rather than letting the facts lead you to truth.
Such as it is. Truth is an unfaithful lover.
So now there is no cause-effect relationship propelling historical events? It is just one big happenstance and coincidence. John Wilkes Booth just happened to bump into Lincoln at the theater on April 14, 1865. The six million civilians murdered by the Nazis? Hitler did not plan that; most of them wandered into the gas chambers. CIA atrocities? No real impact on America. Things just happen, for no apparent reason. Or do you mean that cause-effect was suspended for the JFK hit alone, and then resumed as normal thereafter?
By "The cold warrior that was threatening Cuba" you mean the Joint Chiefs, the Pentagon, and the CIA, right? They are the ones who wanted to bomb and invade Cuba. JFK told them no.
You know nothing of my motives for seeking the truth. You not only slander my president, you now slander me. I set out to find the truth of Dallas, because human beings' heads don't snap back when they are shot from behind...and because I knew the military-industrial-intelligence complex despised him. And their fingerprints are all over Dealey Plaza and the aftermath.
"Heritage-reading right winger" is an oxymoron. Right wingers don't know their heritage. They embrace lies, latch onto any myth, distort facts, anything to cling to their cherished nonsense. In the JFK assassination, you've reverted to your old ways. You're like Wesley Liebeler, Warren Commissioner and lifelong Republican, who never admitted to hating JFK, yet this hatred blinded him to the truth even when David Lifton handed him the truth on a platter. Yet to the end, he clung to his false autopsy and his warped view of America.
I am much closer to the truth than you will ever be, because I have read and evaluated nearly every piece of evidence, every book, every transcript, every note, every source imaginable, without prejudice. The sum of your knowledge is contained in one work: H&W. And you are blinded by your hatred of JFK.
I have tried to point you in the right direction, by sharing 40 years of research with you. And, by and large, I think I have done it in a respectful way. Unlike the CIA, I believe in free speech. I have permitted you to vent on my blogsite, impugn my president, indict my motives, trash my logic, and assassinate the truth. But now I'm done with you.
Like your "cooler heads" who itched for all-out war in 1962 but who magically turned into peace doves in 1963, I'm turning away from nuking you. I pity your ignorance, and I have nothing to learn from you.
So long, and...one last piece of advice. You need to be a little more skeptical of CIA propaganda. When you side with Allen Dulles, Dick Bissell, Charles Cabell, Ed Lansdale, Walter Dornberger, Ted Shackley, Dave Phillips, Howard Hunt, et al, you are siding with the devil and his minions.
Only dullards believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was the murderer of the man who enacted Executive Order 11110.
"Heritage reading" refers to the magazine "Heritage" put out by the Heritage Foundation. I once subscribed to it.
Honestly, there's just no way to reason with you. You're like a marble bag - open it up and out they come. You cast your own spin on everything I say, and don't even try to understand that I mostly agree with you.
For instance, I am not a "JFK hater". I am simply a realist. There are centers of power in this country, and the presidency is but one, and not even the most powerful. So it is highly unlikely that JFK even had much input into the early stages of Vietnam, and surely didn't see what was coming down the pipe.
But the man himself? He was just a man - a smart and gifted man of privilege, a natural leader, but also one who knew how to deal with the other power centers in the country. Otherwise, he would not have been elected. To get elected, you have to have media support - that is, the media has to see you as a "credible" candidate, or you never take off. To be credible, you have to deal with the corporations and the wealthy families who own the media.
Is that so complicated? We're a plutocracy. JFK knew this, and did not set out to change it. What he most wanted to do in his brief tenure was to take Cuba back. He would have had he lived, I suspect.
You're really kind of off the deep end on this stuff. It is fascinating - a gripping murder mystery. But don't read too much into it or you will never understand history.
You don't, you know.
By the bye ... you seem like the hero-worshiping sort - if you want someone to admire, try Gray Hart or Frank Church. Hart wanted to be president, but didn't play by the rules. He was a true reformer. Look what happened!
Not so with JFK - all that he did was covered up for all of his life. So tell me, man of forty years of careful research ... why?
From James Douglass's book, "JFK And The Unspeakable: Why He Died And Why It Matters": "...during the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy, under enormous pressure, almost committed the United States to a nuclear holocaust that would have multiplied the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb thousands of times. Kennedy's saving grace was that unlike Truman he recognized the evil of nuclear weapons. Kennedy resisted the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and most of his civilian advisers, who pressured him for a preemptive attack on Soviet missiles in Cuba. Thanks to the sheer grace of God, to Kennedy's resistance to advisers, and to Nikita Kruschev's willingness to retreat, humanity survived the crisis."
From James DiEugenio's review of Douglass's book: "Kennedy wanted Jean Daniel to tell Castro that he understood the horrible exploitation, colonization, and humiliation that the Cuban people had endured. He even painfully understood that the USA had been part of this during the Batista regime. Startlingly, he said he approved of Castro's declarations in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Daniel then went to Havana to convey these sentiments to Castro on JFK's behalf. Clearly elated by Daniel's message, Castro responded, "Suddenly a president arrives on the scene who tries to support the interest of another class."
From pg. 107 of Douglass's book: "There was 'virtually unanimous desire for introduction of US forces in Vietnam...' As General Maxwell Taylor (Joint Chiefs) later recalled, '...no one was actually against it except President Kennedy...it was really the president's personal conviction that US ground troops shouldn't go in.'"
From "JFK And The Unspeakable," pp.14-16: "The new president had bitterly disappointed the CIA and the military by his decision to accept defeat at the Bay of Pigs rather than escalate the battle. Kennedy realized after the fact that he had been drawn into a CIA scenario that was a trap...'They were sure I'd give in to them...well, they had me figured all wrong.' The major players in deceiving Kennedy were his CIA advisers, especially Allen Dulles...the assumption was that President Kennedy, who had emphatically banned direct American involvement, would be forced by public opinion to [call in] American forces, probably Marines...in effect, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed.
"JFK then...cut the CIA budget in 1962 and again in 1963, aiming at 20 percent reduction in 1966. He never managed to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. But Kennedy's firing of Dulles, Bissell, and Cabell...placed him in direct conflict with a Cold War institution that had come to hold itself accountable to no one.
"...one week after the assassination Dulles was appointed by the new president Lyndon Johnson to serve on the Warren Commission. He thus directed an investigation that pointed toward himself.
"Allen Dulles's own closely guarded feelings toward John Kennedy were revealed years later in a remark to...assistant editor Willie Morris of Vogue...in Washington to collaborate with [Dulles] on a piece in defense of the CIA's role in the Bay of Pigs...Dulles stunned Morris with an abrupt comment. 'That little Kennedy,' Dulles said, 'he thought he was a god.' 'Even now,' Morris wrote over a quarter of a century later, 'those words leap out at me, the only strident ones I would hear from my unlikely collaborator.'"
From pp. 52-53: "[JFK was] bucking the military-industrial complex which had become alarmed at the president's sudden turn toward peace and his alliance with peace activists...the alarm was sounded...in the August 12 US News & World Report with an article headlined, 'If Peace Does Come--Waht Happens To Business?'...Will the bottom drop out if defense spending is cut?' The president's peacemaking had moved beyond any effective military control or even monitoring...as JFK biographer Richard Reeves observed, 'By moving so swiftly on the Moscow negotiations, Kennedy politically outflanked his own military.'"
Where are you, Mark T? Given up? Conceded defeat? I know the above passages sting, because they ring of the truth, and you must surrender your cherished fallacies. Don't be a coward. Surface and admit you were wrong. Deliver yourself from the darkness and step into the light. We will welcome you to our side...the side of the righteous.
So I just spent a very long time reading this entire exchange and find the effort you both put into it inspiring.
But I'm compelled to point out (as a neutral observer directed to the site from a Google search) that Mark comes across as the much more thoughtful observer. I admire Tim's passion, but the condescending tone is thoroughly off-putting. So is the bizarre hard-on for President Kennedy.
I disagree totally with Dux. Ultimate Sacrifice? More like Ultimate Modified Limited Hangout.
JFK supported 3rd World Nationalism. The CIA overthrew democratic regimes and assassinated leaders for clinging to that principal. Why wouldn't they do it at home?
Why did David Morales, E Howard Hunt, David Phillips, James Angleton, De Morenschildt, and Jack Ruby all make weird confessional or semi-confessional statements near the end of their lives?
Why did "Citizen" Ruth Paine spend so much time pouring over national archives records?
Ultimate Sacrifice is by far the most sophisticated piece of disinformation ever produced. That sophistication actually strengthens the case for the traditional National Security establishment did it argument.
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