I have many conservative friends, and, prudently, when in their presence I avoid the usual dangerous topics when I can: religion, politics, history, taxes, etc. But every now and then a polemic discussion rears its inevitable head, and I can't fight back the urge to inject my subversive, sarcastic, and eristic words. Such an occasion happened recently. Here's my reconstruction of the conversation (to the best of my memory):
CONSERVATIVE: I know you don't believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord and personal savior.
ME: Well...now that you mention it. The rationalist in me wants to parse that sentence. The phrase "My Lord and personal savior" sounds threatening. Like I'd better believe or else. As if someone is trying to control my thoughts and actions...and if I do not conform (meaning blindly believe that there is an all-powerful white man in the sky waiting to condemn me or save me based on someone's interpretation of a centuries-old book), there will be literally hell to pay.
CONSERVATIVE: Since when is faith a bad thing?
ME: When blind faith shuts down reason, overrides temperance, denies the power of the intellect, and incites intolerance and violence, then it is a bad thing.
CONSERVATIVE: My Christian beliefs forbid me from practicing hate.
ME: Yet you listen to Rush Limbaugh every day--the right wing's high minister of hate.
CONSERVATIVE: That's politics, not religion. Rush is merely pointing out how your side is harming democracy by enforcing a socialist agenda on unwilling citizens.
ME: From my reading of the Bible, Jesus was the most prominent socialist in history. Didn't he say that we will be judged by how we treat the least among us? Didn't he drive the moneychangers from the temple? Didn't he say that it will be harder for a rich man to enter His Kingdom than...
CONSERVATIVE: (Clearly flustered) Jesus wants us to be free. He loves America, and he blesses every day with His riches.
ME: But America is quickly becoming a third-world Republic in the sense that the wealth inequity gap is widening dramatically. The poor are getting poorer and the rich richer.
CONSERVATIVE: Every man--regardless of race, status or creed--has the opportunity to succeed and become rich in America.
ME: Not true. If that were so, capitalism would cease to exist, because the capitalist system requires that there be a few at the top and many at the bottom. The factory owner must have hundreds, maybe thousands, of factory laborers to make his enterprise profitable. And when it does become profitable, he keeps the lion's share of profit for himself. If we had all kings and no peons, capitalism would cease to exist.
CONSERVATIVE: You're perverting the intent of democracy and capitalism.
ME: They are not the same thing. You know what Louis Brandeis said? "We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have all wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can't have both."
CONSERVATIVE: Who's Louis Brandeis? One of your atheist, pinko icons?
ME: Supreme Court Justice in the 1920s.
CONSERVATIVE: Well, he's full of crap.
ME: How about James Madison, then? You right-wingers are fond of him, right? He said, "History records that moneychangers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments." That makes America a government of the rich, by the wealthy, and for the few.
CONSERVATIVE: Only Jesus can save heathens like you; I am going to pray for your salvation.
ME: Don't bother. If Heaven is anything like America, I'll pass. I want to go to Paradise. A place where everyone has his own room in the mansion. A place where the First shall be Last and the Last shall be first. A place where there is no suffering. A place where love and peace reign. A place where no man can oppress another. A place where material wealth and power do not matter. Hey wait...that is the Heaven promised us in the Bible. On second thought, go ahead and pray for my soul.
Monday, December 30, 2013
Monday, December 23, 2013
Truman Blasted CIA In Wake of JFK Assassination
Fifty years ago yesterday, President Harry Truman, the man responsible for creating the CIA, had second thoughts about the agency's usefulness and runaway power. He wrote a letter to the Washington Post (reprinted below), exactly one month after the assassination of JFK, when Washington and the rest of the world were whispering about the CIA's involvement in the murder of the President. Truman seems to hint, if only obliquely, his own suspicions in the letter which appeared only in first editions and then was quickly pulled. There is now evidence that Allen Dulles used his considerable influence with the Post's editorial board to squelch the article.
Months later, when the Warren Commission, with Dulles as its de facto head, was ostensibly investigating Kennedy's murder, Dulles tried to get Truman to recant. On April 17, 1964, they met in Washington. Truman stuck to his guns, but Dulles got even anyway. In a treacherous and devious bit of spycraft, Dulles wrote a false denial which claimed that Truman was appalled at the article and never meant it to read the way it did.
In September 1964 Oswald was named as the lone assassin, and the investigation led by Dulles was steered away from one of the prime suspects--Dulles himself.
Here is the article written by the feisty little man from Missouri:
INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 22 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.
Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
Months later, when the Warren Commission, with Dulles as its de facto head, was ostensibly investigating Kennedy's murder, Dulles tried to get Truman to recant. On April 17, 1964, they met in Washington. Truman stuck to his guns, but Dulles got even anyway. In a treacherous and devious bit of spycraft, Dulles wrote a false denial which claimed that Truman was appalled at the article and never meant it to read the way it did.
In September 1964 Oswald was named as the lone assassin, and the investigation led by Dulles was steered away from one of the prime suspects--Dulles himself.
Here is the article written by the feisty little man from Missouri:
INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 22 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.
Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Despite Public Support of Warren Commission, Kennnedys Believed There Was A Plot
Writing in the International Business Times, Joseph Lazzaro provides more proof that the Kennedy family never bought the Warren Commission lies. In fact, they knew from the beginning that JFK had been brought down by a domestic conspiracy, and they had no illusions about whom the like Judases were. Lyndon Johnson, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and powerful Texas oilmen were at the top of the list of suspects. These men had the means, motive and opportunity. And Bobby Kennedy knew it.
Lazzaro writes, "One week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy privately communicated to the leadership of the Soviet Union that they did not believe accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
"Jacqueline Kennedy and RFK wanted the Soviet leadership to know that 'despite Oswald’s connections to the communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents.'
"Publicly, Jacqueline Kennedy endorsed the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone, and it was not until 1999 that her and RFK’s private views were made known, when they were revealed by historians Aleksandr Fusenko and Timothy Naftali in their book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 'One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964.'
"In the book, the historians reported that when Jacqueline Kennedy’s artist friend William Walton traveled to Moscow on a previously scheduled trip a week after President Kennedy’s assassination, Walton carried the above 'felled by domestic opponents' message from Jacqueline Kennedy and RFK to another friend of the Kennedy administration, Georgi Bolshakov, a Russian diplomat. Bolshakov served as a back-channel link between the White House and the Kremlin during the October 1962 missile crisis."
(Read more in "The President's Mortician," available on Amazon, branesandnoble.com, and neverlandpublishing.com)
Lazzaro writes, "One week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy privately communicated to the leadership of the Soviet Union that they did not believe accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
"Jacqueline Kennedy and RFK wanted the Soviet leadership to know that 'despite Oswald’s connections to the communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents.'
"Publicly, Jacqueline Kennedy endorsed the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone, and it was not until 1999 that her and RFK’s private views were made known, when they were revealed by historians Aleksandr Fusenko and Timothy Naftali in their book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 'One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964.'
"In the book, the historians reported that when Jacqueline Kennedy’s artist friend William Walton traveled to Moscow on a previously scheduled trip a week after President Kennedy’s assassination, Walton carried the above 'felled by domestic opponents' message from Jacqueline Kennedy and RFK to another friend of the Kennedy administration, Georgi Bolshakov, a Russian diplomat. Bolshakov served as a back-channel link between the White House and the Kremlin during the October 1962 missile crisis."
(Read more in "The President's Mortician," available on Amazon, branesandnoble.com, and neverlandpublishing.com)
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
JFK's Wounds Are Glossed Over By History Channel Program
I am just now getting around to watching the multitude of JFK Assassination Anniversary specials which aired last month. Too many to watch live, so I recorded them for later viewing. And while most are the same tired old lies, some are almost fair in their presentation of both sides--conspiracy vs. Oswald did it. On the surface, "The JFK Assassination: The Definitive Guide," a History Channel presentation, appears to give serious researchers a fair hearing, but on second look, the program is cunningly and subtly biased. Each time a legitimate piece of evidence is mentioned, there is a quick cut to a disinformationist like Gerald Posner, Vincent Bugliosi or Max Holland, for refutation. So while pro-conspiracy tidbits get the viewer tantalizingly close to a breakthrough, before the lead is explored in depth, in steps an establishment-approved and historically challenged idiot like John McAdams. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile viewing for the special it might have been.
Stunningly, there is even a mention of one of the most overlooked, yet significant, players in the drama (and, oh by the way, the villain of my book "The President's Mortician), John Liggett. Suspiciously his name is misspelled, as it appears fleetingly on the screen. There is no James Melvin Liggett, but at least they got the middle name right. Other key suspects, like George DeMohrenschildt, Ruth Paine, and Allen Dulles, are mentioned in passing...the message being that they are fringe and insignificant characters. At least "Definitive Guide" is not a complete whitewash like "Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours To Live."
The most glaring cover-up was Posner's easy dismissal of the Dallas doctors' observations about JFK's wounds. At Parkland all medical personnel who attended to the President saw a fist-sized exit wound in the back of the head, near the right ear, in the occipital-parietal area of the head. But the autopsy doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital saw a completely different head wound, one that was more than three times the size of the Parkland wound, and one that stretched from the rear of the head all the way to the front of the head. In fact, the Bethesda wound was so large that the Bethesda doctors thought at first that surgery of the head area had been performed. Dr. Humes uttered the phrase, "Surgery of the head area, namely in the top of the skull, is indicated." He recognized that someone tinkered with JFK's head wound while his body was in transit from Parkland to Bethesda. Who would do such a thing, and why, and where? The answers to these questions are essential to solving the case for this simple reason: the Parkland wound indicated that JFK was shot from the front; the Bethesda wound indicated that JFK was shot from the rear. Or put another way, if JFK was shot from the front, there is no doubt that a conspiracy took his life because Oswald, the ostensible lone shooter, was behind the Presidential limo at the time of the shooting and could have only hit JFK from behind had he indeed fired a rifle from the Texas School Book Depository. If the wound was altered, there is little doubt that it was done to hide a conspiracy and frame Oswald as the lone assassin.
In his book "Best Evidence," JFK researcher David Lifton puts it succinctly: "The Dallas/Bethesda conflict regarding the fatal head wound was built into the records of the Warren Commission...its existence could not be denied. On November 22, 1963, two groups of doctors saw the President's head, and their descriptions diverged. Only three explanations seemed possible: 1) Parkland Was Right And Bethesda Was Wrong. In that case, the Bethesda autopsy surgeons falsely described a...wound...quadrupled its area, and incorrectly stated that half of the President's brain was clearly visible through the hole in his head. 2) Bethesda Was Right And Parkland Was Wrong. In that case, the many witnesses who saw the wound in Dallas somehow mistook a 6-inch hole at the top of the head as a much smaller hole at the right rear. 3) Both Groups of Witnesses Were Correct. In that case, their descriptions conflicted because the size and location of the wound had been altered during the time interval that separated the two groups of observations."
Astounding as it sounds, only the third option is viable. It is unreasonable to believe that either of two sets of doctors knowingly lied about the wounds of the most important patient they would ever tend to in their lifetimes. As Lifton puts it, "Of the three alternatives, only the third was plausible. President Kennedy's fatal wound must have been altered."
You can find out how, where, and when this was done, by reading my book.
neverlandpublishing.com
Stunningly, there is even a mention of one of the most overlooked, yet significant, players in the drama (and, oh by the way, the villain of my book "The President's Mortician), John Liggett. Suspiciously his name is misspelled, as it appears fleetingly on the screen. There is no James Melvin Liggett, but at least they got the middle name right. Other key suspects, like George DeMohrenschildt, Ruth Paine, and Allen Dulles, are mentioned in passing...the message being that they are fringe and insignificant characters. At least "Definitive Guide" is not a complete whitewash like "Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours To Live."
The most glaring cover-up was Posner's easy dismissal of the Dallas doctors' observations about JFK's wounds. At Parkland all medical personnel who attended to the President saw a fist-sized exit wound in the back of the head, near the right ear, in the occipital-parietal area of the head. But the autopsy doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital saw a completely different head wound, one that was more than three times the size of the Parkland wound, and one that stretched from the rear of the head all the way to the front of the head. In fact, the Bethesda wound was so large that the Bethesda doctors thought at first that surgery of the head area had been performed. Dr. Humes uttered the phrase, "Surgery of the head area, namely in the top of the skull, is indicated." He recognized that someone tinkered with JFK's head wound while his body was in transit from Parkland to Bethesda. Who would do such a thing, and why, and where? The answers to these questions are essential to solving the case for this simple reason: the Parkland wound indicated that JFK was shot from the front; the Bethesda wound indicated that JFK was shot from the rear. Or put another way, if JFK was shot from the front, there is no doubt that a conspiracy took his life because Oswald, the ostensible lone shooter, was behind the Presidential limo at the time of the shooting and could have only hit JFK from behind had he indeed fired a rifle from the Texas School Book Depository. If the wound was altered, there is little doubt that it was done to hide a conspiracy and frame Oswald as the lone assassin.
In his book "Best Evidence," JFK researcher David Lifton puts it succinctly: "The Dallas/Bethesda conflict regarding the fatal head wound was built into the records of the Warren Commission...its existence could not be denied. On November 22, 1963, two groups of doctors saw the President's head, and their descriptions diverged. Only three explanations seemed possible: 1) Parkland Was Right And Bethesda Was Wrong. In that case, the Bethesda autopsy surgeons falsely described a...wound...quadrupled its area, and incorrectly stated that half of the President's brain was clearly visible through the hole in his head. 2) Bethesda Was Right And Parkland Was Wrong. In that case, the many witnesses who saw the wound in Dallas somehow mistook a 6-inch hole at the top of the head as a much smaller hole at the right rear. 3) Both Groups of Witnesses Were Correct. In that case, their descriptions conflicted because the size and location of the wound had been altered during the time interval that separated the two groups of observations."
Astounding as it sounds, only the third option is viable. It is unreasonable to believe that either of two sets of doctors knowingly lied about the wounds of the most important patient they would ever tend to in their lifetimes. As Lifton puts it, "Of the three alternatives, only the third was plausible. President Kennedy's fatal wound must have been altered."
You can find out how, where, and when this was done, by reading my book.
neverlandpublishing.com
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Help Further the Cause of Anti-Gun Violence on the Anniversary of Newtown
On this day, the one-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre, please take a moment to write your representative or sign a petition (link below), to help prevent children from being the victims of senseless slaughter. Members of Congress who accept donations from the NRA are using blood money to get elected. They are the equivalent of child murderers. How do these disgraceful and corrupt cowards sleep at night? I know how...they have no conscience. What follows is a remembrance published by one of the parents of a murdered child in Newtown:
"My name is Neil Heslin. My son, Jesse, was in first grade -- just six years old -- when he was killed December 14, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The gun used to kill my son and 19 other children that bright December morning was a Bushmaster XM-15, a civilian version of a military weapon. This gun is a profit center of Freedom Group, which makes Bushmaster and other brands of assault rifles. Cerberus Capital Management owns 94% of Freedom Group and collects the tainted profits.
One year ago, Cerberus made a promise to sell its interests in Bushmaster. But now Cerberus executives are dragging their feet instead of honoring their promise, quietly trying to keep profiting off the assault weapon that killed my son. On September 24th, I went to the company’s headquarters in New York to remind the executives about the promise they made, but they ignored my request for a meeting.
Help me make it uncomfortable for investors to profit from gun manufacturers like Freedom Group, to profit from murder."
Remember Jesse & Honor Newtown Families: Divest from Guns http://petitions.moveon.org/s/4CGlE4 @moveon
"My name is Neil Heslin. My son, Jesse, was in first grade -- just six years old -- when he was killed December 14, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The gun used to kill my son and 19 other children that bright December morning was a Bushmaster XM-15, a civilian version of a military weapon. This gun is a profit center of Freedom Group, which makes Bushmaster and other brands of assault rifles. Cerberus Capital Management owns 94% of Freedom Group and collects the tainted profits.
One year ago, Cerberus made a promise to sell its interests in Bushmaster. But now Cerberus executives are dragging their feet instead of honoring their promise, quietly trying to keep profiting off the assault weapon that killed my son. On September 24th, I went to the company’s headquarters in New York to remind the executives about the promise they made, but they ignored my request for a meeting.
Help me make it uncomfortable for investors to profit from gun manufacturers like Freedom Group, to profit from murder."
Remember Jesse & Honor Newtown Families: Divest from Guns http://petitions.moveon.org/s/4CGlE4 @moveon
Thursday, December 12, 2013
CIA's Skeletons Are Being Unearthed: And The Atrocities Are Ugly
The brave few who have challenged the intelligence establishment in this country are slowly eroding the walls the CIA has built around its dirtiest secrets. The Freedom of Information Act provides all citizens the right to peruse the documents we paid for, regardless of which clandestine agency created them and how heinous the crimes reported therein. Thus, some day, hopefully soon, the true story of the CIA's sordid history will be revealed for all to see.
Under great pressure from those who have filed civil suits, the National Security Archive has posted several documents relating to the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. For those of you who need a quick history refresher, Mossadegh was Iran's legitimately elected leader who just happened to have populist/socialist leanings, and, as such, threatened U.S. business interests in the region--specifically the oil industry. Mossadegh was beloved by the Iranian people, but he was deemed unsuitable by the CIA (Corporations Invisible Army) and was thus overthrown. An iron-fisted totalitarian was installed; perhaps you'll remember him: the Shah of Iran. Despised by the people for his political oppression and his overt corruption, the Shah did a profitable business with U.S. oil companies for a quarter century. When the Iranian people finally took action in the late '70s, the Shah was deposed and American embassy workers were taken hostage. The hostage crisis lasted 15 months, toppled the Carter administration and ushered in the era of Reagan. But the genesis of the crisis can be fully blamed on the U.S. itself, namely the CIA and its corporate allies, for intervening in a sovereign nation's right to determine its own destiny.
This was standard operating procedure for the CIA, which overthrew socialist and communist leaders across the globe from the 1940s on. Among their other clandestine tricks were the rescue and repatriation of Nazi war criminals after World War II and the subversion of the free press in America. Operations we are learning more about each day.
The work of incorporating Nazis into our intelligence apparatus, space programs, medical research, and weapons technology was called Operation Sunrise or Operation Paperclip. Among the well-known "Paperclip Nazis" were:
Wernher von Braun, Nazi V-2 rocket scientist who worked on guided missiles and manned rocket programs for the U.S. He was named Director of NASA's Space Flight Center, and, despite his questionable past, became somewhat of a celebrity in the 1960s. At no time was he forced to publicly renounce his Nazi ideology or made to pay for his war crimes. (He used slave labor camps to build his rockets in Nazi Germany. Thousands died of starvation and brutality in these camps.) A CIA-sponsored feature film, called I Aim For The Stars, was even made which honored his courage and audacity.
Kurt Blome, Nazi chemist who performed cruel experiments on death camp prisoners. He was hired by the U.S. Army to develop chemical warfare weapons.
Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's top intelligence officer. He got a job spying on the Soviets for the CIA. In fact, he cut a deal with the CIA (OSS) to hire practically his entire Third Reich intelligence network. Much of the information he provided his superiors in U.S. intelligence greatly exaggerated Soviet military capabilities. Gehlen lied to make himself seem more important and useful to the CIA, and this led directly to the escalation of the Cold War and U.S. military buildup in the 1950s and beyond.
Heinrich Rupp, another Nazi war criminal who went to work for the CIA after World War II. In 1980 he accompanied George H.W. Bush, Vice Presidential candidate at the time, to cut a deal with Iran to delay the release of American hostages until after the election of the Reagan/Bush ticket in America in November 1980. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, just minutes after Reagan and Bush were sworn into office. In return, Rupp promised release of Iran's frozen assets, laying the groundwork for the Iran-Contra deal. So Rupp, the Paperclip Nazi, helped steal an election, control U.S. foreign policy, and helped precipitate one of the worst scandals of the 1980s.
Arthur Rudolph, Operations Director at Mittelwerk factory at the Dora/Nordhausen concentration camps where thousands were worked to death.
Evil as it was, Operation Paperclip was surpassed, some say, by Operation Mockingbird. Mockingbird was a well-organized, systematic destruction of the free press in America in the second half of the 20th century. Why destroy the free press? Because a free and independent press was the CIA's worst enemy. Unfettered investigative journalism would have (or at least should have) uncovered the CIA's dirty secrets and criminal operations. The CIA needed to operate in secrecy, without threat of being detected, in order to get away with murder, coup d'états, drug running, sabotage of democracies, and covert fascist policies.
As outlined by reporter Carl Bernstein in a Rolling Stone article in 1977, the CIA co-opted, bribed, threatened, recruited and partnered with media assets at TV networks, newspapers, publishers and radio outlets across the nation. Frank Wisner, who ran Mockingbird for the CIA in the 1950s, once famously bragged, the program was like his own mighty Wurlitzer, "...I can play any tune I want on it, and America will follow along." William Colby, CIA Director under Nixon, added, "The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media." This meant that it was a simple matter for the agency to print and broadcast propaganda, cover up misdeeds, plant false stories, and smear CIA opponents at will. I believe this is what prevented an honest journalistic investigation of the JFK assassination.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Under great pressure from those who have filed civil suits, the National Security Archive has posted several documents relating to the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. For those of you who need a quick history refresher, Mossadegh was Iran's legitimately elected leader who just happened to have populist/socialist leanings, and, as such, threatened U.S. business interests in the region--specifically the oil industry. Mossadegh was beloved by the Iranian people, but he was deemed unsuitable by the CIA (Corporations Invisible Army) and was thus overthrown. An iron-fisted totalitarian was installed; perhaps you'll remember him: the Shah of Iran. Despised by the people for his political oppression and his overt corruption, the Shah did a profitable business with U.S. oil companies for a quarter century. When the Iranian people finally took action in the late '70s, the Shah was deposed and American embassy workers were taken hostage. The hostage crisis lasted 15 months, toppled the Carter administration and ushered in the era of Reagan. But the genesis of the crisis can be fully blamed on the U.S. itself, namely the CIA and its corporate allies, for intervening in a sovereign nation's right to determine its own destiny.
This was standard operating procedure for the CIA, which overthrew socialist and communist leaders across the globe from the 1940s on. Among their other clandestine tricks were the rescue and repatriation of Nazi war criminals after World War II and the subversion of the free press in America. Operations we are learning more about each day.
The work of incorporating Nazis into our intelligence apparatus, space programs, medical research, and weapons technology was called Operation Sunrise or Operation Paperclip. Among the well-known "Paperclip Nazis" were:
Wernher von Braun, Nazi V-2 rocket scientist who worked on guided missiles and manned rocket programs for the U.S. He was named Director of NASA's Space Flight Center, and, despite his questionable past, became somewhat of a celebrity in the 1960s. At no time was he forced to publicly renounce his Nazi ideology or made to pay for his war crimes. (He used slave labor camps to build his rockets in Nazi Germany. Thousands died of starvation and brutality in these camps.) A CIA-sponsored feature film, called I Aim For The Stars, was even made which honored his courage and audacity.
Kurt Blome, Nazi chemist who performed cruel experiments on death camp prisoners. He was hired by the U.S. Army to develop chemical warfare weapons.
Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's top intelligence officer. He got a job spying on the Soviets for the CIA. In fact, he cut a deal with the CIA (OSS) to hire practically his entire Third Reich intelligence network. Much of the information he provided his superiors in U.S. intelligence greatly exaggerated Soviet military capabilities. Gehlen lied to make himself seem more important and useful to the CIA, and this led directly to the escalation of the Cold War and U.S. military buildup in the 1950s and beyond.
Heinrich Rupp, another Nazi war criminal who went to work for the CIA after World War II. In 1980 he accompanied George H.W. Bush, Vice Presidential candidate at the time, to cut a deal with Iran to delay the release of American hostages until after the election of the Reagan/Bush ticket in America in November 1980. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, just minutes after Reagan and Bush were sworn into office. In return, Rupp promised release of Iran's frozen assets, laying the groundwork for the Iran-Contra deal. So Rupp, the Paperclip Nazi, helped steal an election, control U.S. foreign policy, and helped precipitate one of the worst scandals of the 1980s.
Arthur Rudolph, Operations Director at Mittelwerk factory at the Dora/Nordhausen concentration camps where thousands were worked to death.
Evil as it was, Operation Paperclip was surpassed, some say, by Operation Mockingbird. Mockingbird was a well-organized, systematic destruction of the free press in America in the second half of the 20th century. Why destroy the free press? Because a free and independent press was the CIA's worst enemy. Unfettered investigative journalism would have (or at least should have) uncovered the CIA's dirty secrets and criminal operations. The CIA needed to operate in secrecy, without threat of being detected, in order to get away with murder, coup d'états, drug running, sabotage of democracies, and covert fascist policies.
As outlined by reporter Carl Bernstein in a Rolling Stone article in 1977, the CIA co-opted, bribed, threatened, recruited and partnered with media assets at TV networks, newspapers, publishers and radio outlets across the nation. Frank Wisner, who ran Mockingbird for the CIA in the 1950s, once famously bragged, the program was like his own mighty Wurlitzer, "...I can play any tune I want on it, and America will follow along." William Colby, CIA Director under Nixon, added, "The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media." This meant that it was a simple matter for the agency to print and broadcast propaganda, cover up misdeeds, plant false stories, and smear CIA opponents at will. I believe this is what prevented an honest journalistic investigation of the JFK assassination.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Saturday, December 7, 2013
A New Liar to Rebuff
Beware truth seekers, there is yet another deluded JFK author out there. This one is someone named James L. Swanson, and his book is called "End of Days." (It would be more aptly titled "Endless Daze," because it stumbles and bumbles its way from untruth to untruth like an unrepentant drunk trying to convince his wife that the lipstick on his collar is tomato juice.) Even worse, Swanson, like Bill O'Reilly, has begun his own "assassination franchise." His previous work was about the manhunt for Lincoln's killer. Let's hope his next book is "Killing Swanson."
The lone nutters, like children who believe in the tooth fairy, take the original myths spun by the Warren Commission and embellish them as if they are somehow uncovering some new Oswald-damning information. It is the equivalent of a 5-year-old telling mommy that "...not only did the tooth fairy leave me a quarter, but he also talked to me and patted me on the head good-night." (These morons generally aren't even old enough to remember the assassination and, having been raised in the age of Reagan conservatism, mostly hate Kennedy anyway.) Swanson is no exception. In an interview with The Oregonian, Swanson snivels, "One of the most common misconceptions is that Dallas was a conservative or 'right wing' city of hate that killed President Kennedy. That's absurd. Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist, not a conservative. And he spent more time living in the Soviet Union than he ever did in Dallas. Jackie Kennedy described him as a "silly little communist." Another misconception is that people fail to remember how strong the evidence against Oswald really is."
Yes, Dallas was a liberal bastion in 1963; no matter that city leaders printed "Wanted for Treason" posters with JFK's picture on them and freely handed them out the day he was killed. Oilmen like H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison, who ran Dallas, hated Kennedy and vowed to "shoot him out of office." Dallas was more right-wing insane and hateful than any city in America. Daily radio broadcasts, sponsored by Hunt and listened to by most Dallasites, spewed right-wing hate at JFK constantly. And Newspaper publisher Ted Dealey ran an endless stream of negative stories about the President.
As for Oswald, there is no hard evidence against him. A paraffin test proved he did not fire a rifle that day. He was spotted in the second-floor lunch room of the Texas School Book Depository at the time of the shooting. And someone else's fingerprints were found near the murder weapon: Mac Wallace's, LBJ's personal hit man. Oswald was sent by the CIA to the Soviet Union to pose as a fake defector. This clandestine twist apparently is too spy-crafty for Swanson's little brain. Imagine if he did any real investigation and found that Oswald's best friends in Dallas--George DeMohrenschildt and Ruth Paine--were CIA. Swanson's tiny cerebral cavity would explode...just like JFK's head did when he was shot from the grassy knoll.
Just like anti-abolitionists a century ago, Oswald-did-it historians will be ridiculed and dismissed as charlatans 100 years from now. Future man will ask, "How did pseudo-experts like Swanson get away with their inane fairy tales. Why weren't they challenged by investigative journalists?" Alas, investigative journalism died in the 20th century. As ex-CIA Director William Colby put it, "The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
The lone nutters, like children who believe in the tooth fairy, take the original myths spun by the Warren Commission and embellish them as if they are somehow uncovering some new Oswald-damning information. It is the equivalent of a 5-year-old telling mommy that "...not only did the tooth fairy leave me a quarter, but he also talked to me and patted me on the head good-night." (These morons generally aren't even old enough to remember the assassination and, having been raised in the age of Reagan conservatism, mostly hate Kennedy anyway.) Swanson is no exception. In an interview with The Oregonian, Swanson snivels, "One of the most common misconceptions is that Dallas was a conservative or 'right wing' city of hate that killed President Kennedy. That's absurd. Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist, not a conservative. And he spent more time living in the Soviet Union than he ever did in Dallas. Jackie Kennedy described him as a "silly little communist." Another misconception is that people fail to remember how strong the evidence against Oswald really is."
Yes, Dallas was a liberal bastion in 1963; no matter that city leaders printed "Wanted for Treason" posters with JFK's picture on them and freely handed them out the day he was killed. Oilmen like H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison, who ran Dallas, hated Kennedy and vowed to "shoot him out of office." Dallas was more right-wing insane and hateful than any city in America. Daily radio broadcasts, sponsored by Hunt and listened to by most Dallasites, spewed right-wing hate at JFK constantly. And Newspaper publisher Ted Dealey ran an endless stream of negative stories about the President.
As for Oswald, there is no hard evidence against him. A paraffin test proved he did not fire a rifle that day. He was spotted in the second-floor lunch room of the Texas School Book Depository at the time of the shooting. And someone else's fingerprints were found near the murder weapon: Mac Wallace's, LBJ's personal hit man. Oswald was sent by the CIA to the Soviet Union to pose as a fake defector. This clandestine twist apparently is too spy-crafty for Swanson's little brain. Imagine if he did any real investigation and found that Oswald's best friends in Dallas--George DeMohrenschildt and Ruth Paine--were CIA. Swanson's tiny cerebral cavity would explode...just like JFK's head did when he was shot from the grassy knoll.
Just like anti-abolitionists a century ago, Oswald-did-it historians will be ridiculed and dismissed as charlatans 100 years from now. Future man will ask, "How did pseudo-experts like Swanson get away with their inane fairy tales. Why weren't they challenged by investigative journalists?" Alas, investigative journalism died in the 20th century. As ex-CIA Director William Colby put it, "The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Friday, December 6, 2013
The CIA Began Linking Oswald to Castro Just One Day After JFK's Murder
An obscure memo uncovered among the documents in Boston's JFK Library directly links the Central Intelligence Agency to a Miami publication which, just one day after JFK's assassination, accused Lee Harvey Oswald of being an agent of Fidel Castro. In one stroke the CIA was trying to plausibly deny its own involvement in Kennedy's murder and provide the U.S. with the pretense for overthrowing a communist government 90 miles from our shore. JFK researcher Jefferson Morley recently brought these facts to light; he is currently suing the CIA for release of over 1,000 files related to the JFK assassination.
The magazine the CIA used to make its false allegations on November 23, 1963, was Trinchera, Spanish for "Trenches." According to Joseph Lazzaro, writing for the International Business Times, Trinchera was published by a group which called itself the Cuban Student Directorate or DRE. The JFK Library memo states that the DRE received $51,000 per month from the CIA; that's the equivalent of $389,000 in 2013 money, or $4.8 million annually. No word on where the CIA raised the money to fund its propaganda campaign, but a good bet is its Southeast Asia drug operations which was responsible for generating millions of illicit dollars covertly.
Records declassified under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the CIA liaison who paid the DRE its money was George Joannides. Joannides, who has other sinister links to the Kennedy assassination, was head of PsyOps at the CIA's Miami station. He was also the CIA's liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-78) which reopened the JFK investigation. As the CIA's point man, Joannides destroyed documents, intimated witnesses, misled committee members, and obstructed justice at every turn. He was vigilant in guarding the CIA secrets and preventing the committee from making the logical connection of CIA involvement in Dallas. Lazzarro writes, "HSCA Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey said that had he known who Joannides was at that time, Joannides would have not continued as CIA liaison, but would have become a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the HSCA staff or by the committee. In addition, Joannides’ failure-to-disclose occurred despite the fact that Blakey and the CIA had a pre-investigation agreement between the HSCA and the CIA that CIA personnel who were operational in 1963 could not be involved in the committee’s investigation."
Even the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), created in 1992 after the release of Oliver Stone's JFK, had something to say about Joannides. According to Lazzarro, "U.S. Judge Jack Tunheim, ARRB chairman from 1994-1995, said that had the board known about Joannides’ activities in 1963, it would have been a no-brainer to investigate him: 'If we’d known of his role in Miami in 1963, we would have pressed for all his records.'"
What possible reason could the CIA have to withhold files that are now a half-century old, unless those files expose the agency's culpability in the death of the 35th President?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
The magazine the CIA used to make its false allegations on November 23, 1963, was Trinchera, Spanish for "Trenches." According to Joseph Lazzaro, writing for the International Business Times, Trinchera was published by a group which called itself the Cuban Student Directorate or DRE. The JFK Library memo states that the DRE received $51,000 per month from the CIA; that's the equivalent of $389,000 in 2013 money, or $4.8 million annually. No word on where the CIA raised the money to fund its propaganda campaign, but a good bet is its Southeast Asia drug operations which was responsible for generating millions of illicit dollars covertly.
Records declassified under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the CIA liaison who paid the DRE its money was George Joannides. Joannides, who has other sinister links to the Kennedy assassination, was head of PsyOps at the CIA's Miami station. He was also the CIA's liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-78) which reopened the JFK investigation. As the CIA's point man, Joannides destroyed documents, intimated witnesses, misled committee members, and obstructed justice at every turn. He was vigilant in guarding the CIA secrets and preventing the committee from making the logical connection of CIA involvement in Dallas. Lazzarro writes, "HSCA Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey said that had he known who Joannides was at that time, Joannides would have not continued as CIA liaison, but would have become a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the HSCA staff or by the committee. In addition, Joannides’ failure-to-disclose occurred despite the fact that Blakey and the CIA had a pre-investigation agreement between the HSCA and the CIA that CIA personnel who were operational in 1963 could not be involved in the committee’s investigation."
Even the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), created in 1992 after the release of Oliver Stone's JFK, had something to say about Joannides. According to Lazzarro, "U.S. Judge Jack Tunheim, ARRB chairman from 1994-1995, said that had the board known about Joannides’ activities in 1963, it would have been a no-brainer to investigate him: 'If we’d known of his role in Miami in 1963, we would have pressed for all his records.'"
What possible reason could the CIA have to withhold files that are now a half-century old, unless those files expose the agency's culpability in the death of the 35th President?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Reagan as John Wayne in 1980s America
My blogger pal from down under, Greg Maybury, has a new post on his site: Pox Amerikana. It's about the influence of Reagan on America and the world in the '80s. I highly recommend it. You can read it at http://www.poxamerikana.com
. I quote a passage here, with my reply below it.
Maybury writes, "As far as The Gipper was concerned, once inaugurated he was the new Marshall in town, and like all good Marshalls do, when the bad guys drink the saloon dry, break the piano player’s fingers, trash the local whorehouse and rob the town bank, then the only thing he can do is form a posse, pack the saddle-bags and go after them in true John Wayne tradition. In character, political mindset and ideology, and in the timing of his ascension to power, Ronnie was ideally positioned to do just that – bring the bad guys to justice and clean up the town. For Reagan the bad guys were the Keynesians and the Communists, wherever they might be found. More than any other modern president, Reagan walked into the White House with cow-shit on his boots, evoked the mythology of Old West with effortless ease, and for better or worse, successfully reinvented some of those myths for the modern world."
My response: The Gipper-as-John-Wayne analogy works better if we imagine the Duke as the Christian Bale character in "American Psycho," instead of a cowboy in a simple-minded Howard Hawks' shoot-em-up. Reagan put the whip to poor people, not the bad guys. And the posse he led out of town were fatcat defense contractors, corporate raiders, savings-and-loan swindlers, and intelligence schemers. It was more of a getaway than a round-up. When the Duke/Gipper rode off into the sunset he left behind a teetering economy, the highest wealth inequity in our history, a cold disdain for poor minorities, an imperialist reputation despised by the rest of the world, and a sick American predilection for the Gordon Gekkos of the world. Reagan was emblematic of conservatives who were engaged in what Galbraith called, "the oldest philosophical sleight-of-hand: a moral justification for greed."
Follow me on Twitter @tpfleming
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
. I quote a passage here, with my reply below it.
Maybury writes, "As far as The Gipper was concerned, once inaugurated he was the new Marshall in town, and like all good Marshalls do, when the bad guys drink the saloon dry, break the piano player’s fingers, trash the local whorehouse and rob the town bank, then the only thing he can do is form a posse, pack the saddle-bags and go after them in true John Wayne tradition. In character, political mindset and ideology, and in the timing of his ascension to power, Ronnie was ideally positioned to do just that – bring the bad guys to justice and clean up the town. For Reagan the bad guys were the Keynesians and the Communists, wherever they might be found. More than any other modern president, Reagan walked into the White House with cow-shit on his boots, evoked the mythology of Old West with effortless ease, and for better or worse, successfully reinvented some of those myths for the modern world."
My response: The Gipper-as-John-Wayne analogy works better if we imagine the Duke as the Christian Bale character in "American Psycho," instead of a cowboy in a simple-minded Howard Hawks' shoot-em-up. Reagan put the whip to poor people, not the bad guys. And the posse he led out of town were fatcat defense contractors, corporate raiders, savings-and-loan swindlers, and intelligence schemers. It was more of a getaway than a round-up. When the Duke/Gipper rode off into the sunset he left behind a teetering economy, the highest wealth inequity in our history, a cold disdain for poor minorities, an imperialist reputation despised by the rest of the world, and a sick American predilection for the Gordon Gekkos of the world. Reagan was emblematic of conservatives who were engaged in what Galbraith called, "the oldest philosophical sleight-of-hand: a moral justification for greed."
Follow me on Twitter @tpfleming
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Sunday, November 24, 2013
The President's Mortician is Featured in Local Paper
The Alton Telegraph this weekend has a feature story on The President's Mortician. To access the article use this link:
http://www.thetelegraph.com/news/news_local_features/530035/historical-novel-focuses-on-JFK-assassination
http://www.thetelegraph.com/news/news_local_features/530035/historical-novel-focuses-on-JFK-assassination
Thursday, November 21, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #1: When They Killed Kennedy, They Also Killed America
America was once a great country, and its leaders understood that to keep it from falling into the hands of a petty, greedy, narrow-minded, regressive few, we had to be vigilant and forward thinking. FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy all took this responsibility quite seriously. However, every President since Kennedy has abrogated his duty; to the point where, slowly over time, our greatness has eroded. America has become a government of the rich, by the selfish, and for the few. Congress shuts down the government to prevent the sick from getting access to health care. Social Security and Medicare are endangered. The NRA and a small handful of rich right-wingers buy and sell politicians like cattle. Schoolchildren are slaughtered and we raise not one finger to prevent its recurrence. Climate change and evolution are dismissed. Science is denigrated. Progressive thinking is derided. War and the threat of war are constants. It was not always this way.
FDR was keenly aware of the external and internal threats to democracy. He used government for good purposes: to defeat world fascism and lift us out of the Depression. He also stood guard against internal threats. His cabinet and appointees were extensions of this vigilance. In 1936, William Dodd, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which he stated, "A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime....A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions."
Roosevelt used his powers as President to stop fascist infiltration of the U.S. economy. On the 20th of October, 1942, he seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation. The shares of the bank were owned by Prescott Bush (father of George H.W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush), E. Roland Harriman, and three members of the Nazi Party. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over the Union Banking Corporation and the Silesian-American Corporation, a company that had been managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker.
President Eisenhower, though a Republican, supported social safety programs. He wrote a letter to his brother Edgar on Nov. 8, 1954, which read in part: “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” Hunt and his Texas oil cronies financed the murder of John Kennedy and supplanted him with their own oil-friendly, warmongering President, Lyndon Johnson.
JFK also actively stood for progress and peace, and against the takeover of America by wealthy interests. Four of his prominent speeches illustrate this--
April 27, 1961: Following the Bay of Pigs, a flawed operation concocted by the CIA to trap the President, Kennedy spoke out against secret organizations: “Secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society. There is a very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning…there is a monolithic, ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence.” This was a direct shot at the CIA and its culture of secrecy. He also put on notice those organizations whose members had accumulated undue influence over government agencies and, by extension, the American people. Organizations like Skull and Bones, Bilderbergers, Freemasons, the Council on World Affairs, et al, had infiltrated all spheres of the government.
America since then: Two Skull and Bones presidents have presided over unnecessary wars which greatly profited their crony defense contractors. The CIA has operated clandestinely without oversight in foreign and domestic matters, enriching its corporate sponsors by overthrowing socialist and democratic governments around the globe; subverting the free press; drugging its own citizens; conducting illegal wars; and siding with totalitarian regimes.
June 10, 1963: In a speech delivered at the American University commencement, JFK declared his intent to end the Cold War, not win it. He advocates for world peace and says, “ What kind of peace do I seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Total war makes no sense in an age…when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would by wind and water and soil and seeds travel to the far corners of the Earth…every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace should…examine his own attitude towards the possibility of peace with the Soviet Union…Both [the U.S. and USSR] are devoting to weapons mass sums of money which could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease…if we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”
America since then: The Cold War lasted another quarter century, and JFK’s vision of world peace never came about. Since November 22, 1963, war and the threat of war have been constants in American life.
To sum up, Kennedy envisioned perpetual peace; what we got after his death was perpetual war.
September 2, 1963: Speaking with Walter Cronkite about Vietnam, JFK said, “In the final analysis, it’s their [the South Vietnamese] war; they’re the ones who have to win or lose it.” Just weeks later JFK issued National Security Action Memo (NSAM) 263, calling for total American withdrawal from Vietnam in his second term.
America since then: Three days after JFK’s death, Lyndon Johnson rescinded NSAM 263 with his own National Security Action Memo (NSAM 273) which laid out the rationale for the Vietnam War. The war lasted 12 years and cost 58,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives, and billions of American dollars.
October 22, 1963: In a speech praising scientific advancements and research, JFK, in an age where political charlatans were ridiculed for denying or condemning scientific fact, lauded Americans’ “…wholehearted understanding of the importance of pure science…” Kennedy encouraged scientists to find ways to “…protect land and water, forests and wildlife, to combat exhaustion and erosion, to stop the contamination of water and air by industrial as well as nuclear pollution, and to provide for the steady renewal and expansion of the natural bases for life.”
America since then: Scientific research and discoveries are condemned as anti-religion
(evolution) and anti-free enterprise (carbon emissions have caused climate change). Politicians and corporations with blatant agendas bully their way into public discourse, and are not denounced by media for what they are—regressive, ignorant, and greedy.
When they killed Kennedy, they killed his vision for America—peace, progress and an age of enlightenment. Fifty years on, we’ve seen the America that the plotters wanted—hatred for science, constant war, denigration of social programs for the old and the needy, and protection of the rich and greedy—come to pass.
“When they saw him from a distance and before he came close to them, they plotted against him to put him to death. They said to one another, Here comes this dreamer! Now then, come and let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; and we will say, 'A wild beast devoured him.' Then let us see what will become of his dreams!”
--Genesis 37:18-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
FDR was keenly aware of the external and internal threats to democracy. He used government for good purposes: to defeat world fascism and lift us out of the Depression. He also stood guard against internal threats. His cabinet and appointees were extensions of this vigilance. In 1936, William Dodd, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which he stated, "A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime....A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions."
Roosevelt used his powers as President to stop fascist infiltration of the U.S. economy. On the 20th of October, 1942, he seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation. The shares of the bank were owned by Prescott Bush (father of George H.W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush), E. Roland Harriman, and three members of the Nazi Party. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over the Union Banking Corporation and the Silesian-American Corporation, a company that had been managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker.
President Eisenhower, though a Republican, supported social safety programs. He wrote a letter to his brother Edgar on Nov. 8, 1954, which read in part: “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” Hunt and his Texas oil cronies financed the murder of John Kennedy and supplanted him with their own oil-friendly, warmongering President, Lyndon Johnson.
JFK also actively stood for progress and peace, and against the takeover of America by wealthy interests. Four of his prominent speeches illustrate this--
April 27, 1961: Following the Bay of Pigs, a flawed operation concocted by the CIA to trap the President, Kennedy spoke out against secret organizations: “Secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society. There is a very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning…there is a monolithic, ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence.” This was a direct shot at the CIA and its culture of secrecy. He also put on notice those organizations whose members had accumulated undue influence over government agencies and, by extension, the American people. Organizations like Skull and Bones, Bilderbergers, Freemasons, the Council on World Affairs, et al, had infiltrated all spheres of the government.
America since then: Two Skull and Bones presidents have presided over unnecessary wars which greatly profited their crony defense contractors. The CIA has operated clandestinely without oversight in foreign and domestic matters, enriching its corporate sponsors by overthrowing socialist and democratic governments around the globe; subverting the free press; drugging its own citizens; conducting illegal wars; and siding with totalitarian regimes.
June 10, 1963: In a speech delivered at the American University commencement, JFK declared his intent to end the Cold War, not win it. He advocates for world peace and says, “ What kind of peace do I seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Total war makes no sense in an age…when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would by wind and water and soil and seeds travel to the far corners of the Earth…every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace should…examine his own attitude towards the possibility of peace with the Soviet Union…Both [the U.S. and USSR] are devoting to weapons mass sums of money which could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease…if we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”
America since then: The Cold War lasted another quarter century, and JFK’s vision of world peace never came about. Since November 22, 1963, war and the threat of war have been constants in American life.
To sum up, Kennedy envisioned perpetual peace; what we got after his death was perpetual war.
September 2, 1963: Speaking with Walter Cronkite about Vietnam, JFK said, “In the final analysis, it’s their [the South Vietnamese] war; they’re the ones who have to win or lose it.” Just weeks later JFK issued National Security Action Memo (NSAM) 263, calling for total American withdrawal from Vietnam in his second term.
America since then: Three days after JFK’s death, Lyndon Johnson rescinded NSAM 263 with his own National Security Action Memo (NSAM 273) which laid out the rationale for the Vietnam War. The war lasted 12 years and cost 58,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives, and billions of American dollars.
October 22, 1963: In a speech praising scientific advancements and research, JFK, in an age where political charlatans were ridiculed for denying or condemning scientific fact, lauded Americans’ “…wholehearted understanding of the importance of pure science…” Kennedy encouraged scientists to find ways to “…protect land and water, forests and wildlife, to combat exhaustion and erosion, to stop the contamination of water and air by industrial as well as nuclear pollution, and to provide for the steady renewal and expansion of the natural bases for life.”
America since then: Scientific research and discoveries are condemned as anti-religion
(evolution) and anti-free enterprise (carbon emissions have caused climate change). Politicians and corporations with blatant agendas bully their way into public discourse, and are not denounced by media for what they are—regressive, ignorant, and greedy.
When they killed Kennedy, they killed his vision for America—peace, progress and an age of enlightenment. Fifty years on, we’ve seen the America that the plotters wanted—hatred for science, constant war, denigration of social programs for the old and the needy, and protection of the rich and greedy—come to pass.
“When they saw him from a distance and before he came close to them, they plotted against him to put him to death. They said to one another, Here comes this dreamer! Now then, come and let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; and we will say, 'A wild beast devoured him.' Then let us see what will become of his dreams!”
--Genesis 37:18-20
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Wednesday, November 20, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #2: So Who Actually Pulled The Trigger? Here Are The Likely Suspects
It is my contention that each of the groups or individuals who wanted Kennedy dead had to provide their own assassin, in order that there would be mutually assured involvement, culpability and deniability. In other words, no group or individual could rat out the other because each of them had the goods on the other. They were all equally guilty, and this ensured mutual silence. Thus, LBJ, rogue CIA, Texas oilmen, the Joint Chiefs, and the Mafia (all deadly JFK enemies) hired their own gunmen for Dallas.
This is not just speculation on my part; there is hard evidence of assassins linked to each of the Kennedy-hating groups in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Let’s start with Malcolm Wallace, LBJ’s personal killer.
Wallace’s fingerprints were found on a box in the Texas School Book Depository on the day of the assassination. There is no innocent explanation for this. For decades, Wallace had been accused, and once convicted, of doing LBJ’s dirty work. On October 22, 1951, Wallace shot and killed John Kinser, a man who was having an affair with Josepha Johnson, Lyndon Johnson’s sister. Kinser was reportedly blackmailing LBJ, and LBJ ordered him hit. Wallace was convicted of murder, but inexplicably the judge gave him just a five-year suspended sentence. Some say LBJ pressured the judge into the light sentence.
Wallace went on to kill several LBJ enemies. After the Kennedy assassination, Wallace went to work for Ling-Temco-Vought, a Vietnam defense contractor owned by D.H. Byrd who also owned the Texas School Book Depository where Wallace’s print was lifted on November 22, 1963. Byrd was a close friend and financial supporter of LBJ. They were photographed together at University of Texas football games.
Then there’s CIA/OAS hitman Jean Souetre, who also had links to the Mafia and the international “French Connection” drug trade. Souetre, using one of his aliases—Micheal Roux—entered the U.S. on November 19, 1963, through New York, from where he traveled to Fort Worth. From there he followed JFK to Dallas on the morning of November 22. After the assassination, Souetre was expelled from the U.S.
The source for much of the information about Souetre was an Army code breaker name Eugene Dinkin. Dinkin deciphered cable traffic prior to Kennedy’s killing which stated that a known assassin named Jean Souetre would be in Dallas on November 22. Dinkin was taken into custody and hospitalized in a closed psychiatric ward where he was held for four months. Apparently the Army did not like what he had to say, and it was trying to shut him up. The cables he decoded were in the hands of the CIA before the assassination.
There is evidence to indicate that Souetre met with E. Howard Hunt in the spring of 1963 in Madrid. Madrid, at the time under the rule of fascist dictator Franco, was a hotbed of ultra right-wing activity. Ostensibly the CIA’s Hunt was recruiting Souetre for the hit on JFK. Later that spring Souetre came to the U.S. to visit General Edwin Walker just before Walker was supposedly shot at by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Eugene Hale Brading, also known as Jim Braden, was arrested in Dealey Plaza shortly after the shooting of the president. But he was released a short time later. The day before the assassination he visited the offices of Dallas oilman Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, a fanatical right-winger and an avowed Kennedy hater. Brading/Braden admitted to being in the Dal-Tex building on the same floor where Hunt Oil kept an office. The office was vacant at the time, and its west window looked out over the parade route. It was perfect vantage point from which a killer could have shot at JFK as the motorcade turned down Elm Street.
Another man who was arrested by police, and then mysteriously released on November 22, was an Air Force sharpshooter named Jack Lawrence. Lawrence worked at a car dealership in Dallas for a short time before the assassination. In his book Crossfire author Jim Marrs writes, “Lawrence had obtained a job as a car salesman at the dealership…with job references from New Orleans that were later discovered to be phony. Lawrence never sold a car and on the day before the assassination, he had borrowed one the firm’s cars, after telling his boss he had ‘a heavy date.’ On Friday, November 22, Lawrence failed to show up for work. However, about 30 minutes after the assassination, he came hustling through the company’s showroom, pale and sweating with mud on his clothes.” For some reason Lawrence had left the company car behind and had to get a ride back to the site where he had left it—in the parking lot behind the picket fence atop the grassy knoll at the west end of Dealey Plaza. The very spot from which assassination eyewitnesses heard and saw shots fired and smoke drift out from under some trees. Lawrence may have been Curtis LeMay’s hired hit man, though no evidence directly links him to the Air Force chief of staff.
Jack Ruby had long-standing and indisputable ties with the Mafia. He also once worked on the staff of Richard Nixon. When Ruby shot Oswald on November 24, Nixon, watching it on TV, reportedly said, “Hey, I know that man.” On the day before the assassination, he was in the Hunt Oil building at about the same time that Eugene Hale Brading was.
The one guy who shot no one was the fall guy Lee Harvey Oswald. At the time of the assassination he was seen calmly sipping a Coke in the Texas School Book Depository's 2nd-floor lunchroom.
Follow me on Twitter @tpfleming
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This is not just speculation on my part; there is hard evidence of assassins linked to each of the Kennedy-hating groups in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Let’s start with Malcolm Wallace, LBJ’s personal killer.
Wallace’s fingerprints were found on a box in the Texas School Book Depository on the day of the assassination. There is no innocent explanation for this. For decades, Wallace had been accused, and once convicted, of doing LBJ’s dirty work. On October 22, 1951, Wallace shot and killed John Kinser, a man who was having an affair with Josepha Johnson, Lyndon Johnson’s sister. Kinser was reportedly blackmailing LBJ, and LBJ ordered him hit. Wallace was convicted of murder, but inexplicably the judge gave him just a five-year suspended sentence. Some say LBJ pressured the judge into the light sentence.
Wallace went on to kill several LBJ enemies. After the Kennedy assassination, Wallace went to work for Ling-Temco-Vought, a Vietnam defense contractor owned by D.H. Byrd who also owned the Texas School Book Depository where Wallace’s print was lifted on November 22, 1963. Byrd was a close friend and financial supporter of LBJ. They were photographed together at University of Texas football games.
Then there’s CIA/OAS hitman Jean Souetre, who also had links to the Mafia and the international “French Connection” drug trade. Souetre, using one of his aliases—Micheal Roux—entered the U.S. on November 19, 1963, through New York, from where he traveled to Fort Worth. From there he followed JFK to Dallas on the morning of November 22. After the assassination, Souetre was expelled from the U.S.
The source for much of the information about Souetre was an Army code breaker name Eugene Dinkin. Dinkin deciphered cable traffic prior to Kennedy’s killing which stated that a known assassin named Jean Souetre would be in Dallas on November 22. Dinkin was taken into custody and hospitalized in a closed psychiatric ward where he was held for four months. Apparently the Army did not like what he had to say, and it was trying to shut him up. The cables he decoded were in the hands of the CIA before the assassination.
There is evidence to indicate that Souetre met with E. Howard Hunt in the spring of 1963 in Madrid. Madrid, at the time under the rule of fascist dictator Franco, was a hotbed of ultra right-wing activity. Ostensibly the CIA’s Hunt was recruiting Souetre for the hit on JFK. Later that spring Souetre came to the U.S. to visit General Edwin Walker just before Walker was supposedly shot at by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Eugene Hale Brading, also known as Jim Braden, was arrested in Dealey Plaza shortly after the shooting of the president. But he was released a short time later. The day before the assassination he visited the offices of Dallas oilman Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, a fanatical right-winger and an avowed Kennedy hater. Brading/Braden admitted to being in the Dal-Tex building on the same floor where Hunt Oil kept an office. The office was vacant at the time, and its west window looked out over the parade route. It was perfect vantage point from which a killer could have shot at JFK as the motorcade turned down Elm Street.
Another man who was arrested by police, and then mysteriously released on November 22, was an Air Force sharpshooter named Jack Lawrence. Lawrence worked at a car dealership in Dallas for a short time before the assassination. In his book Crossfire author Jim Marrs writes, “Lawrence had obtained a job as a car salesman at the dealership…with job references from New Orleans that were later discovered to be phony. Lawrence never sold a car and on the day before the assassination, he had borrowed one the firm’s cars, after telling his boss he had ‘a heavy date.’ On Friday, November 22, Lawrence failed to show up for work. However, about 30 minutes after the assassination, he came hustling through the company’s showroom, pale and sweating with mud on his clothes.” For some reason Lawrence had left the company car behind and had to get a ride back to the site where he had left it—in the parking lot behind the picket fence atop the grassy knoll at the west end of Dealey Plaza. The very spot from which assassination eyewitnesses heard and saw shots fired and smoke drift out from under some trees. Lawrence may have been Curtis LeMay’s hired hit man, though no evidence directly links him to the Air Force chief of staff.
Jack Ruby had long-standing and indisputable ties with the Mafia. He also once worked on the staff of Richard Nixon. When Ruby shot Oswald on November 24, Nixon, watching it on TV, reportedly said, “Hey, I know that man.” On the day before the assassination, he was in the Hunt Oil building at about the same time that Eugene Hale Brading was.
The one guy who shot no one was the fall guy Lee Harvey Oswald. At the time of the assassination he was seen calmly sipping a Coke in the Texas School Book Depository's 2nd-floor lunchroom.
Follow me on Twitter @tpfleming
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #3: The Incredible George DeMohrenschildt: The Man Who Knew Everyone In The JFK Case
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Monday, November 18, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #4: The Suspects’ Own Words And The Words Of Others Indict The Guilty
What follows is my list of the prime suspects in the murder of President Kennedy and the incriminating statements by them or others who knew them very well—
1)The CIA and the Pentagon
”…as Kennedy’s [peace] speech reached out to Kruschev, it opened a still wider chasm between the president and his own military and intelligence advisers. To the Pentagon and the CIA, the president’s words of peace at American University seemed to put him on the enemy’s list.”
--from JFK And The Unspeakable, by James Douglass
“One very high American official here, a man who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA's growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it any longer.
Unquestionably Mr. McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor both got an earful from people who are beginning to fear the CIA is becoming a Third Force co-equal with President Diem's regime and the U.S. Government - and answerable to neither. If the U.S. ever experiences a military takeover, it will come from the CIA, and not the Pentagon.”
--from an article by Richard Starnes Washington Daily News, October 2, 1963
2) Lyndon Johnson and John Connally
“He [Yarborough] described how Connally and Johnson were screwing him; worse, he said they’d be after John Kennedy in a minute if they thought they could get away with it.”
--from Advance Man, by Jerry Bruno
3) Allen Dulles
“That little Kennedy, he thought he was a god.”
--spoken by Allen to Willie Morris of Harper's
4) David Atlee Phillips, Frank Sturgis, David Morales, Lucein Sarti, William Harvey
All implicated in E. Howard Hunt’s deathbed confession.
--from Rolling Stone article of April 2007
5) George H.W. Bush and George DeMorhrenschildt
“Maybe you will be able to bring a solution into the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife
and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being
followed everywhere…I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must
have angered a lot of people. Could you do something to remove this net around us? This will
be my last request for help and I will not annoy you any more.”
--letter from George DeMohrenschildt to his good friend George H.W. Bush
who was Director of the CIA at the time. DeMohrenschildt was Oswald’s
best friend in Dallas. Shortly after this letter was written, DeMohrenschildt
was found shot to death on the very day he was scheduled to testify to the
House Select Committee on Assassinations .
6) Curtis LeMay
“Those goddamn Kennedys are gonna destroy this country if we don't do something about this!”
--from the movie "Thirteen Days"
1)The CIA and the Pentagon
”…as Kennedy’s [peace] speech reached out to Kruschev, it opened a still wider chasm between the president and his own military and intelligence advisers. To the Pentagon and the CIA, the president’s words of peace at American University seemed to put him on the enemy’s list.”
--from JFK And The Unspeakable, by James Douglass
“One very high American official here, a man who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA's growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it any longer.
Unquestionably Mr. McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor both got an earful from people who are beginning to fear the CIA is becoming a Third Force co-equal with President Diem's regime and the U.S. Government - and answerable to neither. If the U.S. ever experiences a military takeover, it will come from the CIA, and not the Pentagon.”
--from an article by Richard Starnes Washington Daily News, October 2, 1963
2) Lyndon Johnson and John Connally
“He [Yarborough] described how Connally and Johnson were screwing him; worse, he said they’d be after John Kennedy in a minute if they thought they could get away with it.”
--from Advance Man, by Jerry Bruno
3) Allen Dulles
“That little Kennedy, he thought he was a god.”
--spoken by Allen to Willie Morris of Harper's
4) David Atlee Phillips, Frank Sturgis, David Morales, Lucein Sarti, William Harvey
All implicated in E. Howard Hunt’s deathbed confession.
--from Rolling Stone article of April 2007
5) George H.W. Bush and George DeMorhrenschildt
“Maybe you will be able to bring a solution into the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife
and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being
followed everywhere…I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must
have angered a lot of people. Could you do something to remove this net around us? This will
be my last request for help and I will not annoy you any more.”
--letter from George DeMohrenschildt to his good friend George H.W. Bush
who was Director of the CIA at the time. DeMohrenschildt was Oswald’s
best friend in Dallas. Shortly after this letter was written, DeMohrenschildt
was found shot to death on the very day he was scheduled to testify to the
House Select Committee on Assassinations .
6) Curtis LeMay
“Those goddamn Kennedys are gonna destroy this country if we don't do something about this!”
--from the movie "Thirteen Days"
Sunday, November 17, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #5: NOVA’s “Cold Case Kennedy” is Junk Science
Like its fictitious namesake, PBS’s “Cold Case Kennedy” is a made-for-TV junk, full of improbable plot twists, magic bullets, astounding coincidences, and an easy, pat solution. Watching it pleases the simple-minded. It encourages one to not think too hard; just rely on pseudo-experts to do the thinking for you. In the end, you’ll be satisfied with the conclusion. Because in TV land the real murderers never get away with it.
Just one problem. This Cold Case was a real murder, and not just any murder, but the murder of a President who was secretly at war with his own intelligence agency and military chiefs. He had enemies who had the power to muddy any crime scene, kill any witness, destroy tangible evidence, even highjack the body for pre-autopsy alteration. You won’t see this in any TV special. In the JFK case you have to actually do your own thinking instead of relying on some TV contrivance.
For instance, in TV land bullets can do impossible things like land intact on a hospital stretcher after fracturing human bone and tearing human skin and muscle. In real life this never happens. But in NOVA the magic bullet is pristine after passing through Kennedy’s and Connally’s bodies. The Cold Case scientists concoct, contort, and twist themselves into logic pretzels to accomplish this. They ignore the fact that no other bullet in recorded human history has ever done this. And Dallas doctors found more fragments in Connally's body than are missing from the magic bullet…no mention of this on NOVA.
Then the TV scientists try to make us believe that it is quite common for a person who is shot in the head from behind to have his head move backwards. It all has to do with putty in the head…or play-dough in the brain…I can’t recall which. It was all explained so fast that I could barely follow the logic (which was the whole point, I suppose). It’s meant to rationalize JFK’s head snap backwards while being shot from the back. (No gunshot victim in recorded history has ever done this, but this is TV land where anything is possible.) Most appeasing to the uncritical viewer. But it ignores eyewitnesses’ testimony of hearing and seeing shots from in front of the motorcade. Eyewitness evidence was discretely omitted from the NOVA episode.
Contradictory wound analysis was glossed over. Some doctors got it right; others got it wrong. The ones who agreed with NOVA were right; the others were whimsically wrong. No dissenting experts were given more than brief air time; then they were summarily dismissed as quacks. I'm surprised the NOVA producers did not insist they wear black hats. You see, conflicting medical evidence makes for bad TV…as in not comforting.
JFK’s autopsy photos and x-rays are assumed to be genuine. And only the set which were done at the end of the autopsy are presented. No mention made of earlier photos and x-rays which have just disappeared. And omitted are the Dallas doctors’ observations of frontal entry wounds. These men saw bullet entries in the front of Kennedy’s body and an exit wound to the rear of his head. But an autopsy photo shows the rear of Kennedy's head intact...the bullet exit wound just DISAPPEARED between Dallas and Bethesda. This is too dangerous and confusing information to present to mindless TV viewers, so I guess the NOVA scriptwriters thought it best to ignore the Parkland evidence.
I was left wondering what NOVA really stands for. My best guess is Never Offer Viable Alternatives.
I call on all thinking Americans to boycott PBS. Do not send them your dollars; do not support them in any way. If the network persists in preserving and protecting the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people, then it has outlived its usefulness.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Follow me on Twitter @tpfleming
Just one problem. This Cold Case was a real murder, and not just any murder, but the murder of a President who was secretly at war with his own intelligence agency and military chiefs. He had enemies who had the power to muddy any crime scene, kill any witness, destroy tangible evidence, even highjack the body for pre-autopsy alteration. You won’t see this in any TV special. In the JFK case you have to actually do your own thinking instead of relying on some TV contrivance.
For instance, in TV land bullets can do impossible things like land intact on a hospital stretcher after fracturing human bone and tearing human skin and muscle. In real life this never happens. But in NOVA the magic bullet is pristine after passing through Kennedy’s and Connally’s bodies. The Cold Case scientists concoct, contort, and twist themselves into logic pretzels to accomplish this. They ignore the fact that no other bullet in recorded human history has ever done this. And Dallas doctors found more fragments in Connally's body than are missing from the magic bullet…no mention of this on NOVA.
Then the TV scientists try to make us believe that it is quite common for a person who is shot in the head from behind to have his head move backwards. It all has to do with putty in the head…or play-dough in the brain…I can’t recall which. It was all explained so fast that I could barely follow the logic (which was the whole point, I suppose). It’s meant to rationalize JFK’s head snap backwards while being shot from the back. (No gunshot victim in recorded history has ever done this, but this is TV land where anything is possible.) Most appeasing to the uncritical viewer. But it ignores eyewitnesses’ testimony of hearing and seeing shots from in front of the motorcade. Eyewitness evidence was discretely omitted from the NOVA episode.
Contradictory wound analysis was glossed over. Some doctors got it right; others got it wrong. The ones who agreed with NOVA were right; the others were whimsically wrong. No dissenting experts were given more than brief air time; then they were summarily dismissed as quacks. I'm surprised the NOVA producers did not insist they wear black hats. You see, conflicting medical evidence makes for bad TV…as in not comforting.
JFK’s autopsy photos and x-rays are assumed to be genuine. And only the set which were done at the end of the autopsy are presented. No mention made of earlier photos and x-rays which have just disappeared. And omitted are the Dallas doctors’ observations of frontal entry wounds. These men saw bullet entries in the front of Kennedy’s body and an exit wound to the rear of his head. But an autopsy photo shows the rear of Kennedy's head intact...the bullet exit wound just DISAPPEARED between Dallas and Bethesda. This is too dangerous and confusing information to present to mindless TV viewers, so I guess the NOVA scriptwriters thought it best to ignore the Parkland evidence.
I was left wondering what NOVA really stands for. My best guess is Never Offer Viable Alternatives.
I call on all thinking Americans to boycott PBS. Do not send them your dollars; do not support them in any way. If the network persists in preserving and protecting the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people, then it has outlived its usefulness.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Follow me on Twitter @tpfleming
Friday, November 15, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #6: Prime Suspect Was Power-Mad Nazi Sympathizer and U.S. Corporate Elitist
An incomplete yet stunning biography of the Dulles brothers, written by Stephen Kinzer, delineates the utter control and totalitarian power that Allen and John Foster had over America and the world in the 1950s. Allen Dulles was head of the CIA and John Foster Dulles ran the State Department. Under Eisenhower, who essentially abrogated his domestic and foreign policies to these brothers, the Dulleses had free reign to overthrow foreign leaders whom they despised and maintain a secret imperialist dominance for American corporate interests around the globe.
Long before the ‘50s, in fact, the Dulleses were funneling U.S. dollars into Nazi Germany. Their firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, helped finance I. G. Farben, the German chemical company which produced the Zyklon B gas used to murder millions of Jews in concentration camps, as well as Krupp A.G., Nazi weapons manufacturer. John Foster was close friends with Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schact. Allen signed his letters to Nazi officials with a respectful “Heil Hitler.”
Sullivan & Cromwell became so influential and powerful in American corporate spheres that the Dulleses were often rewarded with posts on many of their clients’ boards. One was United Fruit, which, with Allen’s CIA help, overthrew duly elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. United Fruit had confiscated peasants’ land there for growing bananas at slave-labor costs. When Arbenz tried to return the land to the peasants and nationalize the fruit-growing industry, UFC and the CIA ousted him. The CIA earned the nickname Corporations’ Invisible Army.
Eisenhower turned a blind eye to this as long as the Dulles brothers kept America out of war. Ike had seen enough death and destruction in World War II, and opted for another way to exert America’s dominance over the world. So while he played golf with Bob Hope in Palm Springs, the Dulles brothers ran the country.
When Kennedy came into office, Allen, still head of the CIA, assumed he was still in charge. But after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired him. This outraged the Eastern intelligence/business establishment, and Allen took out his revenge in Dallas. To ensure the matter would be covered up properly and exculpate all guilty parties, LBJ appointed Allen to the Warren Commission…or was it the other way around?
As de facto head of the Warren Commission, Dulles attended more meetings and hearings than any other member. He misled witnesses, diverted evidence, misinformed his colleagues, and brushed aside all CIA culpability. Funny what happens in a murder case when the lead investigator is also the prime suspect.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Long before the ‘50s, in fact, the Dulleses were funneling U.S. dollars into Nazi Germany. Their firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, helped finance I. G. Farben, the German chemical company which produced the Zyklon B gas used to murder millions of Jews in concentration camps, as well as Krupp A.G., Nazi weapons manufacturer. John Foster was close friends with Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schact. Allen signed his letters to Nazi officials with a respectful “Heil Hitler.”
Sullivan & Cromwell became so influential and powerful in American corporate spheres that the Dulleses were often rewarded with posts on many of their clients’ boards. One was United Fruit, which, with Allen’s CIA help, overthrew duly elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. United Fruit had confiscated peasants’ land there for growing bananas at slave-labor costs. When Arbenz tried to return the land to the peasants and nationalize the fruit-growing industry, UFC and the CIA ousted him. The CIA earned the nickname Corporations’ Invisible Army.
Eisenhower turned a blind eye to this as long as the Dulles brothers kept America out of war. Ike had seen enough death and destruction in World War II, and opted for another way to exert America’s dominance over the world. So while he played golf with Bob Hope in Palm Springs, the Dulles brothers ran the country.
When Kennedy came into office, Allen, still head of the CIA, assumed he was still in charge. But after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired him. This outraged the Eastern intelligence/business establishment, and Allen took out his revenge in Dallas. To ensure the matter would be covered up properly and exculpate all guilty parties, LBJ appointed Allen to the Warren Commission…or was it the other way around?
As de facto head of the Warren Commission, Dulles attended more meetings and hearings than any other member. He misled witnesses, diverted evidence, misinformed his colleagues, and brushed aside all CIA culpability. Funny what happens in a murder case when the lead investigator is also the prime suspect.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Thursday, November 14, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #7: Photographic Clean-Up Crew In Dealey Plaza
When people ask me why a clear photo of another shooter in Dealey Plaza has never been found, I tell them it’s because all photos and films were confiscated by “authorities” shortly after the shooting. Some of these photos and films were never returned to the rightful owners. Other images were edited or cropped to delete conspiratorial content. Some were misinterpreted. Some pictures were just reported lost; some cameras were even stolen.
Gordon Arnold took a home movie of the assassination while standing almost directly in the line of fire by the picket fence on the grassy knoll. He hit the deck and covered up when the shots whizzed right over his head. Quickly two “cops” emerged from behind the fence and demanded, at gunpoint, that Arnold turn over his camera. One of the cops was carrying a rifle and the other was sobbing uncontrollably.
Phil Willis, standing on the south side of Elm Street with his family, swears he took a picture of Jack Ruby walking in front of the Texas Book Depository right after the shooting. Ruby said he was not in the plaza at the time of the shooting, and proof of his presence there would have sent conspiratorial shockwaves through the investigation. When Willis got his photo back, he saw that it had been cropped right through the image he claimed was Jack Ruby.
Canadian journalist Norman Similas was in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting, and he took photographs of the open sixth-floor window of the Book Depository, the exact location of Oswald’s sniper’s nest. When his film was later developed it showed two men in the window, which would indicate Oswald had conspirators. When he submitted the photo to his newspaper in Toronto, the negative went missing. He has never seen it again.
Orville Nix took an amateur film of the assassination with a good view of the grassy knoll in the background, and what appears to be a gunman behind the fence. According to Crossfire, by Jim Marrs, “…Itek Corporation, which handles government contracts and is closely tied to the CIA, studied the film…and concluded that the gunman figure was actually shadows…[however] when Nix panned back over the area the ‘shadow figure’ is no longer visible.” Nix gave his film to the FBI in 1963; supposedly the original was returned to him, but it has since disappeared. Nix died in 1972, and now his granddaughter is actively searching for the original.
Beverly Oliver, another amateur filming from the south side of Elm, said that she was approached by government agents—either FBI or Secret Service—just days after the assassination. They said they were aware of her film and wanted to develop it for evidence. The agents confiscated the film, and Oliver never saw it again.
Mary Moorman took one of the most famous photos of the assassination. It was a picture of JFK just as the bullet which killed him struck his head. Moorman’s photo has obviously been cropped. How do I know? Look closely sometime. There is no one driving the car. Limo driver William Greer, who some say pulled a gun and pointed it at JFK, has been cut out of the picture.
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http://neverlandpublishing.com/tpm.html
Gordon Arnold took a home movie of the assassination while standing almost directly in the line of fire by the picket fence on the grassy knoll. He hit the deck and covered up when the shots whizzed right over his head. Quickly two “cops” emerged from behind the fence and demanded, at gunpoint, that Arnold turn over his camera. One of the cops was carrying a rifle and the other was sobbing uncontrollably.
Phil Willis, standing on the south side of Elm Street with his family, swears he took a picture of Jack Ruby walking in front of the Texas Book Depository right after the shooting. Ruby said he was not in the plaza at the time of the shooting, and proof of his presence there would have sent conspiratorial shockwaves through the investigation. When Willis got his photo back, he saw that it had been cropped right through the image he claimed was Jack Ruby.
Canadian journalist Norman Similas was in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting, and he took photographs of the open sixth-floor window of the Book Depository, the exact location of Oswald’s sniper’s nest. When his film was later developed it showed two men in the window, which would indicate Oswald had conspirators. When he submitted the photo to his newspaper in Toronto, the negative went missing. He has never seen it again.
Orville Nix took an amateur film of the assassination with a good view of the grassy knoll in the background, and what appears to be a gunman behind the fence. According to Crossfire, by Jim Marrs, “…Itek Corporation, which handles government contracts and is closely tied to the CIA, studied the film…and concluded that the gunman figure was actually shadows…[however] when Nix panned back over the area the ‘shadow figure’ is no longer visible.” Nix gave his film to the FBI in 1963; supposedly the original was returned to him, but it has since disappeared. Nix died in 1972, and now his granddaughter is actively searching for the original.
Beverly Oliver, another amateur filming from the south side of Elm, said that she was approached by government agents—either FBI or Secret Service—just days after the assassination. They said they were aware of her film and wanted to develop it for evidence. The agents confiscated the film, and Oliver never saw it again.
Mary Moorman took one of the most famous photos of the assassination. It was a picture of JFK just as the bullet which killed him struck his head. Moorman’s photo has obviously been cropped. How do I know? Look closely sometime. There is no one driving the car. Limo driver William Greer, who some say pulled a gun and pointed it at JFK, has been cut out of the picture.
Follow me on Twitter @tpfleming
http://neverlandpublishing.com/tpm.html
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #8: Part Two of Discussion on JFK, LBJ and Vietnam
In Part One, I engaged writer Jack Durish in a debate over the causes and effects of Vietnam. In Part Two, another writer, Arthur Frank, challenges my assertions. (Note: I have neither edited nor proofed other writers’ comments; they appear here unvarnished, with typos and faulty grammar.)
Arthur Frank, Novelist:
“Timothy: It is not the dead that should concern you. There were 2 categories, black plastic bags, blown to bits in the theater of operations, and aluminum boxes, died later in field hospitals. One went out in a flash, the other went out over tie in great pain. They knew they were dying, it was only a matter of time.
"The ones that you should cry about are the wounded, dismembered, disoriented , permanently scarred to smaller or larger degrees. I got out of it pretty much unscathed, but not a lot of others. A friend of mine who is still screwed up all these years later used to fly medivac helicopters, He doesn't remember much because he used to fly stoned. I asked him how he flew a chopper , which is all hands and feet, constant motion, when he was stoned. He said it was simple. If he wasn't stoned, he was too scared shitless to fly, when he was stoned, basic instincts operated the chopper, he had little to do with it.
"If you really want to know. ask someone who was on the ground over there. If they like you , they might tell you, all these years later. Or maybe not.
It wasn't Bell, it was Sikorsky who made the Huey.If you had a Bell, oit was on;ly good for reconnaoisance and if you were in one, you wwerre probably dead, They were easily shot down and fell out of the sky like a stone.
"It wasn't Ling Temco Voight, it was Ling Temco Vine, which was basically a holding company . They bought out all kinds of smaller manufacturing firms, many of whom made civlian and military supplies. I used to work for LTV in Labor Relations after I got out of yhere service. They went bely up.It was a long time ago, and now we buy all kinds of stuff from people that we used to shoot at. Look in Home Depot.Go figure.
Everybody gives JFK a pass on Viet Nam. It was Jack who sent all kinds of advisors to the Arvn, shipped them all kinds of militray supplies and started drafting Americans into the Army and Navy . Ity was LBJ wjho escalated it further, and It was RMN who gave it an all time , make it or break it push. It failed and he pulled pout in response to political pressure. I was back home by then.
"I was there for every belessed minute of it.It is a brutal business, and if you can't follow the Marine addage, "kill them all and let God sort it out." then you shouldnt be there at all.”
Fleming:
“Lots of misinformation in your posts, Arthur. If you're civil, we can discuss. Cronkite interviewed JFK on Sept. 2, 1963, the evening of the first half-hour news broadcast in history. When asked about Vietnam, JFK said, "It's their war (meaning the South Vietnamese); they're the ones who have to win it." Shortly afterwards, he issued National Security Action Memo 263, calling for complete withdrawal of all advisors and military assistance by 1965. LBJ reversed this the very week he took office.
"The owner of Ling-Temco-VOUGHT was one David Harold Byrd. He is a prominent character in my book. Byrd was a wealthy Dallas businessman who hated JFK. His oil cronies were H.L. Hunt, Murchison, and Richardson. Byrd just happened to own the Texas School Book Depository building, and he was the founder of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol. That's right, incredibly enough, Byrd provided the first and last places of employment for Lee Harvey Oswald. This is no coincidence. Byrd, Hunt and Murchison were LBJ's guardian angels and benefactors. As were Brown & Root and Halliburton. When LBJ ramped Vietnam, his cronies got huge defense contracts. (Bell Helicopter of Dallas/Fort Worth made a fortune off the Huey too.) Rewards for services rendered getting him to the White House.
"It is not the dead that should concern you." Really? You're saying it was better to die than live the rest of your life wounded? Okay. You seem to have a great deal of bitterness about the whole thing, and you resent those who did not go there and yet write about it like they were experts. Be that as it may, I knew plenty of people who were on the ground over there; some came back, some not. The ones who came back are grateful to be alive. I wrote about survivors of the Battle for Hill 875 near Dak To in the Central Highlands, November 1967. You should read it, then maybe I'll have some cred with you. "The Barefoot Hero" appears in the anthology Writers On The Wrong Side Of The Road.
"To recap: JFK wanted out of Vietnam entirely by 1965; LBJ: massive escalation by 1965. JFK murdered in LBJ's home state, and in city ruled by LBJ's cronies who made a fortune off the war. If you can't connect the dots, Arthur, well..."
Frank:
“The whole Viet Nam thing is totally fubar. It goes back to the 1800;s with the French colony of French Indo China, which included territories of Laos, Cambodia and Viet Nam.
After WW 2 m the Big One, the French had trouble with their colonies, as did everybody else more or less. The US didn't have colonies, so we didn't have the trouble.There were uprisings and the French put troops in there to contain it. They ran a poor campaign and Eisenhower started to send them help. Ike liked the French for some unknown reason. He treateed De Gaulle like the Pope. Eisenhower escalated the troop support. You didn't see much in the papers.The French pulled out altogether, Kennedy escalated the troops to fill the vacuum. Foriegn campaigns benefit officers, especially 1 st Looies and Captains, it is the patthway to Field Grade- Light Col and Bird, maywe even Brigagier Foriegn wars kill grunts, elevate the officers.
In fact , if JFK wanted the troops out , he could have puklled them - He was the President, Even if the Pentagon got pissed at him, it would not have hurt him. He was the Golden Boy. He could do no wrong.The idea that he wanted them out is just bushwah.
Regarding the dead, any soldier will tell you that you kind of distance yourself emotioanlly from others in hot zones.because you feel like crap if your buddy buys the farm. Feeling like crap is a good way to get killed yourself. You are also tickled silly that you are glad it was somebody else amnd not you, which also makes you feel like crap, but not enough to get you killed too.. If anybody tells you different, they are either lying to you or they were a clerk, not a grunt.
The bottom line in Viet Nam is that NOBODY was determined to win it and get ouit. If they were serious, they would have pattern bombed the border for a 10 mile stretch, pulled concertina wire, set up guard posts along the border, identified the enemy, and when they caught them, hung them and let them swing in the breeze as an example to others.. The military doesn't think that way anymore, not since Black Jack Pershing , Douglas Mac Arthur and George Patton...kill the enemy, preserve the peace.Simple.
Basically, that is the way it is, once you scrub out all the politically correct crap. War sucks. You do your best to win it, because if you lose you are screwed. You bury the dead, you do what you can for the injured and you pray that some field grade asshole who is sitting fat and happy far behind the lines doesn't get you back into the crap you just got out of.
Winston Churchill said that ‘Total extasy is having been shot at and missed.’ The man had a point.”
Fleming:
Arthur: "Completely missed my point, or evaded it. The truth of Vietnam is ugly, I grant you. And it may be painful, and it may hard to face. But it is the truth nonetheless. Defense contractors, the CIA, and every other scourge of the 20th century were making barrels of cash. From p. 184 of Barry & The Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History: ‘Do you want to know why the Vietnam War lasted so long? Because too many people were making too much money.’ If JFK had lived, America would have been out of Vietnam in his second term. Oh, what's the use...that's the problem with America. Too many people believing whatever they damn well please, regardless of the facts. Bye Arthur, and bye to your peculiar version of history."
“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to be to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”
--Major General Smedley Butler, USMC
www.leftlooking.blogspot.com
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
http://m.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/book-blog/penned-in-st-louis-by-jane-henderson-tim-fleming/article_
Arthur Frank, Novelist:
“Timothy: It is not the dead that should concern you. There were 2 categories, black plastic bags, blown to bits in the theater of operations, and aluminum boxes, died later in field hospitals. One went out in a flash, the other went out over tie in great pain. They knew they were dying, it was only a matter of time.
"The ones that you should cry about are the wounded, dismembered, disoriented , permanently scarred to smaller or larger degrees. I got out of it pretty much unscathed, but not a lot of others. A friend of mine who is still screwed up all these years later used to fly medivac helicopters, He doesn't remember much because he used to fly stoned. I asked him how he flew a chopper , which is all hands and feet, constant motion, when he was stoned. He said it was simple. If he wasn't stoned, he was too scared shitless to fly, when he was stoned, basic instincts operated the chopper, he had little to do with it.
"If you really want to know. ask someone who was on the ground over there. If they like you , they might tell you, all these years later. Or maybe not.
It wasn't Bell, it was Sikorsky who made the Huey.If you had a Bell, oit was on;ly good for reconnaoisance and if you were in one, you wwerre probably dead, They were easily shot down and fell out of the sky like a stone.
"It wasn't Ling Temco Voight, it was Ling Temco Vine, which was basically a holding company . They bought out all kinds of smaller manufacturing firms, many of whom made civlian and military supplies. I used to work for LTV in Labor Relations after I got out of yhere service. They went bely up.It was a long time ago, and now we buy all kinds of stuff from people that we used to shoot at. Look in Home Depot.Go figure.
Everybody gives JFK a pass on Viet Nam. It was Jack who sent all kinds of advisors to the Arvn, shipped them all kinds of militray supplies and started drafting Americans into the Army and Navy . Ity was LBJ wjho escalated it further, and It was RMN who gave it an all time , make it or break it push. It failed and he pulled pout in response to political pressure. I was back home by then.
"I was there for every belessed minute of it.It is a brutal business, and if you can't follow the Marine addage, "kill them all and let God sort it out." then you shouldnt be there at all.”
Fleming:
“Lots of misinformation in your posts, Arthur. If you're civil, we can discuss. Cronkite interviewed JFK on Sept. 2, 1963, the evening of the first half-hour news broadcast in history. When asked about Vietnam, JFK said, "It's their war (meaning the South Vietnamese); they're the ones who have to win it." Shortly afterwards, he issued National Security Action Memo 263, calling for complete withdrawal of all advisors and military assistance by 1965. LBJ reversed this the very week he took office.
"The owner of Ling-Temco-VOUGHT was one David Harold Byrd. He is a prominent character in my book. Byrd was a wealthy Dallas businessman who hated JFK. His oil cronies were H.L. Hunt, Murchison, and Richardson. Byrd just happened to own the Texas School Book Depository building, and he was the founder of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol. That's right, incredibly enough, Byrd provided the first and last places of employment for Lee Harvey Oswald. This is no coincidence. Byrd, Hunt and Murchison were LBJ's guardian angels and benefactors. As were Brown & Root and Halliburton. When LBJ ramped Vietnam, his cronies got huge defense contracts. (Bell Helicopter of Dallas/Fort Worth made a fortune off the Huey too.) Rewards for services rendered getting him to the White House.
"It is not the dead that should concern you." Really? You're saying it was better to die than live the rest of your life wounded? Okay. You seem to have a great deal of bitterness about the whole thing, and you resent those who did not go there and yet write about it like they were experts. Be that as it may, I knew plenty of people who were on the ground over there; some came back, some not. The ones who came back are grateful to be alive. I wrote about survivors of the Battle for Hill 875 near Dak To in the Central Highlands, November 1967. You should read it, then maybe I'll have some cred with you. "The Barefoot Hero" appears in the anthology Writers On The Wrong Side Of The Road.
"To recap: JFK wanted out of Vietnam entirely by 1965; LBJ: massive escalation by 1965. JFK murdered in LBJ's home state, and in city ruled by LBJ's cronies who made a fortune off the war. If you can't connect the dots, Arthur, well..."
Frank:
“The whole Viet Nam thing is totally fubar. It goes back to the 1800;s with the French colony of French Indo China, which included territories of Laos, Cambodia and Viet Nam.
After WW 2 m the Big One, the French had trouble with their colonies, as did everybody else more or less. The US didn't have colonies, so we didn't have the trouble.There were uprisings and the French put troops in there to contain it. They ran a poor campaign and Eisenhower started to send them help. Ike liked the French for some unknown reason. He treateed De Gaulle like the Pope. Eisenhower escalated the troop support. You didn't see much in the papers.The French pulled out altogether, Kennedy escalated the troops to fill the vacuum. Foriegn campaigns benefit officers, especially 1 st Looies and Captains, it is the patthway to Field Grade- Light Col and Bird, maywe even Brigagier Foriegn wars kill grunts, elevate the officers.
In fact , if JFK wanted the troops out , he could have puklled them - He was the President, Even if the Pentagon got pissed at him, it would not have hurt him. He was the Golden Boy. He could do no wrong.The idea that he wanted them out is just bushwah.
Regarding the dead, any soldier will tell you that you kind of distance yourself emotioanlly from others in hot zones.because you feel like crap if your buddy buys the farm. Feeling like crap is a good way to get killed yourself. You are also tickled silly that you are glad it was somebody else amnd not you, which also makes you feel like crap, but not enough to get you killed too.. If anybody tells you different, they are either lying to you or they were a clerk, not a grunt.
The bottom line in Viet Nam is that NOBODY was determined to win it and get ouit. If they were serious, they would have pattern bombed the border for a 10 mile stretch, pulled concertina wire, set up guard posts along the border, identified the enemy, and when they caught them, hung them and let them swing in the breeze as an example to others.. The military doesn't think that way anymore, not since Black Jack Pershing , Douglas Mac Arthur and George Patton...kill the enemy, preserve the peace.Simple.
Basically, that is the way it is, once you scrub out all the politically correct crap. War sucks. You do your best to win it, because if you lose you are screwed. You bury the dead, you do what you can for the injured and you pray that some field grade asshole who is sitting fat and happy far behind the lines doesn't get you back into the crap you just got out of.
Winston Churchill said that ‘Total extasy is having been shot at and missed.’ The man had a point.”
Fleming:
Arthur: "Completely missed my point, or evaded it. The truth of Vietnam is ugly, I grant you. And it may be painful, and it may hard to face. But it is the truth nonetheless. Defense contractors, the CIA, and every other scourge of the 20th century were making barrels of cash. From p. 184 of Barry & The Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History: ‘Do you want to know why the Vietnam War lasted so long? Because too many people were making too much money.’ If JFK had lived, America would have been out of Vietnam in his second term. Oh, what's the use...that's the problem with America. Too many people believing whatever they damn well please, regardless of the facts. Bye Arthur, and bye to your peculiar version of history."
“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to be to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”
--Major General Smedley Butler, USMC
www.leftlooking.blogspot.com
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
http://m.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/book-blog/penned-in-st-louis-by-jane-henderson-tim-fleming/article_
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #9: JFK, LBJ and Vietnam
Recently I got caught up in a history discussion with some other writers on a LinkedIn forum. The topic of “What was America’s worst war” was introduced by Dennis Byrne, Chicago Sun Times columnist and author of Madness: The War of 1812.
The material is lengthy, so I will present it in two parts. Part 2 will appear tomorrow in my post etitled JFK Conspiracy Fact #8. I present the discussion unedited and unproofed (typos and all), because it is an illuminating conversation. Misinformation about the “why” of Kennedy’s death is rampant, even among the supposedly historically literate. I will identify the writers as they appear.
Dennis Byrne:
“I suggest that America's worst war was the War of 1812.
Not Iraq? Not Vietnam?”
Timothy Fleming Author of The President’s Mortician: A Story of How and Why JFK’s Murder was Executed and Covered Up:
“Vietnam...pointless and cruel. War profiteers got rich, of course, but no one else benefitted.”
Jack Durish Author/Historical Fiction, Spy Thrillers, Action/Adventure, Short Stories:
“Every war seems pointless and cruel and war profiteers always get rich, but no one else benefited? How about the other communist inspired insurgencies that failed in Southeast Asia because we attempted to hold the line in Vietnam? Thailand. Indonesia. Et al. And we would have succeeded in Vietnam - indeed we succeeded and then walked away - because we were so poorly led politically.”
Fleming:
“So it is America's right and privilege to determine by what system others will decide their fate? 58,000 dead Americans to accomplish what? Prevent SE Asians from determining their own fate? We lost the war. The North overran Saigon in April 1975. Did you miss that chapter? And you seem to ascribe innocent motivations to USA intentions. Naïve.”
Durish:
“No, Timothy, I do not advocate that the US has any special privileges or rights to determine anything for others. Indeed, it's a fool's errand to attempt it (as seen so clearly in Iraq). Especially when we espouse a system (democracy) that we do not ourselves want (well at least those among us who think).
The fact is that the South Vietnamese had made their choice to avoid communism and made that choice clear. The partition of Vietnam was based on that decision. However, the communists were hell bent on expanding their plans for world domination throughout Southeast Asia (and later everywhere else) and invaded South Vietnam. Yes, there were South Vietnamese who joined their cause, but it was never a popular movement in that country.
Now tell me: Where should we have fought that war?”
Fleming:
“Where? Nowhere. It was never our war. It was theirs. We made it our war for profit. It was Bell Helicopter's war. It was Halliburton's war. It was Brown & Root's war. It was Ling- Temco-Vought's war. It was Dow's war. It was General Dynamics war. It was not fought to beat back the communists; it was fought for profit.”
Durish:
“Timothy: What proof do you have of your assertions? Yes, those companies profited from the war. Profits in and of themselves are not evil. (Well, to communists they were evil) However, those profits were merely an outcome of the conflict unless you can provide specific proof that those organizations actually caused the US entry into the war. Where's the proof?
Harry Truman became famous for investigating and uncovering "war profiteering". These were people who "took illegal advantage" of the opportunity. They paid bribes and gave favors to those who insured that they obtained government contracts at excessive profits. However, even in that case, he never found that the proof that they inspired Hitler to invade Europe or the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Likewise, there is no proof that any American organization colluded with Joseph Stalin to strive for world domination or encouraged North Vietnam to invade their southern neighbors.”
Fleming:
“There's not enough room here to provide the evidence. Please read my latest work, "The President's Mortician." http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Sorry for the link and shameless plug, but I have neither the time nor the space here to give you a good answer. Have no doubt, though, that I DO have rock-solid evidence that Vietnam was fought to line the pockets of the wealthiest, most powerful defense contractors...the kind of corporations that can make kings, write the laws, control the information, and subvert democracy for their own means.”
Durish:
“Timothy: Out of respect, I will put your book on my TBR pile. Unfortunately, it is a huge and terrifying thing. Although, I must admit that I've read evidence purporting to prove the same case (maybe different from yours, maybe the same) and all ranks up there with other conspiracy theories alongside such venerable examples as the "Grassy Knoll" conspiracy or the fact that George Bush had explosives planted in the WTC Towers and had it detonated in time with holographic projections of airlines crashing into them. Alternatively, I have read credible history regarding the events we've been speaking of.and found perfectly reasonable explanations for our involvement in Vietnam.
Furthermore, I have studied the history of Korea and Cuba (of which I've written novels) and see the same diplomatic bumbling as evidenced in all US attempts to steer foreign relations. My research has led me to wish on occasion that some secret cabal would take over our relations with other nations. They couldn't do worse than the State Department and would be entitled to some reasonable profits for their efforts.”
Fleming:
"Fair enough, Jack. It is a terrifying thing, but I want to know my real history...not the crap we've been fed to assuage or deepest suspicions. As Thoreau said, "More than love, than riches, than fame. give me the truth!"
Nice talking to you...and please send the link for your Cuba novel."
The material is lengthy, so I will present it in two parts. Part 2 will appear tomorrow in my post etitled JFK Conspiracy Fact #8. I present the discussion unedited and unproofed (typos and all), because it is an illuminating conversation. Misinformation about the “why” of Kennedy’s death is rampant, even among the supposedly historically literate. I will identify the writers as they appear.
Dennis Byrne:
“I suggest that America's worst war was the War of 1812.
Not Iraq? Not Vietnam?”
Timothy Fleming Author of The President’s Mortician: A Story of How and Why JFK’s Murder was Executed and Covered Up:
“Vietnam...pointless and cruel. War profiteers got rich, of course, but no one else benefitted.”
Jack Durish Author/Historical Fiction, Spy Thrillers, Action/Adventure, Short Stories:
“Every war seems pointless and cruel and war profiteers always get rich, but no one else benefited? How about the other communist inspired insurgencies that failed in Southeast Asia because we attempted to hold the line in Vietnam? Thailand. Indonesia. Et al. And we would have succeeded in Vietnam - indeed we succeeded and then walked away - because we were so poorly led politically.”
Fleming:
“So it is America's right and privilege to determine by what system others will decide their fate? 58,000 dead Americans to accomplish what? Prevent SE Asians from determining their own fate? We lost the war. The North overran Saigon in April 1975. Did you miss that chapter? And you seem to ascribe innocent motivations to USA intentions. Naïve.”
Durish:
“No, Timothy, I do not advocate that the US has any special privileges or rights to determine anything for others. Indeed, it's a fool's errand to attempt it (as seen so clearly in Iraq). Especially when we espouse a system (democracy) that we do not ourselves want (well at least those among us who think).
The fact is that the South Vietnamese had made their choice to avoid communism and made that choice clear. The partition of Vietnam was based on that decision. However, the communists were hell bent on expanding their plans for world domination throughout Southeast Asia (and later everywhere else) and invaded South Vietnam. Yes, there were South Vietnamese who joined their cause, but it was never a popular movement in that country.
Now tell me: Where should we have fought that war?”
Fleming:
“Where? Nowhere. It was never our war. It was theirs. We made it our war for profit. It was Bell Helicopter's war. It was Halliburton's war. It was Brown & Root's war. It was Ling- Temco-Vought's war. It was Dow's war. It was General Dynamics war. It was not fought to beat back the communists; it was fought for profit.”
Durish:
“Timothy: What proof do you have of your assertions? Yes, those companies profited from the war. Profits in and of themselves are not evil. (Well, to communists they were evil) However, those profits were merely an outcome of the conflict unless you can provide specific proof that those organizations actually caused the US entry into the war. Where's the proof?
Harry Truman became famous for investigating and uncovering "war profiteering". These were people who "took illegal advantage" of the opportunity. They paid bribes and gave favors to those who insured that they obtained government contracts at excessive profits. However, even in that case, he never found that the proof that they inspired Hitler to invade Europe or the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Likewise, there is no proof that any American organization colluded with Joseph Stalin to strive for world domination or encouraged North Vietnam to invade their southern neighbors.”
Fleming:
“There's not enough room here to provide the evidence. Please read my latest work, "The President's Mortician." http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Sorry for the link and shameless plug, but I have neither the time nor the space here to give you a good answer. Have no doubt, though, that I DO have rock-solid evidence that Vietnam was fought to line the pockets of the wealthiest, most powerful defense contractors...the kind of corporations that can make kings, write the laws, control the information, and subvert democracy for their own means.”
Durish:
“Timothy: Out of respect, I will put your book on my TBR pile. Unfortunately, it is a huge and terrifying thing. Although, I must admit that I've read evidence purporting to prove the same case (maybe different from yours, maybe the same) and all ranks up there with other conspiracy theories alongside such venerable examples as the "Grassy Knoll" conspiracy or the fact that George Bush had explosives planted in the WTC Towers and had it detonated in time with holographic projections of airlines crashing into them. Alternatively, I have read credible history regarding the events we've been speaking of.and found perfectly reasonable explanations for our involvement in Vietnam.
Furthermore, I have studied the history of Korea and Cuba (of which I've written novels) and see the same diplomatic bumbling as evidenced in all US attempts to steer foreign relations. My research has led me to wish on occasion that some secret cabal would take over our relations with other nations. They couldn't do worse than the State Department and would be entitled to some reasonable profits for their efforts.”
Fleming:
"Fair enough, Jack. It is a terrifying thing, but I want to know my real history...not the crap we've been fed to assuage or deepest suspicions. As Thoreau said, "More than love, than riches, than fame. give me the truth!"
Nice talking to you...and please send the link for your Cuba novel."
Monday, November 11, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #10: Flying the LCAP Way; And Killing JFK
What follows is an excerpt from my latest book, The President’s Mortician: A Story of How and Why JFK’s Murder Was Executed and Covered Up:
“Running the country and the world required that the CIA raise its own money in order that its operations be kept secret. Using more than its rationed share of public funds would have risked exposure. Even though the Empire’s millionaires chipped in for big events, like the murder of a sitting U.S. president, the CIA had to be mostly self-sufficient. It did this by, among other things, selling narcotics and running guns. And in order to sell drugs it needed pilots who could fly all over the world to make pick-ups and drop-offs. So the CIA came up with an ingenious idea—it would recruit young, impressionable, adventure-seeking cadets from the Civil Air Patrol who aspired to a life, whether for the US Air Force or not, of daring and stealth. The ideal recruit would also lack morals or a social conscience, or, in the alternative, would be a loner, willing to commit abnormal or questionable acts without resistance.
“An unusually high number of Louisiana Civil Air Patrol cadets became psychopathic killers, CIA pilots, or gullible, low-level fall guys. Among them were John Liggett, Charles Rogers, Lee Harvey Oswald, Barry Seal, and James Bath. In order to facilitate its recruitment of LCAP cadets, the CIA needed mesmeric leaders who had sway over young men. It found one such leader in David Ferrie, a defrocked priest, a skilled pilot, a hypnotist, and a pedophile. Ferrie, we now know, was well acquainted with numerous players in the JFK assassination drama, including Lee Harvey Oswald. While serving in a Louisiana Civil Air Patrol unit in 1955, Oswald was recruited into the CIA by ‘Captain’ Ferrie. While Oswald did not become a drug-running pilot, there were plenty of other LCAP members who did, like Barry Seal and Charles Rogers.
“Seal, whose incredible life is well-chronicled in Daniel Hopsicker’s stunning book, Barry and the Boys, became an adept pilot at a very young age under Ferrie’s tutelage. Subsequently, Seal was entrusted by the CIA to fly drugs out of Southeast Asia, Central America, and South America; guns in and out of troubled nations across the globe; and operatives to secret CIA missions whenever it needed a democratic or socialist leader overthrown. Hopsicker writes, ‘[Seal] was a high-rolling mercenary, a rogue pilot, an infamous gun-runner, the chief Mena narcotics trafficker, a fast-talking, self-assured, 300-pound pilot and Special Forces veteran, a notorious drug smuggler, a mystery man, and the most valuable informant in DEA history.’ Seal, according to Hopsicker, was also something else—one of the getaway pilots flying out of Dallas after JFK was killed.
“Another LCAP alumnus who became notorious was Texas native Charles Rogers, CIA pilot and murdering psychopath. Rogers was as brilliant as he was disturbed. A graduate of the University of Houston, Rogers worked as a seismologist for Shell Oil in the 1950s before joining the CIA. It is a seismologist’s job to determine if the underlying rock or substrata of any particular area is fertile ground to drill for oil or natural gas. This was and is vital information to oil companies; thus, seismologists and geologists are in great demand. But that kind of life was apparently not adventurous enough for Charles. So in 1956, he applied with the CIA and was interviewed in the offices of Shell Oil’s law firm, Fulbright-Jaworski (yes, the Leon Jaworski of Watergate fame). It was most likely George DeMohrenschildt who interviewed Rogers for the CIA. A long-time CIA asset and, later, Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler in Dallas, DeMohrenschildt was also an expert in knowing where to drill for oil. He had an advanced degree in petroleum engineering, and he was associated with many Texas oil millionaires, including H.L. Hunt. Thus, it made sense that he would be the one to assess Rogers’ worth as an intelligence asset.
“On DeMohrenschildt’s recommendation, and with a good word from David Ferrie, Rogers was hired by the ‘Company.’ He was assigned to Latin America, where his piloting experience came in handy. As an avowed anti-communist, Rogers enthusiastically flew men and weapons into and out of Guatemala and points south in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion.
“When the CIA began planning its next big covert action, Rogers became a central player. What his exact role was is unclear, but Rogers was photographed in Dealey Plaza, the JFK kill zone, on November 22, 1963. Several pictures snapped by news photographers on the scene show three ‘tramps’ being led away from the scene of the crime by men dressed as Dallas police officers. One of the tramps bears a remarkable resemblance to Charles Rogers. In fact, a Houston police department forensic artist named Lois Gibson is convinced that Charles Rogers is one of the tramps.
“One James R. Bath turned out to be another ‘illustrious’ grad of Byrd’s Civil Air Patrol. He served in his CAP unit in the mid-1950s, about the time Oswald, Ferrie, Seal and the other CIA recruits were active members. But it’s what he accomplished after his CAP training that makes him notorious. Bath began a lucrative CIA career sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, after leaving active duty with the Air Force. He joined the Texas Air National Guard in 1965 where he met his great pal, George W. Bush, just as the Vietnam War was escalating. The Air National Guard was a great hideout for those pilots who wanted to avoid combat. According to author Pete Brewton, Bush claimed that he and Bath never went into business together; however, ‘…records filed in a Houston lawsuit involving Bath contradict the [Bush’s] son: they show Bath was an investor in a Bush oil and gas enterprise.’
“Another mysterious and unique individual who served in the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol with Ferrie and Oswald was a man named John Liggett, a brilliant, quirky guy who became a master mortician/reconstruction artist. Little is known about his days in LCAP, except that he was almost certainly recruited into espionage and criminal work by Ferrie. In the early 1960s Liggett was working at Restland Funeral Home in Dallas where he bragged that he was the best at rebuilding injured and deformed bodies. Even his colleagues admitted that he was quite skilled in this area. He rebuilt skulls, eye sockets, noses, ears, and any feature necessary to make the deceased look whole again. Mourners at the funeral home often raved about his abilities, abilities that came in handy when the mob or the CIA needed to cover up the cause of someone’s death. But Liggett was more than just a mortician; he was a killer, and, like Charles Rogers, he had a preference for bludgeoning his victims with a hammer. The Dallas police caught up to Liggett in 1974, when he was arrested for the attempted murder of Dorothy Peck, wife of Jay Bert Peck. Jay Bert Peck was Lyndon Johnson’s cousin, and according to some, bore a remarkable resemblance to LBJ. Liggett never divulged his reasons for viciously beating Peck and burning her home. The Dallas Times Herald reported that ‘…a suspect [Liggett]…will be questioned by Dallas police about the bizarre sexual mutilation slaying of a legal secretary whose apartment was set afire to conceal the homicide.’ It seems Liggett’s modus operandi was known to the local police.
“To those who were close to him at the time, Liggett’s role in the JFK scenario is no less mysterious than it is memorable. On November 22, 1963, Liggett was officiating the funeral of his wife’s aunt at Restland Funeral Home, when he was suddenly called away from the graveside. He returned after a few minutes to tell his wife that Kennedy had been shot and he had to go to Parkland Hospital. When Lois asked him if Restland was going to get the job, John replied that he did not know but that she should not try to contact him. This was quite unusual. Normally when Liggett was on a job or on call, his wife and kids visited him at the funeral home. Never before had he instructed them to stay away. Equally as strange, Liggett did not return home until the next day. When he arrived he seemed worn and disheveled, quite unlike his customarily cool comportment and dapper dress. He quickly ordered Lois and the kids to pack up; they were going to hit the road.”
Follow me on Twitter @tpfleming
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
http://m.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/book-blog/penned-in-st-louis-by-jane-henderson-tim-fleming/article_
“Running the country and the world required that the CIA raise its own money in order that its operations be kept secret. Using more than its rationed share of public funds would have risked exposure. Even though the Empire’s millionaires chipped in for big events, like the murder of a sitting U.S. president, the CIA had to be mostly self-sufficient. It did this by, among other things, selling narcotics and running guns. And in order to sell drugs it needed pilots who could fly all over the world to make pick-ups and drop-offs. So the CIA came up with an ingenious idea—it would recruit young, impressionable, adventure-seeking cadets from the Civil Air Patrol who aspired to a life, whether for the US Air Force or not, of daring and stealth. The ideal recruit would also lack morals or a social conscience, or, in the alternative, would be a loner, willing to commit abnormal or questionable acts without resistance.
“An unusually high number of Louisiana Civil Air Patrol cadets became psychopathic killers, CIA pilots, or gullible, low-level fall guys. Among them were John Liggett, Charles Rogers, Lee Harvey Oswald, Barry Seal, and James Bath. In order to facilitate its recruitment of LCAP cadets, the CIA needed mesmeric leaders who had sway over young men. It found one such leader in David Ferrie, a defrocked priest, a skilled pilot, a hypnotist, and a pedophile. Ferrie, we now know, was well acquainted with numerous players in the JFK assassination drama, including Lee Harvey Oswald. While serving in a Louisiana Civil Air Patrol unit in 1955, Oswald was recruited into the CIA by ‘Captain’ Ferrie. While Oswald did not become a drug-running pilot, there were plenty of other LCAP members who did, like Barry Seal and Charles Rogers.
“Seal, whose incredible life is well-chronicled in Daniel Hopsicker’s stunning book, Barry and the Boys, became an adept pilot at a very young age under Ferrie’s tutelage. Subsequently, Seal was entrusted by the CIA to fly drugs out of Southeast Asia, Central America, and South America; guns in and out of troubled nations across the globe; and operatives to secret CIA missions whenever it needed a democratic or socialist leader overthrown. Hopsicker writes, ‘[Seal] was a high-rolling mercenary, a rogue pilot, an infamous gun-runner, the chief Mena narcotics trafficker, a fast-talking, self-assured, 300-pound pilot and Special Forces veteran, a notorious drug smuggler, a mystery man, and the most valuable informant in DEA history.’ Seal, according to Hopsicker, was also something else—one of the getaway pilots flying out of Dallas after JFK was killed.
“Another LCAP alumnus who became notorious was Texas native Charles Rogers, CIA pilot and murdering psychopath. Rogers was as brilliant as he was disturbed. A graduate of the University of Houston, Rogers worked as a seismologist for Shell Oil in the 1950s before joining the CIA. It is a seismologist’s job to determine if the underlying rock or substrata of any particular area is fertile ground to drill for oil or natural gas. This was and is vital information to oil companies; thus, seismologists and geologists are in great demand. But that kind of life was apparently not adventurous enough for Charles. So in 1956, he applied with the CIA and was interviewed in the offices of Shell Oil’s law firm, Fulbright-Jaworski (yes, the Leon Jaworski of Watergate fame). It was most likely George DeMohrenschildt who interviewed Rogers for the CIA. A long-time CIA asset and, later, Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler in Dallas, DeMohrenschildt was also an expert in knowing where to drill for oil. He had an advanced degree in petroleum engineering, and he was associated with many Texas oil millionaires, including H.L. Hunt. Thus, it made sense that he would be the one to assess Rogers’ worth as an intelligence asset.
“On DeMohrenschildt’s recommendation, and with a good word from David Ferrie, Rogers was hired by the ‘Company.’ He was assigned to Latin America, where his piloting experience came in handy. As an avowed anti-communist, Rogers enthusiastically flew men and weapons into and out of Guatemala and points south in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion.
“When the CIA began planning its next big covert action, Rogers became a central player. What his exact role was is unclear, but Rogers was photographed in Dealey Plaza, the JFK kill zone, on November 22, 1963. Several pictures snapped by news photographers on the scene show three ‘tramps’ being led away from the scene of the crime by men dressed as Dallas police officers. One of the tramps bears a remarkable resemblance to Charles Rogers. In fact, a Houston police department forensic artist named Lois Gibson is convinced that Charles Rogers is one of the tramps.
“One James R. Bath turned out to be another ‘illustrious’ grad of Byrd’s Civil Air Patrol. He served in his CAP unit in the mid-1950s, about the time Oswald, Ferrie, Seal and the other CIA recruits were active members. But it’s what he accomplished after his CAP training that makes him notorious. Bath began a lucrative CIA career sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, after leaving active duty with the Air Force. He joined the Texas Air National Guard in 1965 where he met his great pal, George W. Bush, just as the Vietnam War was escalating. The Air National Guard was a great hideout for those pilots who wanted to avoid combat. According to author Pete Brewton, Bush claimed that he and Bath never went into business together; however, ‘…records filed in a Houston lawsuit involving Bath contradict the [Bush’s] son: they show Bath was an investor in a Bush oil and gas enterprise.’
“Another mysterious and unique individual who served in the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol with Ferrie and Oswald was a man named John Liggett, a brilliant, quirky guy who became a master mortician/reconstruction artist. Little is known about his days in LCAP, except that he was almost certainly recruited into espionage and criminal work by Ferrie. In the early 1960s Liggett was working at Restland Funeral Home in Dallas where he bragged that he was the best at rebuilding injured and deformed bodies. Even his colleagues admitted that he was quite skilled in this area. He rebuilt skulls, eye sockets, noses, ears, and any feature necessary to make the deceased look whole again. Mourners at the funeral home often raved about his abilities, abilities that came in handy when the mob or the CIA needed to cover up the cause of someone’s death. But Liggett was more than just a mortician; he was a killer, and, like Charles Rogers, he had a preference for bludgeoning his victims with a hammer. The Dallas police caught up to Liggett in 1974, when he was arrested for the attempted murder of Dorothy Peck, wife of Jay Bert Peck. Jay Bert Peck was Lyndon Johnson’s cousin, and according to some, bore a remarkable resemblance to LBJ. Liggett never divulged his reasons for viciously beating Peck and burning her home. The Dallas Times Herald reported that ‘…a suspect [Liggett]…will be questioned by Dallas police about the bizarre sexual mutilation slaying of a legal secretary whose apartment was set afire to conceal the homicide.’ It seems Liggett’s modus operandi was known to the local police.
“To those who were close to him at the time, Liggett’s role in the JFK scenario is no less mysterious than it is memorable. On November 22, 1963, Liggett was officiating the funeral of his wife’s aunt at Restland Funeral Home, when he was suddenly called away from the graveside. He returned after a few minutes to tell his wife that Kennedy had been shot and he had to go to Parkland Hospital. When Lois asked him if Restland was going to get the job, John replied that he did not know but that she should not try to contact him. This was quite unusual. Normally when Liggett was on a job or on call, his wife and kids visited him at the funeral home. Never before had he instructed them to stay away. Equally as strange, Liggett did not return home until the next day. When he arrived he seemed worn and disheveled, quite unlike his customarily cool comportment and dapper dress. He quickly ordered Lois and the kids to pack up; they were going to hit the road.”
Follow me on Twitter @tpfleming
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
http://m.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/book-blog/penned-in-st-louis-by-jane-henderson-tim-fleming/article_
Sunday, November 10, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #11: Read My Interview in Today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The JFK assassination is the focus of the November 10 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Arts & Entertainment page. In the books section I am interviewed by the Post's book editor, Jane Henderson. She has a regular feature, in question and answer format, which highlights St. Louis authors. Here is a reprint of the article:
"Penned in St. Louis by Jane Henderson:"
Tim Fleming, 60, grew up in an Irish Catholic family and began reading books about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination when he was just a kid. “It’s been a lifelong obsession,” he says. Now a retired English teacher who lives in O’Fallon, Ill., Fleming uses history as a backdrop for his novel “The President’s Mortician” (Neverland, 242 pages, $16.95).
The “mortician” of the title is John Liggett, a real person. Why is he important? • I believe he was involved in the postmortem alteration of JFK’s wounds to disguise the true nature of how JFK was murdered. How, where and when he did this is the central thesis of “The President’s Mortician.”
If he helped cover up facts about the shooting, why haven’t historians paid more attention to him and any survivors who knew him? • His work was done in secret, and few people even knew of his existence. I was lucky enough to stumble upon a close relative of Liggett, who told me his story.
You also send Liggett on a fictional trip to St. Louis? • Yes, Liggett was not only a master mortician, but also a contract killer who was jailed for murders he committed in Dallas. I have him commit a fictional murder in St. Louis to bring the narrative close to the area I know best.
Read more at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
"Penned in St. Louis by Jane Henderson:"
Tim Fleming, 60, grew up in an Irish Catholic family and began reading books about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination when he was just a kid. “It’s been a lifelong obsession,” he says. Now a retired English teacher who lives in O’Fallon, Ill., Fleming uses history as a backdrop for his novel “The President’s Mortician” (Neverland, 242 pages, $16.95).
The “mortician” of the title is John Liggett, a real person. Why is he important? • I believe he was involved in the postmortem alteration of JFK’s wounds to disguise the true nature of how JFK was murdered. How, where and when he did this is the central thesis of “The President’s Mortician.”
If he helped cover up facts about the shooting, why haven’t historians paid more attention to him and any survivors who knew him? • His work was done in secret, and few people even knew of his existence. I was lucky enough to stumble upon a close relative of Liggett, who told me his story.
You also send Liggett on a fictional trip to St. Louis? • Yes, Liggett was not only a master mortician, but also a contract killer who was jailed for murders he committed in Dallas. I have him commit a fictional murder in St. Louis to bring the narrative close to the area I know best.
Read more at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Saturday, November 9, 2013
JFK Conspiracy Fact #12: The “Why” is Explained in This Excerpt From My Book The President’s Mortician
“In the time that has passed since the 35th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was murdered, the topic has been addressed by hundreds of books, countless documentaries, numerous investigations—both public and private, and even a courtroom battle. The evidence in the case has been hashed and re-hashed many times over, yet the years (nearly 20 now) and the analysis overkill have not dulled the world’s fascination with the subject. Nor has time diminished America’s conviction that a conspiracy was afoot to take Kennedy’s life on November 22, 1963. Since the early 1970s the numbers have remained consistent—three in every four citizens believe that either accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone, or he did not act at all…rather, he was likely just the “fall guy” or the patsy. Moreover, among people 27-39 years of age as of 1980, upwards of 85% were pro-conspiracy. In other words, all reasonable people with even a passing knowledge of the events and aftermath of JFK’s assassination suspect that an organized, far-reaching plot took the president’s life that day in Dallas.
“Who killed JFK? The easy answer is that rogue CIA operatives planned, orchestrated and covered up the murder. But this solution is too pat, too simplistic. For it does not take into account the other elements that played their parts in the drama—Texas oilmen, Mafia associates, future presidents and corrupt politicians, ambitious lawyers, Secret Service traitors, the military hierarchy, and wealthy defense contractors. Taken together, these elements form a Secret American Empire.
“Born of the anti-communist fervor which inflamed the nation in the 1940s and ‘50s; fed by the enormous wealth of oil and weapons makers; protected by ambitious, greedy public servants; and enforced by violent, pathological criminals, this Secret American Empire possesses what amounts to its own foreign policy, its own air force, its own militia, its own economy, and its own rules. It is not subject to the laws of the land. It is rich and powerful enough to operate outside the laws that restrict all the rest of us. As Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, one of its high ministers, once said, ‘I am the richest man in the world. I can do any damn thing I want to do.’ This empire existed before JFK’s murder, but it had never before pulled off anything so outrageous and brazen as the crime it committed on November 22, 1963. In fact, some of the participants feared for their own apprehension and left the country before and after the execution. Their fears were unfounded, however, because the fix was in. The new president, Lyndon Johnson, was the Empire’s boy, and soon he cut off all legitimate investigations and appointed his own fraudulent commission made up of the Empire’s most ardent protectors. Once the perpetrators knew they were safe, America became their playground. They were free to romp through the public trust, trample the Constitution, start an unnecessary and catastrophic war, have free reign over domestic and foreign policy, and invoke immunity from crimes committed. The JFK assassination taught the Empire that it could get away with anything, and in the years subsequent to 1963 it has coalesced its power and consolidated its reign over democracy. Its candidates have been elected, by hook or crook; its power base has expanded; its wealth has grown unchecked. It has smugly, almost defiantly, moved on to evermore audacious, outlandish covert operations—the removal of Richard Nixon from office, the subversion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the narcotic trafficking necessary to fund covert operations, and the overthrow of foreign governments. In short, the Secret American Empire, while waving the flag in our faces and clamoring to high heaven about the land of the free and the home of democracy, has done everything it can to undo the processes and the restraints that would impede it under a true democratic system. We are living in, and have been since 1963, a neo-fascist oligarchic state, where only wealth and power matter, where the ways and means of a free press are stifled, where the people are propagandized by disinformation and half-truths, where our elected officials represent their own greedy interests and the interests of the Secret Empire, rather than the interests of those who elected them.
“Would it have been different if JFK had lived? Emphatically, yes! Kennedy, a conventional cold warrior when he took the oath of office, had transformed into a startling advocate of world peace by 1963. His landmark address at American University, in June 1963, laid out a revolutionary vision of America and its place in the world, one that made him a lot of deadly enemies. A world without endless war? An America free of what Eisenhower called ‘…the unwanted influence of the military-industrial complex’? A pullback on the power of the intelligence community? JFK became a marked man. He wanted to pull us completely out of Vietnam. He wanted to negotiate a settlement to the Cold War and live in peaceful co-existence with the communist world. The Secret Empire was not going to tolerate such a radical paradigm shift in domestic and foreign affairs. That was the entire point of the assassination.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Follow me on Twitter @tpfleming
“Who killed JFK? The easy answer is that rogue CIA operatives planned, orchestrated and covered up the murder. But this solution is too pat, too simplistic. For it does not take into account the other elements that played their parts in the drama—Texas oilmen, Mafia associates, future presidents and corrupt politicians, ambitious lawyers, Secret Service traitors, the military hierarchy, and wealthy defense contractors. Taken together, these elements form a Secret American Empire.
“Born of the anti-communist fervor which inflamed the nation in the 1940s and ‘50s; fed by the enormous wealth of oil and weapons makers; protected by ambitious, greedy public servants; and enforced by violent, pathological criminals, this Secret American Empire possesses what amounts to its own foreign policy, its own air force, its own militia, its own economy, and its own rules. It is not subject to the laws of the land. It is rich and powerful enough to operate outside the laws that restrict all the rest of us. As Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, one of its high ministers, once said, ‘I am the richest man in the world. I can do any damn thing I want to do.’ This empire existed before JFK’s murder, but it had never before pulled off anything so outrageous and brazen as the crime it committed on November 22, 1963. In fact, some of the participants feared for their own apprehension and left the country before and after the execution. Their fears were unfounded, however, because the fix was in. The new president, Lyndon Johnson, was the Empire’s boy, and soon he cut off all legitimate investigations and appointed his own fraudulent commission made up of the Empire’s most ardent protectors. Once the perpetrators knew they were safe, America became their playground. They were free to romp through the public trust, trample the Constitution, start an unnecessary and catastrophic war, have free reign over domestic and foreign policy, and invoke immunity from crimes committed. The JFK assassination taught the Empire that it could get away with anything, and in the years subsequent to 1963 it has coalesced its power and consolidated its reign over democracy. Its candidates have been elected, by hook or crook; its power base has expanded; its wealth has grown unchecked. It has smugly, almost defiantly, moved on to evermore audacious, outlandish covert operations—the removal of Richard Nixon from office, the subversion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the narcotic trafficking necessary to fund covert operations, and the overthrow of foreign governments. In short, the Secret American Empire, while waving the flag in our faces and clamoring to high heaven about the land of the free and the home of democracy, has done everything it can to undo the processes and the restraints that would impede it under a true democratic system. We are living in, and have been since 1963, a neo-fascist oligarchic state, where only wealth and power matter, where the ways and means of a free press are stifled, where the people are propagandized by disinformation and half-truths, where our elected officials represent their own greedy interests and the interests of the Secret Empire, rather than the interests of those who elected them.
“Would it have been different if JFK had lived? Emphatically, yes! Kennedy, a conventional cold warrior when he took the oath of office, had transformed into a startling advocate of world peace by 1963. His landmark address at American University, in June 1963, laid out a revolutionary vision of America and its place in the world, one that made him a lot of deadly enemies. A world without endless war? An America free of what Eisenhower called ‘…the unwanted influence of the military-industrial complex’? A pullback on the power of the intelligence community? JFK became a marked man. He wanted to pull us completely out of Vietnam. He wanted to negotiate a settlement to the Cold War and live in peaceful co-existence with the communist world. The Secret Empire was not going to tolerate such a radical paradigm shift in domestic and foreign affairs. That was the entire point of the assassination.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN/098882907X
Follow me on Twitter @tpfleming
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