JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

October 31, 2017

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

Review of James Douglass’ Book
By Edward Curtin
Global Research, October 31, 2017
https://www.globalresearch.ca/jfk-and-the-unspeakable-why-he-died-and-why-it-matters/16273

This article was first published by Global research in November 2009.

Despite a treasure-trove of new information having emerged over the last forty-six years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. There are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. Both groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred almost a half-century ago, so let’s move on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as James Douglass shows in his extraordinary book, JFK andthe Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Simon & Schuster,2008). It is clearly one of the best books ever written on the Kennedy assassination and deserves a vast readership. It is bound to roil the waters of complacency that have submerged the truth of this key event in modern American history.

It’s not often that the intersection of history and contemporary events pose such a startling and chilling lesson as does the contemplation of the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed with the situations faced by President Obama today. So far, at least, Obama’s behavior has mirrored Johnson’s, not Kennedy’s, as he has escalated the war in Afghanistan by 34,000. One can’t but help think that the thought of JFK’s fate might not be far from his mind as he contemplates his next move in Afghanistan.

Douglass presents a very compelling argument that Kennedy was killed by “unspeakable” (the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s term) forces within the U.S. national security state because of his conversion from a cold warrior into a man of peace. He argues, using a wealth of newly uncovered information, that JFK had become a major threat to the burgeoning military-industrial complex and had to be eliminated through a conspiracy planned by the CIA – “the CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it” – not by a crazed individual, the Mafia, or disgruntled anti-Castro Cubans, though some of these may have been used in the execution of the plot.

Why and by whom? These are the key questions. If it can be shown that Kennedy did, in fact, turn emphatically away from war as a solution to political conflict; did, in fact, as he was being urged by his military and intelligence advisers to up the ante and use violence, rejected such advice and turned toward peaceful solutions, then, a motive for his elimination is established. If, furthermore, it can be clearly shown that Oswald was a dupe in a deadly game and that forces within the military/intelligence apparatus were involved with him from start to finish, then the crime is solved, not by fingering an individual who may have given the order for the murder or pulled the trigger, but by showing that the coordination of the assassination had to involve U.S. intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA . Douglass does both, providing highly detailed and intricately linked evidence based on his own research and a vast array of the best scholarship.

We are then faced with the contemporary relevance, and since we know that every president since JFK has refused to confront the growth of the national security state and its call for violence, one can logically assume a message was sent and heeded. In this regard, it is not incidental that former twenty-seven year CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, in a recent interview, warned of the “two CIAs,” one the analytic arm providing straight scoop to presidents, the other the covert action arm which operates according to its own rules. “Let me leave you with this thought,” he told his interviewer, “and that is that I think Panetta (current CIA Director), and to a degree Obama, are afraid – I never thought I’d hear myself saying this – I think they are afraid of the CIA.” He then recommended Douglass’ book, “It’s very well-researched and his conclusion is very alarming.” [1]

Let’s look at the history marshaled by Douglass to support his thesis.

First, Kennedy, who took office in January 1961 as somewhat of a Cold Warrior, was quickly set up by the CIA to take the blame for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. The CIA and generals wanted to oust Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. Kennedy refused to go along and the invasion was roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy. But it was all a sham.

Though Douglass doesn’t mention it, and few Americans know it, classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had learned of the date of the invasion more than a week in advance, had informed Castro, but – and here is a startling fact that should make people’s hair stand on end – never told the President. [2] The CIA knew the invasion was doomed before the fact but went ahead with it anyway. Why? So they could and did afterwards blame JFK for the failure.

This treachery set the stage for events to come. For his part, sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (as in a bad joke, later to be named to the Warren Commission) and his assistant General Charles Cabell (whose brother Earle Cabell, to make a bad joke absurd, was the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed) and said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Not the sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within a government whose power was growing exponentially.

The stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, in opposition to nearly all his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in U.S. foreign policy.

In 1961, despite the Joint Chief’s demand to put troops into Laos, Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman, his representative at the Geneva Conference, “Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.”

Also in 1961, he refused to concede to the insistence of his top generals to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in Berlin and Southeast Asia. Walking out of a meeting with top military advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, “These people are crazy.”

He refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Afterwards he told his friend John Kenneth Galbraith that “I never had the slightest intention of doing so.”

Then in June 1963 he gave an incredible speech at American University in which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end of the Cold War and the “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” and movement toward “general and complete disarmament.”

A few months later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev.

In October 1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from Vietnam by the end of the year and a total withdrawal by the end of 1965.[3]

All this he did while secretly engaging in negotiations with Khrushchev via the KGB , Norman Cousins, and Pope John XXIII , and with Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist Jean Daniel. In an interview with Daniel on October 24, 1963 Kennedy said, “I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.” Such sentiments were anathema, shall we say treasonous, to the CIA and top generals.

These clear refusals to go to war and his decision to engage in private, back-channel communications with Cold War enemies marked Kennedy as an enemy of the national security state. They were on a collision course. As Douglass and others have pointed out, every move Kennedy made was anti-war. This, Douglass argues, was because JFK, a war hero, had been deeply affected by the horror of war and was severely shaken by how close the world had come to destruction during the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout his life he had been touched by death and had come to appreciate the fragility of life. Once in the Presidency, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peace maker. He came to see the generals who advised him as devoid of the tragic sense of life and as hell-bent on war. And he was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA. On numerous occasions he spoke of the possibility of a military coup d’etat against him. On the night before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it.” And we know that nobody did try to stop it because they had planned it.

But who killed him?

Douglass presents a formidable amount of evidence, some old and some new, against the CIA and covert action agencies within the national security state, and does so in such a logical and persuasive way that any fair-minded reader cannot help but be taken aback; stunned, really. And he links this evidence directly to JFK’s actions on behalf of peace.

He knows, however, that to truly convince he must break a “conspiracy of silence that would envelop our government, our media, our academic institutions, and virtually our entire society from November 22, 1963, to the present.” This “unspeakable,” this hypnotic “collective denial of the obvious,” is sustained by a mass-media whose repeated message is that the truth about such significant events is beyond our grasp, that we will have to drink the waters of uncertainty forever. As for those who don’t, they are relegated to the status of conspiracy nuts.

Fear and uncertainty block a true appraisal of the assassination – that plus the thought that it no longer matters.

It matters. For we know that no president since JFK has dared to buck the military-intelligence-industrial complex. We know a Pax Americana has spread its tentacles across the globe with U.S. military in over 130 countries on 750 plus bases. We know that the amount of blood and money spent on wars and war preparations has risen astronomically.

There is a great deal we know and even more that we don’t want to know, or at the very least, investigate.

If Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not “a lone-nut” assassin. Douglass marshals a wealth of evidence to show how from the very start Oswald was moved around the globe like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters. As he begins to trace Oswald’s path, Douglass asks this question: “Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?” After serving as a U.S. Marine at the CIA’s U-2 spy plane operating base in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher than top secret but a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission), Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union. After denouncing the U.S., working at a Soviet factory in Minsk , and taking a Russian wife – during which time Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union – he returned to the U.S. with a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow, only to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by a man, Spas T. Raikin, a prominent anti-communist with extensive intelligence connections, recommended by the State Department. He passed through immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted, moved to Fort Worth, Texas where , at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was met and befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset. De Mohrenschildt got him a job four days later at a graphic arts company that worked on maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy missions over Cuba. Oswald was then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt who, in 1977, on the day he revealed he had contacted Oswald for the CIA and was to meet with the House Select Committee on Assasinations’ Gaeton Fonzi, allegedly committed suicide. Oswald then moved to New Orleans in April 1963 where got a job at the Reilly Coffee Company owned by CIA-affiliated William Reilly. The Reilly Coffee Company was located in close vicinity to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence offices and a stone’s throw from the office of Guy Bannister, a former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago Bureau, who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services, supplying and training anti-Castro paramilitaries meant to ensnare Kennedy. Oswald then went to work with Bannister and the CIA paramilitaries.

During this time up until the assassination Oswald engaged in all sorts of contradictory activities, one day portraying himself as pro-Castro, the next day as anti-Castro, many of these theatrical performances being directed from Bannister’s office. It was as though Oswald, on the orders of his puppet masters, was enacting multiple and antithetical roles in order to confound anyone intent on deciphering the purposes behind his actions and to set him up as a future “assassin.” Douglass persuasively argues that Oswald “seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI,” as a provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960-64, in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said, “It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.”

When Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963, de Mohrenschildt exited the picture, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly given a $285,000 contract to do a geological survey for Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which he never did , but for which he was paid. Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the picture on cue. Douglass illuminatingly traces in their intelligence connections. Ruth later was the Warren Commission’s chief witness. She had been introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In September 1963 Ruth Paine drove from her sister’s house in Virginia to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald and bring her to her house in Dallas to live with her. Thirty years after the assassination a document was declassified showing Paine’s sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her father traveled throughout Latin America on an Agency for International Development (notorious for CIA front activities) contract and filed reports that went to the CIA. Her husband Michael’s step-father, Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell helicopter and Michael’s job there gave him a security clearance. Her mother was related to the Forbes family of Boston and her lifelong friend, Mary Bancroft, worked as a WW II spy with Allen Dulles and was his mistress. Afterwards, Dulles questioned the Paines in front of the Warren Commission, studiously avoiding any revealing questions. Back in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently got Oswald a job in the Texas Book Depository where he began work on October 16, 1963.

From late September until November 22, various Oswalds are later reported to have simultaneously been seen from Dallas to Mexico City. Two Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theatre, the real one taken out the front door and an impostor out the back. As Douglas says, “There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald than the Warren Report could use or even explain.” Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that Oswald impostors were used, as he told LBJ concerning Oswald’s alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He later called this CIA ploy, “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico…their ( CIA’s) double-dealing,” something that he couldn’t forget. It was apparent that a very intricate and deadly game was being played out at high levels in the shadows.

We know Oswald was blamed for the President’s murder. But if one fairly follows the trail of the crime it becomes blatantly obvious that government forces were at work. Douglass adds layer upon layer of evidence to show how this had to be so. Oswald, the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans could not have withdrawn most of the security that day. The Sheriff Bill Decker withdrew all police protection. The Secret Service withdrew the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s car where they had been the day before in Houston; took agents off the back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire. They approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November 18) where the car came, almost to a halt, a clear security violation. The House Select Committee on Assasinations concluded this, not some conspiracy nut.

Who could have squelched the testimony of all the doctors and medical personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in his neck and head, testimony contradicting the official story? Who could have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the White House detail by JFK, who warned that he feared the president was going to be assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden seven times and his evidence on the aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago on November 2 – a story little known but extraordinary in its implications – is riveting.) The list of all the people who turned up dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched, distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up – clearly point to forces within the government, not rogue actors without institutional support.

The evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in such depth and so logically that only one hardened to the truth would not be deeply moved and affected by his book.

He says it best: “The extent to which our national security state was systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we absorb and think in a system. We lack the independence needed to judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s murder and immediate cover-up.”

Speaking to his friends Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell about those who planned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, JFK said, “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”

Let’s hope for another president like that, but one that meets a different end.

[1] http://consortiumnews.com/print’2009/091309a.html [This link appears to be too old to still work. Unlike the print age, the digital age loses references, another way that memory and history are stolen.]

[2] Vernon Loeb, “Soviets Knew Date of Cuba Attack,” Washington Post, April 29, 2000

[3] See James K. Galbraith, “Exit Strategy,” Boston Review, October/November 2003

Edward Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

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Ray McGovern Explains What Happens to a President Who Goes Against the CIA

Ray McGovern Explains What Happens to a President Who Goes Against the CIA

October 31, 2017 

Ray McGovern Explains What Happens to a President Who Goes Against the CIA

http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2017/10/30/deep-states-jfk-triumph-trump/

The Deep State’s JFK Triumph Over Trump

by Ray McGovern Posted onOctober 31, 2017

It was summer 1963 when a senior official of CIA’s operations directorate treated our Junior Officer Trainee (JOT) class to an unbridled rant against President John F. Kennedy. He accused JFK, among other things, of rank cowardice in refusing to send U.S. armed forces to bail out Cuban rebels pinned down during the CIA-launched invasion at the Bay of Pigs, blowing the chance to drive Cuba’s Communist leader Fidel Castro from power.

It seemed beyond odd that a CIA official would voice such scathing criticism of a sitting President at a training course for those selected to be CIA’s future leaders. I remember thinking to myself, “This guy is unhinged; he would kill Kennedy, given the chance.”

Our special guest lecturer looked a lot like E. Howard Hunt, but more than a half-century later, I cannot be sure it was he. Our notes from such training/indoctrination were classified and kept under lock and key.

At the end of our JOT orientation, we budding Agency leaders had to make a basic choice between joining the directorate for substantive analysis or the operations directorate where case officers run spies and organize regime changes (in those days, we just called the process overthrowing governments).

I chose the analysis directorate and, once ensconced in the brand new headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, I found it strange that subway-style turnstiles prevented analysts from going to the “operations side of the house,” and vice versa. Truth be told, we were never one happy family.

I cannot speak for my fellow analysts in the early 1960s, but it never entered my mind that operatives on the other side of the turnstiles might be capable of assassinating a President – the very President whose challenge to do something for our country had brought many of us to Washington in the first place. But, barring the emergence of a courageous whistleblower-patriot like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, or Edward Snowden, I do not expect to live long enough to learn precisely who orchestrated and carried out the assassination of JFK.

And yet, in a sense, those particulars seem less important than two main lessons learned: (1) If a President can face down intense domestic pressure from the power elite and turn toward peace with perceived foreign enemies, then anything is possible. The darkness of Kennedy’s murder should not obscure the light of that basic truth; and (2) There is ample evidence pointing to a state execution of a President willing to take huge risks for peace. While no post-Kennedy president can ignore that harsh reality, it remains possible that a future President with the vision and courage of JFK might beat the odds – particularly as the American Empire disintegrates and domestic discontent grows.

I do hope to be around next April after the 180-day extension for release of the remaining JFK documents. But – absent a gutsy whistleblower – I wouldn’t be surprised to see in April, a Washington Post banner headline much like the one that appeared Saturday: “JFK files: The promise of revelations derailed by CIA, FBI.”

The New Delay Is the Story

You might have thought that almost 54 years after Kennedy was murdered in the streets of Dallas – and after knowing for a quarter century the supposedly final deadline for releasing the JFK files – the CIA and FBI would not have needed a six-month extension to decide what secrets that they still must hide.

Journalist Caitlin Johnstone hits the nail on the head in pointing out that the biggest revelation from last week’s limited release of the JFK files is “the fact that the FBI and CIA still desperately need to keep secrets about something that happened 54 years ago.”

What was released on Oct. 26, was a tiny fraction of what had remained undisclosed in the National Archives. To find out why, one needs to have some appreciation of a 70-year-old American political tradition that might be called “fear of the spooks.”

That the CIA and FBI are still choosing what we should be allowed to see concerning who murdered John Kennedy may seem unusual, but there is hoary precedent for it. After JFK’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, the well-connected Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired as CIA director after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s murder.

By becoming de facto head of the Commission, Dulles was perfectly placed to protect himself and his associates, if any commissioners or investigators were tempted to question whether Dulles and the CIA played any role in killing Kennedy. When a few independent-minded journalists did succumb to that temptation, they were immediately branded – you guessed it – “conspiracy theorists.”

And so, the big question remains: Did Allen Dulles and other “cloak-and-dagger” CIA operatives have a hand in John Kennedy’s assassination and subsequent cover-up? In my view and the view of many more knowledgeable investigators, the best dissection of the evidence on the murder appears in James Douglass’s 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

After updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes that the answer to the big question is Yes. Reading Douglass’s book today may help explain why so many records are still withheld from release, even in redacted form, and why, indeed, we may never see them in their entirety.

Truman: CIA a Frankenstein?

When Kennedy was assassinated, it must have occurred to former President Harry Truman, as it did to many others, that the disgraced Allen Dulles and his associates might have conspired to get rid of a President they felt was soft on Communism – and dismissive of the Deep State of that time. Not to mention their vengeful desire to retaliate for Kennedy’s response to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. (Firing Allen Dulles and other CIA paragons of the Deep State for that fiasco simply was not done.)

Exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Postpublished an op-ed by Harry Truman titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.”

Strangely, the op-ed appeared only in the Post’s early edition on Dec. 22, 1963. It was excised from that day’s later editions and, despite being authored by the President who was responsible for setting up the CIA in 1947, the all-too-relevant op-ed was ignored in all other major media.

Truman clearly believed that the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions. He began his op-ed by underscoring “the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency … and what I expected it to do.” It would be “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.”

Truman then moved quickly to one of the main things clearly bothering him. He wrote “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.”

It was not difficult to see this as a reference to how one of the agency’s early directors, Allen Dulles, tried to trick President Kennedy into sending U.S. forces to rescue the group of invaders who had landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 with no chance of success, absent the speedy commitment of US air and ground support. The planned mouse-trapping of the then-novice President Kennedy had been underpinned by a rosy “analysis” showing how this pinprick on the beach would lead to a popular uprising against Fidel Castro.

Wallowing in the Bay of Pigs

Arch-Establishment figure Allen Dulles was offended when young President Kennedy, on entering office, had the temerity to question the CIA’s Bay of Pigs plans, which had been set in motion under President Dwight Eisenhower. When Kennedy made it clear he would not approve the use of US combat forces, Dulles set out, with supreme confidence, to give the President no choice except to send US troops to the rescue.

Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. In his notes, Dulles explained that, “when the chips were down,” Kennedy would be forced by “the realities of the situation” to give whatever military support was necessary “rather than permit the enterprise to fail.”

The “enterprise” which Dulles said could not fail was, of course, the overthrow of Fidel Castro. After mounting several failed operations to assassinate Castro, this time Dulles meant to get his man, with little or no attention to how Castro’s patrons in Moscow might react eventually. (The next year, the Soviets agreed to install nuclear missiles in Cuba as a deterrent to future US aggression, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis).

In 1961, the reckless Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom then-Deputy Secretary of State George Ball later described as a “sewer of deceit,” relished any chance to confront the Soviet Union and give it, at least, a black eye. (One can still smell the odor from that sewer in many of the documents released last week.)

But Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak. A few months after the abortive invasion of Cuba — and his refusal to send the US military to the rescue — Kennedy fired Dulles and his co-conspirators and told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” Clearly, the outrage was mutual.

When JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters came out, the mainstream media had an allergic reaction and gave it almost no reviews. It is a safe bet, though, that Barack Obama was given a copy and that this might account in some degree for his continual deference – timorousness even – toward the CIA.

Could fear of the Deep State be largely why President Obama felt he had to leave the Cheney/Bush-anointed CIA torturers, kidnappers and black-prison wardens in place, instructing his first CIA chief, Leon Panetta, to become, in effect, the agency’s lawyer rather than take charge? Is this why Obama felt he could not fire his clumsily devious Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who had to apologize to Congress for giving “clearly erroneous” testimony under oath in March 2013? Does Obama’s fear account for his allowing then-National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and counterparts in the FBI to continue to mislead the American people, even though the documents released by Edward Snowden showed them – as well as Clapper – to be lying about the government’s surveillance activities?

Is this why Obama fought tooth and nail to protect CIA Director John Brennan by trying to thwart publication of the comprehensive Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of CIA torture, which was based on original Agency cables, emails, and headquarters memos? [See here and here.]

The Deep State Today

Many Americans cling to a comforting conviction that the Deep State is a fiction, at least in a “democracy” like the United States. References to the enduring powers of the security agencies and other key bureaucracies have been essentially banned by the mainstream media, which many other suspicious Americans have come to see as just one more appendage of the Deep State.

But occasionally the reality of how power works pokes through in some unguarded remark by a Washington insider, someone like Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, the Senate Minority Leader with 36 years of experience in Congress. As Senate Minority Leader, he also is an ex officiomember of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to oversee the intelligence agencies.

During a Jan. 3, 2017 interview with MSNBC’S Rachel Maddow, Schumer told Maddow nonchalantly about the dangers awaiting President-elect Donald Trump if he kept on “taking on the intelligence community.” She and Schumer were discussing Trump’s sharp tweeting regarding US intelligence and evidence of “Russian hacking” (which both Schumer and Maddow treat as flat fact).

Schumer said: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Three days after that interview, President Obama’s intelligence chiefs released a nearly evidence-free “assessment” claiming that the Kremlin engaged in a covert operation to put Trump into office, fueling a “scandal” that has hobbled Trump’s presidency. On Monday, Russia-gate special prosecutor Robert Mueller indicted Trump’s one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort on unrelated money laundering, tax and foreign lobbying charges, apparently in the hope that Manafort will provide incriminating evidence against Trump.

So, President Trump has been in office long enough to have learned how the game is played and the “six ways from Sunday” that the intelligence community has for “getting back at you.” He appears to be as intimidated as was President Obama.

Trump’s awkward acquiescence in the Deep State’s last-minute foot-dragging regarding release of the JFK files is simply the most recent sign that he, too, is under the thumb of what the Soviets used to call “the organs of state security.”

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and CIA analyst for a total of 30 years and now servers on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Reprinted with permission from Consortium News.

Read more by Ray McGovern

• More Holes in Russia-gate Narrative – September 20th, 2017
• Truth and Lives vs. Career and Fame – August 20th, 2017
• Moral Corrosion of Drone Warfare – July 16th, 2017
• Russia-China Tandem Shifts Global Power – July 3rd, 2017
• What Trump Can Expect From Putin – July 2nd, 2017

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Is It Insanity, Evil, or Both that Has the Western World in Its Grip by Paul Craig Roberts

Is It Insanity, Evil, or Both that Has the Western World in Its Grip

October 30, 2017 

Is It Insanity, Evil, or Both that Has the Western World in Its Grip

Paul Craig Roberts

As the presstitute media has no allegiance to truth, one has to wonder if we can even believe obituaries.

For what it is worth, perhaps nothing, the presstitutes report that three US aircraft carrier battle groups are off North Korea or on the way there.

What for? Why are the morons in Washington following the 19th century British practice of sending warships? This is juvenile. China has already said that China will allow no attack on North Korea unless Korea strikes first. The Russians have indicated their opposition as well. Both China and Russia have missiles that can wipe out the three aircraft battle groups at will. So what is the point of sending obsolete ships, like the battleships anchored in Pearl Harbor for the Japanese, other than to have them obliterated and to use their demise as an excuse to start World War III?

The two-bit punk Washington puppet, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, has declared that “We recognize that Europe has also entered the North Korean missile range, and NATO member states are already in danger.” Remember, this was the same lie told about Europe being in range of non-existent Iranian missiles, an excuse for putting US missiles on Russia’s border just as North Korea is being used to put US missiles on China’s border.

We also have the report that Vice President Pence visited the Minot Nuclear missile base and recklessly and irresponsibly told the launch crews:

“We are entering a very dangerous time, and I have come here personally to tell you that you may receive a Launch Order in the near future.  I want you to know that we have planned for all contingencies, but it is possible that things may escalate beyond what we believe will take place.  If you receive a properly formatted launch order, you launch.  Don’t waste time trying to confirm the order, because it is not standard operating procedure for you to delay like that.  If you get a launch order, carry it out.” http://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/news/u-s-national-news/1505-vp-pence-makes-history-first-sitting-vp-to-personally-visit-minot-nuclear-missile-base-reportedly-tells-crews-if-the-order-comes-launch

This irresponsible and reckless statement by a US vice president comes as the Russians celebrate the Soviet military official who refused to believe the Soviet warning system of incoming US nuclear missiles and did not start the process that would have resulted, for a warning system failure, in nuclear Armageddon.

We should be scared to death that US political leaders are so insensitive to the ever present chance of false warnings. The moron Pence is a danger to all of humanity. Pence is not a patriot protectiong us, he is an idiot who should be impeached for his utter and total irresponsibility before he destroys us all.

Go online and read. False nuclear attack alarms were commonplace during the Cold War, but both Washington and Moscow were too responsible to act on them. Now we have an idiot vice president who wants to act on them!

The idiots in Washington have ordered outmoded B-52 bombers to be on 24-hour alert. Why? Not a single one of them could penetrate Russian air defense. What is the purpose of this nonsensical order except to worsen distrust between nuclear powers. What crime is worse than worsening distrust between nuclear powers? Why is Washington completely hooked on criminal behavior? Who is responsible? Why are they not arrested for the endangerment of humanity and life on planet Earth?

Washington’s disregard of urgent warnings from Russia and China is the most extraordinary thing I have experienced in my life.

Why is it that Washington and Washington’s vassals can’t hear when powers capable of destroying all of them clearly state that they have had enough of Washington’s arrogance and hubris?

https://www.rt.com/news/408168-europe-nato-pyongyang-missile-danger/

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Is It Insanity, Evil, or Both that Has the Western World in Its Grip by Paul Craig Roberts

Is It Insanity, Evil, or Both that Has the Western World in Its Grip

October 30, 2017 

Is It Insanity, Evil, or Both that Has the Western World in Its Grip

Paul Craig Roberts

As the presstitute media has no allegiance to truth, one has to wonder if we can even believe obituaries.

For what it is worth, perhaps nothing, the presstitutes report that three US aircraft carrier battle groups are off North Korea or on the way there.

What for? Why are the morons in Washington following the 19th century British practice of sending warships? This is juvenile. China has already said that China will allow no attack on North Korea unless Korea strikes first. The Russians have indicated their opposition as well. Both China and Russia have missiles that can wipe out the three aircraft battle groups at will. So what is the point of sending obsolete ships, like the battleships anchored in Pearl Harbor for the Japanese, other than to have them obliterated and to use their demise as an excuse to start World War III?

The two-bit punk Washington puppet, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, has declared that “We recognize that Europe has also entered the North Korean missile range, and NATO member states are already in danger.” Remember, this was the same lie told about Europe being in range of non-existent Iranian missiles, an excuse for putting US missiles on Russia’s border just as North Korea is being used to put US missiles on China’s border.

We also have the report that Vice President Pence visited the Minot Nuclear missile base and recklessly and irresponsibly told the launch crews:

“We are entering a very dangerous time, and I have come here personally to tell you that you may receive a Launch Order in the near future.  I want you to know that we have planned for all contingencies, but it is possible that things may escalate beyond what we believe will take place.  If you receive a properly formatted launch order, you launch.  Don’t waste time trying to confirm the order, because it is not standard operating procedure for you to delay like that.  If you get a launch order, carry it out.” http://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/news/u-s-national-news/1505-vp-pence-makes-history-first-sitting-vp-to-personally-visit-minot-nuclear-missile-base-reportedly-tells-crews-if-the-order-comes-launch

This irresponsible and reckless statement by a US vice president comes as the Russians celebrate the Soviet military official who refused to believe the Soviet warning system of incoming US nuclear missiles and did not start the process that would have resulted, for a warning system failure, in nuclear Armageddon.

We should be scared to death that US political leaders are so insensitive to the ever present chance of false warnings. The moron Pence is a danger to all of humanity. Pence is not a patriot protecting us, he is an idiot who should be impeached for his utter and total irresponsibility before he destroys us all.

Go online and read. False nuclear attack alarms were commonplace during the Cold War, but both Washington and Moscow were too responsible to act on them. Now we have an idiot vice president who wants to act on them!

The idiots in Washington have ordered outmoded B-52 bombers to be on 24-hour alert. Why? Not a single one of them could penetrate Russian air defense. What is the purpose of this nonsensical order except to worsen distrust between nuclear powers. What crime is worse than worsening distrust between nuclear powers? Why is Washington completely hooked on criminal behavior? Who is responsible? Why are they not arrested for the endangerment of humanity and life on planet Earth?

Washington’s disregard of urgent warnings from Russia and China is the most extraordinary thing I have experienced in my life.

Why is it that Washington and Washington’s vassals can’t hear when powers capable of destroying all of them clearly state that they have had enough of Washington’s arrogance and hubris?

https://www.rt.com/news/408168-europe-nato-pyongyang-missile-danger/

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One Day Tomorrow Won’t Arrive by Paul Craig Roberts

One Day Tomorrow Won’t Arrive

October 28, 2017 

One Day Tomorrow Won’t Arrive

Paul Craig Roberts

Before the idiots in Washington get us blown off of the face of the earth, the morons had better come to terms with the fact that the US military is now second class compared to the Russian military.

For example, the US Navy has been made obsolete by Russia’s hypersonic maneuvering Zircon missile.

For example, the speed and trajectory changes of the Russian Sarmat ICBM has nullified Washington’s ABM system. One Sarmet is sufficient to take out Great Britain, or France, or Germany, or Texas. It only takes a dozen to wipe out the United States.

Why don’t you know this?

For example, Washington’s enormously expensive F-35 jet fighter is no match whatsoever for Russian fighters.

For example, US tanks are no match for Russian tanks.

For example, Russian troops are superior in their combat readiness and training and are highly motivated and not worn out by 16 years of pointless and frustrating wars over no one knows what.

If the US ends up in a catastrophic war with a militarily superior power, it will be the fault of Hillary Clinton, the DNC, former CIA director John Brennan and the military/security complex, the presstitute media, and the American liberal/progressive/left, which, made completely stupid by Identity Politics, has allied with neoconservative warmongers against President Trump and prevented Trump from normalizing relations with Russia.

Without normal relations with Russia, nuclear Armageddon hangs over us like the sword of Damocles.

Do you not agree that it is outrageous, astounding, inexcusable, inexplicable, reckless and irresponsible that the Democratic Party, the print and TV media, the military/security complex that is supposed to protect us, and the liberal/progressive/left are working hand in glove to destroy the human race?

Why is there so much opposition to normalizing relations with a nuclear power? Why did even the Greens jump on the anti-Trump propaganda bandwaggon. Don’t the Greens understand the consequences of nuclear war?

Why is there such a crazed, insane effort to eject a president who wants to normalize relations with Russia?

Why are these questions not part of the public discourse?

The failure of political leadership, of media, of the intellectual class in Ameria is total.

The rest of the world must find some means of quarantining Washington before the evil destroys life on earth.

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The Kennedy Assassination

The Kennedy Assassination

October 28, 2017 

The Kennedy Assassination

Paul Craig Roberts

Dear Readers, some of you are pushing me to continue with the Las Vegas shooting story while others are asking to know what to make of the release of files pertaining to President Kennedy’s assassination. I appreciate that you are interested and are unsatisfied with official explanations.

My answer is that we already know, thanks to exhaustively researched books such as James W. Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable (Simon & Schuster, 2008), far more than is in the released files.

My answer is also that it doesn’t matter what we know or what the facts are, the official story will never be changed. For example, we know as an absolute indisputable fact that Israel intentionally attacked the USS Liberty inflicting enormous casualties on US Navy personnel, and the US government continues the coverup that it was all a mistake despite unequivocal statements to the contrary by the Moorer Commission, led by Admiral Tom Moorer, former Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

My answer also is that time is better spent in trying to prevent conspiracies in the making, such as the endless stream of lies and accusations against Russia that are turning a friendly country into an enemy and renewing the risk of nuclear armageddon. Indeed, the biggest conspiracy theory of the present time is the one issuing from the military/security complex, the Democratic National Committee, and the presstitute media that Russia in collusion with Donald Trump hacked the US presidential election.

The Russian government knows that this is a lie, and when they see a lie repeated endlessly now for one year without a shred of evidence to support it, the Russian government naturally concludes that Washington is preparing the American people for war. I cannot imagine a more reckless and irresponsible policy than destroying Russia’s trust in Washington’s intentions. As Putin said, the main lesson life has taught him is that “if a fight is unavoidable, strike first.”

If you really want to know who killed President Kennedy and why, read JFK and the Unspeakable. Yes, there are other carefully researched books that you can read.

Douglass concludes that Kennedy was murdered because he turned to peace. He was going to work with Khrushchev to end the Cold War. He refused the CIA US air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion. He rejected the Joint Chiefs’ Operation Northwoods, a plan to conduct false flag attacks on Americans that would be blamed on Castro to justify regime change. He refused to reappoint General Lyman Lemnitzer as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He told US Marine commandant General David Shoup that he was taking the US out of Vietnam. He said after his reelection he was going to “break the CIA into 1,000 pieces.” All of this threatened the power and profit of the military/security complex and convinced military/security elements that he was soft on communism and a threat to US national security.

The film of the motorcade taken by Zapruder shows that the bullet that killed Kennedy hit him from the front, blowing out the back of his head. You can see Kennedy’s wife Jackie reaching from the back seat onto the trunk of the limo to recover the back of his head. Other tourist films show moments before the shot the Secret Service agents being ordered off of the presidential limo so that a clear shot at Kennedy is possible. The film shows one Secret Service agent protesting the order.

The medical “evidence” that Kennedy was hit from behind was falsified by medical doctors under orders. Navy medical corpsmen who helped the Navy doctors with the autopsy testified that they were dismayed by orders from Admiral Calvin Galloway to ignore entry wounds from the front. One of the corpsmen testified “all at once I understood that my country was not much better than a third world country. From that point on in time, I have had no trust, no respect for the government.”

Dr Charles Crenshaw, one of the doctors forced to lie, later broke his silence with a book and was rewarded with a fierce media campaign to discredit him.

Lt. Commander William Pitzer, director of the Audio-Visual Department of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, filmed the autopsy. The film clearly showed the entry wound from the front. Pitzer was found shot to death on the floor of the production studio of the National Naval Medical Center. It was ruled a suicide, as always.

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI knew that Oswald, who Douglass believes was on the payroll of both the CIA and FBI, was sent to Cuba by the CIA in order to establish the story for the patsy role Oswald was unaware was being prepared for him. However, Hoover, along with LBJ, Earl Warren and the members of the Warren Commission understood that it was impossible to tell the American people that their president has been assassinated by the US military and US security agencies. At a dicey time of the Cold War, clearly it would have been reckless to destroy Americans’ trust in their own government.

Finian Cunningham presents a summary of much of the accumulated evidence. All experts long ago concluded that the Warren Commission report is a coverup. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/10/28/jfk-files-cover-up-continues-president-assassination.html

I am not an expert. I have not spent 30 years or longer, as has Douglass, investigating, interviewing witnesses, tracking down unexplained deaths of witnesses, and piecing together the available volumnious information. if you want to know what happened, put down your smart phones, close your video screens, and read Douglass’ or a similar book.

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Note from the poster: Some complementary information about this matter

 http://newfreepages.blogspot.pt/2017/10/the-real-jfk-autopsy-photos-showing-jfk.html