JFK: The Last True "Peace President"

by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Global Research
November 23, 2010

Just 47 years ago, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. This marked the turning of the American National Security State apparatus against its own leadership. After having overthrown, assassinated leaders, and orchestrated coups around the world, the moment its growing power was threatened by the civilian leadership in America, the apparatus of empire came home to roost.

The National Security State

The apparatus of the National Security State, largely established in the National Security Act of 1947, laid the foundations for the extension of American hegemony around the globe. In short, the Act laid the foundations for the apparatus of the American Empire. The National Security Act created the National Security Council (NSC) and position of National Security Adviser, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC) as the Pentagon high command of military leaders, and of course, the CIA.

The first major foreign operation carried out by the National Security State, or rather, the “secret government,” was the overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Iran. In 1952, the British were concerned at the efforts of Iran’s new Prime Minister Mohommad Mossadeq, in nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, taking the monopoly away from British Petroleum. So the British intelligence, the SIS, proposed to the Americans a joint operation, and the CIA obliged.

In early 1953, with the ascendancy of the Eisenhower administration, two brothers, the Dulles brothers, came to dominate foreign policy decisions. John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State while his brother, Allen Dulles, became director of the CIA. Allen Dulles was a founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a director of the CFR from 1927 to 1969,[1] while John Foster Dulles had joined the Council in the 1930s, and was a career diplomat and Wall Street lawyer.[2] In 1953, the Dulles brothers both worked and lobbied Eisenhower for the removal of Mossadeq from Iran,[3] and subsequently, the CIA and SIS worked together to enact the plan and overthrew the Iranian government.[4]

On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation in which he warned America and indeed the world about the growing influence of the National Security State in what he referred to as the “military-industrial complex”:

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."[5]

Eisenhower was speaking from the point of view of having first-hand knowledge of this “influence” in the corridors of power, himself as President being unable to challenge it, and unable to do so simply in the first decade of the American Empire. He was warning against the influence of the interconnected relationship and organized power of the military, government, and industry, in that the growing influence of this “complex” was so vast that it threatened to take over the government and subvert democracy itself. It was the functions of this complex that saw profit created through war and empire, and thus, there was a constant drive and impetus towards pursuing empire and resorting to war. If you build a massive military structure, you are going to use it; if it is profitable to go to war, you will go to war.

The “Secret Government” and the Bay of Pigs

In January of 1959, the Cuban Revolution ousted the military strong man and American-ally Batista, and installed the Communist government of Fidel Castro. Beginning in October of 1959, the United States began a covert bombing and strafing campaign against Cuba, and in the early months of 1960, the US even firebombed Cuban cane fields and sugar mills. The CIA had organized the Cuban exile community, largely under the leadership of former supporters of Batista, in Florida to mount an operation aimed at overthrowing the revolutionary government.[6]

The CIA and the American military, headed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (itself a creation of the National Security Act of 1947), were dead-set against Cuba. The idea of a Communist government so close to the United States was seen as completely unacceptable to the National Security State. Thus, in less than three months of JFK becoming president, in April of 1961, the CIA launched the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, in which nearly 2,000 Cuban exiles trained and supported by the CIA were to invade from the sea. However, Kennedy refused to go along with the operation and cancelled the air support for the invasion, leading to the failure of the invasion and capture of the exiles, and “the CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy.” Kennedy, in turn, blamed the CIA and the Pentagon, and fired CIA Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Director of the CIA, Charles Cabell in January of 1962.[7]

The Bay of Pigs reveals some startling information about the “Deep Politics” surrounding the Kennedy administration. “Deep politics” is a term popularized by former Canadian diplomat, author and academic Peter Dale Scott, who – in my opinion –is one of the pre-eminent researchers of the “secret government.” Scott defines “deep politics” as “looking beneath public formulations of policy issues to the bureaucratic, economic, and ultimately covert and criminal activities which underlie them.”[8] In short, “deep politics” is the functions and actions of the “secret government”.

David Talbott, former Editor-in-Chief of Salon, wrote a book about the assassinations of JFK and Robert Kennedy, in which he undertook in depth research into what can only be described as the “deep politics” of their deaths. In it, he explained that upon JFK becoming President, Allen Dulles had felt that as he and his late brother John Foster Dulles (who died in 1959) “had largely run America’s foreign policy between the two of them during the 1950s,” that “he expected to continue the family’s policies undisturbed under the new, inexperienced president.” Dulles, in the presence of a close Kennedy confidante, even “started boasting that he was still carrying out his brother Foster’s foreign policy,” saying, “that’s a much better policy. I’ve chosen to follow that one.” The Kennedy confidante who was present informed JFK who was furious, “God damn it! ... Did he really say that?”[9]

Richard Bissell, a man who formerly worked with the OSS (the precursor to the CIA), as well as the Ford Foundation, was brought into the CIA by Allen Dulles in 1958 as the Deputy Director for Plans, overseeing and personally running the covert plots to overthrow Arbenz in Guatemala, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and primarily Fidel Castro. He was in charge of the Bay of Pigs operation. In short, Bissell was a devout acolyte of the “secret government.” Bissell reassembled the key CIA officers involved in the Guatemala coup for the Bay of Pigs operations, including Tracy Barnes, David Atlee Phillips, Howard Hunt (who would later become famous as one of the Watergate burglars) and David Sanchez Morales.[10]

The Bay of Pigs operations, which was organized in the Eisenhower administration, under the guidance of his Vice President, Richard Nixon, was briefed to Kennedy upon becoming president. JFK “made it clear to Dulles and Bissell that he would not commit the full military might of the United States to the Bay of Pigs operation.”[11] During the Bay of Pigs operation, when it was clear that the operation would fail without military support, a major meeting took place with Kennedy, his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Vice President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lyman Lemnitzer, as well as Admiral Burke, the Navy Chief and Richard Bissell of the CIA. Bissell urged the president to take military action, with the support of Navy Chief Burke. Kennedy had refused, and he “was beginning to realize that his top military and intelligence chiefs did not take his instructions that seriously.”[12]

Kennedy had repeatedly told Bissell in the lead up to the Bay of Pigs that as president, he reserved the right to abort the operation at any time. Yet Bissell had informed the military leaders of the Bay of Pigs operation that there were forces in the White House trying to stop it from going forward, and if they succeeded, he advised them to “mutiny against their U.S. advisors and proceed with the invasion.” Further, on the first day of the invasion, Admiral Burke, the Navy Chief, had sent “the U.S. aircraft carrier Essex and helicopter landing ship Boxer close to Cuban shore, in violation of Kennedy’s order to keep U.S. ships fifty miles away.”[13] This was the true first test of the young president:

"The country’s military and intelligence chiefs had clearly believed they could sandbag the young, untested commander-in-chief into joining the battle. But he had stunned them by refusing to escalate the fighting."[14]

As declassified CIA documents later revealed, the CIA itself knew that the operation was doomed to fail, and had hid these bleak reports from Kennedy and went ahead with the operation anyhow. Startlingly, “the CIA knew that it couldn’t accomplish this type of overt paramilitary mission without direct Pentagon participation,” and further, the CIA had “discovered in advance that the plan had been leaked to Soviet intelligence” and Castro, who even knew the date of the attack. Dulles, therefore, “regarded the band of Cuban exiles who were about to hit the beaches as mere cannon fodder, a device to trigger the real invasion by the U.S. military.”[15]

On the evening that the mission had finally come to an abrupt failure, Allen Dulles sat down to dinner with Richard Nixon, “the man who had spearheaded the plan as vice president,” and Dulles proclaimed, “This is the worst day of my life!” Thus, the Bay of Pigs failure “sent shockwaves through the [central intelligence] agency, particularly among the agents who had worked closely with the Cuban émigrés on the operation.”[16]

Following the Bay of Pigs, “the heavens ripped open for the Kennedy administration” and “never came back together,” as JFK became “estranged from his national security team.” CIA agents like Howard Hunt, who were involved in the operation, would proclaim that the United States “owed the Cuban people a blood debt,” and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Lyman Lemnitzer proclaimed that Kennedy’s actions were “unbelievable... absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.” With Kennedy’s first test as president, the nations’ top military and intelligence officials saw him “to be a dangerously weak link at the top of the chain of command.”[17]

Kennedy, for his part, said, “I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards,” and also “lashed out at the Joint Chiefs.” JFK publicly took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs failure, but “CIA and Pentagon officials knew that he privately spread the word that they were to blame.” Subsequently, Kennedy threatened to “shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces, and scatter it to the winds.”[18]

Kennedy Versus the “Kings” of the National Security State

Shortly after the Bay of Pigs, the Joint Chiefs approached Kennedy urging him to invade the Southeast Asian country of Laos, “to respond to the advances of Communist insurgents,” yet Kennedy quickly dismissed their advice, and Kennedy had personally thought of Chairman Lemnitzer as “a dope.” However, “Kennedy was acutely aware of how formidable the institutional powers were that he confronted.” As Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, an old family friend of the Kennedy’s explained, regarding JFK confiding in him, that Kennedy was “seared” by the Bay of Pigs experience, and “he had experienced the extreme power that these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and Pentagon, on civilian policy.” JFK even questioned if he, as president, could “ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies.”[19]

Following the Bay of Pigs, JFK pulled away from any advice of these National Security kingpins and began to rely upon his most trusted personal advisers, and particularly his brother Robert Kennedy, who was the Attorney General, who would “move into the center of national security decision making for the rest of his brother’s presidency,” and took on the responsibility of supervising the CIA.[20]

Kennedy, for his part, “was more viscerally antiwar than has been recognized in some quarters,” as he once stated, “I am almost a “peace-at-any-price” president.” As Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, once explained, JFK “brought into the presidency the knowledge of history that many presidents didn’t have when they became president,” and that JFK had thought that, “the primary responsibility of the president is to keep the nation out of war if at all possible.”[21]

Arthur Schlesinger, Special Assistant to President Kennedy, later recalled that, “Certainly we did not control the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” reflecting on the deep divisions within the Kennedy administration. The National Security State’s “secret government,” which had controlled foreign policy in the previous two administrations of Truman and Eisenhower, “was not prepared to cede power to the new Kennedy government. This was soon made clear to the president’s team by the top military commanders.” In particular, Schlesinger explained regarding Kennedy’s fears of the military, “Kennedy’s concern was not that Khrushchev [the Soviet leader] would initiate something, but that something would go wrong in a Dr. Strangelove kind of way,” referring to Stanley Kubrick’s film in which a rogue U.S. general starts World War III. Even Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was struggling to control the generals under his command.[22]

General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief, was a particularly staunch opponent of the Kennedy administration. He had once mused aloud to a Washington Post columnist in July of 1961 that he felt “nuclear war would break out in the final weeks of the year,” and that nuclear war was “inevitable.” LeMay, as McNamara acknowledged, was a staunch advocate of “preemptive nuclear war to rid the world of the Soviet threat,” casually acknowledging that “it would likely incinerate such major U.S. cities as Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit.” LeMay, during World War II, made his name by “laying waste to much of Japan with his infamous firebombing campaign.”[23]

In the summer of 1961, JFK came under intense pressure from both the military and intelligence officials in his government “to consider launching a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.” On July 20, “at a National Security Council meeting, Kennedy was presented an official plan for a surprise nuclear attack by the Joint Chiefs chairman, General Lemnitzer, and Allen Dulles,” and Kennedy, disgusted, got up and left in the middle of the meeting, then remarked to his Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “and we call ourselves the human race.”[24] Kennedy had, in the fall of 1961, fired Allen Dulles, Charles Cabell, the Deputy Director of the CIA, and Richard Bissell, the Deputy Director of Plans for the CIA. Kennedy had made himself “Enemy #1” of the National Security State apparatus. A retired Marine general at the time once “suggested a coup was in order if the “traitors” could not be voted out.”[25]

As Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, began to increasingly exert supervision over the CIA, he discovered that the CIA was working with the Mafia in plots to assassinate Castro. JFK had appointed John McCone as CIA director to replace Dulles, however, Richard Helms “emerged as the real power in the agency soon after the downfall of Dulles and Bissell,” leading one top official to even state that, “Helms was running the agency,” and that, “anything McCone found out was by accident.”[26] Richard Helms worked in the OSS, the precursor to the CIA during World War II, and became CIA Director of Plans in 1962, running the covert operations of the CIA.

The Joint Chiefs Propose a Plan for State-Sponsored Terrorism

In 1962, the Pentagon was still pushing for a war with Cuba, and was even drawing up contingency plans for an invasion of Cuba. One such plan, named Operation Northwoods, was recently declassified. On March 13, 1962, Chairman of the Joint Chief General Lemnitzer delivered this plan to McNamara, marked “top secret” and signed by the nation’s highest military commanders.[27]

Operation Northwoods, also named “Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba,” was endorsed by the entire Joint Chiefs, which recommended the operation go into planning stages, and recommended that the Joint Chiefs assume responsibility “for both overt and covert military operations” of the plan.[28] The purpose of the plan was to orchestrate pretexts for a US military intervention in Cuba, and the Joint Chiefs recommended that throughout the operations, the US military will be in an “exercise” mode in order to allow for a “rapid change from exercise to intervention if Cuban response justifies.”[29]

Among the recommended provocations and pretexts to justify a war, the Joint Chiefs suggested that, “a series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around [the US military base at] Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces,” including starting rumours, landing “friendly Cubans in uniform” outside of the base to “stage attack on base” in Cuban uniform, capturing friendly “saboteurs inside the base,” and have friendly Cubans “start riots near the base main gate.”[30] Further recommendations were to “blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires,” as well as burning aircraft on the base, or sabotage a ship in the harbor, or to even, “sink [a] ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims.”[31]

One startling recommendation was that, “We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” or that, “we could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters,” and blame Cuba, and that, “casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”[32] However, the most disturbing aspect of Operation Northwoods was the recommendation that:

"We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government."[33]

The general even suggested bombing other Latin American countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Nicaragua and blaming it on Cuba. They even suggested that a “US military drone aircraft” could be destroyed by a US military plane that, “properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban” aircraft.[34] The Joint Chiefs further suggested, “hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba.” Startlingly, the plan also recommended concocting a scenario in which an American plane, possibly consisting of “a group of college students,” would be flown over Cuba and blown up, to be blamed on Cuba.[35]

So there you have it, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff put out recommendations for hijacking US aircraft, staging “false flag” attacks, which are covert military operations in which they attack selected targets under the “flag” of another nation/entity in order to blame that particular entity for the attack, such as the recommendations for attacking Guantamo Bay by “friendly Cubans” and conducting a “terror campaign” within the United States, itself.

Three days after Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lemnitzer presented this plan to McNamara, he was summoned by President Kennedy to the Oval Office for a discussion of Cuba strategy alongside other National Security figures. Many of the figures suggested a military invasion of Cuba, and Lemnitzer jumped at the opportunity to recommend Operation Northwoods, yet spared the specific operational plans of “blowing up people on the streets of Miami and the nation’s capital and blaming it on Castro.” However, “Kennedy was not amused” and he told the general that, “we were not discussing the use of U.S. military force.”[36]

Yet, over the next month, the Joint Chiefs and in particular, Lemnitzer, continued to press both McNamara and Kennedy for a military invasion of Cuba, and “after a National Security Council meeting in June, the president took the general aside and told him he wanted to send him to Europe to become NATO’s new supreme allied commander.” Kennedy thus replaced Lemnitzer with Max Taylor.[37]

The Cuban Missile Crisis: America on the Verge of a Military Coup

Another event of monumental importance to the conduct of JFK challenging the “secret government” apparatus of the National Security State was with the Cuban Missile Crisis, a thirteen-day nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, which was described by one top official involved as, “the most dangerous moment in human history.” The crisis was started when US reconnaissance observed missile bases being built in Cuba by the Soviet Union. It brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before or since. During the crisis, JFK, his brother Bobby, and Robert McNamara:

"were trying to steer the decision-making process toward the idea of a naval blockade of Cuba, to stop the flow of nuclear shipments to the island and to pressure the Soviets into a peaceful resolution of the crisis. But virtually his entire national security apparatus was pushing the president to take military action against Cuba. Leading the charge for an aggressive response were the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were urging the president to launch surprise air strikes on the island and then invade."[38]

Air Force Chief Curtis LeMay, who had been advocating nuclear war with the Soviet Union since the early 1950s, thought Cuba was a “sideshow” and told the President that the United States should “fry it.” LeMay, himself a member of the Joint Chiefs, “was in the habit of taking bullying command of Joint Chiefs meetings,” and with LeMay leading the charge for war, “the other chiefs jumped into the fray, repeating the Air Force general’s call for immediate military action.” LeMay even did something remarkable for a military official:

"He decided to violate traditional military-civilian boundaries and issue a barely veiled political threat. If the president responded weakly to the Soviet challenge in Cuba, he warned him, there would be political repercussions overseas, where Kennedy’s government would be perceived as spineless. “And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too,” LeMay added. With his close ties to militaristic congressional leaders and the far right, LeMay left no doubt about the political damage he could cause the administration. “In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time,” LeMay told Kennedy.[39]

Kennedy asked him to repeat what he said, LeMay obliged, and Kennedy retorted, “You’re in there with me.” Kennedy soon left the meeting with McNamara, “the confrontation with his top military men had clearly disturbed the commander-in-chief. Later he told an aide that the administration needed to make sure that the Joint Chiefs did not start a war without his approval, a chronic fear of JFK’s.” After Kennedy and McNamara left the meeting, a secret taping system in the office recorded the conversation between the generals, who “began profanely condemning Kennedy’s cautious, incremental approach to the crisis.”[40]

LeMay’s right-hand man, General Tommy Power, who even LeMay regarded as “not stable,” had taken “it upon himself to raise the Strategic Air Command’s alert status to DEFCON-2, one step from nuclear war,” and ensured that the Soviets knew it. The White House was completely unaware of Power’s actions at the time.[41]

As the crisis continued, Kennedy ordered McNamara “to keep close watch over the Navy to make sure U.S. vessels didn’t do anything that would trigger World War III.” Admiral Anderson, Chief of Naval Operations, who was running the Naval blockade of Cuba, was increasingly frustrated at McNamara’s “hands-on control” of the blockade and clashed with the Defense Secretary in the Navy’s Flag Plot room, suggesting that he didn’t need McNamara’s advice on managing the blockade, prompting McNamara to respond explaining that he doesn’t “give a damn” about past procedures for running blockades, to which Anderson replied, “Mr. Secretary, you go back to your office and I’ll go to mine and we’ll take care of things.” As Anderson later recalled, “Apparently it was the wrong thing to say to somebody of McNamara’s personality,” as when McNamara left the office, he told his aide, “That’s the end of Anderson.” Anderson, months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, was sent to Portugal as ambassador, “where he would be chummy with dictator Antonio Salazar.”[42]

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t the Joint Chiefs alone who were trying to push for war, as the “CIA also played a dangerous game during the crisis,” as Kennedy had ordered the CIA to halt all raids against Cuba during the crisis, “to make sure that no flying sparks from the agency’s secret operations set off a nuclear conflagration.” However, Bill Harvey, the CIA agent in charge of “Operation Mongoose,” the CIA plan which employed the Mafia to attempt to kill Castro, in brazen defiance of Kennedy’s orders, mobilized “every single team and asset that we could scrape together” and then dropped them into Cuba, “in anticipation of the U.S. invasion that the CIA hoped was soon to follow.”[43]

Robert Kennedy became the conduit through which the back-channel negotiations took place with the Soviets that ultimately ended the crisis without catastrophe. Nikita Khrushchev recounted the situation in his memoirs, in which he explained that Robert Kennedy “stressed how fragile his brother’s rule was becoming as the crisis dragged on,” which struck Khrushchev as “especially urgent.” Robert Kennedy warned the Soviets that, “If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.” Khrushchev even later wrote that, “for some time we had felt there was a danger that the president would lose control of his military,” and that, “now he was admitting this to us himself.” Thus:

“Moscow’s fear that Kennedy might be toppled in a coup, Khrushchev suggested in his memoirs, led the Soviets to reach a settlement of the missile crisis with the president. “We could sense from the tone of the message that tension in the United States was indeed reaching a critical point.”"[44]

Thirteen days after the crisis began, the Soviets announced that they would remove the missiles from Cuba, with the US agreeing to remove missiles from US bases in Turkey and “pledging not to invade Cuba,” which Kennedy and future presidents would honour. At the announcement of the end to the crisis, General LeMay roared at Kennedy, “It’s the greatest defeat in our history,” and that, “We should invade today!” A defense analyst at the Pentagon, Daniel Ellsberg, who was consulting with Air Force generals and colonels on nuclear strategy at the end of the crisis, remarked that after the settlement was reached, “there was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles,” explaining, “not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup – I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.”[45]

What’s more, the CIA was further enraged at Kennedy, as “for those militants who were part of the massive juggernaut organized to destroy the Castro regime, the peaceful resolution of the missile crisis was a betrayal worse than the Bay of Pigs.”[46]

Going into 1963, however, the anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami continued to undertake covert actions against Castro. The CIA claimed the groups got out of its control, “but the rebels were heavily dependent on agency funding and it was never certain whether the groups’ frequent defiance of Kennedy policy was in fact instigated by their spymasters in Langley and Miami.”[47]

One of these groups was the Cuban Student Directorate (DRE), “a particular favourite of the CIA,” which was founded in 1954 “as a Catholic student group militantly opposed to the dictator Batista,” but in 1960 moved to Miami and shifted its operations against Castro, where its operations were planned by the CIA. A man named Lee Harvey Oswald became affiliated with the group in August of 1963. Oswald made contacts with other Cuban exile groups that summer, some of whom found the “Ex-Marine” to be “suspicious” and even reported on him to Bobby Kennedy.[48]

Kennedy Makes Moves for Peace

In June of 1963, Kennedy delivered his famous “Peace Speech” in which he discussed “the most important topic on earth: world peace.” Kennedy continued:

"What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

... First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable – that mankind is doomed – that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.

We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade – therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable – and we believe they can do it again."[49]

Kennedy further stated, “Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union,” suggesting an end to the Cold War, and then remarked: “We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough – more than enough – of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it.” Kennedy famously proclaimed, “We all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”[50]

This was not particularly to the liking of the National Security State, a proclamation for America to follow “not a strategy of annihilation, but a strategy of peace.” Kennedy even stated that America would “never start a war.” As Robert McNamara later recalled, “the American University speech laid out exactly what Kennedy’s intentions were,” and that, “If he had lived, the world would have been different, I feel quite confident of that.”[51]

Kennedy and Vietnam

While the National Security State began maneuvering for an escalation of violence in Vietnam, Kennedy began formulating a plan of his own. He was intent upon the United States withdrawing from the conflict. However, knowing that it would prompt a great outcry, he would wait until after the 1964 election. As Kennedy told one of his top aides, Kenny O’Donnell, “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I am reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected.”[52]

As Vietnam came to crisis late in his term, Kennedy was the lone voice against escalation of military conflict. On October 11, 1963, Kennedy issued National Security Action Memoranda NSAM 263, authorizing his plans “to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel [from Vietnam] by the end of 1963,” with the longer goal of withdrawing “the bulk of U.S. personnel” by the end of 1965. However, Kennedy ordered that, “no formal announcement be made of the implementation,” yet on November 20, at a top-level conference, “the secrecy was lifted,” and it was reported in the New York Times the following day, which was the day before Kennedy was assassinated.[53]

Following Kennedy’s continuing stealth moves to avoid an escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, the majority of his national security bureaucracy “was in flagrant revolt against him. The Pentagon and CIA were taking steps to sabotage his troop withdrawal plan.” Further:

"Frustrated by the growing instability of South Vietnam’s Diem regime, U.S. officials split over whether to back a military coup to replace it, with Kennedy himself vacillating back and forth on the question."[54]

An open revolt took place between the two camps with Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, “who supported a coup, and Saigon CIA station chief John Richardson, who backed the increasingly autocratic President Ngo Dinh Diem.” Richard Starnes, a newspaper correspondent in Saigon, wrote on this feud, and explained that “a high U.S. official” in Saigon views the CIA as a “malignancy,” guilty of “insubordination,” and that he “was not sure even the White House could control [it] any longer.” The U.S. official added:

"If the United States ever experiences a [coup attempt] it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon... [The CIA] represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone."[55]

On November 1, South Vietnamese military plotters killed Diem and his brother in a coup which “was facilitated when the CIA withdrew Richardson from Saigon, allowing the agency to cooperate with the South Vietnamese generals behind the plot.”[56]

Kennedy is Killed

Throughout the fall of 1963, “the CIA pursued its own agenda” with mobsters and militant Cuban exiles, while “the Kennedy’s struggled to control the sprawling operations related to Cuba.”[57]

While in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was killed while driving in his motorcade along Dealey Plaza. E. Howard Hunt, the infamous CIA agent who overthrew the government of Guatemala and worked in the CIA’s anti-Castro Cuban operations, and who later achieved infamy as one of the Watergate burglars, had his deathbed confession revealed by his son in 2007. In his confession, E. Howard Hunt revealed that it was the CIA and Lyndon Banes Johnson who were behind the assassination, and that he, himself, was involved.[58]

Hunt recalled that in 1963, he was invited to a secret meeting in a CIA safe house in Miami by Frank Sturgis, another infamous Watergate burglar, and a “mob-friendly anti-Castro operative.” At the meeting was also CIA agent David Morales, someone Hunt referred to as a “cold-blooded killer,” and William Harvey, another CIA man. The discussion of the meeting was the Kennedy assassination, or what they referred to as “the big event.”[59] Bill Harvey was the man that Richard Helms, CIA Deputy Director for Plans, had put in charge of the CIA’s anti-Castro Cuban operations, and who had a particularly antagonizing relationship with Robert Kennedy, who was trying to supervise Harvey’s operations.[60]

As author Peter Dale Scott revealed, Vice President Lyndon Johnson “had been, since 1961, the ally of the Joint Chiefs (and in particular Air Force General Curtis LeMay) in their unrelenting efforts, against Kennedy’s repeated refusals, to introduce U.S. combat troops into Asia.” The Joint Chiefs had thus taken it upon themselves to keep Johnson more informed than Kennedy on the situation in Southeast Asia, with Chairman Lemnitzer himself going around Kennedy to Johnson. The Joint Chiefs created a back channel where they were delivering “accurate Vietnam reports” to Johnson, “which were denied to the President.” US Army Intelligence reports produced in Saigon were delivered to McNamara and Kennedy, which were “false and optimistic” in order to help “ensure their ongoing support for the war,” while US Army Intelligence in Honolulu produced a second set of reports, described as “accurate and gloomy,” which were supplied to Johnson. When Lemnitzer was replaced as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the man Kennedy chose to replace him, General Max Taylor, continued in taking part in this deception. As Peter Dale Scott explained:

"These divisive intrigues came to a head at the Honolulu conference of November 20, 1963, two days before the assassination. At this meeting the truth about the deterioration of the ineffective war effort “was presented in detail to those assembled, along with a plan to widen the war, while the 1,000-man withdrawal [first publicly acknowledged at the same meeting] was turned into a meaningless paper drill.”The tone of the meeting, in other words, was in keeping with the policies of the man who would not become President until the shootings in Dallas two days later."[61]

Thus, “a group within the military command, dissatisfied with Kennedy’s limited support, had already begun secretly to plan for the option preferred by the Vice-President.”[62] Two days after the assassination, Johnson and his top advisers issued a new policy statement in contrast to Kennedy’s NSAM 263 issued on October 11, 1963, which called for a withdrawal of forces from Vietnam. Johnson’s NSAM 273 was finalized on November 26, 1963, four days after the assassination, of which the key policy innovation was “for the United States to begin carrying the war north” in Vietnam. On the very same day Johnson’s NSAM 273 was issued, the Joint Chiefs launched “accelerated planning for escalation against North Vietnam.”[63] Roughly one month later, on December 24, 1963, Lyndon Johnson told the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Just get me elected, and then you can have your war.”[64]


The Warren Commission: The American Establishment Cover-Up Committee

The Warren Commission was established by Lyndon Johnson on November 29, 1963, to investigate the assassination of JFK. Among the members were Gerald Ford, a Congressman who would later become President of the United States, and John J. McCloy, a lawyer, banker, former Assistant Secretary of War in World War II, and former President of the World Bank. McCloy was chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank from 1953 to 1960, was chairman of the Ford Foundation from 1958 to 1965, and was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1946 to 1949, and again between 1953 and 1958. From 1954 until 1970, McCloy was Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he was succeeded by David Rockefeller, a close associate from Chase Manhattan.

Another notable member of the Warren Commission was none other than Allen Dulles, the former CIA Director whom Kennedy had fired. An interesting fact to note is regarding Dulles’ Deputy Director of the CIA whom Kennedy also fired, Charles Cabell, who was also an Air Force General. Cabell’s brother, Earle Cabell, happened to be mayor of Dallas at the time of Kennedy’s assassination. Allen Dulles was the “Warren Commission’s most active member,” and was adamant in his “unwillingness to let the Commission’s investigation get into a most pertinent project, the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro.”[65]

The Warren Commission was responsible for producing the idea of the “magic bullet theory,” which postulated that three bullets fired from Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository resulted in the murder of Kennedy. The “lone gunman” and “single bullet theory” were sold to the American people and not subjected to criticism by the mainstream media.

Peter Dale Scott differentiated between the notion of a “secret government” – with the institutional structure of something like a government – and “deep politics” – being, rather, the methods of deception, itself. Thus, it is not within a state structure that the assassination was conducted, but rather it was in the functions of an intricate network that transcends government and industry. Scott explained that, “the President was murdered by a coalition of forces inside and outside government,” and that, “In short, Kennedy was killed by the deep political system.”[66]

As a result of the death of JFK, the National Security State “secret government” – or the “deep political” system, as it is more accurately described, got exactly what it wanted with the escalation of the Vietnam War. The military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned the American people about two years prior, had turned the apparatus of the “secret government” in on the president, himself. It was a political lynching on a grand scale. And it was not to be the last.

Notes

[1] CFR, Historical Roster of Directors and Officers. Council on Foreign Relations

[2] CFR, Continuing the Inquiry, War and Peace. History of the CFR

[3] Ebrahim Norouzi, The Dulles Brothers. The Mossadeq Project: April 7, 2010

[4] James Risen, Secret History of the CIA in Iran. The New York Times: 2000

[5] Dwight D. Eisenhower, Military-Industrial Complex Speech. Farewell Adddress: January 17, 1961

[6] William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. (Common Courage Press: Monroe, Main, 2004), page 186

[7] Prof. Edward Curtin, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. Global Research: November 25, 2009

[8] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993), page 10

[9] David Talbott, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. (Free Press, New York, 2007), page 43

[10] Ibid, page 44.

[11] Ibid, page 45.

[12] Ibid, pages 45-46.

[13] Ibid, page 46.

[14] Ibid, page 47.

[15] Ibid, pages 47-48.

[16] Ibid, page 49.

[17] Ibid, page 50.

[18] Ibid, pages 50-51.

[19] Ibid, pages 51-52.

[20] Ibid, pages 52-53.

[21] Ibid, pages 53-54.

[22] Ibid, pages 64-65.

[23] Ibid, pages 66-67.

[24] Ibid, pages 68-69.

[25] Ibid, page 75.

[26] Ibid, pages 86-87.

[27] Ibid, page 106.

[28] Joint Chiefs of Staff, Operation Northwoods: Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba. March 13, 1962, Washington, D.C.

[29] Ibid, page 7.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid, page 8.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid, pages 8-9.

[34] Ibid, page 9.

[35] Ibid, pages 10-11.

[36] David Talbott, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. (Free Press, New York, 2007), pages 107-108

[37] Ibid, page 108.

[38] Ibid, page 163.

[39] Ibid, pages 163-165.

[40] Ibid, pages 165-166.

[41] Ibid, pages 166-167.

[42] Ibid, pages 167-168.

[43] Ibid, page 169.

[44] Ibid, pages 171-172.

[45] Ibid, pages 172-173.

[46] Ibid, page 173.

[47] Ibid, pages 176-177.

[48] Ibid.

[49] President John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at American University. Washington D.C., June 10, 1963

[50] Ibid.

[51] David Talbott, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. (Free Press, New York, 2007), page 206

[52] Ibid, pages 215-216.

[53] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993), page 26

[54] David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. (Free Press, New York, 2007), page 217

[55] Ibid, pages 217-218.

[56] Ibid, page 218.

[57] Ibid, page 181.

[58] Ryan Singel, Who Killed JFK? Famous Spook Outs the Conspiracy. Wired: April 3, 2007

[59] David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. (Free Press, New York, 2007), pages 402-406

[60] Ibid, pages 103-105.

[61] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993), pages 30-32

[62] Ibid, page 33.

[63] Ibid, pages 26-28.

[64] Ibid, page 32.

[65] Ibid, page 19.

[66] Ibid, page 299.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). e is co-editor, with Michel Chossudovsky, of the recent book, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century. He is currently writing a book on "Global Government" due to be released in 2011 by Global Research Publishers.

The JFK "Head Shot" Paradox

Editor's NOTE:

The following piece is from Jim Fetzer's blog HERE... I totally agree with the assertions made by Professor Fetzer with respect to the medical evidence and the implications, particularly the conclusions reached by Dr. David W. Mantik regarding the skull X-rays, and the autopsy photographs.

I have no special expertise in analysis of the Zapruder film but it is obvious that the extant version of the Z-film is incompatible with what we now know about the actual head wounds of JFK.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert


Sunday, November 14, 2010

By: Professor James H. Fetzer


As a philosopher of science with a keen interest in the nature of scientific knowledge, I have been fascinated by the recent book by G. Paul Chambers, Head Shot: The Science Behind the JFK Assassination (2010). I have found several aspects of his discussion of interest, including his conclusion—that the fatal shot to JFK’s head seen in the Zapruder film was caused by a shot from the right-front (“the grassy knoll”)—which he affirms on the basis of his competence as a physicist. He does not seem to notice that JFK’s brains and blood are blown out to the right-front in the Zapruder film, which he takes to be authentic and unaltered. But that means there is a paradox in his analysis, since, if the film is authentic, the blow-out to the right-front contradicts his conclusion that the shot that caused this effect was fired from the right-front, which is founded on elementary laws of physics. This, in turn, implies that he has not taken into account all the relevant evidence and thereby violated a basic principle of scientific reasoning, which may be appropriate for politicians, editorial writers, and used-car salesmen, but not for him.

Indeed, it is precisely because the back-and-to-the-left motion of his body provides such a simple proof of a shot fired from the right-front that those who have written extensively about it, such as Robert Groden and Josiah Thompson, have been adamantly opposed to acknowledging that the film is a fabrication, which was recreated using original footage which was subjected to sophisticated techniques of optical printing and special effects. A brilliant tutorial concerning how we know this was done has been presented by John P. Costella, another Ph.D. in physics with electromagnetism, the physics of moving objects and properties of light, among his areas of specialization. Previous arguments of David Wrone and Rollie Zavada, which Chambers presents, have been refuted by the publication of Inside the ARRB (2009) by Douglas Horne, whose key arguments about the film are summarized in an article of mine for those who may not have time for all five volumes!

Chambers’ discussions of the Zapruder film, whose authenticity he endorses, and of the medical evidence, which he disregards as corrupt, are especially interesting. Perhaps if he had read Assassination Science (1998), Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003), which are devoted to taking rumor and speculation out of the case and placing its study on an objective and scientific foundation, he might have a different outlook on both. Not the least puzzling aspect of this book is that, while his credentials as a physicist are advanced as the reason we should believe him (based upon his analysis of the motion of JFK’s head under the impact of the bullet), no one who has ever observed the film could have any serious doubt that it was fired from the right-front. The back-and-to-the-left motion of his body, which was accentuated in Oliver Stone’s “JFK”, makes that much obvious. You don’t have to be a Ph.D. in physics to notice.

As Horne has explained, there are five physical features that distinguish the original film, which was developed in Dallas, from the film that is available to us today. As he also remarks, the original was brought to the National Photographic Interpretation Center on Saturday, 23 November 1963, and processed by one team of experts, while a second film was brought to the NPIC the following day, Sunday, 24 November 1963, and processed by a different team of experts. We not only know that the films are different based upon their physical properties but from the occurrence of content anomalies found in the extant film. Some the most revealing content features that indicate it is a fabrication include the driver’s head turns (looking back toward JFK and then forward after he has been killed), which, as Noel Twyman, Bloody Treason (1997), has reported, occur twice as fast as humanly possible; that no witnesses reported the back-and-to-the-left motion seen in the extant film; and that Secret Service agents were nauseated to see JFK’s brains and blood across the trunk of the limousine in Washington, which has been “tidied” up in the film.

Roderick Ryan, a Hollywood expert on special effects whom Noel (Twyman) consulted about the blow-out to the right-front, explained to him that it and the blood spray had been painted in. A new group of Hollywood experts has now concluded that the blow-out itself was painted over in black to conceal the massive defect, as Horne explains in Volume IV of Inside the ARRB. But while there are many indications that the film is a fabrication, the most important proof is the inconsistency between the impact damage to the cranium, which is the film's most stunning feature, showing brains and gore bulging out to JFK's right-front, and the medical evidence, which shows a massive defect at the back of his head just to the right of center. Indeed, Escort Motorcycle Officer Bobby Hargis, who was riding to the left-rear, was hit so hard by the blown-out brains and debris that he though he himself had been shot. Jackie (Kennedy) told the Warren Commission that, from the front, he looked just fine, but that she had had a hard time holding his skull and brains together at the back of his head.

The question thus becomes how a massive blow-out of brains and gore to the left-rear could be shown bulging out to the right-front in the film.

Recent research by another physicist, David W. Mantik, who is also an M.D. and board-certified in radiation oncology, has demonstrated that the JFK autopsy X-rays have been altered to conceal the blow-out to the back of the head. The alteration of the film and the alteration of the X-rays thus constitute mutually reinforcing deceptions complemented by the publication of frame 313 in LIFE magazine with a caption saying that the bullet had entered the back of his head and blown out the right-front—a caption that was rewritten twice after breaking the plates, an event unique in the history of American journalism—and the televised appearance by Abraham Zapruder the very evening of the assassination, during which he placed his hand to his right forehead to described a blow-out to the right-front, which did not occur. By dismissing the medical evidence as corrupt and endorsing the authenticity of the film, Chambers violated the requirement of total evidence, which insists that reasoning in science must be based upon all the available relevant evidence.

No doubt, most of us would have a difficult time mastering the use of the technique of optical densitometry, which Mantik borrowed from physics and applied to the X-rays when he studied them at the National Archives. Since David’s report of his research, which established that the X-rays are fabrications and that there was a second shot to the head, were published in Assassination Science (1998), which Chambers cites, I have a hard time understanding why he did not discuss it in this book. He does cite Mantik twice (on pages 188 and 192), but does so in relation to his article on the Zapruder film and not in relation to his work on the medical evidence. Rather than addressing Mantik’s work on the Zapruder film directly, as would be typical for disagreements between physicists, Chambers instead simply accepts the verdict of an historian on the work of a physicist—which may be another unique event. He claims the medical evidence forms an “unstable data set”, which was true before Mantik sorted out the authentic from the inauthentic, as he has done in a brilliant synthesis that was published in Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000). Indeed, there are no indications here that Chambers is familiar with the most important objective and scientific studies of the medical evidence or of the fabrication of the film, especially in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003) and in Horne’s multiple volumes.

The study of the assassination has drawn the attention of physicists at least since David S. Lifton’s Best Evidence (1980). As Lifton explains, he showed photos of Zapruder frames to Richard Feynman at CalTech in 1965, where the Nobel Prize laureate pointed out that there is forward movement from frames 312 to 313, which, when the back-and-to-the-left motion observed in the film is taken as proof of a shot from in front, implies that JFK was hit at least twice in the head—once from behind and once from in front—a double-hit that was meticulously diagrammed in Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas (1967). Chambers dismisses JFK’s forward movement as an effect of William Greer, the driver, slowing the vehicle. More than 60 witnesses have reported that Greer slowed the vehicle dramatically or actually brought it to a halt, which is not seen in the film, (Editor's emphasis throughout) but only he moves slightly forward at that point in time. The vehicle is shown as accelerating immediately thereafter, making it anomalous that the occupants’ bodies—Governor and Nellie Connally and the Secret Service agents—are thrown forward following frame 313.

Since we know that, if the shot was fired from the right-front, then his brains should have been blown-out to the left-rear and not to the right-front, which is what we observe in the film, the conclusion that the film has been faked clearly follows.

Chalmers cites work by Wrone and Zavada that has been refuted in books with which he should be familiar, but does not report that proof of something wrong with the film is present in the film itself. It occurred to me that those who were falsifying the film might have paid so much time and attention to the head shot and its effects—as we see them now in frames 313-316—that they might have overlooked the head wound in later frames. And, indeed, I found that it is visible in frame 374, among others, where its cashew-nut-like shape corresponds very closely to “Area P” (for “patched”) in Mantik’s analysis of the lateral cranial X-ray, as I have explained and demonstrated in “Dealey Plaza Revisited: What Happened to JFK?”

Perhaps if he had read more of Assassination Science (1998), which he cites, Chambers might have learned that Robert B. Livingston, M.D.—a world authority on the human brain and also an expert on wound ballistics, having supervised an emergency medical hospital for injured Okinawans and for Japanese prisoners of war during the Battle of Okinawa—had concluded that the diagrams and photographs of the brain stored at the National Archives cannot be authentic photographs and diagrams of the brain of John F. Kennedy. He compared the multiple reports from experienced physicians at Parkland Hospital of cerebellar as well as cerebral tissue extruding from the blow-out at the back of the head with the photographs and diagrams at the National Archives—the brain itself is mysteriously missing—which show a wholly intact cerebellum. Since Chambers does not know the medical evidence any better than he knows the photographic, he precluded drawing inferences about those who were involved in the cover-up and the crime itself.

The Mafia, for example, could not have extended its reach into Bethesda Naval Hospital to falsify X-rays that were under the control of medical officers of the US Navy, agents of the Secret Service, or the president’s personal physician. Neither pro- nor anti-Castro Cubans could have substituted another brain for that of JFK. And the KGB, which may have had an ability to fabricate films comparable to that of the CIA and of Hollywood, would have had no opportunity to gain access to the original Zapruder film. Once we know the breadth and depth of the cover-up, which was implemented in great detail to effect mutually-reinforcing forms of deception, we begin to appreciate that those who had the motive, the means and the opportunity to bring them about were at the highest levels of our own government, as James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable (2008), explains.

It not only troubles me profoundly that Chambers violates a basic principle of scientific reasoning and that evidence internal to the extant film refutes his presumption that the film is authentic but that Jefferson Morley endorses the book with the following claim: “He dismantles the bad science at the core of Vincent Bugliosi’s flabby Reclaiming History [2007] and politely punts the fantasy that the Zapruder film was altered.” While I agree that Bugliosi’s work is indefensible, to the best of my knowledge, Morley has never studied the film and is not in a position to know whether it is authentic or not. This is not the first time Morley has proven to be unequal to the demands of serious research about the assassination of one of the Kennedys. Science, as we have seen, can enable us to sort out authentic from inauthentic evidence, but we have to think things through and not let ourselves be misled by pseudo-science masquerading as genuine in the search for truth.

* Thanks to David W. Mantik, John Costella, and Morgan Reynolds for their feedback.

Welcome New Visitors

Many have undoubtedly been led here from my companion site moralphilsophyofcurrentevents.blogspot.com and are already familiar with my assessment of how the United States got into its current precarious position. For those of you who have arrived here by other means, I include the short following summary of when the American experiment in elective government appears to have gone seriously off-track.

In the wake of the CIA's creation after WWII (which rather than providing only an intelligence component, began a clandestine paramilitary program including a virtual secret army replete with an assassination capability) a "Shadow Government" gradually arose which was referred to by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as the "military industrial complex" (MIC) in his farewell address to the nation. He warned about its growing power and influence which was already considerable by the time Eisenhower left office.

When John F. Kennedy became President in January of 1961, the power of this Shadow Government led by the MIC had already grown to a dangerous level. Kennedy realized after the failed Bay of Pigs fiasco in which the CIA seriously misled him, that the renegade agency would have to be dealt with and summarily fired DCI director Allen Dulles, his deputy General Charles P. Cabell and Richard Bissel CIA director of plans otherwise known as head of "black-ops." President Kennedy placed his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in a position to informally oversee the CIA and some researchers believe JFK planned to make RFK head of the CIA after his re-election in 1964.

Due to various policy prescriptions of the Kennedy administration including withdrawing from Viet Nam, decreasing or ending the oil depletion allowance, beginning a rapprochement with the Soviet Union, decreasing or ending the power of the Federal Reserve and possibly ending the embargo of Cuba, President Kennedy became increasingly despised by many factions of the power base which increasingly made up the Shadow Government. For an excellent treatment of the many reasons why President Kennedy was assassinated see James W. Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2008).

A cadre of these diverse elements had JFK murdered, effectively ending not only the Kennedy administration but its major policy initiatives. The new President Lyndon B. Johnson quickly canceled or reversed them all e.g. through NSAM #273 he began the progressive buildup of US combat troops in Vietnam desired by the joint chiefs of staff under Kennedy but to which he would not acquiesce. This represented a complete change from the withdrawal that JFK had put into place through NSAM #263 in which the US would be completely out of Viet Nam by 1965.

Today the MIC has become the MIMIC (media/intelligence/military/industrial/complex) as a result of over 45 years of media, defense, investment banking and other key industries which benefitted from deregulation and consolidation. This has made it much easier for the Shadow Government to control the American populace in a subtle/covert yet highly effective fashion. The not so Shadow Government is now a ruling oligarchy which is rapidly approaching a Fascist state not fundamentally different from that of the Third Reich as difficult as that may seem to be. JFK Assassination researcher Jim Marrs has outlined the many ways in which the two compare in his book The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies that Threaten to Take over America, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2008).

Many of the original intelligence agents who built the CIA after its creation were former Nazi's or individuals with various ties including investment banking ties to the Nazi regime. The now all-powerful intelligence/"defense" apparatus of the United States is replete with neo-Nazi's known today as Neoconservatives made up of members of both major political parties.

Neoconservatives are intellectual descendants of Leon Trotsky through Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago who have now adopted Nazi tactics both domestically and abroad. For more information on the political teachings of the Straussian trained Neoconservatives read the writings of Professor Francis A. Boyle e.g. Biowarfare and Terrorism (Atlanta, Ga.: Clarity Press Inc. 2005) who completed parts of his education at the University of Chicago and who is therefore very familiar with Strassian derived Neoconservativism.

I encourage any interested readers to investigate this new site, return on a frequent basis and by all means inform anyone you think might be interested in understanding how we as a nation got to our current dangerous situation. Only if we admit the truth about what has transpired will it be possible to reverse our inexorable decline.

Please feel free to utilize the comment section after each post.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert

After the JFK Assassination--a True Coup d'état: Is the Current US Government Legitimate?

Dr. J. P. Hubert, MD FACS
August 3, 2010


It is now beyond reasonable doubt (BRD) that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own National Security State in what was a violent coup d'état that is, an overthrowing of the legitimate elected government of the United States by force through the use of the clandestine black-ops services of the CIA, elements of the Secret Service, the US military, the FBI and organized crime.[1]

Probability and Statistics:

Various scientific calculations have been done which indicate that there is less than 1 chance in a trillion that JFK's death was the result of one man acting alone. There were at least 15 separate violations made by the US Secret Service in their handling of Presidential Security in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.[2] These were unprecedented breaches in protocol. It would have been unusual if even one of these breaks in procedure had occurred let alone 15 during one Presidential visit. It defies credulity to think that such a scenario could have occurred on the basis of chance alone. Obviously the Secret Service “stood-down” so as to facilitate the conspirator’s killing teams in accomplishing the dastardly deed.[3] This means there was an extremely well orchestrated conspiracy to kill the President.

Perhaps even more astoundingly, during the 3 year period following the assassination of JFK and the murders of Lee Harvey Oswald and Officer J. D. Tippit, some 17 witnesses who were involved either directly or peripherally died, 72% of which were unnatural deaths, 52% being murders. The probability that even 15 of the 17 witnesses would be dead by 1967 is 100 quadrillion to 1 or 10(-17).[4]

The 35th President of the United States was murdered at essentially high noon on a bright autumn day in the middle of an American city while his security detail looked on and did nothing. The conspirators’ message was simple; “we’re in charge and there is nothing you can do about it.” Within the first hour after the Assassination, a pre-arranged “patsy” who had been placed in position at the Texas School Book Depository[5] was hunted down and apprehended long before any agency should have even suspected that he might have been involved. Lee Harvey Oswald--who as a result of the FIA[6] and the JFK Records Act[7] is now known to have been an American intelligence operative[8]--whether wittingly or by some last minute ruse played the part of the “fall-guy. During the entire time Oswald was in custody he denied killing President Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippitt. There exists more and more evidence that Oswald was not involved in the killing of either JFK or Officer Tippitt.

Before being given the opportunity to disclose his role as an intelligence operative and what he might have known about the conspiracy to kill JFK[9], Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered on national TV in a room full of police and FBI agents whose only responsibility was to protect him. The night before his killing, the Dallas Police Department received 2 separate calls from unknown person(s) who reported that Oswald was to be murdered. Despite the warning, the Dallas Police made no attempt to prevent the killing of ostensibly the most important prisoner in US custody at the time. It defies all logic to believe that both JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald were killed by lone “deranged” gunmen.

Metaphysical Certainty:

In light of all of the cumulative JFK Assassination evidence now available, there exists metaphysical certainty that JFK was killed by a massive conspiracy with the power not only to murder the President but to successfully perpetrate a cover-up of monumental proportions which included securing massive medical fraud in the forensic evidence.[10] David Lifton, Douglas P. Horne and Dr. David W. Mantik and others have amply documented the details of how the medical fraud was accomplished.[11] The absolutely critical concept to understand is that no foreign or domestic entity would have had the access, power and requisite technological expertise to direct and accomplish the cover-up other than the American National Security State including US military physicians, 3 of which conducted the sham autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Shadow Government in Control:

Unless and until the United States publicly discloses to the citizenry that its duly elected government was overthrown in 1963 and that since then the replacement/imposter government has been at least technically/legally speaking illegitimate[12] it will likely be impossible to reverse the increasingly rapid disintegration of America. The reality is that since the murder of President John F. Kennedy, there has been an extra-constitutional imposter “government” in place which prior to that time existed only in the shadows. It has been given many different names including the “war party” the MIMIC (media, intelligence, military, industrial complex) the secret government, the shadow government etc. That entity or “Regime” as a result of the JFK assassination appears to have profoundly altered the trajectory of the United States by placing the country on a constant war footing and building and sustaining an enormous foreign military base presence throughout the world which serves to project American power and enlarge the “empire.”

Beginning with the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and his reversal of John F. Kennedy’s NSAM # 263 (within 4 days of the JFK Assassination) calling for an end to all US presence in Vietnam by 1965[13], the course which the US took was that of increasing militarization and empire-building rather than the move toward peace, nuclear disarmament and ending of the cold war begun by JFK in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.[14] As should be readily apparent, the result has been catastrophic for the United States and much of the world. Since the death of President Kennedy, the confidence of the American people in their government has been drastically reduced suggesting that at a subliminal level at least, Americans are aware that something extremely troubling has transpired. Moreover, the polarization of the major political parties which now exists can be traced to the Johnson administration’s prosecution of the Vietnam War and its terrible sequelae.

Hegelian Dialectic and the Manipulation of US Population:

A form of Hegelian dialectic[15] is currently being utilized successfully by the oligarchical “Regime” to control the masses through an artificial binary division of reality[16] into a politics of left vs.: right in combination with the unrelenting “bread and circus” entertainment extravaganza being foisted upon the people the latest incarnation of which is the absurd reality TV phenomenon. Most Americans are too busy attempting to survive to be able to sort through the maze of distractions. They seek refuge in meaningless electronic games, TV shows and sporting events as a way to escape from the dismal realities of their increasingly hopeless lives. For those with more time and the requisite interest in politics and current events, the shadow government provides a steady diet of right vs.: left diatribes carried out by various “experts”, talking heads and partisan political hacks many of whom function as US intelligence assets and "cut-outs" of various kinds.[17] Few Americans realize that this left/right dichotomy is totally artificial and contrived so as to limit the universe of acceptable public discourse.

Effect of Dumbing-Down of America:

Americans have been “dumbed-down” for over 50 years such that as an aggregate entity we are no longer capable of reason or for that matter intellectually sound individual thought. The completely artificial bi-polar division between right and left, liberal and conservative so dominates the public discourse that one would think that it totally exhausts the entire panoply of possibilities. This of course is the sine que non of the Hegelian dialectic which is served up on a nightly basis in the form of cable “news” TV shows which attempt to promote an endless debate over which political worldview is best while demonizing its opponent. The idea that on many topics the position of neither left nor right is credible--seems to have been totally missed by most Americans.

The Left/Right Divide and the Hiding of the Truth:

For example, we have become accustomed to there being only 2 possibilities in any given dispute over issues of public policy; the position of the liberal (progressive) left and that of the neoconservative right.[18] How many Americans understand that the neoliberal left and the neoconservative right are but artificial constructs in the Hegelian tradition, designed to allow for the appearance of debate all the while serving to disguise the truth that the resolution/synthesis has already been predetermined by the oligarchical Regime currently in charge? The Regime has as its greatest weapon the fact that no one wishes to believe the truth. For most of us it is simply too painful, unnerving and overwhelming. As many propagandists have indicated, “the bigger the lie the more readily it will be believed.” It is viscerally more comfortable to believe the lie that our government exists of, by and for the people rather than for an elite few who wield all the power and influence and for whom everyone else exists only to be utilized, abused and discarded. The mercenary (all volunteer) US military is a perfect example of the latter being made up almost exclusively of the offspring of impoverished Americans. This has been the case since the draft was ended in the 1970’s.

Theater of the Absurd:

Every four years the Regime treats us to another “theater of the absurd” in which US citizens are allowed to vote for one of 2 Presidential candidates, each of whom has been vetted by the oligarchy such that from its standpoint it matters little which one is elected. Irrespective of what campaign promises are made, once in power, the new Presidential administration hues to the wishes of the not so hidden “shadow government.” It should be intuitively obvious that no serious candidate for high office could rise to that level without demonstrating a willingness to regurgitate the “party line” of their respective political affiliation. As a result so-called third-party candidates are virtually never successful when running for the highest office in the land. The only real opportunity for rank and file US citizens to effect change in their government is to elect a Representative to the US House who is committed to representing their views. Unfortunately, the mega corporations now appear to enjoy monopoly control[19] due to the campaign finance laws which allow for virtually unlimited contributions to candidates.[20] The practical effect is to nullify the political power of the average citizen.

The Political Process is Broken:

The current political process then is broken. So what can we do? It is obvious that under the current set of circumstances, it makes no difference who is elected President and what major political party has the White House or Congress for that matter. To say this of course is considered heresy among the pundit/ruling class who earn their livings by pretending the system is legitimate. Unfortunately however, it is true and they are wrong. There are simply too many powerful individuals and multinational corporations who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Examples include the banking, health care, munitions and energy industries and their lobbies and individual pundits who make up the afternoon and evening chattering class on cable TV such as Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, Ed Schultz, Keith Oberman and others.[21]

All of the above individuals to one degree or another represent special interest groups across the political spectrum. None are truly independent thinkers. They owe their jobs to their willingness to hue a particular political line as representatives of the media entity to which they belong. For example, O’Reilly, Hannity and Beck regurgitate the Neoconservative party line for Fox News with very little difference in their messages that is, there are differences in style but not substance.

Matthews (frequently repeats the claim that JFK and RFK were both killed by a lone deranged individual and he accepts/advertizes the poor work of scholarship that is Pozner's "Case Closed" which is easily debunked), Oberman (who also accepts Pozner's conclusions in "Case Closed") and Schultz largely follow the left or liberal party line with minor differences in substance and major differences in style. All advance the liberal political views of MSNBC.

CNN on the other hand touts itself as simply reporting the facts without an obvious political orientation. However, the most powerful CNN pundit is Wolf Blitzer who is essentially an Israeli (Zionist) intelligence cut-out all the while presenting himself as a non-editorializing straight-up journalist. CNN is completely loyal to Zionist Israel and the Zionist Lobby. It never criticizes the genocidal policies of the Jewish state so in that sense at least it is completely biased in favor of the Israeli Jews and against the Palestinian Arabs. It has failed to report the Apartheid nature of modern Israel where the human rights granted to Jews are denied to Arabs.

The Power of the Israel Lobby:

Not one of the above cable entities or individual pundit’s dares to criticize the Israeli government or its immoral policies however. In fact no major network or cable entity is willing to risk doing so due to the power of the Zionist (Israel) Lobby. Only in foreign venues or on the internet among bloggers does one find a willingness to question Israel’s Apartheid/genocidal policies or the actions of the Zionist Lobby. There is a complete symbiosis between the corporate oligarchy in control of the US government and the Israeli neo-Fascist entity whose interests are protected by the extensive Zionist Lobby which has infiltrated virtually every branch of the US government, most major ‘think-tanks” and much of US academia. There exists only a very small Jewish minority in the United States who admit that the actions of the modern state of Israel are not only immoral but counterproductive to the ultimate survival of the Jewish state. Fortunately, in Israel, Jewish intellectuals and academics such as Ilan Pappe have begun to break the strangle hold that radical Zionist’s such as Benyamin Netanyahu, Igor Lieberman and others have held over successive Israeli governments.

Is there a Solution?

While the internet is still relatively unregulated, it behooves every US citizen to peacefully but actively spread the truth that in the wake of World War II/the creation of the CIA and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the constitutional representative democratic republic which was brought into being in 1789 was replaced[22] with a not so secret shadow government which does the bidding of the elites and is antithetical to the needs, desires and goals of everyone else.

This effort should include organizing at the state and local levels. It should include electing to the US House of Representatives individuals who cannot be purchased by the multinational corporations and special interest groups. Finding such highly morally committed individuals will not be easy.

Finally, interested and committed individuals of like-mind should ban together for the purpose of pooling their various resources in order to better oppose the corporate media and their relentless attempts to “brain-wash” the public. Time is short for the survival of the American experiment. Please help Spread the word!


Notes:

[1] The evidence is simply overwhelming. For those who are not yet familiar with some of the seminal works they include but are not limited to those in the selected reference section appended to this essay.
[2] Philosopher of Science Professor James H. Fetzer performed a calculation assuming that the probability that any one of them would be breached was only 10% which is more than likely too high. For even 12 to be breached at the same time yields a probability of 10(-12).
[3] Evidence now strongly suggests that there were likely at least “3” teams, one in the TSBD, one behind the fence at the grassy knoll, and one at the southwest end of the overpass in the storm drain. It is also possible that a 4th team was positioned at the southeast end of the overpass and another in the Dal-Tex building fairly close to ground level. The exact identity and number of the assassin’s is of course irrelevant to the issue of whether a conspiracy existed.
[4] Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact. The Warren Commission, the Authorities and the Report. (New York: Random House, 1975) chapter 16, p. 302.
[5] Only someone in the US Secret Service would have been privy to the last minute change in the Dallas parade route which took the motorcade directly past the TSBD on Elm Street rather than down Main Street which had been the published route up until that point. The “last-minute” change was no doubt arranged to lessen the number of witnesses who would see the shooting and to be certain that Oswald was placed in the correct strategic position to be framed.
[6] Abbreviation for “Freedom of Information Act.”
[7] Passed in 1992 in response to the Motion Picture by Oliver Stone about the JFK Assassination. The law is known as the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The Act ordered all assassination-related material to be placed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
[8] See for example, James Di Eugenio and Lisa Pease, Editors. The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003) and John Newman. Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth about the Unknown Relationship between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK. (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1995).
[9] Judyth Vary Baker who alleges a romantic affair with Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1963 while the two worked under-cover at the Reilly Coffee Co. of New Orleans also claims that Oswald discovered the plot to kill Kennedy and had hoped to derail it but was unable to do so. Oswald apparently suspected that the result might be his own death as well as President Kennedy’s. Please see the extensive set of interviews on this site in which Judyth Baker is questioned in detail about Oswald.
[10] This included altering the wounds on the body of JFK prior to the “official” autopsy, substituting a different brain, falsifying the location of the alleged back wound in order to make the magic bullet hypothesis plausible, altering the skull X-rays and photographs of the head etc. See Douglas P. Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK, Volumes I-V. (2009). Also see David Lifton. Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 1980).
[11] See for example Douglas P. Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK, Volumes I-V. (2009), especially volume IV.
[12] We have lost the legitimate succession of power from one Presidential Administration to the next by direct “propagation” due to the violent removal of President John F. Kennedy from office and the resultant complete turnabout in policy that Lyndon B. Johnson ordered and presided over.
[13] Johnson signed NSAM # 273 which began the increasing build-up of land forces in Vietnam 4 days after JKF’s Assassination.
[14] For an excellent detailed discussion of President Kennedy’s move toward peace in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis see James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2008).
[15] Problem, reaction, solution or (thesis, antithesis, synthesis).
[16] This metaphysical construct is extremely dangerous since it results in a complete polarization of the population into left vs.: right.
[17] See for example Carl Bernstein. “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977 for a discussion of the many media personages who are under the control of the national security state.
[18] The traditional or Paleoconservative “right” no longer exists for all practical purposes in that the neoconservatives have taken over the right wing of the US political spectrum. Neoconservatism has its roots in Trotsky and its branches in Nazism/Fascism. Newt Gingrich and former Vice President Dick Cheney are illustrative of the more radicalized Neoconservative right.
[19] The Health Insurance Lobby was the major beneficiary of the recently passed Health Reform Bill, the Banking Lobby virtually wrote the Banking Reform legislation.
[20] "Bundling" of funds by large corporate donors is a favorite tactic.
[21] One possible exception is the courageous Dylan Ratigan who has been willing to speak truthfully about the reality of the present circumstances at least with respect to the various lobbies which control the Congress. He has not to date challenged the Zionist Lobby which presumably would result forthwith in his dismissal from MSNBC.
[22] A true violent Coup d'etat. I specifically use this term recognizing that Peter Dale Scott disagrees with the use of that term when applied to the JFK Assassination.

References:

1. Bernstein, Carl. “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977
2. Boyle, Francis A. Biowarfare and Terrorism. (Atlanta Georgia: Clarity Press Inc., 2005).
3. Boyle, Francis A. Tackling America’s Toughest Questions. (Atlanta Georgia: Clarity Press Inc., 2009).
4. Crenshaw, Charles A. et.al. Trauma Room One: The JFK Medical Coverup Exposed. (New York: Paraview Press, 2001).
5. Di Eugenio, James and Lisa Pease, Editors. The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003).
6. Douglas, James W. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2008).
7. Fetzer, James H., Editor. Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK. (Chicago: Catfeet Press, 1998).
8. Fetzer, James H., Editor. Murder in Dealey Plaza: What We Know Now that We Didn’t Know Then about the Death of JFK. (Chicago: Catfeet Press, 2000).
9. Fetzer, James H., Editor. The Great Zapruder Film Hoax: Deceit and Deception in the Death of JFK, (Chicago: Catfeet Press, 2003).
10. Fonzi, Gaeton. The Last Investigation. (Ipswich, Mass.: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 1993).
11. Hersh, Burton. The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA. (New York: Scribner’s, 1992).
12. Horne, Douglas P. Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK, Volumes I-V, 2009).
13. Hurt, Henry. Reasonable Doubt. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985).
14. Lane, Mark. Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991).
15. Lifton, David. Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 1980).
16. Livingstone, Harrison E. High Treason 2. (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., 1992).
17. Livingstone, Harrison E. Killing Kennedy: And the Hoax of the Century. (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., 1995).
18. Livingstone, Harrison E. Killing the Truth. Deceit and Deception in the JFK Case. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., 1994).
19. Mangold, Tom. Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’ Master Spy Hunter. (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1992).
20. Meagher, Sylvia. Accessories After the Fact. (New York: Random House, 1975).
21. Melanson, Philip H. Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence. (New York: Praeger, 1990).
22. Newman, John. Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth about the Unknown Relationship between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK. (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1995).
23. Prouty, L. Fletcher. JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. (New York: Carroll Publishing Group, 1996).
24. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much. (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992).
25. Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
26. Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in U.S. Government Files 1994-1995. (Ipswich, Mass: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2003).
27. Talbot, David. Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. (London: Simon and Schuster UK Ltd, 2007).
28. Thompson, Josiah. Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-study of the Kennedy Assassination Proving that Three Gunmen Murdered the President. (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1967).

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Me & Lee: How I came to know love and lose Lee Harvey Oswald (Waterville, Oregon: Trine Day LLC, 2010) by Judyth Vary Baker is now publicly available and can be purchased through amazon.com HERE...

I read Edward Haslam's related book, Dr. Mary's Monkey (Waterville, Oregon: Trine Day LLC, 2007) a while back and had been eagerly anticipating my copy of Baker's book. It arrived roughly 10 days ago and I have now finished a careful methodical review. I found it to be well written, extremely englightening, full of complexity and overall a fascinating read. Judyth Baker's story is both inspiring and tragic.

Needless to say the assertions that Judtyh Vary Baker makes with regard to Lee Harvey Oswald's character, his involvement in concert with Baker, Dr. Alton Ochsner, Dr. Mary Sherman, David Ferrie and others in the clandestine project to develop a bioweapon in the summer of 1963 with which to kill Fidel Castro, Oswald's infiltration of the plot to kill President Kennedy and his alleged attempts to stop the assassination of JFK are earthshaking if true as they will alter the JFK Assassination research community landscape and US political history permanently.

I am currently in the process of writing a detailed review of Me and Lee which I will publish upon completion. I wholeheartedly recommend purchasing a copy of Baker's book to anyone who is interested in finding the truth about what happened to the 35th President of the United States and the American Republic thereafter. Given the deplorable state of affairs in contemporary America. Ms. Baker's book is fortuitous and timely.

To view multiple video interviews of Judyth Vary Baker see THIS...

--Dr. J. P. Hubert


See also the following Dr. Jim Fetzer interview of author Dean Hartwell who supports the veracity of Judyth's claims:



________________________________________________________

Famed Surgeon and Former Head of American Cancer Society Engaged in Crimes Against Humanity if Judyth Vary Baker's Allegations are True!

Since my previous post, noted JFK Assasination researcher and author Professor James H. Fetzer has completed a fascinating radio interview with Ed Haslam the author of Dr. Mary's Monkey (Waterville, Oregon, Trine Day LLC, 2007) regarding Judyth Vary Baker's new book; Me and Lee (Waterville, Oregon, Trine Day LLC, 2010).
Ed Haslam has provided an incredible radio summary of Judyth's book which has further improved my understanding of the material covered in Me and Lee. I wholeheartedly recommend the radio interview to readers. At this point I have only a few additional questions I would appreciate obtaining the answers to.

One of the most egregious and unethical things ever to have been done to an impressionable young and burgeoning medical scientist is what Dr. Alton Ochsner allegedly did to Judyth Vary Baker after she objected on moral grounds to the testing of their bioweapon on unsuspecting prisoner's. He purportedly not only ended her career in Medicine but threatened to do physical harm to her if she did not complete her part of the project at the Prison and remain quiet about what she had been involved in.

If Judyth Vary Baker's testimony is true, Ochsner violated international humanitarian as well as US law by directing that prisoners be injected with the weaponized cancer causing virus in the absense of their consent and violated the Hippocratic oath he undoubtedly took as a physician to first "do no harm."

The actions ostensibly undertaken by David Ferrie in clandestinely injecting prisoner's with the cancer-causing virus at Dr. Alton Ochsner's request was a crime against humanity, one which is comparable to the Nazi human experiments so forcefully repudiated at the Nazi War Crimes Tribunal after World War II.

It bears repeating, It is always and everywhere morally wrong to intentionally harm a patient irrespective of the circumstances. The alleged prisoners in question were utilized as human test animals the result of which was their death(s). In this case, a successful human experiment would of necessity demand the death of the subject--a situation which is beyond the pale for any medical doctor to have been involved in let alone one of such fame and professional reputation. It is truly unfortunate that this case was not brought to the Hague or other international criminal court of justice. Presumably, Dr. Alton Ochsner could be tried in absentia even at this late date.

Haslam who edited and wrote the forward to Judyth's book firmly believes in the truthfulness of her claims as does Professor Fetzer, and acclaimed JFK Assassination author Jim Marrs.

To listen to the interview, proceed HERE...

Needless to say, Judyth's story would make an excellent sequel to Oliver Stone's movie JFK as would the material which Ed Haslam presented in his book Dr. Mary's Monkey.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert, MD FACS

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“Dr. Mary’s Monkey”

by Mary Wenworth
09/20/10
Capecodtoday.com HERE...

Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassination are part of this chronicle


In "Dr. Mary's Monkey," Edward T. Haslam weaves a tale of intrigue involving polio vaccines, secret laboratories, a gruesome death, romance, and, yes, monkeys.

Would you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of JFK are also part of this chronicle? Set in New Orleans in the fifties and early sixties, it demonstrates that truth is way stranger than fiction.

Haslam set out to discover what his father, a former Commander in the U.S. Navy and a Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Tulane, had come across in the New Orleans medical community that not only offended his sense of medical ethics, but also frightened him into silence.


Interview With Edward T. Haslam

When a small child Haslam had sat in Dr. Mary Sherman's lap during one of her visits to the Haslam home. It was to be expected then that her murder, which remains unsolved to this day, would have been a painful event for the whole family. Nevertheless, the senior Haslam, just before his death, would not reveal to his son what he had learned. Only that very powerful people were involved and his son should think twice about "crossing swords" with them.

Haslam's search goes back to 1952 when Dr. Alton Ochsner persuaded Sherman, a well-known and respected cancer researcher and faculty member at the University of Chicago, to come to New Orleans. Ochsner was a prominent surgeon, an influential figure in New Orleans political circles, president of the American Cancer Society, and a staunch anti-communist. He promised Sherman a partnership in his clinic, her own cancer laboratory that would never want for funds because of Ochsner's connections, and an associate professorship at Tulane Medical School.

What were the events over the next fourteen years that led to Dr. Sherman's murder in July 1964- eight months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?

The answer to this question begins with the 33,000 Americans a year who had contracted polio during the early fifties. Parental fear that their child would be the next victim of this crippling, and often deadly, disease put enormous pressure on American medical researchers.

A significant step forward occurred when researchers found they could use the kidneys of rhesus monkeys as the culture for growing a vaccine. In early 1955, Dr. Jonas Salk announced that his vaccine would prevent polio. Following his instructions, five commercial laboratories began producing it in preparation for mass inoculations set to begin in April of that year.

As a precaution, Dr. Bernice Eddy, a researcher who worked for the National Institute of Health (NIH) in New Orleans, was ordered at the last minute to safe-test the Salk vaccine. Her finding was shocking: the vaccine itself could cause paralysis.

It heralded the biggest fiasco, to date, in the history of American medicine: unbelievably, the top dogs in the medical community decided to go ahead, anyway. [It is possible that this decision was based on a trade-off: some children would be paralyzed and some of them would die but many more would be protected from the disease.]

In a display of unimaginable arrogance, Ochsner, who had holdings in one of the five laboratories, inoculated his own grandchildren to demonstrate that the vaccine was safe. Both contracted polio. His granddaughter recovered from her paralysis but tragically his grandson died.

Estimates vary, but a significant number of other children also died or had permanent paralysis. Later on, in 1960, Dr. Albert Sabin was believed to have saved the day because his oral vaccine used a weakened virus rather than the dead virus used by Salk. Moreover, it had already been tested extensively in other countries. It began to be distributed here almost five years to the day that Americans had begun receiving the Salk inoculations.

About this time, another unsung heroine of American medicine, Dr. Sarah Stewart proved that a virus caused cancer. NIH officials, in an attempt to muzzle their whistleblower, had shifted Eddy, a close friend of Stewart's, from working on polio vaccine to doing research on influenza. Nevertheless, Eddy began to quietly perform more tests on polio vaccines.

At an October 1961 meeting in Manhattan of the New York Cancer Society, Eddy made a career-ending move. Without the consent of her superiors, she revealed an even more alarming discovery than her first: both polio vaccines were contaminated with a cancer-causing virus!

Another fiasco even bigger than the first! And one with far-reaching consequences. Between 1955 and 1963, millions of Americans had been injected with, or had swallowed, a substance that caused cancer.
How could this have happened? The answer is that little thought had been given to the possibility that life-threatening viruses could be extracted from kidney cultures along with the polio vaccine.

What was done about it? Not much. Both Salk and Sabin resisted informing the American people of this development. A few heads rolled - but not many. The media paid little attention to this catastrophe. [Since Eddy had predicted that it would take thirty years for the cancers to develop, one might surmise that the medical community felt shielded by the prospect that a connection between the vaccine and a cancer would be difficult to prove.]

Haslam drew up charts from statistics obtained from the National Cancer Institute that show that the epidemic began in the 1985 (1955+30) when cancers of five of the body's soft tissues - the skin, breast, prostate, lymphoma and lung - began a dramatic increase.

He writes, "Remember the dreaded polio epidemic of the 1950s with its 33,000 cases of polio each year. Compare that to these numbers from 1994: 182,000 new cases of breast cancer diagnosed; 200,000 new cases of prostate cancer diagnosed; 500,000 new cases of lung cancer diagnosed. The increase in any one of these diseases in the years since 1985 was greater than the entire polio epidemic at its peak!"

It is a significant part of this exposé that these key discoveries were made in national institutions like the NIH based in one particular city. New Orleans was the gateway to the United States for South American countries. Many came to the city for medical treatment. Dr. Ochsner's Clinic, in particular, with its posh accommodations became a destination for Latin America's elite. Ochsner's rabid anti-communism grew out of his personal friendships with dictators like Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, Juan Peron of Argentina, and Tomas Gabriel Duque of Panama.

Ochsner was incensed by Fidel Castro's successful 1959 rebellion in Cuba against the US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Many anti-Castro Cubans and their allies felt that either the 1961 disastrous Bay of Pigs assault or the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis should have occasioned a full-scale invasion of Cuba to "free the Cuban people from the Castro dictatorship." [Of course, none of these people had expressed any concern for the Cuban people when Batista, a real dictator, had been in power.]

A 1976 report from Senator Frank Church's Select Committee on Assassinations showed that the CIA had been busy for more than a decade with inventing new ways to murder Castro. Was using the cancer-causing polio vaccine one of these ideas?

[Douglas's research combined with Haslam's gives us a fairly complete picture that Oswald's activities in New Orleans that portrayed him as a friend of Cuba was part of a plan for Oswald to be involved in carrying out this mission. It also helped set him up to be the "patsy" for President Kennedy's assassination.]

Ochsner had recruited Judyth Vary, a young woman not yet twenty, to work in one of his labs. Almost immediately upon her arrival in New Orleans in May 1963, a bit ahead of her employment date, she became the protégé of Lee Harvey Oswald who had recently returned to his native city. He helped Vary get settled and find work. During this period, Vary married her fiancé, Robert Baker, who came to the city for the ceremony but left immediately for a summer job in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oswald worked with Ochsner, David Ferrie and the local Mafia boss, Carlos Marcello, as well as the CIA and FBI. Vary noted that the Oswald family had apparently had a long relationship with Marcello. David Ferrie had had a rather checkered career as a seminary student, a pilot for Eastern Airlines, and an operative for the CIA. By the time Vary came to know him, he was wearing a homemade orange wig and painting his eyebrows with a black greasy substance. An unforgettable looking character.

Both Vary and Oswald eventually received cover jobs in the Reily Coffee Company where they could come and go in order to do their undercover work. No questions asked. Even though Oswald was also married, had a small child and another on the way, it was not long before the two began an affair that ended with Lee's murder in November of that year.

Ferrie did experiments on mice in his own apartment, but he also rented another that housed an underground lab. It was here that Vary was soon put to work, inspecting new batches of mice that were brought into the secret lab by one or another of the anti-Castro Cubans who came and went from an upstairs apartment. After destroying the mice with the most advanced tumors, Judyth would remove the tumors, grind them up in a blender and take the mixture to Dr. Sherman's home a few blocks away.

Dr. Sherman's work In New Orleans included teaching at Tulane Medical School, doing operations at Charity Hospital, staffing at several children's hospitals and working in Ochsner's Clinic. It appears that another secret lab was at the US Public Health Hospital. Perhaps Sherman started out to develop a vaccine to cure cancer. But ended up dedicating herself to perfecting a biological weapon from the cancer-causing monkey virus.

According to Vary-Baker, Dr. Sherman, herself, helped convince her that it was their patriotic duty to develop a biological weapon that could kill Castro before he unleashed "nukes" on the United States.

When the virus became fast-acting at killing not only mice but also monkeys, it was determined that it needed to be tried on a human. An inmate at Angola State Prison who volunteered for the experiment was brought to the Jackson State Mental Hospital not far from New Orleans where he died from an injection.

Judyth wrote a letter to Dr. Ochsner, complaining that the inmate did not know the possible consequences of the experiment. An angry Ochsner terminated Judyth as well as Oswald from any further connection to the project. In the fall she went back to Florida to a lab job in Gainesville that Ferrie had found for her. In mid-October, Oswald was transferred to Dallas. The two kept in touch by using Mafia safe lines through an arrangement that Ferrie had worked out.

Oswald told Judyth of the plans to assassinate Kennedy and that he hoped to be able to prevent it. If he came out of it alive he promised that they could carry out their plans to elope to Mexico, get quickie divorces, and get married. Their last conversation was on Wednesday, November 21st, two days before the assassination. Instead, Oswald ended up at the age of twenty-four being the scapegoat for the president's murder and being murdered himself. [James Douglas covers this in his book, JFK and The Unspeakable, that has been the subject of an earlier posting on this blog.]

Ferrie called Judyth to tell her that her life would be in danger if she ever told anyone what she knew. [Silent for more than thirty-five years, her book, Me and Lee, is about to be released by Trine Day Books.] (Editor: It is now available through Amazon).

Sherman's grotesquely disfigured body was found in her apartment early in the morning of July 21, 1964. Her right arm had been entirely burned away, leaving only a bone extending from her shoulder. Her right rib cage was gone and her insides lay exposed from her shoulder to her waist. Her face was unrecognizable.

Investigators determined that her body had been taken from another location and placed in her apartment. Incredibly, an autopsy showed that she was still alive after the burn and that the fatal wound had been a stabbing that penetrated her heart. Subsequently, she was stabbed and slashed several times after death and a fire was set in her apartment to make her death look like a random murder or a burglary gone wrong.

The most likely instrument for the hideous incineration of one side of her body was the linear particle accelerator that was secretly installed in the US Public Health Hospital where US Marines guarded it. Sherman would have had access to it and undoubtedly used it in her experiments because the accelerator can be depended upon to weaken a virus with great precision while being relied upon to not kill it.

Was Dr. Mary Sherman killed in July 1964 on the eve of hearings that Warren Commission investigators held in New Orleans because she couldn't be relied on to keep quiet? Neither the motive for her murder nor those responsible for it have ever been identified. In fact, the investigation of her murder was abruptly terminated at the end of two weeks. Who would have had the power to shut it down? [Could the fact that Allen Dulles, a former Director of the CIA, served on the Warren Commission have anything to do with it?]

The story does not end here. Was any use made of this cancer-causing virus? Haslam points out that this virus was labeled SV-40. What about the other 39 viruses found in the vaccine? Was one of them the AIDS virus? If so, how did it get out into the world? Was HIV-1 an undesirable mutation that resulted from using radiation on SV-40? Haslam discusses the ways in which this virus could have gotten into the blood stream of the world's population.

To learn more, go to TrineDay.com to order the book.

[One of the earliest uses of a biological weapon happened in this country at the end of the French and Indian Wars that the British won. The British commander, Jeffrey Amherst, agreed to his lieutenant's request to give smallpox infected blankets to the Native Americans who had fought on the side of the French and were conducting a guerrilla war against Amherst and his troops.]