JFK Conference: James DiEugenio made clear how Foreign Policy changed after November 22, 1963

[Octafish]

Last edited Sat Nov 2, 2013, 11:55 AM - Edit history (1)

As a Democrat, a DUer and as a citizen of the United States, I was proud to attend the Passing the Torch: An International Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy at Duquesne University. One of the many important things discussed there was what author, historian and teacher, James DiEugenio reported on the important change in foreign policy JFK represented from his predecessor and his successors, immediate and otherwise.



DiEugenio said President John F. Kennedy did not undergo a change of heart from Cold War hawk to liberal dove Democrat only after the hair-raising nuclear crises he experienced in office. "John F. Kennedy was never a Cold Warrior," DiEugenio said. Throughout his 16-year career in the House and Senate, President Kennedy sided with the People, Justice and Democracy -- across the United States and around the world. This is a world view radically different from Eisenhower, and his foreign policy makers, principally the Dulles Brothers and their allies, including young Dick Nixon.

The JFK Administration may have represented a break in the action, H20 Man's Father explained to him and I agree. It was a special interlude, indeed. In only 1,037 days, we launched the nation toward the moon, creating a new type of economy; maintained the peace when several times the heads of the military and the secret organs of the national security state counseled all-out war; and started the nation on a path where all men are equal under the law, no matter race, color, or creed, and justice extended to economics and health, as under FDR and the New Deal.

DiEugenio’s research shows President Kennedy was working to defend the interests of democracy over those of colonialism, not only in Europe, as evinced in divided Berlin, but in Africa, Asia, South America and around the world. During less than three years in office, Kennedy turned official U.S. support from that of Eisenhower and the Dulles Brothers for supporting US commercial and colonial interests over democracy, such as in Guatemala and Iran, to respect for the nations and their democratically elected leaders, like Lumumba and Sukarno. In matters of war and peace, JFK always sided with peace, making overtures to North Vietnam. The Dulles Brothers and Nixon sided with France and the colonial powers, even drawing up plans to nuke the North Vietnamese Army at Dien Bien Phu, Operation VULTURE.

The record shows JFK's Foreign Policy of democracy over colonialism was immediately reversed by Lyndon B. Johnson, who reversed course in Vietnam and supported the pro-colonialist forces in Congo, Vietnam, Brazil, Dominican Republic and elsewhere around the world. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and most who followed continued the Business-As-Usual, advancing the interests of Big Money, Big Oil and Big Wars for Profit.

One of the things I am most proud of is how Democratic Underground covered many of these salient points on its boards, from DU1 through the present day. At the Duquesne conference, I was listening and nodding, knowing that many times we had discussed this on DU. In looking back to one particularly important post through GOOGLE, I found we sourced this information back to DiEugenio. That's what the Internet can do: Spread Truth.

Why it matters.

Democracy depends on Truth. The Republic depends on Justice. That is, the reality that ours is a nation under law.

Once a criminal is, or criminals are, allowed to go free, Justice has been denied. We find ourselves operating under a falsehood, we are living a Big Lie.

We as a Nation have been on the criminal path since November 22, 1963.

DUers know you don’t need to read a history book or watch a tee vee special to know: It shows. Since 1964 and the Gulf of Tonkin, it’s been a series of wars without end for profit. And in the process, the rich became super-rich -- the richest and most powerful people in history.

Thanks for reading. Keep spreading the Truth, DU! The next 50 years can be different -- they can be decades of peace and prosperity for ALL: They can be Democratic.

[stranger81]

1. DiEugenio is one of the most interesting guys out there still working this subject,

and so glad you were able to hear him speak live. I've never had the pleasure, but I sure enjoy his posts at the JFK Education Forum.

Keep the updates coming, Octafish, and thanks for being vicarious eyes and ears for all of us at this important event!

[Octafish]

2. He brought up Edmund GULLION, US diplomat whom JFK counseled in Vietnam in 1951...

JFK returned from a fact-finding tour of Vietnam where Gullion explained the real sitution. Then a US Rep., Kennedy would later give Ike, Dulles and even Adlai Stevenson the What's For in the Senate for suporting the French and Dutch.

Caroline Kennedy Nominated to be Next U.S. Ambassador to Japan

Thurston Clarke, Penguin Press
JULY 31, 2013

EXCERPT...

In the case of Vietnam, Kennedy repeatedly refused to send U.S. combat units to assist South Vietnamese forces, repeatedly overruling advisors who wanted him to do just that. In 1962 National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy tried to change his mind, reminding him that his advisers had unanimously recommended sending combat units, and suggesting cabling Ambassador Frederick Nolting, Jr., that combat troops would be sent “when and if the U. S. military recommend it on persuasive military grounds.” Kennedy would not budge. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Maxwell Taylor concluded, “I don’t recall anyone who was strongly against [sending combat troops], except one man and that was the President.” Kennedy may have had this in mind when he told reporters at a 1962 press conference, “Well, you know that old story about Abraham Lincoln and the Cabinet. He says, ‘All in favor say “aye,” ’ and the whole Cabinet voted ‘aye,’ and then, ‘All opposed no,’ and Lincoln voted ‘no,’ and he said, ‘the vote is no.’ ”

Kennedy’s reluctance to send combat troops stemmed from his own visit to Vietnam in 1951. He and his brother Bobby had arrived at a violent juncture in the struggle between the French colonial authorities and Viet Minh guerrillas led by Ho Chi Minh. A suicide bomber had killed a French general, antigrenade nets covered government ministries, and artillery flashes lit the horizon as they dined at a rooftop restaurant in Saigon with Edmund Gullion, then serving as the political counselor at the embassy. Kennedy asked Gullion what he had learned. “That in twenty years there will be no more colonies,” Gullion said. “We’re going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing we will lose, too, for the same reason. There’s no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The home front is lost. The same thing would happen to us.”

CONTINUED...

http://thepenguinpress.com/2013/07/caroline-kennedy-nominated-to-be-next-u-s-ambassador-to-japan/

DiEugenio is amazing. Thank you for caring, Stranger81!

[Bolo Boffin]

3. JFK was never a cold war warrior. Wow.

The guy who went ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion, planned by Eisenhower's CIA...

The guy who stood outside the Berlin Wall and declared himself a citizen of Berlin...

The guy who stood up to the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis and forced them to take the missiles out of Cuba...

Not a Cold War warrior. OK, then.

"There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass'sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin."

ETA: One more JFK quote - from his prepared remarks for November 22, 1963 at the Dallas Trade Mart:

But American military might should not and need not stand alone against the ambitions of international communism. Our security and strength, in the last analysis, directly depend on the security and strength of others, and that is why our military and economic assistance plays such a key role in enabling those who live on the periphery of the Communist world to maintain their independence of choice. Our assistance to these nations can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task. For our assistance makes possible the stationing of 3-5 million allied troops along the Communist frontier at one-tenth the cost of maintaining a comparable number of American soldiers. A successful Communist breakthrough in these areas, necessitating direct United States intervention, would cost us several times as much as our entire foreign aid program, and might cost us heavily in American lives as well.

About 70 percent of our military assistance goes to nine key countries located on or near the borders of the Communist bloc--nine countries confronted directly or indirectly with the threat of Communist aggression--Viet-Nam, Free China, Korea, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Greece, Turkey, and Iran. No one of these countries possesses on its own the resources to maintain the forces which our own Chiefs of Staff think needed in the common interest. Reducing our efforts to train, equip, and assist their armies can only encourage Communist penetration and require in time the increased overseas deployment of American combat forces. And reducing the economic help needed to bolster these nations that undertake to help defend freedom can have the same disastrous result. In short, the $50 billion we spend each year on our own defense could well be ineffective without the $4 billion required for military and economic assistance.

Emphasis mine. The reports of JFK pulling out of Vietnam are greatly exaggerated. It was a thorny problem, but let's not pretend it was a fait accompli in either direction.

[stopbush]

7. Thanks for the corrective to the magical, naive thinking being espoused in the OP.

Sad that DU has to put up with the JFK CT crap every November. It's embarrassing.

[RobertEarl]

9. Now, now, stopbush

"DiEugenio said President John F. Kennedy did not undergo a change of heart from Cold War hawk to liberal dove Democrat only after the hair-raising nuclear crises he experienced in office. "John F. Kennedy was never a Cold Warrior," DiEugenio said."

JFK was not a Cold Warrior. Cold meaning taking covert action or hidden or not directed right at the target: Russia. JFK was not a Hot Warrior, either. Instead he was a peaceful man who averted war and used overt actions to deliver that peace. Overt actions like bolstering other countries forces when asked to.

The Cold war was one that Nixon et al played. Instead of going right at Russia, they increased the war in Vietnam. Using Vietnam as a proxy. That was 'Cold', meaning we invaded Vietnam to try and defeat Russia! That became a hot war with millions dead. JFK wanted none of that.

Your spurious words are beneath what should be found in a thread like this. You should delete them and be on your way.

[Bolo Boffin]

15. JFK used Southeast Asia to split the USSR's focus on Germany

Last edited Sat Nov 2, 2013, 05:27 PM - Edit history (2)

He mentioned it in his nationally televised speech on July 25, 1961:

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/TNC-258.aspx

The immediate threat to free men is in West Berlin. But that isolated outpost is not an isolated problem. The threat is worldwide. Our effort must be equally wide and strong, and not be obsessed by any single manufactured crisis. We face a challenge in Berlin, but there is also a challenge in Southeast Asia, where the borders are less guarded, the enemy harder to find, and the dangers of communism less apparent to those who have so little. We face a challenge in our own hemisphere, and indeed wherever else the freedom of human beings is at stake.

So even here, JFK was raising the specter of communist domination in Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries, and America's interest in seeing it did not spread there.

And as I quoted above, JFK believed that an American presence in Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries was important. I'll repeat a section from his undelivered remarks on November 22.

But American military might should not and need not stand alone against the ambitions of international communism. Our security and strength, in the last analysis, directly depend on the security and strength of others, and that is why our military and economic assistance plays such a key role in enabling those who live on the periphery of the Communist world to maintain their independence of choice. Our assistance to these nations can be painful, risky, and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task. For our assistance makes possible the stationing of 3.5 million allied troops along the Communist frontier at one-tenth the cost of maintaining a comparable number of American soldiers. A successful Communist breakthrough in these area, necessitating direct United States intervention, would cost us several times as much as our entire foreign aid program, and might cost us heavily in American lives as well.

About 70 percent of our military assistance goes to nine key countries located on or near the borders of the Communist-bloc -- nine countries confronted directly or indirectly with the threat of Communistic aggression -- Viet-Nam, Free China, Korea, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Greece, Turkey, and Iran. No one of these countries possesses on its own the resources to maintain the forces which our own Chiefs of Staff think needed in the common interest. Reducing our efforts to train, equip, and assist their armies can only encourage Communist penetration and require in time the increased overseas deployment of American combat forces. And reducing the economic help needed to bolster these nations that undertake to help defend freedom can have the same disastrous result. In short, the $50 billion we spend each year on our own defense could well be ineffective without the $4 billion required for military and economic assistance.

JFK thought American aid and military training was the first front and kept American troops out of harm's way. But it's very clear from these remarks that if he thought direct intervention became necessary, he would send them in.

And having just allowed (even given tacit permission for) the November 1 military coup that overthrew Diem, JFK had to know that Vietnam was in a perilous situation when he died. There is no way to know what he may have done or what he would have deemed necessary. Anyone who pretends to know otherwise is fooling themselves.

[stopbush]

24. Do some research - find out how many American military advisors were in Nam

when JFK took office and how many were there by the time his life was taken.

You might also read a few of JFK's speeches from 1963.

[RobertEarl]

27. He could have invaded

Could have sent combat troops, like LBJ did. He didn't.

Instead he spoke of peace, not war. Ike warned JFK that he was up against an MIC that would stop at nothing. Those military men were hell bent on war and they hated that JFK was opposed to them.

Your assertions are not worth much. The actual Truth is something beyond your vision, maybe? Maybe you are the naive one?

[stopbush]

31. RFK on JFK & Nam:

On April 30, 1964,RFK was interviewed by John Bartlow Martin as part of the John F. Kennedy Library’s official oral history project:

Robert F. Kennedy: The president had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam.

Martin: What was the overwhelming reason?

Kennedy: Just the loss of all of Southeast Asia if you lost Vietnam. I think everybody was quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall.

Martin: What if it did?

Kennedy: Just have profound effects as far as our position throughout the world, and our position in a rather vital part of the world. Also, it would affect what happened in India, of course, which in turn has an effect on the Middle East. Just, it would have, everybody felt, a very adverse effect. It would have an effect on Indonesia, hundred million population. All of these countries would be affected by the fall of Vietnam to the Communists, particularly as we had made such a fuss in the United States both under President Eisenhower and President Kennedy about the preservation of the integrity of Vietnam.

Martin: There was never any consideration given to pulling out?

Kennedy: No.

Martin: But the same time, no disposition to go in all . . .

Kennedy: No . . .

Martin: . . . in an all out way as we went into Korea. We were trying to avoid a Korea, is that correct?

Kennedy: Yes, because I, everybody including General MacArthur felt that land conflict between our troops, white troops and Asian, would only lead to, end in disaster. So it was. . . . We went in as advisers, but to try to get the Vietnamese to fight themselves, because we couldn’t win the war for them. They had to win the war for themselves.

Martin: It’s generally true all over the world, whether it’s in a shooting war or a different kind of a war. But the president was convinced that we had to keep, had to stay in there . . .

Kennedy: Yes.

Martin: . . . and couldn’t lose it.

Kennedy: Yes.

Martin: And if Vietnamese were about to lose it, would he propose to go in on land if he had to?

Kennedy: Well, we’d face that when we came to it.

Source: Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, eds., Robert Kennedy In His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam Press, 1988), 394-395.

[RobertEarl]

39. Did you read your own post?

Right there it says : If we had to...

JFK felt that we didn't have to go to war. Otherwise he'd have gone to war.

He was right. Surely you don't believe, as the generals did, that we had to go to war in Vietnam?

JFK is hated by the warmongers. Probably because, in the end, he was proven right. Vietnam was a big mistake, and it wasn't JFK who made that mistake.

As the OP states: "James DiEugenio made clear how Foreign Policy changed after November 22, 1963". Time has proven that once JFK was out of the way, the warmongers got their war on.

[pscot]

258. I was in the army in Europe at the time

and it wasn't until JFK's murder that Viet Nam began to ramp up. By the end of my hitch in 1965 our chopper pilots were leaving for Nam. In fact, one of them had already died there. I don't believe Kennedy would have escalated the war the way Lyndon Johnson did, but we'll never know..

[Spider Jerusalem]

276. Kennedy increased the number of Americans in Vietnam from under a thousand to 16,000.

He already was escalating it.

[pscot]

279. 16000 is a long ways from half a million

The deployment exploded after Lyndon Johnson was elected in his own right. Kennedy despised the brass. I don't think it would have happened if he'd lived, but the argument is moot.

[david thurman]

288. (Reply #276)

ADVISORS! NOT COMBAT TROOPS; Because the military brass kept lying to JFK, that we were winning and if we just had more there we'd win for sure. He finally caught on and realized he could use their lies to pull out

PLEASE Beware of NSAM #263 signed by JFK in October 1963; ALL American personnel were to be out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. The Lodge/Rusk/Bundy/
Hillsman arranged coup of the Diem brothers didn't change the orders of NSAM #263 as JFK told his secretary, upon signing a letter to a dead soldiers family, "When I return from Texas we're getting out of Vietnam, we're not going to lose one more life over there." NSAM #263 was conveniently classified "Top Secret" until the 1990's.

[sabrina 1]

11. Sad that a Democratic Forum would remember a murdered Democratic

President? What an odd thing to say on a Democratic forum.

[Bolo Boffin]

14. Nobody said that, sabrina 1.

Let us remember JFK here. But it's not necessary to rehash endless CT about his death to do so. JFK is about more than the way he died.

[CanSocDem]

16. kicking.........

[Octafish]

26. Bolo Boffin's is the official meme in Dallas this month.

Let us remember JFK here. But it's not necessary to rehash endless CT about his death to do so. JFK is about more than the way he died.

http://50thhonoringjohnfkennedy.com/

What a coincidence! A city wide mis-direction.

[sabrina 1]

30. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.

But the rest of the world can and will remember however they want to remember. Why anyone cares so much about what others choose to do or don't choose to do and then try to TELL them what to do, is beyond me.

The more effort there is to try to control what people talk about, the more likely they are to talk about it.

When I am not interested in something other people seem interested in, I just ignore it.

It's not that hard to ignore stuff you aren't interested in. Which raises the question, why has there always been such an effort to stop people from talking about the murder of JFK? It hasn't worked so it seems like a complete waste of effort.

[YoungDemCA]

43. Because they're presenting a false, romanticized view of history....

Witness the phrase, "JFK was never a Cold Warrior."

[sabrina 1]

48. And you know this, how?? Were you a friend of JFK, there during his administration?

Where do you get your certainty from? I wasn't there, I have no clue what went on behind closed doors in the JFK administration, but historical facts seem to support the claim that he wanted to change US Foreign Policy. But if YOU were there, perhaps you can provide as much evidence to back up your theories as others have?? I'm interested, but not in drive by ad homs. In FACTS.

[Bolo Boffin]

45. I'm going to say this again: I'm interested in discussing JFK's assassination.

That's why I participate in these discussions. I am not interested in stopping people from talking about it. I think the discussion should be in the CS group, but that's not saying no one should be talking about it.

Now let this be an end to your silly assertions to the contrary. Let's make this an end of your questioning the motives of people who disagree with you. Let's get back to the topic and leave this Meta crap behind us.

[sabrina 1]

46. How about you stop judging people for what interests them?

If you are not interested in this thread then the solution was easy, avoid it, trash it, ignore it.

You can have the opinion that this thread belongs in the CT forum, a forum I have zero interest in so never even read it. But the majority of the people in the world won't be influenced to stop discussing what they are interested in because one relatively unknown internet forum relegates the discussion to a CT forum. No one cares, in the RL, what a few people online do or think.

The truth is that this topic has only become more interesting over time so all the efforts to create the impression that people who find it interesting are crazy CTs has not influenced new generations of people one bit, More people today question the official story than back in the beginning.

So all these efforts have failed spectacularly. Why waste time on something that has proven to be a failure, the attempt to influence people's opinions, conclusions, questions etc. You simply can't even if you got this thread moved, it would have zero impact on the issue. In fact YOU and the other person who shows up in all these threads have caused ME to pay way more attention to this topic than I ever did before. So it's counter productive. Leave people alone, they are not going to be influenced on this subject no matter how victorious you might be on a relatively small corner of the internet, other than to spark even more interest in the subject.

[Bolo Boffin]

47. I haven't.

"If you are not interested in this thread then the solution was easy, avoid it, trash it, ignore it."

It is not possible for you to have actually read the post you responded to and said that. So, sabrina 1, it is not I who have judged anyone. It is you judging me, and that badly.

I refuse to respond any further to your provocations, distractions, and Meta bullshit. Speak to the subject of the OP if you want to speak to me. And that goes from here on out.

[nyquil_man]

194. Of course it's a waste of effort.

There's no way anybody's going to shut down discussion of the JFK assassination, especially in the internet age.

It's also a waste of effort asking why it happens, especially from someone who professes not to understand "why anyone cares so much about what others choose to do or don't choose to do."

As far as trying to tell someone else what to do, what do you call your suggestion that anyone who disagrees with the OP should simply ignore it? Why should they do that? Because you want a thread free of disagreement?

Has it never occurred to you that those who disagree with you as to who killed President Kennedy might care just as deeply about his memory as you do?

[stopbush]

212. Sad that so many DUers act as apologists for Oswald, the bastard that killed JFK.

[sabrina 1]

213. That would be, very sad, if it were true! n/t

[zappaman]

216. It's true.

"As for Oswald, I don't know if he was a hero in all this or not."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2232672

[stopbush]

231. You're welcome to your fantasies, but the evidence says it is true.

I guess you're one of those people who has a soft spot for the person who killed JFK.

[sabrina 1]

232. Excuse me??

I guess you're one of those people who has a soft spot for the person who killed JFK.

Please back that up with something factual, or retract it. Speaking of fantasies, do you seriously expect ANYONE here to take anything you say seriously when you post garbage like this??

[stopbush]

234. You want facts? The facts are that Oswald killed JFK.

It was his rifle, his bullets, fired from his workplace. The evidence is overwhelming. If the JFK CTists had 5% of the evidence that convicts Oswald of the shooting pointing at someone else, they would be screaming from the rooftops. But they don't. They've got zip. Nada. Niente.

At this late date, anyone who disbelieves the massive evidence against Oswald, evidence that has been there for 50 years for anyone with an ounce of sense to see for themselves, is an enabler in the rehabilitation of the man who actually shot JFK, excusing away the murderer's actions.

[sabrina 1]

235. You acccused me of sympathizing with the killer of JFK. Either retract that or prove it. I have

zero interest in anything else you have to say. Don't try to change the subject. I expect an apology as I know for a fact that you simply lied about another DUer and that makes pretty everything you have to say totally not even worthy of consideration.

[stopbush]

236. If you're saying that Oswald was the killer of JFK, then sure, I'll retract it and apologize.

You're still allowed to have zero interest in anything I have to say.

[sabrina 1]

237. You made an egregious accusation. There are no 'conditions' under which an apology

is required. Either prove it or retract it. Nothing you have to say after making such a disgusting accusation has any credibility at all.

You have totally discredited yourself.

[Jim DiEugenio]

211. Jim Replies on JFK as Cold Warrior

At post 174, I responded to the Missile Crisis and BOP stuff you first used.

Now let me show what the focus of my talk was. It was about places that are ignored and what the Dulles brothers had done there. There is no doubt they were ideological and, through Sullivan and Cromwell, financial Cold Warriors.

In several areas, Kennedy reversed course very soon:in Laos, where Ike wanted him to commit and told him he should; in Congo, where Ike and Dulles approved the murder of Lumumba and the dividing up of Katanga into a shell state for England and Belgium to exploit; and in Indonesia, where Dulles and Ike had tried to overthrow Sukarno and refused to help him get West Irian back from the Dutch.

JFK got an agreement for neutralization in the first: he refused to let Katanga split off and backed Hamarksjold's independence policies to the point of approving a UN mission to stop Katanga from splitting off; and he sent RFK and Ellsworth Bunker to the Hague to get the Dutch to return West Irian back to Indonesia.

In return, after his death, all three of these are reversed back by the CIA and LBJ. That was my point. Ike and LBJ were real Cold Warriors. Not Kennedy. This is all reviewed in detail in my book Destiny Betrayed.

But in Pittsburgh I went beyond this due to more research in two new books. So at Duquesne I expanded this to include other places in Africa and the Middle East where JFK reversed Dulles and offended NATO allies in the Third World e.g. Egypt and Iran.

So yes, what I said was accurate in reference to the best modern scholarship in the field. Unfortunately, like the JFK murder, the subject has been politicized by those who have an agenda on both the left and right.

[ucrdem]

220. +1,000,000

Welcome Jim DiEugenio! DU keeps getting better and better!

[MinM]

252. Review Of Jim DiEugenio's Book By Oliver Stone

http://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t519-review-of-jim-s-book-by-oliver-stone

Welcome aboard, Jim.

I've, mostly casually, followed the JFK case for 40 years (since I was in elementary school during the Watergate hearings). There is nobody on the planet that knows more or understands the case better than Jim DiEugenio.

keep up the great work...

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34625

[MinM]

281. Where New JFK Evidence Points

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/11/19/where-new-jfk-evidence-points/

[Mc Mike]

282. Excellent article. Thanks. nt.

[Octafish]

17. JFK stood up to the Cold War hawks who counseled war -- EVERY TIME.

Even though Dulles and Lemnitzer knew their invasion plans were compromised, the CIA and Pentagon tried to force Kennedy to make war over the Bay of Pigs.

While an attack on Soviet missile bases in Cuba and on ships at sea would escalate to nuclear war, the Pentagon and most of the Cabinet tried to force Kennedy to make war, nuclear if necessary -- the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Pentagon and the Hawks in Congress and his Cabinet recommended war in Vietnam and southeast Asia to stop the spread of Communism, Kennedy sent volunteers -- which he ordered out by the end of 1964 -- but said he would never commit U.S. draftees to fight in another country's civil war, Vietnam.

Most troublesome to me, seeing how the Hawks lied America into invading Iraq twice in the last 22 years, DCI Allen Dulles and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lyman Lemnitzer counseled Kennedy to order an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in Fall of 1963 -- the optimal time for a successful pre-emptive war.

[Bolo Boffin]

44. It's an interesting take on the Cuban Missile Crisis that JFK's real opponents were Americans.

No, you don't really think think that. You know as well as anybody that America was on the brink of war with the Soviet Union then, a war JFK would have fought.

Just as I'm sure you know JFK's response to Khrushchev over Berlin was to tell Americans on July 25, 1961 to get ready for a possible war over the USSR's actions in Germany. You also know that in that same speech, he brought up Southeast Asia as another front in the Cold War.

Did he want to avoid war if he could? Of course. But he was getting us more and more involved in Vietnam. He didn't pull military advisers out: he put them into the country. He didn't leave the missiles in Cuba: he forced them out. He maintained the options of war and peace as long as he could. But don't kid yourself. He would have gone hot with a war if he thought it necessary. And he gave every indication that a collapse of peaceful efforts and a Communist breakthrough in Southeast Asia would need to be met with open military force.

[Octafish]

53. JFK understood leadership. He tried peace first.

Contrast with the present day's Money Trumps Peace national policy.

[Bolo Boffin]

56. "present day's Money Trumps Peace national policy" - Present day?

You're including President Obama's foreign policy in that assessment? Otherwise, I don't know why you would have said "present day." I would have expected "BFEE's Money Trumps Peace national policy."

But I'm sure you'll be along to explain how you weren't attacking Obama, not at all.

Anyway. Did you see the Chomsky article down there in Spider_Jerusalem's post? Chomsky did a pretty good job of laying out how wrong it is to claim JFK as some Cold War dove in order to justify some motive for his assassination on the part of LBJ or the military-industrial complex or the BFEE, what have you. He's got a pretty impressive CV, too! What's your take on that?

[Octafish]

85. Yes. The illegal, lie-based war on Iraq goes straight back to Dallas.

Connecting the dirty dots along the way is the name Bush.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1377737

What a coincidence. Not.

[Bolo Boffin]

90. As I said and you side-stepped, present day implies Barack Obama.

Help me help you, Octafish. I'm pointing out how your message can be misconstrued. A simple "of course I don't mean to include Obama" is all you need to say.

[Octafish]

93. Why this need to control the message, Bolo Boffin?

I think more people should like hearing about the Bush connections to Dallas.

John McAdams, lone nut theorist, hosts this DU thread:

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/blog/DU_Bush.htm

Interesting choice, as it connects a lot of dots from the presentday to Dallas.

Those interested in restricting awareness and shutting down discussion are not my friend.

[HangOnKids]

96. The Pedantic Need To Control The Message Is Quite Tedious

You have many friends here Octa, and I am very proud to be one!

[Bolo Boffin]

99. Do you often derail your own threads?

You started this about JFK and Vietnam, and now you want to talk Bush and Dallas. Having trouble dealing with the evidence JFK wasn't the peacenik you make him out to be?

And you think I have a need to control the message...

Here I am trying to discuss your own OP and you can't accept it. You still have to make silly implications about my motives while you yourself are changing the subject. How about this? Let's discuss your OP. That's what I've been trying to do. Why not do that?

[Octafish]

103. How many days?

Weeks?

[Bolo Boffin]

105. Again with silly implications about my motives.

How about this, Octafish? How about I do with my time as I like? What business is it of yours how I spend my time?

I am here to discuss your OP. We are met at a public discussion board. You have started a topic of interest to me. I am here to discuss it. Let's start doing that, shall we?

[YoungDemCA]

111. Just because you believe something does not make it so

There is precious little evidence that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK that involved anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald (and maybe his wife to a lesser extent, IIRC).

There is little evidence that JFK would have pulled American troops out of Vietnam.

There is little evidence that JFK was a "man of peace", unless you compare him only to the more extreme Cold Warriors in the U.S. government at that time

Occam's Razzor applies here. Stop making things up, and stop quoting sources that are not credible or not backed up by the evidence available.

[HangOnKids]

117. Just because you believe something does not make it so

Back at you

[stopbush]

145. Well and simply put. eom

[Octafish]

158. Audio tape: LBJ urged taking "every step that we can" to support overthrow of Joao Goulart

BRAZIL MARKS 40th ANNIVERSARY OF MILITARY COUP

DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS SHED LIGHT ON U.S. ROLE

[font color="red"]Audio tape: President Johnson urged taking "every step that we can" to support overthrow of Joao Goulart[/font color]

U.S. Ambassador Requested Pre-positioned Armaments to aid Golpistas; Acknowledged covert operations backing street demonstrations, civic forces and resistance groups

Edited by Peter Kornbluh

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/

Simple: Like the time in 1964 when Goulard said 'No' to the CIA.

[stopbush]

178. What does that have to do with Oswald killing JFK?

[Octafish]

179. You must have missed the OP about the change in foreign policy between administrations.

The record shows Johnson's foreign policy was pretty much the same as Eisenhower and Nixon's.

[stopbush]

180. "The record" shows that there wasn't much change between DDE's foreign policy and JFK's FP.

Unless you count JFK's escalation in Nam to be way beyond what Ike was doing there.

LBJ was a great president who accomplished and fulfilled most of JFK's domestic initiatives. Unfortunately, he listened to the fucking generals in Nam, and that will always be a stain on a presidency that was for the most part progressive and important.

I doubt LBJ would have escalated things in Nam had JFK not already increased our presence there by tens of thousands of "military advisors" and rattled the Cold War sabre at practically every public opportunity. LBJ's escalation in Nam would not have been possible had JFK not sown the seeds.

Just my opinion, of course, but that never seems to stop anybody at DU.

[Octafish]

182. No need to be insulting. Here's where you can learn more:

'Arrogant' CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6918706

WARNING: Going from your posts, stopbush, you will find the information there new and unsettling.

[Bolo Boffin]

165. "little evidence that JFK would have pulled American troops out of Vietnam"

That's going farther than I would. If JFK could have, he would have. He was working with McNamara on a timetable to do just that, even while allowing the Diem coup to take place. And at Honolulu before he was killed, the consensus was that a withdrawal was still achievable.

I just don't know what he would have done in March when McNamara came back and said Vietnam had only been deteriorating since September. I think since McNamara was changing his tune, his other advisors who wanted more involvement would have prevailed and he would have ratcheted up US involvement. But no one can really say.

[Octafish]

222. You should read more and learn. What JFK was doing in Vietnam...

Exit Strategy

In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam

James K. Galbraith
Boston Review/ October-November 2003

Forty years have passed since November 22, 1963, yet painful mysteries remain. What, at the moment of his death, was John F. Kennedy’s policy toward Vietnam?

It’s one of the big questions, alternately evaded and disputed over four decades of historical writing. It bears on Kennedy’s reputation, of course, though not in an unambiguous way.

And today, larger issues are at stake as the United States faces another indefinite military commitment that might have been avoided and that, perhaps, also cannot be won. The story of Vietnam in 1963 illustrates for us the struggle with policy failure. More deeply, appreciating those distant events tests our capacity as a country to look the reality of our own history in the eye.

One may usefully introduce the issue by recalling the furor over Robert McNamara’s 1995 memoir In Retrospect. Reaction then focused mainly on McNamara’s assumption of personal responsibility for the war, notably his declaration that his own actions as the Secretary of Defense responsible for it were “terribly, terribly wrong.” Reviewers paid little attention to the book’s contribution to history. In an editorial on April 12, 1995, the New York Times delivered a harsh judgment: “Perhaps the only value of “In Retrospect” is to remind us never to forget that these were men who in the full hubristic glow of their power would not listen to logical warning or ethical appeal.” And in the New York Times Book Review four days later, Max Frankel wrote that

David Halberstam, who applied that ironic phrase to his rendering of the tale 23 years ago, told it better in many ways than Mr. McNamara does now. So too, did the Pentagon Papers, that huge trove of documents assembled at Mr. McNamara’s behest when he first recognized a debt to history.

In view of these criticisms, readers who actually pick up McNamara’s book may experience a shock when they scan the table of contents and sees this summary of Chapter 3, titled “The Fateful Fall of 1963: August 24–November 22, 1963”:

A pivotal period of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, punctuated by three important events: the overthrow and assassination of South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem; President Kennedy’s decision on October 2 to begin the withdrawal of U.S. forces; and his assassination fifty days later. (Emphasis added.)

CONTINUED...

http://new.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith.html

[Bolo Boffin]

224. I found that article long ago

At last someone has brought it here. It does a much better job of arguing the point than anything I read here thus far.

But I still don't buy it. Every option was on the table when JFK headed to Dallas. He very well could have ordered all American military advisors out of Vietnam instead of escalating. I'm not discounting that at all.

But he also could have escalated the conflict. It is folly to say that he might not have. No one knows what JFK would have done. And it is far worse than folly to suggest that the military had him killed so that they could escalate in Vietnam. It's simply not what happened.

[Octafish]

227. Read Gareth Porter for more.

Perils of Dominance is the first completely new interpretation of how and why the United States went to war in Vietnam. It provides an authoritative challenge to the prevailing explanation that U.S. officials adhered blindly to a Cold War doctrine that loss of Vietnam would cause a "domino effect" leading to communist domination of the area. Gareth Porter presents compelling evidence that U.S. policy decisions on Vietnam from 1954 to mid-1965 were shaped by an overwhelming imbalance of military power favoring the United States over the Soviet Union and China. He demonstrates how the slide into war in Vietnam is relevant to understanding why the United States went to war in Iraq, and why such wars are likely as long as U.S. military power is overwhelmingly dominant in the world.

Challenging conventional wisdom about the origins of the war, Porter argues that the main impetus for military intervention in Vietnam came not from presidents Kennedy and Johnson but from high-ranking national security officials in their administrations who were heavily influenced by U.S. dominance over its Cold War foes. Porter argues that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson were all strongly opposed to sending combat forces to Vietnam, but that both Kennedy and Johnson were strongly pressured by their national security advisers to undertake military intervention. Porter reveals for the first time that Kennedy attempted to open a diplomatic track for peace negotiations with North Vietnam in 1962 but was frustrated by bureaucratic resistance. Significantly revising the historical account of a major turning point, Porter describes how Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara deliberately misled Johnson in the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, effectively taking the decision to bomb North Vietnam out of the president's hands.

[Bolo Boffin]

229. Robert Buzzanco already did.

http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/test/review%20of%20porter%20in%20dh.pdf

[Octafish]

230. Great. Read John M. Newman for more.

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JMNPP.aspx

[Bolo Boffin]

238. Newman is odd.

I thought the whole point of killing Kennedy was to have a war in Vietnam, Cuba, etc. But Newman says Angleton planted a WWIII virus in Oswald's file so Johnson, etc. would not go looking behind Oswald in order to avoid war. That doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't they want the planted evidence of Cuban/Soviet backing of Oswald to be known? That way they get their war. Instead, Newman says they planted that evidence so Johnson would stay away from looking too closely and not see the CIA had done it. So why did the CIA kill Kennedy?

Also, the idea of having an Oswald lookalike in Mexico City at the same time Oswald was there (which is what Newman is saying) borders on farce.

[Octafish]

243. Newman is profound.

Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City

By John Newman, Ph.D.
Copyright ©1999 by John Newman.
All Rights Reserved.

I. The Rosetta Stone

The Assassination Records Review Board finished its search more than a year ago—a search for records relating to the murder of a president thirty-six years ago. Surprisingly, the passage of time has not managed to erode or cover over all of the important evidence. On the contrary, the work of the Review Board has uncovered important new leads in the case. I will leave medical and ballistic forensics to others. I will confine myself to document forensics, an area for which the work of the board had been nothing less than spectacular. More specifically, I will confine myself to the documentary record concerning Lee Harvey Oswald’s 1963 visit to Mexico City.

In 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) completed its work, including a report on Oswald’s activities in Mexico written by Eddie Lopez and Dan Hardway. Our first glimpses of their report began shortly after the 1993 passage of the JFK Records Act. Not even all the redactions of those early versions could hide the seminal discoveries in that work. While Lopez couched his words in careful language, he suggested that Oswald might have been impersonated while he was in Mexico City just weeks before the assassination. Lopez was more forthright when I interviewed him about this in 1995. Armed with more CIA documents and the first Russian commentary (Nechiporenko’s book, Passport to Assassination), I went further in my own Oswald and the CIA (Carroll & Graf: 1995) in advancing the argument that Oswald was impersonated in the Mexican capitol. Specifically, someone pretending to be Oswald made a series of telephone calls between 28 September and 1 October, allegedly to and from the Cuban and Soviet consulates in Mexico City.

I concluded then, that, based on the content of the CIA Mexico City telephone transcripts alone, the speaker purporting to be Oswald was probably an impostor. I will not repeat my lengthy discussion here, other than to summarize it in this way: the speaker’s words were incongruous with the experiences we can be reasonably certain Oswald underwent. For reasons still obscure, the CIA has lied consistently for these past several decades about the tapes from which those transcripts were made. The Agency concocted the story that the tapes were routinely destroyed before the assassination. It is perhaps true that some tapes were destroyed before the assassination. But Lopez uncovered FBI documents containing detailed accounts of how two of the tapes were listened to after the assassination by FBI agents familiar with Oswald’s voice.

More evidence would come in time. Shortly after the passage of the JFK Records Act, the public gained access to a telephone transcript the day after the assassination in which FBI Director Hoover informs President Johnson that it is not Oswald’s voice on the tapes. The Review Board diligently followed these leads and settled the matter when they found CIA documents in which the Agency itself explicitly states that some of the tapes were reviewed after the assassination. The CIA’s continued silence on the matter of the tapes stands, like a giant beacon, pointing the way forward to the investigator. The impersonation of Oswald in Mexico by someone who drew attention to an Oswald connection to a KGB assassination officer may prove to be the Rosetta stone of this case.

Before going further, I once again pay tribute to Peter Dale Scott, who wrote of these matters as early as 1995, advancing his "Phase I-Phase II hypothesis" on largely deaf ears. I will not repeat his lengthy discussion here, other than to summarize it in this way: In Phase I, immediately after the assassination, previously planted evidence of a Cuban/Kremlin plot surfaced in Oswald’s files; this, in turn, precipitated Phase II, in which a lone-nut cover-up was erected to prevent a nuclear war.

In Oswald and the CIA, I deliberately steered clear of the conspiracy-anti-conspiracy vortex in order to set out some of the facts concerning Oswald’s pre-assassination files. Since then, the cumulative weight of the evidence uncovered by the Review Board has led me to the conclusion that the Oswald impersonation can best be explained in terms of a plot to murder the president. I remain open to other interpretations and fresh analyses by fellow researchers, and I understand that new evidence could corroborate or undermine this hypothesis. What follows is a first stab at explaining, in a short and simple way, how those plotting the president’s murder may have left their fingerprints in the files.

CONTINUED...

http://www.ctka.net/pr999-osciamex.html

BTW: Got a link or source for any of your allegations about John Newman, Bolo Boffin? I'd like to know who would libel a good man, a patriot and scholar.

[Bolo Boffin]

244. What "allegations" have I made against Newman? n/t

[Octafish]

245. Read your post, Bolo Boffin.

"Newman is Odd."

Then you write:

I thought the whole point of killing Kennedy was to have a war in Vietnam, Cuba, etc. But Newman says Angleton planted a WWIII virus in Oswald's file so Johnson, etc. would not go looking behind Oswald in order to avoid war. That doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't they want the planted evidence of Cuban/Soviet backing of Oswald to be known? That way they get their war. Instead, Newman says they planted that evidence so Johnson would stay away from looking too closely and not see the CIA had done it. So why did the CIA kill Kennedy?

Also, the idea of having an Oswald lookalike in Mexico City at the same time Oswald was there (which is what Newman is saying) borders on farce.

So, where are your sources for all that?

[Bolo Boffin]

247. There are no libelous allegations in my post.

I can't help it that Newman's position here is odd. My sources are Pease's description of a talk he gave and other quotes directly from him. Do a search for WWIII virus Newman and you'll find them all.

[Octafish]

248. You wrote ''Newman is odd.''

Your words, Bolo Boffin.

[Bolo Boffin]

250. That's libelous?

You must be joking. Any time you want to head back toward the topic, let me know.

[Octafish]

251. You defamed his character, Bolo Boffin.

That makes it more likely, for people who never heard of him, to consider him "odd" instead of an "authority."

Here's why John M. Newman is an important author in regards to the assassination of President Kennedy:

Dr. John M. Newman, MAJOR, US Army, RETD

Born December 20, 1950, Dayton Ohio

Education:
BA Chinese Studies, George Washington University (1973)
MA East Asian Studies, George Washington University (1976)
PhD Modern Far Eastern History, George Washington University (1992)

Experience:
US Army Intelligence, 1974-1994
Assistant to the Director, National Security Agency, 1988-1990
US Army Attaché in China, 1990-1992
Professor, University of Maryland, 1981-Present
Honors Professor, University of Maryland, 1994-2012
Adjunct Professor, James Madison University, 2013-
Yoga Instructor, 2006-present

Publications:

JFK and Vietnam (Warner, 1992)
Oswald and the CIA (Carroll and Graff, 1995; Skyhorse edition, 2008)
Quest for the Kingdom: The Secret Teachings of Jesus in the Light of Yogic Mysticism (Createspace, Amazon: 2011)

SOURCE: http://www.amazon.com/John-M.-Newman/e/B001IZT9DK

That is an impressive biography, grabbed from Amazon the booksellers. Those who call a distinguished Army officer, scholar, and researcher of the assassination of President Kennedy "odd" serve to deflect attention from the important issues he's examined.

[Bolo Boffin]

255. The fuck I did, Octafish.

You are making a mountain out of a molehill in an attempt to distract from the actual topic. Just more Meta bullshit.

Whenever you're ready to get back to the topic, let me know.

ETA: Ah, yes. What you're doing is the discussion board equivalent of flopping.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flop_(basketball)

Any time you want to get up off the boards and start playing again, Octafish...

[Octafish]

256. Your words, Bolo Boffin.

People judge you by the words you use. That's why I don't like you disparaging John M. Newman as "odd." It is not true. That's why saying so is libel.

BTW: The righteous indignation is also revealing.

[Bolo Boffin]

257. Righteous indignation? Me?

I'm laughing my ass off at you flopping so hard.

Up off the boards, Octafish, and back in the game.

[RZM]

38. But he didn't really WANT to do that stuff, you see

He was on the verge of reversing course and had to be killed to prevent that. Or something.

Of course the same evil forces sat back and watched Nixon go forward with detente less than a decade later . . .

Or did they?

[RobertEarl]

40. He never reversed course

He never started a war. Once he was dead, tho, the war began. Simple history.

After the debacle of the war and it was finally proven to the warmongers that war was not the answer, detente was the next move. The only sensible move and one which, had JFK not been killed, would have happened much sooner.

The question is, for each and everyone: are you in favor of war, or detente?

[bobthedrummer]

144. Our man Diem: How America Came To Back South Vietnam's Despised And Doomed President (by Seth Jacobs

Boston College Magazine Spring 2005 issue)
http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/spring_2005/features.html#top

[soundsgreat]

174. "Ick bin ein Berliner" = Cold Warrior???

This is an amazing unconventional view of this famous sentence.

With this saying JFK won the hearts of West Berliners within one moment. Because it was a promise not to forsake them. Which has nothing to do with cold war. Berliners were not interested in sharpen the cold war for pretty obvious reasons.

[Jim DiEugenio]

210. Jim Replies

Let us take the Bay of Pigs first.

After investigating the operation and receiving two reports on it, one from Max Taylor and one from Lyman Kirkpatrick, Kennedy fired the top three officers in the CIA. Something which had never been done before or since, correct?

Why did he do that? As he commented later, he was deceived on multiple grounds, one of them being there would be an indigenous uprising. There was none. Dulles and Bissell lied to Kennedy right down the line. Because they knew that he would never have approved the plan if they revealed their real agenda which was this: the operation had no real chance of success. And they thought he would order Arleigh Burke's navy which was right down there in to save him the humiliation. Which is what Nixon told him he would have done.

Obviously, if there had been no lies, there would have been no Bay of Pigs.

Missile Crisis: When one reads the transcripts, its obvious that almost everyone wanted a military response. It was Kennedy who then asked Max Taylor how many civilians would be killed in a bombing run, worst case scenario. The reply was in the thousands. Kennedy said that was too many. He went with the lowest level response, the blockade.

During the blockade, the Cubans killed a U2 pilot, Rudolf Anderson needlessly. It was clearly wrong and the Russians went nuts in Moscow. It was the only fatality of the whole 13 days. There was a contingency plan in place to bomb the rocket sites of anti aircraft cannon. The advisors brought it up. Kennedy ignored it.

Near the end, when JFK and RFK were near an agreement, LBJ was asked his advice, he said Kennedy had not done enough to show the public who was boss.

As per Vietnam, as John Newman notes in his masterly book, one has to differentiate between what Kennedy said in public and what he was doing in private. In May of 1963, Kennedy sent McNamara to the Sec/Def meeting in Hawaii to monitor the withdrawal plan. It is clear from those declassified documents, that McNamara was not satisfied with the pace of the withdrawal, also there was no contingency for reversing it. He wanted it sped up. This is significant since it PREDATES NSAM 263 BY FIVE MONTHS!

Should JFK have said in Dallas, on a campaign trip a year before election in a state he barely won, "Hey you yokels, we are out of there after I am reelected even if it does go Red." That would be like LBJ saying in 1964, "I will send half a million men to fight in the jungles of Vietnam and we will win even if we take 300, 000 casualties and ruin the economy."

Yeah sure.

[gopiscrap]

214. welcome to DU

[Bolo Boffin]

228. Bolo Replies to "Jim Replies"

Welcome to DU, Mr. DiEugenio.

I don't see anything I really disagree with until you get to John Newman's "masterly book." Then it all goes wonky. JFK was working both sides of the foreign policy aisle. He was allowing the Diem coup to go forward even while asking for a plan to get everyone out by late 1965. I've been talking this over with another poster here, and JFK was certainly no war-mad fool slobbering for war, but neither was he an appeaser. And on the scale between hawk and dove, he was much closer to the hawk side than the dove.

But beyond your insistence that you know JFK was withdrawing from Vietnam, something no one can say because he had not made his final decision on the matter, worse yet is making this assertion in support of the notion that the military killed him in order to stay in Vietnam. This is not true. If it had been, all they had to do was frame Castro for the crime and head right the hell into Cuba and then start cleaning house in Vietnam. But they didn't. You know why? Lee Oswald was the only one shooting in Dealey Plaza and no credible evidence has anyone putting him up to it.

You want to be mad at the military? Go ahead. You want to protest the involvement of US forces in conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq? Be my guest. You'll probably find me right next to you protesting those dumb, stupid wars. But none of that requires these assertions that go beyond evidence into mere speculation.

I hope you enjoy yourself here. When we aren't yelling at each other about JFK, we find lots of other things to agree about. Plus, we have pictures of cats every Sunday.

[Jim DiEugenio]

240. Jim Replies to Bolo on Vietnam

Yes, in my view, it is all but certain JFK was withdrawing from Vietnam.

We now have this from all three military advisors: Bundy via Goldstein's book, and we had it from Taylor and McNamara. Plus the declassified documents on this even convinced the NY Times and Philly Inquirer on this point.

Now, to say that the "coup cable caper" is working both sides, that does not seem to me to be defensible logically.

Why?

Because the new evidence from the ARRB PREDATES the coup cable stuff by three months. So he was withdrawing before any of that happened. And further, as Goldstein states, the coup made no impact on his decision to withdraw.

Finally, if there was any kind of working both sides, then where was the plan to escalate the war after the coup? No one mentions this appearing. And according to you JFK should have brought it out. He did not.

The first sign of any plan to insert any American forces is not until March of 1964 when LBJ requested on from the JCS.

This is what I mean. JFK was not a Cold Warrior in any traditional sense. LBJ was. And to say Kennedy was more hawk than dove ignores this point: Eisenhower inserted combat troops into Lebanon. He threatened atomic weapons in both Korea and Vietnam (Operation Vulture, look it up.) LBJ inserted combat troops into both Vietnam and Dominican Republic and,according to Gordon Goldstein's book, he considered using atomic weapons in Vietnam--with Ike's backing.

Kennedy never committed combat troops anywhere that I know of. And except for the Missile Crisis, when he had to, never considered using atomic weapons. And, BTW, in the Kennedy Tapes, its hard to find anywhere where he specifically talks about the use of atomic weapons even there.

So, yes I stand by my statement.

[Bolo Boffin]

241. Bolo Points Out To "Jim Replies" The Link He Missed

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/1106/Would-John-F.-Kennedy-have-pulled-US-out-of-Vietnam

And the quote you would have found there, which you no doubt are familiar with:

Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, returned from the conference convinced that US policy was up in the air, according to Mr. Dallek. Given the commitment of many US officials and lawmakers to a military solution in Vietnam, the time for disengagement did not seem at hand.

But Kennedy was already thinking about a second term – and its possible greater freedom of action. On Nov. 21, 1963, he told Bundy aide Michael Forrestal that at the beginning of 1964, he should organize an in-depth study of every Vietnam option, including means of withdrawal.

“We have to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top,” Kennedy said, according to Dallek.

Yes, withdrawal was on the table in this review of options, because "every Vietnam option" means just that.

But it also means escalating military engagement. There was no final decision. There would not be until after the election. And the JFK who OKed Operation Mongoose and allowed the Diem coup to proceed very well may have done this as the second coup took place and the GSV sunk further into the mire. And then again, he may not have. You or I cannot know what he would have done. And thus the silliness of building up the ironclad decision of Vietnam withdrawal as a motive for his assassination reveals itself.

[Jim DiEugenio]

242. What Bolo Missed Completely

If we were in an MA or Ph. D. American history program, and I was your mentor, I would tell you to start over.

Your comment above violates about 3 rules of historiography: concerning both textual and witness testimony, and most recent testimony.

As is proven by the declassified October phone call between Bundy, McNamara and Kennedy, Bundy was not in on the origins and progress of the withdrawal plan. This is proven by the fact that McNamara has to repeat the fact that they must find a way to get out of Vietnam. Bundy does not know what they are talking about. This is in the movie Virtual JFK. JFK was disappointed in the fact that Bundy was one of the first advisors to urge him to commit combat troops into Vietnam.

The other problem you have is that Bundy's own testimony vitiates Dallek's book. Dallek's book was published in 2003. Gordon Goldstein's book Lessons in Disaster was published in 2008. That book was to be a co venture with Bundy as the main author. Bundy went through the whole declassified record and came to the conclusion that JFK was not going into Vietnam. And he had nothing but admiration for how Kennedy had handled it. And he was chagrined at his own stupidity. And he acknowledged that JFK had worked out his plan with McNamara and not him.

Dallek's book was disappointing because he did not use the most recently declassified documents about the withdrawal plan from the ARRB. Both Virtual JFK and Lessons in Disaster used more of them.

[Bolo Boffin]

254. Bolo Points Out That Forrestal Is Not Bundy Which Jim Appears To Be Confused About

Last edited Sat Nov 16, 2013, 12:00 AM - Edit history (1)

Forrestal was Bundy's aide, true enough, but the quote I was trying to draw your attention to was made to him, not Bundy. I'll wait here while you verify that for the historical record.

Please let me know the name of the university at which you mentor master and doctoral candidates in history.

Now correct me if I am wrong, mentor at TBD University, but the withdrawal plan had been in place since July 1962. At that point, withdrawal was expected to be completed by July 1966. So the December 1965 date put into place was pushing up the withdrawal date long in place by six months.

https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=146535&relPageId=9
https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=146535&relPageId=17

And according to page 9 there of the November 20, 1963 Honolulu conference, the July 1962 withdrawal date was based "on the assumption that the insurgent action would be reduced, by the end of calendar year 1965, to a level which the Vietnamese themselves could control". And the "differences between the current Comprehensive Plan and the objectives arising from the McNamara-Taylor mission are not great."

Why was that? Because even on November 20, the withdrawal was victory-based, victory here being Vietnamese being able to control the region, and that process was still being seen as successful and thus accommodating of a December 1965 deadline.

I am not saying Kennedy would have escalated. I'm not saying he would not have, either. It's on the context of this conference that Kennedy said what he said to Forrestal. The December 1965 date was a modification of the July 1962 plan and operated under those assumptions. Kennedy was getting ready for a new comprehensive plan, one in which simple withdrawal would have been on the table. But so would escalation! That's what all options means.

I completely agree that Kennedy may well have gotten out of Vietnam after the election. But the final decision had not been made. Why would Kennedy be ordering a complete review if his mind was already made up? He could have just said, here is the new goal, gentlemen, go make it work.

The insertion of certainty where there can be none is a failure of your historical methods, Mr. DiEugenio, especially when put into service of the ludicrous assertion that the military then killed JFK so they could withdraw in July 1966 instead of December 1965. That was, after all, the plan, correct?

[Jim DiEugenio]

268. With Bolo, he is always moving the goalposts

Just trace this whole thing, you will see what I mean.

In the last one, you used two people, Forrestal and Bundy. If I had replied to Forrestal, you would have said I missed Bundy, the man who is much more important in the Big Picture. So I replied to Bundy explaining how Kennedy had decided to go through McNamara on the withdrawal plan.

You want to deny that plan so now you say, Well what about Forrestal. But you forget, its through Dallek on the quote.

All you have to know about Dallek is this: In over 1100 pages of text,in two books, there is no index entry for Edmund Gullion. Today, for someone like me, for any Kennedy biography, that means: game, set, match. Not worth reading. And Dallek's failings are multiplied by not using the ARRB declassified docs.

Because in Goldstein, Forrestal makes clear what Kennedy's reason for the review was. He told Forrestal, we have a 100 to 1 shot of winning. Uh, do you think he was going to stay with those odds? See, Kennedy was very disappointed that he had to ride herd to get everyone on board for NSAM 263. He was now going to review everything about how we got involved in the quagmire, including how the coup cable got sent. This would get everyone more adept at what he was thinking, not just McNamara.

That key point also touches on the briefing book you now drag in versus the declassified documents. The ARRB docs have no mention in them of any victory at all. Just withdrawal. Why?

Because McNamara supervised the meeting and he was Kennedy's point man on the issue up to that time. Clearly, JFK wanted to change that.

This will be my last post here. I am spread to thin as it is. And its the fiftieth. Its a shame that a really good idea for a forum is partly vitiated by a couple of let us say, faux Democrats. But that is the way the Web turned out.

Meanwhile keep up the good work Octafish and others. Very much appreciated.

[ucrdem]

269. Right on Jim DiEugenio.

Hate to see you go, even temporarily, and all your contributions are greatly appreciated, even if you don't get a lot of feedback on your posts here. But you've got more important things to do at the moment. Keep up the good work and please keep us posted about your publications, appearances and activities, if you can! Cheers and good luck, looking forward to any future postings, ucrdem

[Bolo Boffin]

270. But, wait! You didn't tell us the name of the university you mentor doctoral candidates for!

I think, rather than my moving the goalposts, you saw a way to steep around the point I was making, and you took it. I brought you back to the original goalposts, Mr. (Dr.?) DiEugenio. But a nice try.

"Faux Democrats"? You clearly know nothing about me or my political opinions, and the fact you would pass judgment on me based on my opposition to your silly conspiracy theories is not a testament to your historical prowess. Your master and doctoral candidates deserve better.

At any rate, you are retiring from the field, having done nothing to blunt the point I am making. No one can know exactly what Kennedy would have done in Vietnam, especially not in 1963 - not well enough to justify the military or the CIA or whoever killing him on a Dallas street. Why should they? All they would have to do is sandbag him in the imminent 1964 election! Even you admit Kennedy was going to do nothing substantial about withdrawal until after the election, during which the public rhetoric about Vietnam was all about victory. Why would anyone so worked up about war kill Kennedy when all they had to do is see him lose the election?

Fortunately the guilt of the assassination comes down to the facts on the ground, not these attempts to hype a motive. Motive is almost irrelevant when it comes to determining guilt of a crime. But that's all alternative history buffs have when it comes to the Kennedy assassination. The facts so clearly point to Oswald as the sole actor in that deed, you can only exaggerate the motives of your preferred defendants. Once the discussion properly centers on who was shooting in Dealey Plaza, the conspiracy game is up. Why Oswald did it, we may never know. But knowing why is not necessary or sufficient in order to determine who.

Good day to you.

[Octafish]

271. But that's not what he wrote.

And you know it.

He also pegged you, Bolo Boffin.

You know that, too.

[Bolo Boffin]

272. Ominous vague pronouncements from Octafish.

Come back when you can start dealing with the evidence and leave this Meta bullshit behind.

[Octafish]

273. Your interaction with DiEugenio shows what you're all about, Bolo Boffin.

Not much "there" there.

[Bolo Boffin]

275. Thank you for your opinion. n/t

[zappaman]

274. Your interaction with DiEugenio shows what you're all about, Bolo Boffin.

Pretty much shows that poor Jim, like some of his acolytes, has a hard time arguing the facts.

[Bolo Boffin]

277. It bothers me that DiEugenio never managed to mention the university he works for.

So very strange that he wouldn't say.

[Mc Mike]

280. Thanks for the time you've taken here, Mr. D.

To have an accomplished historian, researcher, and author post here, in their own original words, is a benefit to the site.

Reading the contents of your posts, vs. the contents of most WC 'official story' advocates, was a breath of fresh air.

[DeSwiss]

4. K&R

[Octafish]

18. DiEugenio said Kennedy was attacked bitterly in Washington for siding with democracy in Congo...

...Vietnam and elsewhere. Traced the attacks back to Sullivan & Cromwell, the Wall Street law firm that helped "create" Panama by carving it out of Columbia in 1897. From their ranks, the CIA -- as in "Corporate Interests of America" -- would later come into being. DiEugenio described how in 1964 Warren Commission member John McCloy, whose law firm represented the interests of M. A. Hanna Mining Company, also served the secret U.S. government to secretly negotiate with João Goulart, the leader of Brazil and warn him if he continued his policies to redistribute wealth by nationalizing the nation's resopurces, he would be removed from power. Goulart said, "No," and he was soon gone.

[Spider Jerusalem]

66. "Siding with democracy"?

So the CIA-backed coup that brought down Diem was in the interest of democracy? Interesting theory.

[Octafish]

79. Excellent point.

However, the coup was intended to bring in a new government that would represent the people of Vietnam, not the French colonialist power.

[alcibiades_mystery]

108. The French had been kicked out of Vietnam for nine years when Diem was killed

Are you even serious right now? Diem was killed in early November 1963, just a few weeks before Kennedy himself. What does that have to do with the French colonialists, who had their asses handed to them in 1954?

[YoungDemCA]

110. "What does that have to do with the French colonialists?" Nothing, of course

Diem was supported by the U.S. until the Kennedy Administration decided that he was a liability to winning the budding war in Vietnam.

[Octafish]

164. I'm sorry. I assumed readers had a basic understanding of the history of Vietnam.

Nixon and the Dulles brothers helped shape US policy in Indochina to support the French, big oil and big business. At one time, they even planned to atom bomb Gen. Giap and his army surrounding Dien Ben Phu. When President Kennedy was in office, he attempted to work a peaceable solution. Even Gen. Giap knew about it.

http://www.ctka.net/2013/General_Giap_Knew_Kang.html

[alcibiades_mystery]

169. A ridiculous response

Your initial post that I responded to said this: "the coup was intended to bring in a new government that would represent the people of Vietnam, not the French colonialist power."

That displays levels of ignorance of Vietnamese history that you cannot rescue with a thousand links. The coup was intended to represent the people of Vietnam? A ludicrous notion. Never mind your deep ignorance of the timeline, the French, Diem, or seemingly anything else related to Vietnam in that era.

[Octafish]

170. Only ridiculous if you value supporting Diem, whose power came from corrupt colonialist money.

If you value democracy and a lasting peace in Vietnam, it made sense to try a new government.

[alcibiades_mystery]

172. Diem was a brutal tyrant supported by the US, including Kennedy, until he became inconvenient

His replacement were brutal tyrants supported by the US until they became inconvenient. And etc, until the flag of the national Liberation Front flew over the presidential Palace in 1975.

Only laughable ignorance and absurd hero worship could lead you to believe that the coup winked at and approved by JFK was somehow in support of democracy for the Vietnamese people. Everyone knew damn well that any legitimate election held even in the RVN in 1963 would have seen immediate reunification under Ho Chi Minh. Supporting democracy would have meant allowing just such an election instead of stifling it at every turn.

[Octafish]

173. So you understand what Kennedy was trying to do?

Kennedy's approach to the problems of Vietnam and southeast Asia was very different from Eisenhower, as well as from Johnson and Nixon. His successors had no problem pulling the trigger, bringing in the ground troups to fight, and getting the nation into a war without knowing how or when to get out. Sounds familiar.

Galbraith and Vietnam

by RICHARD PARKER
The Nation, March 14, 2005 issue

In the fall of 1961, unknown to the American public, John F. Kennedy was weighing a crucial decision about Vietnam not unlike that which George W. Bush faced about Iraq in early 2002--whether to go to war. It was the height of the cold war, when Communism was the "terrorist threat," and Ho Chi Minh the era's Saddam Hussein to many in Washington. But the new President was a liberal Massachusetts Democrat (and a decorated war veteran), not a conservative Sunbelt Republican who claimed God's hand guided his foreign policy. JFK's tough-minded instincts about war were thus very different. Contrary to what many have come to believe about the Vietnam War's origins, new research shows that Kennedy wanted no war in Asia and had clear criteria for conditions under which he'd send Americans abroad to fight and die for their country--criteria quite relevant today.

But thanks also in part to recently declassified records, we now know that Kennedy's top aides--whatever his own views--were offering him counsel not all that different from what Bush was told forty years later. Early that November, his personal military adviser, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, and his deputy National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow, were on their way back from Saigon with a draft of the "Taylor report," their bold plan to "save" Vietnam, beginning with the commitment of at least 8,000 US troops--a down payment, they hoped, on thousands more to follow. But they knew JFK had no interest in their idea because six months earlier in a top-secret meeting, he had forcefully vetoed his aides' proposed dispatch of 60,000 troops to neighboring Laos--and they were worried about how to maneuver his assent.

Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, then Ambassador to India, got wind of their plan--and rushed to block their efforts. He was not an expert on Vietnam, but India chaired the International Control Commission, which had been set up following French withdrawal from Indochina to oversee a shaky peace accord meant to stabilize the region, and so from State Department cables he knew about the Taylor mission--and thus had a clear sense of what was at stake. For Galbraith, a trusted adviser with unique back-channel access to the President, a potential US war in Vietnam represented more than a disastrous misadventure in foreign policy--it risked derailing the New Frontier's domestic plans for Keynesian-led full employment, and for massive new spending on education, the environment and what would become the War on Poverty. Worse, he feared, it might ultimately tear not only the Democratic Party but the nation apart--and usher in a new conservative era in American politics.

Early that November, just as Taylor and his team arrived back in Washington, Galbraith arrived from New Delhi for the state visit of Prime Minister Nehru. Hoping to gain a quick upper hand over Taylor and his mission, he arranged a private luncheon for Kennedy and Nehru at the Newport estate of Jacqueline Kennedy's mother and stepfather. No one from the State Department--to Secretary of State Dean Rusk's great consternation--was invited, save Galbraith. Ten days earlier, Galbraith, in one of his back-channel messages, had shared with Kennedy his growing concerns about Vietnam. From India, he'd played a role in defusing the Laos situation that spring, but over the summer, the Berlin crisis had sent a sharp chill through relations with the Soviets, with the risks of nuclear confrontation for a time all too real. About this, Galbraith now told the President:

Although at times I have been rather troubled by Berlin, I have always had the feeling that it would be worked out. I have continued to worry far, far more about South Viet Nam. This is more complex, far less controllable, far more varied in the factors involved, far more susceptible to misunderstanding. And to make matters worse, I have no real confidence in the sophistication and political judgment of our people there.

This was advice Kennedy was hearing from no one else in his Administration, but clearly welcomed.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050314/parker

So, to prevent war...

Papers reveal JFK efforts on Vietnam

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff
Boston Globe June 6, 2005

EXCERPT...

Records show that McNamara and the military brass quickly criticized the proposal. An April 14 Pentagon memo to Kennedy said that ''a reversal of US policy could have disastrous effects, not only upon our relationship with South Vietnam, but with the rest of our Asian and other allies as well."

Nevertheless, Kennedy later told Harriman to instruct Galbraith to pursue the channel through M. J. Desai, then India's foreign secretary. At the time, the United States had only 1,500 military advisers in South Vietnam.

''The president wants to have instructions sent to Ambassador Galbraith to talk to Desai telling him that if Hanoi takes steps to reduce guerrilla activity , we would correspond accordingly," Harriman states in an April 17, 1962, memo to his staff. ''If they stop the guerrilla activity entirely, we would withdraw to a normal basis."

A draft cable dated the same day instructed Galbraith to use Desai as a ''channel discreetly communicating to responsible leaders North Vietnamese regime . . . the president's position as he indicated it."

But a week later, Harriman met with Kennedy and apparently persuaded him to delay, according to other documents, and the overture was never revived.

CONTINUED...

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/06/06/papers_reveal_jfk_efforts_on_vietnam/

Which didn't stop some circles from trying to kindle a conflagration...

From The Secret History of the CIA by Joseph Trento:

EXCERPT…

Who changed the coup into the murder of Diem, Nhu and a Catholic priest accompanying them? To this day, nothing has been found in government archives tying the killings to either John or Robert Kennedy. So how did the tools and talents developed by Bill Harvey for ZR/RIFLE and Operation MONGOOSE get exported to Vietnam? Kennedy immediately ordered (William R.) Corson to find out what had happened and who was responsible. The answer he came up with: “On instructions from Averell Harriman…. The orders that ended in the deaths of Diem and his brother originated with Harriman and were carried out by Henry Cabot Lodge’s own military assistant.”

Having served as ambassador to Moscow and governor of New York, W. Averell Harriman was in the middle of a long public career. In 1960, President-elect Kennedy appointed him ambassador-at-large, to operate “with the full confidence of the president and an intimate knowledge of all aspects of United States policy.” By 1963, according to Corson, Harriman was running “Vietnam without consulting the president or the attorney general.”

The president had begun to suspect that not everyone on his national security team was loyal. As Corson put it, “Kenny O’Donnell (JFK’s appointments secretary) was convinced that McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, was taking orders from Ambassador Averell Harriman and not the president. He was especially worried about Michael Forrestal, a young man on the White House staff who handled liaison on Vietnam with Harriman.”

At the heart of the murders was the sudden and strange recall of Saigon Station Chief Jocko Richardson and his replacement by a no-name team barely known to history. The key member was a Special Operations Army officer, John Michael Dunn, who took his orders, not from the normal CIA hierarchy but from Harriman and Forrestal.

According to Corson, “John Michael Dunn was known to be in touch with the coup plotters,” although Dunn’s role has never been made public. Corson believes that Richardson was removed so that Dunn, assigned to Ambassador Lodtge for “special operations,” could act without hindrance.

SOURCE:

“The Secret History of the CIA.” Joseph Trento. 2001, Prima Publishing. pp. 334-335.

So. Yes. There is that.

[JimboBillyBubbaBob]

76. And,

look how it all turned out!

[zeemike]

5. Too close to bedtime to do this justice

Bookmarked it for tomorrow.

[Octafish]

20. DiEugenio is profound.

A historian who cites his sources of information and admits when he's wrong, as he pointed out errors in the first edition of his book, Destiny Betrayed. And the guy sounds like he could be from Detroit -- no snobby, country club, frat house nasal condescendo -- just a regular voice of a person looking for answers to the question, "Why?"

Here's a decent interview from last year in Examiner.com: JFK assassination redux, Part 1: James DiEugenio on 'Destiny Betrayed' (Q&A)

EXCERPT...

Some of the books I consulted with were John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA, and JFK and Vietnam. Other important books are Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable, Jerry McKnight’s Breach of Trust, Tony Summers’ Conspiracy, and Jim Marrs’ Crossfire and Bill Davy’s Let Justice be Done. A book I used to draw my picture of Kennedy’s foreign policy is Richard Mahoney’s JFK: Ordeal in Africa.

[zeemike]

21. I was not familiar with him before.

So thanks for making me aware of him...a good read all of it...and goes a long way toward dispel the re writing of history by the right wingers and centrist.

[stopbush]

25. Translation: here's a bunch of evidence-bereft CT books I've read before writing my own

evidence-bereft CT book.

BTW - amazing that anyone wishing to look credible these days would cite Crossfire and JFK & The Unspeakable as source material.

[Octafish]

36. That's not true at all, stopbush.

Each of those authors cites sources for all their observations. For example, John M. Newman was an active duty Army Major, serving as an instructor at West Point, when he wrote "JFK and Vietnam." A veteran of U.S. Army intelligence, Dr. Newman was qualified to pour through the records of the CIA to write "Oswald and the CIA." He currently is on the faculty at the University of Maryland.

Why do you have to besmirch the reputation of a scholar and a veteran of the Army to make your point? Oh. Because the facts, as Newman makes clear, aren't on your side so smearing is all you have.

[stopbush]

82. Pot, meet kettle.

That's rich - Octafish saying someone else is besmirching someone's reputation, when her stock in trade is besmirching everyone and anything involved with the facts put forward in the WCR.

[Octafish]

83. Show where I'm wrong. Otherwise don't libel me.

Last I looked, I had posted more than 36,000 times on DU. The relatively few posts about JFK seem to be the only occasions you pop up on them, largely to denigrate anyone who disagrees with the Warren Commission.

DUers should GOOGLE Octafish + stopbush + Kennedy to see for themselves. They also may see how much we've learned over the past 50 years.

Seeing how important truth is for democracy, I would think anyone interested in Democratic politics and policies would likewise be interested. For some reason, you think there's nothing new to learn, so you act to shut down discussion. That is most un-democratic.

[stopbush]

92. In the past, I've spent (wasted?) plenty of time showing you where you are wrong.

I agree with you: DUers should google Octafish+stopbush+Kennedy to see for themselves. They might even learn something about the facts in the case (ie: NOT the tripe Octa is peddling) in the process.

Truth IS important for democracy. Those of us who have accepted the truth of the Warren Commission Report know that better than anyone else, especially if we ourselves were once in the uninformed and hysterical CT camp, as are you.

And, no, there's not much "new" to learn about the JFK assassination, which was from an investigator's perspective - and in the words of Vincent Bugliosi - "a simple murder case."

At this point, the JFK CTists come off just like the Republicans with their voter suppression efforts, ie: a theory in search of a problem/conspiracy. In both cases, facts are irrelevant.

[Octafish]

94. Bugliosi presents only information that supports his theory.

From Gary Aguilar, who also spoke at the Duquesne conference:

But it is not just crackpots who have given up the faith; so also has the government itself. Two independent teams of seasoned, government investigators assembled by the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that, as the HSCA put it, “It is a reality to be regretted that the (Warren) Commission failed to live up to its promise.”14 Bugliosi never mentions this finding. Nor does he mention any of the harshest of the official critiques. Instead he offers only a few of the milder ones, which he then nitpicks and dismisses, in order to stand foursquare with the Warren Commission. The Commission’s key failing was not investigating the murder itself, but instead handing the job over to the FBI, which, the HSCA determined, had “generally exhausted its resources in confirming its case against Oswald as the lone assassin, a case that Director J. Edgar Hoover, at least, seemed determined to make within 24 hours of the assassination.”155 The Church Committee also discovered that “derogatory information pertaining to both (Warren) Commission members and staff was brought to Mr. Hoover’s attention ... .”166 One can only wonder if the notorious Hoover might have sought such information as insurance that the Commission wouldn’t deviate from Hoover’s lone nut theory – one that exculpated the Bureau and Hoover for not shielding JFK from a successful plot. Nowhere in Bugliosi’s 2500 pages will you find any of these official findings.

http://www.jfkhistory.com/review.html

So, no. You haven't shown where I was wrong, only where you come from.

[Bolo Boffin]

101. Bullshit.

If that thick encyclopedia contains only the information that supports his theory, his point is unassailable.

No, he also goes into alternate theories and shows why they are wanting. Plenty of evidence on all sides of the question are concerned. It is impossible to cover all evidence and every cul-de-sac and bayou the conspiracy advocates find themselves wandering around in, but Bugliosi did above and beyond duty on covering all that he could.

Now let's discuss your OP, shall we?

[Octafish]

141. Why the indignation, Bolo Boffin?

If Bugliosi is correct, his analysis and theory will withstand criticism.

As for telling me what to write, don't.

And why answer for stopbush? He or she can answer for him or her self, right?

[stopbush]

142. Your problem is that you give way too much credence to little tidbits of opinion

and no weight to the mountains of evidence presented in the WCR. In your JFK CT-obsessed world, everybody that had anything to do with the WCR and the official investigations is a conspirator.

BTW - you don't bother mentioning that the HSCA confirmed the findings of the WCR. According to the HSCA:

• Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at Kennedy. The second and third shots Oswald fired struck the President. The third shot he fired successfully killed the President.

• The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Soviet Government was not involved in the assassination of Kennedy.

•The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Cuban Government was not involved in the assassination of Kennedy.

•The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that anti-Castro Cuban groups, as groups, were not involved in the assassination of Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.

•The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the national syndicate of organized crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.

•The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Central Intelligence Agency were not involved in the assassination of Kennedy.

•Agencies and departments of the U.S. Government performed with varying degrees of competency in the fulfilment of their duties. President Kennedy did not receive adequate protection. A thorough and reliable investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination was conducted. The investigation into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate. The conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith, but presented in a fashion that was too definitive.

The ONLY thing you CTists have to hang your hats on from the HSCA was their entirely erroneous view that a fourth shot was fired. That lie was vehemently disputed at the time by the NAS and others, and that has been proven to be absolutely false in the intervening years. What's really needed is for surviving members of the HSCA to issue a corrective to its bungled acceptance of the 4th bullet fantasy and deal with the mountain of evidence that has rendered that particular fantasy moot. Not that that would stop you CTists. You'd just claim they were all in on the conspiracy too.

[stopbush]

143. Have you even read Bugliosi? Be honest, because I don't see how you would make such a statement

Last edited Mon Nov 4, 2013, 04:17 PM - Edit history (1)

had you read his 2500-page book.

As far as not mentioning the "harshest" of the official critiques, you mean the crackpotiest of the crackpots? Should Bugliosi address the "evidence" that JFK's limo driver turned around and shot him, as has been alleged by a few of the "harshest" critics? How about the critics who opine that the bullet that hit JFK in the head must have stopped in his head so as not to hit Jackie, who was in the line of trajectory had the bullet come from the grassy knoll?

Had you read Bugliosi's book - which you obviously haven't - you would know that Bugliosi addresses every MAJOR conspiracy theory out there and pretty much decimates them in his rebuttals. That he opts not to go down the rabbit hole of examining every single crackpot theory - all of which are little more than ham-fisted reworkings and tangential hypotheses on the major CTs that Buglosi does destroy - simply says that after writing THE most in-depth book ever written on the JFK killing, he probably didn't feel the need to swat the CT flies buzzing around him. You guys are never going to go away, you've never met a hair-brained theory you can't embrace wholeheartedly, nor a piece of concrete evidence you can't cavalierly dismiss, so why even engage the crackpots at all? In fact, it's amazing that the "harshest critics" of the WCR have no problem supporting CTs that conflict with each other, a la Oliver Stone's admitted cinematic "fiction."

For such an ardent JFK CTist, I find it odd that you can't be bothered to read Bugliosi for yourself, but choose instead to rely on critiques of his work written by men who don't necessarily have an ax to grind, but who definitely have a buck to be made off the gullible.

[Octafish]

146. No, I haven't read his book. The great DUer H20 Man did and wrote interesting things about it.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1874158

He also said Bugliosi does an excellent job of putting together a case against Oswald and documenting what supports that case, but doesn't mention much of what doesn't support that case.

[stopbush]

150. "No, I haven't read his book." That says it all, does it not?

At least I keep my criticism of the JFK CT books to the ones I've read.

You - on the other hand - have no problem acting as a MAJOR critic of a book you can't even be bothered to read. BTW - it would have made great reading for you on your way to that JFK CT conference you just attended.

There's a word for criticizing things you have no knowledge of. I'll let others fill in the blank.

For the thousands of hours you spend hawking JFK CTs, I find it amazing that you can't take the tens of hours it would take you to read through Bugliosi at a leisurely pace.

Question: since you haven't bothered reading Bugliosi, I'll assume you've never bothered to read the Warren Commission Report either. Care to confirm my surmise?

[Octafish]

154. So what? I did read the Warren Report.

It was a rush hatchet job chock full of the crapola fed to it by the CIA and FBI. I did not read all 26 volumes of related materials -- 26 volumes you have claimed on DU to have read.

One book I did read that you denigrate is James Douglass' "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters." It's a well-researched history that has served to open the eyes of many thousands of people:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x302204

Odd how angry you get talking about the assassination of President Kennedy. Your indignation, first expressed years ago on DU, makes me doubt you really are open minded about this subject.

[stopbush]

177. I don't have an open mind on the JFK killing, You're right there.

And why should I? I don't have an open mind on whether fairies or werewolves or gods exist, either. No evidence that any of them exist, no matter how many programs on the History Channel or A&E claim they do. I'm not open minded on the subject of Republicans doing good for the country.

Douglass' book is pathetic. It preaches to the choir. People like you who are predisposed to believe in CTs love it. Those less enamored of opinion and fantasy posing as fact find it less engaging. Yes, and the Bible has opened the eyes of thousands of people who never knew an ass could talk, or that the world was created in a week.

BTW - anger and indignation are your characterizations of my posts. I guess that's to be expected.

[stopbush]

181. A hatchet job? Really?

25,000 interviews is a hatchet job?

Let me ask you a question: do you believe the Boston Police captured and killed the perps in the Boston Marathon bombing, or was that a hatchet job? After all, they got both of those guys within a week. How was that possible? Could the answer be "that's what police do?"

I ask because many JFK CTists seem incredulous that the Dallas Police could have grabbed Oswald so quickly. But if you think about it, the Boston bombers had a much better chance of escape than did Oswald, and they were caught. They weren't even at the scene when the bombs went off. Oswald was shooting from the TSBD. He was at ground zero. They were faces in the crowd, Oswald was the only employee missing from the TSBD after the shooting. Oswald left behind the rifle he had purchased through mail order, and that rifle was traced to him within 24 hours of the killing. The bullets that hit JFK and Connally were matched to Oswald's rifle to the exclusion of every other firearm in the world.

BTW - just because you can't be bothered to read multi-volume works doesn't mean others don't. Some of us like to read. For some it's a chore. I will say that Bugliosi's "Reclaiming History" was an easy and fast read for me, because for all its detail, it doesn't get bogged down. On the other hand, I gave up reading Walter issacson's book on Einstein after not being able to get past pg 50 in 4 days time, so turgid was his writing style.

So reading all of the WCR isn't such a big deal, because it's really very interesting, especially if - like me - you came from the CT perspective, believing all the lies that "the WCR didn't investigate this," or "Oswald was a crappy shot" or "the WCR was a hatchet job." Once you actually read the thing, it's very interesting, engaging and thorough. Not at all what the naysayers WHO HAVE NEVER READ IT say.

For most, the WCR summary that's available on line at http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/ should be enough. But most CTists can't even be bothered to read that.

[sabrina 1]

120. So what are you so worried about then? DUers are pretty smart people,

if something is 'evidence bereft' they don't you to tell them so. You appear to have a low opinion of DUers. Do you think DUers are not capable of judging for themselves what is worthwhile info and what is not?

[gopiscrap]

6. that's interesting

[Octafish]

22. DiEugenio blasted Bill O'Reilly and his Nixon-stained GOP boss, Roger Ailes...

DiEugenio explained that Bill O'Reilly had filed excellent reports on the Kennedy assassination as a tee vee reporter, but, "suddenly, once Roger Ailes started signing his checks, it was 'What Kennedy assassination? It was Oswald.'"

Bill O’Reilly’s Outdated ‘Killing Kennedy’

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and co-author Martin Dugard are hoping for another financial “killing” with their Killing Kennedy. But the new book may have a bigger agenda, solidifying popular history behind the Warren Report on JFK’s murder and tearing down his character, writes Jim DiEugenio.

By Jim DiEugenio
ConsortiumNews, October 13, 2012

EXCERPT...

Regarding both JFK and another historical figure featured in the book – Martin Luther King Jr. – the authors throw in many stories about extramarital affairs. In using the likes of David Heymann and Seymour Hersh’s discredited book, The Dark Side of Camelot, they present the most extreme tales in this regard.

I have dealt with this issue concerning Kennedy in my long essay, “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” (See The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pgs. 324-73) Concerning King, many people who heard these alleged surveillance tapes, like journalist Ben Bradlee, felt they were created by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Which brings us to a real quandary. O’Reilly and Dugard spend many pages describing the alleged character flaws of Kennedy and King. But they spend next to none describing the much larger flaws of J. Edgar Hoover, longtime CIA Director Allen Dulles and President Johnson. I wonder why – and there is a likely explanation.

For decades, it has been a strategic goal of the American Right to tear down the hero status of Kennedy and King, whereas there is no similar political need to disparage Hoover, Dulles and Johnson. So, a book that is designed to do several things at once – cement the conventional wisdom about the Kennedy assassination in line with the original Warren Commission findings, pander to right-wing readers and make gobs of money – would naturally ignore all the messy evidence of CIA and FBI wrongdoing and highlight the human frailties of Kennedy and King.

Thus, Killing Kennedy is just the latest example of O’Reilly’s lucrative decision to sell out, even on a topic that once appeared to draw his honest interest. Many years ago O’Reilly was the host of a syndicated program called Inside Edition that drew on his past acquaintance with Gaeton Fonzi, the late, great field investigator for both the Church Committee and the HSCA. Fonzi supplied O’Reilly with many interesting stories about the Kennedy case in the early 1990s when Oliver Stone’s film was creating a new furor about the case. The stories all pointed toward a conspiracy, and some still exist on YouTube today.

CONTINUED...

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/10/13/bill-oreillys-outdated-killing-kennedy/

It is interesting, like Plato said:

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

[gopiscrap]

23. yup

[bbgrunt]

8. k and r

[Octafish]

29. DiEugenio pegged the Dulles Brothers in public to the proverbial wall.

Something that seldom if ever is mentioned on ABCNNBCBSFakeNoiseNutworks or in the many dozens of college and high school history books I've looked at:

"Allen Dulles' 40 year intelligence career ended when Kennedy fired him over this deceit over the Bay of Pigs. He was now sitting at home, watching, as JFK was tearing apart piece by piece this whole imperial empire that him and his brother had been working on since when? Anyone here know? The Dulles brothers supervised the mandate thing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. OK. It's how the European countries would go in and control all those oil rich countries in the Middle East. All right. That's why Dulles went in to Iran in 1954 to save the country for ARAMCO against Mossadegh nationalizing the oil companies." -- James DiEugenio

Proud to write DU has addressed the question:

BFEE Overthrew Iranian Democracy for BP

[Eddie Haskell]

190. Allen Dulles should have been a suspect.

Instead he's appointed to the commission. Like Stone said, how can anyone believe this crap?

[Octafish]

191. David Talbot called Dulles, ''the Chairman of the Board of the Assassination.''

He is writing a new book on the theme. I look forward to its publication.

Mr. Talbot spoke about it at length. I plan to start a thread on his address in the coming week.

IMO, his appointment to the Warren Commission shines a light on the corruption within the national security establishment, like behind the assassination.

Know your BFEE: Spawn of Wall Street and the Third Reich

In a democracy, Business, Spying and War powers should not be private affairs.

[ucrdem]

10. "John F. Kennedy was never a Cold Warrior"

Absolutely correct and it can't be said often enough. The damage that revisionists have done to Kennedy's memory is astonishing, ditto the fondness of the fake left for this particular talking point. Next up: brace yourselves Chomsky fans, but Joe Kennedy was not bootlegger either.

[sabrina 1]

12. Who is the 'fake left'?

[rhett o rick]

49. That is a great question. What is this poster implying? The Conserva-Dems have been

trying to change the conversation lately. They are trying to say that they are on the left, that they are liberal. They say that Pres Obama is liberal. If you ask them what does that make Sen Sanders, Sen Warren and Rep Grayson? All you get are crickets. Now we have the "fake left". From my perspective I think the Conserva-Dems are the fake left.

Democrats with conservative ideologies.

[Octafish]

34. DiEugenio has written about the Right killing off the JFK Legacy (New Frontier), too...

The Posthumous Assassination of JFK

Judith Exner, Mary Meyer, and Other Daggers

By James DiEugenio
Probe
From the September-October, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 6)

Current events, most notably a past issue of Vanity Fair, and the upcoming release of Sy Hersh’s new book, extend an issue that I have dealt with in a talk I have done several times around the country in the last two years. It is entitled “The Two Assassinations of John Kennedy.” I call it that because there has been an ongoing campaign of character assassination ever since Kennedy was killed.

In the talk to date, I’ve dealt primarily with the attacks on Kennedy from the left by Noam Chomsky and his henchman Alexander Cockburn which occurred at the time of the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK. But historically speaking, the attacks on the Kennedys, both Jack and Robert, have not come predominantly from the left. The attacks from the right have been much more numerous. And the attacks from that direction were always harsher and more personal in tone. As we shall see, that personal tone knows no limits. Through papers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the attacks extend into the Kennedys’ sex lives, a barrier that had not been crossed in post-war mainstream media to that time. To understand their longevity and vituperativeness, it is necessary to sketch in how they all began. In that way, the reader will be able to see that Hersh’s book, the Vanity Fair piece on Judith Exner, and an upcoming work by John Davis on Mary Meyer, are part of a continuum.

The Right and the Kennedys

There can be no doubt that the right hated the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. There is also little doubt that some who hated JFK had a role in covering up his death. One could use Secret Service agent Elmer Moore as an example. As revealed in Probe (Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 20-21), Moore told one Jim Gochenaur how he was in charge of the Dallas doctors testimony in the JFK case. One of his assignments as liaison for the Warren Commission seems to have been talking Dr. Malcolm Perry out of his original statement that the throat wound was one of entry, which would have indicated an assassin in front of Kennedy. But another thing Gochenaur related in his Church Committee interview was the tirade that Moore went into the longer he talked to him: how Kennedy was a pinko who was selling us out to the communists. This went on for hours. Gochenaur was actually frightened by the time Moore drove him home.

But there is another more insidious strain of the rightwing in America. These are the conservatives who sometimes disguise themselves as Democrats, as liberals, as “internationalists.” This group is typified by men like Averill Harriman, Henry Stimson, John Foster Dulles and the like. The common rubric used to catalog them is the Eastern Establishment. The Kennedy brothers were constantly at odds with them. In 1962, Bobby clashed with Dean Acheson during the missile crisis. Acheson wanted a surprise attack; Bobby rejected it saying his brother would not go down in history as another Tojo. In 1961, JFK disobeyed their advice at the Bay of Pigs and refused to add air support to the invasion. He was punished for this in Fortune magazine with an article by Time-Life employee Charles Murphy that blamed Kennedy for the failure of the plan. Kennedy stripped Murphy of his Air Force reserve status but — Murphy wrote to Ed Lansdale — that didn’t matter; his loyalty was to Allen Dulles anyway. In 1963, Kennedy crossed the Rubicon and actually printed money out of the Treasury, bypassing that crowning jewel of Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Board. And as Donald Gibson has written, a member of this group, Jock Whitney, was the first to put out the cover story about that Krazy Kid Oswald on 11/22/63 (Probe Vol. 4 No.1).

Killing off the Legacy

In 1964, author Morris Bealle, a genuine conservative and critic of the Eastern Establishment, wrote a novel called Guns of the Regressive Right, depicting how that elite group had gotten rid of Kennedy. There certainly is a lot of evidence to substantiate that claim. There were few tears shed by most rightwing groups over Kennedy’s death. Five years later, they played hardball again. King and Bobby Kennedy were shot. One would think the coup was complete. The war was over.

CONTINUED...

http://www.ctka.net/pr997-jfk.html

[ucrdem]

57. Great article, recommended to all.

Covers a lot including the origins of the Cuban-done-it theory for anyone who missed Douglass' chapter on JFK's communications with Castro. Thanks Octa!

[Spider Jerusalem]

13. Sorry...no

The core issue in the current Kennedy revival is the claim that JFK intended to withdraw from Vietnam, a fact suppressed by the media; and was assassinated for that reason, it is prominently charged. Some allege further that Kennedy was intent on destroying the CIA, dismantling the military-industrial complex, ending the Cold War, and opening an era of development and freedom for Latin America, among other forms of class treachery that led to his downfall. This 1991-2 drama proceeded at several levels, from cinema to scholarship, engaging some of the best-known Kennedy intellectuals as well as substantial segments of the popular movements that in large part grew from opposition to the Vietnam war. Much as they differ on parts of the picture and other issues, there is a shared belief across this spectrum that history changed course dramatically when Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, an event that casts a grim shadow over all that followed.

(snip)

While history never permits anything like definitive conclusions, in this case, the richness of the record, and its consistency, permit some unusually confident judgments. In my opinion, the record is inconsistent with the withdrawal thesis throughout, and supports a different conclusion. In brief, basic policy towards Indochina developed within a framework of North-South/East-West relations that Kennedy did not challenge, and remained constant in essentials: disentanglement from an unpopular and costly venture as soon as possible, but after victory was assured (by the end, with increasing doubt that US client regimes could be sustained). Tactics were modified with changing circumstances and perceptions. Changes of Administration, including the Kennedy assassination, had no large-scale effect on policy, and not even any great effect on tactics, when account is taken of the objective situation and how it was perceived.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199209--.htm

[ucrdem]

28. JFK in the Senate, April 6, 1954: "to pour money, máteriel, and men

into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive." That point of view didn't change in 1960, when Kennedy made his "strategy of peace" the center of his presidential campaign, and it didn't change when he took office. It changed when LBJ took the reigns.

DiEugenio and Douglass are right, and on this particular point at least Chomsky's "unusually confident judgment" is wrong, or if you prefer, out of date.

[Spider Jerusalem]

59. 1954?

Try looking at Kennedy's actions as president, eh? He increased US troops in Vietnam from 900 to 16,700. Ordered the CIA-sponsored coup that toppled Diem (because the Diem government weren't perceived as reliable partners). In every public speech and private utterance espouses the "domino theory", and reiterates that Southeast Asia must not be allowed to fall to Communism. And Kennedy never made any "strategy of peace" the centre of his campaign; unless banging on about a nonexistent "missile gap" is a strategy of peace.

[ucrdem]

62. I think you need to read up on what Kennedy actually wrote and said.

Start here: http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Peace-John-Fitzgerald-Kennedy/dp/0060123257

[Spider Jerusalem]

63. I think you do.

Mr. Brinkley: Mr. President, have you had any reason to doubt this so-called "domino theory," that if South VietNam falls, the rest of Southeast Asia will go behind it?

The President: No, I believe it. I believe it. I think that the struggle is close enough. China is so large, looms so high just beyond the frontiers, that if South Viet-Nam went, it would not only give them an improved geographic position for a guerrilla assault on Malaya but would also give the impression that the wave of the future in Southeast Asia was China and the Communists. So I believe it.

http://web.viu.ca/davies/H323Vietnam/JFK.Dom.htm

[ucrdem]

64. I don't suppose you have a print source for that?

It's interesting, sure, but there's lots of interesting stuff floating around on the web. This appears to be a transcript of a TV broadcast but doesn't provide a source or date of broadcast. Not saying it didn't happen, just that it looks a little dubious.

[Spider Jerusalem]

65. I have a video:

dailynightly.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/09/20405441-kennedys-63-pitch-reverberates-in-obamas-action-plan

On edit, see also here: http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/33588299#33588299

[ucrdem]

67. But only of the last part, which is unobjectionable.

Kennedy says "we can't expect these countries to do everything the way we want to do them. . . . We can't make everyone in our image, and there are a good many people who don't want to go in our image," and so on. That's the point he made in 1954 in the Senate and the one stuck to throughout his political career: the US can only exercise so much influence over other countries, and nationalist movements should be respected, including in Algeria and Indochina. That's in the first video at the link; the second video, strangely enough, cuts to a color segment on Austinland right after the two anchors agree to let Kennedy re-do his answers to three Vietnam questions, but neither are shown. So we still don't have a source for the statements in the Canadian transcript.

[Spider Jerusalem]

68. ...

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9397#axzz2jZLjigBq

[ucrdem]

70. Attaboy.

Okay here's my take, based on Douglass' much more nuanced and detailed analysis, found in chapter 3 of The Unspeakable, which I find completely convincing, based among other things on a conversation JFK had in spring of 1963 with Senator Mike Mansfield, who opposed intervention, based on the recollections of Kennedy confidante Kenny O'Donnell, who sat in on the meeting, as recalled on pp. 15-16 of O'Donnell's book:

"The President told Mansfield ... that he now agreed ... on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.
""' But I can do it until 1965 -- after I'm reelected,'" Kennedy told Mansfield.
"Kennedy explained ... that if he announced a withdrawal of American military personnel from Vietnam before the 1964 election, there would be a wild conservative outcry against returning hum to the Presidency for a second term." (qtd. in Douglass, pp. 126-7)

IN other words Kennedy was answering with his domestic political situation in mind. I have no doubt that this little prevarication was perfectly understood by the two NBC guys, or that that's why they pointedly asked him about Vietnam in the interview they were planning to use to kick off their new TV show.

[Bolo Boffin]

71. I wouldn't say Kennedy "ordered" the Diem coup

He sure as hell let it happen with some pointed encouragement, things he also regretted at the time and after. But "ordered"? No.

[Mc Mike]

73. Re E. Howard Hunt's forged diplomatic cables tying Kennedy to the Diem assassination:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=2734948&mesg_id=2740271

[Bolo Boffin]

74. You say "Re: Hunt's forged cables" like I said something about them.

Or even referred to them. Or was even thinking about them.

Setting those aside, there's quite a lot of evidence that Kennedy encouraged and supported the military coup that took Diem out of power. I would stop short of saying he ordered it. I would say it was not an act he relished or wanted to happen particularly. But it was the position of the US government to not stand in a coup's way and even to provide one with financial support. That much he did do.

[Mc Mike]

84. Just pointing out the indisputable fact of the existence of the forgeries, BB.

And the purpose of the forgeries is simple. If there's a lot of real evidence that Kennedy was behind the coup resulting in the murder of Diem, what would be the need for fake evidence to be created?

Hunt and his fake 'evidence' ties the Kennedy assassination into the Watergate scandals. Proves that there was a virulent right-wing out of control faction in our military intelligence career staff that was answerable to out of power non elected right wingers instead of the democratically elected President Kennedy and his administration.

When you talk about the 'position of the government', you're ignoring the fact that even Republican prez Eisenhower saw a threat to our democratic form of government from some parts of that government, in other words there wasn't one unified decision making chain of command.

[Bolo Boffin]

88. That doesn't change the indisputable fact that Kennedy let the coup happen.

Hunt forged those cables as part of Nixon's 1972 campaign dirty tricks. They were meant to alienate Catholic voters from the Democrats. You can allow them to cloud your mind about what Kennedy actually did, if you like. But I reserve the right to separate fact and fantasy.

[Octafish]

135. Actually, yes. What JFK wanted was different than what Pentagon, State and CIA delivered.

From C-SPAN:

The Presidency: President Kennedy's Vietnam Tapes

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA
Sunday, November 3, 2013

To mark the 50th anniversary this November 22 of President Kennedy's assassination, we look back at his policies. This is a discussion about Oval Office recordings and what they reveal of JFK's thinking about America's involvement in Vietnam. Over the past decade, 260 hours of President Kennedy's recorded conversations have been released -- 25 of these tapes are exchanges related to his Vietnam strategy. We hear about new findings concerning this strategy from Marc Selverstone -- chairman of the Miller Center Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia.

http://www.c-span.org/Events/The-Presidency-President-Kennedy39s-Vietnam-Tapes/10737442215/

The Miller Center has the tapes in question, and a transcript:

http://millercenter.org/presidentialclassroom/exhibits/jfks-memoir-dictation-on-the-assassination-of-diem

I'm proud to write, DU has examined these issues:

'Arrogant' CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam

[Bolo Boffin]

151. No, JFK didn't want Diem assassinated. But they OKed the coup.

JFK had no trouble accepting his part and his administration's part in the Diem coup as one of your tapes (this one) makes clear. He tried to mitigate the effect of the early August cable, but in the end went along with the coup that cable inspired. Now the question was whether the generals would produce the government in Saigon the people were looking for or if the revolts would continue.

What happened? The first month or so, things looked promising. But by March 1964, even McNamara was saying the situation in Vietnam had only deteriorated since September 1963. Well, he was beginning to say it by December.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon2/pent5.htm

Following his return from Vietnam, Mr. McNamara, on 16 March, submitted to the President a formal report. In it the Secretary of Defense acknowledged, "The situation has unquestionably been growing worse, at least since September." RVNAF desertion rates were increasing, and the GVN military position generally was weakening noticeably. The VC position, on the other hand, showed signs of improving. He referred pointedly to the increase in North Vietnamese support. The conclusion was that greater U.S. support was needed.

...(From McNamara's report) The U.S. policy of reducing existing personnel where South Vietnamese are in a position to assume the functions is still sound. Its application will not lead to any major reductions in the near future, but adherence to this policy as such has a sound effect in portraying to the U.S. and the world that we continue to regard the war as a conflict the South Vietnamese must win and take ultimate responsibility for. Substantial reductions in the numbers of U.S. military training personnel should be possible before the end of 1965. However, the U.S. should continue to reiterate that it will provide all the assistance and advice required to do the job regardless of how long it takes.

If that report had gone to Kennedy instead of Johnson, I don't think his reaction would have been any different. You may think otherwise, but it is impossible to know. I consider that one of the stronger advocates for getting out of Vietnam is here changing his tune. I think that would have weighed heavily on Kennedy.

[Mc Mike]

160. We see things differently.

I listened to your taped link (in post 151), and read Octa's 3rd link (in post 135), in reply to your post 88. Your tape of JFK on Nov. 4 says that Kennedy was in charge, threw a coup like a cold warrior, then regretted it, especially the resulting deaths. The 3rd link in post 135 has quite a bit of info that says the right wing in our intel apparatus were the actors in the coup, JFK wasn't.

I don't feel you're being hostile or vituperative with me, we just don't share the same view of things. I think that Kennedy was facing what Eisenhower warned against, a very undemocratic group of people within the government, who served the interests of people who were more powerful than the President and the Administration. In fighting against the threat to democracy these people represented, he wasn't jealously guarding his power in order to do the same bad cold warrior things they did, he wanted a more democratic and less cold warrior path. He was struggling against those nasty nazi forces of reaction on a lot of fronts, and they killed him.

To have Hunt -- Nixon and Poppy's associate, one of those virulently nasty nazi forces of reaction -- faking evidence that 'proves' Kennedy was a cold warrior, exhibits for me the famous repug projection tactic. They love to scream accusations of guilt at their political opponents about things which they themselves are guilty of. It's character assassination on top of the actual assassination. It's double think, telling us the guy they said was a lilly livered commie appeaser was also a criminally blood thirsty anti commie. It's also interesting how all three of those swine were in Dallas on 11 22, and all of them told oddly inconsistent stories about where they were or how they heard about the assassination.

Hunt was one of the box car 'tramps', and it doesn't matter one bit that Carto's Liberty Lobby won the defamation suit he filed against them for saying so. To have a far right outfit get into a high profile fight with Hunt about the info is just part of the repuglinazis tactics, to try to frame anyone, who says Hunt was picked up in Dealey, as a right wing nut job, and to control both sides of the debate.

[Bolo Boffin]

163. Clearly.

I just see the November 4 tape of JFK as clear evidence that he knew what was happening, knew what his administration had done to encourage it, and was taking full responsibility for it. Of course others were the primary actors, but JFK did nothing to stop them.

JFK worked for American interests with war in one hand and an outstretched hand for peace in the other. It was the only way to be a Cold War warrior. And while he stumbled in the very beginning of his term in office on that front, he quickly got his bearings on that front. If he had not drawn such a hard line in the Cuban Missile crisis, the Soviets might not have realized what a loose cannon Castro was until far too late in the game.

Hunt faking those cables was about the 1972 campaign, not about muddying the waters around a motive for JFK's murder. Making JFK order Diem's death - which he didn't - was meant to peel Catholic voters away from the Democrats according to Hunt's testimony. It was also about tying the Vietnam War directly to the Kennedy administration. Nixon couldn't have been more clear about that in the White House tapes. That way the Pentagon Papers would be seen as the Democrats' issue, not his. But Hunt couldn't find where JFK had ever ordered Diem's assassination (because he didn't). That would have been the smoking gun. So Hunt made them up. Nixon didn't pay people to come back empty handed.

So I get why people are so keen to show JFK as completely the opposite of how Hunt and Nixon tried to portray him. I do. But Kennedy did have some blood on his hands. Kennedy would be the first to say that. The evidence just was not as damning as Nixon needed it to be.

And of course you know the HSCA says Hunt was not one of the box car "tramps." So no need to go into that.

[Mc Mike]

187. 'Cold Warrior' means different things for different people.

Last edited Sat Nov 9, 2013, 01:58 PM - Edit history (1)

For me, it means the people above Eisenhower who planned the Bay of Pigs and lied to Kennedy about the Cuban population's mass desire to rise up in support of the few Batista Cuban attackers. It means the guy who the repugs ran on a platform of 'dropping the nuclear bomb' in '64, it means Nixon's Christmas bombing of a children's hospital, it means Bircher general Ed Walker proselytizing US troops in Germany with pro-nazi ideas. Officially, Oswald tried to kill Walker, but that story if true just proved he couldn't hit a still target that was back lit, let alone a moving one from a greater distance.

If by calling Kennedy a 'cold warrior' you mean he wasn't a lily-livered treasonous appeaser of the communists, then I agree with you that the repugs lying charges of such were incorrect. If you mean he was the same as those repug 'cold warriors', then I (and all those repugs) disagree with you. A lot of people who disagree with you calling Kennedy a cold warrior connect the term with Attilah the hun style fascists, and you quite possibly have a quite different definition in mind.

The link of Octa's which I referred to had quite a bit of credible reporting that suggests your interpretation of Kennedy's 'responsibility' for the Viet coup is more in line with Kennedy's 'responsibility' for the several attempts on DeGaulle's life, which traced back to the CIA.

Re Hunt, your acceptance of the HSCA is selective, because they say there was a conspiracy, possibly involving intel people, Batista cubans, organized crime figures, far right wingers. Also, Richard Sprague was chief counsel for the HSCA before he was replaced by Blakely, and he was the first person to identify Hunt as the boxcar tramp. A J Weberman and Dick Gregory also identified Hunt as one of the tramps. To adhere to the lone nut theory, you have to believe some parts of the HSCA and not others, you have to find some members of the HSCA credible and not others. All I have to do is see the inconsistencies in the official story to know it stinks to high heaven.

[Bolo Boffin]

193. And the truth is in between, but closer to hardline than appeaser.

And that's why I don't like denials that JFK was a "Cold Warrior." It's usually done to build up some sort of motive for rubbing him out so war could be had. But JFK was quite willing to draw a hard line when he needed to. He did it several times, and just because he didn't press the Bay of Pigs attack doesn't mean he wouldn't have carried out an overt war with the Soviets over nukes in Cuba.

As to "the people above Eisenhower who planned the Bay of Pigs," from Sabato's new book on Kennedy:

A few days later (after the Bay of Pigs invasion), Kennedy called Eisenhower and asked the former president to meet him at Camp David to discuss the crisis. "I believe there is only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing," Ike replied matter-of-factly, "It must be a success." He asked Kennedy why he hadn't provided air cover for the rebels. JFK answered that he had been worked about the Soviet response in Berlin. Eisenhower assured the president that the Communists only attacked when they detected weakness. "The failure of the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do something they would not otherwise do," he warned. "Well," said Kennedy, "my advice was that we must try to keep our hands from showing in the affair." Eisenhower was stunned. "Mr. President, how could you expect the world to believe we had nothing to do with it? Where did these people get the ships to go from Central America to Cuba? Where did they get the weapons?"

...But even this major blunder did not lessen the Kennedy adminstration's resolve to eliminate Castro. Shortly after the Bay of Pigs, the president approved Operation Mongoose, a program of secret military missions, sabotage, and assassination plots designed to topple the Castro regime. "The lesson Kennedy drew from the Bay of Pigs was not that he should talk to Castro, but that he should intensify his efforts to overthrow him." JFK's unrelenting hostility toward Castro made it exceedingly difficult for any of his successors to reverse course - and none of them has done so in a fundamental way during the fifty-four years Fidel or his brother Raul have governed Cuba."

The quote in that second paragraph is from Piero Gleijeses' article in the Journal of Latin American Studies 27 (Feb 1995), "Ships in the Night: The CIA, the White House and the Bay of Pigs." That's my understanding of what the Bay of Pigs meant to Kennedy. That determination was tempered in the Berlin crisis and the Cuban Missile crisis, and I do believe it is seen in the way he carried out his Vietnam policy. He took Eisenhower's advice to heart. You can see that in the astronomical buildup of military advisers over his short term in office. He always had Laos in the crosshairs, more so than Vietnam, and losing Vietnam would have meant one step further removed from Laos. Even the October 2 meeting that resulted in plans to remove 1000 advisers from Vietnam included a plan to invade Laos in an emergency to protect the borders.

So I don't buy the notion of "people over Eisenhower" any more than I buy "people over Kennedy." Eisenhower in consultation with Kennedy didn't treat him like a fellow sufferer under the boot of the CIA. He was simply amazed that JFK would not support the invasion he'd given approval to. There was no warning there to resist the CIA or others at any cost. There was only "Go large or go home."

Re: Kennedy's responsibility in the Diem coup - I see it play out first in how Cable 243 went out and its immediate aftermath. I don't see any reason yet to discount the Wikipedia article on Cable 243. Yes, the way it went out was rather shady, but in the end the cable was not retracted. In fact, Kennedy went around the table containing supporters and non-supporters of the coup, asking if they would recommend retracting the cable. No one would go that far, not even Taylor. And in the aftermath of the actual coup, Kennedy taped a memo about the responsibility for that memo. I've linked to the audio a couple of times in this thread. That's as far as I give Kennedy the blame, just exactly what he was willing to accept himself. He didn't want Diem to die and never gave that order. If that's the same level of responsibility for the attempts on DeGaulle's life, then so be it.

My acceptance of the HSCA is selective, yes. But everyone who cites the HSCA selects what they will accept and what they will not. People intent on seeing a conspiracy behind JFK's assassination seize on that conclusion of the HSCA, but they reject so much else the HSCA report says, to the point of almost rejecting the entire thing. So you will forgive me for being selective there since everyone is.

I accept the great majority of what the report says, but I reject the conclusion of conspiracy for one simple reason - it is based solely on the evidence of the Dictabelt recording of a Dallas police motorcycle. There have been several studies rejecting that this is a recording of the events in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, and the latest has demolished the case that it can be used in any way to reflect those events in any way. It's from Larry Sabato's book again. They have established the identity of the officer driving the motorcycle: Willie Price, who was two miles away from Dealey Plaza during the assassination. This is done in several ways. Since the recording is not of Dealey Plaza, use of the Dictabelt as evidence of the gunshots is excluded. That was the only reason the HSCA ever concluded conspiracy in the case of JFK. And so I can reasonable discount that evidence and the conclusion of conspiracy based on it.

Since the recording is not of Dealey Plaza, all the acoustical analysis done by people intent on showing a conspiracy is in the end an exercise in faulty pattern recognition.

A PDF of the audio study done for the Sabato book:

http://www.thekennedyhalfcentury.com/pdf/Kennedy-Half-Century-Audio-Research.pdf

We're never going to agree on Hunt being one of the tramps. I don't see it. You do.

[Mc Mike]

198. I agree with you about the dictabelt evidence.

Last edited Sun Nov 10, 2013, 10:32 AM - Edit history (1)

Further, I say that the statement, by French SDECE intelligence man Herve Lamarr (pen name James Hepburn) in his book 'Farewell America', that the 'Zapruder footage was altered' is very credible. I studied it with low tech humble means in the early '90's, by running it frame by frame on my VCR, and could see cuts and splices, even before reading that French Intel had done a black bag job to obtain the original footage. They announced via publication of the book that they had done so, and that they had the unaltered footage to prove it.

The phony dictabelt evidence is like the altered Zapruder footage. People who don't believe the outrageously fallacious 'official story' sometimes wound up basing SOME objections to the official story on red herring style 'official evidence', then reasonable advocates of the official story point to the flawed logic and evidence that resulted, as 'proof' that further buttresses that official story. The change in HSCA staff from Sprague to Blakely was a way to de-rail the investigation, which had it's momentum from a massive public demand for post-Watergate 'clean up the gov' efforts. Therefore, the results of the HSCA covered some ground that the WC woefully failed to do, but put the de-railing poison pill of 'all based on one dictabelt recording'.

But it's obvious that the dictabelt recording had nothing to do with the findings that individual right wing intel members, organized crime members, Batista Cubans, etc., were possibly involved in the conspiracy. Those kinds of conclusions obviously weren't drawn from an audio tape, BB.

The link I referred to from Octa had a lot of credible reporting, from the Boston Globe, AP, San Jose Merc, etc. It showed statements by a lot of key government players that indicated a fight for control between the CIA and Kennedy over foreign policy. An interesting book by Mark Aarons and John Loftus titled 'Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis, and the Swiss Banks' made this statement -- "In effect, there were two CIAs in Germany, one liberal (Department of Army Detachment), one conservative (DDU). The first took orders from the President, DDU took its from Dulles, who had joined Thomas Dewey's Campaign Staff, expecting Dewey to be the next President." (p. 234) That shows a fight for control within intel itself, with a faction that didn't believe that 'politics stop at the water's edge', but instead placed themselves above President Truman, and unaccountable to his orders and control, because they wanted to take political power in this country. It's a eerily and blatantly familiar pattern that played out again the next time a Democratic president was elected, and of course the smirking nazi coddling repug shithead Dulles is involved yet again.

Between Truman and Kennedy, Republican Prez Eisenhower held office. Now, I've read your writing and links on this op that named key players and info from them suggesting Kennedy backed the Vietnam war and coup, and I've read Octa's writing and links that named key players and info from them suggesting the CIA was attempting to wrest control of our gov from the Presidency. With all the evidence and statements from and about key players like Lodge, Harriman, Bundy, Lemnitzer, Lansdale, McNamara, O'Donnell, Galbraith, etc., the info can become an overwhelming labrynth that baffles even the smart citizens who read this site. Too many components swirling to keep straight in the head of anyone who isn't an avowed scholar of US foreign policy '55 - '65. Digression aside, I bring up Eisenhower for a couple of reasons. First, the only and obvious reason for his warning about the MIIC in his farewell speech was to say that there were forces that he couldn't control or change when he was president, which he was worried would destroy Democracy in this country, so you can draw a straight line from Dulles' treasonous actions during Truman's administration to Dulles' treasonous actions during Kennedy's Administration, and it goes right through Eisenhower's warning about forces above him during his own administration. I call him a Republican instead of my usual term 'repug', because he fought against the nazis, and didn't believe they had aims or values that he could compromise with to further his own party's power and goals.

Second, when you bring up Eisenhower's chastisement of Kennedy re Cuba, it shows a marked distinction between Republican cold warriors and Kennedy. And Kennedy's denial of air support was an agreed upon precondition. Air support would only be provided when the massive popular uprising, which the CIA lyingly guaranteed, occurred. That was clearly stated before the operation, and military and intel figured he'd just send them anyway, even when it became clear that they lied to the President. Of course the whole Bay of Pigs operation was built before Kennedy came into office, by the same Military Industrial intel complex -- featuring shit head Poppy Bush, and E. Howard Hunt, and Dulles, and Nixon's Batista cuban buddies -- the same MIC that Eisenhower warned of, and it was pushed onto Kennedy a few months after he came into office.

And the results which Sabato reported Eisenhower predicting, of 'emboldened communists attacking because they detected weakness', didn't come about from the failed attempt to reinstate Batista subordinates into power. True, we got the Missile crisis, but did that come from the failure of the bay of pigs, or from the attempt itself? Either way, we wound up with a temporary removal of Cuban missiles and US missiles in Turkey, and we also got the red phone. The Bay of Pigs failure didn't result in Cuba as a springboard for a Russian commie takeover of the Americas.

There are a lot of things we won't agree about, but to me, it's still positive to discuss them. Photos of Nixon laughing it up with the Chinese communist leaders while carpetbombing Vietnam, though we were only in Vietnam to supposedly fight China's effort to spread Chinese communism -- that's essence of 'cold warrior'. Bullying, irrational, driven by lust for power, financially benefitting Dow and Monsanto, irrationally hypocritical, bloodthirsty and mass-murderous. The Berlin airlift, that's self-defense. Well thought out. It's like being in a bar and some drunken loud mouth is yelling and bullying, threatening and breaking things, then some quiet guy knocks his ass out. A reasonable person doesn't say both are violent bar patrons, though by strict definition they are. In 1960, Kennedy knocked Nixon's ass out in the election, and the repugs couldn't quit screaming and crying about it. And the people above and behind Nixon killed Kennedy.

[Bolo Boffin]

202. Well, that's a start.

"the findings that individual right wing intel members, organized crime members, Batista Cubans, etc., were possibly involved in the conspiracy."

That's not quite what the HSCA said. A small distinction, but an important one:

3. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.
a. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Soviet Government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
b. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Cuban Government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
c. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that anti-Castro Cuban groups, as groups, were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.
d. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the national syndicate of organized crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.
e. The Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

By "right wing intel members," I assume you mean members of the Secret Service, the FBI, and the CIA. They didn't get the same caveat as anti-Castro Cuban groups or the mob. In fact, the HCSA expression of their non-involvement is stronger than the Soviet Government's or the Cuban Government's. They get a "basis of the evidence available to us." It's a flat denial for the US Government groups.

And the "possibly involved" doesn't mean much. They didn't have the time, cash, or inclination to track down and preclude every individual member of the anti-Castro groups or the mob. Nor would anyone expect them to.

The dictabelt evidence was the only reason they stated this, anyway. Without clear and credible evidence of a fourth shot necessitating a conclusion of conspiracy, there would be no reason to go looking for where one might possibly have been. All manner of people might have helped Oswald. But without the slightest bit of evidence that someone did, there is no reason to go looking.

Something we do agree on: there are certainly a lot of unsavory types in the government before and since the assassination. And they certainly did capitalize on JFK's death. But they have always sought a way to capitalize on every event they could. They are not causing every disaster so that they can. They are just working the plan and taking advantage of every opportunity to advance their goals. This isn't evidence they killed Kennedy. You might as well say Zapruder had a hand in the conspiracy so he could sell his film. I don't anyone would go that far.

Re: the results of the Bay of Pigs - the first thing was the conference where Khrushchev tried his best to bully Kennedy into withdrawing from Berlin. I think that was a direct result of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Khrushchev and the Soviets saw weakness and tried to exploit it. JFK stood his ground there. Then they doubled down and put missiles into Cuba to put a thorn into America's side the way they viewed Berlin as a thorn in theirs. That blew up in their face again.

And another thing we agree on: your analogy of the calm guy in the bar ending the fight. That's a very apt way of putting Kennedy's role and stance. But he was counseled on it by Eisenhower. And he took that advice to heart. That is, until Lee Oswald shot him.

[Mc Mike]

208. Here's an excerpt from HSCA, p. 258;

Last edited Wed Nov 13, 2013, 08:40 PM - Edit history (1)

http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/report/html/HSCA_Report_0144b.htm

on the subject that should have received the Warren Commission's most probing analysis -- whether Oswald acted in concert with or on behalf of unidentified co-conspirators -- the Commission's performance was in fact flawed. One of the primary causes was the absence of full and proper co-operation of the FBI and CIA, and the desire of national leaders to allay public fears of a conspiracy.

So the Commission didn't discover a conspiracy, because they wanted to allay public fears of a conspiracy.

The line about absence of co-operation from some FBI and CIA people is one reason I said 'right wing intel members'. In addition to the right wing intel members who were connected to the Batista cubans, and the ones who were connected to organized crime in assassination attempts, the cover up of info about the assassination is itself part of the criminal conspiracy.

Incidentally, the next page, 259, quotes Commission counsel Burt Griffin as saying to the HS Committee that 'there was no showing that Oswald had any connection with organized crime.' Which ignores the fact that Oswald's high profile bust for distributing FPCC literature resulted in him contacting Charles Dutz Murrett for bail. Murrett was Oswald's uncle and surrogate father, and described as an associate of significant organized crime figures affiliated with the Marcello organization. So the Commission didn't bother to find out who bailed the 'lone nut commie rabble rouser' out of jail in New Orleans. And Dave Ferrie, a trainer and arms procurer for the Batista cubans Bay of Pigs invasion (a right wing intel operation), was also an investigator for Marcello's lawyer C. Wray Gill, as well as being connected to Oswald in his Civil Air Patrol.

The point isn't to cherry pick where the HSCA factually corrects the WC, it is to say that when they're talking about 'organized crime', they're talking about the mob people who were working with right wing intel. When they're talking about individual Batista Cubans, they're talking about the expatriates who were working with right wing intel people. The right wing intel people would be people like the CIA's Clay Shaw, and 'ex-FBI, ex-ONI' member Guy Bannister, the guy whose office Oswald used to pass out the FPCC pamphlets that occasioned his New Orleans bust.

Regarding Zapruder or other Dealey witnesses being part of the conspiracy, looking at the front page of DU today, I saw where dozens of right wing gun nuts turned out to a restaurant in Dallas to terrorize four women who are mothers for gun control. I'd say that shows how easy it would be to get a good number of rabid committed reactionaries to the scene in '63.

RE your last sentence, I already gave props to Eisenhower, plenty. He deserves them. But I don't agree that his counsel is the only thing that made Kennedy operate the way he did. He had plenty of smarts, talent, and heart on his own.

[Bolo Boffin]

209. "dozens of right wing gun nuts turned out to a restaurant in Dallas" - wasn't that incredible?

If there was ever a time you wish you could open a trapdoor and disappear people, those gun zealots would have been primary targets.

So what this comes down to is that we agree on an awful lot of stuff.

I did a response to Octafish somewhere on these JFK threads just recently where I talked about the non-investigation of Oswald's contacts. The Johnson administration were the first JFK conspiracy theorists, I like to say, and they really screwed up by not chasing those down. They were afraid of what they might find (Oswald support from Cuba) even though they would not have found that. And they had their own reasons for not wanting a close look at Mongoose - could anyone have believed Cuba didn't whack President Kennedy if it was revealed we were trying to do precisely that to Castro? But that doesn't mean the HSCA thought the right wing intel members had participated in the JFK assassination. They just didn't go down certain roads knowing what they would find, and that wasn't about who shot JFK, it was about who was trying to kill Castro.

When Lee Oswald shot Kennedy, he moved an awfully big rock and a lot of things went scurrying. It doesn't mean they were part of the assassination and that doesn't excuse what evil they were in the middle of doing in the name of the American people. And we don't have to convict them of the JFK assassination plot in order to properly condemn them. Restraint in accusations is a wiser policy, I think.

[Mc Mike]

239. I'd say we agree on a lot of good Democratic issues, if not the one brought up by the o.p.

The current Dallas wack a doodles should be brought up on a number of all-purpose charges, creating a disturbance \ disturbing the peace, intimidation, obstructing traffic, and conspiracy to commit \ criminal conspiracy charges.

The falseness of Oswald's 'connections' to the left was blatantly obvious, even in '63. Obvious to average citizens, obvious to media sources, obvious to politically powerful people. The assertion that people believed Castro was behind it, and so were afraid to look, is a red herring idea from the right wing birchers. Not accusing you, just saying where the idea appears to have come from, in my view.

The large number of international leaders the agency was involved with assassinating would seem more likely to make them suspects in the assassination of our national leader, rather than making it seem more likely that Castro could reach into a far-right stronghold to assassinate Kennedy out of revenge.

[YoungDemCA]

42. +1 Thank you.

Magical thinking isn't only limited to the Right.

[sabrina 1]

52. Could you expand on that comment please? 'Magical thinking'! What does that

refer to? Sorry, I'm not good at reading people's minds.

[HangOnKids]

97. I would like some clarification on that comment as well n/t

[Bolo Boffin]

55. That's an excellent article by Noam Chomsky. n/t

[ucrdem]

58. It's 21 years out of date and seriously deficient historically.

And that's about the kindest way I can put it.

[Bolo Boffin]

60. "seriously deficient historically" - feel free to back that up any time now.

And that's about the kindest way I can put that.

[ucrdem]

61. Chomsky: "Changes of Administration, including the Kennedy assassination, had no large-scale effect

on policy." Seriously? I understand that he's no historian, but that's hardly an excuse for ignorance.

[Bolo Boffin]

69. Handwaving. n/t

[YoungDemCA]

114. American foreign policy *has* been remarkalby stable over the years

The U.S federal government includes a hell of a lot more people than merely the current Administration officials. And there's incredible institutional conservatism built-in.

But you knew that.

[ucrdem]

115. Simplistic, reductive and misleading.

To believe that has anything to do with this discussion you'd have to believe that elected officials are powerless, elections don't matter, and political parties are interchangeable. I suppose it suits Chomsky's purposes to profess such stupidity but it clearly isn't true, and if it you really thought it was, why would you have any interest in partisan politics?

[Mc Mike]

19. Thanks for covering the event here.

There obviously was a clear difference in foreign policy paths chosen by JFK vs. those of the Dulles Nixon bush repug crowd. The same crowd of naysayers who find the lone nut theory so persuasive now weigh in to persuade us there is no difference between Kennedy and the repug cold warriors. Makes me wonder why the repugs were screaming charges of treason and appeasement at Kennedy before his assassination.

[Octafish]

159. The main stream media and academia have foisted the Big Lie...

...repeating that JFK was a traitor and appeaser, what LeMay said, came in all manner and loudly to proclaim the idea that it was a straight-line on foreign policy -- and today, on domestic policy -- between administrations and parties. Like Jack Anderson noted: over time, power corrupts. When a president comes along who actually puts peace and prosperity ahead of the needs of Wall Street and Murder Inc, there was a problem.

FDR fought them in 1933 and won, thanks in no small part to Gen. Smedley Butler. The American people are on to their gangster asses. Unfortunately or by design, the Democratic Party leadership no longer sees fit to do all it can to defend the New Deal, the Great Society, and the New Frontier, let alone expand on anything approaching social justice or progress.

Regarding Duquesne: Just being there was one of the most amazing events of my life: movie stars, authors, researchers, government and paralegal types, academia, librarians and other scientists and physicians, writers and hacks, one bum like me -- full of new energy. Then, I got home.

[Mc Mike]

161. Your thread last year on the assassination helped me

I lost a good friend on Thanksgiving 11 22 12, and reading and writing in your thread then helped me feel better. He was a big Kennedy Democrat, and he would have enjoyed the information, though he was never involved in online exchanges.

[hootinholler]

32. That there is, is self evident

However, getting at the what exactly is there proves problematic. Especially when powerful interests are bent on obfuscation.

Odd how some families have a much better life expectancy, eh?

[indepat]

33. Wow, a nation on a criminal path since November 22, 1963, and since the Gulf of Tonkin, a series of

wars without end for profit enabling the rich to become super-rich. Now someone please tell me this assessment is erroneous and ours is not a corporatist government.

[Playful Piranha]

35. DiEugenio's website is ctka.net

It has a wealth of info on the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations.

[WillyT]

37. K & R !!!

[YoungDemCA]

41. "JFK was never a Cold Warrior"

Uh-huh. Tell the Cubans that.

Historical revisionism is fun for some, but others of us get tired of it.

[sabrina 1]

107. Yes, there has been lots of historical revisionism going on. Now we are

beginning to get the facts finally. Apparently JFK was not a 'cold warrior'. Maybe you could provide something to back up your claims rather than these contentless opinions.

[YoungDemCA]

109. How about this...

1. His extensive and well-documented ties to McCarthy-no, not Eugene, but Joseph.

2. His campaigning on the so-called "missile gap" that didn't exist.

3. His willingness to increase by several times the number of military "advisers" in Vietnam.

4. His actions re: Cuba, his own rhetoric in Berlin, hell his own Inaugural Address.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres56.html

Also here's a helpful source re: JFK and Vietnam:

The real JFK is to be found not in the fantasies of Oliver Stone, but in the summation by biographer Thomas Reeves.

Given his belief in the global struggle between east and west, his acceptance of the domino theory, his conviction that Vietnam was the testing ground for combatting 'wars of national liberation,' his often zealous committment to counterinsurgency, and his determination to never appear soft on communism, Jack might well have been compelled, as conditions worsened, to commit more American troops to Vietnam. It is clear that his harsh public rhetoric made disengagement more difficult. And his clumsy and unprincipled acquiescence in the coup tied the United States closely to the eight military governments that briefly succeeded Diem. (A Question of Character, p. 411)

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/progjfk5.htm

[KoKo]

50. Thanks for your Continuing Reporting on This!

K&R!

[rhett o rick]

75. You are right. I deleted my post. I just find that the obsession to lock or hide posts to

be disruptive.

[Bolo Boffin]

89. And I find the obsession to break DU rules to be just as disruptive.

At the very least. But, come, let us contribute to the actual topic here.

[rhett o rick]

100. Open minded liberals recognize that little is black and white.

The problem here is the difference of opinion of what the definition of CT is. I want to point out that the CT posse only alert on CT that goes against their world view. They seem to be using the CT alert to control discussion. Not very politically liberal.

[Bolo Boffin]

102. I want you to wander through this very thread at your leisure.

I want you to notice who it is that is arguing for black and white viewpoints in regards to JFK's stance on Vietnam and who is saying it's a gray area. I want you to notice who is landing the first blows against the motives of the people arguing a different point of view. I want you to see who it is that changes the subject from the OP and who is actually trying to discuss the OP.

As an open-minded liberal, open your eyes and your mind and see what's happening here.

[rhett o rick]

106. Oh I see it. It's the conservatives that want to believe that Oswald acted alone.

They can not conceive that their holy authoritarian spy agencies would do anything but protect them.

What are the odds that a nitwit like Oswald could defeat our powerful intelligence agencies and alone kill the president? I would say very remote. Then add to that, RFK also gets assassinated but a lone gunmen with no conspiracy. Both JFK and RFK had the same enemies, very powerful enemies. Then add MLK jr. to the mix. Again the same enemies and again the naive conservatives want soooo very badly that lone gunmen without conspiracy assassinated these men.

To try to rationalize that conspiracies dont exist in politics is absurdly naive, and usually found only with the conservatives.

[YoungDemCA]

112. Yes, I'm a conservative...

You got me pegged.


Seriously, the ad hominem attacks by CT'ers are getting tiresome.

[rhett o rick]

136. IMO those that are open-minded and willing to listen to different views are usually liberals.

Those that dont want to listen or even dont want anyone to listen to different views usually are conservatives, quick to label anyone that doesnt see their side as CT crazies.

IMO the idea that these three men, enemies of the authoritarian right, were all individually assassinated by lone gunmen acting without any conspiracies, to be unbelievable. Conspiracies abound in politics especially associated with intelligence agencies. Now why do some feel the overwhelming need to shut down such discussions?

[Bolo Boffin]

113. There is nothing liberal or conservative about thinking Oswald acted alone.

Last edited Mon Nov 4, 2013, 03:52 AM - Edit history (1)

The very idea is hogwash. Black-and-white hogwash. And if you are using the JFK assassination theories as a litmus test for liberalism or conservatism, then I don't know what to say. The only person you are stunting with that attitude is yourself.

Now. Can we at long last discuss the OP instead of this Meta bullshit?

ETA: I took this test from here:

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/progressive-movement/news/2009/03/11/5709/interactive-quiz-how-progressive-are-you/

Here's my score:



I've also taken the other test that rates you on left-right and authoritarian-libertarian. Here's my graph:



So anybody that wants to make out I'm a conservative Democrat or center-right or even a conservative plant JUST BECAUSE I think Lee Oswald shot JFK all by himself? FUCK THAT NOISE.

Seriously. Take your litmus test and file it in the nearest recyclable bin. It's worthless.

[sabrina 1]

121. You are entitled to your opinion. The majority of people on the planet

who have read any history at all, disagree with you. You'll have to accept that. They are entitled to their opinion also. Frankly your opinion doesn't bother me, nor should it. What I don't get is why anyone should care so much what other people choose to believe about an historical assassination that NO ONE knows the facts about, unless they were a part of it.

It is astounding, the obsession with trying to suppress the opinions of what is a MAJORITY in this country and around the world. The more I see it the more interested I am in this topic, which is generally what happens when there is such a concerted effort to try to influence the 'thinking' of other people.

Why do you care what others are interested in or conclude about this?

[Bolo Boffin]

122. More Meta bullshit out of you.

Move on.

[HangOnKids]

123. Thanks for keeping this thread kicked

As for the "move on" comment to Sabrina, maybe you should take your own advice.

[Bolo Boffin]

124. I'm happy to keep the thread kicked, HangOnKids.

I want to discuss the OP. I'm happy to discuss the OP.

But if you will take a second and parse the actual facts on the ground, you will see sabrina 1 is responding to me. In every instance on this thread where we are "talking," she said something to me first. And I have laid down the law with her and her harassment of me: she can talk to me about the OP - which I would be happy to do with her or you or anyone - or she can move on.

So let's talk the OP. Ready? Let's go!

[HangOnKids]

125. I've read the thread

You are hilarious! But sadly my limit of clown car discussions is maxed out. Keep kicking Octa's great thread!

[Bolo Boffin]

126. Goodbye, then.

And don't respond to me again unless you're talking the OP.

[sabrina 1]

127. Ordering people around now? 'Move on'?

Another example of what I referred to in my previous comment. Thank you for that ...

[Bolo Boffin]

129. Move. On. n/t

[sabrina 1]

130. Move on to what? I have no problem with this thread so why should I

move on?

It's a very interesting thread as are most of Octafish's OPs. He certainly has gained a lot of credibility on this forum over the years.

[Bolo Boffin]

131. Then start fucking talking about the damn topic instead of harassing me!

Jesus Fucking Christ.

[sabrina 1]

133. You are harassing me. You are attempting to tell me what to do, you are

using foul language to address me with. You are attacking people throughout this thread and causing a derailment of a thread which is disruptive to the majority here who are interested in the topic.

If you don't like the thread you have several options. But you don't get to tell anyone else what to do.

Do NOT address me again with foul language and authoritarian commands. If you want to speak to me do it civilly, which would be in accordance with community standards. If you don't, ignore my comments. I don't whine about people addressing me if I respond to them. That is your choice. This conversation would have ended at the first comment if YOU had not decided to keep it going. Take responsibility for your own actions and stop blaming everyone else.

And stop attacking me with personal insults! THAT is harassment.

[Bolo Boffin]

149. In EVERY instance where we are having a "talk" on this thread

YOU have started in on ME.

MOVE. ON.

[rhett o rick]

139. Not what I said at all. I said conservatives want to believe that Oswald acted alone.

I believe that to be true. Conservatives tend to blindly trust their authoritarian leaders. Liberals tend to be open-minded and willing to listen to different perspectives.

It's my opinion that an open-minded person would have a hard time buying the "there are no conspiracies involved in either the JFK assassination, the RFK assassination, or the MLK jr. assassination" meme. That doesnt mean they are CT crazies as some seem to think is so important to label. Now there is your ad hominem attacks.

[stopbush]

147. Most conservatives I know are gleeful that Ds buy into the JFK Cts.

Last edited Mon Nov 4, 2013, 04:43 PM - Edit history (1)

It feeds their "we can't trust the government" meme. But it's worse than that, because the JFK CTs at their core propose that a sitting Democratic President was murdered by a government that was in large part populated at its highest levels by JFK's fellow Dems.

BTW - no one trying to rationalize or deny that conspiracies exist. No one is disputing that Lincoln or Sadat died at the hands of a conspiracy. That's what the evidence shows. What people are disputing are the evidence-free fantasies of the CTists in the case of JFK's murder. There's a difference, you know.

[zappaman]

148. You win the thread.

[sabrina 1]

166. You don't win a thread by being so spectacularly wrong.

Right Wingers WANT the world to believe that the 'commie did it alone'. That the commies/democrats are so evil they even killed a 'commie' president.

You haven't argued with Right Wingers over this it seems. NO ONE wants the world to believe that a 'leftie, pinko, commie' killed a US President.

I'm laughing thinking of the years I spent on arguing with Right Wingers and THIS was one of their favorite things to insult Dems with 'you pinko commies are so unpatriotic you even killed one of your own'.

Too funny, there is no logic to this claim. If I were a Right Winger I would want to believe that a 'Leftie' killed a US President for what should be obvious reasons.

[zappaman]

167. "Right Wingers WANT the world to believe that the 'commie did it alone'."

The facts/evidence point to that conclusion that Oswald did indeed do it alone, not the "wants" of the RW.

Do RWers wonder if Oswald was a hero...?

"As for Oswald, I don't know if he was a hero in all this or not."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2232672

[sabrina 1]

168. I'm sure there are some Right Wingers, in fact I know THERE are

some who would view anyone who murdered a Dem President as a hero. But those people are sick and thankfully pretty rare.

The facts point to nothing of the kind. There are no facts regarding the JFK assassination, unlike the Lincoln assassination. THAT is a fact and that is why so many years later so many people do not believe the official story.

And that is their right. When questions remain, when witnesses, such as the ER Doctor are ignored, as long as there are huge holes in a story, people with the ability to think will continue to question things.

Right Wingers otoh, push the 'commie did it alone' theory and would continue to do so even if clear evidence surfaced that this was not the case.

I have no idea what happened that day. I wasn't there but I know that both Robert Kennedy and Jackie did not agree with the Right Wing that it was Oswald alone who did it. And they WERE there so I'm leaning towards those two people's opinons over the opinions of all the right wingers I have encountered who also try to intimidate people who agree with Jackie and Robert Kennedy by calling them CTs.

Thankfully I have never been easily intimidated and will continue to support those who want everything, all documents, related to that murder, released RIGHT NOW. There is no reason on earth to keep anything regarding that terrible tragedy, 'classified', unless of course there is something to hide.

[Octafish]

156. Most Democrats I know are furious the perpetrators have not been brought to justice.

Because most Democrats I know believe a conspiracy was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and that of his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

As for the conservatives and their opinions impacting you stopbush: They're wrong on politics and they're wrong on Dallas.

[stopbush]

176. The perpetrator (singular) in the JFK case was Oswald. Case closed. The evidence is overwhelming.

In the case of RFK - well, Sirhan has been in jail forever, but I will admit that there could have been others involved.

In the case of Dr King, Ray's MO looks to be that of a hired gun. The HSCA felt there might have been a small-scale conspiracy involved, but i tend not to trust their judgement as they fell hook, line and sinker for that bogus Dictabelt "evidence" in the JFK case. With hindsight, the HSCA seemed to have conspiracy-on-the-brain syndrome.

[rhett o rick]

157. I doubt that they are gleeful. You are making a false equivalency when

you try to compare conservatives hate for government with liberals that may not trust the government. First of all conservatives hate the part of government that helps people but dont hate the intelligence agencies. Liberals are apt to be more skeptical of intelligence agencies.

I dont push any particular conspiracy theory re. JFK, I just think that the odds of Oswald acting alone are remote. I bet at the time of JFK's assassination there were two or three groups conspiring to kill the president. I bet there are some today. Maybe al Qaeda, maybe the Koch Bros., maybe the KKK, maybe the Russians.

Then when you add the RFK and MLK jr. assassinations to the mix, and try to claim their were not conspiracies in any of the assassinations, I say the odds are astronomical.

Do you trust the government in all aspects? Did you when Bush was president?

[stopbush]

175. I'm not claiming there were "not conspiracies in any of the assassinations." Just in JFK's case.

Last edited Tue Nov 5, 2013, 01:55 PM - Edit history (1)

A much sounder claim for conspiracy can be made in both the RFK & King assassinations. In RFK's case, the forensic evidence of bullets sprayed about the room seem to indicate more than one shooter. In King's case, the assassin James Earl Ray had an MO much closer to what one would expect from a hired gun, including a weapon one would expect (as opposed to the cheap rifle used by Oswald) and the fact that he was able to go on the lam and evade law enforcement for an extended period.

Your thought that there may be groups around today conspiring to kill the president may well be true. The point is that conspiring and pulling it off are two different things. It's a huge and unfounded leap of faith to believe that just because the mob/Cubans/Russians wanted JFK dead that they were the ones that pulled it off.

And it's not a mater of trusting government. It's a matter of believing evidence. No one in the past 50 years has produced a shred of real evidence to prove a conspiracy in the JFK case. Quite the contrary.

BTW - you do know, do you not, that the Warren Commission investigated every conspiracy theory that was current at the time, and even though they found all of them unfounded, they still stipulated in their report that their findings did not preclude evidence coming forth at a later date that would prove a conspiracy. 99.999% of JFK CT nuts don't know that, don't want others to know it and will never admit it.

[sabrina 1]

162. You couldn't be more wrong. It drives Right Wingers insane when

people do NOT accept the official story because they believe that means people believe that a Dem President may have been murdered by a Right Winger. Right Wingers PUSH the 'the commie did it' and it should be obvious why this is the reason Right Wingers push the CT that Oswald, a Commie, acted alone.

I don't know where you get the idea that it is beneficial to Right Wingers to think that maybe this was not a 'leftie' murder.

That is a hysterical and I have to give you credit, new theory. You must never have had argued with Right Wingers if that is what you believe.

[sabrina 1]

118. It is, very disruptive and costing DU many members who are sick of it also.

[SidDithers]

72. I'm surprised you didn't whine about the alert in ATA...

Post the text of the alert, if you think it was unjustified, or if you think it was rude.

Edit: and putting JFK assassination conspiracy threads in Creative Speculation isn't censorship, it's housekeeping.

Your post is a perfect example of why I believe the Hosting system in GD is completely dysfunctional.

Sid

[Octafish]

77. So what did I post that isn't true?

James DiEugenio sourced his information, largely crediting Richard D. Mahoney for opening his eyes to JFK's democratic foreign policies.



Does discussion of President Kennedy's foreign policy bother you?

I'd think you would want DUers to discover important information about a president who believed in democracy for people in other countries.

[rhett o rick]

80. So you call it "housekeeping"? And you consider yourself the Housekeeper?

And when others disagree, you want them locked or hidden. And if juries or hosts dont agree, then you rationalize that you get to disparage them.

I dont disagree that Creative Speculation should be limited to CS. Where I disagree with you is with your definition of Creative Speculation.

I also disagree with your tenancy to only alert on CT that doesnt conform to your world view.

I recognize that my post #51 was inappropriate and have deleted it. I also recognize that I should be ignoring you.

[SidDithers]

87. Whatever...

Sid

[sabrina 1]

132. I think the hosts of GD do a fantastic job. Just because

you don't get to censor everything you don't like, mostly that appears to be what interests Democrats in the US, doesn't mean the HOSTS are wrong.

Why do you still come to DU if disapprove of it so much? Here's something for you to consider, this is a Left/Liberal forum and so long as it continues to advertise itself that way it will attract Left/Liberal members.

I think this is a great forum for Left/Liberal/Democratic citizens of this country.

Do you have any similar forums in Canada?

[SidDithers]

134. Oh, it's you again...

Well, I feel differently. I don't think the Hosts do a fantastic job. I think the Hosts are paralyzed by committee, and consequently fail to make any decision in the majority of cases.

I also think that the many Hosts have a giant fucking blind spot where conspiracy theories and CT and woo websites are concerned, and consistently ignore the "no conspiracy theories" part of the GD SOP. Here, I'll re-quote it for you, since you seem to be unfamiliar with it.

Discuss politics, issues, and current events. No posts about Israel/Palestine, religion, guns, showbiz, or sports unless there is really big news. No conspiracy theories. No whining about DU."

"Who shot JFK?" is the mother of all conspiracy theories.

Have you ever been a Host, sabrina? If not, then you're not really speaking with an informed opinion of how Hosting decisions are made.


Lastly, there are hundreds of international DUers who post here. You know exactly what you can do with your xenophobia.

Sid

[sabrina 1]

137. Here let me help you so you understand the hosts' decision here.

JFK was murdered, that is not a conspiracy theory.

Here in the US this month all over the country, there are documentaries being shown, memorials being held, conferences to discuss this now 50 year old historical tragedy, the murder of a Democratic President. And the reason is because it is REAL, and because a majority of Americans do not believe the official story, they never have. And there is no way anyone can stop them from discussing it, believing whatever they want to believe, attending Conferences, watching documentaries no matter how hard they try.

The Conference Octafish attended and reported on is REAL, it is not a CT and it was attended by some pretty CREDIBLE people, far more credible than anyone who is desperately trying to prevent people who could not attend themselves, from learning about it.

This will be a long month for those who try so hard to shut down discussion of this REAL HISTORICAL event and frankly people, a majority are sick to death of the attempt to shut them up. Just plain sick of it!

And yes, there are many wonderful members here from other countries. They are respectful and SUPPORTIVE of Americans struggle to gain eg, what THEIR countries have. They do not have the gall to tell us who live here, who have family members and/or friends who have DIED for lack of HC, that they are simply whining!

You have no CLUE how angry people get here when a family member or friend dies simply because they could not afford treatment.

Considering the FACTS I just laid out for you, the hosts in GD are doing a fabulous job.

Odd that DU manages to be one of the most popular political forums on the internet, even though it is not run the way YOU want.

Maybe the Admins know a little more than you do about how a forum that advertises itself as a Liberal/Democratic forum should be run?

[SidDithers]

138. tl:dr...

and not terribly interested in your opinion anyway.

Sid

[sabrina 1]

140. Didn't expect YOU to be. But I'm happy to know that a majority

of DU Dems ARE, as I am in theirs.

[H2O Man]

78. "Cold Warrior"

Perhaps the single largest success of JFK's thousand Days was the showdown in the waters surrounding Cuba. The Cold Warriors demanded war, despite the fact that it risked millions of deaths -- including in the USA.

If one considers the two US Presidents, both before and after JFK, the is little doubt they would have opted for military aggression. Now, that includes two Democrats, as well as Republicans. And those four are the best comparisons of other politicians of that era, to allow us to consider the proper context of those events.

JFK, with the help of RFK, found another way. And those events, rooted entirely in the thinking and values of President Kennedy, are the most accurate measure of if he was or was not a "Cold Warrior."

As always, your OP attracts inaccurate attacks, much like fly paper attracts flies.

Recommended.

[Octafish]

95. Thank you, H2O Man.

The message your Father conveyed regarding the short interlude the Kennedy Administration represents from those those around it made clear for me the definition of Democracy -- the awareness that each person deserves more than equal justice under law: each human life is of infinite value.

[H2O Man]

104. One of the things

that I've enjoyed the most in my years on this forum is how you appreciated the accuracy of what my Dad said to me years ago about JFK's presidency. The longer I live and learn, the more I understand how absolutely on target he was with that one. Of course, he had the advantage of living in a different time than you and I, so he -- and the extended Clan -- had a unique view of what John Kennedy was attempting to accomplish. My grandfather had come from Ireland as a youth, in 1879, and my father was raised by a family of men and women who did not accept being considered second-class citizens. Much like the Kennedy family, they understood both the nature of freedom and democracy, and the nature of those seeking to oppress the masses.

Dallas didn't surprise my father at all. Upset him, for sure. Same with RFK. But I'd have to say that the one thing that really surprised him was that Nixon was elected in '68, and re-elected in '72. Even with the Watergate hearings, trials, and Nixon's resignation, he knew that the cancer hadn't been removed from the system.

We are still dealing with the consequences of those dark things.

[Zen Democrat]

81. Everyone should read "JFK and the Unspeakable" by Jim Douglass to clear up the Cold Warrior thing.

Douglass is a Catholic Worker and peace activist who tells the story from WWII to November 22nd. If you still try to excuse the Warren Report, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

There are lots of good books about various aspects of JFK's presidency and assassination, but this one is unique. In my opinion, people who haven't read it are in the dark.

[deutsey]

128. I found it to be very well documented, as well.

[stopbush]

152. Yeah, I've read it, I'm not in the dark, and it's a mess.

JFK comes off as a sniveling, easily manipulated naif, whose every hawkish public pronouncement is treated by Douglass as "not what he really felt." To Douglass, the man who faced down Kruschev in Cuba, the man who was ready to go to the mat of war with the USSR was a man who didn't have the guts to say what he really thought in public. He was man easily manipulated by the powerful who surrounded him.

Typical CTist tactic of twisting a person's plain words into something else to comport with their CT narrative. Worse, Douglass views the entire JFK legacy through his own peacenik-colored glasses. Hardly an unbiased look at the FACTS in the case.

A useful deconstruction of Douglass' book may be found here: http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2009/12/unspeakably-awful.html, in which the author observes, Douglass’s key villain—the “Unspeakable” of his title—turns out to be the same kind of opaque nemesis that Oliver Stone is fond of conjuring up. The best identification Douglass can offer is “shadowy intelligence agencies using intermediaries and scapegoats under the cover of ‘plausible deniability,’” and even more vaguely, “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.” How convenient: a culprit who is indescribable. In essence, though, Douglass’s evil-doer is indistinguishable from that bogeyman of vulgar, atheistic, and leftist radicals from the ‘60s: the “military-industrial complex,” except that he adds to the stew the Central Intelligence Agency.

[bobthedrummer]

86. Warren Commission Member John J. McCloy certainly helped to change/shape policies pre/post 11-23-63.

Here are a sampling of links from all kinds of sources-for those that love the truth. K+R

John J. McCloy Wikipedia page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._McCloy

Federation of American Scientists Kennedy administration docs on Weapons Reduction, etc.
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/jfk

George H.W. Bush remarks on McCloy's passing
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16822#axzz2jcMGHDui

American Council on Germany McCloy bio
http://www.acgusa.org/index.php?section=bio-mccloy

Spatacus Schoolnet entry
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmccloyJ.htm

Of course there are some posters in this thread that don't care for the truth at all and never will.

[Bolo Boffin]

153. McCloy was against the Diem coup

[Octafish]

186. McCloy and Dulles have important NAZI links that are largely forgotten.

A fact curiously missing from American history and any mention of the Warren Commission

Two of its members were directly responsible for the rise of post-war fascism. Allen Dulles, as a top official of the OSS and CIA, incorporated NAZI war criminals into the CIA from its founding. John McCloy, as High Commissioner for Germany, allowed Klaus Barbie and who-knows-who-else to escape justice. Of course, both men were also barons of Wall Street and Beltway Insiders. We all can see what that means today.

[bobthedrummer]

188. Some of US will never forget that simple fact, will we, despite what the perception managers peddle.

I wonder how many in this thread know that E. Howard Hunt became a personal assistant to Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs fiasco?
How many know that Hunt was the founder of the CIA's Mexico station? Of course Hunt was an OSS alumnus (Far East), a disinfo master and a lot of other things including a Watergate perp.

E. Howard Hunt Wikipedia page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt

E. Howard Hunt Spartacus Schoolnet entry
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKhuntH.htm

Scavenger Hunt
E. Howard Hunt interview by Ann Louise Bardach (Slate 10-5-04)
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2004/10/scavenger_hunt.html

[avaistheone1]

192. Didn't know that about Hunt.

Didn't realize that Hunt was that high in the organization and had such an intimate relationship with Dulles.
I am going to read your links tomorrow. It's late here now...

I appreciate the info.

[Oilwellian]

91. Advancing the interests of Big Money, Big Oil and Big Wars for Profit.

Indeed.

K&R

[avaistheone1]

155. Octafish, thanks for the report on James DiEugenio's presentation.

That was the President Kennedy I remember.

k&r

[MinM]

171. Jim Garrison, Larry King, and RFK

Jim DiEugenio has some good stuff here and elsewhere at that forum. Also of course at his own site.

[MinM]

197. Jim DiEugenio podcast (11/07/13)

# Show #654
Original airdate: November 7, 2013
Guest: Jim DiEugenio

# Pittsburgh, the Who's Who of the research community
# I wish it would have lasted a week, my idea of paradise
# John McAdams, Lisa Pease, Jim DiEugenio and Time magazine
# Three days and the writer keyed the whole thing around this professor
# 448 JFK researchers and two people, McAdams and Holland
# (The article, your National Security State tax dollars at work)
# David Talbot's article on books by Philip Shenon and Howard Willens
# Spector proposed the single bullet theory to Warren at the TSBD
# Warren pivoted, said nothing and left the building
# David Slawson was thinking of writing about reopening the case
# James Angleton called him and warned him
# CIA Chief of Counter Intelligence, liaison to the Warren Commission
# CTKA, Larry King interview on Jim Garrison and RFK
# Oliver Stone interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now
# Untold History of the United States DVDs
# Limited theater re-release of JFK starting November 8th
# Jim will speak twice at the Lancer conference in Dallas,
# on JFK's foreign policy and on the HSCA
# Jim recommends that listeners please go to one of these
# Another occasion like this is not seen in the near future
# Over 30 speakers over four days, November 21-24
# Barry Ernest, Pamela Brown, Jeff Morley, Rollie Zavada,
# Don Thomas, William Law, Ed Tatro, Jim Marrs, Larry Hancock,
# Russ Baker, Rex Bradford, Dave Mantik, Joan Mellen,
# Dick Russell, Pat Speer, Tink Thompson, others
# COPA speakers Cyril Wecht, Walt Brown,
# Bob Groden, Ernst Titovets, Bill Kelly,
# Bill Simpich, John Judge, Joe McBride, others
# There could be fireworks, it should be very exciting
# Dallas meet and greet luncheon with a Q & A roundtable
# November 23, 12:30 - 5:00 pm, maximum of 35 people, $30.00
# Where's Bugliosi? Where's Posner?
# Many who applied for tickets to Dealey Plaza did not get in
# Thank you to all the contributors to 50 Reasons for 50 Years
# No duplication, 50 different reasons, #44 with Dan Hardway
# John Kelin article, he wrote Praise from a Future Generation (2007)
# A coming article by Jim on Tony Summers and Patricia Lambert
# An article by Jim on Dave Reitzes and Michael Shermer
# Conspiracy (Summers 1980) is on Jim's Top Ten JFK Books list
# Listener questions, significance of the Clinton, Louisiana trip?
# Two hamlets, Clinton and Jackson, a very rural area
# Four separate events, presented to Oswald as a surveillance mission
# A Cuban exile training camp at Marydale Farms run by Lloyd Cobb
# Shaw tried to get his application into the East Louisiana State Hospital
# They were going to try to show that he was a patient up there
# Oswald and the Coke machine?, a famous incident, Officer Marrion Baker
# Marrion Baker's first day affidavit states, "third or fourth floor"
# That was manufactured, because Oswald wasn't really on the second floor
# Interesting pictures, looks like Oswald and Frazier on the TSBD steps
# E-mail Len at [e-mail] with questions for HSCA investigators

http://www.blackopradio.com/pod/black654a.mp3

http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2013.html

[robertpaulsen]

183. Great report, Octafish! I wish I could have been there. CTKA rocks!

I think your research showing how DU has sourced DiEugenio without realizing who he is and what a thorough researcher he is is testimony to what you're saying: the message is what's really important. But I think it's also important to acknowledge and give proper credit and I'm glad you're giving James DiEugenio the exposure he deserves here. I've got his site bookmarked and I always check in on a weekly basis to see what's new.

While regrettably I was unable to attend the Duquesne conference, I've been reading some books to expand my own research on the subject. Have you read A Farewell to Justice by Joan Mellen? I'm about 84 pages into this thoroughly documented (literally 130 pages of thousands of endnotes from interviews, government documents and other sources) account of Jim Garrison and his investigation into the assassination of JFK. I was immediately wowed on page 2 by this account that I had heard rumors of in the past regarding Warren Commission member, Congressman Hale Boggs:

At the end of March, Jim Garrison found himself in Washington, D.C., in the company of Louisiana congressman Hale Boggs, who had been a member of the Warren Commission. Garrison expressed his doubts. Boggs then confided to Garrison that during a closed January 22, 1964 session of the Commission, Oswald's FBI number and FBI wages had been examined. "I would hope none of these records are circulated to anybody," Boggs had told Earl Warren and the former CIA director fired by John F. Kennedy, Allen Dulles.

Then he revealed what had been said to Jim Garrison. From his own experiences as a hunter alone, Boggs believed, one man could not have fired those shots. Boggs told Garrison that no notes, no transcription had been made of the hours of interrogation of Oswald by the Dallas police, which also claimed to have no record of the calls received and made by Oswald while he was in custody.

It was Hale Boggs who nurtured Jim Garrison's doubts about the Warren Report and encouraged his investigation. Later, Jim Garrison would insist that it was Senator Russell Long who had motivated him to investigate the Kennedy assassination, but it wasn't so. That Garrison was guilty of saying too much to the press would be another myth perpetrated by his detractors. To the day of his death, he protected Hale Boggs' role in inspiring his investigation into the murder of John F. Kennedy.

So much for Cokie Roberts' claim that Boggs thought everything was hunky-dory with the Warren Report. It made me wonder about his strange disappearance/death with his Alaska flight in 1972. I found this story that I hadn't read previously quite fascinating:

New Details Uncovered in 1972 Disappearance of Congressman Hale Boggs
By Jonathan Walczak Wed., Oct 17 2012 at 12:00AM



Forty years ago yesterday, Hale Boggs, a powerful Democratic congressman with a colorful past, disappeared in a small plane over Alaska. The massive search that ensued turned up no leads, and the plane, along with the bodies of Boggs and three others who died, remains hidden somewhere in the wilderness.

Boggs -- who served on the Warren Commission, accused the FBI of tapping congressional phones, and called for J. Edgar Hoover's resignation -- was the majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Seattle and the rest of the country were captivated as the government sent out dozens of planes and ships to find him, but search efforts failed. In the years that followed, conspiracy theories flourished, in part because of his connections to the Kennedy assassination and the FBI, and in part because no trace of the plane ever surfaced.

To mark the anniversary of Boggs' disappearance, Seattle Weekly made Freedom of Information requests to eight government agencies and reviewed more than 1,500 pages of documents. While none of the records get us closer to knowing why and where Boggs' plane went down, they do paint a fuller picture of the his life before the crash - including an incident in which he was run off the road by an unknown driver in Washington, D.C., in 1970 - and unveil possible ties between the Nixon White House and an anonymous tipster who claimed to know where Boggs' plane crashed.

Among the findings:

- Amid hundreds of pages in Boggs' FBI file is a single sheet of information that has apparently never been reported. Around 11:30 p.m. on July 23, 1970, two years before he disappeared, Boggs was driving in Washington, D.C., when a late model Lincoln Continental forced him off the road. He gave chase and was able to take down a license plate number. No additional information is available in the file, and the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, which investigated the incident, told the Weekly that it could not locate any relevant records.

- Immediately after Boggs disappeared, the U.S. Coast Guard station in Long Beach, Calif., received a call from an individual who claimed to know where the plane crashed. The tipster said he had access to experimental electronic equipment, and he provided detailed directions to the wreck. The FBI apparently found him credible, with one agent, whose name is redacted, stating his opinion that the "source of aforementioned information is reliable."

Though this tip has previously been reported, the Weekly uncovered new details on the tipster, who is described as a "white male, about thirty five, six foot three inches, two hundred and fifteen pounds, hair black, who apparently has injured left arm." He also appears to have served in the military.

But the most interesting piece of information is the tipster's phone number, which was not redacted in the FBI file. The number, 378-5243, was provided by the Long Beach Coast Guard station. Since no area code was specified, the tipster presumably had the same one as the station, "213."

A hunt for information on the number [phone] turns up a solitary reference in an obscure congressional document from 1974. In that record, a report on a congressional hearing that examined the possibility of amending the Constitution to protect unborn children, the number is listed as belonging to Right to Life, an anti-abortion group founded in 1969. Right to Life, which claimed to be America's first pro-life organization, provided an address in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif.

Interestingly enough, one of the 12 founders of Right to Life was James Francis McIntyre, the Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles from 1948-70, who knew President Richard Nixon.

Seattle Weekly was unable to track down an old phone book to determine whether the organization had the same number in 1972, when Boggs disappeared, as it did in 1974, when it surfaced in the congressional report.

But if the number was the same, why would someone associated with an pro-life organization, founded in part by a powerful bishop connected to President Nixon, claim to have inside knowledge on the disappearance on an influential Democratic congressman?

The FBI file shows that agents who interviewed the tipster were advised "that should [they] believe [redacted] are involved in a covert type operation, then it should be suggested to them that if they doubted the seriousness of the matter they should contact their 'principals' for further advice." Essentially, the FBI directed its agents to evaluate whether they thought the source was a spy. Once interviewed, the tipster, according to the report, "appeared rational, extremely intelligent, but somewhat strange." The FBI file sheds no additional light on his identity.

- In the days that followed Boggs' disappearance, several independent ham radio operators in Northern California said they spoke with or heard a transmission from someone on the plane after it crashed, who told them that there were survivors.

- The day after Boggs vanished, according to the FBI file, a search plane picked up a signal "believed to be that of a crash locator beacon for approximately 40 minutes some distance from Juneau, however, search planes were unable to pinpoint the source of the signal."

In addition to Boggs (whose daughter is journalist Cokie Roberts), three others disappeared: Nick Begich, the father of current U.S. Sen. Mark Begich; Russell Brown, an aide to Begich; and Don Jonz, the plane's pilot.

Four decades after the plane vanished, plenty of questions remain: Did the mysterious tipster have accurate information on the crash? Did the ham radio operators really talk with survivors? Who ran Boggs off the road in 1970?

For now, the wreck remains untouched somewhere in the Alaskan wilds.

Pretty bizarre! Since this is from over a year ago, Octafish, I was wondering if you've found any other information on the subject. Thanks again, you know I love all that you do here!

[Octafish]

199. Thank you for the heads-up, robertpaulsen! Boggs had his doubts...

"Over the postwar years, we have granted to the elite and secret police within our system vast new powers over the lives and liberties of the people. At the request of the trusted and respected heads of those forces, and their appeal to the necessities of national security, we have exempted those grants of power from due accounting and strict surveillance."
--House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, in a speech before Congress, April 22, 1971

&quot FBI Director J. Edgar) Hoover lied his eyes out to the (Warren) Commission -- on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it."
--Hale Boggs, speaking to an aide, quoted by Bernard Fensterwald, Coincidence or Conspiracy?

It is a myth that the Warren Commission was united in its conclusion that a lone assassin killed President John F. Kennedy. On the seven member Warren Commission, there were three dissenters: Senator Sherman Cooper, Senator Richard Russell, and Congressman Hale Boggs. As journalist Jim Marrs points out, "The most vocal critic among Commission members (was Hale Boggs). Boggs became frustrated with the panel's total reliance on the FBI for information. Speaking of the 'single-bullet theory,' Boggs once commented, 'I had strong doubts about it.' On April 1, 1971, House Majority Leader Boggs delivered a blistering attack on (FBI Director) J. Edgar Hoover, charging that under his directorship the FBI had adopted 'the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo.' Boggs, who undoubtedly would have become Speaker of the House and a powerful ally in any reopening of the JFK assassination investigation, vanished on October 16, 1972, while on a military junket flight in Alaska. Despite a massive search, no trace of the airplane or of Boggs has ever been found."

"Several years after (Hale Bogg's) death in 1972, a colleague of his wife Lindy (who was elected to fill her late husband's seat in the Congress) recalled Mrs. Boggs remarking, 'Hale felt very, very torn during his work (on the Commission) ... he wished he had never been on it and wished he'd never signed it (the Warren Report).'"
--Bernard Fensterwald, Coincidence or Conspiracy?

http://haleboggs.tripod.com/index.htm

via Peter Lemkin

[Octafish]

200. Joan Mellen is a national treasure...

How the Failure To Identify, Prosecute and Convict President Kennedy's Assassins Has Led To Today's Crisis Of Democracy

BY JOAN MELLEN
January 24, 2006
Lecture Delivered at the Ethical Culture Society, New York City

Hear this Speech: http://nysoundposse.com/2006/01/event-who-planned-murder-of-jfk-who.html

The last time I was in this room was for the memorial service of a distinguished American author, J. Anthony Lukas, who wrote “Common Ground,” about race and class in Boston. During the course of his career, Tony came into conflict with an institution that I will discuss this evening, “The New York Times.”

“A Farewell To Justice” is about the Kennedy assassination. It opens as a biography of Jim Garrison, district attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, who remains the only public official ever to have brought anyone before the bar of justice for participation in the conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. Garrison assumed that role when he discovered that the person framed for the crime, a low-level intelligence agent named Lee Harvey Oswald, resided in his jurisdiction between April and September of 1963. The Biblical metaphor is inevitable: that great harlot city New Orleans, destroyed by flood, with, among its many sins, incubating the Kennedy assassination.

After his suspect Clay Shaw was acquitted, Shaw the man whom the new evidence reveals was a CIA operative guilty of participating in the implementation of the murder of President Kennedy, Garrison was asked how he imagined that he could convict someone of conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy in a Louisiana state court. Garrison said: “I guess I thought I was living in the country I was born in.” He wasn't and we aren't.

I would like to suggest that the truth about the Kennedy assassination, far from being a matter of interest only to historians, and not even to most of them, will help us understand how we have arrived at a point where people as respectable as New York attorney Martin Garbus are comparing the current U.S. government with the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century. It's my belief that the present state of our political culture is a direct result of the fact that those responsible for the murder of President Kennedy have never been brought to justice.


To sum up: “A Farewell To Justice” suggests that the clandestine service of the CIA not only covered up the truth about the Kennedy assassination - that's easy to demonstrate from the four million documents now residing at the National Archives - but organized the event itself. That the CIA escaped without penalty, this extraordinary fact, has been integrated over these forty-two years into the body politic. It has produced a political culture where the unthinkable has become accepted practice. Meaningful freedom of the press has fallen into serious jeopardy.

For a flagrant example of what we have come to, we might revisit the scantily reported exchange on December 1st (2005) between Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel and John Yoo, a former deputy assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft, a participant in the writing of the Patriot Act, and now a Berkeley law professor.

The subject of the debate was the illegal expansion of presidential powers.

Professor Cassel asks, “If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?” And Yoo answers, “No treaty.”

Cassel follows up: “Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.” And Yoo replies, “I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.”

If Professor Cassel's hypothetical question seems melodramatic, we have Martin Garbus, alarmed by the twin expansion of Presidential and police powers, writing in the “New York Observer”: “This country is approaching a dangerous turning point,” and suggesting that the United States today bears some similarities to Weimar Germany where liberal democracy was not able to contend with the fascist onslaught.

In Miami a few weeks ago I was struck by the omnipresence, on the streets and restaurants, of police officers from a variety of law enforcement agencies. Famously, Benjamin Franklin replied to a question of whether this new land should be a monarchy or a republic with the line, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

What begins as surveillance moves to wiretapping, then COINTELPRO tricks, and finally to murder - a diagram of what happened to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and why the illegal NSA surveillance is so alarming.

We have not been aided in understanding the meaning of the Kennedy assassination by the continued public silence of those closest to President Kennedy. One day I requested of Wilmer Thomas, one of Jim Garrison's law school classmates (Tulane School of Law, Class of 1949) to ask his acquaintance, Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whom he believed was behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Professor Schlesinger observed, quietly, “We were at war with the National Security people.”

That the CIA at its highest levels exacted its revenge on President Kennedy has been an open secret since 1963. A Gallup poll on the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in 2003 found that twice as many people believed that the CIA was implicated in the assassination as there were who accepted the official fiction that Oswald had acted alone.

In 1963, people were already worried abut the CIA's extraordinary use of its powers. In the “New York Times,” Arthur Krock wrote in October 1963 that if ever there would be a coup in the United States, it “would come from the CIA and not the Pentagon.” The CIA, Krock wrote, was a “malignancy” on the body politic. It is difficult to imagine such words being printed in the “Times” today, so profoundly has our freedom of the press eroded since the time of the Kennedy assassination.

After the death of President Kennedy, ex-President Harry S. Truman, under whose watch the CIA was created in 1947, wrote on the front page of the “Washington Post,” that the CIA had been running a “shadow government,” becoming “operational.” Brazenly, Allen Dulles at one point even told a reporter to think of the CIA as “the State Department for unfriendly countries.” The CIA's policy-making also involved interference in the electoral process in Italy and France, funneling money to certain political parties - in Italy it was the Christian Democrats whom the CIA funded in an effort to prevent a coalition of socialists and Communists from taking power. The assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was connected to that CIA campaign.

At the time of the assassination, Charles de Gaulle remarked that John F. Kennedy, whom he admired, had died as a result of an intra-government conflict, a situation not uncommon in many countries. The documentation available since the passage of the JFK Act in 1992 overwhelmingly supports de Gaulle's view.

The rubber-stamping of the Warren Report by the press in 1964 seems to mark the moment when the mainstream press became “embedded” in official versions of events. Traces of that process have surfaced. In April 1967 the CIA issued a memo (available at the National Archives) instructing friendly reporters on how to reply to challenges to the Warren Report, recommendations that have resurfaced in the past few years in a renewed set of attacks on Jim Garrison, a decade after his death.

So it should come as no surprise that the “New York Times” for a year covered up the National Security Agency domestic surveillance of citizens with rubber-stamped search warrants issued under a “Foreign Intelligence Services Act” (FISA) run by the Pentagon, or with no warrants at all. Only when their own reporter was about to publish a book detailing the evidence did the “Times” run that story. It should be horrifying that the Congressional debate about the Patriot Act has not been over whether there should be such a government capability, but how long it should be extended.

CONTINUED...

http://www.joanmellen.net/NYC_2006article.html


PS: Farewell to Justice is outstanding. I heard Dr. Mellen speak at Duquesne. I hope to report on her presentation soon.

[Octafish]

201. James Douglass was in town...

...He spoke at Oakland Community College, part of the JFK Speaker Series. Later the same evening, a group performed a staged reading of "Noah's Ark," a one-act play by Ginny Cunningham based on Douglass' "JFK and the Unspeakable. Another speaker was Dr. Cyril Wecht, whom I heard at Duquesne in October. There was near-zero publicity on the outstanding program here in Detroit. I heard about the OCC series at Duquesne. I will try to report on the remarkable experience.

[robertpaulsen]

205. Keep up the great reporting! Was Josiah Thompson there?

Recently, through sheer dumb luck, I happened to wander into a local used book store to find a first edition hardcover of Six Seconds in Dallas. $25, which I think is worth five times as much. Maybe someday if he's out here in California I'll get his autograph on it.

[Octafish]

206. Dr. Thompson was at Duquesne Conference...

...He spoke after Dr. Larry Sabato. Dr. Thompson formally about "One Second in Dallas" when President Kennedy may have been struck by two bullets. This is from memory (I promise to report more fully when I have time to replay his presentation and add to my notes):

Dr. Thompson reported on an error from his earlier research that had made him believe the President was struck in the back of the head just a fraction of a second before a bullet struck him from the front. The mistake came from measurements made of slight changes in position between two frames of the Zapruder film.

The mistake resulted from properties in the film that were not taken into account -- specifically how film registers bright light sources and less intense sources. This property means moving objects don't register equally on the film, introducing errors that turned up when measuring distance between points appearing on different frames. These discrepancies were greater than what the film could accurately record.

He and an associate, Keith Fitzgerald, reported how taking these inaccuracies in measurement into account removed the problems in timing that had been noticed when the Zapruder film timeline was overlayed on the sounds recorded on the Dictabelt timeline.

The audio and video record now match up precisely with an analysis that shows the president was still hit by two bullets that they report were separated by about 1/2 second -- not the tiny fraction of a second from the mistaken photo analysis. My hair stood on end when Robert J. Groden spoke a little later and reported how new analyses of the Zapruder film had revealed the president may have been struck twice in that 1/2 second.

[robertpaulsen]

207. That is making MY hair stand on end!

One part of Thompson's book that I believe has stood the test of time (46 years) that doesn't get as much coverage is how he disproved that there was a missed shot. Most people think that James Tague was hit by a missed shot. Josiah Thompson goes into some detail in that book regarding how test analysis proved it was a bullet fragment that hit the curb. In other words, the bullet that hit the curb hit something else before striking the pavement that nicked Tague, either Connally or Kennedy.

So either there was no missed shot and therefore no magic bullet, or there was a missed shot that didn't strike Tague. If the latter is the case, where did the bullet go? Defenders of the Official Story prefer to let that sleeping dog lie.

[Bolo Boffin]

215. Did Sabato say anything about his study that showed the Dictabelt evidence is useless?

Well, in determining the events of Dealey Plaza, since the recording was of a motorcycle two miles away at the time?

[zappaman]

217. Can I take a guess as to the answer?

NO.

[Bolo Boffin]

218. Sabato? I would have expected him to.

He had the study done in connection with his recent book and the white paper's available at the website. I don't see why he wouldn't have, unless it was before the book was released and he was saving it for the official press conference.

[Octafish]

219. Are you monitoring every word I write, Bolo Boffin?

Yes, Dr. Sabato did. He also said the subject deserves more study.

[Bolo Boffin]

221. Stop making those accusations immediately.

I find them highly offensive. If you want, I'll apologize to you for saying you are a conspiracy theorist. You clearly consider that term an insult, and even though I find it simply descriptive, that's no excuse for calling someone a name they find offensive. So I am truly sorry for doing that.

But this accusations that I am monitoring your words and spending all my time with you and further implications that I work for the CIA or whoever? They have to stop. Those accusations couldn't be more wrong. What I am doing, Octafish, is reading the words you write on a public discussion board for progressives and liberals. I am a progressive Democrat. I like Democratic Underground. You are here writing things on this public forum and I am reading them and I am responding to them. That is what I am doing. And you are going to have to get used to that happening, whereas I don't have to and will not get used to your constant insults.

Stop them immediately.

Thank you for letting me know you have heard that the Dictabelt is irrelevant to any discussion of what happened in Dealey Plaza. Since the Dictabelt was recording a motorcycle two miles away from Dealey Plaza, matching its audio to the Zapruder tape is an exercise in futility and/or confirmation bias. Take your pick.

The subject of JFK does deserve more study. More records do need to be released. The life, presidency, and death of John F. Kennedy will be a fruitful source of study and discussion for a long time. And I have never implied that it is not.

[Octafish]

223. No, I won't. You pop up on every post I write on the subject of JFK.

Where do you find the time?

[Bolo Boffin]

225. So?

What the hell business of yours is it when and where I post? Stop hijacking your own freaking OP to discuss me and get back to the topic.

[Octafish]

226. ''Stop hijacking your own freaking OP to discuss me and get back to the topic.''

The irony must escape you. You can start your own thread where you are free to write about what you want.

BTW: The sheer number of your responses on my OPs from the Duquesne conference represent hours devoted to watching what I write. Your responses to what I've posted on Dallas over the years add up to DAYS you've devoted to monitoring what I have written. I don't know about you, but I find that odd.

[Bolo Boffin]

233. Meta. n/t

[Octafish]

246. Dude.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x253572

[Bolo Boffin]

249. Now you're just being random.

That thread has nothing to do with the Dictabelt evidence.

[zappaman]

259. Thank you

The sheer number of your responses on Octafish's OPs from the Duquesne conference represent minutes devoted to countering the "stuff" he writes. Your responses to what he's posted on Dallas over the years add up to HOURS you've devoted to countering the falsehoods and whackadoodle "theories" he has written. I don't know about you, but I find that a great service in trying to set the record straight.

[Octafish]

260. Yeay! Tag Team.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x309574

How do you ever find the time, zappaman?

[zappaman]

261. You must be confused again...my reply was to another DUer.

Are you monitoring every word I write, Octafish?

[Octafish]

262. Not at all. This is a discussion board, remember?

Feel free to start a thread where you can post about what it is you want. Perhaps someone will want to comment on what you wrote.

FYI: I don't need to monitor what you write to know what you're about. That's what your words do.

[zappaman]

263. Thanks for reminding me!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024028402

You better believe it!

[Octafish]

265. DUers need to know that your source is an ultraconservative right winger.

McAdams in his own words: http://mu-warrior.blogspot.com/

An example: "David Suzuki: Environmentalist, Hypocrite, Crackpot."

So, while I understand why you would select to quote John McAdams because he specializes in promoting the Oswald-did-it theory, it's a real puzzler to me why a self-described DUer would choose to do so.

[Bolo Boffin]

266. Genetic fallacy. n/t

[Bolo Boffin]

267. I appreciate it.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024039205

Wow, look at that coat bunching up.

[adavid]

184. After JFK was....

assassinated, Israel started their nuclear bomb program, and to this day, are not allowing inspectors and are not a signatory to the NNPT.
Which would be a classic definition of rouge state.

[woo me with science]

185. K&R

[Eddie Haskell]

189. What did you think of Gary L. Aguilar, M.D.?

I found him very convincing.

[Octafish]

195. While I don't know him personally, I think the world of the guy.

I did not hear Dr. Aguilar speak at Duquesne, however. The schedulers decided to have concurrent sessions and I had indicated to another speaker I would attend his presentation.

Dr. Aguilar's presentation: "JFK's Medical Evidence: You Don't Need to be a Physician to Understand How Wrong the Official Conclusions Are"

The conference is to be available on DVD. I look forward to hearing what he said and reporting on same.

Were you at the conference, Eddie Haskell?

[Eddie Haskell]

196. I wish

No, I heard him on a podcast a few months back, and found him thoroughly convincing. His expertise is unassailable.

[The Midway Rebel]

203. I used to believe in JFK CTs

Until I started reading these threads on DU about six years ago. That dude poster and a couple of others still around on this thread would clean house every fucking time.

It was like watching a kung fu movie of logic and fact against an army of JFK CT woo. Logic and fact would whoop ass and judo flip an army of swarming JFK CT woo. Sort of like they have on this thread.

Someone would say well what about this? And I'd be all like, yeah man what about that? BAM refuted! Well, what about these? Yeah man, what about those? BAM refuted. On and on and on it went. Finally some guy showed up with some really fine tuned analysis of the Zapruder film where you could actually see and MEASURE the FORWARD snap of the head and the CTers just could not deal with that evidence. Too much science.

In my case at least, your years long effort to convince everyone of a JFK assassination conspiracy here on DU has backfired as I now believe LHO acted alone that day in Dallas.

Further, I have come to see the fascination and devotion to facts that can't be proven as somewhat akin to a religion. Further still, I have come to view the behaviors of Americans who convene for national conferences to share their fascination and devotion to the mystery as an industry fueled by a middle class hobby not much different than a Star Trek convention or music festival.

What convinces me even more is your expressed hatred of people like me who do not share your opinion of the facts. I know if you had your way you would ban me from DU. You have said as much. That breaks my heart because I love and respect you and many of the DU posters on the CT side even though I think you are wrong about the facts.

I thank you for helping me seeing the evidence in a new light.

When people here on DU accused CT deniers of being CIA operatives, that was the final straw for me.

That and the repeated denial of the evidence that is piled up that says Oswald acted alone.

I guess I am in the CIA now too.

[defacto7]

204. K & R

Thank you Octafish for swimming this lake of info-bombers. There are two groups in this thread, one that offers information people can choose from for reasonable discourse as they desire and the other consists of those who prefer to seek and destroy anything that doesn't suit them even to the point of disruption and insult.

Information is good whatever it is, period. Thanks for offering it and not seeking to deprive us of it.

All in all, whatever we know, whatever we believe or surmise about Kennedy's assassination, all we can do is search for information and form a subjective opinion. That's all. Every person who says they "know beyond a doubt" or "by overwhelming evidence" anything concerning Kennedy's assassination is deluded because that is impossible. The last and only chance humanity has to know the truth concerning it will be in November of 2038. Even then, it all depends on whether those files are delivered without censure and it was compiled in fact... and that is all there is.

Until that time, I'll compile any information offered by more scholarly persons than myself to try to make sense of a point in time that changed the world for the worse.

Gather everything, question everything and discard nothing.

[aikoaiko]

264. Interesting coincidence

[Uncle Joe]

278. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Octafish.

[Octafish]

283. Where New JFK Evidence Points

President John F. Kennedy in the motorcade through Dallas shortly before his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. (Photo credit: Walt Cisco, Dallas Morning News)



Where New JFK Evidence Points

By Jim DiEugenio
Global Research, November 20, 2013
Consortiumnews 19 November 2013

Media specials are on tap for the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s murder, but none will explore the troubling new evidence that has been declassified in recent years – and that undercuts the Official Story of the Lone Gunman.

In late 1991, film director Oliver Stone released JFK, his film about the investigation of the murder of President John F. Kennedy by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. To say the film was controversial does not begin to describe the furor which surrounded its reception. Six months before the film was in theaters, stories began to appear in large newspapers criticizing a film no one had seen yet.

When the film was finally shown, there was an interesting dichotomy. Whereas most of the film critics liked it, editorials and news stories about the movie attacked it. One critic actually lost her job over a positive review of the film.

But the film did two things relevant to the state of the evidence in the matter of President Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. At the end of his film, Stone had shown a title card saying that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had been classified until the year 2029.

Embarrassed – and faced with public outrage – Congress held hearings. Many people testified including Stone, and the last chief counsel of the HSCA, Robert Blakey. As a result, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was created, tasked with finding and releasing all documents held by public and private entities in America concerning the murder of President Kennedy. Eventually, two million pages of classified files were open to the public.

The second thing the film did was arouse the curiosity of many people who were not aware of the evidentiary problems that had haunted the Kennedy case for nearly 30 years. Stone’s film was the first time in over a decade that millions of Americans had been exposed to things like the Zapruder film, Oswald’s odd relationships with the FBI and CIA, his associations with right-wingers in Dallas and New Orleans, the investigative failings of the Warren Commission, the problems with the autopsy of President Kennedy, and much, much more.

These new people who were drawn into the case had fresh perspectives to offer and new insights. Between the newly declassified documents and this new generation of writers, the information base about both Kennedy and his murder grew exponentially in a relatively short time.

But this week’s 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination will be marked almost entirely by television specials that will be silent about this new and plentiful information, which alters the calculus of the Kennedy case. That is because, despite the uproar created by Stone’s film, the defenders of the Warren Commission’s narrative circled the wagons and protected the Establishment’s preferred solution to the assassination – that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Why Oswald?

There always was an attractiveness to the Oswald-did-it storyline. It is the simplest explanation, a lone gunman acting out of some personal grievance, ideological fixation or psychological imbalance. No need to explore evidence of a larger conspiracy. No need to integrate Kennedy’s murder into the historic developments that his presidency represented.

Thus, many influential people – from officials involved in the original investigation defending their judgments to a later generation of authors burnishing their reputations for probity – have fought fiercely to defend the Oswald-acted-alone narrative. They have done so despite nagging evidentiary problems, such as the “magic bullet theory,” which attributed the multiple wounds to Kennedy’s neck and Texas Gov. John Connally’s chest, wrist and thigh to a single bullet found almost unscathed on a gurney at Parkland Hospital, and those troubling images from the Zapruder film showing Kennedy’s head being knocked backward by the fatal shot, although Oswald was behind him at the Texas Bookstore Depository.

Most importantly, Gerald Posner’s book, Case Closed, which was published before the ARRB was even set up, was used to close the door on further inquiry by pronouncing Oswald guilty again. Yet, Posner’s book did not include any of the intriguing documents the ARRB declassified. Neither did it include the results of the ARRB special investigation into the medical evidence launched by chief counsel Jeremy Gunn.

After Posner’s book, there seemed to be something of an informal agreement by the gatekeepers in the media. There would be no programs dedicated to airing the discoveries of the ARRB, despite the fact that the ARRB had unprecedented powers to declassify documents and compel testimony. Because of these combination of factors, the American public was given little exposure to the ARRB material and the revolutionary work of new authors on the Kennedy case, the most infamous American homicide of the Twentieth Century.

Besides the Oswald-acted-alone solution, there have been other proposed narratives that accept the idea of conspiracy but don’t directly challenge the institutions of the state. These scenarios acknowledge the likelihood of other conspirators but point the finger at the Mafia or Fidel Castro or some other enemies of America.

But much of the new evidence tends to bolster the narrative advanced by Garrison and by Stone’s movie: that the assassination must have involved elements of the U.S. intelligence community working with right-wing operatives who considered Kennedy soft on communism and that a cover-up was put in place by key government figures to prevent an unraveling of these powerful institutions and the erosion of public trust in the authorities.

Who Was Oswald?

Let us begin with the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald had been portrayed by the Warren Commission as a lonely, communist sociopath. Although there was never any clear motive put forth by the Warren Commission as to why the alleged assassin killed JFK, it was intimated that it was the net result of the frustrations in his life caused by financial problems, ideological intent, and marital troubles. This is still what most current defenders of the Commission say today.

But one of the most surprising things that the ARRB disclosed was the volume of files on Oswald held by both the CIA and FBI – after both agencies had long denied that they had much paper on Oswald. But it was not just the volume of documents, but it was the unexpected direction they pointed.

One of the most curious aspects of Oswald’s strange and contradictory life was his military service. One of the things that shocked New Orleans DA Jim Garrison was the fact that, while in the Marines, Oswald took a Russian test. As Garrison writes in his book, the Commission tried to explain this away by stating that he got more questions wrong than right.

But it’s obvious that Oswald stuck with learning Russian because when a friend of his arranged a meeting with Rosaleen Quinn, she commented afterwards that Oswald spoke excellent Russian. And Quinn had been privately tutored in advance of a State Department exam. (James DiEugenio,Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 131)

After acquiring fluency in Russian, Oswald then applied for a hardship discharge in order to leave the service early. Even though he had just a few months left to serve, his request was granted – and in only 10 days. The HSCA interviewed a person on the board who granted the discharge. Colonel B. J. Kozak testified that it normally took from three to six months to secure such a release. (HSCA interview of Kozak of Aug. 2, 1978)

After Oswald returned from Russia – receiving surprisingly little trouble despite his defection – he became friendly with the White Russian community in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He then went to New Orleans in the summer of 1963. Numerous witnesses had testified to seeing him with former FBI agent Guy Banister or at Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street.

But in the files declassified by the ARRB there is even more evidence in this regard. In the declassified files of the Church Committee, there is testimony by two federal immigration agents that they were following David Ferrie in 1963 because of his association with Cubans in the country illegally. Wendell Roache and Ron Smith of the Immigration and Naturalization Service stated that they traced Ferrie to Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street, and Oswald was there. (DiEugenio, p. 113)

Further, at least one of the pro-Castro flyers that Oswald was passing out that summer was stamped with the 544 Camp Street address. According to Banister’s secretary Delphine Roberts, Banister was aware that Oswald had committed this faux pas, and he was upset about it. The rightwing zealot complained that, “How is it going to look for him to have the same address as me!” (HSCA interview with Roberts, July 6, 1978)

The natural question arises: What would an alleged communist like Oswald be doing using the conservative Banister’s office as an address, and also working out of that office? In that regard, one of the most compelling revelations to emerge from the ARRB is that both the FBI and the CIA were running counter-intelligence operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in 1963. This included using electronic surveillance, penetration agents, and agents provocateur against the New York-based organization.

CIA Mystery

In one of the CIA’s declassified files on this subject, it was discovered that the men running this counter-intelligence effort at CIA were David Phillips and Jim McCord. (Newman, pgs. 236-41) Phillips’s name in this regard is especially fascinating because of his reported meeting with Oswald in August of 1963 at the Southland Center in Dallas by the militant Cuban exile Antonio Veciana.

At that time, according to the Warren Commission, Oswald was about a month away from leaving for Mexico. In addition to not telling the reader about Phillips, McCord and the CIA counter-intelligence program against the FPCC, the Warren Report also did not reveal a memorandum sent from the CIA to the FBI on Sept. 16, 1963, saying the CIA was “giving some consideration to countering the activities” of the FPCC “in foreign countries. … CIA is also giving some thought to planting deceptive information which might embarrass the Committee in areas where it does have some support.”

Oswald had just embarrassed the FPCC by his tactics in New Orleans. First, by getting into a fight with an anti-Castro activist, being arrested, jailed, and then pleading guilty in court. He then took part in a debate where he was exposed as a former Soviet defector. As author Jim Douglass asks: Did this memo refer to Oswald now going to Mexico? (Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 179)

One of the notable achievements of the ARRB was the fact that it declassified the HSCA’s Mexico City Report, which clearly suggests that there was an imposter masquerading as Oswald at both the Cuban consulate and Russian embassy, the places where Oswald was supposed to have visited while he was supposed to be there.

The report states that the CIA could produce no pictures of Oswald either entering or leaving either place, although the Agency had multiple cameras facing each doorway. Further, there is a table in the report which shows that the surveillance tapes the Agency says it had of Oswald in both places could not be of Oswald because the man the CIA had on the tapes spoke broken Russian and fluent Spanish. (Lopez Report, p. 130) However, witnesses said Oswald spoke fluent Russian and broken Spanish.

When one of the tapes of Oswald was sent to Dallas after Kennedy’s assassination and listened to by the FBI agents interviewing Oswald, the agents said the voice was not Oswald’s. When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was alerted to this, he relayed the information to President Johnson. (FBI Memorandum from Hoover to James Rowley, Nov. 23, 1963)

The FBI Mystery

There are two more declassified connections by the FBI to this important episode. First, a FLASH warning that the FBI had put on Oswald’s file, after his defection to the Soviet Union, was taken off while Oswald was in Mexico. Further, it was removed at about the time the Bureau got information that Oswald was allegedly meeting a KGB agent named Valery Kostikov.

This is important, because as both authors John Newman and Jim Douglass note, if the FLASH notice had been in place, it is probable that Oswald would have been placed on the Security Index. That list would have been turned over to the Secret Service, and Oswald would likely have been picked up or surveilled for Kennedy’s upcoming trip to Dallas.

Secondly, in a declassified memo discovered by Newman, Hoover had scribbled a handwritten note in the marginalia of a memo. In speaking of cooperation between the CIA and the FBI, the Director wrote that he was doubtful about such endeavors because he could not forget “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico” as an example of their double-dealing. Within six weeks of Kennedy’s murder, Hoover thought that the CIA was, at the very least, not being forthcoming about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City.

Hoover was not alone in this suspicion about a CIA connection to Oswald. At a talk at the Cyril Wecht Symposium in Pittsburgh last month, Dan Hardway, an HSCA investigator who specialized on exploring a possible relationship between Oswald and the CIA, said the House panel prepared two indictments for perjury based on the obstruction of the Mexico City investigation. One was for Phillips; the other was for Anne Goodpasture, who controlled the tape and photo production in Mexico City.

Hardway has revealed that when he and another HSCA investigator were getting very close to exposing the skullduggery in Mexico City and who was responsible for it, the CIA moved a man name George Johannides into position as a liaison man over them.

As journalist Jefferson Morley has revealed, the CIA lied to Robert Blakey about the appointment of Johannides. The Agency told Blakely that his new liaison had no connection to the Kennedy case, when, in 1963, Johannides was the Chief of the Psychological Warfare Branch at JM/WAVE, the CIA’s huge Miami station. One of his specific functions was to monitor and supply the anti-Castro Cuban exile group, Cuban Student Directorate, or DRE, which was in contact with Oswald that summer. Carlos Bringuier, the man who got into a physical altercation with Oswald on a city street in New Orleans, was a member of the local branch of the DRE.

Angleton’s Connection

A similar maneuver occurred during the Warren Commission investigation, when the original CIA liaison to the Warren Commission, John Whitten, was replaced by James Angleton, the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief whose office handled (or mishandled) the original reporting about Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union.

When reports came in about Oswald entering the American embassy in Moscow and asking to renounce his citizenship, the information went to the various intelligence repositories in Washington. The FBI issued a FLASH warning to be placed on Oswald if he tried to reenter the country under a false name. After all, the possibility existed that the KGB could have turned him into a spy.

However, at the CIA, the information about Oswald was not acted on immediately or with the normal protocol. A routine 201 form, which catalogues anyone of interest to the Agency, was not filled out on Oswald at that time. Nor did the information go to the Soviet Russia division. Instead, the Oswald notice was funneled to James Angleton’s super-secret, CI/SIG unit, a protective agency that was supposed to be on guard against penetration agents but has been connected to some of the CIA’s most convoluted deep-cover operations, sometimes called “the wilderness of mirrors.” (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 27)

Besides Angleton’s influence over what CIA files would be made available to the Warren Commission, one of its seven members was former CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom President Kennedy had replaced as director after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961.

So, it is clear today that the idea the CIA had no intelligence interest in Oswald in the months leading up to Kennedy’s murder has been disproven. In fact, Newman uncovered a CIA memo in the Soviet Russia division which reads, “It was partly out of curiosity to learn if Oswald’s wife would actually accompany him to our country, partly out of interest in Oswald’s own experiences in the USSR, that we showed operational intelligence interest in the Harvey [Oswald] Story.”

The Autopsy Mystery

Another one of the myths circulated by the Warren Commission was that they did not have the actual autopsy exhibits because the Kennedy family would not allow them to access the material. This was a pretense exposed by the declassification of the Commission’s Jan. 21, 1964 executive session hearing. In that transcript, Commissioner John McCloy asked Chief Counsel Lee Rankin if they had the raw materials of the autopsy, and Rankin replied that they did.

In a transcript from the next session on Jan. 27, Rankin talked about actually seeing an autopsy picture and wondering how the bullet could exit Kennedy’s throat from an entrance point that low in the back. Rankin’s puzzlement about the back wound segues neatly into one piece of information that the ARRB did manage to get into the mainstream U.S. media, namely that Commissioner Gerald Ford changed the draft of the Warren Report to move the location of this back wound that so puzzled Rankin up into Kennedy’s neck.

This all too revealing alteration was exposed when Rankin’s son donated an earlier draft of the Warren Report to the ARRB. As Commission historian Gerald McKnight notes in his book Breach of Trust, this revision brought the back wound into “line with the Commission’s no-conspiracy conclusion, repositioning it to make it consistent with what came to be called, the single-bullet theory.” (McKnight, pgs. 171-172)

With the knowledge today that the Commission secretly did have the autopsy photos, this act seems even worse. Because, later on, when the photos were finally revealed to the public, it is clear that the wound was in the back, and not in Kennedy’s neck. Ford appears to have done this simply to make the Commission’s official verdict more palatable to the public, because if the shot was fired from over 60 feet up, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, how could the bullet hit Kennedy in the back and exit at a higher point if it only went through soft tissue?

We now know that this questionable proposition was not even credible inside the Commission itself. The Commission was presented with evidence of three shells being recovered from the so-called sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. So, to make Oswald the lone assassin, only three bullets had to be responsible for all the wounds to all the victims in Dealey Plaza.

The Commission said bystander James Tague, standing on Commerce Street, was hit by a missed shot, and one shot fatally wounded Kennedy by striking him in the head. Which left one shot to do the rest of the damage. And it was quite a lot of damage: seven wounds and two smashed bones in Kennedy and Governor Connally who was sitting in the limousine in front of the President. Those seven wounds with one shot represent the trajectory of what has come to be known as the Magic Bullet.

Rolling Russell

When the Warren Commission verdict was formally announced in the fall of 1964, one of the reasons it appeared authoritative was that it was presented as being unanimous. Seven storied public figures had agreed on each and every aspect of the case against Oswald. Today we know that this was not true.

The best evidence demonstrating its falsity is the Commission’s treatment of Sen. Richard Russell, D-Georgia. For a master’s thesis produced under McKnight’s guidance in 2002, Dani E. Biancolli went through the Russell archive at the University of Georgia.

Almost from the beginning, Russell had problems with the way the Commission was doing business. For instance, Russell was puzzled that the FBI report did not allow for the single-bullet theory. It stated that two separate shots hit Kennedy and one hit Connally. If that is not confusing enough, when the CIA analyzed the Zapruder film, they decided there were two assassins. (McKnight, p. 6)

Russell was not satisfied by the hastily assembled FBI report. He also objected to the fact that Hoover was leaking its findings to the press, making it difficult for the Commission to maintain its independence in the face of public perceptions. Being an experienced trial lawyer, he also began to notice that the Commission was not notifying him when important witnesses would be testifying, e.g. Oswald’s brother, Robert. (Biancolli, p. 46)

Russell also noted that the CIA was giving certain members of the Commission more information than others. Troubled by the overall proceedings, Russell wrote a memo to himself which began with the phrase, “Something strange is happening.” He then noted that the Commission was only going to consider Oswald as the assassin. To lawyer Russell, this was “an untenable position.” (ibid, p. 47) Russell was so disturbed by the way the Commission was progressing that he actually composed a letter of resignation to President Lyndon Johnson.

Russell took the step of drafting an official dissent to the Warren Report. And he wanted the report to contain his reservations about the Magic Bullet. (ibid, p. 63) Aware of this, the more active members of the Commission – Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, John McCloy and chief counsel Lee Rankin – tricked Russell. They had discontinued their dealings with their stenography service prior to the final meeting where Russell was to present his dissent. But they did have a secretary in the room to create the pretense that a full transcript was being recorded. (ibid, p. 65) No such thing occurred.

Russell was so effective in his presentation at this meeting that he was joined in the effort by Sen. John Sherman Cooper, R-Kentucky, and to a lesser extent by Rep. Hale Boggs, D-Louisiana. But Russell’s eloquent dissent was not recorded in the transcript. In fact, there really is no transcript of this Sept. 18, 1964 meeting. (ibid, pgs. 63-64) With no transcript available, none of Russell’s objections made it into the Warren Report. Thus, the false veneer of a unanimous Commission was maintained.

Further showing how compromised the Warren Commission was, it is clear today that the Commission demanded little respect from the intelligence agencies supplying it with information. For instance, as ARRB employee Doug Horne discovered, Commission counsel Arlen Specter requested the Secret Service produce any tapes of the Nov. 22 press conference by the doctors at Parkland Hospital. Even though they had a recording, the Secret Service failed to turn it over to the Commission. Perhaps because during the interview, Dr. Malcolm Perry said three times that the wound to Kennedy’s throat was one of entrance. If that were true, Oswald could not have caused it.

The CIA also sent the Commission very limited information about Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City. For instance, the CIA did not send any information to the Commission about any of the phone taps they had at the Cuban or Russian embassies. And there is no evidence that the Commission ever knew who did the translation for the intercepts of incoming phone calls.

Further, the Commission never interviewed Silvia Duran, the receptionist at the Cuban consulate, the person who had the most contact with Oswald. Because of these failings, the information in the Warren Report about Oswald in Mexico City, which many people today see as crucial, is so skimpy as to be almost useless.

Hesitant Investigators

As the Russell incident indicates, it’s clear today that the Warren Commission was a reluctant investigative body from the start. This began with the technique President Johnson used to get Earl Warren to serve as chairman, something Warren did not want to do. LBJ told Warren that because of Oswald’s visits to the Russian and Cuban consulates, there was a danger of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and Cuba and the possible deaths of 40 million Americans in a matter of minutes.

Johnson later said Warren teared up at this suggestion, and Warren mentioned Johnson’s warning at his first staff meeting. The danger of a freewheeling investigation clearly had an impact on many of the investigators who came to see their job as tamping down suspicions of a larger conspiracy, rather than following the facts wherever they might lead. When Wesley Liebeler met with witness Sylvia Odio in Dallas, he told her that they had orders from Warren that if they came across any evidence of conspiracy they were to shove it under the rug. (Odio interview with Church Committee, Jan. 16, 1976)

What makes this so regrettable today is that there is no audio or photographic evidence that Oswald was at either the Russian or Cuban offices in Mexico City. The descriptions of a short, blonde man suggest an imposter. Hoover also felt that the CIA had given him a cover story. This declassified evidence in the Lopez Report leaves the question: Was the specter of a nuclear war used as a pretext to stop any real investigation?

Another crucial piece of evidence that was revived by the ARRB was this: There appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to kill Kennedy in Chicago just three weeks before the successful one in Dallas. In November 1975, journalist Edwin Black wrote a long and detailed essay on this aborted plot for the Chicago Independent, a paper with a small and local circulation. Soon, this milestone essay was more or less forgotten, but the HSCA secured a copy of it.

Because of its recirculation, other writers have done more work on the subject. One of the most disturbing aspects of the Chicago attempt is that the outline of the plot is eerily similar to what happened in Dallas, down to the apparent fall guy. Three men who appeared to be Cubans were going to kill Kennedy in a rifle ambush as he exited off a freeway ramp in front of a tall building.

The man who was supposed to be accused of the crime was Thomas Vallee. Like Oswald, Valle was a former Marine who was stationed at a U-2 base in Japan. Vallee supposedly was resentful toward Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs disaster. Curiously, the codename of the FBI informant who tipped off the Secret Service was “Lee.” The existence of a prior assassination plot with parallels to Kennedy’s killing in Dallas would seem to be relevant if one were exploring a wider conspiracy, but there was not one word about this episode in the Warren Report.

Medical Evidence

Some of the most startling new evidence in the JFK case from the declassified files relates to the ARRB’s medical investigation and from new doctors who have entered the JFK field. For instance, Dr. Gary Aguilar has collated the interviews done by HSCA investigators Andy Purdy and Mark Flanagan about the wounds to President Kennedy as seen by the witnesses at Bethesda Medical Center, the hospital where Kennedy’s autopsy was done after his body was returned to Washington.

The HSCA report said there was a discrepancy between what the medical staffers at Parkland Hospital in Dallas saw and what the staffers at Bethesda saw. Witnesses at the former, where Kennedy was rushed after the shooting, said they saw a large, avulsive hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. This would strongly indicate a shot from the front. Yet the HSCA Report said that the witnesses at Bethesda did not see this wound.

It turns out this was false. When Aguilar went through all the declassified reports from the Bethesda witnesses, they agreed that there was a large avulsive hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. Aguilar has a table of over 40 witnesses in two locations who are now on the record as saying they saw this wound. The odds of that many trained medical personnel being wrong are, needless to say, very high. Yet, it remains unclear who at the HSCA was responsible for the deception.

As contradictory to the single-gunman theory as the ARRB-revealed medical evidence seems to be, the present state of the ballistics evidence is probably moreso. Broadly speaking, this consists of the ammunition, the rifle, and the crime scene.

Let us begin with new revelations about the so-called Magic Bullet. When Gary Aguilar was going through the declassified FBI files pertaining to the identification of that exhibit – formally called CE 399 – he was puzzled by the lack of actual FBI field reports in the file, so-called “302” reports on witness interviews.

What initially spurred his interest in this matter was the 1967 interview that author Josiah Thompson conducted with O. P. Wright, the security director at Parkland Hospital. When Thompson showed Wright a photo of CE 399, he denied that it was the bullet he gave to the Secret Service. CE 399 is a round-nosed, military jacketed, copper-coated bullet. Wright said he turned over a lead-colored, sharp-nosed, hunting round. (Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175)

Yet, in the declassified file, Aguilar could find no 302 where anything like Wright’s definitive response to Thompson was recorded. Or a 302 in which Wright said that CE 399 resembled the bullet he found the day of the assassination. Yet, the FBI was supposed to have shown CE 399 to Wright to confirm the identification of the Magic Bullet as what was turned over at Parkland Hospital. But there was only a summary memorandum confirming that ID.

Though the ARRB told Aguilar that they had exhausted that particular FBI file, there was a clue for further inquiry. In the summary memo, the FBI agent who supposedly showed the exhibit to Wright was identified as Bardwell Odum. In November 2001, Aguilar and Thompson visited the retired agent who told his interviewers that he never took any bullet around to show to any Parkland witnesses – and since he knew Wright well, he would have recalled the interview.

Further, if that event had happened, Odum would have had to file a 302. Aguilar had studied the report file in sequential order and none were missing, indicating that Odum never filed a 302 presumably because he never showed the bullet to Wright.

The FBI’s Fiddling

But why would the FBI have fiddled with the evidence relating to the chain of custody for the Magic Bullet? One obvious answer would be that FBI Director Hoover understood how important it was to remove any doubts that Oswald was the lone gunman.

After the declassification process was complete, researcher John Hunt petitioned the National Archives to examine the FBI’s own data in order to determine if CE 399 actually arrived at FBI headquarters when the Bureau said it did and if it was carried there by agent Elmer Lee Todd as Hoover said it was. As basic to an investigation as trail of evidence is, this was not done by either the Warren Commission or the HSCA.

In a handwritten receipt, Todd noted he got the bullet at the White House from James Rowley of the Secret Service at 8:50 p.m. Hunt then reviewed the work of Robert Frazier who was the technician who booked and analyzed firearms evidence on the JFK case that day. In Frazier’s chronicle, entitled appropriately enough, “History of Evidence,” Frazier wrote that he received the bullet from Todd at 7:30 p.m. In another document entitled “Laboratory Work Sheet,” Frazier wrote this again and described the exhibit as “Bullet from Stretcher.”

The obvious problem was: How could Todd have given CE 399 to Frazier at the FBI lab before he got it from Rowley at the White House? Assuming the contemporaneous documentary record is correct, either the FBI switched the bullet or there was more than one bullet. Either alternative would vitiate the Commission’s conclusion about Oswald as the lone gunman.

In Thompson’s book he writes that both Todd and Frazier marked the bullet with their initials; this was based on a two-page FBI document inside a Justice Department Report. The FBI needed Todd’s initials on the bullet because the initials of the man who gave the bullet to Rowley, Secret Service agent Richard Johnsen, are not on CE 399. And neither are Rowley’s. Todd’s initials had to be there to give the chain of possession any validity at all.

Hunt discovered that Todd’s initials are not on CE 399, which would mean that the forensic value of the Magic Bullet was worthless. (Hunt’s articles can be read herehttp://www.jfklancer.com/hunt/mystery.html, and herehttp://www.jfklancer.com/hunt/phantom.htm).

Miscarriage of Justice

This essay could be twice as long as it is. And it could touch on many other different fields: the efforts of the FBI and CIA to electronically monitor Jim Garrison’s office; the FBI concealment of Guy Banister’s address of 544 Camp Street from the Warren Commission; the witnesses who saw Oswald, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie in the hamlets of Clinton and Jackson; the testimony of Victoria Adams that Oswald was not running down the Depository stairs from the sixth floor after the shooting; the work by Josiah Thompson and Dave Wimp which demonstrates there is no forward movement by Kennedy at frames 312-313 of the Zapruder film, which shows Kennedy going only one way, back and to the left.

These revelations, based largely on the documentary record released by the ARRB, have revolutionized what the evidence tells us about Kennedy’s assassination. Based on these documents and other discoveries, the Warren Commission is revealed as a miscarriage of justice and its report a distortion of history, perhaps justified in the minds of some participants as needed to protect the country from the repercussions of a no-holds-barred investigation.

While President Johnson may have raised the specter of a nuclear conflagration in 1963, the later motives for the continuing cover-up – and the intensity of the attacks on anyone who has questioned the official version – can best be explained by the institutional self-interests of the government agencies that would be implicated in the cover-up or the actual crime.

Along with fierce resistance from the CIA and the FBI, there was the close-minded response to the new evidence from the gatekeepers of the major U.S. news media. Ridiculing authors and investigators who challenged the Warren Commission’s findings became something of a litmus test for measuring a journalist’s fitness to get a good-paying job in the mainstream press.

But this arrogant behavior by these powerful governmental and media institutions – their contempt for an intellectually unconstrained evaluation of the JFK evidence – has proved costly in terms of public trust. Polls reveal that the decline in America’s faith in government began in 1964, the year the Warren Report was issued. As the ARRB’s former counsel Jeremy Gunn said in a speech at Stanford, with what the ARRB discovered, he would much rather be defending Oswald than prosecuting him.

Despite this new evidence, there are many programs being broadcast this month about both President Kennedy and his murder, e.g. Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy. Not a single one will present anywhere near a representative selection of the new evidentiary discoveries made by the ARRB. Yet, this information is crucial to understanding where the United States finds itself today, a country awash in excessive secrecy and growing public distrust.

Another one of the declassified files – the records of the Sec/Def meeting of May 1963 – revealed that Oliver Stone was correct in another facet of his movie. President Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam, a decision that – if not reversed by President Johnson – might have dramatically changed the course of U.S. history.

In the face of this continuing denial of a full accounting of Kennedy’s assassination on the 50thanniversary, the public should ask two simple questions: What really happened to President Kennedy in Dealey Plaza? And why the unending resistance from the news media to present the new evidence to the American people?

Jim DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book is Reclaiming Parkland.

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/11/19/where-new-jfk-evidence-points/

PS: Thank you, Mr. DiEugenio! You are the BEST!

PPS: Mods, Mr. Robert Parry of ConsortiumNews also permits DemocraticUnderground to print articles in full.

PPPS: The author is the guy quoted above in the OP.

[Jim DiEugenio]

284. Don't forget my latest, its really moving around

Thanks to Bob Parry, he is a blessing:

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/11/25/jfks-embrace-of-third-world-nationalists/

[Octafish]

285. NAZI-CIA; October Surprise; Bush-Moon Axis; Corporate McPravda...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=1450222

Robert Parry and ConsortiumNews are very much appreciated by good DUers.

PS: A very hearty welcome to DU, Mr. DiEugenio! Good DUers also very much appreciate your work, as well!

[Bolo Boffin]

286. "Good DUers"?

Last edited Thu Nov 28, 2013, 09:32 PM - Edit history (1)

Sounds a lot like "true Scotsmen" to me.'

ETA:

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/no-true-scotsman

You made what could be called an appeal to purity as a way to dismiss relevant criticisms or flaws of your argument.

In this form of faulty reasoning one's belief is rendered unfalsifiable because no matter how compelling the evidence is, one simply shifts the goalposts so that it wouldn't apply to a supposedly 'true' example. This kind of post-rationalization is a way of avoiding valid criticisms of one's argument.

[Octafish]

287. JFK's Embrace of Third World Nationalists

EXCERPT...

Kennedy wanted to reverse this perception of the United States aligning itself with the old order. He told National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy that rebuilding the American relationship with Egypt would be a priority focus of his administration. He was determined that Egypt would stay non-aligned, but he also wanted to end the idea that the United States was close to the Saudis.

To Kennedy, charismatic and influential moderates like Nasser represented the best hope for American foreign policy in the Middle East. In a reference to what Dulles had done with the Aswan project, Kennedy said: “If we can learn the lessons of the past, if we can refrain from pressing our case so hard that the Arabs feel their neutrality and nationalism threatened, the Middle East can become an area of strength and hope.” (ibid, p. 124)

CONTINUED...

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/11/25/jfks-embrace-of-third-world-nationalists/

Thank you, Mr. DiEugenio. That is one great article. It shows JFK believed in Democracy for everybody. That would put most, if not all, the world's despots and oligarchs on notice.