DESTINY BETRAYED:
THE CIA, OSWALD, AND
THE JFK ASSASSINATION

Published in Flagpole Magazine, p. 8 (Dec. 7, 2005).

Author: Donald E. Wilkes, Jr., Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law.

In place of the strong sense of faith in man and mankind, we now have a heavy feeling of a failed mission, of destiny betrayed and unfulfilled. – Rav Alex Israel

The deepest cover story of the CIA is that it is an intelligence organization. – Bulletin of the Federation of American Scientists

Today, 42 years after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, few responsible researchers who have studied JFK’s murder accept the Warren Commission’s main conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, committed the crime. (The Warren Commission was the body appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the Kennedy assassination; it released its Report in September 1964.) As these researchers have shown again and again in scores of books and articles, evidence available to the Commission but improperly evaluated, erroneously rejected, or simply not pursued by that body, together with new evidence unavailable to the Commission, discredits the principal finding of the Warren Report. JFK’s death was, these researchers believe, carried out by a conspiracy; it was not the act of a lone assassin. Different researchers, however, have different conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists also disagree about Oswald: some maintain that he was simply one of the conspirators; others claim that, while he was a member of the conspiracy, he was also unknowingly a dupe of the other conspirators who intended for him to be the fall guy; and still other theorists think that Oswald was a wholly innocent person set up by the conspirators as the patsy. Furthermore, the theorists who regard Oswald as a conspirator disagree as to whether he fired any of the shots in Dealey Plaza.

SNIP...

The theory that JFK’s murder was engineered by the CIA (or by persons affiliated with the CIA), and that the CIA covered up its connections to the murder, warrants serious consideration and should not be peremptorily rejected. In the 1960’s the CIA more resembled an untouchable crime syndicate than a legitimate government entity. Lavishly but secretly funded, unrestrained by public opinion, cloaked in secrecy, conducting whatever foreign or domestic clandestine operations it wished without regard to laws or morals, and specializing in deception, falsification, and mystification, the CIA was riddled at all levels with ruthless, cynical officials and employees who believed that they were above the law, that any means were justified to accomplish the goals they set for themselves, and that insofar as their surreptitious activities were concerned it was justifiable to lie with impunity to anyone, even presidents and legislators. Many of these individuals, thinking he was soft on communism, that he would reduce the size of the military industrial complex, and that he was to blame for the Bay of Pigs disaster (the failed CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba in 1961), hated and despised Kennedy. The CIA routinely circumvented and defied attempts by the executive and legislative branches to monitor its activities. It was involved in innumerable unlawful or outrageous activities. It illegally opened the mail of Americans. It interfered with free elections in foreign countries and arranged to destabilize or overthrow the governments of other countries. It plotted the murder of various foreign leaders. It arranged to hire the Mafia to help with some of these proposed murder plots. It unlawfully stored–in quantities, UGA political science professor Loch K. Johnson notes, sufficient “to destroy the population of a small city”–exotic toxic agents, including cobra venom and shellfish toxin, for the purpose of committing murders. It manufactured and used sinister lethal weaponry, including what Prof. Johnson calls “the ultimate murder weapon,” an electric handgun (the CIA called it a “noise-free disseminator”) with a telescopic sight which could noiselessly and accurately fire poison-tipped darts (the CIA called them “nondiscernible microbioinoculators”) up to a distance of 250 feet. It undoubtedly carried out multiple secret murders and other heinous crimes which it successfully kept hidden. Furthermore, it is now firmly established that after the JFK assassination the CIA simultaneously lied to, and withheld important information from, the Warren Commission.

One of the first serious investigators to raise credible claims that CIA operatives or ex-CIA operatives were involved in the JFK assassination was Jim Garrison, who served as the district attorney in New Orleans, Louisiana from 1962 to 1974. (A brief chronology of Garrison’s life and investigation is set forth at the end of this article.) Garrison and his office investigated the assassination for about five years, from late 1966 until early 1971. His investigation led Garrison to believe that, regardless of whoever actually fired the shots in Dealey Plaza, the assassination was the result of a plot hatched in New Orleans by persons with CIA connections. Furthermore, Garrison concluded, following the assassination the CIA engaged in a coverup to protect itself and the assassins. Garrison brought to trial the only criminal proceeding in which someone was actually charged with involvement in the JFK assassination. Garrison wrote two important books, the first published in 1970, the second in 1988, in which he recounted his investigation and shared the important new facts he had discovered.

In the words of journalist Fred Powledge, who wrote a magazine article on Garrison published in 1967, Garrison thought that “the assassins were CIA employees who were angered at President Kennedy’s posture on Cuba following the Bay of Pigs disaster, and that the CIA was frustrating his investigation, although the agency knew the whereabouts of the assassins.” Philosophy professor Richard H. Popkin, in another magazine article published in 1967, summarized Garrison’s views on the assassination as follows: “The thesis Garrison has set forth is that a group of New Orleans-based, anti-Castroites, supported and/or encouraged by the CIA in their anti-Castro activities, in the late summer or early fall of 1963 conspired to assassinate John F. Kennedy. This group, according to Garrison, included (Clay) Shaw, (David) Ferrie, (Lee Harvey) Oswald, ... and others, including Cuban exiles and American anti-Castroites.... (T)heir plan was executed in Dallas on November 22, 1963. At least part of their motivation ... was their reaction to Kennedy’s decisions at the Bay of Pigs and the changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba following the missiles crisis of 1962.”

In a 1967 interview, Garrison himself phrased his basic conclusions this way: “(A) number of the men who killed the President were former employees of the CIA involved in its anti-Castro underground activities in and around New Orleans.... We must assume that the plotters were acting on their own rather than on CIA orders when they killed the President. As far as we been able to determine, they were not on the pay of the CIA at the time of the assassination.... The CIA could not face up to the American people and admit that its former employees had conspired to assassinate the President, so from the moment Kennedy’s heart stopped beating, the Agency attempted to sweep the whole conspiracy under the rug.... In this respect, it has become an accessory after the fact in the assassination.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.law.uga.edu/dwilkes_more/jfk_22destiny.html

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy believed President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy.

That's what his son and daughter, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Rory Kennedy, reported in an interview with Charlie Rose last weekend in Dallas.



It's also what author and Salon founder David Talbot reported, when he called Robert F. Kennedy the "first conspiracy theorist" in 2007.

Here's why the news from Robert and Rory is so important:



Those are the facts we learned Friday, Jan. 11, 2013. It's called history.

There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, 'The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out.' And when it got down to, 'The plane is 10 miles out,' the young man also said to the vice president, 'Do the orders still stand?' And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, 'Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?' Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant.

– Norman Mineta, (4)

“ 9:32 a.m.
The Vice President in Washington: Underground, in Touch With Bush

Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, summoned by the White House to the bunker, was on an open line to the Federal Aviation Administration operations center, monitoring Flight 77 as it hurtled toward Washington, with radar tracks coming every seven seconds. Reports came that the plane was 50 miles out, 30 miles out, 10 miles out-until word reached the bunker that there had been an explosion at the Pentagon.

Mineta shouted into the phone to Monte Belger at the FAA: "Monte, bring all the planes down." It was an unprecedented order-there were 4,546 airplanes in the air at the time. Belger, the FAA's acting deputy administrator, amended Mineta's directive to take into account the authority vested in airline pilots. "We're bringing them down per pilot discretion," Belger told the secretary.

&quot Expletive) pilot discretion," Mineta yelled back. "Get those (expletive) planes down."

Sitting at the other end of the table, Cheney snapped his head up, looked squarely at Mineta and nodded in agreement.
”
—Dan Balz and Bob Woodward, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42754-20...

Ted Kennedy survived Richard Nixon's Plots

By Don Fulsom

In September 1972, Nixon’s continued political fear, personal loathing, and jealously of Kennedy led him to plant a spy in Kennedy’s Secret Service detail.

The mole Nixon selected for the Kennedy camp was already being groomed. He was a former agent from his Nixon’s vice presidential detail, Robert Newbrand—a man so loyal he once pledged he would do anything—even kill—for Nixon.

The President was most interested in learning about the Sen. Kennedy’s sex life. He wanted, more than anything, stated Haldeman in The Ends of Power, to “catch (Kennedy) in the sack with one of his babes.”

In a recently transcribed tape of a September 8, 1972 talk among the President and aides Bob Haldeman and Alexander Butterfield, Nixon asks whether Secret Service chief James Rowley would appoint Newbrand to head Kennedy’s detail:

Haldeman: He's to assign Newbrand.

President Nixon: Does he understand that he's to do that?

Butterfield: He's effectively already done it. And we have a full force assigned, 40 men.

Haldeman: I told them to put a big detail on him (unclear).

President Nixon: A big detail is correct. One that can cover him around the clock, every place he goes. (Laughter obscures mixed voices.)

President Nixon: Right. No, that's really true. He has got to have the same coverage that we give the others, because we're concerned about security and we will not assume the responsibility unless we're with him all the time.

Haldeman: And Amanda Burden (one of Kennedy’s alleged girlfriends) can't be trusted. (Unclear.) You never know what she might do. (Unclear.)

Haldeman then assures the President that Newbrand “will do anything that I tell him to … He really will. And he has come to me twice and absolutely, sincerely said, "With what you've done for me and what the President's done for me, I just want you to know, if you want someone killed, if you want anything else done, any way, any direction …"

President Nixon: The thing that I (unclear) is this: We just might get lucky and catch this son-of-a-bitch and ruin him for '76.

Haldeman: That's right.

President Nixon: He doesn't know what he's really getting into. We're going to cover him, and we are not going to take "no" for an answer. He can't say "no." The Kennedys are arrogant as hell with these Secret Service. He says, "Fine," and (Newbrand) should pick the detail, too.

Toward the end of this conversation, Nixon exclaims that Newbrand’s spying “(is) going to be fun,” and Haldeman responds: “Newbrand will just love it.”

CONTINUED...

http://surftofind.com/tedkennedy

Claims of Saudi hand in September 11 attacks hang over Obama's speech

Paul McGeough
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), September 12, 2014

Washington: It was ironic that the launch of Barack Obama's war on terror coincided with the 13th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, doubly so because it meant the president's pitch for Saudi Arabia to join his global coalition coincided with renewed attention on claims that Washington was suppressing evidence of Saudi complicity in the strikes on key US cities.

Initially suppressed by the Bush administration, and still kept under wraps by Obama, 28 pages redacted from a Joint Congressional Inquiry into the attacks are locked in a secure underground store beneath Congress.

The New Yorker magazine quotes Massachusetts Democrat Stephen Lynch on the document offering direct evidence of the complicity "on the part of Saudi individuals and entities in Al-Qaeda's attacks on America". But the same report quotes North Carolina Republican Walter Jones' very different take on a document that he, like Lynch, claims to have read - "it's about the Bush administration and its relationship with the Saudis".

A third member of Congress is quoted on the document providing "very disturbing" evidence of Saudi government support for the September 11 hijackers, most of whom were Saudi. He argues: "the real question is whether it was sanctioned at the royal-family level or beneath that, and whether these leads were followed through?"

Well yes … and no. A subsequent investigation, the so-called 9/11 Commission, looked into the allegations and, commission director Philip Zelikow told The New Yorker his investigators could not substantiate what he described as "wild accusations that needed to be checked out … an agglomeration of preliminary, unvetted reports".

CONTINUED...

http://www.smh.com.au/world/claims-of-saudi-hand-in-september-11-attacks-hang-over-obamas-speech-20140912-10fvvb.html