RFK children speak about assassination in Dallas

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34. A historic day...

Law professor Wilkes reviews di Eugenio:

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.

Currently, the conspiracy theories most worthy of consideration are these: (1) the Mafia did it; (2) the CIA did it; (3) the anti-Castro Cubans–that is, opponents of Cuba’s communist leader, Fidel Castro–did it; (4) white-supremacist racists and right-wing extremists did it; and (5) the conspiracy consisted of persons who were affiliated with the Mafia, the CIA, or various anti-Castro or extreme rightist groups, but who were acting as individuals (albeit perhaps with some connivance from the organizations with which they had affiliations).  Although still the subject of lively discussion in JFK assassination literature, conspiracy theories that the assassination was attributable to the FBI or the Secret Service, to the Soviet Union, to Fidel Castro’s Cuba and pro-Castroites, or to Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson (and Johnson’s supporters), appear less credible with the passing of each year.

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.”

Jim Garrison’s theory of the assassination clashed with that of the Warren Commission, which denied there had been a conspiracy.  According to the Warren Report, 24-year old Lee Harvey Oswald, supposedly a twisted, embittered, discontented, hate-filled Marxist and ex-Marine who had once defected to the Soviet Union, assassinated JFK,  acting alone and without assistance.  Using an old, flimsy, cheap,  second-hand bolt-action 6.5 mm Italian carbine, Oswald allegedly fired three shots in less than 10 seconds from a sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository at the president’s open limousine, which was moving at an angle, downhill, and away from the Depository.  The fatal head shot occurred when Kennedy was 265 feet from the window.  (Two days later Oswald, a handcuffed prisoner surrounded by dozens of police officers inside a police station, was shot dead by Jack Ruby, an organized crime figure who operated a Dallas night club and strip joint.  Oswald’s murder occurred on live TV and was witnessed by millions.)

President Lyndon B. Johnson, who appointed the Warren Commission, described Lee Harvey Oswald as “quite a mysterious fellow.”  Political science professor and JFK assassination authority Philip H. Melanson agrees, noting that “[f]rom the time he was an eighteen-year old Marine until his murder at twenty-four, [Oswald] lived a secret life.”  What we know of Oswald’s life from 1959 to 1963, Melanson adds, appears to be “strpouctured by endless coincidences and heavy doses of good and bad luck” and includes a “pattern of mysteries and anomalies” and “frequent and unusual interactions with government agencies” that can hardly be “random and innocent” or the result of “coincidence or happenstance.”

CONTINUED...

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