da trute finely perzents itsef
======
http://truedemocracy.net/td3/shadow/s30.html
...President Truman said of the CIA and its creation, "I think that it was a mistake. And if I'd known what was going to happen, I never would have done it.... But it got out of hand.... Now as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don't just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own and there is nobody to keep track of what they are up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they will have something to report on. They've become . . . it's become a government of all its own and all secret. They just don't have to report to anybody. . . . The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to. . . . You've got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn't matter whether it's the birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA."...
======
Society for Ethical Culture
http://nysec.org
======
From:
How the Failure To Identify, Prosecute and Convict President Kennedy's Assassins Has Led To Today's Crisis Of Democracy
by Joan Mellen 1/24/6 [lecture delivered at the Ethical Culture Society]http://joanmellen.net/NYC_2006article.html
http://nysoundposse.com/2006/01/event-who-planned-murder-of-jfk-who.html
...the truth about the Kennedy assassination...will help us understand how we have arrived at a point where people...are comparing the current U.S. government with the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century... 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...the clandestine service of the CIA not only covered up the truth about the Kennedy assassination...but organized the event itself. That the CIA escaped without penalty...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.,...
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,”...
...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...The documentation available since the passage of the JFK Act in 1992 overwhelmingly supports de Gaulle's view... 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...comparing the deliberate ignoring of crucial information by the 9/11 Commission with a similar failure to investigate a key lead by the Warren Commission...the Able Danger intelligence unit had identified Mohammed Atta and other accused hijackers as part of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States at least a year before 9/11. Colonel Shaffer had wanted this information to go immediately to the FBI only for Defense Department lawyers to forbid Able Danger from contacting the Bureau...Shaffer...had presented the findings of the Able Danger team to Philip Zelikow, that same executive staff director of the 9/11 Commission who has defended the recent attacks on Jim Garrison as a dupe of the KGB! Zelikow saw to it that the Able Danger information never appeared in the 9/11 Commission Report, and went on to deny that he was given the information. He now works on the staff of Condeleeza Rice.
One might ask: could Zelikow and company have gotten away with denying the reality of a cover-up of vital information about 9/11 if we had demanded the truth from the Warren Commission?...demanding the truth about the Kennedy assassination, even at this late date, is a step toward restoring our basic freedoms. The discourse needs to go even further than point to who planned and implemented the crime. Was the CIA acting alone on its own behalf? Whose interests did the Agency serve in 1963...?...The discussion of who rules America might begin with President Eisenhower's heroic warning against a military-industrial (and we need, of course, to add national security) complex. “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” President Eisenhower added. He cut the military budget as soon as he took office; he didn't believe the U.S. should be a militarized nation. The CIA, the research reveals, sabotaged President Eisenhower's effort to achieve détente with the Soviets in the final year of his presidency...
...Eisenhower had a good definition of “National Security.” He said “national security” meant that the country was proceeding in peace and without a deficit...
In November, 1963...LTV, a major defense contractor, was almost bankrupt. Defense contracts flowing from the Vietnam War changed that, and by 1968 the stock had increased geometrically in value. Meanwhile we know that President Kennedy opposed vehemently a protracted ground war, and that as soon as he was dead, Lyndon Johnson dispatched thousands of troops to Vietnam...Brown and Root itself had been bought by Halliburton in 1962. It is less well known that Brown and Root profited not only from the war in Iraq, but first from Vietnam. Having recognized the role of Brown and Root, and discovering that George Brown was a CIA asset (as the CIA's own released documents confirm), Jim Garrison hoped to investigate Brown's role.
Was the CIA acting on behalf of President Eisenhower's military-industrial complex? As a matter for further research, the intelligence connections of the Bushes date from before the very founding of the CIA: the Agency's mandate was outlined in 1946 by Robert A. Lovett, who was a partner of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman.
Not least, as readers of the “Nation” magazine know, after the Kennedy assassination, the FBI was enlisted to brief CIA asset George Bush...To the general observation that the CIA represented the interests of the oil-defense industries, and the Pentagon, must be added another motive for the involvement of the CIA in the assassination. Almost from the moment Kennedy took office, a conflict raged between the President and the CIA. Once Kennedy refused to be blackmailed by the CIA into a full-scale invasion of Cuba at the time of the Bay of Pigs, de Gaulle's “intra-administration war” erupted. The clandestine service of the CIA pushed for an invasion of Cuba. President Kennedy declined, and went on to fire the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, who re-emerges as the central figure at the Warren Commission.
Throughout Kennedy's brief presidency, the CIA treated him as an enemy. They withheld information, which included details about the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Also concealed from President Kennedy were the CIA's continuing assassinations and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.
John F. Kennedy, in turn, sought to reign in the CIA, and to limit the scope of its activities, including reducing the powers of the Director of Central Intelligence...He intended to cut the CIA budget. He sent, I discovered, Richard Goodwin down to No-Name Key to ask the Soldiers of Fortune training there to take over Radio Swan, the CIA radio station, on behalf of the President. They declined. Kennedy threatened the existence of the Agency as they knew themselves.
Richard Reeves, in his very honest biography of John F. Kennedy, quotes the President repeating over and over again: “I've got to do something about those CIA bastards,” and “Those CIA bastards. I'm going to get those bastards if it's the last thing I ever do.” It was the persistent refrain of the Kennedy presidency...We should not be surprised that the National Security Agency, empowered only to spy on foreign agents abroad, is spying on US instead. Research into the Kennedy assassination reveals that although the CIA was supposedly created to deal with foreign threats, the CIA operated together with the FBI in the cover-up of the Kennedy assassination. Documents reveal that this mutual cooperation dates from the moment of the founding of the CIA. In Louisiana, the sabotage of Garrison's investigation was led by the CIA, operating beyond its mandate, domestically...Oswald was virtually NEVER alone. Moreover, he was not involved with anyone who was NOT connected to the CIA...federal agencies worked actively to thwart Garrison's investigation...FBI director J. Edgar Hoover subverted Garrison's effort...Bobby Kennedy then sent Sheridan to New Orleans, as Sheridan freely admitted, to “destroy” Jim Garrison...Placing Oswald in the company of so close an associate of Bobby Kennedy, in an incident that points to foreknowledge of the assassination as well as the framing of Oswald, created the trap that would silence Bobby forever. Bobby asked his aide, Frank Mankiewicz whether “any of our people were involved,” and, Mankiewicz told me, he had asked himself, did you think there might be?...he Warren Commission and the HSCA buried what they knew about Oswald's participation in ANTI-Castro activities, information that would have led directly to the role of the CIA in the assassination.I believe that we are now suffering the consequences of allowing lies about what happened to President Kennedy to remain unchallenged. The consequence of the public not demanding that the murder of the head of state be properly investigated has led directly to the current undermining of the integrity of our democratic institutions, not least the press. An obvious consequence of the obfuscations of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee both has been the ease with which the 9/11 Commission was able to conceal important truths...Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from a sermon a year before his death: “No lie can live forever.”
======
http://tabacco.blog-city.com/cia_invisible_government__the_men_who_killed_kennedy__not_le.htm
======
From:
Don’t Call It a Conspiracy — the Kennedy Brothers
by R.U. Sirius [born Ken Goffman] 7/12/7
http://10zenmonkeys.com/2007/07/12/dont-call-it-a-conspiracy-the-kennedy-brothers
http://spacetimecurves.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html
...the hostility that existed between the Kennedy brothers and their own military, intelligence and enforcement agencies...
R.U. Sirius [born Ken Goffman] : They suckered Kennedy into letting this invasion happen. Apparently, there was a fairly recent revelation that the CIA knew the Bay of Pigs wasn't going to work and they were sure that Kennedy would be forced to mount an invasion.
DT: That's right. I think they were trying to sandbag him. They knew he was young and inexperienced. According to the CIA's own internal history of the Bay of Pigs, which was released and de-classified in 2005, they knew that it would fail. They knew that their own motley brigade of Cuban exiles weren't sufficient to defeat Castro, and they thought that Kennedy's hand would be forced to send in the Marines and Air Force once these guys were pinned down on the beaches. But he didn't. He was very loath to widen the war. He knew — as the CIA itself later determined in an intelligence estimate — that if we were to do that, it would end up like what we're seeing today in Iraq. U.S. forces would have quickly swept aside Castro's military, they'd have marched on to Havana and then they would've gotten bogged down in a long and bloody occupation.
Did Kennedy suspect that he had been sandbagged?
DT: Yes. And he was furious. Afterwards, he famously threatened to shatter the CIA and scatter it to the winds. And he did fire the top two officials of the CIA — Allen Dulles, who ironically later became the most active member of the Warren Commission (to investigate the assassination of JFK), and Richard Bissell. And he was constantly re-shuffling his Joint Chiefs, because they were some frightening characters as well. The head of the Air Force, Curtis LeMay, actually thought you could fight and win a nuclear war.
RU: LeMay comes across in this book as actually very anxious to just get right into a nuclear war. And there's another character – Lyman Lemnitzer — true psycho maniacs. Talk a little bit about these characters.
DT: Those are two of my favorites! Curtis LeMay was this cigar-chomping World War II hero who had devastated Japan with firebombing assaults during that war. He knew that, in the early '60s, America had massive nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. And he thought that was our window of opportunity to take the commies out. Do it now. We would, of course, suffer millions of casualties of our own, but he argued with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that you could still win the war as long as you had more weapons in the end.
RU: The one who dies with the most bombs wins.
DT: Exactly. LeMay, of course, was the inspiration for General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove.
RU: And he was George Wallace's Vice Presidential candidate in 1968.
DT: Lyman Lemnitzer is another frightening character. Kennedy thought he was a dope — that's what Arthur Schlesinger, the Kennedy historian, told me. This is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
RU: Right. A complete idiot.
DT: Yeah, a complete idiot. And at one point, he came up with a scheme called Operation Northwoods, which he presents to McNamara and Kennedy.
JEFF DIEHL: The 9/11 conspiracy people bring that up all the time.
DT: Yes, because it obviously has some potentially interesting parallels with what happened on 9/11, depending on what you think 9/11 was all about. In any case, this was a plan to provoke a number of terrorist acts on U.S. soil and blame it on Castro as a way of creating a pretext for a war on Cuba. The plan included setting off bombs in Miami and Washington and killing American citizens and blaming it on Fidel.
RU: In Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, James Bamford reported that one of the ideas was to blow up John Glenn in space, and blame it on the Cubans.
DT: (Laughs) Yes.
RU: You asked McNamara about it, and McNamara didn't even remember it. I get the sense that the Kennedy administration didn't even take it seriously. They just kind of tossed it in the wastebasket.
DT: I found a memo that Lyman and Lemnitzer did bring it up in the meeting with Kennedy, and he dismissed it out of hand. And Kennedy said, "I hope you're prepared for a wider war." In other words, he thought the Soviets would move against West Berlin if we were to move on Cuba.
I think Jack Kennedy was a wise and temperate man who'd learned the horrors of war firsthand as a young Navy officer in World War II. His own brother, who was a Navy pilot in World War II, had been shot down and killed during that war. So he wasn't like the kind of rich kids we see in office today in the White House…
RU: Although he was a rich kid.
DT: That's right. He was a rich kid. But he actually served in the military, and he knew firsthand the horrors of war.
RU: I love this expression that you use to describe how Kennedy operated. "In the end, JFK threaded the needle of Berlin, as he would do repeatedly during his administration, avoiding either an explosive confrontation or embarrassing capitulation in an artful dance, combining tough speech, symbolic military measures, and back channel diplomacy." Threading the needle – he was trying to sneak down the middle.
DT: Right. He was a skillful guy at the game of politics. He knew that if he came out too publicly as a force for peace, he would be pilloried by the far right, which was on the rise in those days – and was strong in the military — and he would be portrayed as a wimp. And, of course, Democrats have been portrayed that way ever since. But Kennedy was artful about avoiding that label. At the same time, behind the scenes, he was clearly trying to thread the needle and get out of these war situations — in Berlin, in Vietnam, in Laos, and in Cuba.
======
excerpt "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years "http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/about/excerpt.html
..."I think he told me with pleasure," Kennedy would recall. Twenty minutes later, Hoover phoned again to deliver the final blow: "The president's dead," he said and promptly hung up. Again, Kennedy would remember, his voice was oddly flat - "not quite as excited as if he were reporting the fact that he had found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University."...
RFK's search for the truth about the crime of the century has long been an untold story. But it is deeply loaded with historic significance. Kennedy's investigative odyssey - which began with a frantic zeal immediately after his brother's assassination, and then secretly continued in fitful bursts until his own murder less than five years later - did not succeed in bringing the case to court. But Robert Kennedy was a central figure in the drama - not only as his brother's attorney general and the second most powerful official in the Kennedy administration, but as JFK's principal emissary to the dark side of American power. And his hunt for the truth sheds a cold, bright light on the forces that he suspected were behind the murder of his brother. Bobby Kennedy was America's first assassination conspiracy theorist...
======
http://freepedia.co.uk/booktalbot.php ...even on 22 November 1963, RFK had reason to believe that dark forces were at work in Dallas...he planned to open an investigation into the assassination had he become president in 1968...
======
======
http://truedemocracy.net/td3/shadow/s30.html
...President Truman said of the CIA and its creation, "I think that it was a mistake. And if I'd known what was going to happen, I never would have done it.... But it got out of hand.... Now as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don't just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own and there is nobody to keep track of what they are up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they will have something to report on. They've become . . . it's become a government of all its own and all secret. They just don't have to report to anybody. . . . The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to. . . . You've got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn't matter whether it's the birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA."...
======
Society for Ethical Culture
http://nysec.org
======
From:
How the Failure To Identify, Prosecute and Convict President Kennedy's Assassins Has Led To Today's Crisis Of Democracy
by Joan Mellen 1/24/6 [lecture delivered at the Ethical Culture Society]http://joanmellen.net/NYC_2006article.html
http://nysoundposse.com/2006/01/event-who-planned-murder-of-jfk-who.html
...the truth about the Kennedy assassination...will help us understand how we have arrived at a point where people...are comparing the current U.S. government with the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century... 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...the clandestine service of the CIA not only covered up the truth about the Kennedy assassination...but organized the event itself. That the CIA escaped without penalty...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.,...
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,”...
...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...The documentation available since the passage of the JFK Act in 1992 overwhelmingly supports de Gaulle's view... 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...comparing the deliberate ignoring of crucial information by the 9/11 Commission with a similar failure to investigate a key lead by the Warren Commission...the Able Danger intelligence unit had identified Mohammed Atta and other accused hijackers as part of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States at least a year before 9/11. Colonel Shaffer had wanted this information to go immediately to the FBI only for Defense Department lawyers to forbid Able Danger from contacting the Bureau...Shaffer...had presented the findings of the Able Danger team to Philip Zelikow, that same executive staff director of the 9/11 Commission who has defended the recent attacks on Jim Garrison as a dupe of the KGB! Zelikow saw to it that the Able Danger information never appeared in the 9/11 Commission Report, and went on to deny that he was given the information. He now works on the staff of Condeleeza Rice.
One might ask: could Zelikow and company have gotten away with denying the reality of a cover-up of vital information about 9/11 if we had demanded the truth from the Warren Commission?...demanding the truth about the Kennedy assassination, even at this late date, is a step toward restoring our basic freedoms. The discourse needs to go even further than point to who planned and implemented the crime. Was the CIA acting alone on its own behalf? Whose interests did the Agency serve in 1963...?...The discussion of who rules America might begin with President Eisenhower's heroic warning against a military-industrial (and we need, of course, to add national security) complex. “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” President Eisenhower added. He cut the military budget as soon as he took office; he didn't believe the U.S. should be a militarized nation. The CIA, the research reveals, sabotaged President Eisenhower's effort to achieve détente with the Soviets in the final year of his presidency...
...Eisenhower had a good definition of “National Security.” He said “national security” meant that the country was proceeding in peace and without a deficit...
In November, 1963...LTV, a major defense contractor, was almost bankrupt. Defense contracts flowing from the Vietnam War changed that, and by 1968 the stock had increased geometrically in value. Meanwhile we know that President Kennedy opposed vehemently a protracted ground war, and that as soon as he was dead, Lyndon Johnson dispatched thousands of troops to Vietnam...Brown and Root itself had been bought by Halliburton in 1962. It is less well known that Brown and Root profited not only from the war in Iraq, but first from Vietnam. Having recognized the role of Brown and Root, and discovering that George Brown was a CIA asset (as the CIA's own released documents confirm), Jim Garrison hoped to investigate Brown's role.
Was the CIA acting on behalf of President Eisenhower's military-industrial complex? As a matter for further research, the intelligence connections of the Bushes date from before the very founding of the CIA: the Agency's mandate was outlined in 1946 by Robert A. Lovett, who was a partner of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman.
Not least, as readers of the “Nation” magazine know, after the Kennedy assassination, the FBI was enlisted to brief CIA asset George Bush...To the general observation that the CIA represented the interests of the oil-defense industries, and the Pentagon, must be added another motive for the involvement of the CIA in the assassination. Almost from the moment Kennedy took office, a conflict raged between the President and the CIA. Once Kennedy refused to be blackmailed by the CIA into a full-scale invasion of Cuba at the time of the Bay of Pigs, de Gaulle's “intra-administration war” erupted. The clandestine service of the CIA pushed for an invasion of Cuba. President Kennedy declined, and went on to fire the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, who re-emerges as the central figure at the Warren Commission.
Throughout Kennedy's brief presidency, the CIA treated him as an enemy. They withheld information, which included details about the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Also concealed from President Kennedy were the CIA's continuing assassinations and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.
John F. Kennedy, in turn, sought to reign in the CIA, and to limit the scope of its activities, including reducing the powers of the Director of Central Intelligence...He intended to cut the CIA budget. He sent, I discovered, Richard Goodwin down to No-Name Key to ask the Soldiers of Fortune training there to take over Radio Swan, the CIA radio station, on behalf of the President. They declined. Kennedy threatened the existence of the Agency as they knew themselves.
Richard Reeves, in his very honest biography of John F. Kennedy, quotes the President repeating over and over again: “I've got to do something about those CIA bastards,” and “Those CIA bastards. I'm going to get those bastards if it's the last thing I ever do.” It was the persistent refrain of the Kennedy presidency...We should not be surprised that the National Security Agency, empowered only to spy on foreign agents abroad, is spying on US instead. Research into the Kennedy assassination reveals that although the CIA was supposedly created to deal with foreign threats, the CIA operated together with the FBI in the cover-up of the Kennedy assassination. Documents reveal that this mutual cooperation dates from the moment of the founding of the CIA. In Louisiana, the sabotage of Garrison's investigation was led by the CIA, operating beyond its mandate, domestically...Oswald was virtually NEVER alone. Moreover, he was not involved with anyone who was NOT connected to the CIA...federal agencies worked actively to thwart Garrison's investigation...FBI director J. Edgar Hoover subverted Garrison's effort...Bobby Kennedy then sent Sheridan to New Orleans, as Sheridan freely admitted, to “destroy” Jim Garrison...Placing Oswald in the company of so close an associate of Bobby Kennedy, in an incident that points to foreknowledge of the assassination as well as the framing of Oswald, created the trap that would silence Bobby forever. Bobby asked his aide, Frank Mankiewicz whether “any of our people were involved,” and, Mankiewicz told me, he had asked himself, did you think there might be?...he Warren Commission and the HSCA buried what they knew about Oswald's participation in ANTI-Castro activities, information that would have led directly to the role of the CIA in the assassination.I believe that we are now suffering the consequences of allowing lies about what happened to President Kennedy to remain unchallenged. The consequence of the public not demanding that the murder of the head of state be properly investigated has led directly to the current undermining of the integrity of our democratic institutions, not least the press. An obvious consequence of the obfuscations of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee both has been the ease with which the 9/11 Commission was able to conceal important truths...Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from a sermon a year before his death: “No lie can live forever.”
======
http://tabacco.blog-city.com/cia_invisible_government__the_men_who_killed_kennedy__not_le.htm
======
From:
Don’t Call It a Conspiracy — the Kennedy Brothers
by R.U. Sirius [born Ken Goffman] 7/12/7
http://10zenmonkeys.com/2007/07/12/dont-call-it-a-conspiracy-the-kennedy-brothers
http://spacetimecurves.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html
...the hostility that existed between the Kennedy brothers and their own military, intelligence and enforcement agencies...
R.U. Sirius [born Ken Goffman] : They suckered Kennedy into letting this invasion happen. Apparently, there was a fairly recent revelation that the CIA knew the Bay of Pigs wasn't going to work and they were sure that Kennedy would be forced to mount an invasion.
DT: That's right. I think they were trying to sandbag him. They knew he was young and inexperienced. According to the CIA's own internal history of the Bay of Pigs, which was released and de-classified in 2005, they knew that it would fail. They knew that their own motley brigade of Cuban exiles weren't sufficient to defeat Castro, and they thought that Kennedy's hand would be forced to send in the Marines and Air Force once these guys were pinned down on the beaches. But he didn't. He was very loath to widen the war. He knew — as the CIA itself later determined in an intelligence estimate — that if we were to do that, it would end up like what we're seeing today in Iraq. U.S. forces would have quickly swept aside Castro's military, they'd have marched on to Havana and then they would've gotten bogged down in a long and bloody occupation.
Did Kennedy suspect that he had been sandbagged?
DT: Yes. And he was furious. Afterwards, he famously threatened to shatter the CIA and scatter it to the winds. And he did fire the top two officials of the CIA — Allen Dulles, who ironically later became the most active member of the Warren Commission (to investigate the assassination of JFK), and Richard Bissell. And he was constantly re-shuffling his Joint Chiefs, because they were some frightening characters as well. The head of the Air Force, Curtis LeMay, actually thought you could fight and win a nuclear war.
RU: LeMay comes across in this book as actually very anxious to just get right into a nuclear war. And there's another character – Lyman Lemnitzer — true psycho maniacs. Talk a little bit about these characters.
DT: Those are two of my favorites! Curtis LeMay was this cigar-chomping World War II hero who had devastated Japan with firebombing assaults during that war. He knew that, in the early '60s, America had massive nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. And he thought that was our window of opportunity to take the commies out. Do it now. We would, of course, suffer millions of casualties of our own, but he argued with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that you could still win the war as long as you had more weapons in the end.
RU: The one who dies with the most bombs wins.
DT: Exactly. LeMay, of course, was the inspiration for General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove.
RU: And he was George Wallace's Vice Presidential candidate in 1968.
DT: Lyman Lemnitzer is another frightening character. Kennedy thought he was a dope — that's what Arthur Schlesinger, the Kennedy historian, told me. This is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
RU: Right. A complete idiot.
DT: Yeah, a complete idiot. And at one point, he came up with a scheme called Operation Northwoods, which he presents to McNamara and Kennedy.
JEFF DIEHL: The 9/11 conspiracy people bring that up all the time.
DT: Yes, because it obviously has some potentially interesting parallels with what happened on 9/11, depending on what you think 9/11 was all about. In any case, this was a plan to provoke a number of terrorist acts on U.S. soil and blame it on Castro as a way of creating a pretext for a war on Cuba. The plan included setting off bombs in Miami and Washington and killing American citizens and blaming it on Fidel.
RU: In Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, James Bamford reported that one of the ideas was to blow up John Glenn in space, and blame it on the Cubans.
DT: (Laughs) Yes.
RU: You asked McNamara about it, and McNamara didn't even remember it. I get the sense that the Kennedy administration didn't even take it seriously. They just kind of tossed it in the wastebasket.
DT: I found a memo that Lyman and Lemnitzer did bring it up in the meeting with Kennedy, and he dismissed it out of hand. And Kennedy said, "I hope you're prepared for a wider war." In other words, he thought the Soviets would move against West Berlin if we were to move on Cuba.
I think Jack Kennedy was a wise and temperate man who'd learned the horrors of war firsthand as a young Navy officer in World War II. His own brother, who was a Navy pilot in World War II, had been shot down and killed during that war. So he wasn't like the kind of rich kids we see in office today in the White House…
RU: Although he was a rich kid.
DT: That's right. He was a rich kid. But he actually served in the military, and he knew firsthand the horrors of war.
RU: I love this expression that you use to describe how Kennedy operated. "In the end, JFK threaded the needle of Berlin, as he would do repeatedly during his administration, avoiding either an explosive confrontation or embarrassing capitulation in an artful dance, combining tough speech, symbolic military measures, and back channel diplomacy." Threading the needle – he was trying to sneak down the middle.
DT: Right. He was a skillful guy at the game of politics. He knew that if he came out too publicly as a force for peace, he would be pilloried by the far right, which was on the rise in those days – and was strong in the military — and he would be portrayed as a wimp. And, of course, Democrats have been portrayed that way ever since. But Kennedy was artful about avoiding that label. At the same time, behind the scenes, he was clearly trying to thread the needle and get out of these war situations — in Berlin, in Vietnam, in Laos, and in Cuba.
======
excerpt "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years "http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/about/excerpt.html
..."I think he told me with pleasure," Kennedy would recall. Twenty minutes later, Hoover phoned again to deliver the final blow: "The president's dead," he said and promptly hung up. Again, Kennedy would remember, his voice was oddly flat - "not quite as excited as if he were reporting the fact that he had found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University."...
RFK's search for the truth about the crime of the century has long been an untold story. But it is deeply loaded with historic significance. Kennedy's investigative odyssey - which began with a frantic zeal immediately after his brother's assassination, and then secretly continued in fitful bursts until his own murder less than five years later - did not succeed in bringing the case to court. But Robert Kennedy was a central figure in the drama - not only as his brother's attorney general and the second most powerful official in the Kennedy administration, but as JFK's principal emissary to the dark side of American power. And his hunt for the truth sheds a cold, bright light on the forces that he suspected were behind the murder of his brother. Bobby Kennedy was America's first assassination conspiracy theorist...
======
http://freepedia.co.uk/booktalbot.php ...even on 22 November 1963, RFK had reason to believe that dark forces were at work in Dallas...he planned to open an investigation into the assassination had he become president in 1968...
======
======
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 8:12 AM
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