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-...

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....

Gunrunner Ruby and the CIA

by Lisa Pease

It's not as if they didn't know. Assistant counsels to the Warren Commission Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert wrote, in a memo to the Warren Commission members dated March 20, 1964, that "the most promising links between Jack Ruby and the assassination of President Kennedy are established through underworld figures and anti-Castro Cubans, and extreme right-wing Americans." 1 Two months later, Griffin and Hubert wrote another memo to the Commission, significantly titled "Adequacy of the Ruby Investigation" in which they warned, "We believe that a reasonable possibility exists that Ruby has maintained a close interest in Cuban affairs to the extent necessary to participate in gun sales or smuggling."

"They're going to find out about Cuba.
They're going to find out about the guns,
find out about New Orleans,
find out about everything."

Ruby had talked about it himself while in jail, reportedly telling a friend, "They're going to find out about Cuba. They're going to find out about the guns, find out about New Orleans, find out about everything." 2 Tales of Ruby running guns to Cuba abounded in the FBI reports taken in the first weeks after the assassination, yet neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee pursued those leads very far. Griffin and Hubert expressed concern over this, saying that "neither Oswald's Cuban interests in Dallas nor Ruby's Cuban activities have been adequately explored." 3

If They Dared

Hubert and Griffin expressed in their memo of May 14 to Rankin that "we believe that the possibility exists, based on evidence already available, that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald. The existence of such dealings can only be surmised since the present investigation has not focused on that area." 4 They expressed concern that "Ruby had time to engage in susbtantial activities in addition to the management of his Clubs" and that "Ruby has always been a person who looked for money-making 'sidelines'." They even suggested that since the Fort Worth manufacturer of the famous "Twist Board" Ruby was demonstrating the night after the assassination had no known sales, and was manufactured by an oil field equipment company, that "he possibility remains that the 'twist board' was a front for some other illegal enterprise." But what Griffin and Hubert kept coming back to is that there was "much evidence" that Ruby "was interested in Cuban matters, citing his relationship to Louis McWillie; his attempted sale of jeeps to Castro, his reported attendance of meetings "in connection with the sale of arms to Cubans and the smuggling out of refugees"; and Ruby's quick correction of Wade's remark that Oswald was a member of the Free Cuba Committee, a group populated with such notables as Clare Booth Luce, Admiral Arleigh Burke, and Hal Hendrix. "Bits of evidence link Ruby to others who may have been interested in Cuban affairs."

What was their recommendation, based on such tantalizing evidence? "We suggest that these matters cannot be left 'hanging in the air.' They must either be explored further or a firm decision must be made not to do so supported by stated reasons for the decision." History has given us the commission's decision on this, but a clue to the motivation shows up in this same memo, in regards to Seth Kantor, who claimed to have seen Ruby at Parkland hospital around the time of Kennedy's death. "We must decide who is telling the truth, for there would be considerable significance if it would be concluded that Ruby is lying." The concern was not what the truth was, but what the truth might mean if it was uncomfortably discovered.

Ruby was lying, and the implications are enormous.

CONTINUED...

http://www.ctka.net/pr795-ruby.html

TO: SAC, HOUSTON DATE: 11-22-63

FROM: SA GRAHAM W. KITCHEL

SUBJECT: UNKNOWN SUBJECT;
ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT
JOHN F. KENNEDY

At 1:45 p.m. Mr. GEORGE H. W. BUSH, President of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company, Houston, Texas, residence 5525 Briar, Houston, telephonically furnished the following information to writer by long distance telephone call from Tyler, Texas.

BUSH stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent weeks, the day and source unknown. He stated that one JAMES PARROTT has been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston.

BUSH stated that PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is active in political matters in this area. He stated that he felt Mrs. FAWLEY, telephone number SU 2-5239, or ARLINE SMITH, telephone number JA 9-9194 of the Harris County Republican Party Headquarters would be able to furnish additional information regarding the identity of PARROTT.

BUSH stated that he was proceeding to Dallas, Texas, would remain in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel and return to his residence on 11-23-63. His office telephone number is CA 2-0395.

# # #

Date: November 29, 1963

To: Director
Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State

From: John Edgar Hoover, Director

Subject: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
NOVEMBER 22, 1963

Our Miami, Florida, Office on November 23, 1963, advised that the Office of Coordinator of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in U. S. policy, which is not true.

Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in the Miami area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did not entirely agree with the President's policy concerning Cuba, the feeling is that the President's death represents a great loss not only to the U. S. but to all of Latin America. These sources know of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.

An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that these individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination.

The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W. T. Forsyth of this Bureau.

# # #

How Was The CIA Formed?

By absorbing the Nazi war criminal infrastructure

by Jared Israel


===========================================================

On Oct 8, 1998, the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act became US law. This legislation:

“...calls for the establishment of the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group to locate, identify, and make available to the public Nazi war criminal records.” <1>

The IWG’s task was to organize previously classified documents from the OSS, predecessor of the CIA, as well as from the CIA and other intelligence sources, and to make these documents available to the public. These were to include documents relating to possible collusion between US government organizations and Nazi war criminals.

Millions of pages have been released but very little information has trickled down to the broad public. And this trickle has been presented in a way calculated to minimize public awareness of the extent to which the Nazi apparatus was recruited in order - literally - to *become* the US covert operations and intelligence apparatus (the CIA etc.)

This story centers around the figure of Reinhard Gehlen.

===========================================================

Who was Reinhard Gehlen, and how did US intelligence use him?

===========================================================

From April 1942 on, Gehlen was head of German Armies East, the Nazi Army’s intelligence corps in conquered Soviet territory. Commenting on the release of some previously classified documents concerning Gehlen, the IWG wrote:

“Working immediately after the war with Army Intelligence, the Gehlen Organization became the responsibility of the CIA, which continued the relationship until 1956. One document released by the IWG on June 26, 2000, shows an early connection between the Strategic Services Unit (predecessor of the CIA) and Gehlen’s group. The SSU searched for members of Gehlen’s organization in POW camps and extensively interrogated them. As the Cold War developed during 1946, American intelligence officials found themselves lacking recent experience with Soviet intelligence activities and decided to use German experts on the Soviet Union - even though some may have been war criminals.”<2>

The above paragraph includes not one false statement; yet it is completely misleading. This suggests that the IWG’s talent may lie in disinformation rather than research.

1) The statement that the Gehlen organization was “working...with Army Intelligence” is misleading because “working with” implies equality of power: one does not “work with” men hiding from the law. The Nazis recruited by US intelligence were wanted for the worst war crimes; they were “employees” whose alternative was the hangman's noose. Surely they did what they were told.

2) The use of “working with” is also misleading because it suggests that Gehlen’s Organization (the 'Org’) was separate from the Strategic Services Unit and later from the CIA. This is not true. Gehlen’s Org became a decisive, perhaps *the* decisive component of the CIA’s worldwide apparatus. Its thousands of highly experienced operatives, much older than incoming CIA recruits, had to have a big effect on the culture of the CIA. Thus, US intelligence was Nazified.

3) The statement that, “As the Cold War developed during 1946, American intelligence officials found themselves lacking recent experience with Soviet intelligence activities and decided to use German experts on the Soviet Union - even though some may have been war criminals,” is false for three reasons.

a) First, it states that the advent of the so-called Cold War preceded the decision to use Gehlen. But in fact, the relationship between US intelligence and Gehlen began before World War II ended. That is, it began considerably before the ‘outbreak’ of the Cold War.

b) Second, under the terms of the agreements at the Potsdam Conference, <2A>

"5. War criminals and those who have participated in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes shall be arrested and brought to judgment. Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions and any other persons dangerous to the occupation or its objectives shall be arrested and interned."

As we shall see, Gehlen and his Foreign Armies East organization did participate in "planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes."

CONTINUED...

http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/gehle...

Tape: Call on JFK Wasn't Oswald

.c The Associated Press
By DEB RIECHMANN
Sunday, Nov 21, 1999

WASHINGTON (AP) - Hours after President Kennedy was assassinated, FBI agents reportedly listened to a tape of a phone call that a man identifying himself as ``Lee Oswald'' had placed to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City.

They made a startling discovery: The voice on the tape was not Oswald's, government records say.

This controversial tape has been a question mark in the assassination investigation since Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963. Only now - 36 years to the day after the murder - has the government released a flurry of new details about it.

The CIA said years ago that the tapes on which it recorded the call were erased. Documents released in recent years said otherwise. The latest and newest of declassified documents offer more evidence that the tapes survived.

The discovery that the voice on the tape was someone other than Oswald was a ``disquieting discovery because the man who impersonated Oswald was still at large,'' said John Newman, an ex-military intelligence analyst, author and professor at the University of Maryland.

CONTINUED…

http://www.jfklancer.com/LNE/LHO-Mexi.html

On Receiving the Mary Ferrell-JFKLancer Pioneer Award
for Lifetime Achievement in the Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

Dallas, November 21, 1998

Gaeton Fonzi

EXCERPT...

The Warren Commission wrong? The United States Government wrong?

Impossible. Vince Salandria must be some kind of nut. Or maybe just a publicity-seeking shyster. Either way, he'd make an interesting little story. I vividly remember my first visit with Salandria in the paneled basement office of his row home on Delancey Street in Center City. He was 38 years old then, a Penn Law graduate, a man of modest stature and demeanor, with olive skin, dark eyes and a thin, serious face. His voice was a soft velvet but he spoke with a deep intellectual intensity. Funny, he didn't look or sound like a nut.

Salandria told me his interest in the Warren Commission had begun shortly after it was formed because he didn't like the fact that it was holding secret hearings. He began to monitor its activities as best he could from news clips and unofficial reports. He spent his vacation in Dallas to familiarize himself with the murder scene. He ordered the Commission's Report and its 26 volumes of evidence as soon as they were issued and plunged into a page-by-page study.

"My initial feeling," Salandria told me, "was that if this were a simple assassination, as the Commission claimed, the facts would come together very neatly. If there were more than one assassin the details would not fit." Salandria claimed the details did not fit. He told me there were blatant contradictions between the Commission's conclusions and the evidence in the 26 volumes.

Blatant contradictions? That was hard to believe. These were smart, brilliant men on the Warren Commission, they wouldn't permit such flagrant inaccuracy. But Salandria gave me his extra copy of the Report and its 26 volumes of evidence and suggested that I take the time to study them carefully.

I did. And Salandria was right. It was unequivocally clear that the details did not fit. There were blatant contradictions between the Report's conclusions and the Commission's own evidence in its 26 volumes.

The truth had hit me upside the head and still I refused to embrace it. There had to be some valid explanation for the contradictions and I knew the man who would give me that explanation was Arlen Specter. I had known Arlen before he went off to the Warren Commission, considered him not only smart but tough and courageous. I had written about the guts he had to successfully prosecute the politically powerful but corrupt boss of the local Teamsters Union. I was sure that once I sat down with Specter he would explain and clear up all those apparent contradictions in the Warren Report.

Local reporters had, of course, asked Specter about the Warren Report when it was released. He was vigorous in defense of its conclusions. He called the Commission's investigation the most exhaustive and complete in history. The single bullet theory, he insisted, was the only possible way to explain how Lee Harvey Oswald had shot President Kennedy. The reporters dutifully reported what he said.

Amazingly enough, even after all those months had gone by since the release of the Warren Report, I was the first journalist to ask Specter about specific details and about the Report's inconsistencies. I apparently caught Specter off guard.

CONTINUED...

http://www.jfklancer.com/gfonzi.html

JFK and Vietnam

Kennedy's assassination 45 years ago today made it an American war.

By Gordon M. Goldstein
Opinion
Los Angeles Times
November 22, 2008

EXCERPT...

Over the course of the year, Kennedy's advisors presented him with half a dozen or more proposals to Americanize the war. In one, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued that it would be difficult to prevent "the fall of South Vietnam by any measures short of the introduction of U.S. forces on a substantial scale."

Kennedy's advisors told him that to defend the Saigon regime might take more than 200,000 combat troops. McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor, believed that committing American troops was vital. "Laos was never really ours after 1954," Bundy explained to the skeptical president, invoking another Southeast Asian nation where Kennedy had resisted intervention. "Vietnam is and wants to be."

Kennedy was not receptive. Long before becoming president, he had spoken out in Congress against the disastrous French experience in Vietnam, citing it as a reason the U.S. should never fight a ground war there. In the summer of 1961, he said he had accepted the conclusion of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who counseled against a land war in Asia, insisting that even a million American infantry soldiers would not be sufficient to prevail. He would offer military aid and training to Saigon, but he would not authorize the dispatch of ground forces.

Over the three years of his presidency, Kennedy sometimes invoked hawkish rhetoric about Vietnam. He also increased the military advisors and training personnel there to roughly 16,000. But McNamara and Bundy both came to believe that Kennedy would not have Americanized the war -- even if the price was communism in South Vietnam.

Kennedy realized that the inability of the United States to shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail -- the lines of infiltration and resupply from North Vietnam -- would make it impossible to defeat the insurgency. "Those trails are a built-in excuse for failure," Kennedy told an aide in the spring of 1962, "and a built-in argument for escalation." Kennedy was so dubious he declared to White House aide Michael Forrestal that the odds against defeating the Viet Cong were 100 to 1.

In early 1963, Kennedy told Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who opposed increased U.S. involvement in Vietnam, that he would begin withdrawing advisors from South Vietnam at the beginning of his second term in 1965. Kennedy disclosed the same plan to Roswell Gilpatric, his deputy secretary of Defense. But the tragedy in Dallas in November 1963 changed everything.

What happened after Kennedy's death is a familiar story. Lyndon B. Johnson ran for president in 1964, and in August of that year he used an ambiguous incident in the Gulf of Tonkin to extract an open-ended congressional authorization for military action against North Vietnam. On March 8, 1965, Johnson sent the first 3,500 Marines to Vietnam. Within months he had approved deploying 175,000 combat troops.

CONTINUED...

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/a...