MORE REFLECTIONS ON THE JFK ASSASSINATION
by TIM KELLY
by Tim Kelly
Despite the mounds of evidence indicating that President
John F. Kennedy was the victim of an elaborate conspiracy organized by elements
of the national-security state, there are many who still believe the Lee Harvey
Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission.
A partial explanation for this could be ignorance. Many are
simply not aware of the difficulties in the Warren Commission Report. Sure,
they may be generally aware of the controversy surrounding it, but they are
unfamiliar with the particulars and have neither the time nor the inclination
to look further into the matter. So they accept the regime’s
explanation of the assassination, no matter how questionable it is, and move
on.
But I believe there is another explanation: denial. Many
Americans cling to an idealized view of their country. Although they are aware
that coups and assassinations frequently occur abroad, they tell themselves
that such things cannot happen at home. After all, America
James Douglass deals with this
objection in his magnificent book JFK and the Unspeakable. “The unspeakable” was a term
coined by the Catholic spiritual writer Thomas Merton. The unspeakable is “an
evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to
describe.” The truth regarding the JFK assassination, according to Douglass, is
“unspeakable” because its implications are too disturbing for many to accept.
Douglass explains,
The extent to which our national security state was
systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we absorb a system
and think in a system. We lack the independence needed to judge the system
around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security
state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s
murder and immediate cover-up.
On December 22,
1963 , one month to the day after JFK’s death, The Washington
Post published an op-ed by former president Harry S. Truman, in which he
expressed dismay at what the CIA had become
in the 16 years since its creation in 1947. Truman wrote that he was “disturbed
by the way CIA has been diverted from its
original assignment” to keep the President fully informed on intelligence
matters and had been transformed into “an operational and at times a
policy-making arm of the Government.
Interestingly, Truman’s op-ed ran in the paper’s morning
edition but was mysteriously pulled from the afternoon edition and was ignored
by the national press.
Truman’s regrets regarding the creation of the CIA
are important because it was during his presidency that the fledgling agency
took form. It was during the Eisenhower years, however, that the CIA
really came of age; running wild around the world, staging coups, fomenting civil
wars, and assassinating foreign leaders, all the while developing a vast array
of capabilities. By 1963, the CIA had become
a rogue agency.
JFK was not totally without blame for this ominous
development. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he created
the Special
Group Augmented (SGA ). This
committee, which was led by his brother Robert and staffed by high-ranking
members of the country’s national-security apparatus, was charged with marshaling
the resources of multiple government agencies to carry out a regime-change
operation in Cuba SGA decided to
coordinate the various anti-Castro activities then being conducted by the
Pentagon, CIA , and State Department under
one program. The program was code named Operation Mongoose.
Mongoose directed a broad range of activities against the
Castro government. These included economic warfare, sabotage, and even
assassination. General Edward Lansdale, the man selected to lead the program,
brought in a group of CIA operatives who had
extensive experience orchestrating coups and carrying out assassinations
abroad. Mongoose also enlisted the aid of Mafia figures who were eager to
reclaim their Cuban casino operations.
What Mongoose did was pool the resources and put in place
the various planners, technicians, moles, mechanics, and patsies necessary to
carry out the operation: the killing of Castro. For the conspirators in JFK’s
assassination, it could have been a relatively simple matter of reverse
engineering the program to target the U.S.
The motive for the conspirators might have been JFK’s
“retreat” from Cuba Cuba Soviet
Union , and that it was imperative that the Cold War be ended.
Perhaps it was at this point that factions within the military/intelligence
apparatus decided to kill him. Kennedy’s death would automatically lead to the
ascension of Lyndon B. Johnson to the presidency, a man much more amenable to
the interests of the military-industrial complex.
Admittedly, the above scenario is speculative. But, given
the available evidence, it is certainly more plausible than the official “lone-nut” scenario
put forth by the Warren Commission and still promoted by the mainstream media
as history. Of course, it would clarify matters a great deal if the U.S.
Taking a step back, we can see that JFK’s assassination
appears to be a classic palace coup, although one that was broadcast to the
entire nation and captured in living color for posterity.
JFK was no babe in the woods, but he had pretensions of
leadership that may have ultimately put him at odds with the national-security
state. This clash culminated in the bloody events in Dallas November 22, 1963 . The
tragic irony, of course, is that JFK and his brother, Robert, participated in
the construction of the very system that many believe murdered them both.
Tim Kelly is a columnist and policy advisor at The Future of
Freedom Foundation in Fairfax , Virginia America
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