The two most important words in the lives of the American
people for the past 60 years have been “national security.” The term has
transformed American society for the worse. It has warped the morals and values
of the American people. It has stultified conscience. It has altered the
constitutional order. It has produced a democratically elected government that
wields totalitarian powers.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal
authority to round up people, including citizens, and take them to
concentration camps, detention centers, or military dungeons where the
government can torture them, incarcerate them indefinitely, and even execute them
as suspected terrorists.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal
authority to send its military and intelligence forces into any country
anywhere in the world, kidnap people residing there, and transport them to a
prison for the purpose of torture, indefinite detention, and even execution. We
now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to sneak and
peek into people’s homes or businesses without warrants; to monitor their
emails,telephone calls, and financial transactions; and to spy on the
citizenry.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal
authority to support, with money and armaments, totalitarian regimes all
over the world and to enter into partnerships with them for the purpose of
torturing people whom the U.S.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal
authority to assassinate anyone it wants, including American citizens, anywhere
in the world, including here in the United
States
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal
authority to invade and occupy any country on earth, without a congressional
declaration of war, for any purpose whatever, including regime change and the
securing of resources.
And it’s all justified under the rubric “national security.”
Most people would concede that that’s not the kind of
country that America
Four separate amendments in the Bill of Rights address the
power of the federal government to take people, both Americans and foreigners,
into custody and to inflict harm on them: the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth
Amendments. Due process of law, right to counsel, grand-jury indictments, trial
by jury, search and seizure, cruel and unusual punishments, bail, speedy trial
— they are all expressly addressed, reflecting how important they were to our
American ancestors and to their concept of a free society.
In the age of national security, all of those protections
have been rendered moot. They have all been trumped by the concept of national
security.
Ironically, the term isn’t even found in the Constitution.
One searches in vain for some grant of power anywhere in that document relating
to “national security.” It isn’t there. Nonetheless, the government now wields
omnipotent powers — powers that the greatest totalitarian dictatorships in
history have wielded — under the rubric of “national security.”
With the exception of libertarians, hardly anyone questions
or challenges it, including those who profess an ardent allegiance to the
Constitution. Consider, for example, the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce
Clause. For decades, both libertarians and conservatives have complained that
the meaning of that clause has been so expanded as to transform it into a
general grant of power enabling the federal government to regulate the most
minute, localized aspects of economic activity.
Yet here’s a phrase — “national security” — that isn’t even
found in the Constitution, which has been interpreted to grant omnipotent,
totalitarian-like powers to the federal government, and conservatives have been
rendered mute.
It would be one thing if there had been an amendment to the
Constitution stating, “The federal government shall have the power to do
whatever it deems necessary in the interests of national security.” At least
then one could argue that such totalitarian measures were constitutional.
But that’s not the situation we have here. We have the
government coming up with a concept known as “national security,” which it has
then used to adopt powers that would otherwise violate the Constitution. It’s
as if national security has been made the foundation of the nation. Everything
else — the Constitution, society, the citizenry, freedom, prosperity — are then
based on that foundation.
The goodness of national security
What is “national security”? No one really knows. There is
certainly no precise definition of the term. It’s actually whatever the
government says it is. National security is one of the most meaningless,
nebulous, nonsensical terms in the English language, but, at the same time, the
most important term in the lives of the American people.
All the government has to do is say “national security,” and
all discussion and debate shuts down. If the government says that national
security is at stake, that’s the end of the story. Federal judges will
immediately dismiss lawsuits as soon as the government claims, “The case is a
threat to national security, your honor.” Congress will immediately suspend
investigations when the government claims that national security is at stake.
The Justice Department will defer to the national-security establishment when
it raises the issue of national security.
National security, a term not even in the Constitution,
trumps everything. It trumps the judiciary. It trumps the legislative branch of
government. It trumps federal criminal investigations. This nebulous term,
whose meaning is whatever the government wants it be at any particular time,
has been made the foundation of American society.
What is the national-security establishment? It is composed
of several agencies, two of the main ones being the vast military-industrial
establishment and the CIA . Those two
entities have done more to transform American life than anything else, even
more than the welfare state. They are the entities that enforce the sanctions
and embargoes and engage in the invasions, occupations, regime-change
operations, coups, assassinations, torture, indefinite incarcerations,
renditions, partnerships with totalitarian regimes, and executions — all in the
name of “national security.”
One of the most fascinating aspects of all this is how
successful the government has been in convincing Americans of two things: that
all this is necessary to keep them safe and, at the same time, that America has
continued to be a free country notwithstanding the fact that the government has
acquired and has exercised totalitarian powers in order to preserve national
security.
When Americans see the governments of such countries as the Soviet
Union or North Korea
But when the U.S. U.S. America
After all, as advocates of the national-security state often
remind us, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. If measures have to be taken
to preserve the nation — or the security of the nation — that are inconsistent
with the Constitution, then so be it. What good would it do to adhere strictly
to the Constitution if, by doing so, the nation were to fall to the terrorists
or the communists?
Thus, when officials in totalitarian regimes round people up
without charges, incarcerate them indefinitely, torture them, and execute them,
what they are doing is evil. But when officials within the U.S. national
security state do those same things — and more — they look upon themselves as
good and the citizenry look upon them in the same way, simply because they are
doing it to advance freedom and to preserve the national security of the United
States.
And even then, things are not so clear, at least not when it
comes to national security. For example, some foreign totalitarian regimes are
considered evil while others are considered good. Consider, for example, Iran North Korea U.S.
But then consider, say, Egypt, which has been ruled by a
brutal military dictatorship for nearly 30 years, a totalitarian regime that
wields the same kind of totalitarian powers that the U.S. government now
wields. For decades, Egyptian military and intelligence forces have rounded
people up, taken them to prison camps for indefinite detention, tortured them,
and executed them, without formal charges and trial.
Nonetheless, the U.S. U.S. U.S. Egypt Egypt U.S. U.S. Egypt
Good regime, bad regime
Sometimes, the nether world of national security becomes
even more clouded, with some nations shifting back and forth from good to evil.
Consider Iran Iraq Iran U.S. CIA , one of the
principal components of the U.S. Iran Iran
For the next 25 years, Iran CIA
even helped him and his national-security establishment to oppress the Iranian
people. When Iranians finally revolted against the domestic tyranny that the U.S. Iran U.S. Iraq U.S. United States Iraq Iran
Later, when Iraq Kuwait U.S. Iraq Iraq U.S. Iran
How did it all come to this? How did the United
States CIA
— come to be the foundation of American society?
More important, is a national-security state truly
compatible with the principles of a free society? Did Americans delude
themselves into thinking that they could retain a free and safe society with a
government that wields totalitarian powers? Did Americans sacrifice their
freedom, their security, their values, and their consciences on the altar of
national security?
Perhaps most important, has the time come to dismantle the
national-security state in order to restore a free, prosperous, peaceful,
normal, and harmonious society to our land? Is it time to restore a
limited-government, constitutional republic, the type of government that was
clearly envisioned by the Founding Fathers?
Let’s examine those questions. Let’s start by focusing on Cuba
One of the most demonstrable examples of the turn that America Cuba
Consider the economic embargo that the U.S. Cuba
What has been the purpose of the embargo? The answer: the
preservation of national security through regime change — the ouster of Fidel
Castro and his communist regime and its replacement with a regime that would be
subservient to the U.S.
What role was the embargo expected to play in that process?
The aim was to cause massive economic suffering to the Cuban citizenry —
privation, poverty, and even starvation. Then, as a result of that suffering,
the idea was that Castro would be removed from power either by a citizens’
revolt, a military coup, or abdication by Castro himself.
Obviously, the plan has never succeeded, although
undoubtedly U.S.
The embargo is also a classic example of how the turn toward
empire, militarism, and the national-security state has warped the values and
principles of the American people. While there have been those who have
objected to the embargo, even from its beginning, by and large the American
people have deferred to the authority of their government. If U.S. Cuba United
States
Ironically, a few years after the Cuban embargo was
instituted, the U.S. Cuba
The Cuban embargo demonstrated one of the core principles of
the national-security state: that the end, which was the preservation of
“national security,” justified whatever means were necessary to achieve it. If
national security required the government to inflict great suffering on the
Cuban people, then that’s just what would have to be done.
Nothing could be permitted to stand in the way of protecting
national security, whatever that term meant. What mattered was that the
national-security establishment — i.e., the military and the CIA
— knew what national security meant and had the ultimate responsibility for
protecting it.
For their part, Americans were expected to remain silent.
They were expected to defer to the authority of their government. National
security was everything.
Conscience, the casualty
What about conscience? What if Americans, whose traditional
values encompassed compassion for the poor and empathy for the suffering of
others, objected to the embargo? What about the Christian principle of loving
thy neighbor as thyself?
Americans were expected to ditch all that, and most did.
Conscience was abandoned in favor of national security. No matter how much
suffering the Cuban embargo inflicted on the Cuban people, it wasn’t something
over which most Americans troubled themselves. Given that U.S.
Conscience wasn’t all that Americans ditched with the Cuban
embargo. They also abandoned traditional American values of private property,
free enterprise, and limited government.
After all, while the embargo was ostensibly an attack on the
economic well-being of the Cuban people, it was, at the same time, an
infringement on the economic liberty of the American people. Under the
principles of economic liberty, people have a fundamental, God-given right to
travel wherever they want and to dispose of their money any way they choose.
But the embargo made it a federal criminal offense to spend
money in Cuba U.S. Cuba Cuba U.S.
The irony was that that was precisely the sort of economic
control that Castro was wielding in Cuba U.S.
Most Americans remained silent. All that mattered was
national security. If U.S.
In fact, the American mindset throughout the Cold War was
even worse than that. It wasn’t as though Americans viewed their government as
adopting evil or immoral means to protect national security. Instead, the
viewpoint was that whatever was being done by U.S. U.S. U.S. U.S.
Assassination
A good example of that mindset involved assassination.
Ordinarily, in an objective sense, assassination is something bad.
Assassination is murder, an act that is considered a grave sin under
Judeo-Christian principles. Assassination is something that our American
ancestors recoiled from as something objectively bad. When the Constitution
called the federal government into existence, the power to assassinate was not
among the enumerated powers delegated to it. Moreover, to eliminate any doubt
on the matter, the American people, as a condition for accepting the federal
government, demanded the enactment of the Fifth Amendment, which expressly
prohibited the government from depriving people of life without due process of
law.
All those principles went out the window when it came to Cuba Cuba CIA repeatedly
tried to murder him, in a variety of ways.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that U.S.
Meanwhile, Americans were expected to not question or
challenge what the CIA or the military was
doing in the name of national security. If they did, they themselves would come
under close scrutiny by the national-security establishment.
Americans, for their part, understood that the
national-security state was doing things that had to be kept secret from them —
unsavory things but unfortunately necessary to protect national security.
It was as if a pact had been implicitly entered into between
the American people and the officials of the U.S. U.S. U.S.
Americans, for their part, wouldn’t ask questions and would
defer to the authority of their government. What mattered, first and foremost,
was the preservation of national security, a concept whose ever-shifting
meaning would be subjectively determined by officials of the national-security
state.
Equally important, people both within the government and
within the private sector convinced themselves that even if U.S. U.S. CIA
assassinated people, that was something good because it was being done by U.S. United
States
The CIA ’s assassination
attempts against Fidel Castro involved something even more unsavory — the
secret partnership that the CIA entered into
with the Mafia as part of its attempts to assassinate Castro.
Under objective standards of morality and just conduct,
people would consider the Mafia to be a bad organization, given the bad things
that it’s engaged in, such as murder, extortion, and bribery.
But objective standards were cast out the window when it
came to the Cold War. If CIA officials
determined that it was necessary, on grounds of national security, to partner
with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro, then it was considered okay from a
moral standpoint. Moreover, while the other things the Mafia was doing were
considered bad, once the Mafia united with the CIA
to assassinate Castro that action was considered to be good. The end — the
preservation of national security — justified the means—the CIA ’s
partnership with a murderous, law-breaking organization to assassinate Castro.
Let’s take a moment to remind ourselves that the aim of the CIA ’s
assassination attempts on the life of Fidel Castro was the same as that of the
embargo: the preservation of U.S. Cuba U.S.
Other attempts
The assassination attempts on Castro’s life weren’t the only
way that the CIA was trying to effect regime
change in Cuba CIA ’s
invasion of Cuba Bay of Pigs , an action that took place a few
months after John Kennedy assumed office as president.
The Bay of Pigs invasion was a CIA
project that had originated under the Eisenhower administration. From the very
beginning, the operation was based on a lie, one that the national-security
state intended to sell to the American people. Even though the CIA
was orchestrating the invasion, the plan called for U.S. CIA ,
to lie to the American people about the role the CIA
played in the operation. U.S.
Even though the deception was revealed in the aftermath of
the invasion, official lying became an established principle under the
national-security state. The end justified the means. If U.S. U.S. U.S.
There were also the numerous U.S.-sponsored terrorist
attacks in Cuba CIA -supported operatives would bomb
or sabotage Cuban businesses, farms, and industries. Again, the end justified
the means. National security was all that mattered.
One of the most tragic events during the Cold War period
involved the terrorist downing of a Cuban airliner over Venezuelan skies.
Dozens of people were killed, including the members of Cuba CIA
was behind the attack, there is no doubt that the people who did commit the
attack had the same mindset as the CIA —
that the end justified the means.
Moreover, it is somewhat interesting that the U.S. CIA
operative named Luis Posada Carriles. For years, the Venezuelan government,
with whom the United States Venezuela U.S. Panama Panama Panama United
States U.S. Venezuela
Of course, the CIA wasn’t
the only branch of the national-security state that was committed to effecting
regime change in Cuba U.S.
The purpose of Operation Northwoods was to provide a
justification for U.S. Cuba CIA ’s Bay of Pigs
invasion and before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The plan called for U.S. U.S. Guantanamo Bay United
States United
States
The point of all this deception was to provide an excuse for
ordering a military invasion of Cuba United States Cuba
Under the plan, the Pentagon was obviously calling on the
president to deceive the American people and the people of the world, just as
the CIA had called on Kennedy to lie to
Americans about its role in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The Pentagon expected Kennedy to go on national television, look straight into
the cameras, and falsely tell the American people that America U.S.
To Kennedy’s everlasting credit, he rejected Operation
Northwoods. He simply considered it wrong, in an objective sense. But it wasn’t
wrong to the military establishment, just as the Bay of Pigs
invasion, the assassination attempts, the partnership with the Mafia, and
numerous terrorist actions against Cuba CIA . Keep in
mind that under the principles of the national-security state, the end
justified the means, and whatever the U.S. U.S.
Needless to say, however, Kennedy’s sense of moral propriety
with respect to Operation Northwoods did not extend to the cruel economic
embargo against Cuba, which Kennedy himself instigated, but not before he
ordered a large quantity of Cuban cigars to be brought into the country and
delivered to him at the White House.
The cause
So what was it that Fidel Castro did to justify the U.S. Cuba Cuba
Did Castro ever attack the United
States U.S. United
States
No, Castro has never done any of those things — the things
that the U.S. Cuba
So the question remains: Why? Why the long-time efforts at
effecting regime change in Cuba
The answer lies in what was the driving force of the entire
national-security state after World War II and even before: the fear — the
horrible, irrepressible fear — of communism.
In 2009 a retired U.S. State Department official, Walter
Kendall Myers, 73, who is a grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, and his wife, Gwendolyn,
72, pled guilty to spying for Cuba U.S. Cuba
At their sentencing, the presiding judge, U.S. District
Judge Reggie B. Walton, berated the Myerses for what they had done. Walton said
to them, “If someone despises the American government to the extent that
appears to be the case, you can pack your bags and leave and it doesn’t seem to
me you continue to bear the benefits this country manages to provide and seek
to undermine it.”
What had motivated the Myerses to spy for Cuba
We did not act out of anger toward the United
States
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered a
comprehensive damage assessment to determine how U.S.
There are several fascinating aspects to this case, all of
which shed light on U.S. U.S. Cuba Cuba U.S. Cuba America
Actually, however, the matter is more much complex than
that, and if Walton had done his job properly as a judge, he would have taken
into account U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba in determining whether to accept
the length of the Myerses prison sentences under the plea bargain.
What was the specific information that the Myerses delivered
to Cuba U.S. Cuba United
States Cuba U.S. Cuba
What has been the nature of the U.S. Cuba
Even the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which brought the
United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war, was brought
about not by an act of aggression by Cuba and the Soviet Union, as Americans
are taught from the first grade on up. Instead, the truth is that it was the U.S. Cuba
After the Bay of Pigs disaster, the
Pentagon and the CIA became more determined
than ever to get rid of Fidel Castro and replace him with a pro-U.S. stooge.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously presented a plan to invade Cuba U.S.
Operation Northwoods
Operation Northwoods called for U.S. U.S. Cuba U.S. Guantánamo Bay U.S.
Under Operation Northwoods, real people were to be killed,
including Americans. The president, who, of course, would be in on the scheme,
would go on national television, look into the camera, and inform the American
people that Cuba United States Cuba
One of the most fascinating aspects of Operation Northwoods
was the belief among the Joint Chiefs of Staff that such a wide-ranging conspiracy,
which obviously would involve many personnel in both the military and CIA ,
could and would be kept secret from the American people and the people of the
world — and for a very long time. As it was, no one who was privy to the plan,
including the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, ever talked. The U.S.
Another fascinating aspect of Operation Northwoods was the
willingness of the Pentagon to sacrifice the lives of innocent people,
including American citizens, as part of fake terrorist attacks to justify an
invasion of Cuba CIA ,
was that the end justified the means.
To his credit, Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods. But
that didn’t dissuade the Pentagon and the CIA
from continuing to support an invasion of Cuba Cuba Cuba Soviet Union .
While Castro’s forces could defeat a small force of Cuban
exiles, as it did at the Bay of Pigs, resisting a full-fledged military
invasion of Cuba was another thing altogether. Castro knew that he didn’t stand
a chance. If the U.S.
The missile crisis
That’s what motivated Castro to approach the Soviet Union
about installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, not as a way to initiate a nuclear
war on the United States but instead as a way to deter a U.S. invasion of Cuba,
an invasion that the military and the CIA
were discussing, planning, and proposing from the time of the Bay of Pigs
disaster in 1961 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
In the end, Castro’s strategy succeeded. While it appeared
that Kennedy had caused the Soviets to back down and withdraw their nuclear
missiles from Cuba, the price for doing that was twofold: one, Kennedy promised
that the United States would not invade Cuba, a promise that earned him the
deep enmity of the Pentagon, the CIA , and
Cuban exiles; and, two, Kennedy promised to remove nuclear missiles aimed at
the Soviet Union that were installed in Turkey, which bordered the Soviet
Union.
Throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis, the military and the CIA
were exhorting Kennedy to bomb and invade Cuba Cuba CIA
viewed the missile crisis as an opportunity — the perfect excuse to effect
regime change in Cuba CIA even sent sabotage
teams into Cuba
Fortunately, Kennedy and the Soviet premier, Nikita
Khrushchev, were able to extricate themselves from the crisis. As Soviet
records later documented, nuclear missiles had already been installed and made
operational, with authority given to commanders in Cuba U.S. CIA
wanted him to do — bomb and invade Cuba
That’s how close the U.S. America Soviet Union to a nuclear holocaust.
In any event, the classified information that the Myerses
were delivering to Cuba U.S. United
States
That’s what Americans so easily forget — that in the 50
years of “conflict” between Cuba United States U.S. Cuba U.S.
Let’s keep in mind some important facts here: Cuba United States Cuba United States United
States U.S. U.S. Guantánamo Bay U.S. United
States United States
Instead, it has been the U.S. Cuba Cuba Cuba
It should be noted as well that Congress has never declared
war on Cuba
That’s what Judge Walton failed to take into account at the
Myerses’ sentencing hearing — that the classified information that the Myerses
delivered to Cuba United States Cuba Cuba U.S. Cuba
How Americans should think
That’s why the Myerses said that they hadn’t acted out of
anger towards the United States Cuba U.S. U.S. Cuba
But, you see, for Judge Walton and for officials in the U.S.
After all, the job of the national-security state is to keep
Americans safe. U.S.
All Americans are expected to get on board. And whoever
questions or challenges what the government is doing to protect their “national
security” is considered suspect or, even worse, a bad person, or, worst of all,
an enemy of the state or a “terrorist sympathizer” — a person who obviously
hates his government and his country, especially given that under the
principles of the national-security state, government and country are conflated
into one entity.
The mistake the Myerses made was in delivering the
information to Cuba U.S.
Yes, the government would have nonetheless indicted and
prosecuted the Myerses as it did Ellsberg and is doing to Manning. Moreover,
Judge Walton would undoubtedly have still berated them if they had been
convicted. But at least the information would have reached the American people,
which might have caused more Americans to exercise some independence of thought
and personal conscience, which in turn might have brought a change in U.S. Cuba
More examples
Another example of this phenomenon is the case of the Cuban
Five. That case involves five agents of the Cuban government who were arrested
by federal officials in the United States Florida United States Cuba
For that, those five Cuban agents were considered bad people
by U.S. Cuba
Consider Cubana Flight 455, which took off from Venezuela October 6, 1976 , and was
returning to Cuba
The prime suspect in the bombing was a man named Luis Posada
Carriles, an agent of the CIA . Was Posada
operating on behalf of the CIA when he
supposedly orchestrated the attack? It’s impossible to know. We do know that he
and the CIA claimed that he was no longer
working for the CIA during that time. But
the problem is that they would say that anyway, so there really is no way to
know for sure. What we do know is that the U.S. Venezuela CIA was behind the attack.
Let’s suppose that the CIA
was behind the terrorist attack on Cubana Flight 455 and that the Myerses had
discovered the plot when it was being planned. If they had delivered such
information to Cuba, there is no doubt that they would have been treated in the
same way they were treated for transmitting the “national defense” information
that they actually transmitted to Cuba. Under America’s national-security
state, any citizen, either inside or outside the government, who would disclose
such information to a nation being targeted by the CIA
is obviously a hater of the U.S. government and anti-American.
What has been the justification for the U.S. Cuba U.S. Cuba
Those two concepts — U.S. imperialism and the U.S.
national-security state’s excessive and unreasonable fear of communism — have
been driving principles of U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba and the rest of the
world through much of the 20th and 21st centuries. They have also wreaked
untold damage on our nation, our values, our economic well-being, and our
freedom.
The day after Japanese forces attacked Pearl
Harbor in December 1941, they invaded the Philippines U.S. United
States Cuba Philippines United
States
The result was another brutal war of independence in the Philippines U.S.
Thus, the U.S. Japan U.S. America
The U.S. Cuba U.S.
Thus, the Spanish-American War was a watershed event for the
United States U.S.
In fact, the corrupt dictator who ruled Cuba prior to Fidel
Castro’s revolution, Fulgencio Batista, was one of the U.S. empire’s approved
rulers, one who brutalized and plundered the Cuban people while doing whatever
the U.S. empire requested of him. When the Cuban people revolted against
Batista and replaced him with Castro , U.S. Cuba U.S. U.S. Cuba
It is not a surprise that Castro’s position did not sit well
with U.S.
But there was another critically important factor that
guaranteed that Castro would become the target of the U.S.
Those two factors — U.S. imperialism and U.S. anti-communism
— became the twin driving forces of the U.S. government in the second half of
the 20th century. More than anything else, those two forces would corrupt,
warp, and pervert the principles and values of the American people.
From the first grade on up, American students are taught
that “we” won World War II. Actually, the truth of that statement depends on
how one defines the pronoun “we.” When “we” is defined to include the Soviet
Union, then it is true that “we” won World War II. But when “we” is defined to
mean the United States, Great Britain, France, and other non-Soviet Allied
powers, then “we” did not win the war. It was the Soviet Union
that won the war.
Recall, after all, the ostensible reason that Great
Britain
But it was also no victory for the American people because almost
immediately U.S. officials converted the Soviet Union from World War II partner
and ally (and Hitler’s enemy) into a giant new enemy for the United States, a
situation that would bring a half-century of crisis, chaos, conflict, and
hostility during the Cold War and massive death and destruction in such hot
wars as Korea Vietnam
Equally important, that new enemy would provide the
justification for maintaining and expanding a massive and permanent
military-industrial complex and for initiating a massive national-security
state, both of whose policies and practices would end up looking strikingly
similar to those of the totalitarian regimes that the United States had opposed
during the war and was now opposing in the Cold War.
Anti-communist fervor
It is impossible to overstate the depth of the
anti-communist fervor that characterized the Cold War. For those who were born
after that era, the best way to describe it is that the fear of communism was
about 1,000 times greater than the fear of terrorism is today. What was
different, however, was that while terrorism involves a physical act of force,
communism involved more than that. Communism also involved an idea, one that
absolutely scared U.S. officials and much of the American populace to death. There
were several aspects to the anti-communist fervor.
One aspect was the notion that the Soviet Union
intended to initiate a war against the United
States America Eastern
Europe — under the iron boot of the Soviet Union .
A second aspect was the notion that communism would spread
beyond Cuba, into other Latin American nations, which would enable them to
mobilize military forces that would invade Florida and Texas and sweep up the
Eastern seaboard, ultimately defeating U.S. forces and taking over Washington Soviet Union and would do its bidding
after conquering the United States
A third aspect was that communists would take control over
European countries and Asian countries, causing the “dominoes” to continue
falling until the final domino — the United
States
A fourth aspect was communist infiltration in the federal
government and the public schools, where politicians, bureaucrats, and teachers
would be serving effectively as moles of the Soviet Union, who would be
indoctrinating the American people with communist ideas and, even worse, taking
control of the reins of power and surrendering America to the communists.
A fifth aspect, which perhaps was the scariest for U.S.
officials, was that communism would operate as a Sirens song, infecting the
minds of the American people and seducing them into wanting and desiring a
communist way of life, one in which people would eagerly and enthusiastically
surrender their freedom in return for being taken care of from the cradle to
the grave by the state. Under this scenario, communists would begin winning
elections all across the land and gradually begin to seep into the federal
bureaucracies, enabling them to bring communism to America
All five of those aspects of the anti-communism mindset
combined to produce a climate of constant preparation for war and a long, dark
era of deeply seated fear that pervaded the United
States
What was this thing that frightened people so much?
Communism is an economic doctrine in which the state owns the means of
production. In its purest sense, it means that the state owns everything in
society. Since the state is the sole employer, everyone works for the state.
The state guarantees that everyone will be taken care of with housing, food,
employment, health care, education, and other important things. No more worries
about losing one’s home, starving to death, being fired, or being unable to pay
for medical expenses or for an education. Everyone’s needs are taken care of,
from the day they are born to the day they die.
Needless to say, all that is a very attractive notion to
many people.
The rise of socialism
What’s the alternative to communism or, to employ a similar
term, socialism?
The alternative is a private-property, free-market way of
life, one in which the means of production and most everything else are
privately owned. People are free to engage in economic enterprise free of
government regulation, to engage freely in mutually beneficial economic
transactions with others, to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth, and to
decide what to do with it. In a system based on private property and economic
liberty, which some might label as “capitalism,” the role of government is
simply to protect people from the violence or fraud of others, to defend the nation
in the event of an attack, and to provide a judicial forum by which disputes
can be resolved peacefully.
Notwithstanding slavery and other exceptions, the United
States had been founded on principles of private property and the free market.
Despite the many exceptions, it was, in common parlance, a capitalist country.
In fact, America United States
Throughout the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, however,
communism was becoming increasingly popular all over the world. Near the end of
World War I, the Russian Revolution brought a communist regime to power in
Russia. Moreover, socialistic ideas were percolating throughout Europe and Asia.
By the time that World War II broke out, the United States itself had embraced
a variation of socialism with its welfare-state way of life, one in which the
federal government was expected to take care of people by means of certain
important programs, such as Social Security.
Moreover, communist parties were playing active roles in the
political process, including the U.S.
All of that was too much for U.S. United
States CIA into existence. Together, that permanent
military establishment and the CIA would
form the core units of America’s national-security state, which would, over
time, effectively become a fourth branch of government having unbelievable
powers of invasion, assassination, torture, and fomenting coups and
regime-change operations. And the legislative and judicial branches and even
the executive branch would not and could not touch it because of the overriding
principle of “national security.”
What should the United States
The U.S. Germany Western Europe from an attack by its World
War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union . That’s what
NATO was all about. Even worse, the U.S. government promised to defend nations
all over the world from communist aggression, an open-ended commitment that
would transform America into a militarist, garrison state.
War with the USSR
What were the chances that the Soviet Union
would start a new war against its former World War II allies? Virtually nil.
After all, the Soviets had just lost more than 20 million people in the war.
The entire nation, including its economy, was devastated Moreover, the U.S. U.S. Hiroshima Nagasaki
What about the continued Soviet occupation of Eastern
Europe ? The reasoning was no different in principle from that of
the U.S. government, which fiercely opposed any communist regimes in Latin
America. After two world wars, the Soviets wanted puppet regimes in Eastern
Europe to serve as a buffer against future invasions by Germany. The rationale
was no more justifiable than the U.S. Latin America ,
but it certainly did not mean that the Soviet Union was
embarking on a worldwide campaign of military conquest.
The national-security state’s fear of communism in Latin
America went deep. Consider Guatemala. When a socialist named
Jacobo Arbenz was democratically elected president in Guatemala in 1950, the
Pentagon and the CIA went ballistic. They
were convinced that with Arbenz’s election, the communists had established a
beachhead in the Western hemisphere. Apparently, in the minds of the military
and CIA , Guatemalan forces would cross into
Mexico, ford the Rio Grande, conquer Houston and Dallas, sweep northeasterly,
conquer Georgia and the rest of the South, take Washington, D.C, and then hand
the keys to the capital to the Soviet Union. Oh, if they waited until after
1959, Castro’s communist army would invade and conquer Florida and then move
north, conquering everything in its path before joining with Arbenz’s army
outside Washington, D.C., to jointly accept the surrender of U.S. officials in
Washington.
It was obviously a ridiculous, inane notion. But nothing was
beyond the communist-possessed imagination of officials in the U.S.
national-security state. In fact, when Pentagon and CIA
officials learned that Arbenz had purchased a shipload of arms from
Czechoslovakia, which was under Soviet control, that transaction was positive
confirmation that the communists were planning a military takeover of the
United States. Never mind that the Czechs had taken the Guatemalans to the
cleaners by selling them a bunch of military junk. Some giant, worldwide,
monolithic communist threat!
The national-security mindset was the same in Southeast
Asia. The communists would take over in Vietnam United
States
That mindset turned out to be as ridiculous and inane as the
one that related to Latin America . The best proof, of
course, is what happened at the end of the Vietnam War. The dominoes didn’t
fall and the Vietnamese communists didn’t invade and conquer the United States.
In fact, soon after the reunification of the country, the Vietnamese communists
got into a war with the Chinese communists. Today, Vietnam United States
In fact, let’s return to Latin America
for a moment. Today, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua have
socialist-communist regimes. So what? What American feels threatened by that?
Is anyone worrying that communist armies are about to cross the southern border
of the United States or invade Florida? Like I say, the fear of communism and
communists was inane, overblown, exaggerated, and irrational.
What about the Communist Party and American communists —
that is, people in the United States
In a genuinely free society, people are free to expound any
ideas they want, no matter how despicable or unpopular. The American Communist
Party should have been free to participate in the political process to its
heart’s content, doing everything it wanted to peacefully persuade people to
embrace communism and socialism. It was the duty of the government to protect
them in the exercise of their rights and freedom. After all, the best way to
combat a bad idea like communism or socialism is to promulgate a better idea,
such as libertarianism, i.e., a free-market, private-property system.
Unfortunately, that’s not the way the Pentagon, the CIA ,
and the FBI, another important part of the U.S. United States
Thus, to protect “national security” from communism, the
U.S. national-security state adopted policies and practices that in some ways
mirrored the policies and practices of the very regime they had defeated in
World War II — the Nazi regime — and the regime that they had partnered with in
World War II and against which they were now waging the Cold War — the Soviet
regime. Of course, U.S.
Americans should have suspected that something was amiss
when, after the end of World War II , U.S. U.S.
Yet here were U.S. Soviet Union , which had served
as their ally and partner during the war.
The U.S. U.S. Soviet
Union .
Consider, for example, the CIA ’s
highly secret drug experiments, a program known as MKULTRA. Under that program,
the CIA subjected unsuspecting Americans to
LSD and other mind-altering substances. They did it to people in hospitals, to
people in prisons, and to others, with the knowledge and cooperation of
officials in those facilities, always under a vow of secrecy. What they didn’t
have was the consent of many of the people to whom they were administering the
drugs.
What was the justification for those drug experiments, which
somewhat resembled the medical experimentation that had been undertaken by the
Nazis? Why, national security, of course. Pentagon and CIA
officials had learned that the Soviet Union was conducting LSD experiments on
people. Therefore, U.S. officials concluded that in order to keep up with the
communists and ultimately defeat them, it was necessary to do the same thing.
In war, sometimes people have to be sacrificed. The end justifies the means.
It is impossible to know how many people’s minds were
damaged or destroyed or, indeed, how many people were killed, by the CIA ’s
drug experiments. When information about the program became public, the CIA
destroyed most of its MKULTRA files, no doubt on the grounds of national
security. After all, if the public and the world were to learn the details of
MKULTRA, including the identities of the victims, the CIA
could be damaged, which, in the minds of national-security-state officials,
would logically threaten national security.
One of the best accounts of MKULTRA is found in the
book A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA ’s
Secret Cold War Experiments, by H.P. Albarelli Jr. (2011). This
fascinating and gripping book recounts the life and death of a CIA
agent named Frank Olson.
For years, the CIA ’s
official story was that Olson had taken his own life while suffering the throes
of depression. It was all a lie. Many years after Olson’s death, it was
discovered that the CIA had actually
subjected him to an LSD experiment, without telling him or asking him.
Once that truth came out, the CIA ’s
official story changed. Under its new story, it acknowledged that it had in
fact drugged Olson without his knowledge or consent. Thus, it said that Olson
was suffering from both hallucinations and depression as a result of the LSD
experiment on him, which supposedly led to his jumping out of a window from an
upper floor of a New York City hotel. Under the new official story, the CIA
deeply regretted what it had done and apologized profusely to Olson’s widow.
Why would the CIA subject
one of its own employees to an LSD experiment? Why, national security, of
course. The CIA wanted to see how someone
would react if he ingested LSD without being told in advance, information that
could enable the United States to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
The natural question arises: Why would the CIA
feel the need to do that to one of its agents, when that was precisely what it
was doing to patients and prisoners in hospitals and prisons?
In his carefully researched book, one that relies on
confidential sources within the CIA ,
Albarelli provides a convincing case showing that the CIA ’s
new official story was also a lie and that, in fact, it was a fallback position
to disguise the CIA ’s murder of Frank Olson.
Why would the CIA murder
one of its own agents? Why, national security, of course. Albarelli’s research
disclosed that Americans were not the only ones who were the subject of the CIA ’s
LSD experiments. He points to a small village in France, Pont St. Esprit, that
in 1951 became a target of the CIA ’s LSD
experiments. The experiment resulted in the death of five people and in the
need for 300 people to seek medical care or to be placed in treatment
facilities.
According to Albarelli, Frank Olson had participated in that
horrifying LSD experiment and was deeply troubled about it. Ultimately, in a
crisis of conscience, he disclosed the highly classified secret to an
unauthorized person.
In other words, Olson knew too much and talked too much. He
had become a threat to national security. If people were to find out about the CIA ’s
LSD experiment on an entire village in France CIA , which in turn
would threaten national security. There was no effective choice. In order to
protect national security, Olson had to be eliminated. Albarelli’s sources
revealed that Olson didn’t jump out of a window. He was thrown out of it, by
two men working for the CIA .
Undeclared war
There were also several regime-change operations in
different parts of the world, where agents of the national-security state
initiated what can be described only as undeclared attacks on foreign regimes,
with the goal of ousting their rulers from power and replacing them with
U.S.-approved rulers — all under the notion that national security required
that such operations be conducted.
In 1953, the CIA
instigated a coup in Iran Iran CIA
cited national security, saying that Mossadegh had been leaning toward
communism and the Soviet Union . Never mind that British
officials had asked the CIA to oust
Mossadegh owing to his nationalization of British oil interests.
One year later, 1954, the CIA
ousted the democratically elected president of Guatemala U.S. CIA officials and some members of
Congress owned stock in the United Fruit Company, some of whose land in
Guatemala was being seized and redistributed to the poor. U.S. United
States Czechoslovakia
It is interesting that defenders of the national-security
state justify the CIA ’s Guatemala coup by
claiming not only that it protected U.S. national security but also that it
saved Guatemala from tyranny and destruction at the hands of a communist
regime. Their argument is that a country’s laws and constitution are not a
suicide pact. Moreover, voters make mistakes, and if illegal means are
necessary to save a country from such mistakes, then it is right and proper
that such means be employed. The end justifies the means.
Arbenz was lucky. By fleeing the country early in the coup,
he saved his life. It later turned out that among the CIA ’s
contingency plans were his assassination and those of other Guatemalan
officials.
There were the countless regime-change operations against
Cuba, a country that had never attacked the United States, including the Bay of
Pigs invasion, terrorist attacks on Cuban soil, the U.S. embargo against Cuba,
and, of course, the many assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and other
Cuban officials.
In fact, there is every reason to believe that the CIA
was behind the 1967 extrajudicial execution of Che Guevara, one of Castro’s
fellow communist revolutionaries. After he was taken into custody by the Bolivian
military, Guevara’s captors executed him on orders from above. The killing was
a grave violation of international law. While the CIA
has always denied any role in the illegal execution, the fact is that a CIA
agent was present during the execution. Given the subservient nature of most
Latin American regimes to the U.S. CIA are nil.
Moreover, given that Guevara was on the CIA ’s
assassination list, the chances that it would have objected to his
extrajudicial execution are also nil. Finally, soon after the execution the CIA
issued a report detailing the benefits of Guevara’s death.
The CIA ’s participation
in another extrajudicial execution had occurred in South
Vietnam CIA -supported
military coup succeeded in ousting the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh
Diem, from power. Soon after Diem was taken into custody, South Vietnamese
military forces executed him. While the CIA
denied any role in the assassination, there is little doubt that the South
Vietnamese military would never have done it if the CIA
had fiercely opposed it.
It is not surprising that the CIA -supported
regime-change operation in South Vietnam
Support for dictatorships
Support for brutal Latin American dictatorships, especially
military ones, was another policy of the U.S.
In fact, when American citizens became the victims of
torture at the hands of U.S.-trained military or intelligence goons in Latin America,
U.S. officials were noteworthy for their lack of interest. One example involved
the torture and rape of an American nun, Sister Dianna Ortiz, who stated that
present during her ordeal was a man who spoke Spanish with an American accent.
Needless to say, no subpoena was ever served by Congress or the Justice
Department on the CIA demanding the
production of all CIA agents operating in
Guatemala during the time that Sister Dianna was tortured and raped. Obviously,
revealing the identities of such agents would have threatened national
security; therefore Sister Dianna was simply left to adjust to her unfortunate
experience without any expectation of justice from the U.S.
A similar example involved an American woman named Jennifer
Harbury, who married a Guatemalan insurgent, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, who was
resisting the tyranny of the U.S.-supported military dictatorship in Guatemala
Through it all, the CIA
claimed to have no information about Bamaca’s whereabouts. It turned out to be
a lie. A U.S. State Department official blew the whistle and disclosed not only
that the CIA knew where Bamaca was but also
that it had a close working relationship with his torturers and killers. By the
time Harbury acquired that information, Bamaca had been killed by his captors,
another grave violation of international law. The CIA
retaliated against the whistleblower by ensuring that he lost his security
clearance, which was essential to his position at the State Department.
And at home …
In the United States
First of all, there were investigations and accusations of
Americans who were suspected of having connections to communism and the
Communist Party. Reputations and careers were ruined on the supposition that
anyone who believed in communism or had believed in communism during some part
of his life was obviously a threat to national security.
Only a few people had the courage to point out that a free
society protects the rights of people to believe anything they want, associate
with whomever they want, and to promote anything they want, no matter how
despicable such beliefs and associations might be to others. After all, to
defend the right of people to be communists subjected the defender to the
charge of being a communist.
Both the FBI and the CIA
illegally spied on and closely monitored the activities of American citizens.
Secret files were kept on people, often detailing nothing more than their
sexual activity or other personal matters, with the aim of blackmailing them,
embarrassing them, or destroying them.
Of course, those were the sorts of things that were done by
the Gestapo and that were being done by the KGB. In the mind of the ordinary
national-security-state official, however, such practices were evil only when
committed by Nazis or communists, not when they were committed by U.S.
In fact, the communist scare started long before the formal
advent of the national-security state. As Americans were later to find out, the
federal government was keeping secret files on Americans suspected of being
communists as far back as World War I, when U.S.
Among the most famous of the victims during that time was a
Russian immigrant named Emma Goldman, who was arrested and deported for
advocating anarchy and communism. She described her thoughts as she was
involuntarily departing New York New World .
It was America America Russia
Among the national-security state’s favorite tactics during
the Cold War was to plant “moles” within communist organizations, with the goal
of getting their membership lists, spying on them, and looking for evidence of
subversion and treason. If a person were caught doing something illegal,
sometimes he’d be promised leniency if he agreed to become a spy for the
national-security state.
Hardly anyone noticed the totalitarian nature of those
extraordinary “national security” measures. That didn’t matter. What mattered
was the defeat of communism. Anything that had to be done to achieve victory
was justified. The end justified the means. If the United
States
Two organizations that the U.S. Cuba U.S.
Meanwhile, at the height of the Cold War, as the U.S.
national-security state was doing everything it could to destroy communists,
one of the most mysterious episodes in the history of the national-security
state occurred, an event that can be described as a Cold War miracle.
An American man who supposedly attempted to defect to the
Soviet Union and promised to divulge to the Soviet communist regime all the
information that he had acquired during his time in the U.S. military — a man
who later returned to the United States and then openly started a chapter of
the Fair Play for Cuba Committee — a man who openly corresponded with the U.S.
Communist Party — a man who was a self-described Marxist — a man who supposedly
visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico with the intent to re-defect
to the Soviet Union — sauntered across the Cold War stage with not even a
single grand-jury subpoena, much less arrest, torture, incarceration, or
criminal prosecution at the hands of the U.S. national-security state. That man
was a former U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald.
At the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s, when the U.S. U.S.
The official story: Oswald joined the Marines and became an
avowed communist. Somehow during his time in the Marines, he taught himself
Russian, a foreign language that many would agree is very difficult to learn,
especially without the benefit of a language school or a tutor.
Shortly before his term in the Marines was up, Oswald
secured permission to leave his military service early on the ground that his
mother had been injured and needed assistance. It was a lie. Soon after being
discharged, he made his way to the Soviet Union ,
although it is still not clear where he got the money to pay for the trip.
Once in the Soviet Union , Oswald went
to the U.S.
After living in the Soviet Union for
a few years, during which he married a Russian woman, he obtained permission
from U.S. United States U.S.
Moving to Dallas U.S.
Later, he moved to New Orleans U.S. U.S.
During his time in New Orleans, Oswald pamphleteered in
favor of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, even going so far as to distribute
pamphlets on the street to U.S. troops disembarking from a U.S. Navy vessel.
For some unknown reason, he stamped a return address on some of the pamphlets
that led to the offices of a retired FBI official who had ties to U.S.
Oswald also established contact with an anti-Castro group
that was being secretly funded by the CIA
and was closely supervised by a CIA agent
named George Joannides, which for some reason the CIA
kept secret for nearly three decades from — among others — both the Warren
Commission in 1963 and the House Assassination Committee in the late 1970s. At
first Oswald offered to help the group and then later shifted to his pro-Castro
persona by involving himself in a public altercation with the group while
distributing his Fair Play for Cuba Committee pamphlets. Jailed for disorderly
conduct for that altercation, Oswald successfully sought a visit in jail from
an active FBI agent.
Later, Oswald secured a visa to visit Mexico CIA
agent stood in front of him in line, something the CIA
also successfully kept secret for decades.
Then Oswald seems to have visited both the Cuban and Soviet
embassies in Mexico City Soviet Union via Cuba
Upon returning to Dallas November 22, 1963 . On November 25, Oswald was gunned down
by a man named Jack Ruby. The Warren Commission later determined that Oswald
was a lone nut who assassinated Kennedy all on his own.
How others were treated
Why does Oswald’s case qualify as a Cold War miracle?
Because despite the fact that he was an avowed communist who had ostensibly
betrayed his country, shamed the U.S. Marine Corps, divulged secret information
to America’s avowed enemy the Soviet Union, openly promoted communism on the
public streets of America, and visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies with the
supposed intent of returning to the Soviet Union, the national-security state
didn’t lay a finger on the guy.
No grand-jury subpoena. No grand-jury indictment. No illegal
wiretapping of his telephone. No surreptitious delving into his sex life. No
enemy-combatant incarceration. No torture. No harassment of employers.
Nothing significant against a man who was supposedly one of the greatest
betrayers of his country in U.S.
Is that the way we would expect the U.S.
Consider, for example, what it did to Daniel Ellsberg. He
simply divulged the Pentagon’s lies and deceptions to the New York
Times and, indirectly, to the American people. The government went after
him with the ruthlessness that we would expect of it. It indicted him and
sought to put him away in jail for many years.
But that wasn’t all. Men in its service also committed a
felony by breaking into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. For what purpose?
Simply to steal information on his personal life, including personal sexual
matters, designed to shame him, humiliate him, and destroy his credibility.
That’s what we would expect of the government.
Recall what the government did to John Walker Lindh, the
so-called American Taliban. It tortured him, it disrobed him, it posed him
naked, it indicted him, it convicted him, and it sentenced him to a long jail
term. What had Lindh done? He had involved himself in Afghanistan’s civil war
by joining the wrong side — that is, the side that would become America’s enemy
after the 9/11 attacks. For that, he paid a very high price at the hands of the
U.S.
The way the government treated Lindh is how we would expect
it to behave.
Recall Martin Luther King Jr., who won the Nobel Peace
Prize. He was a target of another principal agency within the national-security
state — the FBI — and specifically of its longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover
Absolutely convinced that America was in danger of falling
to the communists, Hoover and his FBI pulled out all the stops to prevent that
from happening, from illegal wiretaps on American citizens, to surreptitious
monitoring of people, to delving into the personal lives of Americans,
especially their sexual activities and proclivities, to maintaining secret
files on people, to infiltrating what were considered to be subversive
organizations.
Among his major convictions was that the U.S. Civil Rights
movement was actually a front for the international communist movement. That’s
how he came to focus his FBI on Martin Luther King Jr., including secretly
monitoring King’s personal life and placing illegal wiretaps on his telephone
conversations. Worst of all was that Hoover
None of that should surprise anyone. That’s how we would
expect federal officials to behave when confronted with an American whose
loyalties supposedly lay with the communists.
Consider Bradley Manning, the U.S. U.S. U.S.
The recruit?
That’s how we would expect U.S.
Yet here we have a former U.S. Marine who had lied to secure
early release from the military, supposedly become an avowed communist,
supposedly defected to America’s Cold War enemy the Soviet Union, presumably
delivered secret information to the Soviets that he had acquired during his military
service, supposedly promoted communism on the streets of America, and
supposedly visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico and — not even a
subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury, much less a grand-jury
indictment.
What are we to make of that? It seems to me — and it has
seemed to many Kennedy assassination researchers over the years — that there is
only one likely explanation for the government’s strange conduct toward Lee
Harvey Oswald — that he was actually a secret, highly trained operative for
U.S. intelligence, most likely the CIA .
The thing is that once we overlay Oswald’s life with that
hypothesis, the strange and unusual aspects of the government’s treatment of
him disappear.
What better place for the CIA
to recruit people than from the U.S.
How likely is it that a U.S. Marine is going to become an
avowed communist? And if it were to happen, especially at the height of the
Cold War, when the U.S. national-security state was doing its best to ferret
out communists within the U.S. government and destroy them, how likely is it
that the Marine Corps wouldn’t be concerned about a self-avowed communist in
its midst?
But if he was a CIA
recruit who was being trained to be a self-avowed communist, then obviously the
Marine Corps would be fully supportive. Indeed, the Marines would have
cooperated fully in Oswald’s learning of the Russian language during the time
he was in the military.
Would it have been unusual for the CIA
to be training people to appear to be genuine communists? Of course not. After
all, both the FBI and the CIA were
infiltrating pro-communist organizations, such as the U.S. Communist Party and
the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and planting moles in them. Those moles had
to put on a good act, one in which they successfully kept secret the fact that
they were actually working for the national-security state.
In fact, consider the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an
organization that included many prominent Americans, some of whom sympathized
with the socialist principles of the Cuban revolution and some of whom simply
opposed U.S. U.S. Cuba
At the same time, the U.S.
So ordinarily you would expect the national-security state
to go ballistic over Oswald, but that’s not what happened. Instead, at the
height of the Cold War this former Marine who supposedly betrayed his country
by becoming a communist and, even worse, went over to the side of America Soviet Union , sauntered across the
national-security stage without incurring any of the ruthlessness and vengeance
that we would expect from the U.S.
If, however, Oswald was actually a U.S. intelligence
operative, it would explain why U.S. national-security officials didn’t lay a
finger on him in New Orleans when this supposed betrayer of America, supposed
lover of communists and communism, supposed pro-Cuba advocate tweaked the noses
of U.S. national-security officials by publicly distributing Fair Play for Cuba
pamphlets on the streets of New Orleans and, at about the same time, made
contact with the U.S. Communist Party. In fact, it would seem that Oswald’s
activities could easily be construed as part of the overall operation to
destroy those two organizations.
Oswald’s role as an intelligence agent would also explain
why a CIA agent was standing in front of him
in line as he waited to get his visa to visit Mexico CIA , which
closely monitored and photographed activities at the Cuban and Soviet embassies
in Mexico City
It would explain why the return address that was printed on
some of Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee pamphlets led to the office of
former FBI agent Guy Bannister and why Oswald was sometimes seen visiting that
office.
It would also explain why Oswald, a supposed loser, had
enough influence to request and receive a visit by an FBI agent to his New
Orleans
It would also explain why Oswald initially offered to help
the DRE , the anti-Castro organization of
Cuban exiles that was secretly being funded by the CIA
and supervised by CIA agent George
Joannides.
It would also explain why Kennedy’s brother Robert F.
Kennedy said to an anti-Castro exile after Oswald had been taken into custody,
“One of your guys did it.” Why would Kennedy place Oswald, a supposed
pro-communist, into the camp of the anti-communists? It would seem that the
only likely explanation is that he had information indicating that Oswald was
in fact a U.S.
The Warren
On January 22, 1964 ,
the Warren Commission held a meeting that would be kept secret from the
American people. The session was called to address the rumor that Oswald was a
paid undercover agent for the FBI. After the session was over, former CIA
Director Allen Dulles, who was serving on the Warren Commission, stated that
the transcript of the session should be destroyed. The Commission went along
with Dulles’s suggestion. Years later, it turned out that a court reporter’s
tape had survived the destruction. Its release was secured by longtime Kennedy
assassination researcher Harold Weisburg.
How did the Warren Commission resolve the issue? They asked
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA
Director Richard Helms whether Oswald was, in fact, a U.S. intelligence
operative. Both of them told the Commission that he was not, and that was the
end of the matter.
The Commission obviously believed it had no choice but to
accept the statements of both men at face value. After all, imagine the
following headlines in the mainstream press: “Warren Commission Suggests CIA
and FBI Lying about Oswald.”
That’s what the Commission would have been doing if it
decided to delve more deeply into the matter — it would have been accusing
Hoover and Helms of lying about Oswald. And how would the Commission have gone
about investigating the matter? Obviously, both the FBI and the CIA
would never have voluntarily turned over any documents indicating Oswald’s
position.
So even investigating the rumor would have required an
extremely aggressive action against both the FBI and the CIA .
The chance that that would happen was nil. After all, this was the height of
the Cold War. A fierce battle between the Warren Commission and the U.S. CIA
and the FBI were liars and that the supposed assassin of John F. Kennedy was an
operative of U.S.
The Warren Commission looked into that abyss and quickly
turned away by accepting the representations of the CIA
and the FBI that Oswald wasn’t a U.S. CIA
assassin. The Warren Commission would obviously have had a difficult time
quickly reaching that conclusion without a serious investigation into Oswald’s CIA
activities.
Actually though, there was another likely reason — a much
bigger reason — that the Warren Commission refused to seriously investigate
whether Oswald was, in fact, a U.S. intelligence agent. That reason would also
explain why U.S. Dallas Texas U.S.
What was that much bigger reason? It revolved around the two
most important words in the lifetimes of the American people since the end of
World War II: “national security.”
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Warren Commission
hearings was the extreme secrecy under which the hearings were conducted. Most
of the hearings, both evidentiary and administrative, were closed to the
public. Moreover, at the conclusion of the hearings the Commission ordered that
most of the rec-ords be sealed from public view for 75 years.
Why? If the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, really was
nothing more than a lone-nut assassin who decided to kill John Kennedy after
learning that his motorcade was traveling past the building in which Oswald was
working, why all the secrecy? Why not simply open up everything to the public?
The answer lies in the concept “national security.” From the
moment Kennedy’s assassination took place, the evidence suggests that high U.S. Cuba Soviet Union .
The first track was directed to the American people. Within
a few hours after Oswald had been arrested, U.S. officials bent over backwards
to assure Americans that Oswald had acted alone in killing the president.
Federal officials immediately shut down any investigation into whether Kennedy
had been killed as part of a conspiracy.
The second track involved what might be considered the
gravest threat to national security in U.S. United
States Soviet Union
to the brink of nuclear war several months before the assassination.
If the American people were to learn that Oswald had been
operating as an agent of Cuba and the Soviet Union when he killed their
president, there is little doubt that they would have demanded immediate
retaliation against both countries, which inevitably would have led to nuclear
war.
The state-sponsored assassination of a foreign head of state
would clearly have been considered an act of war. How could the United
States
Why wouldn’t the U.S. CIA — that
had begun the assassination game by repeatedly trying to assassinate Cuba’s
leader, Fidel Castro. Also kept secret, on grounds of national security, was
the fact that the CIA had entered into a
partnership with the Mafia to assassinate Castro.
Therefore, how could Lyndon Johnson and the U.S.
national-security state justify going to war against Cuba and the Soviet Union
to retaliate for assassinating Kennedy, a war that would inevitably turn
nuclear and cost the lives of tens of millions of Americans, given that the
Soviet Union and Cuba would have been retaliating, not instigating, if they had
used Oswald to assassinate Kennedy?
Shutting down track two
That would help to explain why U.S.
Immediately after the shooting, the anti-Castro group with
which Oswald had made contact in New Orleans DRE ),
began issuing public statements publicizing Oswald’s connections to Cuba Soviet Union , and communism. They talked about
Oswald’s attempted defection to the Soviet Union, his pamphleteering for the
Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and his pro-communist proclivities. The DRE
was obviously doing its best to connect Kennedy’s assassin to Cuba Soviet Union .
What Americans did not know at the time and, in fact, would
not learn for many years was that the DRE
was being closely supervised and funded by the CIA ,
specifically by a CIA agent named George
Joannides. When the House Select Committee on Assassinations began
re-investigating Kennedy’s assassination in the late 1970s, the CIA
called Joannides out of retirement to serve as the its liaison to the
committee. Left secret, however, was Joannides’s role with the DRE
in the months leading up to the assassination. Later, in the 1990s, when the
Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which had been established in the
wake of the outcry caused by Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, began forcing
the disclosure of assassination-related documents, the chairman of the
committee suggested that the CIA had
obstructed justice by keeping Joannides’s role secret. By that time, Joannides
had died and, therefore, was unable to testify. It is interesting that to the
present day the CIA steadfastly refuses to
disclose all its information regarding Joannides’s relationship with the DRE .
When Johnson was establishing a commission to investigate the
assassination, the evidence suggests that he employed track two — Oswald’s
supposed complicity with Cuba and the Soviet Union — with at least two of the
people he was recruiting to be on the commission — Chief Justice Earl Warren,
who would become chairman of the commission, and Sen. Richard Russell. When
both of them resisted serving on the commission, Johnson raised the specter of
a nuclear war that would take the lives of some 40 million Americans.
Now, ask yourself: Why would Johnson say that? If Oswald
was, indeed, nothing more than a lone-nut assassin, then how could an
investigation into the assassination possibly lead to a nuclear war between the
United States Soviet Union ? The answer is this: by confirming,
through an official government investigation, that Oswald’s connections
to the Soviet Union rose to a level of a Soviet-Cuban-Oswald conspiracy to kill
Kennedy, which would very likely lead to retaliation and nuclear war. Thus,
when Johnson told Warren and Russell about the possibility of a nuclear war
arising out of the Kennedy assassination, he could have been alluding only to
(1) the possibility that Oswald was acting on behalf of Cuba and the Soviet
Union when he assassinated Kennedy, and (2) the importance to national security
(and to the lives of millions of people) of pinning the murder solely on Oswald
to avoid nuclear war with the Soviets.
Obviously, there was more than sufficient evidence to
connect Oswald to Cuba and the Soviets — his self-professed devotion to
communism, his attempt to defect to the Soviet Union, his connections to the
Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the U.S. Communist Party, and his possible
recent visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City, where he may
have met with one of the top assassins for the KGB.
But there was more than that. There was also evidence that
Kennedy had been shot from the front. If Oswald shot from behind Kennedy, and
if Kennedy was also shot from the front, then that could mean only one thing:
Oswald wasn’t acting alone when he shot at the president, and the only likely
co-conspirators, given Oswald’s background and connections, were Cuba and the
Soviet Union.
Shot from the front
What was the evidence that Kennedy had been shot from the
front? What follows is some of it.
First, there were the dozens of people who rushed toward the
grassy knoll in front of the president’s motorcade immediately after the
assassination because they were certain that shots had been fired from that
direction.
Second, there were several Dallas
Third, there was the statement of Secret Service agent Clint
Hill, the agent who jumped on the back of the president’s limousine immediately
after the shooting and pushed Jacqueline Kennedy back into the car, that
confirmed the hole in the back of Kennedy’s head.
Fourth, there was the so-called Harper Fragment of Kennedy’s
skull that was found after the shooting, which Dallas physicians established
had come from the back of his head.
Fifth, there was the testimony before the ARRB of Navy Petty
Officer Saundra Spencer, who served in the Naval
Photographic Center
Sixth, there was the testimony before the House Select
Committee on Assassinations of several autopsy personnel confirming the hole at
the back of Kennedy’s head.
Seventh, there was the press conference given by Dallas
Eighth, there is the photograph of White House Press
Secretary Malcolm Kilduff immediately after the assassination in which he
pointed to the right temple of his head to indicate that Kennedy had been shot
in the head from the front.
So given all that evidence and more, it would not have been
difficult to convince people that Oswald had not acted alone in shooting the
president. All that would have to be done is to show people that Oswald was
shooting from the back and that at least one other person was shooting from the
front. And to exploit the grave national-security and nuclear-war implications
of that conspiracy, all that would have to be done is to show people Oswald’s
connections to communism, Cuba, and the Soviet Union.
The evidence suggests that while track one — the lone-nut
assassin theory — was used on the American people, track two — the
national-security threat — was employed on people within the government to
cover up the evidence of conspiracy.
In fact, the evidence suggests that track two was employed
not only on Warren Commission members but also on national-security officials
within the military, who were ultimately charged with conducting the autopsy of
the president’s body.
The role of the military
Why the military? After all, Oswald was ostensibly a
civilian. He was also supposedly nothing more than a lone nut who decided to
assassinate the president. The assassination was purely a Texas
There are two likely reasons: (1) to wrap the investigation
into the assassination within the intrigue of “national security,” thereby
ensuring that Americans wouldn’t ask too many questions when proceedings were
kept secret; and (2) to ensure active participation of the military, with oaths
of silence, in a national-security cover-up of shots fired from the front.
Under Texas Texas Texas Parkland
Hospital
Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson was waiting for the casket at
Dallas Love Field, where his plane was waiting on the tarmac and seats in the
back of the plane were being removed in anticipation of the casket’s arrival.
Although Johnson had raised the specter that the United
States Soviet
Union while he was waiting at Parkland
Hospital Washington Parkland without
the autopsy and quickly delivered to Johnson’s plane at Love Field.
Why was it so important to get the body out of the hands of
the Dallas
Because an honest and genuine autopsy would have reflected
that shots had been fired from the front, which obviously would have destroyed
the lone-nut-assassin theory and inevitably led to the nuclear-war scenario.
That is, Americans would have seen that shots were fired from the front, which
they would have connected to Oswald’s pre-assassination, pro-communist
activities and, thus, would have concluded that the Soviets and Cubans were
also behind the assassination. In the high emotions of the time, they would
have demanded immediate retaliation, which would inevitably have escalated to
nuclear war. Getting the autopsy out of the hands of Texas
Given the culture of the military, it would not have been
difficult to falsify the autopsy. All that high U.S. officials, including the
president, would have had to do is explain that the United States was facing
the biggest national-security crisis in its history and that the military was
needed to conduct a false autopsy to save the nation and the world from a
nuclear holocaust, one that the Kennedy administration would have been
responsible for starting, owing to the fact that it had initiated the
assassination game with its assassination attempts on Castro.
Under such a scenario, there isn’t a military man in the
world who would have refused the orders to do whatever was necessary to save
the country and, equally important, to keep whatever he had to do secret for
the rest of this life.
In fact, the military required participants in the autopsy
to sign formal secrecy oaths and specifically told them that if they ever violated
the oaths, they would be facing court-martial or worse. When the House Select
Committee on Assassinations attempted to talk to some of the enlisted men about
their participation in the autopsy in the 1970s, many of them were still too
scared to talk.
It all seems quite strange, given the government’s official
story that Oswald was nothing more than a lone-nut assassin. But it all makes
perfect sense if in fact the government was using the military to suppress
evidence of a conspiracy that could lead the nation into nuclear war.
It also makes sense of why the Warren Commission would order
its records to be kept secret for 75 years, notwithstanding its official
conclusion that Oswald had acted alone. If national security depended on
keeping evidence of a conspiracy secret from Americans, owing to the
possibility that they would demand retaliation for the assassination, it would
obviously be important to keep that information from generations of Americans.
The Warren Commission’s order to delay release of
Kennedy-assassination records benefited the national-security state in many
ways. For example, the role of the CIA and
George Joannides in the activities of the DRE
wasn’t discovered until after Joannides was dead and after two investigations
into the Kennedy assassination had been conducted.
After the House Select Committee on Assassinations conducted
its hearings, several former enlisted men, now released from their oaths of
secrecy, came forward and disclosed to private assassination researchers that
they had witnessed the president’s body arriving at the Bethesda morgue where
the autopsy was conducted, wrapped inside a body bag inside a plain shipping
casket. Yet the president body’s had left Parkland
Hospital
Restraining the ARRB
Later, the Assassination Records Review Board came up with
additional evidence, including an official report contemporaneously prepared by
one Sgt. Roger Boyajian, that buttressed the case that Kennedy’s body had
arrived at the morgue more than an hour earlier than officially reported and in
a different casket from the one that the body was placed into at Parkland. (And
that implies that the Dallas Bethesda
Naval Hospital
What would have been the purpose for doing that? One purpose
would have been to alter the body before the formal autopsy began in order to
conceal evidence of shots from the front. In fact, the official report filed by
the two FBI agents present at the autopsy — agents who had never been called to
testify before the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee — indicated
that pre-autopsy surgery had in fact been conducted on Kennedy’s head.
So did the ARRB investigate whether the autopsy had been
falsified? No. Why? Because when Congress established the ARRB, it strictly
prohibited it from reinvestigating the case. Imagine that. Its mission was
strictly limited to securing the release of documents. Why would Congress do
that? Why wouldn’t it want the ARRB to investigate if it came up with facts
that needed to be investigated?
The ARRB also determined that there were two separate brain
examinations, which was highly unusual, especially since the autopsy physicians
maintained that only one examination had taken place. But even more unusual,
the ARRB also determined that two separate brains were examined, one that
obviously did not belong to Kennedy.
Why would military officials do that? One reason would be to
hide evidence of a bullet that had entered the president’s head from the front
and exited from the back. In fact, the second brain examined had a weight that
was greater than a normal human brain, notwithstanding the fact that everyone
agrees that there was an extremely large amount of brain destroyed by the shot
that hit Kennedy in the head.
Did the ARRB investigate that? No. Again, its charter
prohibited it from reinvestigating any part of the case, no matter what newly
discovered records revealed.
For years, people had believed that the famous Zapruder film
had ended up in the offices of Lifemagazine, after the magazine purchased
it from Abraham Zapruder. Not so. As detailed in the five-volume
book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, by Douglas P.
Horne, who served on the ARRB staff, the film actually ended up in the hands of
the CIA . (Horne’s book, along with the
book Best Evidence, by David Lifton, provides a detailed analysis of
many of the matters discussed in this article.)
Why the CIA ? After all,
this was supposedly an assassination conducted by a lone nut. What interest
would one of the principal agencies of the national-security state have in a
film of an assassination committed by a lone nut? One possible explanation is
an alteration of the film, specifically to hide evidence of an exit hole in the
back of the president’s head.
Impossible, you say? Well, as Horne details in his article
“The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s
Alteration,” which is posted at LewRockwell.com, the film was taken to a
top-secret CIA facility in Washington, D.C.,
on the Saturday night following the assassination. There, the film was watched
and briefing boards were prepared for CIA
officials.
The evidence suggests that the film was then transported to
the CIA ’s top-secret film center at Kodak
headquarters in Rochester , New York
Did the ARRB investigate that? No. Again, Congress limited
its charter to getting records disclosed and prohibited it from reinvestigating
the case.
The ARRB took the statements and testimony of the official
autopsy photographer as well as people involved in the top-secret development
of the autopsy photographs. The evidence revealed not only that there were
photographs in the official collection that had not been taken by the official
photographer but also that some of the photographs that the photographer took
were not included within the autopsy collection.
Among the official autopsy photographs was one that showed
the back of the president’s head to be fully intact, which contradicted
everyone who stated that there was an exit hole in the back of the president’s
head.
Did the ARRB conduct an investigation into the autopsy
photos? No. Congress had prohibited it from doing so.
An obvious question arises: If there was a national-security
cover-up in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination, can we really blame
U.S.
Almost 50 years after the publication of the Warren
Commission Report, I still cannot understand what Lee Harvey Oswald’s motive
would have been in assassinating President Kennedy. The official version of
events is that he was a confused, disgruntled, little man who sought fame and
glory by assassinating a famous, powerful, and admired president of the United
States
But there are obvious problems with that official version.
After he was taken into custody, Oswald denied having shot
the president or anyone else. If he sought fame and glory by killing the
president, why would he deny having done it? Wouldn’t he instead be openly
bragging about the fact that he had just killed the president?
Of course, it might be said that he wanted fame and glory
and, at the same time, to outsmart the government by successfully avoiding
conviction for the crime. But it would seem that those two things are at least
a bit inconsistent.
Moreover, in planning to shoot the president, Oswald left
quite an easy trail leading to himself. Why would he do that, if he was going
to try to beat the rap? Why use a rifle that he had supposedly purchased by
mail and, therefore, that could easily be traced to him? Why not instead walk
into a gun store and buy a brand new rifle for cash, which would have left no
paper trail leading to him? Remember: in Texas
In fact, Oswald’s defense was not simply a denial that he
had committed the crime. He went further than that. In the hours between his
arrest and his murder at the hands of Jack Ruby, he claimed that he had been
set up — framed. That’s what he meant when he told the press that he was “a
patsy.” What could he possibly have had in mind? What would have been his
strategy, assuming he had in fact assassinated Kennedy and planned to escape
the rap?
After all, a simple denial of having committed the offense
would have been the normal route. In so doing, he would have been saying in
effect, “I didn’t do this. I don’t know who did it. All I know is that I didn’t
do it.” By claiming he had been set up, he was saying, “Not only did I not do
this, I know who did do it, and they’re trying to make it look like I did it.”
That obviously would have meant that at his trial, Oswald not only would have
been claiming he had nothing to do with the killing but also would have been
pointing the finger at some other person or group of people.
For the past half-century since the Kennedy assassination,
there have been two lines of “legitimate” discourse within American mainstream
circles. The first is: Oswald was a lone-nut assassin. The second is: Oswald
conspired with others to assassinate John Kennedy. Each of those positions is
considered to be respectable, credible, and legitimate even if people disagree
with it.
What one will rarely find within mainstream circles,
however, are the following questions: Is it possible that Oswald was innocent?
Is it possible that he was neither a lone-nut assassin nor a conspirator in the
assassination? Is it possible that he was what he said he was — “a patsy”? Is
it possible that someone else committed the crime, framed Oswald, and then had
him killed so that he could never deny it or reveal who it was who had set him
up to take the fall?
Anomalies
As the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination
approaches in 2013, those are questions that the American people are unlikely
to encounter in the mainstream press. For once someone begins to contemplate
the possibility that Oswald was innocent, he begins peering into an abyss — one
that points in the direction of the U.S. national-security state — the set of
institutions, including the CIA and the
military, whose responsibility since 1947 has been to protect national
security.
Those who hold that Oswald was involved in the crime, either
as a lone nut or as a conspirator, have always pointed to the large amount of
evidence incriminating him. There was the assassin’s nest on the sixth floor of
the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald worked. There were the three
rifle cartridges found on the floor near the sniper’s nest. There was Oswald’s
supposed murder of police officer J.D. Tippitt soon after Kennedy’s
assassination. There was his supposed devotion to communism, Cuba Soviet Union .
But there is a big problem with all that evidence, a problem
with which the mainstream press has never grappled. That problem is that when a
person is framed for a crime he didn’t commit, to be successful the framers
must make the evidence of guilt point convincingly to the person who is being
framed. That’s the whole point of a frame-up — to make it look as though an
innocent person has committed the crime.
We all know that people have been framed for crimes they
didn’t commit. The most successful frame-ups are those where the false evidence
of guilt is so convincing that the person being framed cannot successfully
defend against the frame. Of course, Oswald never got a chance to present his
defense or defend his allegation of having been set up, owing to his murder by
Jack Ruby.
So how does one distinguish between a person’s actual
commission of a crime and a frame-up of an innocent person? Sometimes it’s
impossible to do so. Other times, however, there are anomalies that are simply
inconsistent with the guilt of the accused but that are consistent with a
frame-up.
And that’s part of the problem in the case of Oswald. There
are anomalies that are consistent with a frame-up and inconsistent with his
being guilty.
For example, after Oswald was taken into custody, he was
given a paraffin test to determine whether he had fired a rifle that day. The
test revealed no gun-powder residue on his cheek.
Or consider Oswald’s demeanor when confronted by a police
officer on the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository less than 90
seconds after the shooting. He was as cool as a cucumber, showing no
nervousness whatsoever. Moreover, he was not out of breath from having rushed
from the sixth floor to the second floor. And he certainly showed no
inclination to take credit for having shot the president.
There were no fingerprints found on the rifle. The only
print that was found was a print of Oswald’s palm under the rifle stock, which
was discovered under rather suspicious circumstances days after the
assassination.
Assuming that Oswald shot the president, what would have
been his primary objective once he had killed the president, if he planned to
claim he didn’t do it? Wouldn’t his primary objective have been to get off that
sixth floor as fast as he could?
Why then would he have taken the time to hide the rifle?
What possible purpose would that have served? The assassin’s nest was there,
out in the open. The same holds true for the rifle cartridges on the floor. So
what good would it have done to hide the rifle? Surely, Oswald would have known
that a complete search would be made of the entire sixth floor. Why delay an
escape to do something that served no purpose whatsoever?
Thus, hiding the rifle is another one of those anomalies
that are inconsistent with Oswald’s guilt and consistent with a frame-up. If
Oswald was going to leave the assassin’s nest intact and leave the spent
cartridges on the floor, why not simply leave the rifle there too and make a
quick escape? Or if he was going to hide the rifle, why not also take the time
to dismantle the assassin’s nest and hide the spent cartridges?
On the other hand, hiding the rifle makes total sense if
there were people framing Oswald. It would have been too risky for framers to
have brought the gun into the building on the morning of the assassination,
when people might have seen them. The framers would necessarily have brought
the gun into the building the night before the assassination and, to avoid its
being discovered, would have hidden it from view.
Let’s assume what U.S. officials and the mainstream press
will never allow themselves to contemplate: Let’s assume for a moment that
Oswald was, in fact, innocent and that he was, in fact, what he alleged to be —
“a patsy.” To whom could he possibly have been referring when he said he had
been set up?
Could it have been personal friends? Not likely, given that
he had few if any close friends. How about fellow employees at the School Book
Depository? Not likely, given the difficulty he obviously would have had in
making such a theory stick. What would have been their motive?
How about the Cubans and the Soviets, given his supposed
connections to communism, Cuba Soviet Union ? That’s, of course, a possibility —
that the Soviets and the Cubans were the ones he was referring to when he
suggested he had been set up. But how would the Soviets and Cubans have planned
to falsify the president’s autopsy, which would have been a critical step in
concealing that shots had been fired from the front?
If we consider, however, that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the
devoted communist he portrayed himself as, but was instead a devoted ex-Marine
who had been recruited by Navy intelligence or the CIA
or some other intelligence branch of the U.S. government to serve as a
government mole during the Cold War, a subject we explored in part six of this
series, then there is only one likely possibility: assuming Oswald was, in
fact, innocent, he was pointing his finger at the U.S. national-security state,
for whom he had been working.
If Oswald was a patsy …
It’s not difficult to understand why the Warren Commission
felt compelled to accept on blind faith and trust the denials by the CIA
and the FBI that Oswald worked as an intelligence operative for the U.S.
government. If it were established that the denials were false, where would
that have left the Warren Commission? It would have left them with a U.S.
intelligence agent who had assassinated the president, one who was denying his
guilt and was pointing to those with whom he worked as the true assassins. It
would have also destroyed the national-security cover story, by which Oswald’s
connections to communism, Cuba, and the Soviet Union were being used to suggest
a conspiracy to kill Kennedy involving him and the Soviets that would
inevitably have led to nuclear war.
It would have meant, again, peering into an abyss. It would
have meant accusing the national-security state, not just a group of rogue
agents, of having assassinated the president. And what if the accusation had
proven true? Then what? How does one indict an entire large section of the
government? And such an accusation, which would almost certainly have been
denied, would have meant an out-and-out war between the Warren Commission, on
the one side, and on the other the CIA ,
military, and other parts of the national-security state, a war that itself would
have been considered a grave threat to national security, especially at the
height of the Cold War.
Thus, there was never a reasonable possibility that such an
accusation or investigation would ever occur. The assassination was done.
Nothing could bring Kennedy back to life. Any investigation that challenged the
word of the CIA , the FBI, and the military
or that suggested the possibility that the national-security state had
assassinated Kennedy and framed Oswald would have been perceived as a grave threat
to national security and, indeed, to the future existence of the United States.
The evidence convincingly pointed to Oswald. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.
The mainstream press and U.S. U.S. CIA
and the military, would ever effect a regime-change operation within the United
States
Oh sure, they’ll say, the CIA
and the military will do those sorts of things to leaders in foreign countries.
They’ll assassinate them, as they have tried repeatedly to do to Fidel Castro.
They’ll initiate coups in which they oust democratically elected leaders from
office and install pro-U.S. leaders in their stead, as they did in Guatemala
and Iran. But to the mainstream, it is absolutely inconceivable that they would
ever do such things here in the United States
What the mainstream often fails to appreciate, however, is
the driving force of the national-security state, which is the protection of
national security. Nothing matters more. Protecting national security is the
raison d’être of the national-security state. Ever since its founding in 1947,
the national-security state — especially the military and the CIA
— has stood above American society like a godlike guardian — indeed, stood over
the entire world — searching carefully and relentlessly for threats to U.S.
national security — and upon finding them, doing whatever was necessary to
eliminate them.
Assassinations, coups, drug experiments, spying on
Americans, maintaining secret files on Americans, extortion, the use of moles
to infiltrate and destroy communist organizations, communist witch hunts,
terrorism against communist states, invasions, partnerships with former Nazis
and the Mafia, regime-change operations, embargoes, and sanctions — nothing has
ever stood in the way of protecting national security. The CIA
and the military have always done whatever was necessary, no matter how
unsavory, to protect “national security.”
Obvious questions arise, however — questions that the
mainstream press has never been able to bring itself to ask: What would the
U.S. national-security state do if confronted by a president whose actions
posed the gravest threat to national security in the nation’s history, one that
threatened the very existence of the nation? Would it let the nation go down,
or would it do what was necessary to protect national security?
Proponents of the lone-nut theory in the Kennedy assassination
often accuse those who believe that the president was killed at the hands of a
conspiracy — and, even worse, one involving agents of the U.S.
national-security state — of being unable to accept the fact that a little
disgruntled man killed a president of the United States, a man who had fame and
fortune and who was respected and admired by many people all over the world.
Yet after John Hinkley’s assassination attempt on Ronald
Reagan, there was no widespread belief that Hinkley was part of a conspiracy,
including one involving the national-security state. The same holds true with
respect to the two separate assassination attempts on Gerald Ford.
Actually, one could easily argue that it’s the other way
around. Proponents of the lone-nut theory simply cannot bring themselves to
accept the possibility that America
Oh sure, they can accept that the military and the CIA
would conduct regime-change operations in other countries, either by coup,
invasion, or assassination, as they did or tried to do in Cuba, Iran,
Guatemala, Chile, and elsewhere. They can also accept that the
national-security state will drug, assassinate, torture, or execute private
American citizens. They can accept that the national-security state, especially
the FBI, will illegally infiltrate American groups, spy on them, keep files on
them, humiliate them, and destroy their reputations. They can accept that the
military and the CIA will do whatever is
necessary to protect national security, no matter how unsavory. They can accept
the common thesis that the Constitution is not a suicide pact and that it is
proper for federal officials to violate the law if it is necessary to save the
nation.
But they simply cannot bring themselves to accept the notion
that the national-security state would ever target the president of the United
States
The autopsy
Thus, as the evidence surrounding the assassination of John
F. Kennedy has slowly trickled out over the years — in violation of the 75-year
period of secrecy that had been ordered by the Warren Commission — the “lone-nut”
proponents have increasingly buried their heads in the sand, either ignoring
discomforting evidence or suggesting that the people giving such evidence must
be lying, no doubt as part of some giant conspiracy.
Consider the following fascinating example.
During the hearings on the Kennedy assassination before the
House Select Committee in the late 1970s, Congress expressly released personnel
who had participated in the official military autopsy of Kennedy from the oath
of secrecy that the military had forced them to take immediately after the
autopsy.
Why had those soldiers been forced to keep their mouths shut
regarding what they had witnessed during the autopsy? What possible
national-security concerns could have justified forcing them to sign written
oaths of secrecy and threatening them with severe penalties for violating such
oaths?
Let’s recall the critical facts. The president was shot in
Texas, where state law required that an autopsy be conducted. What’s the
purpose of an autopsy? To determine the exact cause of death. The medical
examiner conducts a detailed, comprehensive examination of the body, and
official photographs and X-rays of the body are taken.
For example, if there had been shots fired from the front of
Kennedy, a genuine and honest autopsy would have determined that. Obviously, an
autopsy and a final autopsy report are critically important evidence in the
subsequent criminal prosecution of whoever is charged with the crime and
prosecuted for it.
Yet no autopsy was conducted in Texas
Why were the agents so insistent on getting the body out of
Parkland? One reason was that Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it. He refused to
let Air Force One leave without the casket, notwithstanding his supposed
concern that the assassination might be the start of a Soviet nuclear attack on
the United States. Already seats were being removed from the back of Air Force
One to make room for the casket, indicating that the agents at Parkland
Hospital
Kennedy’s body was taken back to Andrews Air Force Base near
Washington , D.C. Parkland
Hospital Bethesda Naval
Medical Center U.S. Dallas
Such, however, was not the case. Both the direct and the
circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly establish that the president’s body was
delivered to the Bethesda morgue an hour and a half before the Dallas casket
was officially delivered.
A real conspiracy?
This matter was first raised in David Lifton’s 1981
book, Best Evidence. By that time, by order of the House Select
Assassinations Committee, several enlisted men who had participated in various
aspects of the autopsy had been released from their oaths of secrecy that the
military had forced them to sign back in November of 1963. They unequivocally
confirmed the early delivery of the president’s body to the morgue in a
different casket from the one into which the body had been placed before
leaving Dallas.
Later, in the 1990s, as detailed in Douglas P. Horne’s
five-volume book on the assassination,Inside the Assassination Records Review
Board, the ARRB discovered an official report filed on November 26, 1963,
by a Marine sergeant named Roger Boyajian that confirmed the early arrival of
the president’s body at the morgue. (For a detailed account of the facts and circumstances
surrounding the early arrival of the president’s body, see my article “The
Kennedy Casket Conspiracy” at http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/kennedy-casket-conspiracy/.)
The ARRB also discovered a report dated November 22-23, 1963 , from the funeral home that
handled the postautopsy preparation of the body that said, “Body removed from
metal shipping casket at NSNH at Bethesda
So what do the lone-nut proponents say about all this? They
either remain silent about the matter, choosing to act as if it never happened,
or they suggest that all the enlisted men and the funeral home must be lying.
Let’s deal with the second point first. What motive would
enlisted men and funeral-home officials have had to lie about when Kennedy’s
body was delivered to the Bethesda morgue? What could possibly have caused them
to do such a thing? And think about it: If they were lying, could they each
have come up with the same lie independently of the others? They
would necessarily have had to have entered into a conspiracy with each other to
concoct a false story about when the president’s body was delivered to the Bethesda
So here we have the lone-nut proponents, who scoff at the
notion that Kennedy might have been killed at the hands of a conspiracy,
implicitly alleging one of the most ridiculous and outlandish conspiracies of
all — that a group of enlisted men and funeral-home officials conspired to
concoct a false story about the delivery of the president’s body to the morgue.
Moreover, if such a conspiracy really existed, surely the
government would have gone after the conspirators with great ferocity. Surely
it would have court-martialed them or indicted Sergeant Boyajian for filing a
false official report as part of that conspiracy.
But the government did nothing to them. The Pentagon didn’t
even bother to accuse them of lying. Instead, the government, including the
military, has just proceeded along, decade after decade, as if they and their
account of what happened never existed. In other words, act as though it never
happened and just don’t address it. The problem will ultimately go away.
Let’s not forget that the U.S.
Why? Why the extreme secrecy? Why was the president’s body
delivered to the morgue earlier than everyone has been taught to believe? What
was the purpose of that? Why can’t the military, even at this late date, come
forward and give us the explanation for that? Why can’t lone-nut proponents
join assassination researchers in demanding the explanation? What would be the
harm? How could national security possibly be threatened by a full and complete
explanation of why the president’s body was secretly delivered to the Bethesda
The brains
Or consider one of the most startling discoveries made by
the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, one involving the
president’s brain. Or should I say “brains”?
It turns out that while the military pathologists claimed
that there had been only one examination of the brain, which would have been
standard procedure, the ARRB found that the circumstantial evidence established
that a second brain examination took place, an examination of another brain,
one that did not belong to the president but that the military represented to
be Kennedy’s brain. Here is a link to a Washington Post article about
the ARRB’s finding on this matter: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/jfk/ap110998.htm.
Why in the world would the U.S. military conduct two
separate brain examinations as part of the Kennedy autopsy, one that didn’t
even involve the president’s brain but that was fraudulently represented to be
his brain? What possible national-security rationale could there be for such a
deceptive action?
The fundamental problem is this: Since it is simply
inconceivable to the lone-nut proponents that Kennedy could have been made a
target of a regime-charge operation at the hands of the national-security
state, they simply refuse to consider the many unusual occurrences in the case,
occurrences that point to nefarious conduct on the part of the military, the CIA ,
the FBI, the Secret Service, and other parts of the national-security state.
That brings us back to motive. What possible motive would
the national-security state have had to target Kennedy for one of its
regime-change operations? The answer is a simple one and, it is no surprise,
revolves around the two most important words in the lives of the American
people since World War II: national security.
Everyone knows that the military and the CIA
will do whatever the president deems necessary to protect national security. In
the name of national security, they ousted the democratically elected prime
minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, in a coup and replaced him with the brutal
regime of a pro-U.S. dictator, the shah of Iran. They also ousted the
democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, and replaced him
with a succession of brutal pro-U.S. military dictators. They invaded Cuba, a
country that had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.
They tried to assassinate the Cuban president, Fidel Castro, and even entered
into a partnership with the Mafia with that aim in mind. They subjected
unknowing Americans to illicit drug experiments. They illegally spied on
Americans who were suspected of being communists and destroyed their
reputations. There isn’t anything that the military and the CIA
wouldn’t do to protect national security.
An obvious question arises: What would happen if the president
of the United States CIA
— became a threat to national security? What would the military and the CIA
do then? Would they let the country go down? Or would they take the necessary
steps to protect national security?
Did President Kennedy actually become a threat to national
security? Viewed from the standpoint of the national-security state, there can
be no real question about it. Kennedy, in fact, posed a much graver threat to
U.S. national security than Mossadegh, Arbenz, Castro, or anyone else, because
he was the head of the U.S. government. Two of the best sources on this
particular subject are JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It
Matters, by James W. Douglass, a Christian theologian; and chapter five
of Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The Government’s Final
Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of
JFK, a five-volume work by Douglas P. Horne, who served as chief analyst
for military records for the ARRB.
John Kennedy came into office in 1961, at the height of the
Cold War. By that time the U.S. national-security state, which had been called
into existence in 1947, was in full bloom, viewing communists and communism as
grave threats to the national security of the United States. Officials at all
levels of the federal government made it clear that everything must and would
be done to protect national security from the communists, even if some of the
actions taken might not be considered legal or moral. The Constitution, after
all, is not a suicide pact, as proponents of the national-security state often
point out.
Kennedy and Cuba
By the time that Kennedy took office, the CIA
had already initiated plans to invade Cuba CIA officials
determined early on that Castro and Cuba U.S.
By 1961 the CIA already
had some national-security successes under its belt. Eight years before, it had
initiated its successful coup in Iran. One year after that regime-change
operation came the one in Guatemala
When Kennedy took office he learned that his role in the CIA ’s
planned invasion of Cuba U.S. CIA assured him that the
invasion would not require U.S. air support, but that was a lie and a setup.
The CIA was certain that once the invasion
got under way, if air support became necessary, there was no way that Kennedy
would permit the invasion to fail by refusing to provide it.
But the trap didn’t work. Even as the invasion was failing,
Kennedy refused to provide the air support. Dozens of Cuban exiles were
captured or killed during the invasion. Meanwhile, the CIA ’s
role in the invasion became public, and the agency was humiliated. Angry at
Kennedy for refusing to provide the air support that could have saved the lives
of their friends and allies and freed the Cuban people from communist control, CIA
and military officials considered the president to be weak and ineffectual at
best and a traitor at worst.
While Kennedy publicly took responsibility for the invasion,
he was just as angry at the CIA as it was at
him because he figured out that he had been set up. A bureaucratic war broke
out between Kennedy and the CIA , with the
president promising to “splinter the CIA
into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” He fired CIA
director Allen Dulles (whom Lyndon Johnson would later appoint to the Warren
Commission), along with his two chief deputies, Richard M. Bissell Jr. and
Charles Cabell.
But if the president were to succeed in destroying the CIA ,
wouldn’t national security be threatened? There is no doubt about it, at least
from the standpoint of the CIA and the
military. How could the nation survive the communist threat if there were no CIA ?
Between the Bay of Pigs invasion and
the Cuban missile crisis, the national-security state went into overdrive
trying to figure out how to get rid of Castro. An assassination partnership
between the CIA and the Mafia was
established, followed by numerous plots against Castro. Acts of terrorism
initiated by CIA operatives were committed
inside Cuba
It was Operation Northwoods that furnished Kennedy with keen
insights into the mindset of U.S. U.S.
Kennedy rejected the plan, to the ire of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, which had unanimously recommended it to him. The military presented
Kennedy with what it considered a viable plan to protect national security by
effecting regime change in Cuba
The missile crisis
Then Kennedy discovered that the Soviets were installing
nuclear missiles in Cuba CIA to effect regime change
in Cuba by assassination, invasion, terrorism, or other means. After all, the
purpose of Soviet missiles in Cuba U.S. CIA .
Throughout the crisis, the Pentagon and CIA ,
willing to risk nuclear war, urged the president to attack and invade Cuba
By that time, however, Kennedy had lost confidence in both
the military and the CIA . With the world at
the brink of nuclear war, he struck a deal with the Soviet premier, Nikita
Khrushchev, in which he promised that the United
States Cuba
Overnight, what had been a driving force for the
national-security state since Castro’s assumption of power in 1959 — regime
change in Cuba
Kennedy believed that the missile crisis was one of his
greatest triumphs. That’s not the way the Pentagon and CIA
saw it. In their eyes Kennedy had capitulated to the communists. It was Castro
and Khrushchev who had defeated Kennedy. Sure, the Soviets had to take their
missiles out of Cuba, but so what? The missiles had been installed to deter a
U.S. invasion of the island. That strategy worked. And once Kennedy gave the
no-invasion guarantee, there was no further reason to keep the missiles in
Cuba. As part of the deal, Kennedy also secretly promised the Soviets to remove
U.S. Turkey Soviet Union .
The deep anger and sense of betrayal toward Kennedy, which
had begun simmering after the Bay of Pigs , reached a
boiling point within both the military and the CIA .
Don’t forget, after all, that Kennedy had rejected Operation Northwoods. If he
had approved the plan, there never would have been a Cuban missile crisis
because Castro would have been dead and U.S. Cuba
While the missile crisis hardened the CIA
and Pentagon toward the communists, the event had a different effect on
Kennedy. Having come so close to nuclear war, a war in which his wife and
children could have been incinerated, the crisis had a searing effect on how he
viewed life and the relationship between the United States and the Soviet
Union.
He concluded that it was possible for the United States and
the Soviet Union to coexist without a Cold War, much as China and Vietnam and
the United States do today. In his famous speech at American University, he
announced his intention to bring the Cold War to an end by reaching out to the
Soviet Union in a spirit of peaceful coexistence. His speech was broadcast all
across the Soviet Union , where his initiative was
enthusiastically received by Khrushchev.
Coexistence
As part of Kennedy’s vision, he entered into a nuclear
test-ban treaty with the Soviets, over the fierce objections of the military
and the CIA . He also ordered the withdrawal
of a thousand U.S. Vietnam Vietnam
Most important, he began top-secret personal negotiations
with Khrushchev and Castro to end the Cold War, something that most Americans
to this day are probably unaware of.
There was a big problem with Kennedy’s actions, at least
from the standpoint of national-security state operatives: his actions
constituted a grave threat to the nation. After all, as Cold War advocates
constantly reminded us, you can always trust a communist … to be a communist.
You couldn’t trust them on anything else. Communists were hell-bent on
conquering the world. Nothing could dissuade them from that goal. The
communists were lulling Kennedy into lowering the nation’s defenses, after
which they would attack it and bury it.
Given this grave threat to national security, there was only
one thing that could save America Chile
The American people had obviously made a mistake in the 1960
election, rejecting Nixon, a man who knew how to stand up to the communists,
and electing instead a man who proved to be weak, ineffectual, incompetent, and
afraid of the communists — a man who distrusted his own military and
intelligence agency — and a man whose actions were leading America to a
takeover by the communists.
By the time of the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy had gone
far beyond the warnings that Dwight Eisenhower had issued in his farewell
address regarding the threat to America
An end to the Cold War would naturally threaten the
existence of the national-security state, since the Cold War was the
justification for its existence. Obviously, that would have threatened
trillions of dollars in future income to the military and intelligence
community as well as to the countless weapons suppliers, contractors, and
subcontractors, who serve them.
We also mustn’t forget Kennedy’s ardent support of Martin
Luther King, who in the eyes of the FBI was a communist himself. Indeed, we
would be remiss if we failed to note Kennedy’s support of the Civil Rights
movement, which FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who hated the Kennedys, was
absolutely certain was a communist front. If all that wasn’t enough, there were
Kennedy’s numerous extramarital affairs, any of which could have made him
vulnerable to blackmail from the communists. Indeed, who could say with any
degree of certainty that that wasn’t the reason that he was secretly
negotiating with Khrushchev and Castro to end the Cold War? After all, why
would a president fail to notify his military and his intelligence agency of
such critically important negotiations?
Among the sexual affairs that constituted serious threats to
national security was the one with Mary Pinchot Meyer, the former wife of a CIA
official. She not only was an anti-CIA
peacenik, she also had been a member of the American Labor Party, which brought
her under the scrutiny of the FBI. Even worse, the evidence is overwhelming
that Meyer introduced Kennedy to marijuana and, very likely, also to LSD.
(See Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA
Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for
World Peace, by Peter Janney.) What would have happened if the Soviets had
attacked when Kennedy was under the influence of pot or LSD? What if Kennedy
ordered U.S. weapons launched while he was in a drug-induced state? Arguably,
the drug use alone made Kennedy a grave threat to national security, a threat
that the overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests was removed through
assassination at the hands of the U.S.
Let’s examine next the Chilean military coup of 1973, which
took place ten years after the Kennedy assassination. It was that coup, which
ironically occurred on 9/11 in 1973, that foreshadowed in fascinating ways the
U.S. national-security state’s war on terrorism after 9/11 in 2011. In fact, it
was during that coup, which the U.S. CIA
participated in the murder of two American citizens, murders that to this day
go uninvestigated and unpunished.
The justification for supporting the Chilean military coup
and participating in the murders of those two Americans?
Why, national security, of course.
On September 11,
1973 , the democratically elected president of Chile Chile Chile
What was the justification for the Chilean coup, which the U.S.
As a self-avowed Marxist, Allende was an ardent believer in
socialism. Once in power, he began nationalizing businesses and industries,
instituting and expanding social-welfare programs, imposing wage and price
controls, and using the power of the government to attempt to equalize wealth
and regulate and manage Chile
Even worse from the standpoint of Richard Nixon, the CIA ,
and the Pentagon, Allende was strengthening his close relationship with Fidel
Castro, the self-avowed communist who was still in power in Cuba despite the
many efforts by the U.S. military and the CIA
to assassinate or oust him.
Allende’s election was the U.S. CIA , the “dominoes” in
America’s part of the world were falling. For U.S. officials, Allende’s
election constituted another grave threat to U.S. national security. Something
had to be done. As Nixon’s national-security adviser Henry Kissinger put it, “I
don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are
irresponsible.”
The coup
So the CIA went into
action. Interfering directly in the internal affairs of another nation, this
one some 5,000 miles from the United States, the CIA
encouraged the Chilean congress to prevent Allende from assuming the
presidency. When that effort failed, the agency undertook actions designed to
create economic chaos within the country, with the aim of producing the
conditions for a military coup. Nixon ordered the CIA
to “make the economy scream.”
Allende’s socialist and interventionist measures, combined
with the CIA ’s efforts to create economic
chaos, succeeded in throwing the Chilean economy into a deep tailspin. Strikes
paralyzed commerce, and mass demonstrations began filling the streets.
The U.S.
Standing in the way of the coup, however, was the commander
in chief of the Chilean army, Rene Schneider. He opposed a coup and said that
the Chilean military would comply with the constitution of the country
The U.S. U.S.
During the kidnapping, Schneider was shot and killed. U.S.
officials played the innocent, claiming that they had no intention of killing
him. They had only wanted him kidnapped. It was a ridiculous position. U.S.
Anyway, U.S. U.S. South
Vietnam
John Kennedy expressed shock that Diem had been executed
during the coup. Given that Kennedy had approved the regime change, however, he
was as morally culpable for Diem’s death as the soldier who actually did the
shooting.
Once Schneider was gone, there was nothing in the way of a
military coup. On September 11, 1973 ,
the Chilean people learned the hard way why a standing army constitutes a grave
threat to a nation’s democratic processes.
Headed by Pinochet, whom Allende had appointed to replace
Schneider, the Chilean military attacked the presidential palace and, it is no
surprise, took control of the government. Refusing to be taken captive, Allende
committed suicide.
Pinochet’s forces immediately swept across the land to
establish “order and stability.” Some 40,000 people were rounded up and
incarcerated. People were carted away to secret prisons and military dungeons,
where they were tortured, raped, or executed — or “disappeared.” No one got
trials because, as Pinochet saw it, he was engaged in “war” — war against
communism and communists.
Lurking in the background were both the U.S. CIA — the core of the U.S.
In fact, the mindset guiding Pinochet in his war against the
communists, a mindset that fully reflected that of the Pentagon and the CIA ,
would in many ways be mirrored by the mindset of U.S.
Killing Americans
In the initial days of the coup, two young Americans —
Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi — were taken into custody by Chilean
officials. Their crime? They were leftists who believed in what Allende was
doing — that is, attempting to help the poor with social-welfare programs,
equalize wealth, and manage the economy. Since the fear of communism was as
pronounced as the fear of terrorism would become three decades later, Horman
and Terrugi were swept up along with thousands of others who held leftist
political views.
They were both quickly executed. No trial. No preliminary
hearing. No due process. Just murdered. Of course, in the minds of military
officials, it wasn’t murder at all. It was war, a situation in which killing
the enemy is legal and where laws against murder don’t apply.
For years U.S. officials pretended they had no knowledge
about what had happened to Horman and Terrugi. It was all a lie. Some 25 years
after the coup, the State Department released a document admitting that the CIA
had played a role in Horman’s execution. Even though the document didn’t
mention Terrugi, the CIA had probably played
the same undefined role in his murder as well.
It is impossible to overstate the significance of the U.S.
Were there any U.S. grand-jury investigations or indictments
in the murders of Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi? Was there a congressional
investigation into their killings? Do we even know the names of the CIA
agents who participated in their executions? Do we know exactly what role the
U.S. national-security state played in their murders? Do we know whether Nixon
or other high U.S.
The answer to all those questions is no, which is absolutely
astounding. The Congress’s and criminal-justice system’s inaction reveals the
omnipotent power that the military and the CIA
had achieved over the American people some 25 years after the formal adoption
of the national-security state.
It is no surprise that the CIA
continues to steadfastly refuse to declassify tens of thousands of records
relating to U.S.
Recently, almost 40 years after the murders of Horman and
Terrugi, a Chilean judge issued a criminal indictment against a former U.S. Santiago United States
To deal with the communist threat, Pinochet embraced a
policy of assassination that would be embraced many years later by U.S. CIA to
fight communism, the Chilean military embarked on a program of assassinating
suspected communists, not only within Chile itself but also in other countries.
The assassination program was similar to the one that the U.S. military and CIA
would adopt many years later in their post–9/11 war on terrorism. Among the
suspected communists assassinated was a former army general named Carlos Prats,
who opposed the Pinochet dictatorship from Argentina
Murder in America
The most famous of Pinochet’s and DINA’s assassinations,
however, was that of Orlando Letelier, who had served as minister of foreign
affairs, interior, and defense in the Allende regime and who was openly
opposing the Pinochet dictatorship in Washington, D.C. In 1976 he was
assassinated by a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles headed by an American named
Michael Townley, a DINA agent who had formerly worked as a CIA
operative.
Oddly enough, the U.S. Justice Department considered
Letelier’s killing a murder rather than an act of war in the war on communism.
Grand-jury indictments for criminal offenses were issued against the Cuban
exiles and Townley. For planning and orchestrating the cold-blooded murder of
Letelier and his young American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, Townley served a
grand total of 62 months in jail before being released to the U.S.
A Spanish judge recently issued an indictment and arrest
warrant against him for the 1976 kidnapping and murder of a Spanish diplomat,
Carmelo Soria, who was working in Chile
While national security was used to justify U.S. United
States Chile U.S.
Had Chile United States
No. Like Fidel Castro, Mohammed Mossadegh, and Jacobo
Arbenz, Allende was guilty of nothing more than being a popular foreign ruler
who, owing to his belief in statism, was leading his nation into economic and
financial disaster. It was the U.S. Iran Guatemala Cuba Chile
Unfortunately, the national-security mindset did not end
with the Cold War. The mindset would resurge with a vengeance, at least for the
American people, when the war on terror replaced the war on communism.
In his Farewell Address in 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower
issued a stark warning that must have shocked Americans at that time. He said
that the vast U.S.
Eisenhower’s successor, John Kennedy, was so concerned
about the power of the military in American life that he recommended that the
novel Seven Days in May, which was about a military coup in America,
be made into movie to serve as a warning to the American people about how
powerful the military establishment had become in the United States.
Thirty days after Kennedy was assassinated,
the Washington Post published an op-ed by the former president Harry
Truman pointing out that the CIA had become
a dark and sinister force in American life.
Since the Kennedy assassination, however, not a single
president and very few members of Congress have dared to challenge the
existence of what we now know as the national-security state. On the contrary,
since 1963 every president and every Congress have showered the Pentagon and
the CIA with money, weaponry, power, luxury,
and influence.
Moreover, the federal judiciary made it clear a long time
ago that it would never enforce any constitutional restrictions against the
military and the CIA once “national
security” or “state secrets” were invoked.
The national-security state, especially the military and the
CIA , has become a permanent part of American
life. In fact, with their overarching mission to protect “national security,”
their dominant role in the American economy, and now their supremacy over the
American citizenry, the Pentagon and the CIA
are arguably the most important and most powerful parts of the federal
government.
The national-security state has transformed American life.
The military now wields the power to take people into custody, transport them
to a military dungeon or concentration camp, torture them, keep them
incarcerated for life, assassinate them, or execute them, perhaps after a
kangaroo military tribunal. All this can now be done without any semblance of
due process of law or jury trial.
In fact, as a practical matter the establishment of the
national-security state effectively amended the Constitution, without anyone’s
going through the formal amendment process. The two most important words in the
lives of the American people for almost 60 years — “national security” — have
been used to effect the most radical transformation in America’s governmental
system in U.S. history. Ironically, the two words aren’t even found in the
Constitution.
Combined with the quest for empire, which began more than
100 years ago, the national-security state invades and occupies countries that
haven’t attacked the United States and kidnaps people suspected of terrorism
anywhere in the world and “renditions” them to friendly dictatorial regimes for
the purpose of torturing them. Or it simply assassinates them. When it comes to
terrorism, the U.S. national-security state is the judge, jury, and
executioner. Its determination is final and nonreviewable. As a practical
matter, both the military and the CIA have
total immunity from criminal prosecution and from liability for killings and
other acts of violence committed in the name of national security.
Permanent numbness
We shouldn’t forget that it wasn’t always terrorism that
justified the ever-growing expansion of the warfare state. Before 1990 communism
was the official bogeyman that justified U.S. intervention worldwide. Indeed,
the overwhelming weight of the circumstantial evidence suggests that national
security was behind the assassination of John Kennedy, especially in light of
his secret negotiations with the Soviets and Cuban leader Fidel Castro to end
the Cold War, which would have meant that the vast national-security state
could have been dismantled as far back as 1963.
In the name of national security, U.S.
The distressing fact is that both the Pentagon and the CIA
have favored totalitarian types since the very beginning of the
national-security state, when they began recruiting Nazi intelligence
operatives into their fold, with the aim of confronting the Soviet Union —
America’s World War II ally and partner — in the new Cold War that would last
for decades, thereby ensuring the continuation and expansion of the vast
military and intelligence establishment.
During the Cold War the national-security state
intentionally destroyed Iran CIA .
One year later the U.S. Guatemala
It invaded Cuba
It participated in the ouster of the democratically elected
president of Chile CIA , however, no one
has ever been called to account for the murder of those two Americans.
The national-security state also supported, with cash and
armaments, the brutal military dictatorship in Egypt
The list goes on and on.
The American people have walked through it all in what seems
to be a state of permanent numbness. That’s one of the national-security
state’s greatest accomplishments — the subordination of individual conscience
to the military and the CIA . If national
security required an attack on a country that had never attacked the United
States, so be it. If it required cruel and inhumane sanctions or embargoes that
squeezed the lifeblood out of innocent people, so be it. If it required an
assassination of some foreign ruler or just some private citizen somewhere, so
be it. If it required 75 years of secrecy in the Kennedy assassination, so be
it. If it required the execution of American citizens in Chile or elsewhere, so
be it. If it required kidnapping, torture, indefinite incarceration, execution,
or assassination, so be it. If it required supporting brutal dictatorships, so
be it. If it required drug experiments on unsuspecting Americans, so be it. If
it required the recruitment of Nazis into the national-security state, so be
it.
All that mattered was that national security be preserved at
all costs. No one was supposed to question or challenge what the state had to
do to protect national security. Everyone was expected to simply keep his head
down, go about his business, and remain silent and trusting.
Thus no one was supposed to notice that the
national-security state was embracing many of the policies and programs that
characterized totalitarian states. Since it was all being done in the name of
“national security” and to “protect our freedoms and values,” it was all
considered justified. In fact, it was all considered part of our “freedom.”
The worst choice
Perhaps the most willing form of blindness came with the
9/11 attacks. U.S. officials immediately announced that the terrorists had
struck America out of anger and hatred for America’s “freedom and values,” a
line that would immediately be embraced by many Americans. Yet time and again,
terrorists who struck America before and after 9/11 made it clear that their
anger and hatred were rooted in what the U.S. national-security state had been
doing and was continuing to do to people overseas, especially in the Middle
East.
One of the best examples of the horror of U.S. foreign
policy occurred in Iraq, where 11 years of brutal sanctions, which began after
the 1991 Gulf War, contributed to the death of half a million Iraqi children.
When the U.S.
Her answer reflected the official view of the
national-security state. Given the lack of outrage among the American people,
the episode also showed how horribly the national-security had warped the
values, principles, and conscience of the American people. That callous
indifference to the sanctity of human life would be repeated after the 2003
invasion of Iraq
It was such policies that motivated anti-American anger and
hatred, not hatred for America
People like to say that “9/11 changed the world.” It
actually didn’t change U.S. Iraq Afghanistan Middle East
and Latin America .
The worst thing the American people ever did — worse even
than embracing the welfare state — was to permit a permanent warfare state to
come into existence. The national-security state has warped American values and
stultified Americans’ conscience. It has engendered anger and hatred for America CIA . It is a
necessary prerequisite for a free, prosperous, harmonious, and secure society.
Reprinted from The Future
of Freedom Foundation.
Jacob Hornberger [send
him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Copyright © 2013 The
Future of Freedom Foundation
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