General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Mass Media ignoring 'RFK Believed in Conspiracy' shows corrupt nature of America's Press [View all]Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)Excerpts from the book
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
by James W. Douglass
Touchstone Books, 2008
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Our collective denial of the obvious, in the setting up of Oswald and his transparent silencing by Ruby, made possible the Dallas cover-up [of the JFK assassination]. The success of the cover-up was the indispensable foundation for the subsequent murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy by the same forces at work in our government - and in ourselves. Hope for change in the world was targeted and killed four times over. The cover-up of all four murders, each leading into the next, was based, first of all, on denial - not the government's but our own.
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The only trial ever held for [for Martin Luther King's murder] took place in Memphis, only a few blocks from the Lorraine Motel where King was killed. In a wrongful death lawsuit initiated by the King family, seventy witnesses testified over a six-week period. They described a sophisticated government plot that involved the FBI, the CIA, the Memphis Police, Mafia intermediaries, and an Army Special Forces sniper team. The twelve jurors, six black and six white, returned after two and one-half hours of deliberation with a verdict that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government.
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JFK [John Kennedy] , Malcolm [X], Martin [Luther King], and [RFK [Robert Kennedy] were four proponents of change who were murdered by shadowy intelligence agencies using intermediaries and scapegoats under the cover of "plausible deniability".
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Our citizen denial provides the ground for the government's doctrine of "plausible deniability". John F. Kennedy's assassination is rooted in our denial of our nation's crimes in World War II that began the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. As a growing precedent to JFK's assassination by his own national security state, we U.S. citizens supported our government when it destroyed whole cities (Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki), when it protected our Cold War security by world-destructive weapons, and when it carried out the covert murders of foreign leaders with "plausible deniability" in a way that was obvious to critical observers.
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June 10, 1963: President Kennedy delivers his Commencement Address at American University in Washington proposing, in effect, an end to the Cold War. Rejecting the goal of "a Pax Americana enforced on the world by "American weapons of war," Kennedy asks Americans to reexamine their attitudes toward war, especially in relation to the people of the Soviet Union, who suffered incomparable losses in World War II.
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October 11, 1963: President Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 263, making official government policy the withdrawal from Vietnam of "1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963" and "by the end of 1965 ... the bulk of U.S. personnel."
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The national security doctrine of "plausible deniability" combined lying with hypocrisy. It marked the creation of a Frankenstein monster.
Plausible deniability encouraged the autonomy of the CIA and other covert-action ("intelligence" agencies from the government that created them. In order to protect the visible authorities of the government from protest and censure, the CIA was authorized not only to violate international law but to do so with as little consultation as possible. CIA autonomy went hand in glove with plausible deniability. The less explicit an order from the president, the better it was for "plausible deniability".
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The military-industrial complex was totally dependent on "a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war." That Pax Americana policed by the Pentagon was considered the system's indispensable, hugely profitable means of containing and defeating Communism. At great risk Kennedy was rejecting the foundation of the Cold War system.
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The pressures on President Kennedy came less from constituents than from the weapons-making corporations that thrived on the Cold War, and from the Pentagon and the CIA that were dedicated to "winning" that war, whatever that might mean.
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In the summer of 1963, the leaders of the military-industrial complex could see storm clouds on their horizon. After JFK's American University address and his quick signing of the Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev, corporate power holders saw the distinct prospect in the not distant future of a settlement in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
... In [the] direction of U.S.-Soviet disarmament lay the diminished power of a corporate military system that for years had controlled the United States government. In his turn toward peace, Kennedy was beginning to undermine the dominant power structure that Eisenhower had finally identified and warned against so strongly as he left the White House.
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John and Robert Kennedy had become notorious in the ranks of big business. JFK's strategy of withdrawing defense contracts and RFK's aggressive investigating tactics toward men of power were seen as unforgivable sins by the corporate world. As a result of the president's uncompromising stand against the steel industry - and implicitly any corporation that chose to defy his authority - a bitter gap opened up between Kennedy and big business, whose most powerful elements coincided with the military-industrial complex.
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President Kennedy to his advisors Sorenson, O'Donnell, and Schlesinger
I understand better every day why [Franklin] Roosevelt, who started out such a mild fellow, ended up so ferociously anti-business. It is hard as hell to be friendly with people who keep trying to cut your legs off.
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In his deepening alienation from the CIA, the Pentagon, and big business, John Kennedy was moving consciously beyond the point of no return. Kennedy knew well the complicity that existed among the Cold War's corporate elite, Pentagon planners, and the heads of "intelligence agencies." He was no stranger to the way systemic power worked in and behind his national security state.
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We have no evidence as to who in the military-industrial complex may have given the order to assassinate President Kennedy. That the order was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency is obvious. The CIA's fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it.
/... http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Assassinations_page/JFK_Unspeakable.html
See also: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=209x6350 (Mar-31-08)