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Today's
Stories
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
November
12, 2003
The Warren Commission
Revisited
Forty
Years of Lies
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
"If, as we are told, Oswald was
the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?"
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell's penetrating question, one of
sixteen he asked at the time of the Warren Commission Report,
remains unanswered after forty years. That should trouble Americans,
but then again there are many things around national secrecy
today that should trouble Americans.
The most timely lesson to be taken from
the fortieth anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination
concerns secrecy and the meaning of democracy in the world's
most powerful nation. Perhaps no event better demonstrates the
existence of two governments in the United States, the one people
elect and another, often far more influential, as capable of
imposing false history about large events as the fabled Ministry
of Truth.
Since the time of the Warren Commission
we have had the investigation of the House Select Committee and,
in the last decade, the release of truckloads of previously-secret
documents.
These documents were suppressed originally
in the name of national security, but the fact is, despite their
release, much of their content is heavily blacked out, and dedicated
researchers know many documents remain unreleased, particularly
documents from the CIA and military intelligence. Would any reasonable
person conclude anything other than that those documents are
likely the most informative and sensational?
Was it ever reasonable to believe that
material of that nature would be included in document releases?
Just a few years ago, records of some of the CIA's early Cold
War activities, due for mandated release, were suddenly said
to have "disappeared," and that declaration was pretty
much the end of the story for a press regularly puffing itself
as the fourth estate of American society. You do not have to
believe in wild plots to recognize here the key to the Warren
Commission's shabby job of investigation. As it was, several
members of the Commission expressed private doubts about the
main finding of Oswald as lone assassin.
There is a sense in these matters of
being treated as a child sent to his or her room for not eating
the spinach served. This is not so different to the way the American
government treats its citizens about Cuba: it restricts them
from spending money there so they cannot freely go and judge
for themselves what is and isn't.
As it happens, the two things, Cuba and
the assassination, are intimately related. Almost no one who
studies the assassination critically can help but conclude it
had a great deal to do with Cuba. No, I don't mean the pathetic
story about Castro being somehow responsible. That idea is an
insult to intelligence.
No matter what opinions you may hold
of Castro, he is too clever and was in those days certainly too
dedicated to the purpose of helping his people, according to
his lights, ever to take such a chance. Even the slightest evidence
pointing to Castro would have given the American establishment,
fuming over communism like Puritan Fathers confronting what they
regarded as demon possession, the excuse for an invasion.
There never has been credible evidence
in that direction. Yet, there has been a number of fraudulent
pieces of evidence, particularly the testimony of unsavory characters,
claims so threadbare they have come and gone after failing to
catch any hold, remaining as forgotten as last year's fizzled
advertising campaign for some laundry detergent.
The notion that Castro had anything to
do with the assassination is like an old corpse that's been floating
around, slowly decomposing, periodically releasing gases for
decades. And it is still doing so, Gus Russo's Live by the Sword
of not many years ago being one of the most detailed efforts
to tart-up the corpse and make it presentable for showing.
Any superficial plausibility to the notion
of Castro as assassin derives from the poisonous atmosphere maintained
towards him as official American policy. Researchers in science
know that bias on a researcher's part, not scrupulously checked
by an experiment's protocols, can seriously influence the outcome
of an otherwise rigorous statistical study. How much more so
in studies of history on subjects loaded with ideology and politics?
When you consider with what flimsy, and
even utterly false, evidence the United States has invaded Iraq,
it is remarkable that an invasion of Cuba did not proceed forty
years ago. But in some ways the U.S. was less certain of itself
then, it had a formidable opponent in the Soviet Union, and there
was an agreement with the Soviets concerning Cuba's integrity
negotiated to end the Cuban missile crisis, an agreement which
deeply offended the small army of Cuban exiles, CIA men, and
low-life hangers-on who enjoyed steady employment, lots of perquisites,
and violent fun terrorizing Cuba.
Considering America's current crusade
over the evils of terrorism, you'd have to conclude from the
existence of that well-financed, murderous mob in the early 1960s
that there was a rather different view of terror then. Perhaps
there is good terror and bad terror, depending on just who does
the wrecking and killing?
If you were a serious, aspiring assassin,
associated with Castro and living in the United States during
the early 1960s, you would not advertise your sympathies months
in advance as Oswald did. You would not call any attention to
yourself. It is hard for many today to have an adequate feel
for the period, a time when declaring yourself sympathetic to
Castro or communism could earn you a beating in the street, quite
apart from making you the target of intense FBI interest. Oswald
was physically assaulted for his (stagy) pro-Castro efforts in
New Orleans, and he did receive a lengthy visit from the FBI
while held briefly in jail, but this was not new interest from
the agency since he was already well known to them.
Whatever else you may think of Castro,
he is one of the cleverest and most able politicians of the second
half of the twentieth century. He survived invasion, endless
acts of terror and sabotage from the CIA and Cuban exiles, and
numerous attempts at assassination, and he still retains a good
deal of loyal support in Cuba. A man of this extraordinary talent
does not use someone like Oswald to assassinate an American president.
And if Castro had made such a mistake, he quickly would have
corrected the error when Oswald made a (deliberate) fool of himself,
over and over, in New Orleans well before the assassination,
his actions there looking remarkably like the kind of provocateur-stuff
a security service might use to elicit responses and identify
the sympathies of others.
Oswald's (purported) visit to Mexico
and clownish behavior in New Orleans laid the groundwork for
the myth of Castro's involvement, and that almost certainly was
one of the purposes of the activity, laying the groundwork for
an invasion of Cuba. The motive for the assassination is likely
found there. It is just silly to believe Castro risked handing
the U.S. government a new "Remember the Maine."
In recent years, we've had Patrick Kennedy
say he believes Castro was responsible, but his views on this
matter are more like built-in reflexes than informed judgment.
Besides broadcasting a tone agreeable to America's political
establishment, his statement comes steeped in de' Medici-like
conviction that Castro's success stained the honor of his ferociously
ambitious family. Cross that family's path, and you earn a lifetime
grudge. That's the way the family fortune's founder always behaved.
Robert Kennedy hated Castro (just as
he hated other powerful competitors including Lyndon Johnson),
and he took personal oversight of efforts to assassinate him.
Robert also hated certain elements of the Mafia, who, after supporting
his brother with money and influence in the election, felt betrayed
by Robert's legal actions against them. The killing of Castro
would have made all these people much happier, Havana having
been one of the Mafia's gold mines before Castro. Interestingly
enough, it appears that the FBI, under pressure from Robert,
was at the same time making efforts to crackdown on the excesses
of the Cuban refugees. Their excesses , including insane acts
like shooting up Russian ships and killing Russian sailors in
Cuban ports, threatened relations with the Soviet Union.
One of the centers of the FBI's crackdown
effort was New Orleans, and that is where it appears clearest
that Oswald worked for them. His defector background made him
a logical candidate for provocative activities like handing out
leaflets about Castro. At the same time he was offering his services
as an ex-Marine to at least one of the refugee groups.
Oswald almost certainly had a minor role
in American intelligence, an assumption that explains many mysterious
episodes in his life. We know the Warren Commission discussed
this in closed session. We also know Texas authorities believed
they had discovered such a connection. And we know the FBI in
Dallas destroyed important evidence.
If you're looking for Cuban assassins,
why not some of those nasty refugee militia groups, armed to
the teeth by the CIA and trained to terrorize Castro's government?
They also terrorized their critics in Florida. The extensive
preparations necessary for assassinating the President might
have raised little suspicion from the CIA or FBI at a time when
these groups, subsidized and protected by the CIA, were carrying
out all kinds of violent, lunatic acts. There are strong parallels
here with the suicide-bombers of 9/11, who undoubtedly eluded
suspicion because the CIA had been regularly bringing into the
country many shady characters from the Middle East to train for
its dark purposes in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Cuban extremists in Florida were
furious over the Bay of Pigs and felt betrayed by Kennedy's terms
for settling the missile crisis. You couldn't find a better explanation
for the CIA's unhelpful behavior over the years since. Imagine
the impact on the CIA, already badly damaged by the Bay of Pigs
and Kennedy's great anger over it, of news that some of its subsidized
anti-Castro thugs had killed the President?
I don't say that is what happened, only
that there is at least one conjecture with far more force and
substance than the official one. Assassination-theorizing is
not one of my hobbies, but I have contempt for the official explanation,
and it seems rather naive to believe that the American security
establishment would have been satisfied with the insipid conclusions
of the Warren Commission.
Furthermore, it is difficult to believe
that the vast resources of American security and justice employed
at the time - that is, those not concerned with kicking up dust
into the public's eyes - were not able to identify the assassins
and their purpose. Documents covering a surreptitious, parallel
investigation almost certainly exist because what we know includes
suggestions of two investigations intersecting at times. Perhaps,
the best example of this is around the autopsy (discussed below).
Kicking-up dust around the assassination
is an activity that continues intermittently to this day. In
a piece a few years ago in the Washington Post about new Moscow
documents on the assassination, a reporter wrote, "Oswald...defected
to the Soviet Union in 1959 and renounced his American citizenship."
Oswald never renounced his citizenship,
although he made a public show of wanting to do so. This was
one of many theater-of-the-absurd scenes in the Oswald saga.
We now know that on one of his visits to the American embassy
in Moscow, Oswald was taken to an area reserved for sensitive
matters, not the kind of business he was there to conduct.
The Soviets let him stay, never granting
him citizenship, always treating him as an extraordinary outsider
under constant scrutiny.
The Washington Post reporter also wrote,
"Historians have expressed hope that the documents could
shed light on whether Oswald schemed to kill Kennedy when he
lived in the Soviet Union...." That begs the genuine question
of whether Oswald killed Kennedy and kicks-up more dust. No historian
of critical ability could think that way. The Soviets went out
of their way at the time of the assassination to reassure the
U.S. government that they had no connection with it. Any credible
evidence they could produce, we may be absolutely sure, was produced.
The stakes were immensely high.
The testimony of many Soviet citizens
who knew Oswald agreed that he was a man temperamentally incapable
of killing anyone. An exception was his (estranged) wife, Marina,
who found herself, after the assassination, a Soviet citizen
in a hostile country, able to speak little English, the mother
of two young children with absolutely no resources, and hostage
to American agents who could determine her destiny.
Even so accomplished and discerning a
journalist as Daniel Schorr has assisted in kicking-up dust,
writing some years ago at the release of more than a thousand
boxes of memos and investigative reports from the national archives
that there wasn't much there. Somehow, Schorr had managed to
digest and summarize that monstrous amount of information in
a very short time. Then again, in view of all the blacked-out
information, maybe Schorr's assertion owed less to incredible
skills at reading and digesting information than to serene confidence
in the methods of the establishment.
Schorr went from the merely silly to
the ridiculous with his assertion, "There remains no serious
reason to question the Warren Commission's conclusion that the
death of the president was the work of Oswald alone." How
re-assuring, but, if you think about that for a moment, it is
the equivalent of saying what never was proved has not now been
disproved, so we'll regard it as proved - absurd, yet characteristic
of so many things written about the assassination.
Schorr went on to praise Gerald Posner's
new book, Case Closed, as "remov[ing] any lingering doubt."
We'll come back to Posner's book, but Schorr also saw fit to
trot out the then obligatory disparaging reference to Oliver
Stone's movie JFK. Why would a piece of popular entertainment
be mentioned in the same context as genuine historical documents?
Only to associate the movie with Schorr's claim that the documents
had little to say.
Every handsomely-paid columnist and pop
news-celebrity in America stretched to find new words of contempt
for the Stone movie, miraculously, many of them well before its
release. The wide-scale, simultaneous attack was astonishing.
You had to wonder whether they had a source sending them film
scraps from the editing room or purloined pages from the script.
When Stone's movie did appear - proving highly unsatisfactory,
almost silly, in its explanation of the assassination - you had
to wonder what all the fuss had been about.
I was never an admirer of President Kennedy
- still, the most important, unsolved murder of the 20th century,
apart from the lessons it offers, is a fascinating mystery for
those who've studied it.
The President's head movement at the
impact of the fatal shot, clearly backward on the Zapruder film,
a fact lamely rationalized by the Warren Commission, is not the
only evidence for shots from the front. In the famous picture
of Mrs. Kennedy reaching over the back of the car, she was, by
her own testimony, reaching for a piece of the President's skull.
Equally striking is the testimony of a police outrider, to the
rear of the President's car, that he was struck forcefully with
blood and brain tissue.
The doctors who worked to save the President
at Parkland Hospital in Dallas said that the major visible damage
to the President was a gaping wound near the rear of the skull,
the kind of wound that typically reflects the exit of a bullet
with the shock wave generated by its passing through layers of
human tissue. We've all seen a plate glass window struck by a
B-B where a tiny entrance puncture results in a large funnel-shaped
chunk of cracked or missing glass on the opposite side.
The President's head wound, as described
in Dallas, is not present in published autopsy photographs. Instead,
there is a pencil-thin entrance-type wound in an unknown scalp.
Although the Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, who climbed aboard
the President's car after the shots, testified to seeing a large
chunk of skull in the car and looking into the right rear of
the President's head, seeing part of his brain gone, the autopsy
photos show no such thing.
The wound at the front of the President's
neck, just above his necktie, which was nicked by the bullet,
was regarded by those first treating him in Dallas as an entrance
wound since it had the form of a small puncture before a tracheotomy
was done. But the throat wound in the published autopsy photos
is large and messy.
The nature of the pathologists forcefully
raises Russell's question. Why would you need military pathologists,
people who must follow orders? Ones especially that were not
very experienced in gunshot wounds, far less so than hospital
pathologists in any large, violent American city? Why conduct
the autopsy at a military hospital in Washington rather than
a civilian one in Dallas? Why have the pathologists work with
a room full of Pentagon brass looking on? The President's body
was seized at gunpoint by federal agents at the hospital in Dallas
where the law required autopsy of a murder victim. Why these
suspicious actions and so many more, if the assassination, as
the Warren Commission and its defenders hold, reduces to murder
by one man for unknown motives?
The autopsy, as published, was neither
complete nor careful, rendering its findings of little forensic
value. There is some evidence, including testimony of a morgue
worker and references contained in an FBI memo, pointing to autopsy
work, particularly work to the President's head, done elsewhere
before receipt of the body for the official autopsy, but no new
documents expand on this. We do learn the relatively trivial
fact that the expensive bronze casket, known to have been damaged
at some point in bringing it to Bethesda, was disposed of by
sinking in the ocean, but the morgue worker said the bronze casket
arriving with Mrs. Kennedy was empty and that the body, separately
delivered in a shipping casket, displayed obvious signs of work
done to it. The FBI memo, written by two agents at the "earlier
stages" of the official autopsy, states that the unwrapped
body displayed "surgery of the head area." The same
FBI agents also signed a receipt for a mysterious "missile
removed" by one pathologist.
The official autopsy avoided some standard
procedures. For example, the path of the so-called magic bullet
through the President's neck was not sectioned. A mysterious
back wound, whose placement varies dramatically from the hole
in the President's jacket (a fact officially explained by an
improbable bunching-up of the jacket), was probed but no entrance
into the body cavity found. The preserved brain - what there
was of it, and with its telltale scattering of metal fragments
- later went missing. One of the pathologists admitted to burning
his original draft before writing the report we now see.
The Warren Commission did no independent
investigation (it did not even examine the autopsy photos and
x-rays), adopting instead the FBI as its investigative arm at
a time when the FBI had many serious matters to explain. The
FBI had failed to have Oswald's name on its Watch List even though
they were completely familiar with him, seeing him at intervals
for unexplained reasons. His name even had appeared earlier in
an odd internal FBI advisory memo signed by Director Hoover.
The FBI also had failed to act appropriately on an explicit threat
from a known source recorded well before Kennedy went to Dallas.
And the agency destroyed crucial evidence.
With a lack of independent investigation
and the absence of all proper court procedures including the
cross-examination of witnesses, the Warren Report is nothing
more than a prosecutor's brief, and a sloppy one at that, with
a finding of guilt in the absence of any judge or jury. The only
time the skimpy evidence against Oswald was considered in a proper
court setting, a mock trial by the American Bar Association in
1992, the jury was hung, 7 to 5.
Oswald's background is extraordinary.
By the standards of the 1950s and early 1960s, aspects of his
life simply make no sense if viewed from the official perspective.
Here was a Marine, enlisted at 17, who mysteriously started learning
Russian, receiving communist literature through the mail, and
speaking openly to other Marines about communism - none of which
in the least affected his posting or standing.
He became a defector to the Soviet Union,
one who reportedly threatened to give the Soviets information
about operations of the then top-secret U-2 spy plane. Some even
assert he did provide such information, making it possible for
a Soviet missile to down Gary Power's U-2 plane just before the
Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit. Unlikely as that is, for Oswald
would certainly have been treated harshly on his return to the
United States were it true, he did know some important facts
about the U-2's capabilities, because this Russian-studying,
communist literature-reading Marine was posted at a secret U-2
base in Japan as a radar operator before his defection.
At a time when witch-hunting for communists
was a fresh memory and still a career path for some American
politicians, Oswald returned to the U.S. with a Russian wife,
one whose uncle was a lieutenant colonel in the MVD, the Ministry
of the Interior, but the CIA and other security agencies supposedly
took little interest in him. Oswald's source of income in the
U.S. at critical times remains a mystery. A mystery, too, surrounds
the connections of this young man of humble means to some well-heeled,
anti-Soviet Russian speakers in Dallas after his return from
the Soviet Union. His later ability to get a passport for travel
to Mexico in just 24 hours - with a personal history that must
have ranked as one of the most bizarre in the United States -
is attributed to "clerical error."
Oswald, so far as we know, was a patriotic
individual when he joined the Marines. There is no evidence that
he was ever actually a communist or member of any extremist organization.
In fact, there is striking evidence suggesting he did work supporting
the opposite interest after his return to the United States.
Thus the address on some of the "Fair Play for Cuba"
pamphlets he distributed in New Orleans was the office of Guy
Bannister, a former senior FBI agent and violent anti-communist,
still well-connected to the agency.
Oswald's connections with the FBI have
never been satisfactorily examined. There are many circumstances
suggesting his being a paid informant for the FBI, especially
during his time in New Orleans. A letter Oswald wrote to a Dallas
agent just before the assassination was deliberately and recklessly
destroyed by order of the office's senior agent immediately after
the assassination with no reasonable explanation.
One way or another, all the major police
or intelligence agencies were compromised during the assassination
or its investigation. The Secret Service performed abysmally,
in both planning the motorcade and responding to gun fire. Some
of the agents on duty had actually been out late drinking the
night before, as it happens at a bar belonging to an associate
of Jack Ruby, Oswald's own assassin. The performance of the Dallas
police suggests terrible corruption. The FBI failed in vital
respects before and after the assassination. The CIA failed to
cooperate on many, many details of the investigation. These facts
understandably encourage the more farfetched assassination theories.
The CIA has never released its most important
information on Oswald, importantly including documentation of
his supposed activities in Mexico City at the Cuban and Russian
embassies where every visitor was routinely photographed and
identified by the CIA. We may speculate what a thorough vetting
of CIA files would show: likely that Oswald was a low-grade intelligence
agent during his stint in the Soviet Union, perhaps working for
military intelligence to collect information on day-to-day living
conditions and attitudes there, one of several men sent for the
purpose at that time; that he was trained at an American military
school in basic Russian and encouraged to build a quickie communist
identity by subscribing to literature and talking foolishly before
defecting. We would also likely find that he was serving American
security, probably the FBI, during the months before Dallas in
the murky world of CIA/FBI/Cuban refugee/Mafia anti-Castro activities;
and that in the course of that anti-Castro work, he was sucked
without realizing it into an elaborate assassination plot, offering
the plotters, with his odd background, a tailor-made patsy. The
CIA assessment of Oswald would likely show, just as testimony
from his time in the Soviet Union shows, that Oswald was not
capable psychologically of acting as an assassin, lone or otherwise.
The case against Oswald is a flimsy tissue.
It includes a poor autopsy of the victim offering no reliable
evidence; a rifle whose ownership is not established; a rifle
never definitively proved to have actually killed the President;
a claim that jacketed bullets were used, a type of ammunition
that could not possibly cause the kind of wounds to which many
testify; the accused's record of mediocre marksmanship in the
Marines; a parafin test which showed no residue on his cheek
despite his supposedly firing three shots from a bolt-action
rifle; a single palm print claimed to have been obtained from
the rifle after earlier failed attempts; gimmicky, suggestive
photographs of Oswald with a rifle declared montages by several
experts; a completely unacceptable evidence chain for the shell
casings from the site of Officer Tippit's shooting, those submitted
as evidence being almost certainly not those found at the scene;
a bizarre history for the bullets supposed to have killed Tippet;
an illogical weighting of witnesses who told different stories
about Tippit's shooting; plus many other strange and contradictory
details.
Moreover, Oswald had no motive, having
expressed admiration for Kennedy. And Oswald was promptly assassinated
himself by Jack Ruby, a man associated with the murky world of
anti-Castro violence, someone whose past included gun-running
to Cuba and enforcer-violence in Chicago.
There is a kind of cheap industry in
publishing assassination books, most of which are superficial
or silly. This fact makes it easy to attack credible efforts
to question the official story, but in this respect the subject
is no different from others. Just look at the shelves of superficial
or trashy books on psychology, business management, or self-help
available in bookstores.
Russell's question echoes again and again
down the decades as adjustments are made to the official story.
Employing techniques one expects to be used for covering up long-term
intelligence interests, various points raised by early independent
researchers like Joachim Joesten or Mark Lane, have been conceded
here or there along the way without altering the central finding.
This is an effective method: concede details and appear open
to new facts while always forcefully returning to the main point.
A significant writer along these lines
is Jacob Epstein, an author whose other writing suggests intelligence
connections. His first book on the assassination, Inquest, conceded
numerous flaws in the Warren Report. Epstein went on in subsequent
books, Counterplot and Legend to attack at length - and for the
critical reader, quite unconvincingly - ideas of conspiracy,
Oswald's intelligence connections, and his innocence.
The Report of the House Select Committee
on Assassinations, 1979, was the grandest effort of this type.
The Committee was used for selective leaks and plants, as for
example the publication of some bootlegged autopsy photos, which
ended by raising only more questions. Leads often were not followed-up,
greatly frustrating some of the able investigators employed.
The Committee squandered the last opportunity to pursue an independent,
well-financed investigation - last, in the sense of never again
being able to overcome the inertia against assembling the needed
resources and authorities and in the sense that with passing
time evidence deteriorates, memories fade, and witnesses die.
Despite the Committee's attention-getting conclusion from technical
analysis of an old Dictabelt recording that a shot probably was
fired from the front, it also concluded that the shot missed,
a truly bizarre finding that welds hints of conspiracy to yet
another assertion that Oswald was the only killer.
Gerald Posner's Case Closed, 1993, was
another of these. You couldn't help noticing this lamentable
book being widely reviewed and praised. Why would that be? Because,
without producing any new evidence and despite a number of errors,
it freshly re-packaged the main speculations of the Warren Report,
but no repackaging of the Report's jumble of partial facts, guesses,
and accusations can strengthen its conclusions. You can't build
a sound house with large sections of the foundation missing.
Priscilla Johnson's Marina and Lee,1980
, was another kind of book, one of several resembling the kind
of quickie books churned out to discredit Anita Hill in the Judge
Clarence Thomas confirmation. Ms. Johnson managed to interview
Oswald in Russia - I wonder what connections might have made
that possible? - and later used that fact to gain access to Oswald's
widow, Marina. Impressing many who had heard her as a distracted
and confused person, Marina was a woman who had been subjected
to immense, frightening pressure from the FBI and other security
services after the assassination. The book is an almost unreadable
hatchet-job on Oswald's character, effectively diminishing the
image that comes through many photographs and anecdotes of a
rather naïve, brash, sometimes rude but not unlikable young
man caught up in events he incompletely understood.
The official story of the assassination
remains pretty much unchanged from just a few days after events
of forty years ago: one man with an almost broken-down rifle,
no expertise, no resources, and no motive killed the President,
and he was himself killed by a man with the darkest background
simply out of sympathy for the President's wife. Those with no
vested interest and critical faculties intact can never accept
such a fable explaining the brutal work of a well-planned conspiracy.
Now, the really horrifying possibility
is that the security agencies never discovered the assassins
despite vast efforts. That means officials hold tenaciously to
the Oswald story to cover national nakedness. The FBI has a long
and shabby record of blunders and going after the wrong people,
and when you think of the CIA's many failures assessing the capabilities
and approaching demise of the Soviet Union, the many failures
in Vietnam, and its miserable failure around 9/11, that is not
a farfetched possibility. The answer to Russell's question then
becomes that national security indeed applies, if only in the
unexpected form of hiding miserable failure.
But if you can write false history of
an event so large as a Presidential assassination, what truly
are the limits
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 8 / 9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
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