Paul Rigby

I've ordered many of his books at the library. Unfortunately most are inter-library loan, which means they may be impossible to get. I have his book of quotes waiting for me now at the library. Can't wait to see that.

Myra,

Pleasure deferred has a depressing tendency to be pleasure wasted. If you've got some spare cash, or merely run out of patience waiting for the library, try this link for about the best search engine for second-hand books I've found: http://www.bookfinder.com/

Last time I looked, there was a fair bit of Seldes available at very reasonable prices.

I also urge you to get hold of the Spivak pieces. They quickly disabuse the reader of any misguided notions about the recentness of the coalition which comprises the neo-Con lobby in the US: It was all pretty much in place in the mid-1930s. Spivak briefly revisited the case, I believe though don't know for sure, in his 1967 book, A Man In His Time (NY: Horizon Press).

I am mildly astonished that the CIApedia contains any trace of the man. I assume it's all some ghastly mistake, and the real entry is for Gilbert (as in Sullivan).

Paul

Italian Fascism in Colour

Seizure Of Power

9.25pm – 10.20pm ABC TV

Thursday 8 February 2007

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the previously untold story - shown for the first time in colour - of how Mussolini seized power through systematic intimidation, violence and murder.

Possibly something of interest re Angleton et al

John,

Don't forget the American - Morgan - money that kept the whole thuggish show afloat in the mid-1920s! Prior to that, I recall that the Foreign Office offered Mussolini significant subventions. So much for all that nonsense about the Anglo-American struggle in the twentieth century to ward off totalitarianisms of left and right. Turns out they created the right-wing version. Interesting to know if any of that kind of material makes it into the doc you refer to above.

PS If you ever see anything approximating an answer to why Angleton Snr. turned up in Italy in '34, please share at once.

Paul

The film's greatest flaw is this: the men who made it are still alive. If the US government is running an all-knowing, all-encompassing conspiracy, why did it not snuff them out long ago?

This looked eerily familiar. And so it proved.

Pro-Garrison author William Davy, for example, reports a memo dated October 2, 1967, written by Donovan Pratt asking "If all of Garrison's statements are true, how come Shaw is alive and unharmed?" Pratt then goes on to suggest passing this idea to "a press contact who could use it editorially." Let Justice Be Done, p. 139.

Pratt's successor appears to done just that. Nice one, George.

PS The source of the quote from Let Justice Be Done can be found here: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/cia_garrison.htm

Myra,

Always a pleasure to encounter a fellow Seldes admirer. In case you weren't aware - apologies for boring on if you are - the University of Pennsylvania has done him, and In Fact, proud. If you follow this address http://www.library.upenn.edu/rbm/ , then click on the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image, &, finally, tap in Seldes, you are confronted with a complete run of the paper. It's a splendid project, and a model for what universities could and should be offering, both here and in the States.

The corporate fascists failed with FDR; they succeeded with JFK.

Couldn't agree more. The continuities between US fascism in the 1930s and the Dallas coup remain a gaping hole in assassination research. Which is very odd, when you think about it, not least given the controversy that surrounds the Z-fake. And the Luce empire's inter-war politics?

Paul

I will allow the forum archives to be my resume.[/b]

Good. You're fired.

Your response is just what I am talking about. How about you, Paul ... are you going to contact MSNBC, FOX NEWS, or any other news affiliate and share these ground breaking finds wih the world or are you satisfied with just making stupid add nothing remarks on what is supposed to be an education forum? Let us see just how serious this topic is to you!

Bill

Bill,

It's taken me too long, but I've finally worked out of whom - and what - you remind me: a Stalinist apparatchik of, say, anytime between the early 1920s and the early 1950s. The sort routinely called on by the Ossetian mountaineer to shout down dissent, and bully the meek.

Incidentally, your masquerade as an impartial sceptic would be rather more convincing were you occasionally to show some - any -interest in the abundant evidence that the Z-film is a fake. That would be far cleverer.

As to trotting off to MSNBC, Fox News, or any other news affiliate, I did, once, to a UK near-equivalent and a very interesting experience it was, too, if only for the opportunity to encounter first-hand executive paranoia.

Paul

In 1933-1934 there was a plot to remove President Roosevelt from office - a coup d'etat. The conspiracy involved Wall Street brokers, bankers, industrialists, even some members of Roosevelt's Democratic Party, the House of Morgan, the Duponts and the Rockefellers. Roosevelt, like John Kennedy, was considered a communist, a traitor to his class, and worse, by these elite forces who feared his actions to remedy inequalities and to better the situation during the Great Depression which had begun during Herbert Hoover's prior administration. The plot entailed the use of war veterans of the American Legion, an organization founded by wealthy military officers after World War I to resist "radicalism," who were to be mobilized to march to the White House in Washington, D.C., to remove Roosevelt and to install a popular Marine General, Smedley Darlington Butler, as 'dictator" in his place. The plotters were admirers of Benito Mussolini who had led a force of his 'black shirts' against Rome to remove the Italian King, putting Mussolini in power in 1922. They also admired a French Fascist paramilitary organization, the Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire), of approximately 500,000 which they planned to pattern in their efforts in the United States.

When they approached General Butler, he became curious as to their plans and offers of money and power. As he listened and learned more about the plot, he, being totally opposed to the idea of a dictatorship, went to the President, the Secret Service, and members of Congress, leading to a Congressional inquiry by the McCormick-Dickstein Committee, forerunner of the House Un-American Activities Committee, to investigate fascist and communist organizations which threatened the United States government. The Committee stated in its final report that it had found evidence of a plot to overthrow the elected goverment with a military coup.

Some of the names directly involved were Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Company); Grayson M.P. Murphy (Wall Street broker, director of a Morgan Bank, and treasurer of the American Liberty League); Bill Doyle and Gerald C. Maguire (members of the American Legion); and even Douglas MacArthur and Al Smith, former Democratic Governor of New York, were alleged to have been involved by General Butler. Two important witnesses who were to testify, MacGuire and Grayson, died, and another moved to Europe beyond the reach of Congress.

Although a few newspapers reported on the Congressional hearings and the proceedings were placed in the Congressional Record, not much was made of these events. They are not even mentioned in U.S. history texts. The right-wing American Liberty League, funded by the Duponts, went on to try to defeat Roosevelt for his second term in office and then died out, but did give rise to anti-communist, anti-semitic, and anti-union organizations such as the Black Legion, the Minutemen, Minutewomen, Sentinels of the Republic, and other violent hate groups.

General Smedley D. Butler, already retired, went on speaking tours and on the radio to denounce the plotters. His book, War is a Racket, spoke in favor of war veterans and against war. He had been the most unlikely person to have been chosen by these conspirators to displace President Roosevelt, but luckily for us, he foiled their plot.

1. Barbara LaMonica, "The Attempted Coup Against FDR", Probe Magazine (CTKA),

March-April 1999 issue (Vol 6 No. 3).

http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr399-fdr.html

(This article provides connections to the assassination of President Kennedy.)

2. Jules Archer, The Plot To Seize The White House, Hawthorne Books,

New York, 244 pp., 1973.

3. More references may be found by a Google search.

Excellent post, to which I add a few more suggestions for background reading:

Clayton Cramer, “An American Coup d’Etat?”, History Today, Vol 45 (11), November 1995, pp.42-47;

John L. Spivak, "Wall Street's Fascist Conspiracy: 1. Testimony that the Dickstein Committee Suppressed," New Masses, Vol 14 (5), January 29, 1935, pp.9-15;

John L. Spivak, “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy: 2. Morgan Pulls the Strings,” New Masses, Vol 14 (6), February 5, 1935, pp.10-15;

NB: For UK readers, the relevant editions of New Masses were held - presumably still are - by the Hallward Library of Nottingham University.

George Wolfskill. The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934-1940 (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1962);

Official report into the plot: Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities: Public Hearings Before the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Seventy-third Congress, Second Session, at Washington D.C., December 29, 1934. Hearings No. 73-D.C.-6, Part 1; p.194: McCormack-Dickstein Committee published "Extracts," a 125 page "document";

Hans Schmidt. Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History (Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1987).

The initiation of this thread reminded me of some questions that have long nagged - why did James Angelton's father suddenly relocate to Italy in 1934? Was it simply a coincidence, or did Angleton pere have some role in establishing a line of communication between fascist plotters in the US and Mussolini's regime? Did Angleton Snr. hook up with Donovan when the latter visited Italy in December 1935-February 1936? Anyone know the answers?

Paul

Nowhere do I say that Otto Otepka was a "liberal."

Sam Halpern had no reason to lie about Robert F. Kennedy's contradictory policies, either.

Fiddlesticks.

Joan. the same person has described Harold Weisberg as a witting tool of the CIA, and implied the same about Josiah Thompson, while mischaracterizing their work. So, in a sense you are in good company.

Here’s a little sample of the fearless Weisberg in that searing indictment of the FBI- Secret Service Cover-up otherwise known as Whitewash II:

“In almost constant attendance upon the dead President was Roy H. Kellerman, Special Agent of the U.S. Secret Service, a devoted and distraught public servant of 23 years experience, then assistant special agent in charge of the White House detail. He is an exceptionally conscientious man who was in charge of the security detail on the President’s fatal trip to Texas,” (NY: Dell pbk, May 1967, p.184).

Pure Mills & Boon. Now for two real investigators on Kellerman, the Weisbergian hero of Elm Street:

“Roy H. Kellerman, the Secret Service agent in charge of the trip, sat in the front right seat of the limousine. He neither offered warning nor took any action to protect the President. Kellerman claimed, in an interview with two FBI agents the same day, that after this shot [the shot to the throat – PR], the President said: “Get me to a hospital.” Later, he changed his story and quoted the President as having said, “My God, I am hit.” In his testimony, before the Warren Commission…Kellerman called the FBI report incorrect…”

The same authors, from the same chapter, on another ripe lie from Kellerman:

“Five days after the assassination, Kellerman tried to lead FBI investigators to believe that the President was shot in the back and not in the throat. Kellerman embellished his point by telling FBI agents that as a reaction to this shot the President reached round to his back with his left hand – an action not shown on the film or described by witnesses”

Fred Newcomb & Perry Adams. Murder From Within (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Probe, 1974: Chapter 3: Execution).

If Mellen wishes to rehash ancient CIA disinfo, that is, of course, her choice. It is mine to oppose it.

Paul,

There was no "refashioning of history" in Joan's comments on Eisenhower's view of the New Deal.

That view was expressed in a letter to his brother Edgar dated Nov 8, 1954. The relevant portion of that letter follows:

Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions. I oppose this--in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon "moderation" in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas.5 Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Fair point, though I have to observe, following Myra Bronstein, that if Mellen had expressed herself more clearly, there would have been no objection, save to point out that Eisenhower was not looking too closely at some of the funkier activities of think tanks and professors working with subventions emanating a long way from Texas. As it was, Mellen appeared to be arguing that Eisenhower confined contemporaneous opposition to the New Deal to the aforementioned Texan oil men.

Whatever its perceived failings, the only agenda behind the book was to present a balanced view of Garrison and his inquiry into the assassination.

Now, really, Greg - anything on Garrison's conversion from Ayn Rand disciple to belated champion of the New Frontier? These were ideologically compatible? Is there truly nothing to explain on the subject? And how does Mellen deal with the founders of Truth and Consequences, Inc.? Are you not even mildly curious as to their motivation and past associations? And Mellen?

Amd what are we to make of Mellen's rehash of the old CIA line that the Kennedys were up to their necks in secret plots to kill Castro? No agenda here?

Paul

Deleted, duplicate.

“The past is prologue.”

Joan Mellen’s lecture is not history, but a weapon, one consciously fashioned for the particular needs of the establishment (anti-Bush) moment. It thus offers a blend of the truth and rank disinformation. It begins with a useful, if hardly earth-shaking, discrimination:

The Kennedy assassination is present even in its absence in the recent film, “The Good Shepherd,” a movie about the CIA. Its central character, played by Matt Damon, is based largely on the late head of CIA Counter Intelligence, James Jesus Angleton. The distortions of “The Good Shepherd” return us to the meaning of the Kennedy assassination. James Angleton in real life was the mastermind not, as the film suggests, of the Bay of Pigs (that was Richard Bissell), but of a false defector program that sent spies into the Soviet Union. Among them was one Lee Harvey Oswald.

Highly commended for his diligence, Mr. Otepka displayed to me, proudly, a wall filled with a display of framed commendations, including one signed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles on behalf of President Eisenhower. (Certainly in these times President Eisenhower seems to be a bona fide liberal, not only for his prescient remark about the military industrial complex, but for another of his observations, that most of America has accepted the idea of the New Deal, but for a few oil millionaires in Texas).

Two classic pieces of nonsense here.

First, Mellen seeks to sell us Otto Otepka as a “liberal,” by the thoroughly convincing business of tenuously linking him to Eisenhower, whose very illiberal Sec of State, Foster Dulles, not Eisenhower, once commended Otepka. Curious, this, as Otepka was long a hero to the anti-Kennedy US Right, who could spot a zealous McCarthyite with rather more accuracy than Mellen. As the tremendously liberal John A. Stormer wrote, in that legendary hymn to liberalism, None Dare Call It Treason (Florissant, Missouri: Liberty Bell Press, 1964), “In November 1963, the several years drive to destroy the last remnants of a security program in the State Department culminated with the firing of Otto F. Otepka, chief of the Division of Evaluations in the Office of Security. Otepka was veteran security employee and dedicated anti-communist. He was fired by the State Department after he furnished the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee evidence to show that high State Department officials had lied under oath about security matters when they testified before the committee” (p.71).

No more reassuring is Mellen’s attribution of an alleged remark by Eisenhower to the effect that “most of America accepted the New Deal, but for a few oil millionaires in Texas.” This is both a very unEisenhower-sounding remark, and duff history. The finance for the planned fascist putsch outlined to Smedley D. Butler was to come from Wall St.; and both the Liberty League and the various fascist militias of the 1930s were pure Yankee corporate aristocracy. In short, what we appear to have here is an invented quote deployed to fashion a new, false paradigm – a rewrite of history, no less - for Mellen’s subsequent claims about the centrality of the Texas oil-CIA nexus in the assassination. I note in passing that this refashioning of history for subsequent purposes bears alarming similarities to the work of retired CIA man William A. Tidwell on the Lincoln assassination.

Otepka saw at once that there was something unusual about Lee Oswald, “tourist.” As he placed this list of defectors into his security safe, Mr. Otepka planned to request that the CIA look into this individual, “Oswald.” A nighttime burglary, obviously an inside job, resulted in this file vanishing. Soon Otto Otepka was demoted to an inconsequential post, writing summaries of documents. Oswald's “defection” was not to be scrutinized. Later I'll explain whom Mr. Otepka believes was responsible for the burglary and the destruction of his career.

Later, that hoary old disinfo line about Cuba rears its head:

The young Warren Commission lawyers could find no motive for Oswald's shooting of President Kennedy, even as they blamed him. You might well ask, what, then, was the CIA's motive? Return to 1963 and the pressure by both the CIA's clandestine service and the Pentagon for a full-scale invasion of Cuba.

Bilge. The CIA installed Fidel Castro, and used the sabotaged Bay of Pigs raid as cover for the attempted overthrow of De Gaulle. It was so committed to the invasion of Cuba post-JFK that it launched how many subsequent attempts? That’s right, none. This is not the only occasion that an absence of proof is held to be irrefutable evidence.

It was a great disappointment to New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison that Robert Kennedy did not assist him in his investigation. Instead, Robert Kennedy actively attempted to thwart his efforts. He sent Walter Sheridan, his “confidential assistant,” Sheridan's job description, to New Orleans to discredit Garrison. As a historian of Jim Garrison's investigation, I too have pondered why Bobby Kennedy remained aloof, and I have concluded that it could only have been because he did not want his own part in the assassination attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, during which Oswald came to his attention, to emerge.

The above paragraph of Mellen’s is the inevitable prelude to a hoary old piece of CIA-serving propaganda:

I located a document from the CIA's own Secret History, in which the CIA's History Staff is interviewing a CIA officer named Sam Halpern. Halpern reveals his own incredulity that Bobby Kennedy should be working with the Mafia in attempts on the life of Castro at the very same time that he was trying to send other Mafia figures to jail. A CIA operative named Charley Ford, alias Charley Fiscalini, was assigned by Bobby Kennedy to make contact with Mafia types in this country and Canada for the purpose of murdering Castro.

To all this, Charley Ford testified under oath before the Church Committee. That Bobby Kennedy repeatedly attempted to enlist anti-Castro Cubans for these assassination attempts against Castro I learned first-hand from Isidro Borja, of the DRE. “I know Bobby Kennedy was behind it,” he told me indignantly, “because his people approached ME!” Borja told me Bobby's people did succeed in recruiting his good friend Rafael Quintero Ibaria, also known as “Chi Chi.”

Let me reveal my own incredulity that Mellen should place any reliance on “the CIA’s own Secret History,” Sam Halpern, and a source like Charley Fiscalini. This is no more or less fantastic than Noam Chomsky seeking to persuade us of JFK’s love for the CIA based on one book – a hasty post-coup reissue at that - by Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden.

Peter Lemkin seems to wish us to give a free pass to guff like Mellen’s. That’s his preference. It isn’t mine, and I urge others to resist as well.

I will allow the forum archives to be my resume.[/b]

Good. You're fired.

Todays mystery: The assassination occurred on 11/22/63 ... what year was it that Jack started seeing a waltzing Sitzman and how many strokes did he have to get to that point?

The single most shameful and contemptible post I've yet seen on an assassination website.

Harold Feldman, “The Kennedy Body Snatchers,” The Realist, (No. 57), March 1965, pp. 1, 10-14

The evidence is not yet all in, but the crime of murder may have been followed by kidnapping in Dallas on November 23rd, 1963.

For a tiny coalition of bureaucrats and bodyguards to snatch President Kennedy’s body out of Dallas, beyond the county which was holding a man for his murder, was almost certainly a crime. Literally, a crime. The Warren Commission, however, took no notice of the blatant appearances of such a crime. Instead, it offered a justification that must remind anyone of Jack Ruby’s elegant defense –

It was for Jackie and the kids!

The Warren Report states:

After the President was pronounced dead, O’Donnell tried to persuade Mrs. Kennedy to leave the area, but she refused. She said that she intended to stay with her husband. A casket was obtained and the President’s body was prepared for removal.

We shall see that Kenneth O’Donnell, special assistant to President Kennedy, and his associates did something that Jack Ruby did not do. Ruby did not make Mrs. Kennedy

responsible for his offense.

Mrs. Kennedy stood outside the emergency room where the Parkland Hospital physicians stretched their resources to the limit to save the President who was, to all intents and purposes, dead on arrival.

She kept walking in and out of the room. From time to time, she would sit on a folding chair outside the emergency room door, trying to get her thoughts and feelings in order. She refused the suggestion of a sedative. Her clothes were spattered with the blood and brains of her husband. She refused to change her clothing.

She waited for the final news as though no one else were with her, as though nobody in this idiot element of politicians and flunkeys has anything to do with her except her dying husband. “She was in a total daze,” O’Donnell said.

She knew there was no hope for the President. Dr. Burkley, the President’s personal physician, took her into the emergency room for the last time and she prayed for a few seconds. Told that the end had come, she walked to the table where her husband lay. She touched his foot, kissed the instep, and then walked to his side and felt his hand. She took off her wedding ring and slipped it on his finger. As a priest prayed, Dr. Burkley and Mrs. Kennedy made the responses.

In their testimony, O’Donnell and his friends never tire of telling us how important it was to get Mrs. Kennedy, and with her the body of John F. Kennedy, to Washington. Without ever daring to say so, they hint of imminent hysteria and collapse. But there is not the least shred of evidence that that she was in the least out of control or out of reason.

Few widows have been crushed so suddenly and brutally as Jackie Kennedy was that day and few held up so well. She did not break. At no time was she irrational. Police Chief Curry tells us that she turned to someone who had offered her a chair and said, “I am all right. Some of your people need to sit down more than I do.”

Dr. Perry working on the President, noticed that Mrs. Kennedy “was very composed.”

Never was she asked “to leave the area,” as the Warren Report puts it, except to go to a room several doors beyond when the casket was about to be wheeled in. She refused. But at that time the decision to take the body out of Dallas had already been made.

“I want to stay with him,” she said, and went back to her chair.

“Our major concern,” said Presidential aide Lawrence F. O’Brien to the Commission, “was that obviously you just could not leave Mrs. Kennedy sitting in this chair, drenched in blood. Something certainly had to take place.”

But did this “something” have to be the illegal removal of the President’s body – speeding it to a plane whose left rear seats had to be removed at the last minute to make room for the unexpected cargo, almost overturning and tumbling the casket in the process, rushing the body to Bethesda Naval Hospital for an autopsy she never considered? An autopsy, finally, which resulted in such distortion and withholding of evidence as to constitute still perhaps another crime!

Was it impossible for the President’s body to remain in Dallas that afternoon, as the law required, and for her to stay nearby in Dallas?

This alternative, the only legal one and the most convenient, was never considered for a moment by the eager praetorian guard. Mrs. Kennedy was never allowed to consider any alternative. No one on the hospital staff’s was permitted near her. Mrs. Nelson, nurse supervisor of the emergency room, wanted to bring her a glass of water but couldn’t. The hospital administrator, Jack Price, was informed “that the secret service would not let anyone touch her or do anything for her.”

Why these precautions, why this ugly haste on the part of trained, if not completely hardened members of the President’s staff and guard? Mr. Price describes how a Secret Service agent came out and asked for the fastest way to get the body out of the hospital. “He asked if we had a casket, a basket or anything that we could get to move the body immediately.”

Their purpose can only have been to achieve what they did in fact achieve – to get the body quickly out of Dallas, out of Dallas jurisdiction, to prevent a Dallas autopsy.

We can think of several reasons that may have motivated such a step. But when they heap this awful responsibility onto Mrs. Kennedy, it becomes difficult to endure. This is what the Warren Report has to say:

Given a choice between the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Md., and the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital, Mrs. Kennedy chose the hospital in Bethesda for the autopsy because the President had served in the Navy.

O you chivalrous lawyers and statesmen! A lady chose, and knights in tweeds, flannel and serge appear on all sides to do her bidding, regardless of the cost, regardless of the law.

The Warren Report lies and lies again. Nothing was ever said to Mrs. Kennedy about an autopsy before she was on her way to Bethesda, and the evidence is strong that she had nothing to do with the decision to move the body.

Mr. O’Donnell gave us a glimpse into what happened, when he was questioned by Arlen Specter, Commission assistant counsel:

Mr. Specter: Who made that decision, by the way?

Mr. O’Donnell: Mrs. Kennedy.

Mr. Specter: That the autopsy should be performed?

Mr. O’Donnell: I don’t think she knew anything about an autopsy. The question is where the body went. We didn’t tell her there was to be an autopsy. And the choice was Walter Reed or Bethesda. He being a Navy man, she picked Bethesda.

Lawrence O’Brien, asked how Bethesda was chosen, walked around the question but, in so doing, opened a new view of what happened.

Mr. O’Brien: I don’t recall any discussion of the reason specifically other than my assumption that the autopsy would take place at one of the military hospitals in Washington. And obviously there two to select from, and the President being an ex-Navy man, it seemed just sort of normal to suggest Bethesda.

So? Bethesda was not chosen, Bethesda was

suggested.

And for an autopsy that was never mentioned to Mrs. Kennedy. No, she did not choose Bethesda for an autopsy, as the Commission suggests. Mrs. Kennedy never heard

that

suggestion.

Earlier, Mr. O’Donnell presented a different version of the sequence of events. He tells us in effect that the decision for Bethesda was made prior to any consultation with Mrs. Kennedy.

The government witnesses tell us that they were putting the body in the casket and getting ready to depart when two Dallas medical officials accosted them. One was a justice of the peace. They were adamant on one point: It was a direct violation of the law to move a victim of homicide out of the state without an inquest and an autopsy. The body was already in the best Dallas hospital, they said, and a legal autopsy could be undertaken at once.

This, said Mr. O’Donnell,

toujours chevalier sans peur et sans reproche

, “was an impossible situation for Mrs. Kennedy.” Why, he did not say.

But he went on to say that he proposed a compromise. He had the President’s physician, Dr. Burkley, talk to them and suggest that they get a doctor to come along on the plane and “we would bring him immediately to the Naval Hospital” where he could stand by. The Dallas officials declined the suggestion.

What interests us here, though, is the admission by O’Donnell that the Naval Hospital in Bethesda had been chosen as Kennedy’s destination before there is any word that Mrs. Kennedy had any choice in the matter.

According to Dr. Burkley’s account, Mrs. Kennedy was confronted with the problem for the first time only after the plane was on its way. Dr. Kemp Clark had not yet pronounced the President dead when, he says, he ordered a death certificate prepared to “accompany the body to Washington.”

When Mrs. Kennedy testified before the Warren Commission, she was never asked a thing about her weird trip from Dallas or about the autopsy.

At one point, O’Donnell confesses that he would have decided on the body removal even if the problem of Jackie had not forced his hand:

I realized that she was going to stay with her husband, no matter what anybody did, and there was no possible way of in any way getting her to leave. And so, therefore, the only alternative I could see was that we move the President. It is an assumption I probably would have arrived at anyway, but I arrived at it in this manner.

It appears, then, that Kenneth O’Donnell was responsible for the decision to remove the President’s body, possibly after a conference with Lyndon Johnson.

The Warren Commission tells us that Johnson would not leave for Washington without Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy would not leave without the body. O’Brien adds that O’Donnell went to consult Johnson after all hope for Kennedy was gone and that the decisions (1) for Johnson to go to Washington at once and (2) for Kennedy’s body to be taken out of the hospital “forthwith” were both made then and there.

There is no evidence that Johnson was made aware of any opposition or interference from the Dallas authorities.

The President’s body was not the only major evidence removed hastily and stealthily from Dallas that day. The President’s limousine, splattered with blood and flesh debris, chrome dented and windshield cracked, was loaded on board another plane and flown out of the state for dismemberment and rehabilitation.

But at least, in the case of the car, we are spared the emetic plea that “we did if for Jackie.”

The lives of four Presidents were ended by bullets. Of these, only the body of John F. Kennedy was autopsied outside of the city and state where he died.

Only in Kennedy’s case did the man accused of the killing deny his guilt. Only in Kennedy’s case were the number, location and direction of the bullets a subject of dispute and secrecy. Only in his case, therefore, was a proper autopsy more than a formality of the law but a necessity of justice. And only in his case was the autopsy carried out in circumstances of the most doubtful legality.

Lincoln died in Washington, D.C., and that is where the investigation of his death naturally centered. Garfield died in the small burg of Elberon, New Jersey, and that is where his attending physicians and the Surgeon General performed the autopsy. The next day his body was en route to Washington to lie in state. McKinley was shot and died in Buffalo, New York. His body was subject to an autopsy a few hours later, then prepared for transfer to Washington for national honors.

Kennedy was shot at 12:30 p.m. He died at one o’clock. By 2 o’clock his body was on its way to the airport for a secret examination in Bethesda, Maryland.

In the ordinary course of things, the autopsy would have been performed, probably right at Parkland Hospital, that afternoon. The body could have been made ready for the proper transfer to the White House that night.

Why didn’t the law take its ordinary course in the case of John F. Kennedy?

The law of Texas is clear on the matter, and every State has similar laws. The Texas Code of Criminal Procedure provides that no murdered body can be removed without authorization from the Medical Examiner and/or the Justice of the Peace of the county or his authorized deputy; that the Medical Examiner shall immediately investigate a suspected homicide and file his report with the District Attorney; finally, that where an autopsy is deemed necessary, it is to be immediately performed by the Medical Examiner or his deputy. In sparsely populated counties the major responsibility falls on the Justice of the Peace – but in all counties, the law is clear: An autopsy must be performed under the supervision of the county authorities.

This law is the only legal authority by which a legal autopsy of the late President was possible. One naturally asks: By what authority was the autopsy in Bethesda carried out? Who signed the authorization form?

The Warren Commission casts no light on this point. It provides us with an exhibit photograph of a comminuted fracture of a goat’s rib, but it omits the document that made possible the most important autopsy in American history.

In the light of the law and the published evidence of the Warren Commission, let us review what happened in the minutes before and after the President was pronounced dead.

After his rapid conference with Lyndon Johnson, O’Donnell called a quick meeting with Dr. Burkley, General McHugh (Kennedy’s air force aide), and two Secret Service agents, Roy Kellerman and Andrew Berger. Dr. Burkley was to contact the Parkland doctors. Agents Sulliman and Stout were ordered to clear all the corridors and bar entrance to the area. A casket for the President was to be procured.

Dr. Burkley went back into the emergency room where Dr. Clark was finishing his efforts for the President. A priest was administering extreme unction. At Burkley’s request, Dr. Clark signed the death certificate and, Clark says, he “gave this to him to accompany the body back to Washington.”

Once again, an indication that an illegal removal of the body was decided on very early in the game and before any deep consideration of Mrs. Kennedy’s plight. Jack Price noted that the death certificate was being prepared before the priest was summoned to the death-table.

Dr. Clark evidently felt that his signing of the death certificate needed additional explanation. He was never questioned about it during a deposition in Dallas and a long hearing in Washington, so he finally brought the subject up himself.

Dr. Clark: …One other point, if I may here?

Mr. Specter: Yes.

Dr. Clark: In order to remove the President’s body to Bethesda, where the autopsy was to be performed, a death certificate had to be filled out in conformity with Texas State law to allow the body to be transported. This is the second part of the signing of the death certificate.

A very puzzling remark, obviously unfinished. The second part of Dallas death certificates, relating to the disposition of the body, is usually signed by an undertake or judge. But the Commission counsel, Arlen Specter, who was petty and precise to exhaustion in a thousand other details, had no comment or question on Dr. Clark’s obscure statement and hurriedly brought the hearing to an end.

The casket was obtained very quickly, in about twenty minutes. O’Neill Mortuary brought their best bronze de luxe coffin to the emergency platform of the hospital.

Hardly had it disappeared behind the swinging doors of the emergency room when, we are told, an agent of the Dallas Medical Examiner appeared and said “that the President could not be taken from the hospital.”

We learn from other witnesses that this was not a “representative” of the Medical Examiner but Dr. Earl Rose, the Medical Examiner himself.

He was apparently not heeded at all for in a moment the ambulance was ready to leave and the casket, body and all, was being wheeled outside. O’Brien tells us, incidentally, that Mrs. Kennedy did not hear any of the altercations between the Federal officers and the Dallas authorities.

The government witnesses then tell us that a judge, probably Judge Brown, arrived on the scene. Joe B. Brown, who later tried the Ruby case, was listed as the acting coroner for the day but, he told me, he was not at Parkland Hospital at that time. The judge referred to in the testimony, therefore, could only be either Judge David Johnston or Judge Theron Ward, both of whom were there.

The judge, whoever he was, behaved in a cool, judicial manner. After making a phone call, he turned to Dr. Burkley within hearing of the others and declared that the murder of the President was a homicide case and, as such, subject to certain legal procedures. It seems he did not mention the word autopsy because O’Donnell says he “interpreted” one of the “procedures” to mean an autopsy.

The Federal team huddled together and came out ready for a fight. “We brushed them all aside,” says O’Donnell, “came out the same way we had come in, through the same doors.” The victory was won, despite the protests of the Medical Examiner who was shouting quite loudly, “You can’t do that, you can’t leave here now!”

Mrs. Kennedy? She walked behind the coffin. O’Donnell describes her at that moment as “totally unaware of the problems that were then existing” and “perhaps confused as to the speed with which were attempting to depart.”

Andy Berger was in the driver’s seat of the ambulance, we are told by witnesses for the government (although some hospital staff people say that the O’Neill Mortuary people drove the body out in a hearse.) Next to and behind him rode other Secret Service men. The casket was lifted aboard and Mrs. Kennedy was helped in beside it.

The Presidential aides climbed into a car alongside. Just before they took off for the airport, the man from the Medical Examiner’s office tapped on the window. Special Agent Roy Kellerman rolled it down and heard the man say, “I will meet you at the mortuary.” “Yes, sir,” Kellerman replied. And the cars headed for the airport.

Was an inquest of any kind held on Kennedy’s body?

The police homicide report on the assassination, made out long after the body was gone, has a slot for

Coroner Attending

but it is not filled out. In Dallas, the procedure is for a justice of the peace to hold an inquest, ask the Medical Examiner to perform an autopsy and make a report, after which the j.p. hands down a verdict. This was certainly not done in the case of Kennedy.

The Warren Report never pretends that there was an inquest. The testimony of the leading eyewitnesses is at one on the point that a judge and a Medical Examiner’s agent were on the scene and protested the removal of the body.

But apparently there was an attempt to give the Secret Service action some legal blessing. David Johnston, one of ten justices of the peace in Dallas County, was at the Trade Mart for the luncheon in Kennedy’s honor when he heard the news. A call came summoning him to Parkland Hospital.

Upon arriving there, he justified later, he “found Judge Theron, the justice of the peace, Precinct 3, from Garland, handling the inquest on President Kennedy. They did not know Judge Ward and that’s the reason they called me, not knowing he was already there.”

Steve Landgren, assistant administrator of Parkland Hospital, also suggests some effort, at legality in the hectic business:

Within a very short time, I noticed Dr. Earl Rose, who was attempting to make out the necessary legal papers for removal of the body. He seemed quite agitated and upset, and he was asking where Judge Ward was. During the next few minutes there was considerable activity trying to locate a justice of the peace and seemed to be some question as to whether or not an autopsy would be ordered on the president.

Now take note of the significant differences in Jack Price’s account of the same incident:

Shortly thereafter, Dr. Earl Rose was seen in the area. He was very pale and agitated and stated that according to the law, the body could not be moved without an order from a justice of the peace or a decision made about a medicolegal [autopsy]. There was a frantic questioning of the people in the Emergency Room as to where a justice of the peace could be located.

Someone said Justice of the Peace Ward (or Hall) was across the Hall in front of the Lab. I ran over and asked if he were there and directed him to the nurses’ station where Dr. Rose, Clark and a bevy of secret service men were in conference.

We learn nothing further about this episode in the Warren Report or the appended 26 volumes. The Report does not mention Judge Ward (or Hall). It has no record or even mention of an inquest.

When I telephoned Dr. Rose, he was reluctant to speak on any area outside of his range of authority as Medical Examiner which, in Dallas, is very limited. Yes, there was an inquest by Judge Ward, he told me, but he did not know if a record of the same was obtainable and he did not feel it was for him to say what the procedures and conclusions of the inquest were.

Until other evidence is available, we can only maintain tentatively the same kind of makeshift inquest took place, that it was held reluctantly and against the wishes of the Medical Examiner and the officiating judge. Many witnesses and the Warren Report itself describe the conflict:

Before the body could be taken from the hospital, two Dallas officials informed members of the President’s staff that the body could not be removed from the city until an autopsy was performed. Despite the protests of these officials, the casket was wheeled out of the hospital, placed in an ambulance, and transported to the airport shortly after 2 p.m.

Further the Commission sayeth not. Another justice of the peace in Dallas told me that the legality of such an “inquest” would depend on whether the autopsy was specifically ordered for Bethesda, what the findings of the autopsy actually were, whether they were made known to the officiating judge, and whether a verdict was handed down thereafter.

We have not been told any of these things.

The ambulance carrying Kennedy’s body and the Secret Service car were headed for the airport. O’Donnell instructed the agents to signal ahead “that as soon as we came through the gate, they were to close the gate and let nobody else in.”

The ambulance pulled into Love Field and alongside the Presidential plane,

Air Force One

. The seats were taken out of the left side of the aircraft, but the job of unloading and depositing the casket was still a harrowing one. “It was frightening,” O’Donnell told the Warren Commission. The plane’s ramp was too narrow for the casket and at any moment it looked like the box and its grisly contents would tumble. At last the work was done. General McHugh went down to the cockpit to order the plane to take off at once.

The plane did not take off at once. O’Donnell had not counted on one thing: the presence of Lyndon Johnson.

We were all, O’Donnell said later, “under the assumption or apprehension that at some moment we either might not be granted clearance to take off, or that the hospital may have in some way gotten the police to intercept us.” If there had been a legal inquest, if the removal of the body had been authorized, then O’Donnell’s qualms and anxieties are not comprehensible. But despite these urgings of an unclear conscience, O’Donnell had to adjust his plan to the fact that Johnson was aboard, waiting to be sworn in as President of the United States.

When the plane didn’t take off at his order, O’Donnell hurried down to the cockpit himself. There General McHugh told the nervous executive that Johnson had ordered the pilot to delay departure until he had been properly sworn in.

A conference between Johnson and O’Donnell followed, and the plane waited for Judge Sarah Hughes, who was to administer the oath, O’Donnell confesses that he never told Johnson his reasons for wanting to get the plane into the air immediately. “I didn’t describe what I saw as the problems,” he testified.

Instead he talked with the pilot, “to make sure they didn’t let anyone on the plane, or put down the ramps for anybody, except the judge, under any circumstances.”

Judge Hughes arrived. At 2:38 p.m., about an hour and a half after John F. Kennedy died, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as 36th President of the United States, his wife and Mrs. Kennedy beside him. As near to collapse as Jackie is alleged to have been at the time, she stood by in her bloody clothing with perfect self-command to watch the administration of the oath. We have all seen pictures of that occasion.

A few minutes later the plane taxied down the runway and took off for Washington.

Mrs. Kennedy again refused to change her clothes on the plane. “I want them to see what they have done to Jack,” she told Mrs. Johnson. (This remark of Mrs. Kennedy, according to Drew Pearson, was deleted from the Commission’s transcript of Lady Bird Johnson’s statement.) She refused food but did sip some coffee, perhaps something stronger. Dr. Burkley handed her two broken roses he had retrieved from the hospital floor, symbols and souvenirs of the flowering youth in the motorcade that morning. She thanked him and smiled.

When the plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base, she refused to leave the casket even for the trip to Bethesda. It was 6 p.m. She declined the offer of a helicopter and rode the hearse instead.

Before the hearse started, she spoke to Angier Biddle Duke, the State Department’s Chief of Protocol. “Find out how Lincoln was buried,” she said. Mr. Duke, I am sure, would not have thought Mrs. Kennedy was in helpless distress.

Robert Kennedy accompanied her to the Naval Hospital. Once there, she was taken to the 17th floor where other members of the Kennedy family joined them, Jean, Ethel, Pat and Eunice. There they stayed, while the physicians in the morgue led by Dr. James J. Humes, with the attendance of two admirals, had the President’s body X-rayed and color-photographed, before surveying and sectioning all its surface and channels.

At the same time, Mr. Duke’s 7 researchers in the Library of Congress worked furiously for 10 hours on the hour-by-hour reconstruction of Lincoln’s funeral for the big parade to come.

At 4 a.m., before the first signs of the Saturday dawn, both jobs were finished. The President’s body, no longer evidence in a murder case that would never come to trial, was carried to the East Room of the White House. Jackie Kennedy went upstairs. The report on the Lincoln obsequies was ready.

And the X-rays and color photographs of the President’s body, where are they? The Warren Commission never saw them.

The Commission accepted the verbal assurances of the Bethesda medical commander about the number, size and location of Kennedy’s wounds, but they never asked for the only scientific proof that such wounds existed.

Instead, putting art before science, they admitted into evidence a drawing, marked Exhibit 385, prepared by an artist under Dr. Humes’ supervision. It shows an arrow that has entered the base of Kennedy’s neck from behind exiting just below his Adam’s apple.

The evidence that no such wound existed but that another wound was located some five inches below the President’s coat collar is very impressive. And if this wound and the neck wound in front were indeed separate wounds, the Commission’s case for a lone assassin is destroyed.*

The Bethesda autopsy was secret and no one, not even the doctors at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, could learn its findings. The public presentation of the autopsy report was made some 8 months later.

The original notes for Autopsy No. A63-272 were burned, and Dr, Humes signed a certificate to that effect. The only positive proof of wounds or bullets or bullet fragments, the X-rays and photographs, were delivered to the Secret Service and were never examined by the Warren Commission.

More than a year has passed and the suspicions about Kennedy’s death grow and proliferate. They will continue to do so until the X-rays and photographs, with negatives, are produced. If they are not produced, suspicions of a possible crime in Bethesda will be added to doubts about the shooting in Dallas and the unusual inquest at Parkland Hospital.

Until they are produced, we are left with words from witnesses who were never cross-examined, a few drawings by an artist who never saw the body or the photographs, and a report from the Commission which everybody pretends to respect and nobody believes.

* “A Philadelphia Lawyer Looks at the Warren Report,” Vincent J. Salandria, Liberation, Jan. 1965.

Duplicate post deleted.

Hey Charlie,

Seeing as how I was one of your targets a few weeks ago, and since you adressed your post to all of us, I thought it would be germaine to post your greatest hits from the month of January alone.

Show Charlie how it's really done:

Spooks, Hoods & The Hidden Elite, killed JFK/Mark Valenti/Jan 26 2007, 03:22 PM Post #38:

Mr. Dankbaar:

Don't be such a dick.

And just in case the inattentive reader thought the above was a one-off, here's our real pro a few exchanges later in the same thread:

Mark Valenti/Jan 26 2007, 05:43 PM Post #46:

It was indeed dickish of you to post a picture of a black circle, intimating an insult to my powers of visual discernment. If you feel that this claim of dickosity is in error, that's your opinion. In my schoolyard, that remains a move of dick-like proportions, a hit-and-run type of dickensian insult - make a provocation then wonder what all the fuss is about.

What an impressive rhetorical amalgam: pomposity, puerility, and predictability.

Face it, Charlie, you're a mere amateur when it comes to childish insults.

Also involved in Pawley-Cooke escapade was M. Preston Goodfellow, former publisher of the Brooklyn Eagle and Donovan's liason with Garland Williams, to William Keswick and the British SOE in 1942. Later in the war Goodfellow managed sensitive opperations in Burma and China, and formed close ties to Generl Tai Li and drug smuggler Du Yue-sheng. According to... Bruce Cummings, Goodfellow made a fortune by combining business ties with right wing regimes in Asia, with interests in Central America" Pawley's collusion with Cooke, Donavan, Goodfellow, Bullitt, and Hunt is a textbook example of how Establishment privateers run the secret government.

Nathaniel,

A brief glimpse of both Goodfellow in action post-war, and the clique's approach to the conduct of foreign policy:

BRUCE CUMINGS, “Korea 1: Hidden history of a war both sides lost,” The Guardian, 17 June 1988, p.?: “…M. Preston Goodfellow, the senior U.S. intelligence operative, who personally brought Syngman Rhee back into Korea in 1945 – against the wishes of the State Department…”

Quite who - or what - is running U.S. foreign policy in the post-war era remains a continuing puzzle! Or perhaps not...

Paul

Paul Dacre is the editor of the Daily Mail and editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers; this is an abridged version of the third annual Cudlipp lecture he delivered in London on Monday:

Is the BBC's civic journalism - too often credulously trusting, lacking scepticism, rarely proactive in the sense of breaking stories itself - up to dealing with a political class that too often set out to dissemble and to deceive?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1997235,00.html

Dacre is loathsome - didn't he offer a platform to the grotesque Angelton in an interview in the 1970s? - and so is his paper. But on the above point, he couldn't be more right: The BBC is appalling, most notably when it comes to regurgitating spook lies. No wonder. MI5 still vets its employees - and still has an office in the building, no? - and MI6 ("the Foreign Office") funds the World Service. And the sheer gutlessness of what pitifully little investigative journalism it undertakes is an enduring source of wonder. That is, of course, when Panorama etc., isn't simply acting as a front for Britain's murderous secret police!

Thursday, 16 April 1953

• On the same day, President Dwight Eisenhower delivers his "Chance for Peace" address of April 16, 1953, which is "the opening gun of the post-Stalin phase of the Cold War." The speech has been co-authored by C.D. Jackson—a friend of Allen Dulles (and the publisher of Life magazine, who later buys and suppresses the Zapruder film)—and Walt Rostow.Ashton Gray

Ashton,

Was the Eisenhower speech delivered according to the pre-published text? If memory serves, or merely half serves, Eisenhower either didn't deliver the speech or had to truncate it, omitting the key bits about peace, due to an untimely affliction.

The point, of course, was to ensure there was no swift U.S. echo of Churchill's expressed desire to respond to Beria's wide-ranging overtures. From the point of view of both CIA and the CPUSSR, Beria had to go before he gave away eastern Europe, and dethroned the Communist Party. We would have to wait another 40+ years for Gorbachev's backers to do that.

Paul

Operation Red Cross was a CIA op having nothing whatsoever to do with either Cuba or any Soviet defectors, while having everything to do with the arrival of the DeMohrenschildts and Clemard Joseph Charles in Haiti

Utter Bosch?

Paul

Don't know for sure if Chavez is Agency, or merely a useful, if largely unwitting, tool. Ultimately, it makes little difference.

The issue is settled. Or rather, it soon will be. Definitively. Forever. Hugo is the real McCloy.

We know this because Mr. Philip Agee is, according to The Gruaniad, Britain's dauntless "centre-left" daily, shortly to pronounce on Chavez's terrible ordeal at the hands of CIA coupsters. (You remember, the ones who didn't depose him, the swines.)

Agee is to tell all - courtesy of peturbed CIA moralists/pinko State Dept whistle-blowers/the man in the Brooks Bros boiler suite at the corner of the bar (delete as applicable) - in a forthcoming tome of unspecified title: "...he remains as committed as ever, and busy on another book, this time about the CIA's activities in Venezuela over the years," (Duncan Campbell, "The spy who stayed out in the cold," The Guardian, G2, 11 January 2007, p.15).

Mr. Agee the fearless 21st century chronicler of the CIA in Venezuela is no relation to Mr. Agee the fearless 20th century chronicler of the Agency in the broader region who, in the mid-1970s, told Claude Bourdet, in "The CIA Against Portugal," as found in JEAN PIERRE FAYE (Ed.). Portugal: The Revolution In The Labyrinth (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1976), p. 194, that "...the CIA is not a mysterious body with its own brand of politics: it is a tool in the hands of the President of the United States…"

I am pleased to help dispel the confusion.

Phil runs a travel agency in Havana, and pray tell I wouldn't want to cause any difficulties, BUT:

His "Company Diary" fails to include ANY entries for November, 1963. Has he corrected that mistake in later published materials.

I for one am still anxious to hear his immediate reactions to the "Crime-of-the-Century", and moreover, where was he when he got the sad news.

Interesting point. As it happens I was reading this book last night. The purpose was to look at his reaction to the JFK assassination. As you say, that part of the diary is missing. Very strange.

The omission is more shocking than I can adequately feign. Yet let there be no doubt, Mr. Agee is indeed a genuine dissident, as the following makes clear:

"[T]he CIA is not a mysterious body with its own brand of politics: it is a tool in the hands of the President of the United States…"

PHILIP AGEE, as quoted by Claude Bourdet, in "The CIA Against Portugal," as found in JEAN PIERRE FAYE (Ed.). Portugal: The Revolution In The Labyrinth (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1976), p. 194.

A point of view which is not to be confused with official pap such as…

"The Central Intelligence Agency has never assumed the 'right to meddle in other nations' internal affairs.' The charter legislation for the CIA makes it the instrument for such special activities, but only when they are proposed by the policy agencies, directed by the President and financed by Congress after proper notification."

GARY E. FOSTER, "C.I.A. Isn't Lone Wolf of Foreign Policy," New York Times, (Wednesday), 17 February 1993, p.A18 (Letter to the Editor from the Director of Public and Agency Information, CIA).

"One thing I would mention is that when it's a CIA operation, that means it's a White House operation. It's not CIA. They don't do things on their own…If it's a CIA operation it's because they were ordered to do it…"

NOAM CHOMSKY. Class Warfare (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 92

Or patent insider flim-flam of this kind…

"The CIA, as the President's loyal tool - tainted to some extent by involvement in Watergate-related activities - also became vulnerable"

MARCHETTI, VICTOR & MARKS, JOHN D. The CIA And The Cult Of Intelligence (New York: Dell, February 1975), p. 328

"[L]et me say again flatly that CIA does not make policy, and does not operate outside or contrary to established policy”

Admiral William F. Raborn, outgoing Director of Central Intelligence, U.S. New & World Report, 18 July 1966, pp.75-76

And certainly not be confused with the authentic note of old-left dissent…

"The White House knows, or is made aware of, every important step of the CIA…”

"The CIA operates both independently and secretly, but the much circulated view that there are two governments is groundless. There is only one government in the United States and it is directed from Washington."

GEORGE MORRIS. CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO's Foreign Policy (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p.23 & p.145

Dissidence, US-style. Fearless stuff, no?

Paul

"pseudo-leftist CiaOmsky"

I must remember to pinch that description of the great fraud: Plagiarism, the highest form of literary compliment.

"Hard to believe that Chavez is naive enough to think Chomsky is for real, but a lot of people are and do.

"Still, it would take a lot to convince me that Chavez is a fraud. Are you saying the CIA coup attempts against Chavez, which he openly blames on the CIA, were a big show?"

It did - and still does - look that way to me. Going from memory, wasn't the Reagan-era esquadron de la muerte gang running this one? Now that lot aren't synonymous with the Agency. The grand clash, though admittedly not at the highest levels, between Agency and pro-Pentagon neo-cons was still to come: Iraq. Imagine the Agency's fate had that one gone to plan!

Paul

...

Hugo Chavez now fulfils the role of ostensible regional bogeyman, and US plots against him will almost certainly fail precisely as the elaborate paper exercises did in the case of Castro. The dirty secret in contemporary Venezuela's case is that Chavez is working for the economic integration of the region, an integration long earnestly desired by big capital in Washington and New York, but unachievable under overt US command. Hence Chavez's survival. The Guardian recently ran an unusually good piece arguing just this....

"Ok, hold the phone. You claim that Hugo Chavez, the man who stood on the floor of the UN and told America that the CIA was behind 911, is a CIA puppet?"

Myra,

Don't know for sure if Chavez is Agency, or merely a useful, if largely unwitting, tool. Ultimately, it makes little difference. Nevertheless, some reflections on the matter:

1) If he is Agency, he'd sure as hell undertake precisely the kind of action you accurately described, just as a Special Branch officer infiltrating, let us say, the Anti-Nazi League or the Socialist Workers'Party, would be sure to declaim his hatred of the SB/MI5 - before pouching the membership secretary's or treasurer's post!

2) His attribution of responsibility for 9/11 is, in my view, entirely justified. His recent decision to promote sales of the work of Noam Chomsky, the Agency's favourite "leftist" dissident, strongly suggests, however, a certain lack of lit crit rigour, and political consistency. Chomsky, is after all, the man who gave us the following pearl of Agency-serving nonsense:""One thing I would mention is that when it's a CIA operation, that means it's a White House operation. It's not CIA. They don't do things on their own…If it's a CIA operation it's because they were ordered to do it…" (Noam Chomsky. Class Warfare (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 92.) Very convincing.

2) On cue - very obliging of the chap, I must say - I note in my morning paper, under the headline "Chavez lays ground to socialism" (The Guardian, 8 January 2007, p.16) - that he is moving to occupy the vacuum left by the dying Fidel.

3) The Agency may yet decide to martyr him, but only if there's a suitable replacement in the wings.

4) A relatively unified Central and Southern American left offers rich scope for a Republican come-back after 4 to 8 years of Republican-lite government by the nominal opposition. (Buggins turn dictates some safe Democrat centrist is due for a spell in the White House.) In crude summary, think a re-run of the early/mid Reagan years.

5) All the while, Venezuelan oil money will be recycled on lots of essential infra-structure projects. They will benefit the countries concerned immensely, but prepare the country for integration with the US/North American trading bloc.

Sorry to seem so cynical, but this is the way it strikes me.

Paul

"...I get more convinced every day that the Bay of Pigs was a trap for Kennedy--to discredit him, and to manipulate the Cubans into hating him and do the wet work on Nov 22, '63."

Myra,

Couldn't agree more - until the very end. They were simply additional patsies. My favourite quote on the related subjects of Mob and Cubans appeared in New Times in the late 1970s. Citing a New York Daily News piece - which I've never got round to hunting down, but would be delighted to learn details of - the author quoted unnamed "friends" of John Roselli to the effect that Oswald was a decoy while others ambushed Kennedy from closer range.

Roselli shortly thereafter took up residence in a 55-gallon oil drum.

(Source: Iona Antonov, “On the Trail of the President’s Killers: part 2,” New Times, 1977, pp.26-30)

"But, when did the supposed Castro/CIA alliance dissolve, if it ever did?"

And why would Cuba be allowed to starve and crumble for decades if Castro was really the CIA's boy?

Why not? The Agency cares not a jot about the well-being of most Americans, so what chance some islanders ninety miles off shore?

Paul