John Simkin

Does anyone know the number of documents being withheld concerning the events surrounding the assassination of JFK. I think I remember reading that it is over a million.

That is just a reflection on their political system. Take a look at this thread for example: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6572 When you are living in a two party state like the US you do not have an outlet for your dissatisfaction and political blogs are a useful safety valve. The interesting point is whether websites, blogs, forums and email newsletters can really make a difference to the political process. For example, Greg Palast is an investigative journalist who has difficulty getting his articles published in the mainstream media in America (The Guardian Newspaper Group publish his work in the UK). http://www.gregpalast.com/ He has developed a strong following from the disenfranchised in the US using his website and newsletter to keep in contact with his followers. With developments like Google AdSense, other respected radical journalists are beginning to make a reasonable living out of their activities. A recent survey by the Guardian pointed out that more and more young people are using the web as a news source. Understandably, they are willing to trust web journalists like Greg Palast than those working in media controlled by multinational corporations.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKweisberg.htm http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKepstein.htm

I had the pleasure of seeing Janis Ian in concert last night in Brighton. She was fantastic. Her voice is as good as ever and she is an excellent guitar player. Her recent songs show that she has lost none of the ability she showed as a teenager with songs like Society’s Child and Seventeen. Just listen to songs like Autobiography and When I Lay Down. See the following for future concert dates: http://www.janisian.com/tourinfo.html

An interesting point about I. F. Stone and Noam Chomsky. However, I am not convinced this is because they were both Jewish. It has to be admitted that most left-wing activists in the United States and the rest of the world have shown little interest in the assassination of JFK. One of the reasons for this is that JFK is seen by the left as a typical American politician who posed no real threat to capitalism. Therefore they believe that he was probably killed by Oswald. They accept there was a cover-up but put this down to an attempt to hide the incompetence of the CIA and the FBI. What those on the left fail to grasp is that in 1963 JFK did pose a serious threat to the ruling elite. So did Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. Conspiracy theorists have been successfully smeared as being paranoid. Those on the left wish to avoid this label. They would rather see themselves as romantic revolutionaries. They know that they are unable to change the system. However, that does not really matter. As long as the remain intellectually respectable, they are more than happy to earn a good living criticizing the failings of capitalism.

A fantastic posting that deserves its own thread. I have started one here: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6592

It is difficult to see how America is a democracy when the two dominant parties do not reflect such a large percentage of public opinion. If a country is always ruled by one political party, as in the old Soviet Union, it is correctly described as a dictatorship. Is it so different when you are ruled by two political parties that share the same agenda? The way the political system is organized and funded in the United States makes it impossible for any other political party to challenge the Democrats or Republicans. Given this situation, a coup d’etat is not necessary. It has already happened.

I was right about it being an open game. It is a shame Spurs failed to take their early chances. Lee’s mistake was horrendous. Even pub players do not run into their own area with the ball while being chased by an opponent. What was he trying to do? It is now a very big game against Arsenal. Maybe they will be helped if Villarreal give them a good game on Wednesday.

Interesting article by Bobbie Johnson in today's Guardian. Do you agree? http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1755630,00.html Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although "active" web users make up only a small proportion of Europe's online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends. More than half of the internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23% only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net - through messageboards, websites and blogs - are helping change the national conversation, say researchers. "We're seeing this growing," said Julian Smith, an online advertising analyst with Jupiter Research and author of the report. "The strongest part of their influence is on the media: if something online suddenly becomes a story in the local press, then it matters." Although unprompted contributors are generally younger and more vocal than the wider online population, they are increasingly important as opinion formers and trend-setters. Mr Smith says businesses, media organisations and advertisers reading blogs should be wary of making assumptions about their wider significance, but that their muscle cannot be ignored. "They're not representative of the larger audience, but what they're saying does matter," he said. "It's a good straw poll - a snapshot of the verbal conversations going on that we can't measure." "That's exactly right," said Glenn Reynolds, author of An Army of Davids, which explores the explosion in web punditry. "Bloggers and blog-readers are 'influentials' - the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles. They also tend on average to be better off, better educated and, more importantly, employed." There are now more than 35m blogs around the world, according to search engine Technorati. While most bloggers only write for small audiences, they can sometimes achieve wider fame or become the focus of consumer campaigns. Companies like McDonald's, lock manufacturer Kryptonite and computer firm Dell have all fallen foul of internet buzz in recent years. Because search engines like Google can allow grassroots campaigns to become highly visible, industry insiders agree decisions can be shaped by a small number of activists. "It's always been the case that vocal minorities are listened to by media organisations, brands, advertisers and marketers - normally because they're thought to represent a wider swath of opinion," said Tom Coates, a technologist with Yahoo! and prominent blogger. "TV and radio programmes are censored or pulled on the green-inked letters of a few hundred people, products removed from shelves because of less than 100 complaints. "On that basis, these figures start to sound like a pretty large number of people, and probably a much more representative sample than perhaps before." Mr Reynolds admits the idea of small groups being able to pressurise wider decisions is nothing new, but those who ignore online buzz do so at their peril: "You can bury your head in the sand, but very quickly you'll look like a very old-fashioned company."

A researcher who I very much respect refuses to get involved with Forums. However, he has suggested that we take a look at the issue of the Federal Reserve. Any comments: "At the start of 1964 the U.S had the ultimate "Goldilocks" economy thanks to JFK's policies; his most dangerous adversary was the Federal Reserve which he was attempting to castrate...... suggest you focus on James J Saxon, Kennedy's comptroller of currency whose efforts in regard to reforming the U.S. Banking system feature in the November 18 1963 edition of U.S. News and World report.... these people were not happy with JFK and as they sit at the very heart of the ongoing elite power system which governs America beyond the "bodypolitic" they need to be looked at very closely...........unfortunately the only people to have seriously researched this subject are at the "far edge"........Eustace Mullins et al whom I met in DC in 2002; contrary to public perception he does not seem to be a crazed far right lunatic with gross anti semitic sentiments; au contraire he is a deep thinking revisionist historian whose knowledge on the U.S.Federal Reseve is unsurpassed."

Congratulations. Is this your winning entry? http://www.teachnet-uk.org.uk/projects-humanities.htm

I believe that George Bush was involved as a member of the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Complex in the assassination of JFK. The key to this is Operation 40. Gaeton Fonzi has argued convincingly in The Last Investigation that CIA officers, David Atlee Phillips and David Morales were involved in the assassination of Kennedy. Fonzi discovered that in 1963 Morales was head of operations at JM/WAVE, the CIA Miami station. (1) JM/WAVE chief was Ted Shackley and his top deputy was Tom Clines. As Warren Hinckle and William Turner were to point out in Deadly Secrets, Operation 40 the “ultra secret… assassins-for-hire” program was based at the JM/WAVE station. (2) An account of the formation of Operation 40 can be found in the Senate Report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. On 11th December, 1959, Colonel J. C. King, chief of CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, sent a confidential memorandum to Allen W. Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. King argued that in Cuba there existed a "far-left dictatorship, which if allowed to remain will encourage similar actions against U.S. holdings in other Latin American countries." (3) As a result of this memorandum Dulles established Operation 40. It obtained this name because originally there were 40 agents involved in the operation. Later this was expanded to 70 agents. The group was presided over by Richard Nixon. Tracy Barnes became operating officer of what was also called the Cuban Task Force. The first meeting chaired by Barnes took place in his office on 18th January, 1960, and was attended by David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Jack Esterline and Frank Bender. According to Fabian Escalante, a senior officer of the Cuban Department of State Security (G-2), in 1960 Richard Nixon recruited an "important group of businessmen headed by George Bush (Snr.) and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, to gather the necessary funds for the operation". This suggests that Operation 40 agents were involved in freelance work. (4) In 1990 Common Cause magazine argued that: "The CIA put millionaire and agent George Bush in charge of recruiting exiled Cubans for the CIA’s invading army; Bush was working with another Texan oil magnate, Jack Crichton, who helped him in terms of the invasion." (5) This story was linked to the release of "a memorandum in that context addressed to FBI chief J. Edward Hoover and signed November 1963, which reads: Mr. George Bush of the CIA" (6) Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo claim that in 1959 George Bush was asked “to cooperate in funding the nascent anti-Castro groups that the CIA decided to create”. The man “assigned to him for his new mission” was Féliz Rodríguez. (7) Daniel Hopsicker also takes the view that Operation 40 involved private funding. In the book, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History, he claims that Nixon’s had established Operation 40 as a result of pressure from American corporations which had suffered at the hands of Fidel Castro. (8) Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin have argued that Bush was very close to members of Operation 40 in the early 1960s. In September, 1963, Bush launched his Senate campaign. At that time, right-wing Republicans were calling on John Kennedy to take a more aggressive approach towards Fidel Castro. For example, in one speech Barry Goldwater said: “I advocate the recognition of a Cuban government in exile and would encourage this government every way to reclaim its country. This means financial and military assistance.” Bush took a more extreme position than Goldwater and called for a “new government-in-exile invasion of Cuba”. As Tarpley and Chaitkin point out, beneficiaries of this policy would have been “Theodore Shackley, who was by now the station chief of CIA Miami Station, Felix Rodriguez, Chi Chi Quintero, and the rest of the boys” from Operation 40. (9) Paul Kangas is another investigator who has claimed that George Bush was involved with members of Operation 40. In an article published in The Realist in 1990, Kangas claims: "Among other members of the CIA recruited by George Bush for (the attacks on Cuba) were Frank Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Bernard Baker and Rafael Quintero.” In an article published in Granma in January, 2006, the journalists Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo argued that “Another of Bush’s recruits for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Rafael Quintero, who was also part of this underworld of organizations and conspiracies against Cuba, stated: If I was to tell what I know about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the greatest scandal that has ever rocked the nation." (10) Fabian Escalante names William Pawley as being one of those who was lobbying for the CIA to assassinate Castro. (11) Escalante points out that Pawley had played a similar role in the CIA overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala. Interestingly, the CIA assembled virtually the same team that was involved in the removal of Arbenz: Tracey Barnes, Richard Bissell, David Morales, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Rip Robertson and Henry Hecksher. Added to this list was several agents who had been involved in undercover operations in Germany: Ted Shackley, Tom Clines and William Harvey. According to Daniel Hopsicker, Edwin Wilson, Barry Seal, William Seymour, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Hemming were also involved in Operation 40. (12) It has also been pointed out that Operation 40 was not only involved in trying to overthrow Fidel Castro. Frank Sturgis has claimed: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents." Virtually every one of the field agents of Operation 40 were Cubans. This included Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero, Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch, Roland Masferrer, Eladio del Valle, Guillermo Novo, Carlos Bringuier, Eugenio Martinez, Antonio Cuesta, Hermino Diaz Garcia, Felix Ismael Rodriguez, Antonio Veciana, Juan Manuel Salvat, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Isidro Borjas, Virgilio Paz, Jose Dionisio Suarez, Felipe Rivero, Gaspar Jimenez Escobedo, Nazario Sargent, Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz, Jose Basulto, and Paulino Sierra. (13) Most of these characters had been associated with the far-right in Cuban politics. Rumours soon became circulating that it was not only Fidel Castro that was being targeted. On 9th June, 1961, Arthur Schlesinger sent a memo to Richard Goodwin: “Sam Halper, who has been the Times correspondent in Havana and more recently in Miami, came to see me last week. He has excellent contracts among the Cuban exiles. One of Miro's comments this morning reminded me that I have been meaning to pass on the following story as told me by Halper. Halper says that CIA set up something called Operation 40 under the direction of a man named (as he recalled) Captain Luis Sanjenis, who was also chief of intelligence. (Could this be the man to whom Miro referred this morning?) It was called Operation 40 because originally only 40 men were involved: later the group was enlarged to 70. The ostensible purpose of Operation 40 was to administer liberated territories in Cuba. But the CIA agent in charge, a man known as Felix, trained the members of the group in methods of third degree interrogation, torture and general terrorism. The liberal Cuban exiles believe that the real purpose of Operation 40 was to "kill Communists" and, after eliminating hard-core Fidelistas, to go on to eliminate first the followers of Ray, then the followers of Varona and finally to set up a right wing dictatorship, presumably under Artime.” (14) In an interview he gave to Jean-Guy Allard in May, 2005, Fabian Escalante pointed out: “Who in 1963 had the resources to assassinate Kennedy? Who had the means and who had the motives to kill the U.S. president? CIA agents from Operation 40 who were rabidly anti-Kennedy. And among them were Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, Antonio Veciana and Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia." (15) This is not the first time that Fabian Escalante has pointed the finger at members of Operation 40. In December, 1995, Wayne Smith, chief of the Centre for International Policy in Washington, arranged a meeting on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in Nassau, Bahamas. Others in attendance were Gaeton Fonzi, Dick Russell, Noel Twyman, Anthony Summers, Peter Dale Scott, Jeremy Gunn, John Judge, Andy Kolis, Peter Kornbluh, Mary and Ray LaFontaine, Jim Lesar, John Newman, Alan Rogers, Russ Swickard, Ed Sherry, and Gordon Winslow. During a session on 7th December, Escalante claimed that during captivity, Antonio Cuesta, confessed that he had been involved in the assassination of Kennedy. He also named Eladio Del Valle, Rolando Masferrer and Hermino Diaz Garcia as being involved in this operation. All four men were members of Operation 40. (16) It has been argued that people like Fabian Escalante, Jean Guy Allard, Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo are under the control of the Cuban government. It is definitely true that much of this information has originally been published in Granma, the newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. Is there any other evidence to suggest that members of Operation 40 were involved in the assassination? I believe that there are several pieces of evidence that help to substantiate Escalante’s theory. Shortly before his death in 1975 John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter, John Cummings, that he had been guilty of spreading false stories implicating Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of Kennedy. He claimed that two of the gunmen were Cuban exiles. It is believed the two men were Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez. Cummings added: "He told me he'd been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He wasn't in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things.... He asked me not to write it while he was alive." (17) Fred Claasen also told the House Select Committee on Assassinations what he knew about his business partner’s involvement in the case. Martino told Classen: “The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn’t know who he was working for – he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together. Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theatre. They were to meet Oswald in the theatre, and get him out of the country, then eliminate him. Oswald made a mistake… There was no way we could get to him. They had Ruby kill him.” (18) Florence Martino at first refused to corroborate the story. However, in 1994 she told Anthony Summers that her husband said to her on the morning of 22nd November, 1963: "Flo, they're going to kill him (Kennedy). They're going to kill him when he gets to Texas." (19) Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez were both members of Operation 40. So also was Rip Robertson who according to Anthony Summers “was a familiar face at his (John Martino) home. Summers also points out that Martino was close to William Pawley and both took part in the “Bayo-Pawley Affair”. (20) This anti-Castro mission, also known as Operation Tilt, also involved other members of Operation 40, including Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martinez. There is another key CIA figure in Operation 40 who has made a confession concerning the assassination of John Kennedy. David Morales was head of operations at JM/WAVE, the CIA Miami station, at the time of the assassination. Gaeton Fonzi carried out a full investigation of Morales while working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Unfortunately, Morales could not testify before the HSCA because he died of a heart attack on 8th May, 1978. Fonzi tracked down Ruben Carbajal, a very close friend of Morales. Carbajal saw Morales the night before he died. He also visited Morales in hospital when he received news of the heart attack. Carbajal is convinced that Morales was killed by the CIA. Morales had told Carbajal the agency would do this if you posed a threat to covert operations. Morales, a heavy drinker, had a reputation for being indiscreet when intoxicated. On 4th August 1973, Morales allowed himself to be photographed by Kevin Scofield of the Arizona Republic at the El Molino restaurant. When the photograph appeared in the newspaper the following day, it identified Morales as Director for Operations Counterinsurgency and Special Activities in Washington. Carbajal put Fonzi in contact with Bob Walton, a business associate of Morales. Walton confirmed Carbajal’s account that Morales feared being killed by the CIA. On one occasion he told him: “I know too much”. Walton also told him about a discussion he had with Morales about John F. Kennedy in the spring of 1973. Walton had done some volunteer work for Kennedy’s Senatorial campaign. When hearing this news, Morales launched an attack on Kennedy, describing him as a wimp who had betrayed the anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. He ended up by saying: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” Carbajal, who was also present at this meeting, confirmed Walton’s account of what Morales said. (21) Another important piece of evidence comes from Gene Wheaton. In 1995 Gene Wheaton approached the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) with information on the death of Kennedy. Anne Buttimer, Chief Investigator of the ARRB, recorded that: " Wheaton told me that from 1984 to 1987 he spent a lot of time in the Washington DC area and that starting in 1985 he was "recruited into Ollie North's network" by the CIA officer he has information about. He got to know this man and his wife, a "'super grade high level CIA officer" and kept a bedroom in their Virginia home. His friend was a Marine Corps liaison in New Orleans and was the CIA contact with Carlos Marcello. He had been responsible for "running people into Cuba before the Bay of Pigs." His friend is now 68 or 69 years of age... Over the course of a year or a year and one-half his friend told him about his activities with training Cuban insurgency groups. Wheaton said he also got to know many of the Cubans who had been his friend's soldiers/operatives when the Cubans visited in Virginia from their homes in Miami. His friend and the Cubans confirmed to Wheaton they assassinated JFK. Wheaton's friend said he trained the Cubans who pulled the triggers. Wheaton said the street level Cubans felt JFK was a traitor after the Bay of Pigs and wanted to kill him. People "above the Cubans" wanted JFK killed for other reasons." (22) It was later revealed that Wheaton's friend was Carl E. Jenkins, A senior CIA officer, Jenkins had been appointed in 1960 as Chief of Base for Cuban Project. In 1963 Jenkins provided paramilitary training for Manuel Artime and Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero and other members of the Movement for the Recovery of the Revolution (MRR). In an interview with William Law and Mark Sobel in the summer of 2005, Gene Wheaton claimed that Jenkins and Quintero were both involved in the assassination of Kennedy. It seems that members of Operation 40, originally recruited to remove Fidel Castro, had been redirected to kill Kennedy. That someone had paid this team of assassins to kill the president of the United States as part of a freelance operation. This is not such a far-fetched idea when you consider that in 1959 Richard Nixon was approaching oilmen like George Walker Bush and Jack Crichton to help fund Operation 40. We also have the claim of Frank Sturgis that "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents." Further support for this theory comes from an unlikely source. David Atlee Phillips died of cancer on 7th July, 1988. He left behind an unpublished manuscript. The novel is about a CIA officer who lived in Mexico City. In the novel the character states: "I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt." (23) The issue is whether Operation 40 remained active after 1963. Is it possible that a network of CIA agents, right-wing businessmen linked to the arms and oil industries and Cuban exiles continued to assassinate people seen as dangerous to the interests of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Intelligence Complex? I believe this group were also involved in corrupt business activities that date back to Lyndon Johnson in the 1950s. I would suggest that the following people were key members of Operation 40 who need to be looked at very carefully: CIA Officers: Ted Shackley, Tom Clines, Tracy Barnes, David Atlee Phillips, David Morales, Rip Robertson, E. Howard Hunt, Jack Esterline, Carl E. Jenkins, Frank Bender (Gerry Droller), William Harvey, Daniel Hopsicker, William C. Bishop and Edwin Wilson. Assassins: Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero, Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch, Roland Masferrer, Eladio del Valle, Guillermo Novo, Eugenio Martinez, Antonio Cuesta, Hermino Diaz Garcia, Felix Rodriguez, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard L. Barker and Frank Sturgis. Business Sponsors: William Pawley, George Bush and Jack Crichton. It is interesting to now look at what other events these people were involved in following the assassination of JFK. Operation Phoenix in Vietnam (1966-73). This was the killing of non-combatant Vietnamese civilians suspected of collaborating with the National Liberation Front. During this period, Operation Phoenix murdered between 20,857 (CIA figures) and 40,994 (North Vietnam figures) 40,994 civilians. This involved the following members of Operation 40: Ted Shackley, Thomas G. Clines, David Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, David Morales, Chi Chi’ Quintero, Felix Rodriguez and Edwin Wilson) The assassination of Che Guevara in October, 1967 (David Morales and Felix Rodriguez). Watergate (1973-75): E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio Martinez, Virgilio Gonzalez, George Bush, Bernard L. Barker and Frank Sturgis. The assassination of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean Foreign Minister, on 21st September, 1976 (David Atlee Phillips, Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch and Ricardo Morales Navarrete) The bombing of the Cubana Aircraft in October, 1976 that killed all 73 people aboard. (Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch). Attempted assassination of Fidel Castro in November, 2000 (Luis Posada and Guillermo Novo). Iran-Contra Scandal (1986-87): Ted Shackley, Thomas G. Clines, Carl E. Jenkins, Chi Chi’ Quintero, Felix Rodriguez, George Bush and Edwin Wilson. Of these events George Bush can be linked with Watergate and the Iran-Contra Scandal. I will document this in later postings. Notes 1. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 366-371) 2. Warren Hinckle & William Turner, Deadly Secrets, 1992 (page 53) 3. Senate Report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 1975 (page 92) 4. Fabian Escalante, CIA Covert Operations 1959-1962: The Cuba Project, 2004 (pages 42 and 43) 5. Common Cause Magazine (4th March, 1990) 6. The Nation magazine (13th August, 1988) 7. Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo, Granma (16th January, 2006) 8. Daniel Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History, 2001 (page 170) 9. Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, 2004 (page 173) 10. Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo, Granma (16th January, 2006) 11. Fabian Escalante, CIA Covert Operations 1959-1962: The Cuba Project, 2004 (pages 42 and 43) 12. Daniel Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News (24th August, 2004) 13. Jean-Guy Allard, Granma (22nd May, 2005) 14. Arthur Schlesinger, memo to Richard Goodwin (9th June, 1961) 15. Jean-Guy Allard, Granma (22nd May, 2005) 16. Fabian Escalante, Centre for International Policy, Nassau, Bahamas (7th December, 1995) 17. Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, 2003 (page 17) 18. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 328) 19. Anthony and Robbyn Summers, The Ghosts of November, Vanity Fair (December, 1994) 20. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 326) 21. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 380-390) 22. Anne Buttimer, Assassination Records Review Board Report (12th July, 1995) 23. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 371)

The issue is whether Operation 40 remained active after 1963. Is it possible that a network of CIA agents, right-wing businessmen linked to the arms and oil industries and Cuban exiles continued to assassinate people seen as dangerous to the interests of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Intelligence Complex? I believe this group were also involved in corrupt business activities that date back to Lyndon Johnson in the 1950s. I would suggest that the following people were key members of Operation 40 who need to be looked at very carefully: CIA Officers: Ted Shackley, Tom Clines, Tracy Barnes, David Atlee Phillips, David Morales, Rip Robertson, E. Howard Hunt, Carl E. Jenkins, William Harvey, Daniel Hopsicker, William C. Bishop and Edwin Wilson. Assassins: Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero, Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch, Roland Masferrer, Eladio del Valle, Guillermo Novo, Eugenio Martinez, Antonio Cuesta, Hermino Diaz Garcia, Felix Rodriguez, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard L. Barker and Frank Sturgis. Business Sponsors: William Pawley, George Bush and Jack Crichton. It is interesting to now look at what other events these people were involved in following the assassination of JFK. Operation Phoenix in Vietnam (1966-73). This was the killing of non-combatant Vietnamese civilians suspected of collaborating with the National Liberation Front. During this period, Operation Phoenix murdered between 20,857 (CIA figures) and 40,994 (North Vietnam figures) 40,994 civilians. This involved the following members of Operation 40: Ted Shackley, Thomas G. Clines, David Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, Chi Chi’ Quintero, Felix Rodriguez and Edwin Wilson) The assassination of Che Guevara in October, 1967 (David Morales and Felix Rodriguez). Watergate (1973-75): E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio Martinez, Virgilio Gonzalez, George Bush, Bernard L. Barker and Frank Sturgis. The assassination of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean Foreign Minister, on 21st September, 1976 (David Atlee Phillips, Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch and Ricardo Morales Navarrete). The bombing of the Cubana Aircraft in October, 1976 that killed all 73 people aboard. (Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch). Attempted assassination of Fidel Castro in November, 2000 (Luis Posada and Guillermo Novo). Iran-Contra Scandal (1986-87): Ted Shackley, Thomas G. Clines, Carl E. Jenkins, Chi Chi’ Quintero, Felix Rodriguez, George Bush and Edwin Wilson. I would be grateful if members could post information about the links between members of Operation 40 and these events that I have missed.

Article by Greg Palast: The Guardian Friday, April 14, 2006 Well, here they come: the wannabe Rommels, the gaggle of generals, safely retired, to lay siege to Donald Rumsfeld. This week, six of them have called for the Secretary of Defense's resignation. Well, according to my watch, they're about four years too late -- and they still don't get it. I know that most of my readers will be tickled pink that the bemedalled boys in crew cuts are finally ready to kick Rummy in the rump, in public. But to me, it just shows me that these boys still can't shoot straight. It wasn't Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who stood up in front of the UN and identified two mobile latrines as biological weapons labs, was it, General Powell? It wasn't Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who told us our next warning from Saddam could be a mushroom cloud, was it Condoleezza? It wasn't Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who declared that Al Qaeda and Saddam were going steady, was it, Mr. Cheney? Yes, Rumsfeld is a swaggering bag of mendacious arrogance, a duplicitous chicken-hawk, yellow-bellied bully-boy and Tinker-Toy Napoleon -- but he didn't appoint himself Secretary of Defense. Let me tell you a story about the Secretary of Defense you didn't read in the New York Times, related to me by General Jay Garner, the man our president placed in Baghdad as the US' first post-invasion viceroy. Garner arrived in Kuwait City in March 2003 working under the mistaken notion that when George Bush called for democracy in Iraq, the President meant the Iraqis could choose their own government. Misunderstanding the President's true mission, General Garner called for Iraqis to hold elections within 90 days and for the U.S. to quickly pull troops out of the cities to a desert base. "It's their country," the General told me of the Iraqis. "And," he added, most ominously, "their oil." Let's not forget: it's all about the oil. I showed Garner a 101-page plan for Iraq's economy drafted secretly by neo-cons at the State Department, Treasury and the Pentagon, calling for "privatization" (i.e. the sale) of "all state assets ... especially in the oil and oil-supporting industries." The General knew of the plans and he intended to shove it where the Iraqi sun don't shine. Garner planned what he called a "Big Tent" meeting of Iraqi tribal leaders to plan elections. By helping Iraqis establish their own multi-ethnic government -- and this was back when Sunnis, Shias and Kurds were on talking terms -- knew he could get the nation on its feet peacefully before a welcomed "liberation" turned into a hated "occupation." But, Garner knew, a freely chosen coalition government would mean the death-knell for the neo-con oil-and-assets privatization grab. On April 21, 2003, three years ago this month, the very night General Garner arrived in Baghdad, he got a call from Washington. It was Rumsfeld on the line. He told Garner, in so many words, "Don't unpack, Jack, you're fired." Rummy replaced Garner, a man with years of on-the-ground experience in Iraq, with green-boots Paul Bremer, the Managing Director of Kissinger Associates. Bremer cancelled the Big Tent meeting of Iraqis and postponed elections for a year; then he issued 100 orders, like some tin-pot pasha, selling off Iraq's economy to U.S. and foreign operators, just as Rumsfeld's neo-con clique had desired. Reading this, it sounds like I should applaud the six generals' call for Rumfeld's ouster. Forget it. For a bunch of military hotshots, they sure can't shoot straight. They're wasting all their bullets on the decoy. They've gunned down the puppet instead of the puppeteers. There's no way that Rumsfeld could have yanked General Garner from Baghdad without the word from The Bunker. Nothing moves or breathes or spits in the Bush Administration without Darth Cheney's growl of approval. And ultimately, it's the Commander-in-Chief who's chiefly in command. Even the generals' complaint -- that Rumsfeld didn't give them enough troops -- was ultimately a decision of the cowboy from Crawford. (And by the way, the problem was not that we lacked troops -- the problem was that we lacked moral authority to occupy this nation. A million troops would not be enough -- the insurgents would just have more targets.) President Bush is one lucky fella. I can imagine him today on the intercom with Cheney: "Well, pardner, looks like the game's up." And Cheney replies, "Hey, just hang the Rumsfeld dummy out the window until he's taken all their ammo." When Bush and Cheney read about the call for Rumsfeld's resignation today, I can just hear George saying to Dick, "Mission Accomplished." Generals, let me give you a bit of advice about choosing a target: It's the President, stupid.

Someone whose judgement I highly respect suggests that every serious JFK researcher should have a copy of this DVD: More than 40 years have passed since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The Murder of JFK: A Revisionist History takes a comprehensive examination into the theories behind the assassination itself. It also explains the tragedy within the context of the existing U.S. political and cultural climate, and the global context of the Cold War. The Murder of JFK: A Revisionist History includes: • The first digital rendering of the Zapruder film, mastered from the original. • The only known color footage of Lee Harvey Oswald. • Cuban source material on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. • First-time use of audio material from Robert F. Kennedy¹s oral history. • Interviews with Arthur Schlesinger, John Frankenheimer, Jack Anderson and Sam Halpern. • A link between the film Psycho and the FBI’s report on Oswald. • Newly discovered footage from local television archives and foreign new sources, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s thoughts concerning a conspiracy. Winner of the 1999 IDA/ABCNews VideoSource Award for the Best Use of News Footage in a Documentary. Product Code: DVD7167 Actors: Historians, scholars and political officials Aspect Ratio: 4x3 Genre: History Number of Discs: 1 Rating: NR Release Date: February 28, 2006 Run Time: 180 mins UPC: 030306716794 http://www.mpihomevideo.com/?p=25467&pid=1734&pcid=&ccid

I have argued elsewhere that as a result of the assassination certain aspects of John F. Kennedy’s policies were brought to a halt. This included plans to end the oil depletion allowance, investigations into government corruption (TFX and Bobby Baker scandals), secret negotiations with Fidel Castro, the refusal to start a war in Vietnam and an unwillingness to support anti-democratic military dictators in the America. I have attempted to show that all these decisions benefited the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Complex (MICIC). http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5799 Although the MICIC had a good motive for killing Kennedy, it is much more difficult to show how this was organized. A considerable amount of evidence has emerged to indicate that anti-Castro Cubans working for the CIA were involved in the assassination. This in itself was linked to CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Gaeton Fonzi has argued convincingly in The Last Investigation that CIA officers, David Atlee Phillips and David Morales were involved in the assassination of Kennedy. Fonzi discovered that in 1963 Morales was head of operations at JM/WAVE, the CIA Miami station. (1) JM/WAVE chief was Ted Shackley and his top deputy was Tom Clines. As Warren Hinckle and William Turner were to point out in Deadly Secrets, Operation 40 the “ultra secret… assassins-for-hire” program was based at the JM/WAVE station. (2) An account of the formation of Operation 40 can be found in the Senate Report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. On 11th December, 1959, Colonel J. C. King, chief of CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, sent a confidential memorandum to Allen W. Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. King argued that in Cuba there existed a "far-left dictatorship, which if allowed to remain will encourage similar actions against U.S. holdings in other Latin American countries." (3) As a result of this memorandum Dulles established Operation 40. It obtained this name because originally there were 40 agents involved in the operation. Later this was expanded to 70 agents. The group was presided over by Richard Nixon. Tracy Barnes became operating officer of what was also called the Cuban Task Force. The first meeting chaired by Barnes took place in his office on 18th January, 1960, and was attended by David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Jack Esterline and Frank Bender. According to Fabian Escalante, a senior officer of the Cuban Department of State Security (G-2), in 1960 Richard Nixon recruited an "important group of businessmen headed by George Bush (Snr.) and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, to gather the necessary funds for the operation". This suggests that Operation 40 agents were involved in freelance work. (4) In 1990 Common Cause magazine argued that: "The CIA put millionaire and agent George Bush in charge of recruiting exiled Cubans for the CIA’s invading army; Bush was working with another Texan oil magnate, Jack Crichton, who helped him in terms of the invasion." (5) This story was linked to the release of "a memorandum in that context addressed to FBI chief J. Edward Hoover and signed November 1963, which reads: Mr. George Bush of the CIA" (6) Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo claim that in 1959 George Bush was asked “to cooperate in funding the nascent anti-Castro groups that the CIA decided to create”. The man “assigned to him for his new mission” was Féliz Rodríguez. (7) Daniel Hopsicker also takes the view that Operation 40 involved private funding. In the book, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History, he claims that Nixon’s had established Operation 40 as a result of pressure from American corporations which had suffered at the hands of Fidel Castro. (8) Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin have argued that Bush was very close to members of Operation 40 in the early 1960s. In September, 1963, Bush launched his Senate campaign. At that time, right-wing Republicans were calling on John Kennedy to take a more aggressive approach towards Fidel Castro. For example, in one speech Barry Goldwater said: “I advocate the recognition of a Cuban government in exile and would encourage this government every way to reclaim its country. This means financial and military assistance.” Bush took a more extreme position than Goldwater and called for a “new government-in-exile invasion of Cuba”. As Tarpley and Chaitkin point out, beneficiaries of this policy would have been “Theodore Shackley, who was by now the station chief of CIA Miami Station, Felix Rodriguez, Chi Chi Quintero, and the rest of the boys” from Operation 40. (9) Paul Kangas is another investigator who has claimed that George Bush was involved with members of Operation 40. In an article published in The Realist in 1990, Kangas claims: "Among other members of the CIA recruited by George Bush for (the attacks on Cuba) were Frank Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Bernard Baker and Rafael Quintero.” In an article published in Granma in January, 2006, the journalists Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo argued that “Another of Bush’s recruits for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Rafael Quintero, who was also part of this underworld of organizations and conspiracies against Cuba, stated: If I was to tell what I know about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the greatest scandal that has ever rocked the nation." (10) Fabian Escalante names William Pawley as being one of those who was lobbying for the CIA to assassinate Castro. (11) Escalante points out that Pawley had played a similar role in the CIA overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala. Interestingly, the CIA assembled virtually the same team that was involved in the removal of Arbenz: Tracey Barnes, Richard Bissell, David Morales, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Rip Robertson and Henry Hecksher. Added to this list was several agents who had been involved in undercover operations in Germany: Ted Shackley, Tom Clines and William Harvey. According to Daniel Hopsicker, Edwin Wilson, Barry Seal, William Seymour, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Hemming were also involved in Operation 40. (12) It has also been pointed out that Operation 40 was not only involved in trying to overthrow Fidel Castro. Frank Sturgis has claimed: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents." Virtually every one of the field agents of Operation 40 were Cubans. This included Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero, Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch, Roland Masferrer, Eladio del Valle, Guillermo Novo, Carlos Bringuier, Eugenio Martinez, Antonio Cuesta, Hermino Diaz Garcia, Felix Ismael Rodriguez, Antonio Veciana, Juan Manuel Salvat, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Isidro Borjas, Virgilio Paz, Jose Dionisio Suarez, Felipe Rivero, Gaspar Jimenez Escobedo, Nazario Sargent, Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz, Jose Basulto, and Paulino Sierra. (13) Most of these characters had been associated with the far-right in Cuban politics. Rumours soon became circulating that it was not only Fidel Castro that was being targeted. On 9th June, 1961, Arthur Schlesinger sent a memo to Richard Goodwin: “Sam Halper, who has been the Times correspondent in Havana and more recently in Miami, came to see me last week. He has excellent contracts among the Cuban exiles. One of Miro's comments this morning reminded me that I have been meaning to pass on the following story as told me by Halper. Halper says that CIA set up something called Operation 40 under the direction of a man named (as he recalled) Captain Luis Sanjenis, who was also chief of intelligence. (Could this be the man to whom Miro referred this morning?) It was called Operation 40 because originally only 40 men were involved: later the group was enlarged to 70. The ostensible purpose of Operation 40 was to administer liberated territories in Cuba. But the CIA agent in charge, a man known as Felix, trained the members of the group in methods of third degree interrogation, torture and general terrorism. The liberal Cuban exiles believe that the real purpose of Operation 40 was to "kill Communists" and, after eliminating hard-core Fidelistas, to go on to eliminate first the followers of Ray, then the followers of Varona and finally to set up a right wing dictatorship, presumably under Artime.” (14) In an interview he gave to Jean-Guy Allard in May, 2005, Fabian Escalante pointed out: “Who in 1963 had the resources to assassinate Kennedy? Who had the means and who had the motives to kill the U.S. president? CIA agents from Operation 40 who were rabidly anti-Kennedy. And among them were Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, Antonio Veciana and Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia." (15) This is not the first time that Fabian Escalante has pointed the finger at members of Operation 40. In December, 1995, Wayne Smith, chief of the Centre for International Policy in Washington, arranged a meeting on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in Nassau, Bahamas. Others in attendance were Gaeton Fonzi, Dick Russell, Noel Twyman, Anthony Summers, Peter Dale Scott, Jeremy Gunn, John Judge, Andy Kolis, Peter Kornbluh, Mary & Ray LaFontaine, Jim Lesar, John Newman, Alan Rogers, Russ Swickard, Ed Sherry, and Gordon Winslow. During a session on 7th December, Escalante claimed that during captivity, Antonio Cuesta, confessed that he had been involved in the assassination of Kennedy. He also named Eladio Del Valle, Rolando Masferrer and Hermino Diaz Garcia as being involved in this operation. All four men were members of Operation 40. (16) It has been argued that people like Fabian Escalante, Jean Guy Allard, Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo are under the control of the Cuban government. It is definitely true that much of this information has originally been published in Granma, the newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. Is there any other evidence to suggest that members of Operation 40 were involved in the assassination? I believe that there are several pieces of evidence that help to substantiate Escalante’s theory. Shortly before his death in 1975 John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter, John Cummings, that he had been guilty of spreading false stories implicating Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of Kennedy. He claimed that two of the gunmen were Cuban exiles. It is believed the two men were Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez. Cummings added: "He told me he'd been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He wasn't in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things.... He asked me not to write it while he was alive." (17) Fred Claasen also told the House Select Committee on Assassinations what he knew about his business partner’s involvement in the case. He claimed Martino told him: “The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn’t know who he was working for – he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together. Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theatre. They were to meet Oswald in the theatre, and get him out of the country, then eliminate him. Oswald made a mistake… There was no way we could get to him. They had Ruby kill him.” (18) Florence Martino at first refused to corroborate the story. However, in 1994 she told Anthony Summers that her husband said to her on the morning of 22nd November, 1963: "Flo, they're going to kill him (Kennedy). They're going to kill him when he gets to Texas." (19) Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez were both members of Operation 40. So also was Rip Robertson who according to Anthony Summers “was a familiar face at his (John Martino) home. Summers also points out that Martino was close to William Pawley and both took part in the “Bayo-Pawley Affair”. (20) This anti-Castro mission, also known as Operation Tilt, also involved other members of Operation 40, including Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martinez. There is another key CIA figure in Operation 40 who has made a confession concerning the assassination of John Kennedy. David Morales was head of operations at JM/WAVE, the CIA Miami station, at the time of the assassination. Gaeton Fonzi carried out a full investigation of Morales while working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Unfortunately, Morales could not testify before the HSCA because he died of a heart attack on 8th May, 1978. Fonzi tracked down Ruben Carbajal, a very close friend of Morales. Carbajal saw Morales the night before he died. He also visited Morales in hospital when he received news of the heart attack. Carbajal is convinced that Morales was killed by the CIA. Morales had told Carbajal the agency would do this if you posed a threat to covert operations. Morales, a heavy drinker, had a reputation for being indiscreet when intoxicated. On 4th August 1973, Morales allowed himself to be photographed by Kevin Scofield of the Arizona Republic at the El Molino restaurant. When the photograph appeared in the newspaper the following day, it identified Morales as Director for Operations Counterinsurgency and Special Activities in Washington. Carbajal put Fonzi in contact with Bob Walton, a business associate of Morales. Walton confirmed Carbajal’s account that Morales feared being killed by the CIA. On one occasion he told him: “I know too much”. Walton also told him about a discussion he had with Morales about John F. Kennedy in the spring of 1973. Walton had done some volunteer work for Kennedy’s Senatorial campaign. When hearing this news, Morales launched an attack on Kennedy, describing him as a wimp who had betrayed the anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. He ended up by saying: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” Carbajal, who was also present at this meeting, confirmed Walton’s account of what Morales said. (21) Another important piece of evidence comes from Gene Wheaton. In 1995 Gene Wheaton approached the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) with information on the death of Kennedy. Anne Buttimer, Chief Investigator of the ARRB, recorded that: " Wheaton told me that from 1984 to 1987 he spent a lot of time in the Washington DC area and that starting in 1985 he was "recruited into Ollie North's network" by the CIA officer he has information about. He got to know this man and his wife, a "'super grade high level CIA officer" and kept a bedroom in their Virginia home. His friend was a Marine Corps liaison in New Orleans and was the CIA contact with Carlos Marcello. He had been responsible for "running people into Cuba before the Bay of Pigs." His friend is now 68 or 69 years of age... Over the course of a year or a year and one-half his friend told him about his activities with training Cuban insurgency groups. Wheaton said he also got to know many of the Cubans who had been his friend's soldiers/operatives when the Cubans visited in Virginia from their homes in Miami. His friend and the Cubans confirmed to Wheaton they assassinated JFK. Wheaton's friend said he trained the Cubans who pulled the triggers. Wheaton said the street level Cubans felt JFK was a traitor after the Bay of Pigs and wanted to kill him. People "above the Cubans" wanted JFK killed for other reasons." (22) It was later revealed that Wheaton's friend was Carl E. Jenkins, A senior CIA officer, Jenkins had been appointed in 1960 as Chief of Base for Cuban Project. In 1963 Jenkins provided paramilitary training for Manuel Artime and Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero and other members of the Movement for the Recovery of the Revolution (MRR). In an interview with William Law and Mark Sobel in the summer of 2005, Gene Wheaton claimed that Jenkins and Quintero were both involved in the assassination of Kennedy. It seems that members of Operation 40, originally recruited to remove Fidel Castro, had been redirected to kill Kennedy. That someone had paid this team of assassins to kill the president of the United States as part of a freelance operation. This is not such a far-fetched idea when you consider that in 1959 Richard Nixon was approaching oilmen like George Walker Bush and Jack Crichton to help fund Operation 40. We also have the claim of Frank Sturgis that "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents." Further support for this theory comes from an unlikely source. David Atlee Phillips died of cancer on 7th July, 1988. He left behind an unpublished manuscript. The novel is about a CIA officer who lived in Mexico City. In the novel the character states: "I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt." (23) Notes 1. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 366-371) 2. Warren Hinckle & William Turner, Deadly Secrets, 1992 (page 53) 3. Senate Report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 1975 (page 92) 4. Fabian Escalante, CIA Covert Operations 1959-1962: The Cuba Project, 2004 (pages 42 and 43) 5. Common Cause Magazine (4th March, 1990) 6. The Nation magazine (13th August, 1988) 7. Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo, Granma (16th January, 2006) 8. Daniel Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History, 2001 (page 170) 9. Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, 2004 (page 173) 10. Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo, Granma (16th January, 2006) 11. Fabian Escalante, CIA Covert Operations 1959-1962: The Cuba Project, 2004 (pages 42 and 43) 12. Daniel Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News (24th August, 2004) 13. Jean-Guy Allard, Granma (22nd May, 2005) 14. Arthur Schlesinger, memo to Richard Goodwin (9th June, 1961) 15. Jean-Guy Allard, Granma (22nd May, 2005) 16. Fabian Escalante, Centre for International Policy, Nassau, Bahamas (7th December, 1995) 17. Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, 2003 (page 17) 18. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 328) 19. Anthony and Robbyn Summers, The Ghosts of November, Vanity Fair (December, 1994) 20. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 326) 21. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 380-390) 22. Anne Buttimer, Assassination Records Review Board Report (12th July, 1995) 23. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 371)

I have argued elsewhere that as a result of the assassination certain aspects of John F. Kennedy’s policies were brought to a halt. This included plans to end the oil depletion allowance, investigations into government corruption (TFX and Bobby Baker scandals), secret negotiations with Fidel Castro, the refusal to start a war in Vietnam and an unwillingness to support anti-democratic military dictators in the America. I have attempted to show that all these decisions benefited the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Complex (MICIC). http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5799 Although the MICIC had a good motive for killing Kennedy, it is much more difficult to show how this was organized. A considerable amount of evidence has emerged to indicate that anti-Castro Cubans working for the CIA were involved in the assassination. This in itself was linked to CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Gaeton Fonzi has argued convincingly in The Last Investigation that CIA officers, David Atlee Phillips and David Morales were involved in the assassination of Kennedy. Fonzi discovered that in 1963 Morales was head of operations at JM/WAVE, the CIA Miami station. (1) JM/WAVE chief was Ted Shackley and his top deputy was Tom Clines. As Warren Hinckle and William Turner were to point out in Deadly Secrets, Operation 40 the “ultra secret… assassins-for-hire” program was based at the JM/WAVE station. (2) An account of the formation of Operation 40 can be found in the Senate Report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. On 11th December, 1959, Colonel J. C. King, chief of CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, sent a confidential memorandum to Allen W. Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. King argued that in Cuba there existed a "far-left dictatorship, which if allowed to remain will encourage similar actions against U.S. holdings in other Latin American countries." (3) As a result of this memorandum Dulles established Operation 40. It obtained this name because originally there were 40 agents involved in the operation. Later this was expanded to 70 agents. The group was presided over by Richard Nixon. Tracy Barnes became operating officer of what was also called the Cuban Task Force. The first meeting chaired by Barnes took place in his office on 18th January, 1960, and was attended by David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Jack Esterline and Frank Bender. According to Fabian Escalante, a senior officer of the Cuban Department of State Security (G-2), in 1960 Richard Nixon recruited an "important group of businessmen headed by George Bush (Snr.) and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, to gather the necessary funds for the operation". This suggests that Operation 40 agents were involved in freelance work. (4) In 1990 Common Cause magazine argued that: "The CIA put millionaire and agent George Bush in charge of recruiting exiled Cubans for the CIA’s invading army; Bush was working with another Texan oil magnate, Jack Crichton, who helped him in terms of the invasion." (5) This story was linked to the release of "a memorandum in that context addressed to FBI chief J. Edward Hoover and signed November 1963, which reads: Mr. George Bush of the CIA" (6) Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo claim that in 1959 George Bush was asked “to cooperate in funding the nascent anti-Castro groups that the CIA decided to create”. The man “assigned to him for his new mission” was Féliz Rodríguez. (7) Daniel Hopsicker also takes the view that Operation 40 involved private funding. In the book, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History, he claims that Nixon’s had established Operation 40 as a result of pressure from American corporations which had suffered at the hands of Fidel Castro. (8) Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin have argued that Bush was very close to members of Operation 40 in the early 1960s. In September, 1963, Bush launched his Senate campaign. At that time, right-wing Republicans were calling on John Kennedy to take a more aggressive approach towards Fidel Castro. For example, in one speech Barry Goldwater said: “I advocate the recognition of a Cuban government in exile and would encourage this government every way to reclaim its country. This means financial and military assistance.” Bush took a more extreme position than Goldwater and called for a “new government-in-exile invasion of Cuba”. As Tarpley and Chaitkin point out, beneficiaries of this policy would have been “Theodore Shackley, who was by now the station chief of CIA Miami Station, Felix Rodriguez, Chi Chi Quintero, and the rest of the boys” from Operation 40. (9) Paul Kangas is another investigator who has claimed that George Bush was involved with members of Operation 40. In an article published in The Realist in 1990, Kangas claims: "Among other members of the CIA recruited by George Bush for (the attacks on Cuba) were Frank Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Bernard Baker and Rafael Quintero.” In an article published in Granma in January, 2006, the journalists Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo argued that “Another of Bush’s recruits for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Rafael Quintero, who was also part of this underworld of organizations and conspiracies against Cuba, stated: If I was to tell what I know about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the greatest scandal that has ever rocked the nation." (10) Fabian Escalante names William Pawley as being one of those who was lobbying for the CIA to assassinate Castro. (11) Escalante points out that Pawley had played a similar role in the CIA overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala. Interestingly, the CIA assembled virtually the same team that was involved in the removal of Arbenz: Tracey Barnes, Richard Bissell, David Morales, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Rip Robertson and Henry Hecksher. Added to this list was several agents who had been involved in undercover operations in Germany: Ted Shackley, Tom Clines and William Harvey. According to Daniel Hopsicker, Edwin Wilson, Barry Seal, William Seymour, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Hemming were also involved in Operation 40. (12) It has also been pointed out that Operation 40 was not only involved in trying to overthrow Fidel Castro. Frank Sturgis has claimed: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents." Virtually every one of the field agents of Operation 40 were Cubans. This included Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero, Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch, Roland Masferrer, Eladio del Valle, Guillermo Novo, Carlos Bringuier, Eugenio Martinez, Antonio Cuesta, Hermino Diaz Garcia, Felix Ismael Rodriguez, Antonio Veciana, Juan Manuel Salvat, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Isidro Borjas, Virgilio Paz, Jose Dionisio Suarez, Felipe Rivero, Gaspar Jimenez Escobedo, Nazario Sargent, Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz, Jose Basulto, and Paulino Sierra. (13) Most of these characters had been associated with the far-right in Cuban politics. Rumours soon became circulating that it was not only Fidel Castro that was being targeted. On 9th June, 1961, Arthur Schlesinger sent a memo to Richard Goodwin: “Sam Halper, who has been the Times correspondent in Havana and more recently in Miami, came to see me last week. He has excellent contracts among the Cuban exiles. One of Miro's comments this morning reminded me that I have been meaning to pass on the following story as told me by Halper. Halper says that CIA set up something called Operation 40 under the direction of a man named (as he recalled) Captain Luis Sanjenis, who was also chief of intelligence. (Could this be the man to whom Miro referred this morning?) It was called Operation 40 because originally only 40 men were involved: later the group was enlarged to 70. The ostensible purpose of Operation 40 was to administer liberated territories in Cuba. But the CIA agent in charge, a man known as Felix, trained the members of the group in methods of third degree interrogation, torture and general terrorism. The liberal Cuban exiles believe that the real purpose of Operation 40 was to "kill Communists" and, after eliminating hard-core Fidelistas, to go on to eliminate first the followers of Ray, then the followers of Varona and finally to set up a right wing dictatorship, presumably under Artime.” (14) In an interview he gave to Jean-Guy Allard in May, 2005, Fabian Escalante pointed out: “Who in 1963 had the resources to assassinate Kennedy? Who had the means and who had the motives to kill the U.S. president? CIA agents from Operation 40 who were rabidly anti-Kennedy. And among them were Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, Antonio Veciana and Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia." (15) This is not the first time that Fabian Escalante has pointed the finger at members of Operation 40. In December, 1995, Wayne Smith, chief of the Centre for International Policy in Washington, arranged a meeting on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in Nassau, Bahamas. Others in attendance were Gaeton Fonzi, Dick Russell, Noel Twyman, Anthony Summers, Peter Dale Scott, Jeremy Gunn, John Judge, Andy Kolis, Peter Kornbluh, Mary & Ray LaFontaine, Jim Lesar, John Newman, Alan Rogers, Russ Swickard, Ed Sherry, and Gordon Winslow. During a session on 7th December, Escalante claimed that during captivity, Antonio Cuesta, confessed that he had been involved in the assassination of Kennedy. He also named Eladio Del Valle, Rolando Masferrer and Hermino Diaz Garcia as being involved in this operation. All four men were members of Operation 40. (16) It has been argued that people like Fabian Escalante, Jean Guy Allard, Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo are under the control of the Cuban government. It is definitely true that much of this information has originally been published in Granma, the newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. Is there any other evidence to suggest that members of Operation 40 were involved in the assassination? I believe that there are several pieces of evidence that help to substantiate Escalante’s theory. Shortly before his death in 1975 John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter, John Cummings, that he had been guilty of spreading false stories implicating Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of Kennedy. He claimed that two of the gunmen were Cuban exiles. It is believed the two men were Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez. Cummings added: "He told me he'd been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He wasn't in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things.... He asked me not to write it while he was alive." (17) Fred Claasen also told the House Select Committee on Assassinations what he knew about his business partner’s involvement in the case. He claimed Martino told him: “The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn’t know who he was working for – he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together. Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theatre. They were to meet Oswald in the theatre, and get him out of the country, then eliminate him. Oswald made a mistake… There was no way we could get to him. They had Ruby kill him.” (18) Florence Martino at first refused to corroborate the story. However, in 1994 she told Anthony Summers that her husband said to her on the morning of 22nd November, 1963: "Flo, they're going to kill him (Kennedy). They're going to kill him when he gets to Texas." (19) Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez were both members of Operation 40. So also was Rip Robertson who according to Anthony Summers “was a familiar face at his (John Martino) home. Summers also points out that Martino was close to William Pawley and both took part in the “Bayo-Pawley Affair”. (20) This anti-Castro mission, also known as Operation Tilt, also involved other members of Operation 40, including Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martinez. There is another key CIA figure in Operation 40 who has made a confession concerning the assassination of John Kennedy. David Morales was head of operations at JM/WAVE, the CIA Miami station, at the time of the assassination. Gaeton Fonzi carried out a full investigation of Morales while working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Unfortunately, Morales could not testify before the HSCA because he died of a heart attack on 8th May, 1978. Fonzi tracked down Ruben Carbajal, a very close friend of Morales. Carbajal saw Morales the night before he died. He also visited Morales in hospital when he received news of the heart attack. Carbajal is convinced that Morales was killed by the CIA. Morales had told Carbajal the agency would do this if you posed a threat to covert operations. Morales, a heavy drinker, had a reputation for being indiscreet when intoxicated. On 4th August 1973, Morales allowed himself to be photographed by Kevin Scofield of the Arizona Republic at the El Molino restaurant. When the photograph appeared in the newspaper the following day, it identified Morales as Director for Operations Counterinsurgency and Special Activities in Washington. Carbajal put Fonzi in contact with Bob Walton, a business associate of Morales. Walton confirmed Carbajal’s account that Morales feared being killed by the CIA. On one occasion he told him: “I know too much”. Walton also told him about a discussion he had with Morales about John F. Kennedy in the spring of 1973. Walton had done some volunteer work for Kennedy’s Senatorial campaign. When hearing this news, Morales launched an attack on Kennedy, describing him as a wimp who had betrayed the anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. He ended up by saying: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” Carbajal, who was also present at this meeting, confirmed Walton’s account of what Morales said. (21) Another important piece of evidence comes from Gene Wheaton. In 1995 Gene Wheaton approached the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) with information on the death of Kennedy. Anne Buttimer, Chief Investigator of the ARRB, recorded that: " Wheaton told me that from 1984 to 1987 he spent a lot of time in the Washington DC area and that starting in 1985 he was "recruited into Ollie North's network" by the CIA officer he has information about. He got to know this man and his wife, a "'super grade high level CIA officer" and kept a bedroom in their Virginia home. His friend was a Marine Corps liaison in New Orleans and was the CIA contact with Carlos Marcello. He had been responsible for "running people into Cuba before the Bay of Pigs." His friend is now 68 or 69 years of age... Over the course of a year or a year and one-half his friend told him about his activities with training Cuban insurgency groups. Wheaton said he also got to know many of the Cubans who had been his friend's soldiers/operatives when the Cubans visited in Virginia from their homes in Miami. His friend and the Cubans confirmed to Wheaton they assassinated JFK. Wheaton's friend said he trained the Cubans who pulled the triggers. Wheaton said the street level Cubans felt JFK was a traitor after the Bay of Pigs and wanted to kill him. People "above the Cubans" wanted JFK killed for other reasons." (22) It was later revealed that Wheaton's friend was Carl E. Jenkins, A senior CIA officer, Jenkins had been appointed in 1960 as Chief of Base for Cuban Project. In 1963 Jenkins provided paramilitary training for Manuel Artime and Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero and other members of the Movement for the Recovery of the Revolution (MRR). In an interview with William Law and Mark Sobel in the summer of 2005, Gene Wheaton claimed that Jenkins and Quintero were both involved in the assassination of Kennedy. It seems that members of Operation 40, originally recruited to remove Fidel Castro, had been redirected to kill Kennedy. That someone had paid this team of assassins to kill the president of the United States as part of a freelance operation. This is not such a far-fetched idea when you consider that in 1959 Richard Nixon was approaching oilmen like George Walker Bush and Jack Crichton to help fund Operation 40. We also have the claim of Frank Sturgis that "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents." Further support for this theory comes from an unlikely source. David Atlee Phillips died of cancer on 7th July, 1988. He left behind an unpublished manuscript. The novel is about a CIA officer who lived in Mexico City. In the novel the character states: "I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt." (23) Notes 1. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 366-371) 2. Warren Hinckle & William Turner, Deadly Secrets, 1992 (page 53) 3. Senate Report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 1975 (page 92) 4. Fabian Escalante, CIA Covert Operations 1959-1962: The Cuba Project, 2004 (pages 42 and 43) 5. Common Cause Magazine (4th March, 1990) 6. The Nation magazine (13th August, 1988) 7. Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo, Granma (16th January, 2006) 8. Daniel Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History, 2001 (page 170) 9. Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, 2004 (page 173) 10. Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo, Granma (16th January, 2006) 11. Fabian Escalante, CIA Covert Operations 1959-1962: The Cuba Project, 2004 (pages 42 and 43) 12. Daniel Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News (24th August, 2004) 13. Jean-Guy Allard, Granma (22nd May, 2005) 14. Arthur Schlesinger, memo to Richard Goodwin (9th June, 1961) 15. Jean-Guy Allard, Granma (22nd May, 2005) 16. Fabian Escalante, Centre for International Policy, Nassau, Bahamas (7th December, 1995) 17. Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, 2003 (page 17) 18. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 328) 19. Anthony and Robbyn Summers, The Ghosts of November, Vanity Fair (December, 1994) 20. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 326) 21. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 380-390) 22. Anne Buttimer, Assassination Records Review Board Report (12th July, 1995) 23. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 371)

Robert, as always, a perceptive post. Like you I am an outsider who sees US as a “crypto-fascist government”. However, I do not see any danger of a coup d’etat taking place. This is a strategy of last resort. At the moment the Bush administration is firmly in control of the situation. I fully expect Bush to be eventually replaced by a more articulate, more competent, politician willing to do the bidding of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence Complex. This person will continue to dish out large contracts to arms companies but will be much more careful about getting involved in wars it cannot win. In my opinion, the coup d’etat only becomes a real possibility if the power of the MICIC is threatened. That is what JFK did and that is why I believe he was removed in the way that he was. Nor do I see the American public as apathetic. Recent polls show 47% of Americans “strongly disapproving” of George Bush. The problem is, what are Americans going to do about it? The answer is definitely not about electing another politician willing to follow the orders of the MICIC. I think that America needs another “Watergate”. This would force Americans to think deeply about the way their political system functions. We have a Watergate developing in the UK at the moment. See: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6382 I am hopeful that this scandal with eventually expose the corrupt relationship between politicians and corporations (Iraq, PFI, etc.) It is already raising questions about the UK’s corrupt political system. Other than revolution, I cannot see any way that countries like the US and the UK can solve the problems of the corporate state. A high-profile political scandal seems to be the best way forward.

It was the Sunday Times that first broke the Des Smith story. They published more details of their covert taping yesterday. It raises the question why this new material did not appear in the original article that led to the resignation of Des Smith. Is it because that this provides more evidence that Blair was linked closely to Smith and that it is not in the interests of Murdoch to bring the prime minister down. The story has grown so big that Murdoch can no longer protect Blair. Murdoch has probably decided that Blair can be abandoned and replaced by Brown (he has already made the necessary policy commitments to Murdoch). Murdoch is a republican who has always been opposed to our absurd hereditary system and is no lover of the House of Lords. In yesterday’s article it is claimed that Smith told the undercover reporter that it would be necessary to introduce this willing investor in the city academies to David Miliband. Smith claimed that this was important as “Miliband is going to be the next leader after Blair.” This is an interesting statement. Some shrewd political commentators with good inside contacts have been saying for some time that Miliband is Blair preferred successor. The problem for Blair is that Miliband has no real support from within the party. On the tape Smith explained the tariff system, in which a benefactor who gave to “one or two” academies might receive an OBE or a knighthood while a donor who funded five of them would be “a certainty” for a peerage. So far over eight sponsors of the 27 academies have received knighthoods, OBE’s or CBEs whereas several have had their peerages blocked by the Lords Appointments Commission. Others like Sir Peter Vardy have been allowed to force schools in Doncaster and Middlesbrough to teach creationism. I wonder if a businessman offered enough cash he would have been allowed to introduce “black magic” into the curriculum? All this is on tape and so as it stands Smith is certain to be convicted under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. However, Blair is in trouble. New plea bargaining rules allows the authorities to offer leniency if a person agrees to provide evidence against others. As I said at the beginning of this thread, this is Blair’s Watergate. Des Smith is Nixon’s John Dean. How far up will Smith be willing to go? Sir Cyril Taylor, Lord Levy, David Miliband or Blair himself. This was the original story that appeared in the Sunday Times on January 15, 2006 Revealed: cash for honours scandal By the Insight team PRIVATE donors to Tony Blair’s controversial city academies can obtain honours and peerages by sponsoring the schools, a senior adviser to the programme has revealed. Des Smith, a council member of the trust that helps recruit sponsors for academies, disclosed that if a donor gave sufficient money, he could be nominated for an OBE, CBE or even a knighthood. He described what appeared to be a tariff system, in which a benefactor who gave to “one or two” academies might receive such an honour while a donor who gave to five would be “a certainty” for a peerage. Smith’s comments came during an undercover investigation by The Sunday Times. Suspicions of a link between honours and donations to academies — Blair’s scheme for new privately backed schools — have existed since the ambitious programme of establishing up to 200 academies began in 2001. Six of the biggest academy sponsors have already been honoured after pledging their money. Smith is an adviser to Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT), and says he has been a regular visitor to Downing Street. Smith is a council member of the SSAT, and Taylor personally recommended him as a potential “project director” to an undercover reporter who approached the trust posing as a would-be donor. On Friday, Smith told a reporter posing as a donor’s PR assistant that “the prime minister’s office would recommend someone like (the donor) for an OBE, a CBE or a knighthood”. “Really?” replied the reporter. “Just for getting involved with the academies?” “Just for, yes, they call them ‘services to education’,” replied Smith. He went on: “I would say to Cyril’s office that we’ve now got to start writing to the prime minister’s office.” Smith was even more confident about the prospect of securing an honour if the donor was willing to give as much as £10m. “You could go to the House of Lords and get a lord . . . become a lord,” he said. “So, if you invested in five city academies over, say, a 10-year period, it would be . . .” said the reporter. “A certainty,” said Smith. Yesterday David Willetts, the shadow education secretary, said the honours system should not be used to buy support for a policy in this way: “There is a fine line here between recognising public-spirited people who wish to support education and blatantly rewarding people for propping up one of the prime minister’s pet projects.” Taylor yesterday called Smith’s claims “outrageous.” He said: “In no way is giving money to the academy linked to the award of an honour.” He admitted recommending people for honours in the past but not because they had given money to an academy: “I have never said to any prospective or existing sponsor that if they sponsor an academy, that I would recommend them for an honour.” Smith himself backtracked when confronted by The Sunday Times. “It is not possible (to acquire an honour by a donation),” he said.

I have never been convinced by Lifton’s body altering theory but this thread raises some interesting questions. What do you make of the comments by Dr. Cyril Wecht. "Lifton gets away with crap, and no one challenges him. I could assemble a whole team of the best surgeons in the country and still not be able to accomplish in a day what Lifton says was done in a few hours. I have never bought his stuff. It can't be done." What do you make of the John Liggett story that appeared in Nigel Turner's The Smoking Guns (2003)? http://home.comcast.net/~dperry1943/liggett.html

I was very impressed with your performance against Everton. You seem to be back on track. I am really looking forward to today’s game against Manchester United. It should be an open game with Spurs having every chance of winning the midfield battle. In the past, because of my allegiance to West Ham, I have never been a supporter of Spurs. However, I really admire the job done by Jol and will be cheering them on today. I suspect that the spine of the team (Robinson, King, Carrick and Defoe) will eventually become the spine of England.

A good use of multiple-choice questions. It might be worth posting this in "History Resources" as in the UK the Cold War is taught as part of history.

Interesting article by Anwaar Hussain: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m22564&l=i&size=1&hd=0 About the possibilities of a military coup in the United States, historian Andrew Jonas said this; "Coup d’etat in the United States would be too fantastic to contemplate, not only because few would actually entertain the idea, but also because the bulk of the people are strongly attached to the prevailing political system and would rise in defense of a political leader even though they might not like him. The environment most hospitable to coups d’etat is one in which political apathy prevails as the dominant style." The question to ask is whether 'political apathy’ now 'prevails as the dominant style’ in the United States of today or not? With the unending 'war on terror’ resulting in a heavy tampering of the American Constitution by the current US Administration, and the consequent granting of virtually limitless powers to the President of United States for the duration of the unending war, a real 'Constitutional Conundrum' has been created. Ironically, this self-granting of limitless powers in turn has now manifested itself in an inverse power vacuum being created at the decision making level that is now becoming more and more visible with each passing day. Despite the fact that American nation seems to understand more than any other nation that the armed forces exist to support and defend government, not to be the government, yet faced with an intractable national problem on the one hand, and having an efficient and capable military on the other, it is all too enticing to start viewing the military as a gainful solution or as the 'ultimate saviors’ a la certain banana republics where the military does indeed call the shots. The seeds of the outrage are all there. The war-ravaged economy is in the dumps, American casualties in Iraq are mounting with Iraq itself now in the throes of a civil war, corruption in high places is rampant, the environment is in trouble, the delicate subject of 'immigration’ has been given a needless prod resulting in massive protests and political scandals are exploding on almost daily basis in Washington. In addition to all this, despite a national and international uproar, the current American leadership seems to be inching inexorably towards yet another war--this time with Iran. Americans becoming frustrated with democracy and disheartened with the apparent inability of their elected government to negoatiate the nation’s confounding impasses, thus, is a natural response. Unable to effect a change themselves, they may now be looking for someone or something that could produce workable solutions. Despite its misuse by the civilian leadership, the one institution of government in which the Americans continue to retain faith is their military. Ever since Washington’s warnings about the dangers of large military establishments in his farewell address, Americans have generally regarded their armed forces with a careful mix of awe and respect. For over two centuries that admiration was rewarded, and most Americans have come to consider the very idea of a military coup outrageous. To be sure, there always were eccentric conspiracy theorists that saw the Pentagon’s hand in the assassination of President Kennedy, President Nixon’s downfall, and similar events yet not very many Americans would think that a military coup d’etat in America of today is a tangible possibility. That fact may be slowly, but surely, changing. According to a very recent Guardian report, for example, the US government is increasingly faced with a intensifying split between its civilian and military leadership over the war on Iraq after a fourth retired general called for the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to stand down. This latest was retired Major General Charles Swannack, who led the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq. The other three were Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, the former director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Major General Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi troops until 2004 and retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, the former head of US Central Command. The unparalleled ferocity of the attacks and repeated calls for serving officers to go public with their dissent was starting to cause concern among military analysts. "If this opens up so we have more and more officers speaking up and blaming Rumsfeld and blaming senior civilians, then it is possibly heading towards a fairly dangerous civilian-military crisis," opined Andrew Bacevich, a military historian at Boston University. Richard Gabriel fittingly observed in his book 'To Serve with Honor’ that, "When one discusses dissent, loyalty, and the limits of military obligations, the central problem is that the military represents a threat to civil order not because it will usurp authority, but because it does not speak out on critical policy decisions. The soldier fails to live up to his oath to serve the country if he does not speak out when he sees his civilian or military superiors executing policies he feels to be wrong." While Gabriel was right when he described military leadership’s responsibilities vis-à-vis the civilian leadership, he may have been off the mark when he dismissed the military’s potential to threaten civil order. Efforts to carve a role for the military in America’s civilian affairs can be traced to as far back as the Carter administration. According to two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Knut Royce in a July 1983 series in the San Francisco Examiner, a presidential directive had been drafted by a few Carter administration personnel in 1979 "to allow the military to take control of the government for 90 days in the event of an emergency." A requirement on page one of the directive said, "Keeping the government functioning after a nuclear war is a secret, costly project that detractors claim jeopardizes US traditions and saves a privileged few." There was a heated debate, Royce noted, within the Carter administration as to just what constituted an "emergency." Then again during the Iran-Contra affair it came to light that a few high officials of the US government were planning a possible military/civilian coup. Miami Herald on July 5, 1987 ran the story. The article, by Alfonzo Chardy, revealed Oliver North's involvement in plans for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to take over federal, state and local functions during an ill-defined national emergency. With the unending 'war on terror’ continuing endlessly, the incessant chant of 'enemies all around’ and the inevitable militarization of the American society, the armed forces have now penetrated many vital aspects of American society. There now is an entire generation of young Americans who have grown up comfortable with the sight of military personnel strutting about their streets and on their campuses. Military uniforms now draw no stares. Furthermore, with the ever increasing importance attached to agencies like Homeland Security and FEMA, the military is now ideally positioned in thousands of communities to support the supposed coup. Given these treacherous times, there are increasing indications that Americans' traditional and strong resistance to any military interference into civilian affairs may be waning. The time may not be very far when they start re-thinking the appeal and need of that resistance. Indeed, many may already be comparing the military’s principled competence with the shenanigans and uselessness of their elected officials, and finding the former more capable. American public’s unease too is now increasing in a direct proportion to the top military brass’s voicing of its opinion. The terms 'impeachment’, 'censuring’, 'removal from power’ etc. have now become a common lexicon not just in the fringe media. Never before has the threat of disorder occasioned by an increasingly isolated Chief Executive so precipitated with each passing day. Needless to say that the inept civilian leadership, on all sides of the American political spectrum, direly necessitates a strong headship in these troubled times. With the current US administration getting the lowest ever job approval ratings from American public; the country now suffers from a deep pessimism about politicians and government after years of false promises and outright lies. Ruling politicians and their proposals seem rotten and repetitive. With surfacing of reports of vote rigging in the last elections, the American voters now seem to have also given up hope of finding answers through the ballot. Even a cursory glance at the alternative media shows that an increasing number of Americans have come to view the chief function of their government as inventing a security threat and then turning the job over to the military. If that be the case, some may argue, why not remove the corrupt middlemen and entrust the task directly to the military. The "environment of apathy" Janos characterized as a forerunner to a coup seems to have arrived in America. America, ladies and gentlemen, has entered a dangerous phase.

Members might find this article by Paul Kangas, published in The Realist in 1990, interesting. Kangas was working on a book about CIA covert activities when on 8th February, 1999, he was found dead in the bathroom of the offices of Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune. He had been shot in the head. Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: "Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas' past?" A newly discovered FBI document reveals that George Bush was directly involved in the 1963 murder of President John Kennedy. The document places Bush working with the now-famous CIA agent, Felix Rodriguez, recruiting right-wing Cuban exiles for the invasion of Cuba. It was Bush's CIA job to organize the Cuban community in Miami for the invasion. The Cubans were trained as marksmen by the CIA. Bush at that time lived in Texas. Hopping from Houston to Miami weekly, Bush spent 1960 and '61 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion. That is how he met Felix Rodriguez. You may remember Rodriguez as the Iran-contra CIA agent who received the first phone call telling the world the CIA plane flown by Gene Hasenfus had crashed in Nicaragua. As soon as Rodriguez heard that the plane crashed, he called his long-time CIA supervisor, George Bush. Bush denied being in the contra loop, but investigators recently obtained copies of Oliver North's diary, which documents Bush's role as a CIA supervisor of the contra supply network. In 1988 Bush told Congress he knew nothing about the illegal supply flights until 1987, yet North's diary shows Bush at the first planning meeting Aug. 6, 1985. Bush's "official" log placed him somewhere else. Such double sets of logs are intended to hide Bush's real role in the CIA; to provide him with "plausible deniability." The problem is, it fell apart because too many people, like North and Rodriguez, have kept records that show Bush's CIA role back to the 1961 invasion of Cuba. (Source: The Washington Post, 7/10/90). That is exactly how evidence was uncovered placing George Bush working with Felix Rodriguez when JFK was killed. A memo from FBI head J. Edgar Hoover was found, stating that, "Mr. George Bush of the CIA had been briefed on November 23rd, 1963 about the reaction of anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami to the assassination of President Kennedy. (Source: The Nation, 8/13/88). On the day of the assassination Bush was in Texas, but he denies knowing exactly where he was. Since he had been the supervisor for the secret Cuban teams, headed by former Cuban police commander Felix Rodriguez, since 1960, it is likely Bush was also in Dallas in 1963. Several of the Cubans he was supervising as dirty-tricks teams for Nixon, were photographed in the Zagruder film. In 1959 Rodriguez was a top cop in the Cuban government under Batista. When Batista was overthrown and fled to Miami, Rodriguez went with him, along with Frank Sturgis and Rafael Quintero. Officially, Rodriguez didn't join the CIA until 1967, after the CIA invasion of Cuba, in which he participated, and the assassination of JFK. But records recently uncovered show he actually joined the CIA in 1961 for the invasion of Cuba when he was recruited by George Bush. That is how Rodriguez claims he became a "close personal friend of Bush." Then "officially" Rodriguez claims he quit the CIA in 1976, just after he was sent to prison for his role in the Watergate burglary. However, according to Rolling Stone reporters Kohn & Monks (11/3/88), Rodriguez still goes to CIA headquarters monthly to receive assignments and have his blue 1987 bulletproof Cadillac serviced. Rodriguez was asked by a Rolling Stone reporter where he was the day JFK was shot, and claims he can't remember. George Bush claims he never worked for the CIA until he was appointed director by former Warren Commission director and then President Jerry Ford, in 1976. Logic suggests that is highly unlikely. Of course, Bush has a company duty to deny being in the CIA. The CIA is a secret organization. No one ever admits to being a member. The truth is that Bush has been a top CIA official since before the 1961 invasion of Cuba, working with Felix Rodriguez. Bush may deny his actual role in the CIA in 1959, but there are records in the files of Rodriguez and others involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that expose Bush's role. The corporations would not put somebody in charge of all the state secrets held by the CIA unless he was experienced and well trained in the CIA. (Source: Project Censored Report, Feb 1989, Dr Carl Jensen, Sonoma State College). Recently I interviewed former CIA liaison officer L. Fletcher Prouty. He is a consultant for the excellent new movie on how the CIA killed JFK, being made by Oliver Stone. He told me that one of the projects he did for the CIA was in 1961 to deliver US Navy ships from a Navy ship yard to the CIA agents in Guatemala planning the invasion of Cuba. He said he delivered three ships to a CIA agent named George Bush, who had the 3 ships painted to look like they were civilian ships. That CIA agent then named the 3 ships after: his wife, his home town and his oil company. He named the ships: Barbara, Houston & Zapata. Any book on the history of the Bay of Pigs will prove the names of those 3 ships. Again, this is more finger prints of George Bush's involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Yet Bush denies his role in this great adventure. Why would Bush be so shy about his role in this war? What is the secret? Is there something dirty about this war that Bush & Nixon don't want the public to know about? Answer: Yes there is. The same people involved in the Bay of Pigs were the people involved in the Watergate burglary. Why was the Watergate burgalarized [sic]? The CIA was trying to plug up a possible news leak. They were trying to stop the Democrats from publishing the photos of Hunt & Sturgis under arrest for the murder of JFK (May 7, 1977, SF Chronicle.) Presently, there is a law suit attempting to force the government to release the records about the Bay of Pigs invasion. Why are those documents still secret? Why are they locked in the National Archives along with all the photos from [the] Dallas assassination of JFK? Why are the 4000 hours of Watergate tapes in which Nixon is babbling about the mysterious connections between the Bay of Pigs, Dallas and Watergate also being sealed in the National Archives? Is it because all three incidents are connected? Yes. We must demand the secret files on these 3 cases be released now. For a copy of the petition to release the files, please write to: Paul Kangas, private investigator, POB 422644, SF, CA 94142. Thanks to Oliver Stone's blockbuster new movie on JFK there is now sufficient national movement to reopen all these cases. The White House fears Stone's new movie so much that they have hired more CIA journalists to slander the movie & Stone. Don't fall for it. Every serious investigator now agrees that Oswald did not shoot JFK. That James Earl Ray did not shoot Dr. Martin Luther King and that Sirhan Sirhan did not shoot Robert Kennedy. These cases must be reopened so that Sirhan and Ray can be set free. The only bar that keeps Sirhan in prison is the tremendous anti-arab racism in Americans: in both blacks & whites. According to a biography of Richard Nixon, his close personal and political ties with the Bush family go back to 1941 when Nixon claims he read an ad in an L A. newspaper, placed by a wealthy group of businessmen, led by Prescot Bush, the father of George Bush. They wanted a young, malleable candidate to run for Congress. Nixon applied for the position and won the job. Nixon became a mouthpiece for the Bush group. (Source: Freedom Magazine, 1986, L.F. Prouty). In fact, Prescot Bush is credited with creating the winning ticket of Eisenhower-Nixon in 1952.(Source: George Bush, F. Green, Hipocrene, 1988). Newly discovered FBI documents prove that Jack Ruby has been an employee of Richard Nixon since 1947. That that [sic] FBI document Ruby is listed as working as a spy & hit man for Nixon. On Nov. 22, 63 Ruby was seen by a women who knew him well, Julian Ann Mercer, approximately an hour before the arrival of JFK's motorcade, unloading a man carrying a rifle in a case at the Grassy Knoll from his car. Ruby later was seen on national TV killing a witness who could link Nixon & Bush to the killing of JFK: Oswald. On the Trail of the Assassins, Garrison, p xiii. Richard Nixon was Vice President from 1952 until 1960. In fact, Nixon was given credit for planning Operation 40, the secret 1961 invasion of Cuba, during his 1959 campaign for President After Batista was kicked out by the starving people of Cuba, and Fidel Castro came to power, Castro began telling American corporations they would have to pay Cuban employees decent wages. Even worse, Pepsi Cola was told it would now have to pay world market prices for Cuban sugar. Pepsi, Ford Motor Co., Standard Oil and the Mafia drug dealers decided Fidel had to be removed since his policies of requiring corporations to pay market wages was hurting their profits. So the corporations asked then Vice-President Nixon to remove Fidel. Nixon promised he would, just as soon as he'd won the 1960 elections against some underdog, an unknown Democrat named John Kennedy. It would be an easy victory for Nixon. The polls had Nixon winning by a landslide. Besides, Kennedy was a Catholic, and Americans would no more elect a Catholic President than they would elect a woman, a black or a Jew. This was 1959. Nixon told Pepsi, Standard Oil and other corporations who lost property given back to the farmers of Cuba, that if they would help him win, he would authorize an invasion to remove Castro. To further impress contributors to his campaign, then Vice-President Nixon asked the CIA to create Operation 40, a secret plan to invade Cuba, just as soon as he won. The CIA put Texas millionaire and CIA agent George Bush in charge of recruiting Cuban exiles into the CIA's invasion army. Bush was working with another Texas oilman, Jack Crichton, to help him with the invasion. A fellow Texan, Air Force General Charles Cabel, was asked to coordinate the air cover for the invasion. Most of the CIA leadership around the invasion of Cuba seems to have been people from Texas. A whole Texan branch of the CIA is based in the oil business. If we trace Bush's background in the Texas oil business we discover his two partners in the oil-barge leasing business: Texan Robert Mosbacher and Texan James Baker. Mosbacher is now Secretary of Commerce and Baker is Secretary of State, the same job Dulles held when JFK was killed. (Source: Common Cause magazine, 3-4/90). On the Watergate tapes, June 23, 1972, referred to in the media as the "smoking gun" conversation, Nixon and his Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, discussed how to stop the FBI investigation into the CIA Watergate burglary. They were worried that the investigation would expose their conection to "the Bay of Pigs thing." Haldeman, in his book The Ends of Power, reveals that Nixon always used code words when talking about the 1963 murder of JFK. Haldeman said Nixon would always refer to the assassination as "the Bay of Pigs." On that transcript we find Nixon discussing the role of George Bush's partner, Robert Mosbacher, as one of the Texas fundraisers for Nixon. On the tapes Nixon keeps refering to the "Cubans" and the "Texans." The "Texans" were Bush, Mosbacher and Baker. This is another direct link between Bush and evidence linking Nixon and Bush to the Kennedy assassination. In the same discussion Nixon links "the Cubans," "the Texans," "Helms," "Hunt," "Bernard Barker," Robert "Mosbacher" and "the Bay of Pigs." Over and over on the Watergate tapes, these names come up around the discussion of the photos from Dallas that Nixon was trying to obtain when he ordered the CIA to burglarize the Watergate. (Source: Three Men and a Barge", Teresa Riordan, Common Cause magazine, March/April 1990, and San Francisco Chronicle, May 7,1977, interview with Frank Sturgis in which he stated that "the reason we burglarized the Watergate was because Nixon was interested in stopping news leaking related to the photos of our role in the assassination of President John Kennedy.") After Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, he knew he had to centralize all power into the White House to keep his faction in power, not only to hold power, but to prevent the media from digging into how he secretly shot his way into the White House, just like Hitler shot his way into control of Germany. The first thing Nixon did was to demand signed resignations of his entire government. "Eliminate everyone," he told John Ehrlichman about reappointment, "except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause." (Source: Pledging Allegiance, Sidney Blumenthal.) The reason why Bush will 'do anything" is because his hands have as much of Kennedy's blood on them as do Nixon's, Hunt's, Sturgis's, Felix Rodriguez's and Gerald Ford's. This White House gang fears that if the public ever realizes how they shot their way into power it could set off a spark that would destroy their fragile fraud and land them in jail. Other famous Watergate members of the CIA invasion that Bush recruited were Frank Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, Bernard Barker and Rafael Quintero. Quintero has said publicly that if he ever told what he knew about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, "It would be the biggest scandal ever to rock the nation." Meanwhile, in 1960, Prescot Bush was running Nixon's campaign. Nixon was sent to South Vietnam to assure the French-connection government there that if France pulled out, the U.S. would step in to protect the drug trade from the GoIden Triangle. (Source: Frontline, 1988, "Guns. Drugs and the CIA"; Alexander Cockburn; "Cocaine, the CIA and Air America," S.F. Examiner, Feb. 2, '91; The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Alfred McCoy, 1972.) In 1959, Vice President Nixon was flying all over the world, acting just like presidential material. It was an easy race for Nixon. Congressman Jerry Ford was doing a great job fundraising for Nixon, as was George Bush. The rich loved Nixon. The media picked up every bone Nixon tossed out to them. The biggest problem was that Nixon was afraid to speak openly of his plan to invade Cuba. The plan was a secret. No sense in alerting Cuba to the coming invasion. But Kennedy was taking a harder line on Cuba than Nixon, because Kennedy was not aware of the corporate/CIA planned invasion. Nixon lost the 1960 race by the smallest margin in history. At first Bush, Nixon, Cabel and Hunt decided to just go ahead with the invasion, without informing President Kennedy. Then, at the last second, at 4 a.m., just two hours before the invasion was set to go, General Cabel called JFK and asked for permission to provide U.S. air cover for the CIA invasion. Kennedy said no. The CIA was furious with JFK but decided to go ahead with their private invasion anyway. Due to poor intelligence, the CIA landed at the worst possible beach. A swamp. The invasion failed. The CIA lost 15 of its best men, killed, with another 1100 in Cuban prisons. It was the worst single blow the CIA ever suffered. (Source: F. Howard Hunt, Give Us This Day.) Bush, Nixon and Hunt blamed Cabel for asking Kennedy and blamed Kennedy for saying no. They were livid with anger. Nixon's corporate sponsors ordered JFK to make any deal necessary to recover the 1100 CIA agents imprisoned in Cuba. JFK did. Once the CIA had its well-trained Cubans back, they decided to continue the invasion of Cuba just as soon as they could get rid of that S.O.B. Kennedy. The 1964 election was fast approaching. Nixon was running against Kennedy again. Bush, Ford and Nixon knew that they had to get rid of JFK now, or else the Kennedy clan, with Robert and Ted in the wings, could control the White House until 1984. They decided not to wait until '84 to get back in the White House. The Cuban teams of "shooters" began following Kennedy from city to city looking for a window of opportunity to shoot from. They came close in Chicago, but couldn't get the cooperation of Mayor Daley. But in Dallas they had an ace. The mayor was the brother of General Cabel, whom the CIA blamed for the failure of the invasion. The general prevailed on his brother, Earl, and the motorcade was changed to pass the grassy knoll at 7 m.p.h. Hunt and Sturgis shot JFK from the grassy knoll. They were arrested, photographed and seen by 15 witnesses. But the media turned a blind eye to the photos, and for 25 years the world has been searching for the truth. On the day JFK was murdered, Nixon, Hunt and some of the Watergate crew were photographed in Dallas, as were a group of Cubans, one holding an umbrella up, like a signal, next to the President's limo just as Kennedy was shot. The Cubans can be seen holding up the signal umbrella in the Zapruder film and dozens of stills taken during the assassination. After the murder they can be seen calmly walking away. Nixon denied he was in Dallas that day, but new photos and stories prove he was there. Nixon claimed to the FBI he couldn't remember where he was when JFK was killed. (Source: FBI memo, Feb. 23, 1964, published in Coup d'etat in America, Weberman & Canfield). Bush, too, claims he can't remember where he was. Jack Anderson did a TV special in 1988 proving beyond any shadow of doubt that two of the tramps arrested in Dallas behind the grassy knoll were Hunt and Sturgis. After the murder, former Vice President Nixon asked President Lyndon Johnson to appoint Nixon's friend, former FBI agent Jerry Ford, to run the Warren Commission. Nixon also asked LBJ to appoint Nixon's long-time supporter, Judge Earl Warren, to head the Commission. LBJ agreed. Ford interviewed all the witnesses and decided which ones would be heard and which ones eliminated. It is no coincidence that Nixon selected Ford as his Vice President after Spiro Agnew was ousted. When Nixon himself got busted in the Watergate scandal, Earl Warren offered to set up another special commission if it would help get him out of trouble again. Ford, of course, pardoned Nixon for the Watergate burglary but Nixon is still not out of the woods. There are 4000 hours of Watergate tape. On the June 23, 1972, discussions with John Ehrlichman and Haldeman there is clear evidence that Nixon is openly "confessing" to hiring Hunt to kill JFK. That is why the Watergate "investigation" went into secret session after Congress heard some of the tapes. This is why only 12 hours of 4000 hours have been released to the public. Did Congress realize that Nixon and Bush had openly discussed killing JFK for stopping the air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba? Remember, Nixon taped virtually every discussion he had with anyone in his inner circle, including Bush, in order to blackmail people later. There is a photo of Bush reporting to Nixon in the White House in 1968. It will be interesting to see what they were talking about on that day, when the full 4000 hours are finally released. The key to unlocking the secrets behind the 1963 murder of JFK is hidden in the 3988 hours of unreleased White House tapes. Bush was in Dallas the day Reagan was shot. (Source: George Bush, F. Green, 1988.) That must have given Bush a flashback to November 22,1963.

I have no objection to teams playing with largely foreign-born players. My point is that teams should include at least one UK born player. Of course there are restrictions on the number of overseas players in other sports. For example, county cricket teams. This was done to protect the emergence of young British players. According to your logic I suppose the County Cricket Board are full of racists as well.