New Book: JFK and the Unspeakable

[Pat Speer]

Bill, you are correct. I reviewed the segment on demand, and Stone was holding up the book so one could easily see the title. I added where he did this below in parenthesis. I apologize.

MAHER: You sent it to me. I read it.

STONE: And I want you to. (holds book so title can be seen) James Douglas is a Catholic, who wrote it beautifully well. This is very factual about the reasons Kennedy was murdered. It says here"Why he died, and why it matters" . (Puts book down) 'Cause Kennedy did have that moment in the sun...

Kathy

Stone does read the title of the book--just not the full title. The book is called "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters." Stone reads aloud the second part--which is the hook and selling point. No one would buy a book called JFK and the Unspeakable. The "Why" is the hook.

[John Bevilaqua]

Jim Douglas is fairly well known for his work on the Martin Luther King assassination. He was the only journalist to cover the civil trial brought by the Kings in 1999.

He spoke this year at COPA's conference in Memphis, http://www.politicalassassinations.com/Memphis.html

I just got a copy of the dvd of the conference. I will be uploading extracts from talks by Jim Douglas, Judge Joe Brown, John Judge and others to youtube fairly soon.

You will be able to see them at www.youtube.com/user/COPAorg

I recently uploaded video of Philip Van Praag discussing his new evidence on the RFK case on CBS. The video has been viewed more than 2,700 times in a few short days.

John

After William Pepper was a victim of "ambush journalism" by a major network TV program, I began to reconsider some of my thoughts about the validity of Pepper's

claims regarding his alternative suspect in the MLK case. Pepper was shocked to learn that his suspect was still alive when he walked into the taping session on cue, and that he had a verifiable and documented alibi to account for his whereabouts when the shots were fired. He was at work, over a thousand miles away. Pepper's only comment after he was told that this guy planned to bring a lawsuit against him was: "If I knew he was still alive, I would never have accused him of involvement in the MLK murder." Pretty sad, really. If Pepper had done his homework and brought more focus on Robert Emmett Johnson and "Raoul" from Montreal as described in "The Fish Is Red" by Bill Turner, he would have advanced the solution and the conclusion of both the JFK and the MLK murders. I told Dick Russell as much after Pepper's book on the MLK topic was published. Pepper might have been very sincere, but he certainly was an opportunist as well and he might have done more harm than good in the MLK case. Russell was originally quite optimistic about Pepper's "breakthroughs" but must have been ultimately disappointed about the final upshot in his convoluted saga which probably dashed remaining hopes for a final solution. Perhaps that is why most researchers focus on "suspicions" and not "suspects". Much safer that way.

And that favorite old saw about all "real conspirators" being murdered after the fact is just another cop-out which I never agreed with at all. I mean would you want to take the "hit assignment" on either Frank Sturgis or Robert E. Johnson after all? You gotta be nuts to take on that assignment. Go back to armchair quarterbacking and playing your video games. Nobody would mess with either Sturgis or Johnson. Nobody.

[William Kelly]

Jim Douglas on Black Op Radio with Len Osanic

http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2009.html

Show #406

Original airdate: Jan 8th, 2009

Part 1 Guest: Jim DiEugenio

Topics: Assassination Research

Part 2 Guest - Jim Douglass

Jim's book JFK and the Unspeakable is now the #1 Kennedy book on Amazon

American intelligence was instrumental in the JFK Assassination

To say any one force (CIA, Mafia, Castro etc) was responsible is irresponsible

Douglass mentions Vincent Salandria as having the case solved many years ago

Salandria's overview of the case makes the most sense

The Joint Chiefs wanted to win the Cold War

In fear of nuclear holocaust, Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War

Thomas Arthur Vallee, The Chicago Plot and Oswald

Jim's message: Why was JFK assassinated?

Kennedy reached out to his enemy, Khruschev

Because of this we still exist. He prevented nuclear war

Kennedy was all but alone in Washington when he turned to peace

Jim thinks Lyndon Johnson had foreknowledge but didn't participate personally

After the assassinations of JFK, MLK & RFK, he saw his own end and left office

The hope of Obama in the context of Kennedy's American University speech

The task is to learn from the past to save the future

This will be difficult with all the disinformation getting better publicity

Len Osanic.: Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Black Op Radio. Today we are joined by Jim Douglas, noted author and researcher and well known in the community.

Jim Douglas: Hello, Len.

Len O: It’s a pleasure to speak with you again. From what I understand your book “JFK & the Unspeakable” is number one at Amazon.com.

JD: According to my editor and publisher it is the number one best selling “Kennedy” book at Amazon.com.

Len O. Yea, that’s what I meant. There are a lot of books out there, and for the lack of a better word, a lot of disinformation books that go nowhere, blaming Castro, there’s a new one blaming the mafia. If I could think of another word, but it’s pathetic, with all that is known, for anyone who has read your good work. Let’s sum up for people not familiar with your book, that I can’t recommend it highly enough. We had six interviews with you last fall – one on each chapter and a statement that I thought how important the book is, and dedicated an hour or so to each chapter, and it’s good that this has happened. Do you have an opinion how anyone could in this day and age could believe that Oswald a lone assassin, and write a book about that, or do a documentary?

JD: I believe it has government support and instigation actually. It’s beyond any competent authorship or any real work. We’ve known, in terms of available information for decades that the United States government was involved in killing the President. And the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, or for that matter Castro or the mob, that is irresponsible. That’s not to say they weren’t involved, there was a larger plot and they were involved, but to say that either Lee Harvey Oswald or the mob, or that Fidel Castro, was the instigator, not Castro, who was not involved, but to say the first two – Oswald or the mob, that they were the primary actors in the Kennedy assassination, is totally irresponsible.

LO: That’s a good word for it. Have you been traveling promoting the book?

JD: Yes, quite a bit. I’ve met people in Dallas, Northern California, New Mexico, Portland, Wisconsin, of course around here, Alabama, St. Louis, quite a few places, Denver, Colorado.

LO: Has anything come out regarding your book that you would call new information? Since you’ve written it and have been networking with researchers, is there anything new of note worth bringing up?

JD: I think the more one gets into the Kennedy assassination, the more the dots get connected. I don’t think there’s been any new information, really. I think the Assassinations Records Review Board and in particular members of the staff, made significant steps in the 1990s that will become more available as the people who worked on it bring out their own studies. But no, there hasn’t been any new significant information that I’m aware of.

LO: I just thought I would bring that up, as a researcher could have told you of some new tidbits of information.

JD: The Kennedy story is important - why he was assassinated, that’s why I wrote the book. There’s a lot of information about the assassination in the book, but the reason I included that was to connect the dots and to underline His story – John F. Kennedy’s story.

And I think we are kind of missing the point in the research community if we continue to feel the need for new information. We don’t need it. We’ve go enough information. What we need is to connect the dots – see the coherence of that information, and to show the irrelevance of the disinformation, and that we’ve already referred to.

I think Vince Salandria had it down decades ago as did other researchers. I refer to him because he’s sort of a meta-physician on the assassination. He has an overview that I think was right from the day after the assassination when he anticipated Oswald being killed as well, and when that happened it confirmed the overall nature of the scapegoating of Oswald by intelligence sources. So we’ve known for a long time, and new information can strengthen what is already obvious. You don’t really need to strengthen it.

Vince Salandria, one of the foremost researchers, and one who has had an overview of the assassination for decades that makes a great deal of sense, and it is that Lee Harvey Oswald was simply being used by the Central Intelligence Agency and he was being scapegoated. This was a National Security state assassination. Oswald was very much, in terms of the overall apparatus, a minor figure, but in the overall story of the assassination he is significant, because if you follow his story you can’t understand it except by his intelligence connections and by his being manipulated and being brought into a place where he was the scapegoat but also the scapegoat for larger scapegoats – the Soviet Union and Cuba. And fortunately that part of the assassination did not work. Had it did work, we would have had a nuclear war. And that is the reason why Kennedy was assassinated, because stood against it. He didn’t want to win a nuclear war, he wanted to stop it. And that’s an all together different objective from his Joint Chiefs and the Central Intelligence Agency.

LO: I think your book illuminates there were other patsies in the wings, and the idea that if Lee didn’t show up for work that day, there were other people there.

JD: Yes, and of course the first intended scapegoat was Thomas Arthur Valle in relation to the plot in Chicago. And Valle escapes that, thanks to Oswald himself, as well as some whistleblowers in Chicago, especially Abraham Bolden within the Secret Service. But had the plot worked in Chicago, we probably would have never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald.

LO: By the way, have you, speaking of patsies, I came across a book that had some details of someone with the name, have you heard the name Donald Wayne House?

JD: I may have, but if so I have forgotten it. I am not familiar with the books you are talking about.

LO: Well in some ways you say there is no new information, but to a seasoned researcher…

JD: No, I’m not saying there is no new information. There could be a lot of new information. I’m saying in order to understand the assassination of John Kennedy, it’s not critically necessary. But new information is not necessary. I think we have enough information to know what is going on. And I think it is fine that we have new information, but we don’t need it to understand what happened or we are missing the point.

LO: As one of my friends say they are cognitively impaired…Even with Vincent Bugliousi. It is really unbelievable, if he wasn’t motivated by money, that he could actually believe this, that he could put this giant book together, and after a 20 years effort, be embarrassed by researchers who pick him apart.

JD: Yes, I don’t know Vincent Bugliosi’s motives; I think it’s a shame that he put so much time and effort in trying to do the absurd.

LO: His work ends up speaking for himself, when he badgers and belittles people who have taken on an interest in researching this. There isn’t total agreement, but 80% people agree with each other to a point, then somebody else mentions something, and I don’t know about that, but there’s 80% agreement - more than enough to say exactly what is going on - the President was removed.

JD: In regards to Kennedy, what I have found most encouraging from going around talking about why he was killed and why it matters, many people are inspired by that story. When I was engaged in the research, friends would suggest that was a totally dark story that I was getting into. In some ways that’s true, but in other ways it’s not true at all. Here’s a person who gave his life in terms of the risk he took to turn the world towards peace instead of war, and he got the consequences of that - he was killed for that reason. But that is a story of hope, if somebody is willing to take those risks, and as a result we have a world to live in instead of a nuclear wasteland - that is a story of hope and of change and of inspiration, if you understand it.

The reason I wrote that story wasn’t to empower the government, because if you say well, the government succeeded because intelligence agencies killed the President and he wasn’t able to carry out his vision. There’s truth in that, but the primary truth is that if Kennedy was willing to work with his enemies - he reached out to Khrushchev at the height of the worst crisis of that war, the Cuban Missile Crisis. And because of that we have a world today, and we might even have a president who might carry out Kennedy’s vision.

Kennedy overcame those powers himself in the sense he resisted the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA and went to his death in that resistance. But this is a story of hope, it is not about those powers winning, it’s a story of hope, about a president reaching the point to where he was taken out, but to the point where we still have a world in which we can continue to work towards peace.

That’s why I end the book with the statement extended by Jacque Kennedy, that John F. Kennedy is dead, and as she put it to the Soviets Union representatives at the funeral, “Peace is up to us,” and though it’s always been up to us, it’s up to us to bring about Kennedy’s vision of peace. And that Kennedy gave his life for that should be inspirational.

LO: It’s interesting to go behind the scenes and see more than just the assassination but to understand what was really going on. You highlight those pressures, and I think that makes your book stand out from other books that are just about the assassination, as you try to get a total understanding.

JD: The pressures that Kennedy was under were almost unimaginable. Those were pressures for war, not for peace, for war. And other than his brother and a few advisors like Sorensen, he was alone. The national security state, the ideology which he had himself bought into at one time - he was not any apostle of non-violence, he was a Cold Warrior, so he had to turn. That’s why I emphasize the term “turn,” and I originally had the subtitle for the book “a story of turning,” but that seemed too oblique for book sellers. And then I had a subsequent effort called the “assassination of a vision,” and that too was not something that could be picked up quickly, and it was sort of negative, because the vision didn’t die with him. But we ended up with “Why He Died & Why It Matters,” and it is a story of turning, Kennedy turned towards peace and was therefore assassinated.

LO: And then we got LBJ, who…..

JD: Who had a different vision and was hopelessly compromised from day one, and who saw that, if you were to go behind the “evidence” that he was being given by the CIA, you see the CIA itself was the source of the mechanics of the assassination. I’m not saying they were the source of the order, they carried out the mechanics. And Johnson was unwilling to confront that, and he didn’t on the other hand, he didn’t want to accept the evidence on face value because that would have implicated the Soviet Union and Cuba, that Oswald, actually almost certainly an impersonator of Oswald, made at the embassies of Cuba and Soviet Union in Mexico City, and would end in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The CIA was presenting all that to Johnson on the weekend of the assassination, and Johnson was not a naive person. He saw immediately that this was CIA involvement.

Did Johnson have pre-knowledge of the assassination? I think he did. I don’t think he was a major player in carrying out the assassination. I think he was frightened to death by the whole thing. He went along with it, but I don’t think he was a major player in carrying it out. He had the foreknowledge of it, but he went with the lone assassin instead of the heavier direction that the CIA and the Joint Chiefs wanted.

LO: Of course later in his life he had a rare interview where he said he didn’t believe in the lone assassin and the quote he said was “we were running a Murder Inc in the Caribbean.”

JD: Yes, he was aware of all of that, and his own withdraw from the Presidency was a recognition; he was in deep waters all around him. Then when King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, Johnson was way over his head. And for him having been so profoundly complicent with the Vietnam War, he had to get out of there himself before it was too late.

LO: You could draw those conclusions as he dropped out. People have mentioned that he was four cars back and the bullets must have gone over his head maybe eighteen inches, he heard the shots and he saw how easy he could removed.

JD: I didn’t put the information from Madelyn Brown in my book because I tried to anchor everything as firmly as possible with corroboration and documents and such things, but I think that its very feasible hypothesis that Madelyn Brown’s information is correct and Johnson knew about it the night before.

LO: It’s possible, as some people in the research community are skeptical about it, fair enough.

JD: I think it’s wise to be skeptical about everything, and its best to seek out the best sources. There are all kinds of information that were probably true but were left out of JFK & the Unspeakable because it either didn’t have a solid enough source as far as corroboration, or it didn’t easily fit into the story. The book could have been 2,000 pages long, but that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was to write JFK’s story and to explain why he died, and not to write an exhaustive analysis of the assassination. That’s not what it is. The only reason the assassination itself is in there is because of the consequences of what he was doing. But everything that is in there, whether it is Kennedy’s story or the story of the assassination, it is backed up by as much confirmation as I could find.

LO: You mention we have a new President, and Kennedy represented hope, and you say how many people are hopeful that this new president can turn things around after the fraud of the last eight years.

JD: Yes. Well, it is a hope full moment, but only if we understand it in the context of Kennedy for example, and his story. It’s become possible for Obama do something hope full, say carry out the American University vision, only if there is a movement that’s pushing very, very hard to bring about that kind of realization. And if we are aware, and I’m talking more about more than just we in the research community – it must go Way Way beyond the research community, it must go into the movement that brought about Obama’s election victory. Unless we have an understanding of the Kennedy story, IT WILL BE REPEATED, and be repeated in the worst consequences of Obama being assassinated or being pushed by advisors into war or into decisions he will have to either resist at the risk of his life, or has to carry it out at the risk of everybody’s else’s life.

If we can understand Kennedy’s story, and raise the kind of support for bringing about Kennedy’s vision under Obama, that’s one possibility. But if we walk around with some kind of idea thinking Barrack Obama will save the world, that’s nonsense, that’s not going to happen. An understanding of our redemption of us from the powers of war, from oppression, manipulation, and lying, as the CIA has been doing and our propaganda forces have been doing for decades, if we are going to be liberated from those forces, it is up to us. And Obama can’t do it as President of the United States.

It has to be a movement, an international movement, especially a movement of consciousness of the past, an education as to what happened to John F. Kennedy, so it won’t be repeated. And I believe it WILL be repeated unless we understand and educate ourselves about the past. And we are way short with that right now with disinformation books getting far much more attention than we will get from this program. \

I don’t think it’s about getting new information on the Kennedy assassination, it’s telling the story of what we already know. That’s the task and it’s a task that’s very urgent at this moment in history…

Edited July 7, 2009 by William Kelly

[John Simkin]

JD: I think the more one gets into the Kennedy assassination, the more the dots get connected. I don’t think there’s been any new information, really. I think the Assassinations Records Review Board and in particular members of the staff, made significant steps in the 1990s that will become more available as the people who worked on it bring out their own studies. But no, there hasn’t been any new significant information that I’m aware of.

That is one of the problems with the book. He does not seem aware of the new information that has come out over the last few years.

[William Kelly]

JD: I think the more one gets into the Kennedy assassination, the more the dots get connected. I don’t think there’s been any new information, really. I think the Assassinations Records Review Board and in particular members of the staff, made significant steps in the 1990s that will become more available as the people who worked on it bring out their own studies. But no, there hasn’t been any new significant information that I’m aware of.

That is one of the problems with the book. He does not seem aware of the new information that has come out over the last few years.

I don't think Jim Douglas exchanges emails or even has a computer, so he's out of the new loop.

BK

[William Kelly]

Jim Douglas on Black Op Radio with Len Osanic

I think this is a really important interview. Although Len also talks with Jim Douglas on other archived shows, in which each chapter of his book JFK & the Unspeakable are discussed, this interview is short and sweet and Jim makes all the right points.

John Geraghty also mentioned that Len Osanic's interviews with James Douglas on Black Op Radio inspired to begin his new video project, so one good thing has already come out of this.

I also want to illustrate how important it is that these interviews are eventually transcribed so they can be read and referenced, otherwise they are shows.

BK

http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2009.html

Show #406

Original airdate: Jan 8th, 2009

Part 1 Guest: Jim DiEugenio

Topics: Assassination Research

Part 2 Guest - Jim Douglass

Jim's book JFK and the Unspeakable is now the #1 Kennedy book on Amazon

American intelligence was instrumental in the JFK Assassination

To say any one force (CIA, Mafia, Castro etc) was responsible is irresponsible

Douglass mentions Vincent Salandria as having the case solved many years ago

Salandria's overview of the case makes the most sense

The Joint Chiefs wanted to win the Cold War

In fear of nuclear holocaust, Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War

Thomas Arthur Vallee, The Chicago Plot and Oswald

Jim's message: Why was JFK assassinated?

Kennedy reached out to his enemy, Khruschev

Because of this we still exist. He prevented nuclear war

Kennedy was all but alone in Washington when he turned to peace

Jim thinks Lyndon Johnson had foreknowledge but didn't participate personally

After the assassinations of JFK, MLK & RFK, he saw his own end and left office

The hope of Obama in the context of Kennedy's American University speech

The task is to learn from the past to save the future

This will be difficult with all the disinformation getting better publicity

Len Osanic.: Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Black Op Radio. Today we are joined by Jim Douglas, noted author and researcher and well known in the community.

Jim Douglas: Hello, Len.

Len O: It’s a pleasure to speak with you again. From what I understand your book “JFK & the Unspeakable” is number one at Amazon.com.

JD: According to my editor and publisher it is the number one best selling “Kennedy” book at Amazon.com.

Len O. Yea, that’s what I meant. There are a lot of books out there, and for the lack of a better word, a lot of disinformation books that go nowhere, blaming Castro, there’s a new one blaming the mafia. If I could think of another word, but it’s pathetic, with all that is known, for anyone who has read your good work. Let’s sum up for people not familiar with your book, that I can’t recommend it highly enough. We had six interviews with you last fall – one on each chapter and a statement that I thought how important the book is, and dedicated an hour or so to each chapter, and it’s good that this has happened. Do you have an opinion how anyone could in this day and age could believe that Oswald a lone assassin, and write a book about that, or do a documentary?

JD: I believe it has government support and instigation actually. It’s beyond any competent authorship or any real work. We’ve known, in terms of available information for decades that the United States government was involved in killing the President. And the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, or for that matter Castro or the mob, that is irresponsible. That’s not to say they weren’t involved, there was a larger plot and they were involved, but to say that either Lee Harvey Oswald or the mob, or that Fidel Castro, was the instigator, not Castro, who was not involved, but to say the first two – Oswald or the mob, that they were the primary actors in the Kennedy assassination, is totally irresponsible.

LO: That’s a good word for it. Have you been traveling promoting the book?

JD: Yes, quite a bit. I’ve met people in Dallas, Northern California, New Mexico, Portland, Wisconsin, of course around here, Alabama, St. Louis, quite a few places, Denver, Colorado.

LO: Has anything come out regarding your book that you would call new information? Since you’ve written it and have been networking with researchers, is there anything new of note worth bringing up?

JD: I think the more one gets into the Kennedy assassination, the more the dots get connected. I don’t think there’s been any new information, really. I think the Assassinations Records Review Board and in particular members of the staff, made significant steps in the 1990s that will become more available as the people who worked on it bring out their own studies. But no, there hasn’t been any new significant information that I’m aware of.

LO: I just thought I would bring that up, as a researcher could have told you of some new tidbits of information.

JD: The Kennedy story is important - why he was assassinated, that’s why I wrote the book. There’s a lot of information about the assassination in the book, but the reason I included that was to connect the dots and to underline His story – John F. Kennedy’s story.

And I think we are kind of missing the point in the research community if we continue to feel the need for new information. We don’t need it. We’ve go enough information. What we need is to connect the dots – see the coherence of that information, and to show the irrelevance of the disinformation, and that we’ve already referred to.

I think Vince Salandria had it down decades ago as did other researchers. I refer to him because he’s sort of a meta-physician on the assassination. He has an overview that I think was right from the day after the assassination when he anticipated Oswald being killed as well, and when that happened it confirmed the overall nature of the scapegoating of Oswald by intelligence sources. So we’ve known for a long time, and new information can strengthen what is already obvious. You don’t really need to strengthen it.

Vince Salandria, one of the foremost researchers, and one who has had an overview of the assassination for decades that makes a great deal of sense, and it is that Lee Harvey Oswald was simply being used by the Central Intelligence Agency and he was being scapegoated. This was a National Security state assassination. Oswald was very much, in terms of the overall apparatus, a minor figure, but in the overall story of the assassination he is significant, because if you follow his story you can’t understand it except by his intelligence connections and by his being manipulated and being brought into a place where he was the scapegoat but also the scapegoat for larger scapegoats – the Soviet Union and Cuba. And fortunately that part of the assassination did not work. Had it did work, we would have had a nuclear war. And that is the reason why Kennedy was assassinated, because stood against it. He didn’t want to win a nuclear war, he wanted to stop it. And that’s an all together different objective from his Joint Chiefs and the Central Intelligence Agency.

LO: I think your book illuminates there were other patsies in the wings, and the idea that if Lee didn’t show up for work that day, there were other people there.

JD: Yes, and of course the first intended scapegoat was Thomas Arthur Valle in relation to the plot in Chicago. And Valle escapes that, thanks to Oswald himself, as well as some whistleblowers in Chicago, especially Abraham Bolden within the Secret Service. But had the plot worked in Chicago, we probably would have never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald.

LO: By the way, have you, speaking of patsies, I came across a book that had some details of someone with the name, have you heard the name Donald Wayne House?

JD: I may have, but if so I have forgotten it. I am not familiar with the books you are talking about.

LO: Well in some ways you say there is no new information, but to a seasoned researcher…

JD: No, I’m not saying there is no new information. There could be a lot of new information. I’m saying in order to understand the assassination of John Kennedy, it’s not critically necessary. But new information is not necessary. I think we have enough information to know what is going on. And I think it is fine that we have new information, but we don’t need it to understand what happened or we are missing the point.

LO: As one of my friends say they are cognitively impaired…Even with Vincent Bugliousi. It is really unbelievable, if he wasn’t motivated by money, that he could actually believe this, that he could put this giant book together, and after a 20 years effort, be embarrassed by researchers who pick him apart.

JD: Yes, I don’t know Vincent Bugliosi’s motives; I think it’s a shame that he put so much time and effort in trying to do the absurd.

LO: His work ends up speaking for himself, when he badgers and belittles people who have taken on an interest in researching this. There isn’t total agreement, but 80% people agree with each other to a point, then somebody else mentions something, and I don’t know about that, but there’s 80% agreement - more than enough to say exactly what is going on - the President was removed.

JD: In regards to Kennedy, what I have found most encouraging from going around talking about why he was killed and why it matters, many people are inspired by that story. When I was engaged in the research, friends would suggest that was a totally dark story that I was getting into. In some ways that’s true, but in other ways it’s not true at all. Here’s a person who gave his life in terms of the risk he took to turn the world towards peace instead of war, and he got the consequences of that - he was killed for that reason. But that is a story of hope, if somebody is willing to take those risks, and as a result we have a world to live in instead of a nuclear wasteland - that is a story of hope and of change and of inspiration, if you understand it.

The reason I wrote that story wasn’t to empower the government, because if you say well, the government succeeded because intelligence agencies killed the President and he wasn’t able to carry out his vision. There’s truth in that, but the primary truth is that if Kennedy was willing to work with his enemies - he reached out to Khrushchev at the height of the worst crisis of that war, the Cuban Missile Crisis. And because of that we have a world today, and we might even have a president who might carry out Kennedy’s vision.

Kennedy overcame those powers himself in the sense he resisted the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA and went to his death in that resistance. But this is a story of hope, it is not about those powers winning, it’s a story of hope, about a president reaching the point to where he was taken out, but to the point where we still have a world in which we can continue to work towards peace.

That’s why I end the book with the statement extended by Jacque Kennedy, that John F. Kennedy is dead, and as she put it to the Soviets Union representatives at the funeral, “Peace is up to us,” and though it’s always been up to us, it’s up to us to bring about Kennedy’s vision of peace. And that Kennedy gave his life for that should be inspirational.

LO: It’s interesting to go behind the scenes and see more than just the assassination but to understand what was really going on. You highlight those pressures, and I think that makes your book stand out from other books that are just about the assassination, as you try to get a total understanding.

JD: The pressures that Kennedy was under were almost unimaginable. Those were pressures for war, not for peace, for war. And other than his brother and a few advisors like Sorensen, he was alone. The national security state, the ideology which he had himself bought into at one time - he was not any apostle of non-violence, he was a Cold Warrior, so he had to turn. That’s why I emphasize the term “turn,” and I originally had the subtitle for the book “a story of turning,” but that seemed too oblique for book sellers. And then I had a subsequent effort called the “assassination of a vision,” and that too was not something that could be picked up quickly, and it was sort of negative, because the vision didn’t die with him. But we ended up with “Why He Died & Why It Matters,” and it is a story of turning, Kennedy turned towards peace and was therefore assassinated.

LO: And then we got LBJ, who…..

JD: Who had a different vision and was hopelessly compromised from day one, and who saw that, if you were to go behind the “evidence” that he was being given by the CIA, you see the CIA itself was the source of the mechanics of the assassination. I’m not saying they were the source of the order, they carried out the mechanics. And Johnson was unwilling to confront that, and he didn’t on the other hand, he didn’t want to accept the evidence on face value because that would have implicated the Soviet Union and Cuba, that Oswald, actually almost certainly an impersonator of Oswald, made at the embassies of Cuba and Soviet Union in Mexico City, and would end in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The CIA was presenting all that to Johnson on the weekend of the assassination, and Johnson was not a naive person. He saw immediately that this was CIA involvement.

Did Johnson have pre-knowledge of the assassination? I think he did. I don’t think he was a major player in carrying out the assassination. I think he was frightened to death by the whole thing. He went along with it, but I don’t think he was a major player in carrying it out. He had the foreknowledge of it, but he went with the lone assassin instead of the heavier direction that the CIA and the Joint Chiefs wanted.

LO: Of course later in his life he had a rare interview where he said he didn’t believe in the lone assassin and the quote he said was “we were running a Murder Inc in the Caribbean.”

JD: Yes, he was aware of all of that, and his own withdraw from the Presidency was a recognition; he was in deep waters all around him. Then when King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, Johnson was way over his head. And for him having been so profoundly complicent with the Vietnam War, he had to get out of there himself before it was too late.

LO: You could draw those conclusions as he dropped out. People have mentioned that he was four cars back and the bullets must have gone over his head maybe eighteen inches, he heard the shots and he saw how easy he could removed.

JD: I didn’t put the information from Madelyn Brown in my book because I tried to anchor everything as firmly as possible with corroboration and documents and such things, but I think that its very feasible hypothesis that Madelyn Brown’s information is correct and Johnson knew about it the night before.

LO: It’s possible, as some people in the research community are skeptical about it, fair enough.

JD: I think it’s wise to be skeptical about everything, and its best to seek out the best sources. There are all kinds of information that were probably true but were left out of JFK & the Unspeakable because it either didn’t have a solid enough source as far as corroboration, or it didn’t easily fit into the story. The book could have been 2,000 pages long, but that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was to write JFK’s story and to explain why he died, and not to write an exhaustive analysis of the assassination. That’s not what it is. The only reason the assassination itself is in there is because of the consequences of what he was doing. But everything that is in there, whether it is Kennedy’s story or the story of the assassination, it is backed up by as much confirmation as I could find.

LO: You mention we have a new President, and Kennedy represented hope, and you say how many people are hopeful that this new president can turn things around after the fraud of the last eight years.

JD: Yes. Well, it is a hope full moment, but only if we understand it in the context of Kennedy for example, and his story. It’s become possible for Obama do something hope full, say carry out the American University vision, only if there is a movement that’s pushing very, very hard to bring about that kind of realization. And if we are aware, and I’m talking more about more than just we in the research community – it must go Way Way beyond the research community, it must go into the movement that brought about Obama’s election victory. Unless we have an understanding of the Kennedy story, IT WILL BE REPEATED, and be repeated in the worst consequences of Obama being assassinated or being pushed by advisors into war or into decisions he will have to either resist at the risk of his life, or has to carry it out at the risk of everybody’s else’s life.

If we can understand Kennedy’s story, and raise the kind of support for bringing about Kennedy’s vision under Obama, that’s one possibility. But if we walk around with some kind of idea thinking Barrack Obama will save the world, that’s nonsense, that’s not going to happen. An understanding of our redemption of us from the powers of war, from oppression, manipulation, and lying, as the CIA has been doing and our propaganda forces have been doing for decades, if we are going to be liberated from those forces, it is up to us. And Obama can’t do it as President of the United States.

It has to be a movement, an international movement, especially a movement of consciousness of the past, an education as to what happened to John F. Kennedy, so it won’t be repeated. And I believe it WILL be repeated unless we understand and educate ourselves about the past. And we are way short with that right now with disinformation books getting far much more attention than we will get from this program. \

I don’t think it’s about getting new information on the Kennedy assassination, it’s telling the story of what we already know. That’s the task and it’s a task that’s very urgent at this moment in history…

[William Kelly]

I agree Peter.

Jim Douglas on Black Op Radio with Len Osanic

I think this is a really important interview. Although Len also talks with Jim Douglas on other archived shows, in which each chapter of his book JFK & the Unspeakable are discussed, this interview is short and sweet and Jim makes all the right points.

John Geraghty also mentioned that Len Osanic's interviews with James Douglas on Black Op Radio inspired to begin his new video project, so one good thing has already come out of this.

I also want to illustrate how important it is that these interviews are eventually transcribed so they can be read and referenced, otherwise they are shows.

BK

http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2009.html

Show #406

Original airdate: Jan 8th, 2009

Part 1 Guest: Jim DiEugenio

Topics: Assassination Research

Part 2 Guest - Jim Douglass

Jim's book JFK and the Unspeakable is now the #1 Kennedy book on Amazon

American intelligence was instrumental in the JFK Assassination

To say any one force (CIA, Mafia, Castro etc) was responsible is irresponsible

Douglass mentions Vincent Salandria as having the case solved many years ago

Salandria's overview of the case makes the most sense

The Joint Chiefs wanted to win the Cold War

In fear of nuclear holocaust, Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War

Thomas Arthur Vallee, The Chicago Plot and Oswald

Jim's message: Why was JFK assassinated?

Kennedy reached out to his enemy, Khruschev

Because of this we still exist. He prevented nuclear war

Kennedy was all but alone in Washington when he turned to peace

Jim thinks Lyndon Johnson had foreknowledge but didn't participate personally

After the assassinations of JFK, MLK & RFK, he saw his own end and left office

The hope of Obama in the context of Kennedy's American University speech

The task is to learn from the past to save the future

This will be difficult with all the disinformation getting better publicity

Len Osanic.: Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Black Op Radio. Today we are joined by Jim Douglas, noted author and researcher and well known in the community.

Jim Douglas: Hello, Len.

Len O: It’s a pleasure to speak with you again. From what I understand your book “JFK & the Unspeakable” is number one at Amazon.com.

JD: According to my editor and publisher it is the number one best selling “Kennedy” book at Amazon.com.

Len O. Yea, that’s what I meant. There are a lot of books out there, and for the lack of a better word, a lot of disinformation books that go nowhere, blaming Castro, there’s a new one blaming the mafia. If I could think of another word, but it’s pathetic, with all that is known, for anyone who has read your good work. Let’s sum up for people not familiar with your book, that I can’t recommend it highly enough. We had six interviews with you last fall – one on each chapter and a statement that I thought how important the book is, and dedicated an hour or so to each chapter, and it’s good that this has happened. Do you have an opinion how anyone could in this day and age could believe that Oswald a lone assassin, and write a book about that, or do a documentary?

JD: I believe it has government support and instigation actually. It’s beyond any competent authorship or any real work. We’ve known, in terms of available information for decades that the United States government was involved in killing the President. And the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, or for that matter Castro or the mob, that is irresponsible. That’s not to say they weren’t involved, there was a larger plot and they were involved, but to say that either Lee Harvey Oswald or the mob, or that Fidel Castro, was the instigator, not Castro, who was not involved, but to say the first two – Oswald or the mob, that they were the primary actors in the Kennedy assassination, is totally irresponsible.

LO: That’s a good word for it. Have you been traveling promoting the book?

JD: Yes, quite a bit. I’ve met people in Dallas, Northern California, New Mexico, Portland, Wisconsin, of course around here, Alabama, St. Louis, quite a few places, Denver, Colorado.

LO: Has anything come out regarding your book that you would call new information? Since you’ve written it and have been networking with researchers, is there anything new of note worth bringing up?

JD: I think the more one gets into the Kennedy assassination, the more the dots get connected. I don’t think there’s been any new information, really. I think the Assassinations Records Review Board and in particular members of the staff, made significant steps in the 1990s that will become more available as the people who worked on it bring out their own studies. But no, there hasn’t been any new significant information that I’m aware of.

LO: I just thought I would bring that up, as a researcher could have told you of some new tidbits of information.

JD: The Kennedy story is important - why he was assassinated, that’s why I wrote the book. There’s a lot of information about the assassination in the book, but the reason I included that was to connect the dots and to underline His story – John F. Kennedy’s story.

And I think we are kind of missing the point in the research community if we continue to feel the need for new information. We don’t need it. We’ve go enough information. What we need is to connect the dots – see the coherence of that information, and to show the irrelevance of the disinformation, and that we’ve already referred to.

I think Vince Salandria had it down decades ago as did other researchers. I refer to him because he’s sort of a meta-physician on the assassination. He has an overview that I think was right from the day after the assassination when he anticipated Oswald being killed as well, and when that happened it confirmed the overall nature of the scapegoating of Oswald by intelligence sources. So we’ve known for a long time, and new information can strengthen what is already obvious. You don’t really need to strengthen it.

Vince Salandria, one of the foremost researchers, and one who has had an overview of the assassination for decades that makes a great deal of sense, and it is that Lee Harvey Oswald was simply being used by the Central Intelligence Agency and he was being scapegoated. This was a National Security state assassination. Oswald was very much, in terms of the overall apparatus, a minor figure, but in the overall story of the assassination he is significant, because if you follow his story you can’t understand it except by his intelligence connections and by his being manipulated and being brought into a place where he was the scapegoat but also the scapegoat for larger scapegoats – the Soviet Union and Cuba. And fortunately that part of the assassination did not work. Had it did work, we would have had a nuclear war. And that is the reason why Kennedy was assassinated, because stood against it. He didn’t want to win a nuclear war, he wanted to stop it. And that’s an all together different objective from his Joint Chiefs and the Central Intelligence Agency.

LO: I think your book illuminates there were other patsies in the wings, and the idea that if Lee didn’t show up for work that day, there were other people there.

JD: Yes, and of course the first intended scapegoat was Thomas Arthur Valle in relation to the plot in Chicago. And Valle escapes that, thanks to Oswald himself, as well as some whistleblowers in Chicago, especially Abraham Bolden within the Secret Service. But had the plot worked in Chicago, we probably would have never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald.

LO: By the way, have you, speaking of patsies, I came across a book that had some details of someone with the name, have you heard the name Donald Wayne House?

JD: I may have, but if so I have forgotten it. I am not familiar with the books you are talking about.

LO: Well in some ways you say there is no new information, but to a seasoned researcher…

JD: No, I’m not saying there is no new information. There could be a lot of new information. I’m saying in order to understand the assassination of John Kennedy, it’s not critically necessary. But new information is not necessary. I think we have enough information to know what is going on. And I think it is fine that we have new information, but we don’t need it to understand what happened or we are missing the point.

LO: As one of my friends say they are cognitively impaired…Even with Vincent Bugliousi. It is really unbelievable, if he wasn’t motivated by money, that he could actually believe this, that he could put this giant book together, and after a 20 years effort, be embarrassed by researchers who pick him apart.

JD: Yes, I don’t know Vincent Bugliosi’s motives; I think it’s a shame that he put so much time and effort in trying to do the absurd.

LO: His work ends up speaking for himself, when he badgers and belittles people who have taken on an interest in researching this. There isn’t total agreement, but 80% people agree with each other to a point, then somebody else mentions something, and I don’t know about that, but there’s 80% agreement - more than enough to say exactly what is going on - the President was removed.

JD: In regards to Kennedy, what I have found most encouraging from going around talking about why he was killed and why it matters, many people are inspired by that story. When I was engaged in the research, friends would suggest that was a totally dark story that I was getting into. In some ways that’s true, but in other ways it’s not true at all. Here’s a person who gave his life in terms of the risk he took to turn the world towards peace instead of war, and he got the consequences of that - he was killed for that reason. But that is a story of hope, if somebody is willing to take those risks, and as a result we have a world to live in instead of a nuclear wasteland - that is a story of hope and of change and of inspiration, if you understand it.

The reason I wrote that story wasn’t to empower the government, because if you say well, the government succeeded because intelligence agencies killed the President and he wasn’t able to carry out his vision. There’s truth in that, but the primary truth is that if Kennedy was willing to work with his enemies - he reached out to Khrushchev at the height of the worst crisis of that war, the Cuban Missile Crisis. And because of that we have a world today, and we might even have a president who might carry out Kennedy’s vision.

Kennedy overcame those powers himself in the sense he resisted the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA and went to his death in that resistance. But this is a story of hope, it is not about those powers winning, it’s a story of hope, about a president reaching the point to where he was taken out, but to the point where we still have a world in which we can continue to work towards peace.

That’s why I end the book with the statement extended by Jacque Kennedy, that John F. Kennedy is dead, and as she put it to the Soviets Union representatives at the funeral, “Peace is up to us,” and though it’s always been up to us, it’s up to us to bring about Kennedy’s vision of peace. And that Kennedy gave his life for that should be inspirational.

LO: It’s interesting to go behind the scenes and see more than just the assassination but to understand what was really going on. You highlight those pressures, and I think that makes your book stand out from other books that are just about the assassination, as you try to get a total understanding.

JD: The pressures that Kennedy was under were almost unimaginable. Those were pressures for war, not for peace, for war. And other than his brother and a few advisors like Sorensen, he was alone. The national security state, the ideology which he had himself bought into at one time - he was not any apostle of non-violence, he was a Cold Warrior, so he had to turn. That’s why I emphasize the term “turn,” and I originally had the subtitle for the book “a story of turning,” but that seemed too oblique for book sellers. And then I had a subsequent effort called the “assassination of a vision,” and that too was not something that could be picked up quickly, and it was sort of negative, because the vision didn’t die with him. But we ended up with “Why He Died & Why It Matters,” and it is a story of turning, Kennedy turned towards peace and was therefore assassinated.

LO: And then we got LBJ, who…..

JD: Who had a different vision and was hopelessly compromised from day one, and who saw that, if you were to go behind the “evidence” that he was being given by the CIA, you see the CIA itself was the source of the mechanics of the assassination. I’m not saying they were the source of the order, they carried out the mechanics. And Johnson was unwilling to confront that, and he didn’t on the other hand, he didn’t want to accept the evidence on face value because that would have implicated the Soviet Union and Cuba, that Oswald, actually almost certainly an impersonator of Oswald, made at the embassies of Cuba and Soviet Union in Mexico City, and would end in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The CIA was presenting all that to Johnson on the weekend of the assassination, and Johnson was not a naive person. He saw immediately that this was CIA involvement.

Did Johnson have pre-knowledge of the assassination? I think he did. I don’t think he was a major player in carrying out the assassination. I think he was frightened to death by the whole thing. He went along with it, but I don’t think he was a major player in carrying it out. He had the foreknowledge of it, but he went with the lone assassin instead of the heavier direction that the CIA and the Joint Chiefs wanted.

LO: Of course later in his life he had a rare interview where he said he didn’t believe in the lone assassin and the quote he said was “we were running a Murder Inc in the Caribbean.”

JD: Yes, he was aware of all of that, and his own withdraw from the Presidency was a recognition; he was in deep waters all around him. Then when King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, Johnson was way over his head. And for him having been so profoundly complicent with the Vietnam War, he had to get out of there himself before it was too late.

LO: You could draw those conclusions as he dropped out. People have mentioned that he was four cars back and the bullets must have gone over his head maybe eighteen inches, he heard the shots and he saw how easy he could removed.

JD: I didn’t put the information from Madelyn Brown in my book because I tried to anchor everything as firmly as possible with corroboration and documents and such things, but I think that its very feasible hypothesis that Madelyn Brown’s information is correct and Johnson knew about it the night before.

LO: It’s possible, as some people in the research community are skeptical about it, fair enough.

JD: I think it’s wise to be skeptical about everything, and its best to seek out the best sources. There are all kinds of information that were probably true but were left out of JFK & the Unspeakable because it either didn’t have a solid enough source as far as corroboration, or it didn’t easily fit into the story. The book could have been 2,000 pages long, but that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was to write JFK’s story and to explain why he died, and not to write an exhaustive analysis of the assassination. That’s not what it is. The only reason the assassination itself is in there is because of the consequences of what he was doing. But everything that is in there, whether it is Kennedy’s story or the story of the assassination, it is backed up by as much confirmation as I could find.

LO: You mention we have a new President, and Kennedy represented hope, and you say how many people are hopeful that this new president can turn things around after the fraud of the last eight years.

JD: Yes. Well, it is a hope full moment, but only if we understand it in the context of Kennedy for example, and his story. It’s become possible for Obama do something hope full, say carry out the American University vision, only if there is a movement that’s pushing very, very hard to bring about that kind of realization. And if we are aware, and I’m talking more about more than just we in the research community – it must go Way Way beyond the research community, it must go into the movement that brought about Obama’s election victory. Unless we have an understanding of the Kennedy story, IT WILL BE REPEATED, and be repeated in the worst consequences of Obama being assassinated or being pushed by advisors into war or into decisions he will have to either resist at the risk of his life, or has to carry it out at the risk of everybody’s else’s life.

If we can understand Kennedy’s story, and raise the kind of support for bringing about Kennedy’s vision under Obama, that’s one possibility. But if we walk around with some kind of idea thinking Barrack Obama will save the world, that’s nonsense, that’s not going to happen. An understanding of our redemption of us from the powers of war, from oppression, manipulation, and lying, as the CIA has been doing and our propaganda forces have been doing for decades, if we are going to be liberated from those forces, it is up to us. And Obama can’t do it as President of the United States.

It has to be a movement, an international movement, especially a movement of consciousness of the past, an education as to what happened to John F. Kennedy, so it won’t be repeated. And I believe it WILL be repeated unless we understand and educate ourselves about the past. And we are way short with that right now with disinformation books getting far much more attention than we will get from this program. \

I don’t think it’s about getting new information on the Kennedy assassination, it’s telling the story of what we already know. That’s the task and it’s a task that’s very urgent at this moment in history…

[William Kelly]

http://www.examiner.com/x-3859-Hartford-Bo...s-A-Book-Review

Hartford Books Examiner

JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass (A book review)

July 21, 4:56 AM

Who killed JFK? It’s one of the greatest mysteries of our time—and the assassination remains one of the darkest moments in American history. Throughout the years, numerous theories have been put forth. The Mafia, the Russians, the Cubans, the CIA, the FBI, the military industrial unit, LBJ, and, occasionally, Lee Harvey Oswald (among others) have all been fingered as the guilty party, though definitive proof has remained elusive. In fact, one of the only things that can be said with near certainty is that most Americans still believe that Kennedy’s death was the result of a conspiracy.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of books have been written on the subject, with at least a handful more appearing each year. What the more recent offerings benefit from that earlier publications did not is author access to the voluminous files that have been declassified, most within the last fifteen years. Just one such book is JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books, $30.00) by James Douglass. Initially released in July of 2008 and now in a second printing, the book puts the blame right on America’s doorstep.

Rooted in the philosophies of a spiritualist monk, Thomas Merton, JFK and the Unspeakable presents a portrait of a president who turned from being a Cold Warrior to an altruistic being willing to reach out to his enemies in an attempt to achieve peace in the face of nuclear war. Ironically, that transformation to what Merton would call “depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion” would ultimately mark Kennedy for death, as his ideals came to clash with those of his government, which supported the war with ardent ferocity.

Douglass does a masterful job of pinpointing the very acts that turned Kennedy’s own men against him. Those acts include, but are not limited to, the Bay of Pigs invasion, where Kennedy refused to send in reinforcements, and the resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which led to the signing of a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The final nail in the coffin, however, may have been Kennedy’s plan to withdraw completely from Vietnam, a fact that his military advisers knew at the time of his death though it was not yet public knowledge. (Kennedy wanted to wait until after his reelection in 1965 to announce what was sure to be an unpopular decision, which is why he publicly professed support for a cause he no longer believed in. Unfortunately, those proclamations would later be used as rebuttals when the plan to withdraw was mentioned as a motive for murder.)

In addition, Kennedy had also begun private communications with Soviet Premier Khrushchev, and, just prior to the assassination, was looking to start a dialog with Fidel Castro, who appeared open to the possibility of rapprochement with the United States. That good will ended with Kennedy’s death. Though this openness to conversing with the perceived enemy was only known to Kennedy’s closest confidants, it could have been seen as further evidence of the president going soft on Communism—an opinion that certain factions in the U.S. government had already developed based on his prior adoption of alternative strategies to war.

And so those factions of the government conspired to kill their Commander in Chief. But not only that, they set up Lee Harvey Oswald as the fall guy—and Thomas Arthur Vallee in a thwarted attempt in Chicago before Dallas—and fabricated evidence that would have implicated the Russian and Cuban governments in the assassination, which very well could have led to a nuclear holocaust that Kennedy fought so hard to avoid. But Lyndon Johnson, who inherited the presidency, wanted to avoid such a confrontation at all costs and so, with an understanding of the powers that had taken out his predecessor, he charged the Warren Commission with painting a portrait of Oswald as the lone assassin, effectively covering up all the evidence that implicated the CIA—including what was manufactured in an attempt to lay blame elsewhere.

To some, the truth—at least as Douglass sees it—may be shocking. To others, it’s merely confirmation of what has been speculated for years. The author presents compelling and well-documented evidence as to the solution of the crime of the century. More than that, he offers caution as to where America went wrong and how to avoid repeating the same mistakes that led to one of history’s darkest moments. JFK and the Unspeakable is essential reading.

Author: John Valeri

[Anthony Thorne]

Oliver Stone has posted an article on the book at the high profile Huffington Post blog:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/oliver-stone...e_b_243924.html

Some Posner fans are venting steam in the comments immediately beneath his article, but this is a good thing and should give the book a little more publicity.

...................................................................

The murder of President Kennedy was a seminal event for me and for millions of Americans. It changed the course of history. It was a crushing blow to our country and to millions of people around the world. It put an abrupt end to a period of a misunderstood idealism, akin to the spirit of 1989 when the Soviet bloc to began to thaw and 2008, when our new American President was fairly elected.

Today, more than 45 years later, profound doubts persist about how President Kennedy was killed and why. My film JFK was a metaphor for all those doubts, suspicions and unanswered questions. Now an extraordinary new book offers the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance. That book is James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It is a book that deserves the attention of all Americans; it is one of those rare books that, by helping us understand our history, has the power to change it.

The subtitle sums up Douglass's purpose: Why He Died and Why it Matters. In his beautifully written and exhaustively researched treatment, Douglass lays out the "motive" for Kennedy's assassination. Simply, he traces a process of steady conversion by Kennedy from his origins as a traditional Cold Warrior to his determination to pull the world back from the edge of destruction.

Many of these steps are well known, such as Kennedy's disillusionment with the CIA after the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion, and his refusal to follow the reckless recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. (This in itself was truly JFK's shining moment in the sun. It is likely that any other president from LBJ on would have followed the path to a general nuclear war.) Then there was the Test Ban Treaty and JFK's remarkable American University Speech where he spoke with empathy and compassion about the Soviet people, recognizing our common humanity, the fact that we all "inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal."

But many of his steps remain unfamiliar: Kennedy's back-channel dialogue with Khrushchev and their shared pursuit of common ground; his secret opening to dialogue with Fidel Castro (ongoing the very week of his assassination); and his determination to pull out of Vietnam after his probable re-election in 1964.

All of these steps caused him to be regarded as a virtual traitor by elements of the military-intelligence community. These were the forces that planned and carried out his assassination. Kennedy himself said, in 1962, after he read Seven Days in May, which is about a military coup in the United States, that if he had another Bay of Pigs, the same thing could happen to him. Well, he did have another "Bay of Pigs"; he had several. And I think Kennedy prophesied his own death with those words.

Why does it matter? The death of JFK remains a critical turning point in our history. Those who caused his death were targeting not just a man but a vision -- a vision of peace. There is no calculating the consequences of his death for this country and for the world. Those consequences endure. To a large extent, the fate of our country and the future of the planet continue to be controlled by the shadowy forces of what Douglass calls "the Unspeakable." Only by unmasking these forces and confronting the truth about our history can we restore the promise of democracy and lay claim to Kennedy's vision of peace.

But don't take my word for it. Read this extraordinary book and reach your own conclusions.

[William Kelly]

http://www.americamagazine.org/entry.cfm?b...143299025225647

A Surprise Catholic Bestseller

Posted at: 2009-07-29 20:08:22.0

Author: James Martin, S.J.

It's always pleasant business to report good news from the Catholic publishing scene. Actually, good news from a surprising source.

Last year Orbis Books (full disclosure: Robert Ellsberg, the publisher, is a friend, and Orbis published one of my books) published a book by Jim Douglass, a veteran Catholic peace activist and theologian, called JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

It was reviewed very favorably in America here by George Anderson, SJ. Just when you might have thought everything that could be said about the death of JFK had been said, Douglass offered a new examination of the assassination. His own contribution was to attempt to establish the motive for Kennedy's killing, tracing the process of conversion that led him, over the course of three years, from his attitude as an ardent Cold Warrior to his commitment to lead the world away from the edge of apocalypse. A series of political steps caused him to be viewed as a virtual traitor by elements of the CIA and military establishment.

The book was published by Orbis, the publishing arm of Maryknoll. Explaining why a Catholic house would publish a book on this topic, Ellsberg wrote in an email to me today, "Douglass views this history from a contemplative perspective, particularly attuned to the grave moral and even spiritual matters at stake. In fact, he draws on the writings of Thomas Merton to define this perspective.

President Kennedy, it turns out, saw his mission in similar terms. In some ways, the book is a meditation on the cost of peacemaking, and it is a challenge to readers to assume the vision that was cut short by Kennedy's assasins."

The book received coverage in the religious press and won a book award from the Catholic Press Association. Sales (for Orbis) were what Ellsberg called "modestly impressive."

But thus far the book had not received any attention by the secular media.

Until....

Oliver Stone, the director of the controversial movie "JFK," appeared on the Bill Maher show on HBO and brought along a copy of Douglass's book. At one point during his interview he waved the book around and said it was something everyone should read. The next day the book shot up to #31 on Amazon and remained on the Top-100 bestseller list for a week. (Note to authors: Send Oliver Stone your book.) Orbis immediately sold 4,000 copies of the $30 hardcover edition. Stone then posted a blog on the Huffington Post. Within days his post was viewed by over 95,000 people. (Note to our bloggers: Send your link to Oliver Stone.) Suddenly Orbis was unable keep up with demand. As of today they have asked for 15,000 more copies to be printed in anticipation of continued demand, Ellsberg said.

The death knell for small presses, especially small religious presses, especially small Catholic presses, seems to be reported every day. Not so fast. Places like Orbis--to say nothing of the marvelous houses of Loyola, Liguori, Ave Maria, Paulist, LTP, Liturgical Press, New City Press, St. Anthony Messenger, St. Mary's Press, Ignatius Press, OSV Books, Pauline Books, Word Among Us and other places with dedicated staff--work very hard to provide not only fodder for prayer and meditation but books on topics that other presses may balk at. Each has its niche; each is a great gift to the church and the world.

Let's pray that, even if Oliver Stone never mentions another Catholic book on television, that all those presses, and the rest of the Catholic presses, which surprise, delight and inspire us, are around for a long time.

[David Andrews]

Please - from now on - elect only Catholics to the presidency.

[Paul Rigby]

Please - from now on - elect only Catholics to the presidency.

The Washington Daily News, Wednesday, 14 September 1960, p.51

Dr. Peale Just Wasn’t Available

By Richard Starnes

New York, Sept. 14 – Dr. Norman Vincent Peale is a gray flannel evangelist who must be accounted a rousing success at bringing peace of mind to minds that for one reason or another were not at peace.

Actually, when you think about it a little bit, I guess Dr. Peale and I are working different sides of the street. In my own modest way I once in a while try to bring discontent and disquiet into such minds as shop this market, hoping thus to stimulate critical thinking and a spirit of intellectual inquiry, both commodities being in terribly short supply.

So, in my appalling ingenuousness, I assumed that it would be easy to reach Dr. Peale for the purpose of posing a couple of questions that had occurred since Dr. Peale, and others, delivered themselves of the opinion that young Mr. Kennedy isn’t fit to be President of this country because he is a Catholic.

It just shows how wrong a person can be. Dr. Peale’s office help insisted they did not know where their leader was, nor when he would return to the city, except that he would be on hand for preaching at the Marble Collegiate Church next Sunday.

A chap just can’t escape the unworthy suspicion that Dr. Peale’s people do, too, know where to lay hands on him and are just trying to preserve his peace of mind by shielding him from questions.

For instance, it seems natural to ask Dr. Peale if he didn’t think it would have been nice to preface his remarks with some such statement as, “…of course I am supporting Mr. Nixon for the presidency…” or perhaps some reported might just want to say something like, “Look, Dr. Peale, don’t you think this sort of thing might give bigotry a bad name someday?”

I just possibly may have found a clue as to just how much inner tranquillity he has managed to cram into his own lifetime. Tucked amid the recipes for tuna fish casserole in a Sunday supplement piece that appeared last year was an article signed by Mrs. Norman Vincent Peale which contained the following illuminating paragraph:

“Early in my own married life I discovered that Norman had an almost compulsive passion for neatness. If anyone’s personal belongings were not just in place, and if all magazines and newspapers were not in a neat pile, he would be unhappy. Even the fact that a sofa cushion was a bit rumpled was enough to upset him…”

It’s my hunch that Dr. Peale’s objection to Mr. Kennedy is not just that he is a Catholic, but that he is an untidy Catholic who might muss up the White House.

[William Kelly]

I don't think the assassination has anything to do with Kennedy being Catholic -

Other than the fact that the Mafia, via Skinny D'Amato ensured the West Virginia primary would go to JFK in an election dedicated to his religion, and that South American priests and bishops were forced to object to dictators and were assassinated, and a Benedictine priest advocated assassination to anti-deGaul Algerian assassins, and another Benedictine advised the deMenils on art, and Father Walter McChann advised the Cuban refugee community of Dallas and was friends with John Martino and Sylvia Odio, and that Oswald's New Orleans relatives were Catholics, and the CIA financially supported the Catholic Cuban Refugee medical center in Miami through the Catherwood Fund, which also financed the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, and that James Douglas, has now called attention to the assassination as a major milestone that must be revisted to understand what is happening today.

The Catholic Church has an intelligence network that is older than the CIA, British Intelligence and the KGB combined.

BK

[William Kelly]

http://www.americamagazine.org/entry.cfm?b...143299025225647

A Surprise Catholic Bestseller

Posted at: 2009-07-29 20:08:22.0

Author: James Martin, S.J.

It's always pleasant business to report good news from the Catholic publishing scene. Actually, good news from a surprising source.

Last year Orbis Books (full disclosure: Robert Ellsberg, the publisher, is a friend, and Orbis published one of my books) published a book by Jim Douglass, a veteran Catholic peace activist and theologian, called JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

It was reviewed very favorably in America here by George Anderson, SJ. Just when you might have thought everything that could be said about the death of JFK had been said, Douglass offered a new examination of the assassination. His own contribution was to attempt to establish the motive for Kennedy's killing, tracing the process of conversion that led him, over the course of three years, from his attitude as an ardent Cold Warrior to his commitment to lead the world away from the edge of apocalypse. A series of political steps caused him to be viewed as a virtual traitor by elements of the CIA and military establishment.

The book was published by Orbis, the publishing arm of Maryknoll. Explaining why a Catholic house would publish a book on this topic, Ellsberg wrote in an email to me today, "Douglass views this history from a contemplative perspective, particularly attuned to the grave moral and even spiritual matters at stake. In fact, he draws on the writings of Thomas Merton to define this perspective.

President Kennedy, it turns out, saw his mission in similar terms. In some ways, the book is a meditation on the cost of peacemaking, and it is a challenge to readers to assume the vision that was cut short by Kennedy's assasins."

The book received coverage in the religious press and won a book award from the Catholic Press Association. Sales (for Orbis) were what Ellsberg called "modestly impressive."

But thus far the book had not received any attention by the secular media.

Until....

Oliver Stone, the director of the controversial movie "JFK," appeared on the Bill Maher show on HBO and brought along a copy of Douglass's book. At one point during his interview he waved the book around and said it was something everyone should read. The next day the book shot up to #31 on Amazon and remained on the Top-100 bestseller list for a week. (Note to authors: Send Oliver Stone your book.) Orbis immediately sold 4,000 copies of the $30 hardcover edition. Stone then posted a blog on the Huffington Post. Within days his post was viewed by over 95,000 people. (Note to our bloggers: Send your link to Oliver Stone.) Suddenly Orbis was unable keep up with demand. As of today they have asked for 15,000 more copies to be printed in anticipation of continued demand, Ellsberg said.

The death knell for small presses, especially small religious presses, especially small Catholic presses, seems to be reported every day. Not so fast. Places like Orbis--to say nothing of the marvelous houses of Loyola, Liguori, Ave Maria, Paulist, LTP, Liturgical Press, New City Press, St. Anthony Messenger, St. Mary's Press, Ignatius Press, OSV Books, Pauline Books, Word Among Us and other places with dedicated staff--work very hard to provide not only fodder for prayer and meditation but books on topics that other presses may balk at. Each has its niche; each is a great gift to the church and the world.

Let's pray that, even if Oliver Stone never mentions another Catholic book on television, that all those presses, and the rest of the Catholic presses, which surprise, delight and inspire us, are around for a long time.

[William Kelly]

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

Review of James Douglass' Book

by Edward Curtin

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...a&aid=16273

Despite a treasure-trove of new information having emerged over the last forty-six years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. There are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. Both groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred almost a half-century ago, so let’s move on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as James Douglass shows in his extraordinary book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2008). It is clearly one of the best books ever written on the Kennedy assassination and deserves a vast readership. It is bound to roil the waters of complacency that have submerged the truth of this key event in modern American history.

It’s not often that the intersection of history and contemporary events pose such a startling and chilling lesson as does the contemplation of the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed with the situations faced by President Obama today. So far, at least, Obama’s behavior has mirrored Johnson’s, not Kennedy’s, as he has escalated the war in Afghanistan by 34,000. One can’t but help think that the thought of JFK’s fate might not be far from his mind as he contemplates his next move in Afghanistan.

Douglass presents a very compelling argument that Kennedy was killed by “unspeakable” (the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s term) forces within the U.S. national security state because of his conversion from a cold warrior into a man of peace. He argues, using a wealth of newly uncovered information, that JFK had become a major threat to the burgeoning military-industrial complex and had to be eliminated through a conspiracy planned by the CIA – “the CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it” - not by a crazed individual, the Mafia, or disgruntled anti-Castro Cubans, though some of these may have been used in the execution of the plot.

Why and by whom? These are the key questions. If it can be shown that Kennedy did, in fact, turn emphatically away from war as a solution to political conflict; did, in fact, as he was being urged by his military and intelligence advisers to up the ante and use violence, rejected such advice and turned toward peaceful solutions, then, a motive for his elimination is established. If, furthermore, it can be clearly shown that Oswald was a dupe in a deadly game and that forces within the military/intelligence apparatus were involved with him from start to finish, then the crime is solved, not by fingering an individual who may have given the order for the murder or pulled the trigger, but by showing that the coordination of the assassination had to involve U.S. intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA . Douglass does both, providing highly detailed and intricately linked evidence based on his own research and a vast array of the best scholarship.

We are then faced with the contemporary relevance, and since we know that every president since JFK has refused to confront the growth of the national security state and its call for violence, one can logically assume a message was sent and heeded. In this regard, it is not incidental that former twenty-seven year CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, in a recent interview, warned of the “two CIAs,” one the analytic arm providing straight scoop to presidents, the other the covert action arm which operates according to its own rules. “Let me leave you with this thought,” he told his interviewer, “and that is that I think Panetta (current CIA Director), and to a degree Obama, are afraid – I never thought I’d hear myself saying this – I think they are afraid of the CIA.” He then recommended Douglass’ book, “It’s very well-researched and his conclusion is very alarming.”

Let’s look at the history marshaled by Douglass to support his thesis.

First, Kennedy, who took office in January 1961 as somewhat of a Cold Warrior, was quickly set up by the CIA to take the blame for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. The CIA and generals wanted to oust Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. Kennedy refused to go along and the invasion was roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy. But it was all a sham.

Though Douglass doesn’t mention it, and few Americans know it, classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had learned of the date of the invasion more than a week in advance, had informed Castro, but – and here is a startling fact that should make people’s hair stand on end - never told the President. The CIA knew the invasion was doomed before the fact but went ahead with it anyway. Why? So they could and did afterwards blame JFK for the failure.

This treachery set the stage for events to come. For his part, sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (as in a bad joke, later to be named to the Warren Commission) and his assistant General Charles Cabell (whose brother Earle Cabell, to make a bad joke absurd, was the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed) and said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Not the sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within a government whose power was growing exponentially.

The stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, in opposition to nearly all his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in U.S. foreign policy.

In 1961, despite the Joint Chief’s demand to put troops into Laos, Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman, his representative at the Geneva Conference, “Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.”

Also in 1961, he refused to concede to the insistence of his top generals to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in Berlin and Southeast Asia. Walking out of a meeting with top military advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, “These people are crazy.”

He refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Afterwards he told his friend John Kenneth Galbraith that “I never had the slightest intention of doing so.”

Then in June 1963 he gave an incredible speech at American University in which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end of the Cold War and the “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” and movement toward “general and complete disarmament.”

A few months later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev.

In October 1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from Vietnam by the end of the year and a total withdrawal by the end of 1965.

All this he did while secretly engaging in negotiations with Khrushchev via the KGB , Norman Cousins, and Pope John XXIII , and with Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist Jean Daniel. In an interview with Daniel on October 24, 1963 Kennedy said, “I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.” Such sentiments were anathema, shall we say treasonous, to the CIA and top generals.

These clear refusals to go to war and his decision to engage in private, back-channel communications with Cold War enemies marked Kennedy as an enemy of the national security state. They were on a collision course. As Douglass and others have pointed out, every move Kennedy made was anti-war. This, Douglass argues, was because JFK, a war hero, had been deeply affected by the horror of war and was severely shaken by how close the world had come to destruction during the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout his life he had been touched by death and had come to appreciate the fragility of life. Once in the Presidency, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peace maker. He came to see the generals who advised him as devoid of the tragic sense of life and as hell-bent on war. And he was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA. On numerous occasions he spoke of the possibility of a military coup d’etat against him. On the night before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it.” And we know that nobody did try to stop it because they had planned it.

But who killed him?

Douglass presents a formidable amount of evidence, some old and some new, against the CIA and covert action agencies within the national security state, and does so in such a logical and persuasive way that any fair-minded reader cannot help but be taken aback; stunned, really. And he links this evidence directly to JFK’s actions on behalf of peace.

He knows, however, that to truly convince he must break a “conspiracy of silence that would envelop our government, our media, our academic institutions, and virtually our entire society from November 22, 1963, to the present.” This “unspeakable,” this hypnotic “collective denial of the obvious,” is sustained by a mass-media whose repeated message is that the truth about such significant events is beyond our grasp, that we will have to drink the waters of uncertainty forever. As for those who don’t, they are relegated to the status of conspiracy nuts.

Fear and uncertainty block a true appraisal of the assassination - that plus the thought that it no longer matters.

It matters. For we know that no president since JFK has dared to buck the military-intelligence-industrial complex. We know a Pax Americana has spread its tentacles across the globe with U.S. military in over 130 countries on 750 plus bases. We know that the amount of blood and money spent on wars and war preparations has risen astronomically.

There is a great deal we know and even more that we don’t want to know, or at the very least, investigate.

If Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not “a lone-nut” assassin. Douglass marshals a wealth of evidence to show how from the very start Oswald was moved around the globe like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters.

As he begins to trace Oswald’s path, Douglass asks this question: “Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?”

After serving as a U.S. Marine at the CIA’s U-2 spy plane operating base in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher than top secret but a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission), Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union. After denouncing the U.S., working at a Soviet factory in Minsk , and taking a Russian wife - during which time Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union - he returned to the U.S. with a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow, only to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by a man, Spas T. Raikin, a prominent anti-communist with extensive intelligence connections, recommended by the State Department.

He passed through immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted, moved to Fort Worth, Texas where , at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was met and befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset. De Mohrenschildt got him a job four days later at a graphic arts company that worked on maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy missions over Cuba.

Oswald was then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt who, in 1977, on the day he revealed he had contacted Oswald for the CIA and was to meet with the House Select Committee on Assasinations’ Gaeton Fonzi, allegedly committed suicide.

Oswald then moved to New Orleans in April 1963 where got a job at the Reilly Coffee Company owned by CIA-affiliated William Reilly. The Reilly Coffee Company was located in close vicinity to the FBI,CIA, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence offices and a stone’s throw from the office of Guy Bannister, a former FBI agent, who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services, supplying and training anti-Castro paramilitaries meant to ensnare Kennedy. Oswald then went to work with Bannister and the CIA paramilitaries.

During this time up until the assassination Oswald was on the FBI payroll, receiving $200 per month. This startling fact was covered up by the Warren Commission even though it was stated by the Commission’s own general counsel J. Lee Rankin at a closed door meeting on January 27, 1964. The meeting had been declared “top secret” and its content only uncovered ten years later after a lengthy legal battle by researcher Harold Weisberg. Douglass claims Oswald “seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI,” as a provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960-64, in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said, “It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.”

When Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963, de Mohrenschildt exited the picture, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly given a $285,000 contract to do a geological survey for Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which he never did , but for which he was paid. Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the picture on cue. Douglass illuminatingly traces in their intelligence connections. Ruth later was the Warren Commission’s chief witness. She had been introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In September 1963 Ruth Paine drove from her sister’s house in Virginia to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald and bring her to her house in Dallas to live with her. Thirty years after the assassination a document was declassified showing Paine’s sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her father traveled throughout Latin America on an Agency for International Development (notorious for CIA front activities) contract and filed reports that went to the CIA. Her husband Michael’s step-father, Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell helicopter and Michael’s job there gave him a security clearance. Her mother was related to the Forbes family of Boston and her lifelong friend, Mary Bancroft, worked as a WW II spy with Allen Dulles and was his mistress. Afterwards, Dulles questioned the Paines in front of the Warren Commission, studiously avoiding any revealing questions. Back in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently got Oswald a job in the Texas Book Depository where he began work on October 16, 1963.

From late September until November 22, various Oswalds are later reported to have simultaneously been seen from Dallas to Mexico City. Two Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theatre, the real one taken out the front door and an impostor out the back. As Douglas says, “There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald than the Warren Report could use or even explain.” Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that Oswald impostors were used, as he told LBJ concerning Oswald’s alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He later called this CIA ploy, “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico…their ( CIA’s) double-dealing,” something that he couldn’t forget. It was apparent that a very intricate and deadly game was being played out at high levels in the shadows.

We know Oswald was blamed for the President’s murder. But if one fairly follows the trail of the crime it becomes blatantly obvious that government forces were at work. Douglass adds layer upon layer of evidence to show how this had to be so. Oswald, the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans could not have withdrawn most of the security that day. The Sheriff Bill Decker withdrew all police protection. The Secret Service withdrew the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s car where they had been the day before in Houston; took agents off the back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire. They approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November 18) where the car came, almost to a halt, a clear security violation. The House Select Committee on Assasinations concluded this, not some conspiracy nut.

Who could have squelched the testimony of all the doctors and medical personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in his neck and head, testimony contradicting the official story? Who could have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the White House detail by JFK, who warned that he feared the president was going to be assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden seven times and his evidence on the aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago on November 2 – a story little known but extraordinary in its implications – is riveting.) The list of all the people who turned up dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched, distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up - clearly point to forces within the government, not rogue actors without institutional support.

The evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in such depth and so logically that only one hardened to the truth would not be deeply moved and affected by his book.

He says it best: “The extent to which our national security state was systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we absorb and think in a system. We lack the independence needed to judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s murder and immediate cover-up.”

Speaking to his friends Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell about those who planned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, JFK said, “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”

Let’s hope for another president like that, but one that meets a different end.

Global Research Articles by Edward Curtin