ALEXANDER COCKBURN: "OSWALD SHOT HIM"

[William O'Neil]

Today (Saturday, April 7), at approximately 11:05 AM Eastern time, on C-SPAN's "In Depth," Alexander Cockburn responded to an E-mail question about his thoughts on "Case Closed" by stating that he accepts the Warren Commission's conclusions, but doesn't really agree with Gerald Posner.

Once again we must ask ourselves two important quesations:

What sort of impact we are having on the quest for justice in the case of the unsolved, conspiratorial murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy when we cannot persuade the boldest, most progressive, liberal of intellectual lions to accept the truth?

Is it appropriate to use a given scholar's "take" on the assassination as a litmus test for his or her work in other areas?

I eagerly await your thoughts.

Charles

While I agree with Jack on this one and that Alx Cock, even though a Brit posing as a freelance radical, is an establishment stooge, I happened to be watching the program and turned my tape recorder on for just the answer to the one question. This is what I got from it:

A.C. : "I have said in the past, more than once, that I tend to believe the Warren Commission, and then people who don't ... raise their ( ? Herculian ....gust... ?).... and slap their lips and say, 'what an idiot.' And I think actually that the subsequent...encourages that...including the famous magic bullet, do ratify that postion,....I would...Did Lee Harvey Oswald have any accomplances? A lot of people say now no, but if you were there on .... the afternoon of November 22nd...and you had Lee Harvey Oswald's name in your rollodex, how long before you took that name out of your rollodex and tore it up and burned the remains and put them in the trash?"

"I tend to think and always thought that Lee Harvey Oswald thought that by killing Jack Kennedy he would take the pressure off Castro, ...ah, you know? And he saw the attempts to kill Castro as something that provoked him to do it. There were a lot of various peculiar things about Lee Harvey Oswald, it's true. But, by and large, I tend to agree, I tend definately to think he shot him. I think he did. I think the way the Warren Commission describes it is correct....."

So A. Cock thinks Oswald knew about the top secret CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro and responded to them by killing JFK.

A. Cock, like N. Chomsky, is an intellectual whore who will think and theorize whatever he is paid to think.

As for Bugliosi, he knows that the correct approach to solving a crime it to keep an open mind and follow the evidence where ever it goes, and to debate the possible scinarios is just jerking everybody around for as long and hard as you can to waste time and kill real evidence.

BK

I believe a clue to Cockburns viewpoint lies in his answer regarding Oswald and Castro. What scares many "leftists" is the possibility that the conspiracy may have been one of Marxist origin , which they would not care to expose.

Yo! Bill,

I don't believe any "leftist" is "scared" of the possiblity the conspiracy was of Marxist origin and one they would not care to expose, especially jerks like Cockburn.

Those who continue to put forth the notion that Oswald was motivated to kill JFK because of his "Marxist" views or his sympathy for Castro fail to review the entire record, or are promoting their own agenda.

Those who have such agendas or are swayed by such opinions or philosophies are unable to approach the assassination from the perspective of someone capable of understanding it and solving it anyway.

If the assassination conspiracy was a foreign communist conspiracy, rather than by a domenstic anti-communist intelligence network, as it was, you can be sure those with the power to do so would have solved it immediately.

Bill Kelly

Bill, I agree about their failure to study the case in depth and their insincere and shady agenda. However, I do think there is an underlying motivation based on politics. This came up in a discussion I had with Michael Parenti years ago and he suggested the same type of thing. That Oswalds supposed politics, definately made these people uneasy about notions of conspiracy.