Forty Years Of Lies

"If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?"

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell's penetrating question, one of sixteen he asked at the time of the Warren CommissionReport, remains unanswered after forty years. That should trouble Americans, but then again there are manythings around national secrecy today that should trouble Americans.

The most timely lesson to be taken from the fortieth anniversary of President Kennedy's assassinationconcerns secrecy and the meaning of democracy in the world's most powerful nation. Perhaps no event betterdemonstrates the existence of two governments in the United States, the one people elect and another, oftenfar more influential, as capable of imposing false history about large events as the fabled Ministry of Truth.

Since the time of the Warren Commission we have had the investigation of the House Select Committee and, inthe last decade, the release of truckloads of previously-secret documents.

These documents were suppressed originally in the name of national security, but the fact is, despite theirrelease, much of their content is heavily blacked out, and dedicated researchers know many documents remainunreleased, particularly documents from the CIA and military intelligence. Would any reasonable personconclude anything other than that those documents are likely the most informative and sensational?

Was it ever reasonable to believe that material of that nature would be included in document releases? Justa few years ago, records of some of the CIA's early Cold War activities, due for mandated release, weresuddenly said to have "disappeared," and that declaration was pretty much the end of the story for apress regularly puffing itself as the fourth estate of American society. You do not have to believe in wildplots to recognize here the key to the Warren Commission's shabby job of investigation. As it was, severalmembers of the Commission expressed private doubts about the main finding of Oswald as lone assassin.

There is a sense in these matters of being treated as a child sent to his or her room for not eating thespinach served. This is not so different to the way the American government treats its citizens about Cuba: itrestricts them from spending money there so they cannot freely go and judge for themselves what is and isn't.

As it happens, the two things, Cuba and the assassination, are intimately related. Almost no one whostudies the assassination critically can help but conclude it had a great deal to do with Cuba. No, I don'tmean the pathetic story about Castro being somehow responsible. That idea is an insult to intelligence.

No matter what opinions you may hold of Castro, he is too clever and was in those days certainly toodedicated to the purpose of helping his people, according to his lights, ever to take such a chance. Even theslightest evidence pointing to Castro would have given the American establishment, fuming over communism likePuritan Fathers confronting what they regarded as demon possession, the excuse for an invasion.

There never has been credible evidence in that direction. Yet, there has been a number of fraudulent piecesof evidence, particularly the testimony of unsavory characters, claims so threadbare they have come and goneafter failing to catch any hold, remaining as forgotten as last year's fizzled advertising campaign for somelaundry detergent.

The notion that Castro had anything to do with the assassination is like an old corpse that's been floatingaround, slowly decomposing, periodically releasing gases for decades. And it is still doing so, Gus Russo's Liveby the Sword of not many years ago being one of the most detailed efforts to tart-up the corpse and makeit presentable for showing.

Any superficial plausibility to the notion of Castro as assassin derives from the poisonous atmospheremaintained towards him as official American policy. Researchers in science know that bias on a researcher'spart, not scrupulously checked by an experiment's protocols, can seriously influence the outcome of anotherwise rigorous statistical study. How much more so in studies of history on subjects loaded with ideologyand politics?

When you consider with what flimsy, and even utterly false, evidence the United States has invaded Iraq, itis remarkable that an invasion of Cuba did not proceed forty years ago. But in some ways the U.S. was lesscertain of itself then, it had a formidable opponent in the Soviet Union, and there was an agreement with theSoviets concerning Cuba's integrity negotiated to end the Cuban missile crisis, an agreement which deeplyoffended the small army of Cuban exiles, CIA men, and low-life hangers-on who enjoyed steady employment, lotsof perquisites, and violent fun terrorizing Cuba.

Considering America's current crusade over the evils of terrorism, you'd have to conclude from theexistence of that well-financed, murderous mob in the early 1960s that there was a rather different view ofterror then. Perhaps there is good terror and bad terror, depending on just who does the wrecking and killing?

If you were a serious, aspiring assassin, associated with Castro and living in the United States during theearly 1960s, you would not advertise your sympathies months in advance as Oswald did. You would not call anyattention to yourself. It is hard for many today to have an adequate feel for the period, a time whendeclaring yourself sympathetic to Castro or communism could earn you a beating in the street, quite apart frommaking you the target of intense FBI interest. Oswald was physically assaulted for his (stagy) pro-Castroefforts in New Orleans, and he did receive a lengthy visit from the FBI while held briefly in jail, but thiswas not new interest from the agency since he was already well known to them.

Whatever else you may think of Castro, he is one of the cleverest and most able politicians of the secondhalf of the twentieth century. He survived invasion, endless acts of terror and sabotage from the CIA andCuban exiles, and numerous attempts at assassination, and he still retains a good deal of loyal support inCuba. A man of this extraordinary talent does not use someone like Oswald to assassinate an Americanpresident. And if Castro had made such a mistake, he quickly would have corrected the error when Oswald made a(deliberate) fool of himself, over and over, in New Orleans well before the assassination, his actions therelooking remarkably like the kind of provocateur-stuff a security service might use to elicit responses andidentify the sympathies of others.

Oswald's (purported) visit to Mexico and clownish behavior in New Orleans laid the groundwork for the mythof Castro's involvement, and that almost certainly was one of the purposes of the activity, laying thegroundwork for an invasion of Cuba. The motive for the assassination is likely found there. It is just sillyto believe Castro risked handing the U.S. government a new "Remember the Maine."

In recent years, we've had Patrick Kennedy say he believes Castro was responsible, but his views on thismatter are more like built-in reflexes than informed judgment. Besides broadcasting a tone agreeable toAmerica's political establishment, his statement comes steeped in de' Medici-like conviction that Castro'ssuccess stained the honor of his ferociously ambitious family. Cross that family's path, and you earn alifetime grudge. That's the way the family fortune's founder always behaved.

Robert Kennedy hated Castro (just as he hated other powerful competitors including Lyndon Johnson), and hetook personal oversight of efforts to assassinate him. Robert also hated certain elements of the Mafia, who,after supporting his brother with money and influence in the election, felt betrayed by Robert's legal actionsagainst them. The killing of Castro would have made all these people much happier, Havana having been one ofthe Mafia's gold mines before Castro. Interestingly enough, it appears that the FBI, under pressure fromRobert, was at the same time making efforts to crackdown on the excesses of the Cuban refugees. Their excesses, including insane acts like shooting up Russian ships and killing Russian sailors in Cuban ports, threatenedrelations with the Soviet Union.

One of the centers of the FBI's crackdown effort was New Orleans, and that is where it appears clearestthat Oswald worked for them. His defector background made him a logical candidate for provocative activitieslike handing out leaflets about Castro. At the same time he was offering his services as an ex-Marine to atleast one of the refugee groups.

Oswald almost certainly had a minor role in American intelligence, an assumption that explains manymysterious episodes in his life. We know the Warren Commission discussed this in closed session. We also knowTexas authorities believed they had discovered such a connection. And we know the FBI in Dallas destroyedimportant evidence.

If you're looking for Cuban assassins, why not some of those nasty refugee militia groups, armed to theteeth by the CIA and trained to terrorize Castro's government? They also terrorized their critics in Florida.The extensive preparations necessary for assassinating the President might have raised little suspicion fromthe CIA or FBI at a time when these groups, subsidized and protected by the CIA, were carrying out all kindsof violent, lunatic acts. There are strong parallels here with the suicide-bombers of 9/11, who undoubtedlyeluded suspicion because the CIA had been regularly bringing into the country many shady characters from theMiddle East to train for its dark purposes in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Cuban extremists in Florida were furious over the Bay of Pigs and felt betrayed by Kennedy's terms forsettling the missile crisis. You couldn't find a better explanation for the CIA's unhelpful behavior over theyears since. Imagine the impact on the CIA, already badly damaged by the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy's great angerover it, of news that some of its subsidized anti-Castro thugs had killed the President?

I don't say that is what happened, only that there is at least one conjecture with far more force andsubstance than the official one. Assassination-theorizing is not one of my hobbies, but I have contempt forthe official explanation, and it seems rather naive to believe that the American security establishment wouldhave been satisfied with the insipid conclusions of the Warren Commission.

Furthermore, it is difficult to believe that the vast resources of American security and justice employedat the time - that is, those not concerned with kicking up dust into the public's eyes - were not able toidentify the assassins and their purpose. Documents covering a surreptitious, parallel investigation almostcertainly exist because what we know includes suggestions of two investigations intersecting at times.Perhaps, the best example of this is around the autopsy (discussed below).

Kicking-up dust around the assassination is an activity that continues intermittently to this day. In apiece a few years ago in the Washington Post about new Moscow documents on the assassination, areporter wrote, "Oswald...defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and renounced his Americancitizenship."

Oswald never renounced his citizenship, although he made a public show of wanting to do so. This was one ofmany theater-of-the-absurd scenes in the Oswald saga. We now know that on one of his visits to the Americanembassy in Moscow, Oswald was taken to an area reserved for sensitive matters, not the kind of business he wasthere to conduct.

The Soviets let him stay, never granting him citizenship, always treating him as an extraordinary outsiderunder constant scrutiny.

The Washington Post reporter also wrote, "Historians have expressed hope that the documentscould shed light on whether Oswald schemed to kill Kennedy when he lived in the Soviet Union...." Thatbegs the genuine question of whether Oswald killed Kennedy and kicks-up more dust. No historian of criticalability could think that way. The Soviets went out of their way at the time of the assassination to reassurethe U.S. government that they had no connection with it. Any credible evidence they could produce, we may beabsolutely sure, was produced. The stakes were immensely high.

The testimony of many Soviet citizens who knew Oswald agreed that he was a man temperamentally incapable ofkilling anyone. An exception was his (estranged) wife, Marina, who found herself, after the assassination, aSoviet citizen in a hostile country, able to speak little English, the mother of two young children withabsolutely no resources, and hostage to American agents who could determine her destiny.

Even so accomplished and discerning a journalist as Daniel Schorr has assisted in kicking-up dust, writingsome years ago at the release of more than a thousand boxes of memos and investigative reports from thenational archives that there wasn't much there. Somehow, Schorr had managed to digest and summarize thatmonstrous amount of information in a very short time. Then again, in view of all the blacked-out information,maybe Schorr's assertion owed less to incredible skills at reading and digesting information than to sereneconfidence in the methods of the establishment.

Schorr went from the merely silly to the ridiculous with his assertion, "There remains no seriousreason to question the Warren Commission's conclusion that the death of the president was the work of Oswaldalone." How re-assuring, but, if you think about that for a moment, it is the equivalent of saying whatnever was proved has not now been disproved, so we'll regard it as proved - absurd, yet characteristic of somany things written about the assassination.

Schorr went on to praise Gerald Posner's new book, Case Closed, as "remov[ing] any lingeringdoubt." We'll come back to Posner's book, but Schorr also saw fit to trot out the then obligatorydisparaging reference to Oliver Stone's movie JFK. Why would a piece of popular entertainment bementioned in the same context as genuine historical documents? Only to associate the movie with Schorr's claimthat the documents had little to say.

Every handsomely-paid columnist and pop news-celebrity in America stretched to find new words of contemptfor the Stone movie, miraculously, many of them well before its release. The wide-scale, simultaneous attackwas astonishing. You had to wonder whether they had a source sending them film scraps from the editing room orpurloined pages from the script. When Stone's movie did appear - proving highly unsatisfactory, almost silly,in its explanation of the assassination - you had to wonder what all the fuss had been about.

I was never an admirer of President Kennedy - still, the most important, unsolved murder of the 20thcentury, apart from the lessons it offers, is a fascinating mystery for those who've studied it.

The President's head movement at the impact of the fatal shot, clearly backward on the Zapruder film, afact lamely rationalized by the Warren Commission, is not the only evidence for shots from the front. In thefamous picture of Mrs. Kennedy reaching over the back of the car, she was, by her own testimony, reaching fora piece of the President's skull. Equally striking is the testimony of a police outrider, to the rear of thePresident's car, that he was struck forcefully with blood and brain tissue.

The doctors who worked to save the President at Parkland Hospital in Dallas said that the major visibledamage to the President was a gaping wound near the rear of the skull, the kind of wound that typicallyreflects the exit of a bullet with the shock wave generated by its passing through layers of human tissue.We've all seen a plate glass window struck by a B-B where a tiny entrance puncture results in a largefunnel-shaped chunk of cracked or missing glass on the opposite side.

The President's head wound, as described in Dallas, is not present in published autopsy photographs.Instead, there is a pencil-thin entrance-type wound in an unknown scalp. Although the Secret Service agent,Clint Hill, who climbed aboard the President's car after the shots, testified to seeing a large chunk of skullin the car and looking into the right rear of the President's head, seeing part of his brain gone, the autopsyphotos show no such thing.

The wound at the front of the President's neck, just above his necktie, which was nicked by the bullet, wasregarded by those first treating him in Dallas as an entrance wound since it had the form of a small puncturebefore a tracheotomy was done. But the throat wound in the published autopsy photos is large and messy.

The nature of the pathologists forcefully raises Russell's question. Why would you need militarypathologists, people who must follow orders? Ones especially that were not very experienced in gunshot wounds,far less so than hospital pathologists in any large, violent American city? Why conduct the autopsy at amilitary hospital in Washington rather than a civilian one in Dallas? Why have the pathologists work with aroom full of Pentagon brass looking on? The President's body was seized at gunpoint by federal agents at thehospital in Dallas where the law required autopsy of a murder victim. Why these suspicious actions and so manymore, if the assassination, as the Warren Commission and its defenders hold, reduces to murder by one man forunknown motives?

The autopsy, as published, was neither complete nor careful, rendering its findings of little forensicvalue.