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By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.
Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths. Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.
They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement,. They are pulling out of the World Health Organization. They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza. They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal. They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under U.S. control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the U.S.
The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg monarch, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.
I spent two years researching and writing about the warped ideologues of those who have now seized power in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” Read it while you still can. Seriously.
These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianized” state led by a divinely anointed leader. They openly admire Nazi apologists such as Rousas John Rushdoony, a supporter of eugenics who argues that education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches and Biblical law must replace the secular legal code, and Nazi party theorists such as Carl Schmitt. They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. They embrace bizarre conspiracy theories from the white replacement theory to a shadowy monster they call “the woke.” Suffice it to say, they are not grounded in a reality based universe.
Christian fascists come out of a theocratic sect called Dominionism. This sect teaches that American Christians have been mandated to make America a Christian state and an agent of God. Political and intellectual opponents of this militant Biblicalism are condemned as agents of Satan.
“Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and ‘Christian values’ form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all,” I noted in my book. “Labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and ‘homeland’ security.”
The Christian fascists and their billionaire funders, I noted, “speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past.” They commit logocide, killing old definitions and replacing them with new ones. Words — including truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life and love — are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings. Life and death, for example, mean life in Christ or death to Christ, a signal of belief of unbelief. Wisdom refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the doctrine. Liberty is not about freedom, but the liberty that comes from following Jesus Christ and being liberated from the dictates of secularism. Love is twisted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those, such as Trump, who claim to speak and act for God.
As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration. Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain. A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.
The near-collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before the arrival of Trump. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana. The day is not far off when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, have already acquiesced to the inevitable.
The question is not whether we go down, but how many millions of innocents we will take with us. Given the industrial violence our empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.
The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — Elon Musk claims is run by “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” — is an example of how these arsonists are clueless about how empires function.
Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.
When the U.S. offered to build the airport in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, investigative journalist Matt Kennard reports, it required that Haiti oppose Cuba’s admittance into the Organization of American States, which it did.
Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.
USAID, for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed “as a counterweight” to the “radical” Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia. It then funded organizations and initiatives, including training programs so Bolivian youth could be taught American business practices, once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.
Kennard in his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire,” documents how U.S. institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.
Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The heavily funded aid programs, designed to bring down Morales, eventually led the Bolivian president to throw USAID out of the country.
The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. But the inequality these programs facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.
Our tax dollars, meanwhile, disproportionately funds the military, which is the iron fist that sustains the system of exploitation. The 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialization lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas. As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically.”
“The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimizes theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”
Foreign aid maintains sweatshops or “special economic zones” in countries such as Haiti, where workers toil for pennies an hour and often in unsafe conditions for global corporations.
“One of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the U.S., is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labor and taxes and customs,” Kennard told me in an interview. “You open these sweatshops in the special economic zones. You pay the workers a pittance. You get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. The state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they’re offshoring this production, doesn’t benefit at all. That’s by design. The coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. It’s the corporations that benefit.”
These same U.S. institutions and mechanisms of control, Kennard writes in his book, were employed to sabotage the electoral campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of the U.S. empire, for prime minister in Britain.
The U.S. disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.
Humanitarian aid, often described as “soft power,” is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by U.S. corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the U.S. military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child laborers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.
I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organizations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.
The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors generals and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalize the leviathan they worship.
They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.
Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the U.S. will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates. The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.
“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power”:
Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit — witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.
When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”
“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.
The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties including due process, torture, militarized police, the massive prison system, militarized drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.
The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.
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On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to “expand” a migrant detention center located within the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Prior to the release of the executive order, the administration announced that 30,000 migrants would be detained at Guantánamo.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. This will double our capacity immediately,” Trump said.
But according to Department of Homeland Security and Navy documents from 2021 and 2022 reviewed by Drop Site News, the Trump administration may not be able to detain that high of a number of migrants at the facility — at least not immediately. Documents show the Guantánamo migrant detention center only has the capacity to expand to hold 400 people, far below the announced tens of thousands.
Although it is unclear whether, or how, Trump might expand migrant detention at Guantánamo, administration officials have already received a head start from someone else: former president Joe Biden.
For years now, both Democratic and Republican administrations have used a little-known section of the Guantánamo Bay Naval base to detain migrants, primarily from the Caribbean. And due to the secrecy of the facility, known as the Guantánamo Migrant Operations Center (MOC), conditions at the facility are generally unknown.
In the fall, Drop Site News published previously unreported details of the treatment of migrants at the MOC, the bureaucratic process of how migrants are detained, and the private prison companies profiting from the detention center. In August 2024, the Biden administration granted a private prison company a $163.4 million contract to run the facility.
"For decades, the Guantanamo migrant detention center has been the hallmark of the most inhumane, racist, and brutal U.S. policies against people seeking refuge," said Jesse Franzblau, senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center. "The Biden administration could have shut down the facility but tragically renewed and entered into new contracts to keep it up and running."
Drop Site News revealed that the MOC can detain single adults, families, and unaccompanied children. Because the MOC is inside of a military base, migrants awaiting processing are transported in black out vans “with hand restraints and black out goggles to obscure their vision,” according to the documents obtained by Drop Site. Migrants also have limited communication with the outside world, with their few phone calls monitored for “restricted information,” including information about the navy base, the documents showed.
“The idea that the Trump administration is going to send 30,000 migrants to Guantánamo is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard all week. It’s utterly absurd,” said J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents detainees at the Guantánamo military prison and frequently visits the base. “It’s purely performative. President Trump is trying to use the image of Guantánamo to project toughness towards refugees and asylum seekers.”
The Guantánamo Naval Base was first used to detain migrants in the early 1990s, after Haiti’s military coup in 1991 forced thousands to flee. The U.S. converted a section of the military base to “screen” those taken in by the U.S. Coast Guard. Reports from the 1990s describe horrific conditions at the refugee camp and in 1992 President George H.W. Bush ordered the closure of the migrant camp.
But in 1994, the Clinton administration resumed migrant detention at Guantánamo, primarily for Haitians and Cubans. In 1996, the number of people detained finally went back down.
In 2002, President George W. Bush began using the Guantánamo Bay naval base to imprison War on Terror detainees, held under the custody of the military. In the years following, the War on Terror detainees denounced torture and mistreatment by military and intelligence officers. That same year, Bush signed an executive order to, once again, begin sending migrants intercepted at sea to the Guantánamo MOC.
Migrants detained at the MOC are divided into two camps. Those deemed to be refugees and slated to be resettled in third countries fall under custody of the State Department and the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. Migrants who are of “undetermined” status, meaning they have yet to be interviewed by immigration officials and those who are not found to have a valid case for refugee resettlement are under the custody of ICE.
From December 2021 to December 2022, the MOC held an average monthly population of 14 “undetermined” migrants. During that time, there was also an average population of 20 refugees per day, according to records reviewed by Drop Site.
“The MOC is a dilapidated dormitory,” said Dixon, who has seen the facility during his visits to the base. Dixon has also interacted with refugees under State Department custody, who are granted work opportunities at the military base, while waiting to be resettled in a third country.
Thanks to MOC operations contracts, private prison companies have raked in millions of dollars. Since 2003, three different companies have received contracts to operate the immigration detention facility, including the GEO Group and defense contractor MVM.
Last year, the Biden administration granted a multi-million dollar contract to Akima Infrastructure Protection, a government contractor that runs other immigration jails in the mainland U.S.
Akima continues to search for staff to work at Guantánamo. According to a job posting on its website, part of the work requires the guards to escort migrants “using proper security measures with blackout goggles and in vehicles with black out windows for overall facility security and to ensure inability to identify protected migrants.”
“There’s no way there’s 30,000 beds anymore,” a U.S. official told CNN on Wednesday, commenting on Trump’s desire to expand the use of the detention center. The MOC’s operators “would need a lot more staff to manage them. They couldn’t do it with what they’ve got now, no way.”
It is unclear what the process of expanding the Guantánamo facility will look like. Currently, the facility can hold 120 people. And according to government contracting documents reviewed by Drop Site, whoever operates the MOC must have the ability to build a “tent city” and detain up to 400 people in preparation for a possible “surge” in migrant detention. Even at its peak in the early 1990s when Haitian asylum seekers were detained en masse, the center only had the capacity to detain 12,500 people, according to court records from 1993.
A report from the National Immigrant Justice Center describes conditions at the facility when it was at full capacity in the 1990s: “Asylum seekers were housed in tents covered in garbage bags, which barely protected them from the rain, and enclosed by barbed wire fencing,” the report reads. “They were forced to eat spoiled and sometimes maggot-filled food in extreme heat.”
“The numbers that Trump is speaking about now would mean mass horrors worse than what we witnessed in the 1990s,” said Franzblau.
Because of the secrecy of the Guantanamo naval base, little is known about the migrant detention center’s conditions. Congress mandates government inspections for ICE detention centers throughout the country. Those reports, although oftentimes limited, are publicly shared. But no public inspection reports or audits for the Guantanamo migrant facility appear to exist.
“The Migrant Operation Center on Guantánamo is such a black box that advocacy organizations do not get to visit nor to communicate with migrants there, including recognized refugees, potentially families with children,” Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, told Drop Site last September.
Following the publication of Drop Site’s story on the MOC, The New York Times reported on the existence of an internal DHS document from 2023 detailing the treatment of migrants at the facility, confirming Drop Site’s reporting on the use of “black-out goggles.”
The International Refugee Assistance Project also released a report about the facility. Drawing on interviews with migrants previously detained at Guantanamo, the report said the migrants complained of “toilets spewing sewage,” “fungi growing on ceilings,” and “rats running around in the room.” A separate document obtained by Drop Site said that in 2022 officials found “critical physical and logistical complications at the site.”
In December, a coalition of human rights organizations submitted a report to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. In their report, they said the U.S. government “forcibly disappears migrants” at the Guantanamo facility.
On Wednesday, Trump signed the Laken Riley bill into law, a bipartisan bill that will increase immigration detention throughout the country.
In light of the news that President Trump has signed an executive order for a “plan” (as if one were needed) for the release of the JFK assassination files (as well as the MLK, Jr. and RFK files), the following article, that will appear in my upcoming book from Clarity Press, At the Lost and Found, seems appropriate. While it is good that these files might now be released, they are unnecessary to assess the truth behind these assassinations unless one wishes to engage in more “limited hangouts” as described by former CIA agent Victor Marchetti:
Spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.
There is no mystery to who killed these men, unless one wishes to engage in pseudo-debates forever because the truth and its implications are too terrible to bear.
What is the truth, and where did it go?
Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know
“Shut your mouth,” said the wise old owl
Business is business, and it’s a murder most foul
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Don’t worry, Mr. President
Help’s on the way
Your brothers are coming, there’ll be hell to pay
Brothers? What brothers? What’s this about hell?
Tell them, “We’re waiting, keep coming”
We’ll get them as well
– Bob Dylan, Murder Most Foul
Despite a treasure-trove of new research and information having emerged over the last sixty-two years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. They have drunk what Dr. Martin Schotz has called “the waters of uncertainty” that result “in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance, that is.”
Then there are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission.
Both these groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, unknowable or allegedly known, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, ancient history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred more than a half-century ago, so let’s move on.
Nothing could be further from the truth, for the assassination of JFK is the foundational event of modern American history, the Pandora’s box from which many decades of tragedy have sprung.
Pressured to Wage War
From the day he was sworn in as President on January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was relentlessly pressured by the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and by some of his own advisers to wage war – clandestine, conventional, and nuclear.
To understand why and by whom he was assassinated on November 22, 1963, one needs to apprehend this pressure and why President Kennedy consistently resisted it, and the consequences of that resistance.
It is a key to understanding the current state of our world today and why the United States has been waging endless foreign wars and creating a national security surveillance state at home since JFK’s death.
A War Hero Who Was Appalled By War
It is very important to remember that Lieutenant John Kennedy was a genuine Naval war hero in WW II, having risked his life and been badly injured while saving his men in the treacherous waters of the south Pacific after their PT boat was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. His older brother Joe and his brother-in-law Billy Hartington had died in the war, as had some of his boat’s crew members.
As a result, Kennedy was extremely sensitive to the horrors of war, and when he first ran for Congress in Massachusetts in 1946, he made it explicitly clear that avoiding another war was his number one priority. This commitment remained with him and was intensely strengthened throughout his brief presidency until the day he died, fighting for peace.
Despite much rhetoric to the contrary, this anti-war stance was and is unusual for a politician, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Kennedy was a remarkable man, for even though he assumed the presidency as somewhat of a cold warrior vis à vis the Soviet Union in particular, his experiences in office rapidly chastened that stance. He very quickly came to see that there were many people surrounding him who relished the thought of war, even nuclear war, and he came to consider them as insane and very dangerous.
A Prescient Perspective
Yet even before he became president, then Senator Kennedy gave a speech in the U.S. Senate that sent shock waves throughout Washington, D.C. In 1957 he came out in support of Algerian independence from France, in support of African liberation generally, and against colonial imperialism. As chair of the Senate’s African Subcommittee in 1959, he urged sympathy for African independence movements as part of American foreign policy. He knew that continued colonial policies would only end in more bloodshed because the voices of independence would not be denied, nor should they.
The speech caused an international uproar, and Kennedy was harshly criticized by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even members of the Democratic party, such as Adlai Stevenson and Dean Acheson. But it was applauded throughout Africa and what was then called the third world.
Yet he continued throughout his 1960 campaign for president to raise his voice against colonialism worldwide and for a free Africa. Such views were anathema to the foreign policy establishment, including the CIA and the burgeoning military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower belatedly warned against in his Farewell Address, delivered nine months after approving the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in March 1960, a juxtaposition that revealed the hold the Pentagon and CIA had and has on sitting presidents.
Patrice Lumumba
One of Africa’s anti-colonial and nationalist leaders was the charismatic Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, who in June 1960 had been become the first democratically elected leader of Congo, a country savagely raped and plundered for more than half a century by Belgium’s King Leopold II for himself and multinational mining companies. Kennedy’s support for African independence was well-known and especially feared by the CIA, which together with Brussels, considered Lumumba, and Kennedy for supporting him, as threats to their interests in the region.
So, three days before JFK’s inauguration, together with the Belgium government, the CIA had Lumumba brutally assassinated after torturing and beating him. This murder had been approved by President Eisenhower in August 1960 at an NSC meeting where he gave Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA, the approval to “eliminate” Lumumba.
Then on January 26, 1961, when Dulles briefed the new president on the Congo, he did not tell JFK that they had already assassinated Lumumba nine days before. This was meant to keep Kennedy on tenterhooks, to teach him a lesson. On February 13, 1961, Kennedy received a phone call from his UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson informing him of Lumumba’s death. There is a photograph by Jacques Lowe of the horror-stricken president answering that call that is harrowing to view. It was an unmistakable message of things to come, a warning.
Dag Hammarskjöld, Indonesia, and Sukarno
One of Kennedy’s central allies in his efforts to support third world independence was U.N Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. He had been deeply involved in peacekeeping in the Congo and efforts to resolve disputes in Indonesia, the latter being an extremely important country that was central to JFK’s concerns. Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash on September 18, 1961, while on a peacekeeping mission to the Congo. Substantial evidence exists that he was assassinated and that the CIA and Allen Dulles were involved. Kennedy was devastated to lose such an important ally.
Kennedy’s Indonesia strategy involved befriending Indonesia as a Cold War ally as a prerequisite for his Southeast Asian policy of dealing with Laos and Vietnam and finding peaceful resolutions to smoldering Cold War conflicts. Hammarskjöld was central to these efforts. The CIA, led by Dulles, strongly opposed Kennedy’s strategy in Indonesia. In fact, Dulles had been involved in treacherous maneuverings in Indonesia for decades. President Kennedy supported the Indonesian President Sukarno, whom Dulles opposed.
Two days before Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring. The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy’s efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with economic and developmental aid, not military. It was part of his larger strategy of ending conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assisting the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.
Of course, JFK never went to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America’s side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles. And Kennedy’s proposed withdrawal from Vietnam, which was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK’s murder. Soon both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA and Pentagon. In Indonesia, Sukarno would be forced out and replaced by General Suharto, who would rule with an iron fist for the next thirty years, massacring at will with American support.
The Bay of Pigs
In mid-April 1961, less than three months into his presidency, a trap was set for President Kennedy by the CIA and its Director, Allen Dulles, who knew of Kennedy’s reluctance to invade Cuba. They assumed the new president would be forced by circumstances at the last minute to send in ground forces to back the invasion that they had planned. The CIA and generals wanted to oust Fidel Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. This had started under President Eisenhower. 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. Classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had learned the date of the invasion more than a week in advance and had then informed Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, but – and here is a startling fact that should make people’s hair stand on end – the CIA never told the President. The CIA knew the invasion was probably 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 – (who, in an absurdity, was later named to the Warren Commission investigating his death) and his assistant, General Charles Cabell (whose brother Earle Cabell, to further the absurdity, 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.
Afterwards Kennedy said to his friends Dave Powell and Ken O’Donnell, “They were sure I’d give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the [Navy’s aircraft carrier] Essex. They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”
Kennedy Responds After the Bay of Pigs Treachery
The stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, now even more suspicious of the military-intelligence people around him, and 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 combat troops into Laos – advising 140,000 by the end of April – 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.” The president knew that Laos and Vietnam were linked issues, and since Laos came first on his agenda, he was determined to push for a neutral Laos.
Also in 1961, he refused to accede 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 his top military advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, “These people are crazy.”
In March 1962, the CIA, in the person of legendary operative Edward Lansdale, and with the approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented to the president a pretext for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Code-named Operation Northwoods, the false-flag plan called for innocent people to be shot in the U.S., boats carrying Cuban refugees to be sunk, a terrorism campaign to be launched in Miami, Washington D.C., and other places, all to be blamed on the Castro government so that the public would be outraged and call for an invasion of Cuba.
Kennedy was appalled and rejected this pressure to manipulate him into agreeing to terrorist attacks that could later be used against him. He already knew that his life was in danger and that the CIA and military were tightening a noose around his neck. But he refused to yield.
As early as June 26, 1961, in a White House meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s spokesperson, Mikhail Kharlamov, and Alexei Adzhubei, Khrushchev’s son-in-law, when asked by Kharlamov why he wasn’t moving faster to advance relations between the two countries, Kennedy said, “You don’t understand this country. If I move too fast on U.S.-Soviet relations, I’ll either be thrown into an insane asylum, or be killed.”
He refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. The Soviets had placed offensive nuclear missiles and 60,000 support troops in Cuba to prevent another U.S. invasion. American aerial photography had detected the missiles. This was understandably unacceptable to the U.S. government. While being urged by the Joint Chiefs and his trusted advisors to order a preemptive nuclear strike on Cuba, JFK knew that a diplomatic solution was the only way out, short the death of hundreds of millions of people that he wouldn’t accept. Only his brother, Robert, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stood with him in opposing the use of nuclear weapons. In the end, after thirteen incredibly tense days, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev miraculously found a way to solve the crisis and prevent the use of those weapons. Premier Khrushchev had promised to take the Soviet missiles out of Cuba in return for Kennedy’s pledge not to invade, which Kennedy gave. Furthermore, JFK sent RFK to meet with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to secretly promise to Khrushchev’s demand that the U.S. then withdraw their missiles from Turkey.
Afterwards, JFK told his friend John Kenneth Galbraith that “I never had the slightest intention of doing so.”
The Fateful Year 1963
Then on June, 10 1963 he gave an historic 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,” advocating instead a 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 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev via the KGB’s Georgi Bolshakov, Norman Cousins, the journalist and editor of The Saturday Review, and Pope John XXIII, and with Cuba’s Prime Minister Fidel Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist Jean Daniel. Of course, secret was not secret when the CIA was involved.
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 Pentagon generals. These clear refusals to go to war with Cuba, to emphasize peace and negotiated solutions to conflicts, not war, to order the withdrawal of all military personnel from Vietnam, to call for an end to the Cold 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.
The Assassination on November 22, 1963
Once in the presidency, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peacemaker. 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’état 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 not from a sixth-floor window.
Who Killed Him?
If the only things you read, watched, or listened to since 1963 were the mainstream corporate media (MSM), you would be convinced that the official explanation for JFK’s assassination, The Warren Commission, was correct in essentials. You would be wrong because those media have for all these years served as mouthpieces for the government, most notably for the CIA that infiltrated and controlled them long ago. Total control of information requires media complicity, and in the JFK assassination and in all matters of importance, the CIA and MSM are synonyms.
The corporate media are the propaganda arm of the CIA.
So they report that The Warren Commission claim that the president was shot by an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, firing three bullets from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository as Kennedy’s car was driving away from him. But this is patently false for many reasons, including the claim that one of these bullets, later to be termed “the magic bullet,” would have had to pass through Kennedy’s body and zigzag up and down, left and right, to strike Texas Governor John Connolly who was sitting in the front seat, causing seven wounds in all, with the bullet only to be found later in pristine condition on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital.
The absurdity of that claim, the key to the government’s assertion that Oswald killed Kennedy, is only visually reinforced and made ridiculous by the famous Zapruder film that clearly shows the president being shot from the front right, and as the right front of his head explodes, he is violently thrown back and to his left as Jacqueline Kennedy climbs on to the car’s trunk to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull and brain.
This video evidence is clear and simple proof of a conspiracy.
Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?
But there is another way to examine it.
If Lee Harvey Oswald, the man The Warren Commission said killed JFK, was connected to the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not “a lone-nut” assassin or not the assassin at all. There is a wealth of evidence to show how from the very start Oswald was moved around the globe by the CIA like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters by Jack Ruby two days later.
James W. Douglass, in JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, the most important book to read on the matter, asks this question:
Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?
This is a key question.
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, a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission) and being trained in the Russian language, Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union. After denouncing the U.S., rejecting his American citizenship, 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 Assassinations’ investigator, Gaeton Fonzi — allegedly committed suicide.
Oswald then moved to New Orleans in April 1963 where he 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 Special Agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago Bureau, who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services, supplying and training the anti-Castro paramilitaries meant to ensnare Kennedy. Oswald then went to work with Bannister and the CIA paramilitaries.
From this time up until the assassination, Oswald engaged in all sorts of contradictory activities, one day portraying himself as pro-Castro, the next day as anti-Castro, with many of these theatrical performances being directed from Bannister’s office. It was as though Oswald, on the orders of his puppet masters, was enacting multiple and antithetical roles in order to confound anyone intent on deciphering the purposes behind his actions and to set him up as a future “assassin.”
Douglass persuasively argues that 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 left Dallas for Washington, D. C. where he met with CIA officials, 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. He never saw Oswald again.
Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the picture on cue. 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. Back in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently got Oswald a job in the Texas Book Depository where he began work on October 16, 1963.
Ruth, along with Marina Oswald, was the Warren Commission’s critically important witness against Oswald. Allen Dulles, who JFK had fired but who amazingly served as a key member of the Warren Commission, questioned the Paines during the course of it, studiously avoiding any revealing questions.
The Paines had extensive intelligence connections. Thirty years after the assassination a document was declassified showing Ruth 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 stepfather, 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.
From late September until November 22, various “Oswalds” are later reported to have simultaneously been seen from Mexico City to Dallas. Two Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theatre, the real one taken out the front door and an impostor out the back.
As Douglass 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 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 and others have amassed layer upon layer of evidence to show how this had to be so.
Who Had the Power to Withdraw the President’s Security?
To answer this essential question is to finger the conspirators and to expose, in Vincent Salandria’s words, “the false mystery concealing state crimes.”
Oswald, the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans could not have withdrawn most of the security that day. Dallas 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. The Secret Service admitted there were no Secret Service agents on the ground in Dealey Plaza to protect Kennedy, but we know from evidence that during and after the assassination there were people in Dealey Plaza impersonating Secret Service agents. The Secret Service approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November 18) where the car almost came to a halt, a clear security violation. The House Select Committee on Assassinations 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 related 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 psychologically invested in the mainstream narrative would not be deeply moved and affected by his book, the essential book to read on the matter, where there is still more from him and other researchers who have cut the Gordian Knot of this false mystery with a few brief strokes.
Oswald, the Preordained Patsy
Three examples will suffice to show that Lee Harvey Oswald, working as part of a U.S. Intelligence operation, was set up to take the blame for the assassination of President Kennedy, and that when he said while in police custody that he was “a patsy,” he was speaking truthfully. These examples make it clear that Oswald was deceived by his intelligence handlers and had been chosen without his knowledge, long before the murder, to take the blame as a lone, crazed killer.
First, Kennedy was shot at 12:30 PM CT. According to the Warren Report, at 12:45 PM a police report was issued for a suspect that perfectly fit Oswald’s description. This was based on the testimony of Howard Brennan, who said he was standing across from the Book Depository and saw a white man, about 5’10” and slender, fire a rifle at the president’s car from the sixth-floor window. This was blatantly false because easily available photographs taken moments after the shooting show the window open only partially at the bottom about fourteen inches, and it would have been impossible for a standing assassin to be seen “resting against the left windowsill,” (the windowsill was a foot from the floor), as Brennan is alleged to have said. He would have therefore had to have been shooting through the glass. The description of the suspect was clearly fabricated in advance to match Oswald’s.
Then at 1:15 PM in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Police Officer J.D. Tippit was shot and killed. At 1:50 PM, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the Texas Theater and taken out the front door where a crowd and many police cars awaited him, while a few minutes later a second Oswald is secretly taken out the back door of the movie theater. (To read this story of the second Oswald and his movement by the CIA out of Dallas on a military aircraft on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, documented in great detail by James W. Douglass, will make your hair stand on end. )
Despite his denials, Oswald, set up for Kennedy’s murder based on a prepackaged description, is arraigned for Tippet’s murder at 7:10 PM. It was not until the next day that he was charged for Kennedy’s.
The Message to Air Force One
Secondly, while Oswald is being questioned about Tippit’s murder in the afternoon hours after his arrest, Air Force One has left Dallas for Washington with the newly sworn-in president, Lyndon Johnson, and the presidential party. Back in D.C., the White House Situation Room is under the personal and direct control of Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, a man with close CIA ties who had consistently opposed JFK on many matters, including the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy’s order to withdraw from Vietnam.
As reported by Theodore White, in The Making of the President 1964, Johnson and the others were informed by the Bundy-controlled Situation Room that “there was no conspiracy, learned of the identity of Oswald and his arrest …”
Vincent Salandria, one of the earliest and most astute critics of the Warren Commission, put it this way in his book, False Mystery:
This was the very first announcement of Oswald as the lone assassin. In Dallas, Oswald was not even charged with assassinating the President until 1:30 A.M. the next morning. The plane landed at 5:59 P.M. on the 22nd. At that time the District Attorney of Dallas, Henry Wade, was stating that ‘preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting … the electric chair is too good for the killers.’ Can there be any doubt that for any government taken by surprise by the assassination — and legitimately seeking the truth concerning it — less than six hours after the time of the assassination was too soon to know there was no conspiracy? This announcement was the first which designated Oswald as the lone assassin….I propose the thesis that McGeorge Bundy, when that announcement was issued from his Situation Room, had reason to know that the true meaning of such a message when conveyed to the Presidential party on Air Force One [and to a separate plane with the entire cabinet that had turned around and was headed back over the Pacific Ocean] was not the ostensible message which was being communicated. Rather, I submit that Bundy … was really conveying to the Presidential party the thought that Oswald was being designated the lone assassin before any evidence against him was ascertainable. As a central coordinator of intelligence services, Bundy in transmitting such a message through the Situation Room was really telling the Presidential party that an unholy marriage had taken place between the U.S. Governmental intelligence services and the lone-assassin doctrine. Was he not telling the Presidential party peremptorily, ‘Now, hear this! Oswald is the assassin, the sole assassin. Evidence is not available yet. Evidence will be obtained, or in lieu thereof evidence will be created. This is a crucial matter of state that cannot await evidence. The new rulers have spoken. You, there, Mr. New President, and therefore dispatchable stuff, and you the underlings of a deposed President, heed the message well.’ Was not Bundy’s Situation Room serving an Orwellian double-think function?
Oswald’s Prepackaged Life Story
Finally, Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty adds a third example of the CIA conspiracy for those who need more evidence that the government has lied from the start about the assassination.
Prouty was Chief of Special Operation in the Pentagon before and during the Kennedy years. He worked for CIA Director Allen Dulles supporting the clandestine operations of the CIA under military cover. He had been sent out of the country to the South Pole by the aforementioned CIA operative Edward Lansdale (Operation Northwoods) before the Kennedy assassination and was returning on November 22, 1963. On a stopover in Christchurch, New Zealand, he had heard a radio report that the president had been killed but knew no details. He was having breakfast with a U.S Congressman at 7:30 AM on November 23, New Zealand time. A short time later, which was approximately 4:30 PM Dallas time, November 22, four hours after the assassination, he bought the Christchurch newspaper and read it together with the Congressman.
The newspaper reports from the scene said that Kennedy had been killed by bursts of automatic weapons fire, not a single shot rifle, firing three separate shots in 6.8 seconds, as was later claimed to have been done by Oswald. But the thing that really startled him was that at a time when Oswald had just been arrested and had not even been charged for the murder of Officer Tippit, there was already elaborate background information on Oswald, his time in Russia, his association with Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, etc. “It’s almost like a book written five years later,” said Prouty. “Furthermore, there’s a picture of Oswald, well-dressed in a business suit, whereas, when he was picked up on the streets of Dallas after the President’s death, he had on some t-shirt or something…”
Who had written that scenario? Who wrote that script…So much news was already written ahead of time of the murder to say that Oswald killed the President and that he did it with three shots…Somebody had decided Oswald was going to be the patsy…Where did they get it, before the police had charged him with the crime? Not so much ‘where,’ as ‘why Oswald?
Prouty, an experienced military man working for the CIA in the Pentagon, accused the military-intelligence “High Cabal” of killing President Kennedy in an elaborate and sophisticated plot and blaming it on Oswald, whom they had for years set up in advance as part of a fake defector program run by the CIA. They brought him back to the U.S. on June 13, 1962 and had him escorted to Fort-Worth, Texas where he was introduced to his CIA handler de Mohrenschildt. The evidence for a government plot to plan, assassinate, cover-up, and choose a patsy in the murder of President John Kennedy is overwhelming.
Five years after JFK’s assassination, we would learn, to our chagrin and his glory, that the president’s younger brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, equally brave and unintimidated, would take a bullet to the back of his head in 1968 as he was on his way to the presidency and the pursuit of his brother’s killers. The same cowards struck again.
Their successors still run the country and must be stopped.
You’re not supposed to be here. The only reason she’s been here as long as she has is because you’re not supposed to be.
“I don’t even like it here,” she tells you as you watch her stuff her things into the assortment of mismatched suitcases opened up across the bed. “I stayed because it was the one place I knew you weren’t.”
“And now that I’m back?”
“I have to go anywhere else,” she says. “I stayed here all these years because you might be anywhere else, so staying put kept me safe from running into you. Now that this is where you are, anywhere else is where I have to be.”
You explain that you didn’t want to come back. Your dad left his movie theater to you in his will and now you have to decide whether to run it or sell it.
“Well when you decide, pass word along,” she says.
“To who?”
“Anyone,” she says. “First person you see on the sidewalk. Tell them and they’ll know how to get word to me.”
“So everyone in the whole town will know how to get in touch with you?”
She nods. “Everyone except you,” she says. She looks out the window and is suddenly all smiles.
“I can’t believe I finally get to go see the world now that I know you’re not in it!” she says. She jumps up with her arms outstretched and without thinking about it, falls into your embrace, where she seems to go limp. She’s unable to move now that she’s being held by you again. She’s unable to move in any direction except a little bit closer. A little bit closer. Her closets are empty and her passport’s in her pocket and all her bags are packed, but she can’t go anywhere in the world except for a little bit closer.
Happy She Started Packing Her Bags The Minute You Pulled Yours Out Of The Trunk Of Your Hyundai Day!
Only in the world of political make-believe we inhabit in the West would the Wall Street Journal’s account of Biden’s years-long cognitive decline, and its concealment by his officials, count as a scoop.
And only in a world in which the billionaire-owned media alone constructs and polices what counts as reality would the WSJ be able to run this story without also being expected to consider what it signifies about America’s professed democracy.
The emperor, we are now told, was naked all along. How did it take more than four years for the fearless, tenacious billionaire-owned media to notice?
The WSJ reports that even back in 2021 Biden had what his officials described as “bad days” when his mind worked so poorly he had to be kept away from senior Congresspeople and his own cabinet colleagues.
So insulated was he that he rarely met even with key figures directing White House policy, such as the Secretaries of State, Defence and the Treasury.
He was able to hold only two or three cabinet meetings a year during his four-year term – a total of nine, compared to 19 by Barack Obama and 25 by Donald Trump.
His aides barely strayed from his side because they needed to whisper instructions for him to carry out the simplest of public tasks, such as where to enter and exit a room.
Concern only went mainstream when he performed catastrophically in an unscripted TV debate against Trump in June, eventually having to pull out of his re-election bid and let his vice-president, Kamala Harris, take over.
Shortly afterwards, it emerged that he had been receiving regular visits to the White House from a leading neurologist and Parkinson’s expert.
Many observers – myself included – pointed out Biden’s mental infirmity from the get-go. Matt Orfalea has been compiling video clips of the president’s stunning gaffes and verbal confusions for years. None of us were genuises. We didn’t need access to the 50 White House insiders interviewed by the WSJ. It was blindingly obvious.
You had to be lying, or hypnotised, to deny what was so visible.
And yet every time we pointed out Biden’s clear cognitive impairment, we were accused of promoting conspiracy theories, engaging in elder abuse, or supporting Trump.
The emperor, so we were told, was fully clothed.
The truth about Biden hasn’t suddenly leaked out from his officials. Senior politicians on both sides of the aisle knew. White House correspondents knew. Editors knew. And they all lied to protect the system of power to which they belong, the system that keeps them gainfully employed, the system that maintains their status. No one was going to rock the boat.
The WSJ hasn’t suddenly found out things it didn’t know before. The reason it is coming clean now – as are White House staffers – is that President Biden is almost out the door. The truth is no longer a serious threat to the Washington power system.
There will be more revelations about Biden’s incapacity – maybe contained in a future book by Bob Woodward – after his presidency has become a distant memory. When it is safe for the full story to be told. When the lies are no longer important.
But more significant than the media deceptions are the fact that much of the public fell for them, not once but over and over again: day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
Why? Because far too many of us are in the grip of the West’s propaganda system. We believe that the billionaire-owned media is to be trusted, that it serves the public good, not private wealth.
If a large chunk of the public can be persuaded that a man who is incapable of finding the door through which he’s supposed to leave is “sharp as a tack”, then why would they not also believe that the United States is promoting democracy as it has laid waste to the Middle East over the past two decades to control the region’s oil?
Or that Washington is seeking peace for the world and Ukraine by arming it with ever-more offensive weapons against a nuclear-armed Russia so that the US can place ballistic missiles on Moscow’s doorstep?
Or that the US wants a ceasefire in Gaza even as it supplies the munitions, intelligence and diplomatic cover for Israel to carry out a genocide there?
The problem is that, subjected to a lifetime of elite propaganda, many are readier to believe that very propaganda than the evidence of their own own eyes. They are truly hypnotised.
Even now, many are listening to the “revelations” of Biden’s long decline and, just like the WSJ, not wondering how the US has been functioning for the past four years with a president barely able to read a teleprompter, one whose mind is so vacant he can wander off in the middle of a conversation.
Does the US run by itself? Does it need a president? Or is the president nothing more than a figurehead for a permanent bureaucracy that expects to wield power from the shadows, unobserved by voters and unaccountable to them? Is the US a democracy, or is the democracy just a facade behind which a wealth elite maintains its power?
Biden has given us the answer. Were you listening?
Jonathan Cook is a MintPress contributor. Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
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