Why should we care today about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963? That fateful day in Dallas is, after all, a long time ago: those of us, like me, who can remember the day are at least in their sixties. The short answer is that it reveals something essential for us to know about the American government and the Deep State that runs it.
Kennedy had become deeply suspicious of the CIA and other American intelligence agencies. They had given him bad advice about Cuba, which almost got us into a nuclear confrontation with Soviet Russia. Also, he planned to stop escalating the war in Vietnam, which made him profoundly abhorrent to the warmongers running the Pentagon.
Because of these, the Deep State decided to kill Kennedy. The best book on this subject is JFK and the Unspeakable by Jim Douglass, whom I interviewed a number of years ago. Here is what Jim Douglass told me:
“Now, Jim, you were close to Thomas Merton, influenced by Thomas Merton, and part of this title comes from Merton. Would you explain DOUGLASS: Yes, Lew. Thomas Merton wrote a book called Raids on the Unspeakable, a series of essays. He talked about the unspeakable as a kind of power and a kind of reality that went almost beyond the power of speech. It was suggested for him by the nuclear arms race, by the Vietnam War, and by the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm and Martin and RFK. It was a kind of evil where we don’t want to go. That might be one way of coming up with what he meant by the unspeakable.
ROCKWELL: Well, Jim Douglass, thank goodness you have gone where maybe others have feared to go. And all the people that I’ve talked to – and I’ve read, myself, a good amount of Kennedy revisionism, but I was extremely impressed by all you’ve done. And the people I’ve talked to who are the real experts tell me this is the best book and the most important book ever written on the Kennedy assassination. So not only do you go over why, clearly, this was a conspiracy, it just wasn’t a typical lone nut who appears from time to time in American history and is of great use to the power elite, but you show us why he was killed, why this is so important, and why we should all be concerned about it, not simply a historical event we can forget about, but why it continues to have impact on the nature of American society, of the wars that the government fights, what’s happening in terms of the police state here at home, and why it affects every person here today listening to this show.
DOUGLASS: Yes, I really appreciate your emphasizing the whys, because all I hoped to do was to tell the story of the why. I, of course, included the plot, but the only reason I did that was to fill in the picture. My point is not, and I did not write an analysis of the Kennedy assassination. It was to tell the story of JFK, and of all of us, for that matter. It was representing everyone in this country and, because of the nature of the conflict, in some sense, everybody in the world. We’re talking about weapons that could destroy the world. And that story, and of his turning – I use that word advisedly. It comes from the Hebrew Scriptures – his turning away from that kind of destructive power, towards peace, that’s the ‘why’ of his assassination.
ROCKWELL: You know, we hear, for example, about his speech where he said he was going to undo the CIA as an organization. Was that part of it, I mean, in terms of what the CIA did then, what it does today, what the Pentagon does, the Military-Industrial Complex?
DOUGLASS: He underwent a break with the CIA relatively early in his administration at the Bay of Pigs because he understood – he was not a stupid man. He was a very shrewd person. (Laughing) And he understood that he was being manipulated and set up at the Bay of Pigs so that he would have to call in the U.S. troops to win against Castro, and the CIA lied to him to set him up, they lied about the conditions of the uprisings that they told him were going to occur in Cuba and all this kind of thing. And the whole Bay of Pigs invasion had been organized during the Eisenhower administration. But when Kennedy realized afterwards the extent to which he had been lied and set up, he said, I want to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind. And he very deliberately did take steps to impair the CIA from doing that in the future. He fired the man in charge, Allen Dulles, who had been the cold warrior up to that point, and fired his main subordinates who had set him up in the Bay of Pigs. And then, of course, after his assassination, who does Lyndon Johnson, his successor, appoint for the so-called Warren Commission as the major influence within it, but Allen Dulles. He should have been considered, rightly, as the main suspect in the assassination rather than appointed to investigate it. That’s the fox investigating the murder in the hen house.
ROCKWELL: Can you look at the Kennedy assassination as a coup d’etat?
DOUGLASS: Yes. But it’s a very subtle coup d’etat in that the propaganda is so enormous and the transition is done so fluidly into an administration under Lyndon Johnson, that is reversing all of Kennedy’s main decisions. That happens with so little disruption. I mean, Kennedy’s main advisors don’t all surrender and say this is a coup d’etat or anything like that. Everybody sort of surrenders. This is Cold War thinking. This is the mission to the Powers That Be, if you want to put it in biblical terms. And so, although it is, in fact, a coup d’etat in terms of the power – and the way Kennedy was moving, he had become so isolated, and even his closest – well, most of his closest advisers were so subordinate to the Powers That Be that it was not seen as anything like that.”
Because of what the CIA did, it is vital that we get all of the documents from the CIA and FBI about the assassination. And I do mean all of them. President Trump promised to release all these files, but he hasn’t done it. Jacob Hornberger, a long-time libertarian researcher on the Kennedy association, tells the story: “It has now been two months since Donald Trump assumed the presidency. The question naturally arises: Where are those long-secret JFK Records that he repeatedly promised to release to the American people? Or to be more precise, why are those long-secret JFK records still secret? What’s up with the delay, President Trump?
After all, it takes about one minute to write and sign an executive order that states as follows: ‘I, President Donald Trump, hereby order the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the National Archives, the Secret Service, and all other federal entities to immediately disclose all records, files, documents, films, and other matters relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including, but not limited to, the disclosure of all files and records relating to CIA official George Joannides, as well as the elimination of all redactions in JFK-related documents.’
It’s not as if Trump doesn’t know how to issue and sign an executive order. He’s issued more than 53 since he took office this time around. The first time he was president he issued 220 executive orders.
It’s worth pointing out that Trump did issue one executive order relating to those long-secret JFK records. On January 23, he ordered his Director of National Intelligence and his Attorney General to present Trump with a plan for the full and complete release of those long-secret JFK records.
A ‘plan’? Why a ‘plan’? Calling for a plan for disclosure and release is not exactly the same thing as ordering disclosure. What next? A committee to study the plan and make recommendations on modifying the plan? Why not just order disclosure? Why order a plan for disclosure?
As it turns out, that plan for releasing those long-secret JFK records was submitted to Trump on February 7, more than a month ago.
What did the plan say? We don’t know! The reason we don’t know is that Trump, for some unknown reason, has chosen to keep the plan secret from the American people.
What? A secret plan under the Trump administration for releasing those long-secret JFK records? Does that even make any sense? We now have secrecy piled onto secrecy under Trump! Trump hasn’t even explained why the plan has to be kept secret, but my hunch is that it has something to do with protecting ‘national security,’ the two most important (and meaningless) words in the American political lexicon.
What’s really going on here? My hunch is what I’ve been saying the whole time about those long-secret JFK records, which is that the CIA simply will not permit Trump to release those long-secret records. The CIA has succeeded in keeping those long-secret records secret for more than 60 years.
Let’s not forget that during Trump’s first term as president, he proudly announced that he was going to release those long-secret records. He repeatedly made that announcement up to the week of the statutory deadline. Then the CIA stepped in and had a conversation with Trump. After that conversation, Trump buckled and acceded to the CIA’s demand that those long-secret records continue to be kept secret.
My hunch is that this time around, the CIA has again informed Trump that it will not permit him to release those long-secret JFK records. That includes the records that were ordered to be released by the JFK Records Act back in 1992 and it also includes the CIA’s files relating to its officer George Joannides. My hunch is that Trump is too embarrassed to let people know that it is the national-security establishment (e.g., the CIA), not the president, that is ultimately in charge of running the federal government. But how long can Trump remain paralyzed over what to do before more people begin asking him about what he intends to do about those long-secret JFK assassination-related records?”
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
Let’s do everything we can to get all the CIA documents released, as Trump as promised. We have a right to know the truth.
