Dead Kennedys

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

28 May 13

50th anniversary commemorations of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy will include a tickets-only memorial at the scene of the crime, Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, Texas. No doubt there will also be celebrations in some places, just as there were in the aftermath of the November 22, 1963, killing.

Whatever events are held, whether formal or impromptu, they will all have one thing in common: no one knows the full story of what happened. The official version put out by the Warren Commission is long since discredited, but independent investigations have yet to present a coherent alternative narrative.

That there is such a narrative is certain, since that would be the event as it happened. One reason we don't know what happened is that our government has kept assassination-related material secret - protecting national security secrets, say secrecy defenders. Others say stonewalling.

Polling in April 2013 suggests a waning interest in the Kennedy assassination, since only 59% of Americans now believe the official version is false. That number is considerably lower than a 2003 Gallup poll in which 75% of Americans said the Kennedy killing was a conspiracy.

In 1978, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations' lengthy inquiry concluded that JFK "was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy." The official version holds that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and fired only three shots. The House Committee produced evidence that at least four shots were fired. While coming to the inevitable, evidence-based conclusion that a conspiracy killed Kennedy, the committee did not reach a conclusion as to who was part of the conspiracy.

We Know It Was a Conspiracy, But Not Who the Conspirators Were

A myriad of books have been published arguing various versions of events, but for the most part the big money from publishers has gone to writers who support the official version (Gerald Posner, Vincent Bugliosi). But the books of other, conspiracy-centered writers (Mark Lane, Jim Marrs, Anthony Summers) have far out-sold the official version.

That's perhaps to be expected when the majority of Americans have believed for almost 50 years that their government is lying to them about the Kennedy assassination, just as the government has lied about so many other important things, such as the Viet-Nam war, and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and assassination by drone.

A couple of Hollywood movies are in the works, both based on books: "Legacy of Secrecy" with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro (the Mafia did it) and "Parkland" with Colin Hanks and Paul Giamatti (Oswald did it alone). Academy Award winner Erroll Morris is working on a documentary of the assassination (he hasn't said who did it).

From the start, other suspects have included the CIA (because Kennedy wanted to get out of Viet-Nam), Castro (because the CIA was trying to assassinate him), and the KGB (because they're Russian or something).

Another popular suspect has long been Lyndon Johnson, who was Kennedy's vice president at the time, when there were rumors that Kennedy was going to replace him on the 1964 presidential ticket. Johnson is the most obvious first choice, at least based on the traditional analysis of means, motive, and opportunity.

Texas attorney Barr McClellan put the case against LBJ pretty strongly in his 2003 book, "Blood, Money & Power." McClellan was one of LBJ's personal lawyers, but his book did not get wide notice in the mainstream media at the time - when his son, Scott McClellan was serving as White House Press Secretary for President Bush.

"Blood, Money & Power" Did Not Appear on 2003 Bestseller Lists

The New York Times referred to McClellan's book dismissively in early 2004: "It is the most serious of public accusations, but it is so serious that serious people dismiss it as nuts."

The only reason the Times brought it up then was that Barr McClellan had repeated his accusation on a History Channel program about the Kennedy assassination, "The Guilty Men." The Times was reporting on serious, and eventually effective, pushback against the program by "Bill Moyers and other powerful men who worked for President Johnson," as the Times put it.

Early in May 2013, the same charge against LBJ was lodged by Roger Stone, in early publicity for his book, "The Man Who Killed Kennedy - The Case Against LBJ," due out in the fall. The publisher, Skyhorse Publishing in Manhattan, begins its description of the book this way:

Lyndon Baines Johnson was a man of great ambition and enormous greed, both of which, in 1963, would threaten to destroy him. In the end, President Johnson would use power from his personal connections in Texas and from the underworld and from the government to escape an untimely end in politics and to seize even greater power. President Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States, was the driving force behind a conspiracy to murder President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

Skyhorse started publishing in 2006. In 2011, the company issued a paperback edition of Barr McClellan's "Blood, Money & Power. Skyhorse has some 2,000 titles in print, including "Guns Across the Border" (about Operation Fast and Furious), "Hit List," by Richard Belzer (about mysterious deaths of JFK assassination witnesses), "Shooter's Bible," and "Big Breasts & Wide Hips" (a novel).

Roger Stone Hinted at Running for Governor of Florida as a Libertarian

As described on The Stone Zone, "Roger Stone is a legendary American Republican political consultant who has played a key role in the election of Republican presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. Long an outspoken libertarian Republican, Stone stunned the political world when he announced he would leave the GOP over its lurch to the far-right on social issues and join the Libertarian Party. The Libertarians will be on the ballot in all 50 states."

Roger Stone (along with Karl Rove) worked for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), Richard Nixon's 1972 campaign committee. Reportedly, Stone has a tattoo of Nixon on his back.

According to Stone, when Nixon was in the House, Johnson told him to hire Jack Ruby, which Nixon did. In 1963, Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas police department.

Richard Nixon was in Dallas on business for his client Pepsi Cola at the time of the assassination, and left Dallas on the morning of November 22.

There was a fingerprint on the rifle found in the "sniper's nest" in the Texas School Depository on November 22, 1963, that did not belong to Lee Harvey Oswald. That fingerprint belong to an associate of the vice president, a convicted murderer named Malcolm (Mac) Wallace, according to Barr McClellan and others.

According to LBJ biographer Robert Caro: "In attaining this influence, [LBJ] displayed a genius for discerning a path to power, an utter ruthlessness in destroying obstacles in that path, and a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal in moving along it."

"JFK Assassination 50th Anniversary" is the name of a Facebook page dedicated to encouraging a grassroots letter writing campaign to get the U.S. to release all its information relating to the 1963 assassination. Started in August 2012, this page had 286 "likes" as of late May 2013.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Obama's Terrorism Speech: Seeing What You Want to See

By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK

28 May 13

Some eager-to-believe progressives heralded the speech as a momentous change, but Obama's actions are often quite different than his rhetoric

he hallmark of a skilled politician is the ability to speak to a group of people holding widely disparate views, and have all of them walk away believing they heard what they wanted to hear. Other than Bill Clinton, I've personally never seen a politician even in the same league as Barack Obama when it comes to that ability. His most consequential speeches are shaped by their simultaneous affirmation of conflicting values and even antithetical beliefs, allowing listeners with irreconcilable positions to conclude that Obama agrees with them.

The highly touted speech Obama delivered last week on US terrorism policy was a master class in that technique. If one longed to hear that the end of the "war on terror" is imminent, there are several good passages that will be quite satisfactory. If one wanted to hear that the war will continue indefinitely, perhaps even in expanded form, one could easily have found that. And if one wanted to know that the president who has spent almost five years killing people in multiple countries around the world feels personal "anguish" and moral conflict as he does it, because these issues are so very complicated, this speech will be like a gourmet meal.

But whatever else is true, what should be beyond dispute at this point is that Obama's speeches have very little to do with Obama's actions, except to the extent that they often signal what he intends not to do. How many times does Obama have to deliver a speech embracing a set of values and polices, only to watch as he then proceeds to do the opposite, before one ceases to view his public proclamations as predictive of his future choices? Speeches, especially presidential ones, can be significant unto themselves in shaping public perceptions and setting the terms of the debate, so Obama's explicit discussion of the "ultimate" ending of the war on terror can be reasonably viewed as positive.

But it signals nothing about what he actually will do. I'm genuinely amazed that there are still smart people who treat these speeches as though they do. As Esquire's Tom Junod put it after the speech: "if the Lethal Presidency reminds us of anything, it's that we should be a long way from judging this president on his rhetoric or his portrayal of himself as a moral actor." The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf added that Obama "has a long record of broken promises and misleading rhetoric on civil liberties, and it would be naive to assume that he'll follow through on everything he said on Thursday."

What Obama has specialized in from the beginning of his presidency is putting pretty packaging on ugly and discredited policies. The cosmopolitan, intellectualized flavor of his advocacy makes coastal elites and blue state progressives instinctively confident in the Goodness of whatever he's selling, much as George W. Bush's swaggering, evangelical cowboy routine did for red state conservatives. The CIA presciently recognized this as a valuable asset back in 2008 when they correctly predicted that Obama's election would stem the tide of growing antiwar sentiment in western Europe by becoming the new, more attractive face of war, thereby converting hordes of his admirers from war opponents into war supporters. This dynamic has repeated itself over and over in other contexts, and has indeed been of great value to the guardians of the status quo in placating growing public discontent about their economic insecurity and increasingly unequal distribution of power and wealth. However bad things might be, we at least have a benevolent, kind-hearted and very thoughtful leader doing everything he can to fix it.

The clear purpose of Obama's speech was to comfort progressives who are growing progressively more uncomfortable with his extreme secrecy, wars on press freedom, seemingly endless militarism and the like. For the most part, their discomfort is far more about the image being created of the politician they believed was unique and even transcendent than it is any substantive opposition to his policies. No progressive wants to believe that they placed such great trust and adoration in a political figure who is now being depicted as some sort of warped progeny of Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney. That creates internal discomfort and even shame. This speech was designed to allow progressives once again to see Barack Obama as they have always wanted to see him, his policies notwithstanding: as a deeply thoughtful, moral, complex leader who is doing his level best, despite often insurmountable obstacles, to bring about all those Good Things that progressives thought they would be getting when they empowered him.

The terrorism speech, when dissected, provided very little in the way of actual concrete substance. Its most heralded passage, as the ACLU quickly pointed out, did nothing more than call for the "ultimate" repeal of the AUMF; "the time to take our country off the global warpath and fully restore the rule of law is now," said the ACLU's executive director Anthony Romero, "not at some indeterminate future point." Moreover, he noted, "the president still claims broad authority to carry out targeted killings far from any battlefield, and there is still insufficient transparency."

In lieu of substance, the speech was heavy on feel-good rhetoric, mostly designed to signal that unlike the mean and simplistic George Bush - who presumably pursued these policies thoughtlessly and simplistically - Obama experiences inner turmoil and deep moral and intellectual conflict as he embraces them. "For me, and those in my chain of command, those [civilian] deaths will haunt us as long as we live," the president claimed. He added that drones and other new weapons technologies "raise[] profound questions - about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under US and international law; about accountability and morality."

This "he-struggles-so-very-much" conceit is one Obama officials have been pushing for awhile, as when they anonymously boasted to the New York Times about Obama's deep personal involvement in choosing the targets of his "kill list", something he insists upon because he is "a student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas" and wants to ensure compliance with those lofty principles. That same article quoted the supremely obsequious former Obama adviser Harold Koh as hailing torture advocate and serial deceiver John Brennan as "a person of genuine moral rectitude" who ensures that the "kill list" is accompanied by moral struggle: "It's as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war," Koh said.

Obama may do things you progressives find distasteful, but at least marvel at how thoughtful and torn up he is about it all. The New York Times' Ross Douthat had quite a good column this week about this preening pageantry. He aptly described the speech as "a dense thicket of self-justifying argument, but its central message was perfectly clear: Please don't worry, liberals. I'm not George W. Bush." Douthat explained:

"This willingness to grapple with moral complexity has always been one of the things that Obama's admirers love about him, and even liberals who feel disappointed with his national security record still seem grateful for the change from George W. Bush. If we have to have an imperial president, their attitude seems to be, better to have one who shows some 'anguish over the difficult trade-offs that perpetual war poses to a free society' (as The New Yorker's Jane Mayer put it on Friday), rather than falling back on 'the secrecy and winking smugness of the past'. . . . .

"I am not particularly nostalgic for the Bush era either. But Obama's Reinhold Niebuhr act comes with potential costs of its own. While the last president exuded a cowboyish certainty, this president is constantly examining his conscience in public - but if their policies are basically the same, the latter is no less of a performance. And there are ways in which it may be a more fundamentally dishonest one, because it perpetually promises harmonies that can't be achieved and policy shifts that won't actually be delivered.

"That's a cynical reading on Obama's speech, but it feels like the right one. Listened to or skimmed, the address seemed to promise real limits on presidential power, a real horizon for the war on terror. But when parsed carefully, it's not clear how much practical effect its promises will have. . . .

"There is no good reason to overpromise yet again. Where the United States can step back from a wartime footing, we absolutely should. But where we don't actually intend to, we should be forthright about it - rather than pretending that change is perpetually just around the corner, and behaving as though our choices are justified by how much anguish we express while making them."

When it comes to liberals eager to be fooled, Douthat could easily have been talking here about his own newspaper's editors. Within minutes after the completion of Obama's speech, literally, the New York Times editorial page posted a lengthy and gushing editorial headlined "The End of Perpetual War". In their eyes, the speech was "the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America." It analyzed the speech section-by-section and insisted that each called for a "shift [that] is essential to preserving the democratic system and rule of law for which the United States is fighting, and for repairing its badly damaged global image." It concluded: "There have been times when we wished we could hear the right words from Mr. Obama on issues like these, and times we heard the words but wondered about his commitment. This was not either of those moments."

How was the NYT able to post such a detailed and lengthy editorial about Obama's speech almost immediately upon its conclusion? Clearly, they were given a special preview of the speech by some administration official, who fed them exactly the message the White House wanted them to receive. And they ingested it fully. As one civil liberties lawyer put it to me, the NYT editors got snookered not despite the special access they received, but because of it. Most of all, they got snookered because they wanted to, because - like so many progressives - they are eager to see Obama in the light in which they originally saw him. Nobody likes to believe they were fooled or tricked or so enthusiastically supported a politician who does things they find horrible.

That's why a mere speech, filled with all sorts of mixed messages, leads the NYT editors to all but declare that Obama has heroically ended the war on terror - even though just one week before, one of his top military officials told the US senate that the war would last at least another decade or two. After NYT Editorial board editor David Firestone posted the NYT's editorial on Twitter and heralded the speech as "a momentous turning point, making clear an unending state of war is unsustainable," I asked him: "Will it be 'momentous' if it's not followed up with decisive and prompt action?" His reply: "Yes, I hope it doesn't turn out like universal pre-K or an infrastructure bank. But at least he set the bar at the right height."

In contrast to the NYT's instant swooning, serious journalists and commentators - who weren't given special pre-speech access to a marketing pitch by the White House - began analyzing the speech's content and reached a much different conclusion. McClatchy's Leslie Clark and Jonathan Landay astutely noted that Obama's formulation for when drone strikes should be used was broader than past government statements, which meant he "appeared to be laying groundwork for an expansion of the controversial targeted killings".

The Brookings Institution's Benjamin Wittes similarly observed that Obama's speech seemed written to align the president "as publicly as possible with the critics of the positions his administration is taking without undermining his administration's operational flexibility in actual fact." In other words, said Wittes (summarizing the vintage Obama rhetorical device), "the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has - but also to make sure that it could continue to do so." Slate's national security writer Fred Kaplan observed this morning that "the speech heralded nothing new when it comes to drone strikes." In an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Jeremy Scahill argued this about the Obama speech:

It really is sort of just a rebranding of the Bush era policies with some legalese that is very articulately delivered from our constitutional law professor, Nobel Peace Prize-winning president. But effectively, Obama has declared the world a battlefield and reserves the right to drone bomb countries in pursuit of people against whom we have no direct evidence or who we're not seeking any indictment against."

The national security reporter Michael Hastings said much the same thing on MSNBC over the weekend ("That speech to me was essentially agreeing with President Bush and Vice President Cheney that we're in this neo-conservative paradigm, that we're at war with a jihadist threat that actually is not a nuisance but the most important threat we're facing today"), while Carnegie Mellon Professor Kiron Skinner on the same show said that "there was a lot of George W. Bush in that speech", as Obama spoke as though we are in a "long-term ideological struggle in a way that he's not talked about radical Islam before . .. where he's going will take him away from his liberal base."

Ultimately, one can persuasively highlight passages in Obama's speech that support any or all of these perspectives. That's what makes it such a classic Obama speech. And that's the point: his speech had something for everyone, which is another way of saying that it offered nothing definitive or even reliable about future actions. No matter how good it made some eager-to-believe progressives feel, it's impossible rationally to assess Obama's future posture regarding the war on terror, secrecy and civil liberties except by his actions. Until one sees actual changes in behavior and substance on those issues, cheering for those changes as though they already occurred or are guaranteed is the height of self-delusion.