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In reply to the discussion: JFK Conference: James DiEugenio made clear how Foreign Policy changed after November 22, 1963 [View all]Octafish
(55,745 posts)200. Joan Mellen is a national treasure...
How the Failure To Identify, Prosecute and Convict President Kennedy's Assassins Has Led To Today's Crisis Of Democracy
BY JOAN MELLEN
January 24, 2006
Lecture Delivered at the Ethical Culture Society, New York City
Hear this Speech: http://nysoundposse.com/2006/01/event-who-planned-murder-of-jfk-who.html
The last time I was in this room was for the memorial service of a distinguished American author, J. Anthony Lukas, who wrote Common Ground, about race and class in Boston. During the course of his career, Tony came into conflict with an institution that I will discuss this evening, The New York Times.
A Farewell To Justice is about the Kennedy assassination. It opens as a biography of Jim Garrison, district attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, who remains the only public official ever to have brought anyone before the bar of justice for participation in the conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. Garrison assumed that role when he discovered that the person framed for the crime, a low-level intelligence agent named Lee Harvey Oswald, resided in his jurisdiction between April and September of 1963. The Biblical metaphor is inevitable: that great harlot city New Orleans, destroyed by flood, with, among its many sins, incubating the Kennedy assassination.
After his suspect Clay Shaw was acquitted, Shaw the man whom the new evidence reveals was a CIA operative guilty of participating in the implementation of the murder of President Kennedy, Garrison was asked how he imagined that he could convict someone of conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy in a Louisiana state court. Garrison said: I guess I thought I was living in the country I was born in. He wasn't and we aren't.
I would like to suggest that the truth about the Kennedy assassination, far from being a matter of interest only to historians, and not even to most of them, will help us understand how we have arrived at a point where people as respectable as New York attorney Martin Garbus are comparing the current U.S. government with the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century. It's my belief that the present state of our political culture is a direct result of the fact that those responsible for the murder of President Kennedy have never been brought to justice.
To sum up: A Farewell To Justice suggests that the clandestine service of the CIA not only covered up the truth about the Kennedy assassination - that's easy to demonstrate from the four million documents now residing at the National Archives - but organized the event itself. That the CIA escaped without penalty, this extraordinary fact, has been integrated over these forty-two years into the body politic. It has produced a political culture where the unthinkable has become accepted practice. Meaningful freedom of the press has fallen into serious jeopardy.
For a flagrant example of what we have come to, we might revisit the scantily reported exchange on December 1st (2005) between Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel and John Yoo, a former deputy assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft, a participant in the writing of the Patriot Act, and now a Berkeley law professor.
The subject of the debate was the illegal expansion of presidential powers.
Professor Cassel asks, If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him? And Yoo answers, No treaty.
Cassel follows up: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo. And Yoo replies, I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
If Professor Cassel's hypothetical question seems melodramatic, we have Martin Garbus, alarmed by the twin expansion of Presidential and police powers, writing in the New York Observer: This country is approaching a dangerous turning point, and suggesting that the United States today bears some similarities to Weimar Germany where liberal democracy was not able to contend with the fascist onslaught.
In Miami a few weeks ago I was struck by the omnipresence, on the streets and restaurants, of police officers from a variety of law enforcement agencies. Famously, Benjamin Franklin replied to a question of whether this new land should be a monarchy or a republic with the line, A republic, if you can keep it.
What begins as surveillance moves to wiretapping, then COINTELPRO tricks, and finally to murder - a diagram of what happened to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and why the illegal NSA surveillance is so alarming.
We have not been aided in understanding the meaning of the Kennedy assassination by the continued public silence of those closest to President Kennedy. One day I requested of Wilmer Thomas, one of Jim Garrison's law school classmates (Tulane School of Law, Class of 1949) to ask his acquaintance, Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whom he believed was behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Professor Schlesinger observed, quietly, We were at war with the National Security people.
That the CIA at its highest levels exacted its revenge on President Kennedy has been an open secret since 1963. A Gallup poll on the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in 2003 found that twice as many people believed that the CIA was implicated in the assassination as there were who accepted the official fiction that Oswald had acted alone.
In 1963, people were already worried abut the CIA's extraordinary use of its powers. In the New York Times, Arthur Krock wrote in October 1963 that if ever there would be a coup in the United States, it would come from the CIA and not the Pentagon. The CIA, Krock wrote, was a malignancy on the body politic. It is difficult to imagine such words being printed in the Times today, so profoundly has our freedom of the press eroded since the time of the Kennedy assassination.
After the death of President Kennedy, ex-President Harry S. Truman, under whose watch the CIA was created in 1947, wrote on the front page of the Washington Post, that the CIA had been running a shadow government, becoming operational. Brazenly, Allen Dulles at one point even told a reporter to think of the CIA as the State Department for unfriendly countries. The CIA's policy-making also involved interference in the electoral process in Italy and France, funneling money to certain political parties - in Italy it was the Christian Democrats whom the CIA funded in an effort to prevent a coalition of socialists and Communists from taking power. The assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was connected to that CIA campaign.
At the time of the assassination, Charles de Gaulle remarked that John F. Kennedy, whom he admired, had died as a result of an intra-government conflict, a situation not uncommon in many countries. The documentation available since the passage of the JFK Act in 1992 overwhelmingly supports de Gaulle's view.
The rubber-stamping of the Warren Report by the press in 1964 seems to mark the moment when the mainstream press became embedded in official versions of events. Traces of that process have surfaced. In April 1967 the CIA issued a memo (available at the National Archives) instructing friendly reporters on how to reply to challenges to the Warren Report, recommendations that have resurfaced in the past few years in a renewed set of attacks on Jim Garrison, a decade after his death.
So it should come as no surprise that the New York Times for a year covered up the National Security Agency domestic surveillance of citizens with rubber-stamped search warrants issued under a Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA) run by the Pentagon, or with no warrants at all. Only when their own reporter was about to publish a book detailing the evidence did the Times run that story. It should be horrifying that the Congressional debate about the Patriot Act has not been over whether there should be such a government capability, but how long it should be extended.
CONTINUED...
http://www.joanmellen.net/NYC_2006article.html
PS: Farewell to Justice is outstanding. I heard Dr. Mellen speak at Duquesne. I hope to report on her presentation soon.
BY JOAN MELLEN
January 24, 2006
Lecture Delivered at the Ethical Culture Society, New York City
Hear this Speech: http://nysoundposse.com/2006/01/event-who-planned-murder-of-jfk-who.html
The last time I was in this room was for the memorial service of a distinguished American author, J. Anthony Lukas, who wrote Common Ground, about race and class in Boston. During the course of his career, Tony came into conflict with an institution that I will discuss this evening, The New York Times.
A Farewell To Justice is about the Kennedy assassination. It opens as a biography of Jim Garrison, district attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, who remains the only public official ever to have brought anyone before the bar of justice for participation in the conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. Garrison assumed that role when he discovered that the person framed for the crime, a low-level intelligence agent named Lee Harvey Oswald, resided in his jurisdiction between April and September of 1963. The Biblical metaphor is inevitable: that great harlot city New Orleans, destroyed by flood, with, among its many sins, incubating the Kennedy assassination.
After his suspect Clay Shaw was acquitted, Shaw the man whom the new evidence reveals was a CIA operative guilty of participating in the implementation of the murder of President Kennedy, Garrison was asked how he imagined that he could convict someone of conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy in a Louisiana state court. Garrison said: I guess I thought I was living in the country I was born in. He wasn't and we aren't.
I would like to suggest that the truth about the Kennedy assassination, far from being a matter of interest only to historians, and not even to most of them, will help us understand how we have arrived at a point where people as respectable as New York attorney Martin Garbus are comparing the current U.S. government with the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century. It's my belief that the present state of our political culture is a direct result of the fact that those responsible for the murder of President Kennedy have never been brought to justice.
To sum up: A Farewell To Justice suggests that the clandestine service of the CIA not only covered up the truth about the Kennedy assassination - that's easy to demonstrate from the four million documents now residing at the National Archives - but organized the event itself. That the CIA escaped without penalty, this extraordinary fact, has been integrated over these forty-two years into the body politic. It has produced a political culture where the unthinkable has become accepted practice. Meaningful freedom of the press has fallen into serious jeopardy.
For a flagrant example of what we have come to, we might revisit the scantily reported exchange on December 1st (2005) between Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel and John Yoo, a former deputy assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft, a participant in the writing of the Patriot Act, and now a Berkeley law professor.
The subject of the debate was the illegal expansion of presidential powers.
Professor Cassel asks, If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him? And Yoo answers, No treaty.
Cassel follows up: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo. And Yoo replies, I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
If Professor Cassel's hypothetical question seems melodramatic, we have Martin Garbus, alarmed by the twin expansion of Presidential and police powers, writing in the New York Observer: This country is approaching a dangerous turning point, and suggesting that the United States today bears some similarities to Weimar Germany where liberal democracy was not able to contend with the fascist onslaught.
In Miami a few weeks ago I was struck by the omnipresence, on the streets and restaurants, of police officers from a variety of law enforcement agencies. Famously, Benjamin Franklin replied to a question of whether this new land should be a monarchy or a republic with the line, A republic, if you can keep it.
What begins as surveillance moves to wiretapping, then COINTELPRO tricks, and finally to murder - a diagram of what happened to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and why the illegal NSA surveillance is so alarming.
We have not been aided in understanding the meaning of the Kennedy assassination by the continued public silence of those closest to President Kennedy. One day I requested of Wilmer Thomas, one of Jim Garrison's law school classmates (Tulane School of Law, Class of 1949) to ask his acquaintance, Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whom he believed was behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Professor Schlesinger observed, quietly, We were at war with the National Security people.
That the CIA at its highest levels exacted its revenge on President Kennedy has been an open secret since 1963. A Gallup poll on the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in 2003 found that twice as many people believed that the CIA was implicated in the assassination as there were who accepted the official fiction that Oswald had acted alone.
In 1963, people were already worried abut the CIA's extraordinary use of its powers. In the New York Times, Arthur Krock wrote in October 1963 that if ever there would be a coup in the United States, it would come from the CIA and not the Pentagon. The CIA, Krock wrote, was a malignancy on the body politic. It is difficult to imagine such words being printed in the Times today, so profoundly has our freedom of the press eroded since the time of the Kennedy assassination.
After the death of President Kennedy, ex-President Harry S. Truman, under whose watch the CIA was created in 1947, wrote on the front page of the Washington Post, that the CIA had been running a shadow government, becoming operational. Brazenly, Allen Dulles at one point even told a reporter to think of the CIA as the State Department for unfriendly countries. The CIA's policy-making also involved interference in the electoral process in Italy and France, funneling money to certain political parties - in Italy it was the Christian Democrats whom the CIA funded in an effort to prevent a coalition of socialists and Communists from taking power. The assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was connected to that CIA campaign.
At the time of the assassination, Charles de Gaulle remarked that John F. Kennedy, whom he admired, had died as a result of an intra-government conflict, a situation not uncommon in many countries. The documentation available since the passage of the JFK Act in 1992 overwhelmingly supports de Gaulle's view.
The rubber-stamping of the Warren Report by the press in 1964 seems to mark the moment when the mainstream press became embedded in official versions of events. Traces of that process have surfaced. In April 1967 the CIA issued a memo (available at the National Archives) instructing friendly reporters on how to reply to challenges to the Warren Report, recommendations that have resurfaced in the past few years in a renewed set of attacks on Jim Garrison, a decade after his death.
So it should come as no surprise that the New York Times for a year covered up the National Security Agency domestic surveillance of citizens with rubber-stamped search warrants issued under a Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA) run by the Pentagon, or with no warrants at all. Only when their own reporter was about to publish a book detailing the evidence did the Times run that story. It should be horrifying that the Congressional debate about the Patriot Act has not been over whether there should be such a government capability, but how long it should be extended.
CONTINUED...
http://www.joanmellen.net/NYC_2006article.html
PS: Farewell to Justice is outstanding. I heard Dr. Mellen speak at Duquesne. I hope to report on her presentation soon.
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JFK Conference: James DiEugenio made clear how Foreign Policy changed after November 22, 1963 [View all]
Octafish
Nov 2013
OP
DiEugenio is one of the most interesting guys out there still working this subject,
stranger81
Nov 2013
#1
He brought up Edmund GULLION, US diplomat whom JFK counseled in Vietnam in 1951...
Octafish
Nov 2013
#2
Thanks for the corrective to the magical, naive thinking being espoused in the OP.
stopbush
Nov 2013
#7
Kennedy increased the number of Americans in Vietnam from under a thousand to 16,000.
Spider Jerusalem
Nov 2013
#276
And you know this, how?? Were you a friend of JFK, there during his administration?
sabrina 1
Nov 2013
#48
I'm going to say this again: I'm interested in discussing JFK's assassination.
Bolo Boffin
Nov 2013
#45
Sad that so many DUers act as apologists for Oswald, the bastard that killed JFK.
stopbush
Nov 2013
#212
You acccused me of sympathizing with the killer of JFK. Either retract that or prove it. I have
sabrina 1
Nov 2013
#235
If you're saying that Oswald was the killer of JFK, then sure, I'll retract it and apologize.
stopbush
Nov 2013
#236
You made an egregious accusation. There are no 'conditions' under which an apology
sabrina 1
Nov 2013
#237
It's an interesting take on the Cuban Missile Crisis that JFK's real opponents were Americans.
Bolo Boffin
Nov 2013
#44
Audio tape: LBJ urged taking "every step that we can" to support overthrow of Joao Goulart
Octafish
Nov 2013
#158
You must have missed the OP about the change in foreign policy between administrations.
Octafish
Nov 2013
#179
"The record" shows that there wasn't much change between DDE's foreign policy and JFK's FP.
stopbush
Nov 2013
#180
"little evidence that JFK would have pulled American troops out of Vietnam"
Bolo Boffin
Nov 2013
#165
Our man Diem: How America Came To Back South Vietnam's Despised And Doomed President (by Seth Jacobs
bobthedrummer
Nov 2013
#144
Bolo Points Out That Forrestal Is Not Bundy Which Jim Appears To Be Confused About
Bolo Boffin
Nov 2013
#254
But, wait! You didn't tell us the name of the university you mentor doctoral candidates for!
Bolo Boffin
Nov 2013
#270
It bothers me that DiEugenio never managed to mention the university he works for.
Bolo Boffin
Nov 2013
#277
DiEugenio said Kennedy was attacked bitterly in Washington for siding with democracy in Congo...
Octafish
Nov 2013
#18
The French had been kicked out of Vietnam for nine years when Diem was killed
alcibiades_mystery
Nov 2013
#108
"What does that have to do with the French colonialists?" Nothing, of course
YoungDemCA
Nov 2013
#110
I'm sorry. I assumed readers had a basic understanding of the history of Vietnam.
Octafish
Nov 2013
#164
Only ridiculous if you value supporting Diem, whose power came from corrupt colonialist money.
Octafish
Nov 2013
#170
Diem was a brutal tyrant supported by the US, including Kennedy, until he became inconvenient
alcibiades_mystery
Nov 2013
#172
Translation: here's a bunch of evidence-bereft CT books I've read before writing my own
stopbush
Nov 2013
#25
In the past, I've spent (wasted?) plenty of time showing you where you are wrong.
stopbush
Nov 2013
#92
Your problem is that you give way too much credence to little tidbits of opinion
stopbush
Nov 2013
#142
Have you even read Bugliosi? Be honest, because I don't see how you would make such a statement
stopbush
Nov 2013
#143
No, I haven't read his book. The great DUer H20 Man did and wrote interesting things about it.
Octafish
Nov 2013
#146
DiEugenio blasted Bill O'Reilly and his Nixon-stained GOP boss, Roger Ailes...
Octafish
Nov 2013
#22
David Talbot called Dulles, ''the Chairman of the Board of the Assassination.''
Octafish
Nov 2013
#191
That is a great question. What is this poster implying? The Conserva-Dems have been
rhett o rick
Nov 2013
#49
DiEugenio has written about the Right killing off the JFK Legacy (New Frontier), too...
Octafish
Nov 2013
#34
Re E. Howard Hunt's forged diplomatic cables tying Kennedy to the Diem assassination:
Mc Mike
Nov 2013
#73
That doesn't change the indisputable fact that Kennedy let the coup happen.
Bolo Boffin
Nov 2013
#88
Actually, yes. What JFK wanted was different than what Pentagon, State and CIA delivered.
Octafish
Nov 2013
#135
"dozens of right wing gun nuts turned out to a restaurant in Dallas" - wasn't that incredible?
Bolo Boffin
Nov 2013
#209
I'd say we agree on a lot of good Democratic issues, if not the one brought up by the o.p.
Mc Mike
Nov 2013
#239
"seriously deficient historically" - feel free to back that up any time now.
Bolo Boffin
Nov 2013
#60
Chomsky: "Changes of Administration, including the Kennedy assassination, had no large-scale effect
ucrdem
Nov 2013
#61
Wow, a nation on a criminal path since November 22, 1963, and since the Gulf of Tonkin, a series of
indepat
Nov 2013
#33
You are right. I deleted my post. I just find that the obsession to lock or hide posts to
rhett o rick
Nov 2013
#75
Oh I see it. It's the conservatives that want to believe that Oswald acted alone.
rhett o rick
Nov 2013
#106
IMO those that are open-minded and willing to listen to different views are usually liberals.
rhett o rick
Nov 2013
#136
There is nothing liberal or conservative about thinking Oswald acted alone.
Bolo Boffin
Nov 2013
#113
Not what I said at all. I said conservatives want to believe that Oswald acted alone.
rhett o rick
Nov 2013
#139
Most Democrats I know are furious the perpetrators have not been brought to justice.
Octafish
Nov 2013
#156
The perpetrator (singular) in the JFK case was Oswald. Case closed. The evidence is overwhelming.
stopbush
Nov 2013
#176
I'm not claiming there were "not conspiracies in any of the assassinations." Just in JFK's case.
stopbush
Nov 2013
#175
Everyone should read "JFK and the Unspeakable" by Jim Douglass to clear up the Cold Warrior thing.
Zen Democrat
Nov 2013
#81
Warren Commission Member John J. McCloy certainly helped to change/shape policies pre/post 11-23-63.
bobthedrummer
Nov 2013
#86
Some of US will never forget that simple fact, will we, despite what the perception managers peddle.
bobthedrummer
Nov 2013
#188
Did Sabato say anything about his study that showed the Dictabelt evidence is useless?
Bolo Boffin
Nov 2013
#215
''Stop hijacking your own freaking OP to discuss me and get back to the topic.''
Octafish
Nov 2013
#226