- LBJ did not have the resources or the character for organizing
the JFK assassination. He even tried to drop out of the presidency after
the assassination. Nahum Goldmann meets all the requirements, as someone
willing to order an assassination, stick to it and bury it with the use
of huge government and media connections. The best book on the JFK assassination
is by Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment. A secondary source that is
still highly significant is by Salvador Astucia, Opium Lords.
-
- Both of these books suffer to some degree from the idealization
of JFK that was consciously promoted by Oliver Stone and Permindex, but
they get to the real point with extensive evidence: The assassination was
made in Tel Aviv. This is entirely consistent with the fact that JFK's
one truly fundamental conflict was with Israel and its nuclear weapons
program, and the conflict was further exacerbated by the fact that Joseph
Kennedy, the father, was remembered from the '30s as a "right-wing
isolationist," i.e., a major Wall Street businessman with some crooked
dealings who did not want to get into WWII. I say that these books suffer
from an "idealization" of JFK because a major thrust of propaganda
in the '90s was to promote the image of JFK as a man who was so much of
an "outsider" that any "establishment" figure would
want to kill him, i.e., the list of plausible motives and suspects is extended
to infinity and made meaningless. To some extent these two books (the second
more than the first) partly echo this idealization, an idealization which
would bury all the evidence which the authors do themselves present, if
such an idealization were treated seriously.
-
- For this reason, it still is necessary to investigate
the auxiliary question of not simply "Who killed JFK?" but rather
"In what way did going from JFK to LBJ make a significant difference?"
Only in this way can you honestly answer the first question. The rumor-mongering
mill has consciously churned out stories of the imminent "Vietnam
withdrawal" planned by JFK, something wildly divergent and more "radical"
than Nixon's policies of escalation (into Cambodia), withdrawl, detente.
No evidence supports this claim.
-
- Some useful items to check up on in regards to these
issues are: Brad O'Leary and L.E. Seymour, Triangle of Death (published
by the extremely pro-JINSA WorldNetDaily), Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot,
Richard H. Schultz, The Secret War Against Hanoi, Gus Russo, Live by the
Sword. Of course, for actual documents, one can always check out Foreign
Relations of the U.S., Volume IV, Vietnam August-December 1963 and The
Pentagon Papers.
-
- I emphasize again that none of the latter set are recommended
as specific investigations of the JFK assassination. Some of these authors,
i.e., Chomsky, make it an explicit point to emphasize that they are not
investigating the assassination itself but rather the auxiliary query of
"Was the assassination committed over Vietnam, Cuba, or the Cold War?"
Others, such as O'Leary, Seymour and Russo, do throw in a bit of "assassination
investigation" that falls short of key questions, better answered
by Piper and Astucia.
-
- However, with sharp documentation and references, all
of these sources do make clear that, if one is to believe (for example)
that the assassination was motivated by NSAM 263 (a document written by
Robert MacNamara and Maxwell Taylor, whose "withdrawal recommendation"
was sharply and deliberately toned down by JFK) then the emphasis on killing
Kennedy makes little sense. Why not kill MacNamara and Taylor instead,
since it was their idea in the first place? When we move our attention
to the MOSSAD, ADL, WJC and related Israeli Lobby organizations, this strange
ambiguity vanishes. A clear conflict is found which was "JFK specific"
in the sense that an Israeli lobbyist and Sephardic Jew, LBJ, was made
President in time for the 1967 war, a war which then got a very different
reception in Washington than the 1956 war (where Eisenhower and Dulles
specifically told England, France and Israel to turn around and go back).
-
- However, before one can honestly reach the judgment that
this was indeed the true cause of the assassination, it is necessary to
go through the other "prospective motives" of the Stone-Permindex
brand and honestly judge "Does this really fit as a serious motive
and explanation?" Some of the background sources, e.g. Russo, may
not do much as "actual investigations" of the assassination itself,
yet still provide useful leads over the issue of "To what extent would
JFK have been assassinated over Cuba specifically?". Rather, I see
all of the above as highly significant in any real investigation, not simply
for the purpose of "finding a motive" but of crossing out certain
motives from a plethora of "hypothetical motives" that are circulated.
These books are just some good basic introductions to the twin questions
of "Who did it?" and "What was the prime motive for doing
it?" and even the further related issue of "What was definitely
not the prime motive?"
-
-
- Addendum
-
- One of the more specialized mysteries which surrounds
the JFK assassination is the document frequently attributed to General
Lyman Lemnitzer, known as the "Northwoods Document." This purported
document raises several questions when looked at carefully. The document
has been purported to show that Lemnitzer was a such a raving mad Cold
Warrior that he proposed a major attack against Castro which JFK rejected
and that this explains the assassination of JFK and his replacement by
LBJ.
-
- Yet critical inquiry of the JFK assassination that has
been followed with up some investigation about the Johnson Administration
and Cuba, has generally yielded a conclusion that the JFK assassination
helped Castro. Warren Hinckle and William Turner, Deadly Secrets: The
CIA-MAFIA War Against Castro and the Assassination of J.F.K., and Gus Russo,
Live By the Sword: The Castro Against Castro and the Death of JFK, are
both pertinent here. The first source, Hinckle and Turner, leans towards
the 'mistake by right-wing extremists' approach, with the comment that
"The authors believe both Kennedy brothers were men of murderous determination
and would not have left Vietnam, or Cuba, alone -- but if one takes the
revisionists at the best of their argument, Kennedy was running two tracks
on Vietnam, and his assassins killed him because they thought he would
pull out." Russo leans towards the 'lone assassin' theory, with strong
hints that "Far better at the game of deniability than the Kennedys,
Castro had little to lose, and everything to gain by pushing Oswald's buttons,
by telling him of the American attempts on his life and his government,
by merely suggesting through underlings that Cuba's leader would appreciate
his efforts."
-
- One has to ask rationally, if the JFK assassination did
serve (even inadvertantly, without subscribing yet to any special assassination
theory) the purpose of helping Castro, then what exactly was the purpose
of the Northwoods Document and the promotion of LBJ. One point of connection
that clearly exists between Lemnitzer and LBJ is that "In later years,
Nitze -- along with his ally Lemnitzer -- would emerge as one of the Isareli
lobby's key contacts inside the defense establishment in official Washington."
(Michael Collins Piper, "U.S. Officials Proposed Staging Terror Attacks,"
American Free Press, October 8, 2001) This was certainly a significant
point of connection that seems mainly to have been noted by reviewers when
"In his new book Body of Secrets well-known journalist James Bamford
released details of formerly classified documents proving that two high-ranking
U.S. officials, Lyman Lemnitzer and Paul Nitze (hard-line supporters of
Israel) once proposed staging terrorist attacks against Americans, blaming
the attacks on Fidel Castro and sparking a U.S. war of retaliation."
(Michael Collins Piper, "Will Mainstream Censor These 'Delicate'
Revelations?," American Free Press, April 2, 2002)
-
- If it is true that Lemnitzer and Nitze were going off
the deep-end in an anti-Castro furor before LBJ, a renowned friend of Israel,
made it the Oval Office, then one should at least wish to inquire what
endowed their mental state with such a healthy cooling down in the face
of a President whose ascendency benefited Castro. At the very least, one
is obligated to take a closer look at the Northwoods Document itself, in
the face of such a rush to enlightenment. What exactly is it?
-
- The sharpest questions raised as to its nature have been
from Carol Valentine ("Operation Northwoods: The Counterfeit,"
Curator, Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum, October 2001). Valentine notes
the British idiom of the passage "The pasengers could be a group of
college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common
interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight." The main
point which needs to be additionally stressed is that differences of idiom
counted for much more on March 13, 1962, (the asserted date of the Northwoods
Document) than they do today. The process of global-merging of the world
economy has made it difficult for one to measure the significance of such
idiomatic differences in 1962 based on speech today. This has some positive
sides, but the investigator is required to better recall the idiom of yesteryear
when looking at purported historical documents.
-
- Since "James Bamford first penetrated the wall of
silence surrounding the NSA in 1982," it does stretch credibility
to assume that an unrequested 'penetration' happened again in a simple
interviewing style years later. Here one is obligated to ask, 'what exactly
was the motive for putting out another NSA-sponsored book, shortly before
911, which trumpets Pentagon hostility towards JFK and Cuba, and hints
at something like 911?" Before we jump into the 'idle coincidence'
theory, one must note that this was hardly the only 'idle coincidence'
that occurred just around the time of 911. The Lone Gunmen episode was
only one of many other 'idle coincidences' of that time.
-
- Perhaps more immediately pertinent in relation to the
Northwoods Document itself is the question 'assuming that this really does
come from a genuine document of 1962 vintage, what exactly was the real
motive behind it?' The question of idiomatic differences would only further
underscore the fact that if this really is a document from that era, then
it must have been made much more 'on the sly' than has even been noted
(something like in the manner of Laurie Mylroie's scripting of 'intelligence
documents' for JINSA, which then supercede a standard CIA report when passing
to the Oval Office). Clearly people like Mylroie and JINSA did not then
have special connections that were anything like what is available today.
Yet, again, we are confronted with this sharp resurgence in mental health
that Lemnitzer and Nitze experienced after LBJ had put into effect a temporary
break against further attempts to assassinate Castro, a break which stayed
in effect until Nixon.
-
- On the matter of LBJ putting a halt against further hit
attempts on Castro, one should consider the explanation offered by Russo
that Johnson was put in a position where "If he had required the FBI,
the CIA, and the Warren Commission to meticulously investigate the possible
anti-U.S. reasons that motivated Oswald to act, the Warren Commission might
well have turned up convincing evidence that Oswald acted to stop a coming
invasion of Cuba, and continued assassination attempts on Castro, which
Oswald had stumbled upon in New Orleans. Had he publicly recited just some
of the evidence of Oswald as a Castroite, Lyndon Johnson might have been
forced to wage a war of retaliation against Cuba. The cycle of violence
might have continued, and grown exponentially." This explanation
of LBJ's personal actions deserves more credibility than is usually given
to it by many JFK assassination researchers. Although it certainly is
warranted to recall the strong reputation which LBJ had as a supporter
of Israel, the question of 'did he know?' is much more obscure. The very
first flag (generally viewed today by researchers as false) planted after
the 'lone nut' thesis was the 'Havana-Moscow conspiracy' thesis. It would
have been difficult to seriously begin investigating the assassination
without wading through the 'Havana-Moscow conspiracy' thesis.
-
- It would seem clear enough though, as Bamford and ABC
note, that "the documents came to light ... in part because of the
1992 Oliver Stone film, 'JFK,' which examined the possibility of a conspiracy
behind the assassination of President Kennedy." Oliver Stone's Permindex
film did much to steer conversation about the JFK assassination towards
the false flag of 'JFK was on the verge of ending the Cold War and bringing
peace on earth.' Now the Northwoods Document supplements it quite nicely,
and steers suspicion from the NSA towards the Pentagon shortly before the
Pentagon is bombed. The amazing coincidences of life? Perhaps, but, at
least, one might almost feel comforted that the mental health of Lemnitzer
and Nitze rose with the budget of the Israeli lobby. Yet another of those
'amazing coincidences' which seem to surround anything linked with 911.
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