I have posted extensively on this topic and have come to a clear understanding that Oswald was the go to patsy needed to shield the perpetrators from too enthusiastic police attention. That has tended to let me largely ignore the actual Oswald story itself except to note that he was most certainly a CIA asset with all the intricacy that entails.
The actual assassination was pulled off by drawing the motorcade into a kill box that had at least three sniper teams set up. The chancy location but the best location was head on behind the so called grassy knoll. As it was, that worked best. He likely would have survived the rest.
This item fills in a lot more detail on Oswald and the actual background of events. JFK's great misfortune was that he was a career politician first and foremost with scant street sense. His father had been felled by a stroke at the very beginning of his presidency and was in no position to ever properly advise on that. JFK understood that much needed to change, but then made speeches about it rather than act first and explain last.
I so not seeing Trump ever making that mistake.
Figuring Out The Kennedy Assassination, Part 1
August 11, 2017
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/08/jacob-hornberger/figuring-kennedy-assassination/
The Washington Post and Politico recently published two articles entitled “President Trump, Give Us the Full Story on the JFK Assassination” and “How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK’s Murder” by historians Larry J. Sabato and Phillip Shenon.
The thrust of the articles was to call on Trump to release all of the still-secret records relating to the JFK assassination belonging to the CIA and other federal agencies that the National Archives is required by law to release by October. In the Post article, the authors state that they have received reliable information that at least two federal agencies are going to try to persuade Trump to block the release of some of the records. In my opinion, it is a virtual certainty that the CIA is one of those two agencies.
Sabato and Shenon are correct in arguing that Trump should reject any such request. The notion that the release of records that are more than half-a-century old will threaten “national security” — however that undefined term is defined — is manifestly ludicrous.
But then Sabato and Shenon go astray. Like so many others since the JFK assassination, they try to figure out what the motive of the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was. In the Politico article, they posit that maybe — just maybe—Oswald somehow discovered the super-secret assassination attempts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro by the CIA and the Mafia, which had entered into an assassination partnership to kill Castro. Their thesis is that Oswald, as a supposed communist, loved and revered Castro, and therefore decided to retaliate by assassinating Kennedy.
There is a big problem, however, with that thesis, one that is inconsistent with the thesis. Like many other writers on the JFK assassination writers, the authors simply do not confront that inconsistency, perhaps thinking that if they just act like it isn’t there, their thesis might somehow, in isolation, make sense to people.
June 1963. That was when President Kennedy made his famous Peace Speech at American University. In that speech, he threw down the gauntlet to the CIA, Pentagon, military-industrial complex, and the rest of the U.S. national-security establishment by announcing that he was ending the Cold War against Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union and was reaching out to the communist world in a spirit of mutual coexistence, peace, and friendship.
The speech was a culmination of a vicious war that had been waged between JFK and his brother Bobby against the CIA ever since the CIA’s disastrous plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The war had expanded to the Pentagon through Operation Northwoods, the infamous plan unanimously approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that called for a fraudulent pretext to invade Cuba, which the president nixed. It continued through the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which the military establishment considered the worst defeat in U.S. history and akin to Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler at Munich.
The war between Kennedy and the CIA-Pentagon bureaucrats had become so vicious that the president didn’t even pay them the courtesy of advising them of what he planned to announce in his Peace Speech at American University.
Kennedy didn’t stop there. Over the vehement objections of his national-security establishment, he entered into a nuclear-test ban treaty with the Soviets. He then ordered the Pentagon to begin a partial withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and told aides he would order a full pullout after winning the 1964 presidential election.
It is impossible to overstate the enormity of what Kennedy was doing and the rage and animosity it generated. To get a better sense of the magnitude of the change he was proposing and the enemies he was inciting within the national-security establishment, I recommend FFF’s ebook JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board, the agency that was responsible for bringing all those records to the National Archives that are set to be released in October.
As Horne details, Kennedy was changing the direction that the nation had followed since the end of World War II and which it ended up following for another 25 years after Kennedy’s assassination. From 1945 to 1990, the United States was consumed with the gigantic threat that communism and the Soviet Union supposedly posed to the United States, a threat that would obviously guarantee ever-growing power and budgets for the national-security establishment, including its army of contractors, for decades to come.
The change that Kennedy was implementing would have put the quietus to the Cold War and the U.S. government’s anti-communist crusade. In the process, it also threatened the ever-growing power and stream of income of the entire national-security establishment.
For their part, the bureaucrats within the national-security establishment were convinced that Kennedy’s actions would result in America falling under communist rule — that is, that Kennedy’s actions posed a grave threat to “national security.” After all, keep in mind that what Kennedy was doing — reaching out to the Soviet Union and Cuba in a spirit of peace and friendship — was what got Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Castro in Cuba, and Allende in Chile targeted for assassination and regime change at the hands of the CIA and Pentagon.
Now, here’s where common sense, reason, and logic come into play.
What does the official story say about Lee Harvey Oswald? It holds that he was a devout, committed communist, right? It holds that he loved and revered Cuban president Fidel Castro, right?
Well, then, here’s the $64,000 question, the one that Sabato and Shenon simply do not address, perhaps because it doesn’t fit within the paradigm on motive that they posit in their article: If Oswald was the devout, committed communist they say he was and if he loved and revered Fidel Castro, then why kill Kennedy? Kennedy was the president who was making peace with Russia and the Cuba, both of which had responded positively to Kennedy’s plans to end the Cold War.
In the process, Kennedy was also the one who was waging war against the agency that was trying to assassinate Castro (and also, through his brother Bobby, who was the U.S. Attorney General, waging war against the CIA’s partner, the Mafia). Ironically, on the very day that Kennedy was assassinated, he had an emissary personally meeting with Castro about ending the Cold War while, at the same time, the CIA was employing an assassin in Paris to kill Castro.
So, why would Oswald, the supposed devout communist, want to kill Kennedy when it was Kennedy who was initiating a dramatic turn toward peace, friendship, and mutual coexistence with the communist world, one that would obviously bring an end to the CIA’s assassination attempts against Castro and, for that matter, other people whose only crime was believing in socialism or communism? In fact, why assassinate Kennedy given that he would be replaced by a vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, whose mindset mirrored that of the national-security establishment that Kennedy was waging war against? Don’t forget, after all, that Johnson put a quick end to Kennedy’s plan to end the Cold War and soon began ramping up the Vietnam War, which ended up killing more than 58,000 American men and millions of Vietnamese people.
In trying to come up with a motive for Oswald, Sabato and Shenon, of course, are not alone. Ever since the Kennedy assassination, people have tried to come up with a motive for Oswald. None of them, including the Warren Commission, has been successful. That’s because the question they ask — What motivated Oswald to kill Kennedy?— is fatally flawed, as we will see in Part 2 of this essay.
[ Oswald quacked like a patsy from top to bottom in the whole narrative and this made accepting the official story line impossible - arclein ]
FIGURING OUT THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION, PART 2
by
The official story of the Kennedy assassination is that he was killed by a former U.S. Marine, lone-nut, communist assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald.
The big problem, however, is that the official story has never comported with much of the circumstantial evidence in the case nor with common sense, reason, and logic. That’s why no one has ever been able to come up with a credible motive for Oswald to kill Kennedy.
As I pointed out in Part 1, by the time he was assassinated Kennedy was ending the Cold War against the communist world and had announced his intention for America to live in peace, friendship, and mutual coexistence with the Soviet Union, especially Russia, Cuba, and the rest of the communist world.
If Oswald had, in fact, been an genuine communist, that would have made him ecstatic. Why kill Kennedy knowing that he would be replaced by Johnson, who vehemently disagreed with JFK’s change of direction and, instead, was on the same page as the Pentagon and the CIA?
Indeed, it wasn’t communists who hated Kennedy for what he was doing. It was instead the U.S. national-security establishment, which believed that Kennedy’s actions constituted a grave threat to national security.
In 1947, the federal government had been converted from a limited-government republic into a national-security state. The reason? To combat communists, communism, and the Soviet Union, especially Russia.
In the late 1940s, the U.S. government prosecuted officials in the U.S. Communist Party for belonging to an organization that embraced communist literature, literature that called for the violent overthrow of capitalism. The Smith Act prosecutions were big-time news in the 1940s and early 1950s. There is no way that any American would have been unaware of them.
And then there was the Korean War in the early 1950s, where the U.S. government intervened in a foreign civil war, without even the semblance of the congressional declaration of war required by the U.S. Constitution. In that “police action,” as U.S. officials called it, U.S. forces killed and injured millions of North Koreans, not only by carpet-bombing the entire country, including rural villages, but also by illegally using germ warfare. The rationale? The same rationale that would be relied on later to justify the massive killing of people in Vietnam’s civil war — that they were all nothing but “commies, Reds, and gooks.”
Today the Korean War is known as the Forgotten War. But it wasn’t forgotten back in the mid-1950s. Everyone knew about it. And everyone knew that the U.S. Marine Corps had killed a lot of “commies, Reds, and gooks” during the conflict.
Oswald was studying socialism and communism as a teenager. That was during the 1950s. By the time he was studying communism and socialism, the U.S. national-security establishment’s anti-communist crusade had been in full swing for years. The crusade was already part of the national psyche, especially given the Korean War and the persecution and criminal prosecution of suspected communists.
The obvious question arises: Why would a genuine communist want to join an organization — the U.S. Marine Corps — that had just killed and injured millions of communists in Korea? Why would he join a government that was persecuting, prosecuting, and jailing communists here in the United States? Why would he join an organization by which he could be ordered to go anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice and kill more “commies, Reds, and gooks,” such as Vietnam, Laos, or Berlin? Does that make any sense at all?
So, how does one explain this conundrum? How does one explain why Oswald, a supposed communist, joined the Marine Corps, an organization devoted to killing communists?
There is an easy explanation — one, however, that is not consistent with the official story.
In the 1950s, there was a famous television series called I Led Three Lives, which is based on a book of the same name by a man named Herbert Philbrick. The series revolved around an American man who posed as a communist but who was actually a FBI agent. The man’s job was to infiltrate communist cells that were supposedly operating here in the United States and secretly report their activities to the FBI.
It’s worth watching a couple of episodes of I Led Three Lives just to get a sense of what life was like here in the United States during the Cold War and the anti-communist crusade. You can access them on YouTube by searching for “I Led Three Lives.” The commies were supposedly everywhere — the State Department, the Army, Hollywood, the public schools, and other walks of life. The Russians were coming! They were coming to get us, take over the federal government, and turn America entirely Red.
Needless to say, the star of I Led Three Lives was portrayed as a heroic, courageous, and patriotic American. Risking his life every day at the hands of the communists, who might suddenly discover his secret identity, he was fighting to protect Americans from a communist takeover, fighting to keep America “free.”
For any teenage boy in the 1950s who had come to the realization that becoming Clark Kent and Superboy was beyond his reach, it was different with I Led Three Lives. Any American boy could grow up to become a G-Man and devote his life to ferreting out communists, prosecuting them, and jailing them, as U.S. officials were doing with members of the U.S. Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s.
As a PBS documentary entitled Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? pointed out, I Led Three Liveswas Lee Harvey Oswald’s favorite TV Show as a teenager.
Now things makes sense. Since this was his favorite television show, the teenage Oswald would naturally have begun fantasizing growing up to be like the hero of the show — a secret G-man who falsely portrayed himself as a communist in order to find and destroy the countless communist cells that were supposedly spreading across America.
The teenage Oswald would have realized that the job would necessarily involve learning everything he could about communism and socialism. After all, as you can see in the television series, any G-man who was falsely portraying himself as a communist to other communists would have to play his role convincingly. He would have to know communism as well as his enemies and be able to convince them that he too was a committed communist. To do that would require extensive study of communism and socialism.
Now it makes sense why Oswald would join the Marines, just as his older brother had. His joining the Marines demonstrated that like his hero in I Led Three Lives, Oswald hated communists as much as any other Marine. Moreover, he must have known that the Marines were where he would stand a good chance at being recruited to work for the FBI and maybe even the CIA.
In fact, take a look at the website of the CIA. See if it doesn’t point out the CIA looks to the U.S. military as a prime source for recruiting new agents. Clearly, the U.S. Marine Corps would rank near the top. Semper fidelis!
Soon after the Warren Commission got established, the chairman, Earl Warren, called a top-secret meeting of the committee. Its purpose? To address information that Warren had received that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy, was in actuality an intelligence agent, one who had been secretly working for the FBI and maybe even the CIA.
It would certainly explain how Oswald learned to be fluent in Russian while he was in the military.
It would also explain why he was never abused, insulted, prosecuted, or thrown out of the military for proclaiming he was a Marxist Marine while he was still on active duty, even though U.S. officials were carrying out their anti-communist crusade against suspected communists all across America, including within the U.S. military.
It would explain why the military discharged him early so that he could travel to Russia where he would supposedly defect.
It would explain why the FBI and the CIA never indicted him or even summoned him to appear before a federal grand jury after he returned to the United States after supposedly attempting to defect to the Soviet Union.
It would explain how Oswald got a job with a company in New Orleans that was owned by a right-wing, anti-communist businessman.
It would explain why Oswald printed the address of a former FBI agent as the return address on a pro-Cuba pamphlet he was distributing in New Orleans.
It would explain what Oswald was behaving like a communist in New Orleans, with nary a peep from U.S. officials.
It would explain why the person standing in line next to Oswald when he was in New Orleans getting a visa to travel to Mexico was a CIA agent.
It would explain Oswald’s trip to Mexico City prior to JFK’s assassination.
It would explain how Oswald got a job in a photography business in Dallas that developed highly classified documents for the U.S. government.
It would explain why Oswald was seen in the company of a CIA agent in Dallas.
After he was arrested, Oswald proclaimed his innocence and claimed that he was being framed for the assassination of the president. Many people have never given that possibility any consideration. The automatic assumption has been that Oswald was guilty because the pat evidence pointed toward guilt, evidence that was entirely consistent with a good frame-up. Thus, the only question over the years has been: Did Oswald act alone or in a conspiracy with others?
The problem is that when the question is framed like that, it leads to nothing but contradictions, inconsistencies, anomalies, mysteries, and conundrums that cause people to throw their hands up in despair. It’s also why we still have people like Larry Sabato and Philip Shenon trying to come up with some motive for Oswald more than 50 years after the assassination. Many people simply cannot accept the possibility or probability that Oswald was telling the truth — that he was, in fact, innocent and was being framed by the very people who actually did have a motive for assassinating the president — the same motive that drove them to target Mossadegh, Arbenz, Castro, Allende, and others for regime-change operations. They simply cannot accept that that an agency that specialized in protecting “national security” through assassination and cover-up in other parts of the world would actually do its job here in the United States when circumstances supposedly required it.
As I detail in my ebook The Kennedy Autopsy, there was clearly a cover-up involving the autopsy of the president. Today there is no reasonable question about that, especially given the extensive information in Douglas Horne’s five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.
For example, when the ARRB summoned former Navy photography official Saundra Spencer to testify in the 1990s, she said that the autopsy photographs in the official record were not the ones she developed on a top-secret, classified basis on the weekend of the assassination. The ones she developed, she testified, had a big hole in the back of Kennedy’s head, which connoted an exit wound, which implied a shot fired from the front. Her sworn testimony confirmed the statements of the Dallas physicians who confirmed that there was a huge exit-sized wound in the back of Kennedy’s head. Yet, the official photographs in the records show the back on Kennedy’s head to be intact.
Spencer’s testimony stands today. It was never contradicted by the Pentagon or the CIA. That means that the official autopsy photographs in the Kennedy case are fraudulent, which necessarily means that there was a cover-up. The question naturally arises: Who would they be covering up for on the very night of the assassination?
In 1953, in the run-up to the Guatemala regime-change operation, the CIA published a top-secret assassination manual that demonstrates that the agency had begun specializing in assassination early on. Equally important, the manual demonstrates that the CIA was also specializing in how to keep people from discovering its role in state-sponsored assassinations. By the time the 1960s rolled around, the Pentagon and the CIA were teaching Latin American military dictatorships that in the case of covert state-sponsored assassinations, a good strategy would be to blame the assassination on a communist. I wonder why they were so convinced that the blame-a-communist strategy would be successful in keeping people from discovering that a political assassination was state-sponsored.
Was Oswald in fact an U.S. intelligence agent whose secret portrayal as a communist was used to frame him for assassinating the president? As I show in my ebook Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, that’s the only thesis by which all the mysteries, anomalies, inconsistencies, and contradictions disappear. It’s the only thesis by which all the pieces of circumstantial evidence fall into place in the Kennedy assassination.
The problem is that all too many Americans find it too frightening to go down that road. While they now accept the U.S. regime-change operations in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Congo, and others, which took place before, during, and after the Kennedy assassination, unfortunately they still cannot bring themselves to see that the assassination of President Kennedy is as much a part of our nation’s national-security heritage as those other regime-change operations are.
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