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FTR #1210 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Introducing the expansion of American experience with Chiang and his Kuomintang fascists into U.S. Cold War policy in Asia, we present Sterling Seagrave’s rumination about Stanley Hornbeck, a State Department flack who became: “. . . . the doyen of State’s Far Eastern Division. . . .”
Hornbeck “ . . . . had only the most abbreviated and stilted knowledge of China, and had been out of touch personally for many years. . . . He withheld cables from the Secretary of State that were critical of Chiang, and once stated that ‘the United States Far Eastern policy is like a train running on a railroad track. It has been clearly laid out and where it is going is plain to all.’ It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whistle stops along the way at Peking, Quemoy, Matsu, and the Yalu River. . . .”
In numerous programs over the decades, we have documented the fact that President Kennedy’s assassination was a decisive event in the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
As laid out in NSAM #263 (crafted in October of 1963), JFK had decided to pull all U.S. forces out of Vietnam by Christmas of 1965. Two days after his assassination, the Sunday on which Ruby slew Oswald, Kennedy’s withdrawal program was canceled and the escalation policy that became manifest was put into effect, codified in NSAM 273.
This is discussed, in–among other programs–FTR#978, as well as numerous programs in our landmark series of interviews with Jim DiEugenio.
The Zapruder Film, which disproves the Oswald cover story, was purchased by Time Inc. and handled by Life Magazine, placing this crucial bit of evidence in the domain of Henry Luce, a primary promoter of Chiang Kai-shek and Mme. Chiang, aka Mae-ling Soong.
Thus, America’s eyes and ears on Chiang Kai-shek were the same as America’s eyes and ears on the assassination of JFK, which threatened to change the direction on which the railway line described by Stanley Hornbeck was headed.
The Assassination Records Review Board accessed the perspective of a CIA photographic expert, who opined that the Zapruder Film had been tampered with.
He viewed the film and saw what he believed was JFK reacting to between six and eight different shots, from at least three directions.
Life’s publisher was C.D. Jackson, a longtime intelligence and psychological warfare asset. He largely oversaw the Luce publishing outlet’s handling of the film.
During the course of the Cold War, Henry Luce had become “ . . . . a key CIA media asset.”
C.D. Jackson “ . . . . who had been in charge of Life since 1960 . . . . was no ordinary publisher. . . . Jackson had been a specialist in psychological warfare for the government . . . and was an expert in Cold War propaganda . . . .”
The magazine deliberately structured its publishing of still frames from the film to mislead a naive observer about the information contained in the film.
Life also published a cover photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald that had obviously been doctored, with the shadows in the photograph going in different directions!
Numerous eyewitnesses to the killing gave testimony to the effect that, at one point, the motorcade actually came to a complete halt, giving the snipers a stationary target at which to fire.
Among those who testified to that effect were Dearie Cabell, the wife of Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas. Cabell’s brother, General C.P. Cabell, had been a Deputy Director of the CIA, and was fired by JFK for lying to him about the Bay of Pigs invasion.
(Another of those fired was Allen Dulles, who served on the Warren Commission.)
President Biden continued the suspicious handling of JFK evidence by further delaying release of information about the murder.
The notion that the documents could compromise military, intelligence community or law enforcement methodology at this stage of the investigation strains credibility.
The JFK assassination–the key event to keeping American Far Eastern Policy traveling the straight railroad line described by Stanley Hornbeck–was also a central event in the career of Mort Sahl, the brilliant stand-up comedian and one of the inspirations for Mr. Emory’s life’s work.
“. . . . Mr. Sahl worked on radio and on local television in Los Angeles, but he didn’t help his cause with what some felt was on obsession with the Kennedy assassination. His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission report [published by The New York Times—D.E.]. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin, and who accused a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, of conspiring to murder the president. No convincing evidence secret or otherwise, was produced at Mr. Shaw’s trial, and the jury acquitted him in less than an hour.
‘I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,’ Mr. Sahl wrote in ‘Heartland,’ a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, ‘and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company. . . . I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad company. I don’t think that Garrison is bad company. I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are not my comrades The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.’ He concluded, ‘I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice.’ . . . .”
A consummately important study of Vietnam War crimes was authored by Nick Turse. A review by the U.S. Naval Institute can be taken as an advisory in this regard.
Mr. Turse performs the remarkable feat of unsparingly searing presentation of the war crimes that were standard operating procedure for much of the American (and allied) forces in Vietnam by tracing the foundation of those crimes from the technocratic approach to military strategy pursued by the Pentagon and Robert McNamara, through the re-socialization and re-programming of young, often teen-aged, recruits to turn them into reflexive killers, chronicling the massive firepower available to U.S. forces, and documenting the recalcitrant attitude of the officer corps and General Staff, who were unwilling to countenance the professional and ideological damage that would result from presentation and adjudication of the truth.
In addition, Mr. Turse–while avoiding self-righteous posturing–highlights the doctrinaire racism of many U.S. combatants, who committed war crimes behind the “MGR”–the “Mere Gook Rule.”
“ ‘An important addition to Vietnam war studies . . . . Turse’s study is not anti-veteran, anti-military, or anti-American. It does not allege that the majority of U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam committed crimes. . . .” Proceedings (U.S. Naval Institute).
Nick Turse traces the strategic use of overwhelming firepower and de facto countenancing of civilian casualties owes much to the tactical approach of Japanese forces during World War II in China: “ . . . . These efforts were commonly known as ‘pacification,’ but their true aim was to depopulate the contested countryside. ‘The people are like water and the army is like fish.’ Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist revolution, had famously written. American planners grasped his dictum, and also studied the ‘kill-all, burn-all, loot-all’ scorched earth campaigns that the Japanese army launched in rural China during the 1930s and early 1940s for lessons on how to drain the ‘sea.’ Not surprisingly the idea of forcing peasants out of their villages was embraced by civilian pacification officials and military officers alike. . . .”
Exemplifying the brutal reality of the crimes committed by G.I.‘s in Vietnam is the “double veteran” manifestation. Before killing them and adding them to the body count of “enemies” killed, GI’s raped female “guerillas.”
1. Introducing the expansion of American experience with Chiang and his Kuomintang fascists into U.S. Cold War policy in Asia, we present Sterling Seagrave’s rumination about Stanley Hornbeck, a State Department flack who became: “. . . . the doyen of State’s Far Eastern Division. . . .”
Hornbeck “ . . . . had only the most abbreviated and stilted knowledge of China, and had been out of touch personally for many years. . . . He withheld cables from the Secretary of State that were critical of Chiang, and once stated that ‘the United States Far Eastern policy is like a train running on a railroad track. It has been clearly laid out and where it is going is plain to all.’ It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whistle stops along the way at Peking, Quemoy, Matsu, and the Yalu River. . . .”
2. The Zapruder Film, which disproves the Oswald cover story, was purchased by Time Inc. and handled by Life Magazine, placing this crucial bit of evidence in the domain of Henry Luce, a primary promoter of Chiang Kai-shek and Mme. Chiang, aka Mae-ling Soong.
The Assassination Records Review Board accessed the perspective of a CIA photographic expert, who opined that the Zapruder Film had been tampered with.
He viewed the film and saw what he believed was JFK reacting to between six and eight different shots, from at least three directions.
3. Life’s publisher was C.D. Jackson, a longtime intelligence and psychological warfare asset. He largely oversaw the Luce publishing outlet’s handling of the film.
During the course of the Cold War, Henry Luce had become “ . . . . a key CIA media asset.”
C.D. Jackson “ . . . . who had been in charge of Life since 1960 . . . . was no ordinary publisher. . . . Jackson had been a specialist in psychological warfare for the government . . . and was an expert in Cold War propaganda . . . .”
The magazine deliberately structured its publishing of still frames from the film to mislead a naive observer about the information contained in the film.
Life also published a cover photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald that had obviously been doctored, with the shadows in the photograph going in different directions!
4a. Numerous eyewitnesses to the killing gave testimony to the effect that, at one point, the motorcade actually came to a complete halt, giving the snipers a stationary target at which to fire.
Among those who testified to that effect were Dearie Cabell, the wife of Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas. Cabell’s brother, General C.P. Cabell, had been a Deputy Director of the CIA, and was fired by JFK for lying to him about the Bay of Pigs invasion.
(Another of those fired was Allen Dulles, who served on the Warren Commission.)
4b. President Biden continued the suspicious handling of JFK evidence by further delaying release of information about the murder.
The notion that the documents could compromise military, intelligence community or law enforcement methodology at this stage of the investigation strains credibility.
President Joe Biden ordered yet another delay in the release of secret files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy yet to see the light of day more than 50 years after his death.
A White House memo, signed by Biden, said “[t]emporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”
The order comes in response to the archivist of the United States recommending the president “temporarily certify the continued withholding of all of the information certified in 2018” and “direct two public releases of the information that has” ultimately “been determined to be appropriate for release to the public,” with one interim release on Dec. 15 and one more comprehensive release in late 2022, according to the memo.
Former President Donald Trump ordered in 2018 that documentation still under wraps stay redacted for national security reasons, with a deadline of Oct. 26, 2021. His administration said the decision was made at the behest of the intelligence community.
This time around, delays associated with the coronavirus pandemic were to blame for the recommendation to put off the release.
David Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, reported “unfortunately, the pandemic has had a significant impact on the agencies” and National Archives and Records Administration, the White House memo said.
NARA “require[s] additional time to engage with the agencies and to conduct research within the larger collection to maximize the amount of information released,” added the memo, which also said the archivist noted that “making these decisions is a matter that requires a professional, scholarly, and orderly process; not decisions or releases made in haste.”
Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. Oswald was arrested and charged with the killings of Kennedy and Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. The 24-year-old denied shooting Kennedy, claiming he was a “patsy,” before he was shot dead soon after on national television by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
According to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which was signed into law by former President George H.W. Bush in an attempt to minimize conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s death, the Congress declared, “all Government records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy ... should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.”
Congress also found at the time that “most of the records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.”
Tens of thousands of the JFK assassination documents, with varying levels of redactions, have already been released.
Among the information that has not been made public are highly sensitive details about U.S. operations against Cuba in 1963, according to the Intercept. There are also unseen passages about surveillance techniques that detected Oswald’s visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City weeks before Kennedy’s assassination.
“Since the 1990s, more than 250,000 records concerning President Kennedy’s assassination — more than 90 percent of NARA’s collection — have been released in full to the public. Only a small fraction of the records contains any remaining redactions,” the memo said.
A lot of the information that has been made available to the public is not accessible online. Under the order Friday, Biden instructed the archivist to issue a plan for the digitization of the records by Dec. 15.
4c. The JFK assassination–the key event to keeping American Far Eastern Policy traveling the straight railroad line described by Stanley Hornbeck–was also a central event in the career of Mort Sahl, the brilliant stand-up comedian and one of the inspirations for Mr. Emory’s life’s work.
. . . . Mr. Sahl worked on radio and on local television in Los Angeles, but he didn’t help his cause with what some felt was on obsession with the Kennedy assassination. His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission report [published by The New York Times—D.E.]. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin, and who accused a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, of conspiring to murder the president. No convincing evidence secret or otherwise, was produced at Mr. Shaw’s trial, and the jury acquitted him in less than an hour.
“I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,” Mr. Sahl wrote in “Heartland,” a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company. . . . I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad company. I don’t think that Garrison is bad company. I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are not my comrades The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.” He concluded, “I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice.” . . . .
5a. A consummately important study of Vietnam War crimes was authored by Nick Turse. A review by the U.S. Naval Institute can be taken as an advisory in this regard.
Mr. Turse performs the remarkable feat of unsparingly searing presentation of the war crimes that were standard operating procedure for much of the American (and allied) forces in Vietnam by tracing the foundation of those crimes from the technocratic approach to military strategy pursued by the Pentagon and Robert McNamara, through the re-socialization and re-programming of young, often teen-aged, recruits to turn them into reflexive killers, chronicling the massive firepower available to U.S. forces, and documenting the recalcitrant attitude of the officer corps and General Staff, who were unwilling to countenance the professional and ideological damage that would result from presentation and adjudication of the truth.
In addition, Mr. Turse–while avoiding self-righteous posturing–highlights the doctrinaire racism of many U.S. combatants, who committed war crimes behind the “MGR”–the “Mere Gook Rule.”
“ ‘An important addition to Vietnam war studies . . . . Turse’s study is not anti-veteran, anti-military, or anti-American. It does not allege that the majority of U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam committed crimes. . . .” Proceedings (U.S. Naval Institute).
Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse; Copyright 2013 by Nick Turse; Picador [Henry Holt]; ISBN 978–1‑250–04506‑5.
5b. Nick Turse traces the strategic use of overwhelming firepower and de facto countenancing of civilian casualties owes much to the tactical approach of Japanese forces during World War II in China: “ . . . . These efforts were commonly known as ‘pacification,’ but their true aim was to depopulate the contested countryside. ‘The people are like water and the army is like fish.’ Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist revolution, had famously written. American planners grasped his dictum, and also studied the ‘kill-all, burn-all, loot-all’ scorched earth campaigns that the Japanese army launched in rural China during the 1930s and early 1940s for lessons on how to drain the ‘sea.’ Not surprisingly the idea of forcing peasants out of their villages was embraced by civilian pacification officials and military officers alike. . . .”
Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse; Copyright 2013 by Nick Turse; Picador [Henry Holt]; ISBN 978–1‑250–04506‑5; p. 63.
6. Exemplifying the brutal reality of the crimes committed by G.I.‘s in Vietnam is the “double veteran” manifestation. Before killing them and adding them to the body count of “enemies” killed, GI’s raped female “guerillas.”
Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse; Copyright 2013 by Nick Turse; Picador [Henry Holt]; ISBN 978–1‑250–04506‑5; pp. 170–171.
On bullet-point “4c.” in the above essay, Mr. Emory, you state the following, “...The JFK assassination–the key event to keeping American Far Eastern Policy traveling the straight railroad line...”
It should never be downplayed that future Director of Central Intelligence, George Herbert Walker Bush, was in the Dallas-Fort Worth area on 22 November 1963 with the former Chief of the Far East division of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Plans:
Alfred Conrad Ulmer Jr.
In that same vain, the unofficial commander of the guerilla-assassination team “Operation 40,” Richard Milhous Nixon, was also in the Dallas-Fort Worth area on 22 November 1963 meeting with the senior instigator of “Project FUBELT/Track II” coup plots against Salvador Allende:
Donald Mcintosh Kendall
Let that sink in for a moment, the chief of all CIA covert action in the Pacific—Al Ulmer—and the man whole bankrolled the bloodthirsty fascist military intelligence death-squad called “Plan Cóndor”—Don Kendall—were both meeting with men central to the assassination efforts against Prime Minister Castro, “Dick” Nixon & “Poppy” Bush (both future criminal transient occupiers of the office of United States President who waged illegal covert wars both abroad & domestically)?!
Ludicious to call that a coincidence, no?