Spitfire List | Vietnam

Project Paperclip and Agent Orange

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ January 17, 2022 ⋅ Post a comment

The ravages of the Agent Orange defoliant used in Southeast Asia are well known. What has not received as much publicity is the documented fact that the poison was developed by Friedrich “Fritz” Hoffman, one of the Third Reich alumni brought to the U.S. under Project [or “Operation”] Paperclip. “. . . . Under the umbrella of the CIA’s Security Research Services, [CIA organization] Morwede was among the front organizations protecting Nazi chemists transported to the US, including Dr. Friedrich “Fritz” Hoffman, a major beneficiary of the largesse of the Paperclip pipeline. In the late ‘50s, Hoffmann’s work for the CIA and Fort Detrick included development of lethal chemical agents to be used as weapons in Vietnam, proof that the dishonorable was just over the horizon when John Kennedy took office. One of these weapons, the horrific and now-infamous Agent Orange, was authorized for use in Vietnam in November 1961 . . . .” WFMU-FM is podcasting For The Record–You can subscribe to the podcast HERE. Mr. Emory emphatically recommends that listeners/readers get the 32GB flash drive containing all of Mr. Emory’s 43 years on the air, plus a library of old anti-fascist books on easy-to-download PDF files.

FTR#1221 War Games, Part 3 (Rittenhouse Nation)

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ January 14, 2022 ⋅ Post a comment

In these programs, we continue our discussion of Nick Turse’s 2008 tome The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.

Writing in his novel Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller wrote: ” . . . . America is the very incarnation of Doom. And she will lead the rest of the world into the Bottomless Pit. . . .” (The quote was included in his Forgive My Grief books by pioneering JFK assassination researcher Penn Jones.

Epitomizing Miller’s observation is what Mr. Emory terms the resonant synthesis of video games and military training and training technology:

“. . . . Certainly, the day is not far off when most potential U.S. troops will have grown up playing commercial video games that were created by the military as training simulators; will be recruited, at least in part, through video games; will be tested, post-enlistment, on advanced video game systems; will be trained using simulators, which will later be turned into video games, or on reconfigured versions of the very same games used to recruit them or that they played kids; will be taught to pilot vehicles using devices resembling commercial video game controllers; and then, after a long day of real-life war-gaming head back to their quarters to kick back and play the latest PlayStation or Xbox games created with or sponsored by their own, or another, branch of the armed forces.

More and more toys are now poised to become clandestine combat teaching tools, and more and more simulators are destined to be tomorrow’s toys. And what of America’s children and young adults in all this? How will they be affected by the dazzling set of military training devices now landing in their living rooms and on their PCs, produced by video game giants under the watchful eyes of the Pentagon? After all, what these games offer is less a matter of simple military indoctrination and more like a near immersion in a virtual world of war, where armed conflict is not the last, but the first—and indeed the only—resort. . . .”

A concrete example of that “resonant synthesis” is the battle of 73 Easting:

“. . . . Just days into the ground combat portion of the Gulf War, the Battle of 73 Easting pitted American armored vehicles against a much larger Iraqi tank force. The U.S. troops, who had trained using the SIMNET system, routed the Iraqis. Within days, the military began turning the actual battle into a digital simulation for use with SIMNET. Intensive debriefing sessions with 150 veterans of the battle were undertaken. Then DARPA personnel went out onto the battlefield with the veterans, surveying tank tracks and burned-out Iraqi vehicles, as the veterans walked them through each individual segment of the clash. Additionally, radio communications, satellite photos, and ‘black boxes’ from U.S. tanks were used to gather even more details. Nine months after the actual combat took place, a digital recreation of the Battle of 73 Easting was premiered for high-ranking military personnel. Here was the culmination of Thorpe’s efforts to create a networked system that would allow troops to train for future wars using the new technology combined with accurate historical data. . . .”

Placing Henry Miller’s quote into an ironically-relevant context, a popular video game “Doom” quickly was adapted to Martine Corps training purposes:

“. . . . In late 1993, with the green glow of Gulf War victory already fading, id Software introduced the video game Doom. Gamers soon began modifying shareware copies of this ultraviolent, ultrapopular first person shooter, prompting id to release editing software the next year. The ability to customize Doom caught the attention of members of the Marine Corps Modeling and Simulation Management Office who had been tasked by the corps’ Commandant Charles Krulak with utilizing “‘computer (PC)-based war games”‘to help the marines ‘develop decision making skills, particularly when live training time and opportunities are limited.’

“Acting on Krulak’s directive, the marines’ modeling crew nixed Doom’s fantasy weapons and labyrinthine locale and, in three months’ time, developed Marine Doom, a game that included only actual Marine Corps weaponry and realistic environments. Krulak liked what he saw and, in 1997, approved the game. . . .”

Next, Turse discusses Pentagon plans to operate in urban slums in the Third World. Mr. Emory notes that many combat veterans of this country’s long counter-insurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are joining the increasingly militarized police forces in this country.

Pentagon strategy as discussed here by Turse may, eventually be realized, to an extent, in the U.S., particularly in the event of an economic collapse.

More about Pentagon plans for urban warfare in slums, ostensibly in the developing world:

” . . . . As both the high-tech programs and the proliferating training facilities suggest, the foreign slum city is slated to become the bloody battlespace of the future. . . . For example, the U.S. Navy/Marine Corps launched a program seeking to develop algorithms to predict the criminality of a given building or neighborhood. The project titled Finding Repetitive Crime Supporting Structures, defines cities as nothing more than a collection of ‘urban clutter [that] affords considerable concealment for the actors that we must capture.’ The ‘hostile behavior bad actors,’ as the program terms them, are defined not just as ‘terrorists,’ today’s favorite catch-all bogeymen, but as a panoply of nightmare archetypes: ‘insurgents, serial killers, drug dealers, etc.’. . .”

Program Highlights Include: Discussion of Colonel Dave Grossman’s book On Killing against the background of the resonant synthesis of video games and military training; analysis of the use of gaming apps by Nazi elements to celebrate school shootings and encourage them; discussion of school shooter Nikolas Cruz of Parkland high and his Nazi, white supremacist and Trumpian influence; discussion of alt-right use of websites catering to people suffering from depression for recruiting purposes.

FTR#1219 and FTR#1220 War Games, Part 1 and War Games, Part 2

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ December 31, 2021 ⋅ One comment

In these programs, we continue our discussion of Nick Turse’s 2008 tome The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.

In this program, we examine how the military exerts dominant influence over our entertainment activities and how that, in turn, both affects and bolsters the Pentagon.

We begin by “going to the movies.”

The synthesis of Hollywood and “The Complex” is summarized by Nick Turse in the passage below. It should be noted that the melding of Hollywood and the military is a foundation of the derivative synthesis of the military and the video-gaming industry–the focus of the bulk of these programs.

“. . . . As David Robb, the author of Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, observed: ‘Hollywood and the Pentagon have a collaboration that works well for both sides. Hollywood producers get what they want—access to billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware and equipment—tanks, jet fighters, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers—and the military gets what it wants—films that portray the military in a positive light; films that help the services in their recruiting efforts.’. . .”

Indeed, the very genesis of video games in derivative of the defense industry: ” . . . . In 1951, Ralph Baer, an engineer working for defense contractor Loral Electronics (today part of Lockheed Martin) on ‘computer components for Navy RADAR systems,’ dreamed up the idea of home video games, which he termed ‘interactive TV-based entertainment.’. . . .”

The Hollywood/Pentagon/gaming industry synthesis is epitomized by the Institute of Creative Technologies:

” . . . . The answer lies in Marina Del Rey, California, at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), a center within the University of Southern California (USC) system. There, in 1999, the military’s growing obsession with video games moved to a new level when Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera signed a five-year, $45-million contract with USC to create ICT, says the center’s Web site, ‘to build a partnership among the entertainment industry, army and academia with the goal of creating synthetic experiences so compelling that participants react as if they are real.’. . .”

The video game/Pentagon relationship has evolved into a fusion of the two: “. . . . The rest followed, leading to the current continuous military gaming/simulation loop where commercial video games are adopted as military training aids and military simulators are reengineered into civilian gaming money makers in all sorts of strange and confusing ways. . . .”

Author Turse looked ahead (in 2008) and foresaw a future that, to a disturbing extent, has become reality: ” . . . . Certainly, the day is not far off when most potential U.S. troops will have grown up playing commercial video games that were created by the military as training simulators; will be recruited, at least in part, through video games; will be tested, post-enlistment, on advanced video game systems; will be trained using simulators, which will later be turned into video games, or on reconfigured versions of the very same games used to recruit them or that they played kids; will be taught to pilot vehicles using devices resembling commercial video game controllers; and then, after a long day of real-life war-gaming head back to their quarters to kick back and play the latest PlayStation or Xbox games created with or sponsored by their own, or another, branch of the armed forces. . . .”

FTR#1211 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, Part 18

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ November 2, 2021 ⋅ Post a comment

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. . . .”

Next, we visit one of the stops on Hornbeck’s straight railway line:

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. . . .”

The accounts of many G.I.’s about war crimes appear to be largely representative of the conduct of U.S. forces: “ . . . . While we have only fragmentary evidence about the full extent of civilian suffering in South Vietnam, enough similar accounts exist so that roughly the same story could have been told in a chapter about Binh Dinh Province in the mid-1960’s, or Quang Tri Province in the early 1970s, among others. The incidents in this chapter were unbearably commonplace throughout the conflict and are unusual only in that they were reported in some form or recounted by witnesses instead of vanishing entirely from the historical record.”

Turse notes that racism–embodied in the “MGR” (Mere Gook Rule)—contributed fundamentally to the slaughter perpetrated by the U.S. in Vietnam. “ . . . . In 1971, Major Gordon Livingston, a West Point graduate who served as regimental surgeon with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, testified before members of Congress about the ease with which Americans killed Vietnamese. ‘Above 90 percent of the Americans with whom I had contact in Vietnam,’ said Dr. Livingston, treated the Vietnamese as subhuman snd with ‘nearly universal contempt.’ . . . .”

Turse’s very important and profoundly disturbing book encapsulates the American policy in Vietnam. Speaking of the Phoenix assassination program: “ . . . . Phoenix was a program run amok, but it was also the logical result of a military campaign driven by the body count and run under the precept of the mere-gook rule. For the Vietnamese the American war was an endless gauntlet of potential calamities . . . . the range of disasters was nearly endless.

While no exact figures are available, there can be little question that such events occurred in shocking numbers. They were the very essence of the war: crimes that went on all the time, all over South Vietnam, for years and years. When you consider this along with the tallies of dead, wounded, and displaced, the scale of the suffering becomes almost unimaginable—almost as unimaginable as the fact that somehow, in the United States all that suffering was more or less ignored as it happened and then written out of history even more thoroughly in the decades since. . . .”

Stanley Hornbeck referred to U.S. Far Eastern policy as a railroad track, proceeding on a straight line. Sterling Seagrave noted that ” . . . . It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whistle stops along the way at Peking, Quemoy, Matsu, and the Yalu River. . . .”

The reference to the Yalu River is in consideration of a key incident in the Korean War. General Douglas MacArthur was warned by military intelligence professionals not to approach the Yalu River during his advance through North Korea, lest the Chinese enter the conflict.

MacArthur ignored the warning of the military intelligence professionals with the ultimate result that they forecast: Chinese forces entered the conflict and routed the forces under MacArthur’s command.

During the precipitous retreat of the American and U.N. forces, it appears that the U.S. used biological warfare against the Chinese and North Korea.

In numerous programs and lectures, we have discussed the important, devastatingly successively mind control programs engaged in by the military and CIA. Those programs were developed in reaction to downed American airmen who–after captivity–gave testimony that they had been involved in biological warfare attacks against China and North Korea during the war.

A superb book about Unit 731–the Japanese biological warfare unit during World War II–had a chapter in the British edition that was omitted in the American edition. (Sadly, the books are out of print, although both the British and American editions are available through used-book services. Mr. Emory heartily encourages listeners to obtain the book. Even the American edition–missing this key chapter–is worthwhile. Hopefully, a publisher will obtain the rights to the book and re-issue it. If so, we will enthusiastically promote the work.)

The chapter in the UK edition chronicles the investigation into the allegations of American BW use during the Korean War, including circumstantial evidence that Unit 731 veterans and methodology may well have been used in the alleged campaign. That chapter is altogether objective, avoiding ideological bias toward either side in the conflict.

Because of that, we found the omission of this chapter from the U.S. edition to be significant. As the brilliant Peter Dale Scott noted: “The cover-up obviates the conspiracy.” It is a matter of public record that Unit 731’s files were incorporated into the U.S. biological warfare program, and veterans of the Unit bequeathed their expertise to the Americans in exchange from immunity from prosecution for war crimes.

It is a matter of public record that Unit 731’s files were incorporated into the U.S. biological warfare program, and veterans of the Unit bequeathed their expertise to the Americans in exchange from immunity from prosecution for war crimes.

FTR#1172 presents the scientific credentials of the International Scientific Commission investigating the allegations of biological warfare, which are impressive and their conclusions are credible.

The introduction of FTR#1173 consists of reading and analysis of Tom O’Neill’s presentation of the career of one of the CIA’s most important MK-Ultra mind control operatives, which occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War–1954.

Note that Jimmie Shaver was serving in the Air Force. Personnel from that branch were involved in the allegations of BW waged by the U.S. Those allegations were the rationale for the U.S. mind control programs, developed to combat Chinese “brainwashing” which was alleged to have precipitated the basis for the testimony by USAF.

Louis Jolyon West was Jack Ruby’s psychiatrist, and presented the untenable hypothesis that Ruby killed Oswald because he had a brief psychomotor epileptic event in the basement of the Dallas jail. In fact, the evidence suggests strongly that West had helped to erase Ruby’s memory of having killed Oswald.

West’s work with Ruby helped to keep the train of U.S. Far Eastern policy running on track.

The broadcast sets forth the murder of Chere Jo Horton, a three-year-old girl whose mutilation, rape and murder were pinned on 29-year-old Jimmie Shaver.

An obvious victim of mind control, apparently implemented in considerable measure by Louis Jolyon West, Shaver was programmed to take responsibility for the killing, despite enormous contradictions in the evidence.

O’Neill’s discussion of West, Shaver, the mind control programs and the Manson Family “op” is part of what appears to be a domestic Phoenix Program, designed to win “hearts and minds” in the U.S. during the Vietnam War.

Key Points of Discussion and analysis include:

1.–Shaver’s unusual behavior and demeanor at the initial scene of the crime: ” . . . . He was shirtless, covered in blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as ‘dazed’ and ‘trance-like’ . . . .”
2.–Shaver’s apparent lack of awareness of the immediate circumstances of the crime: ” ‘What’s going on here?’ he asked. He didn’t seem drunk, but he couldn’t say where he was, how he’d gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Horton’s body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she’s been raped. . . .”
3.–” . . . . Around four that morning, an Air Force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn’t drunk. One later testified that he ‘was not normal . . . . he was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances.’ . . .”
4.–Shaver didn’t recognize his own wife when she came to visit him. ” . . . . When his wife came to visit, he didn’t recognize her. . . .”
5.–Initially, he believed someone else committed the crime. ” . . . . He gave his first statement at 10:30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: he could summon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. . . .”
6.–Eventually, he signed a statement taking responsibility: ” . . . . After the Air Force marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full responsibility. Though he still didn’t remember anything, he reasoned that he must have done it. . . .”
7.–Enter Jolly West: ” . . . . Two months later, in September, Shaver’s memories still hadn’t returned. The base hospital commander told Jolly West to perform an evaluation: was he legally sane at the time of the murder? Shaver spent the next two weeks under West’s supervision . . . While Shaver was under–with West injecting more truth serum to ‘deepen the trance’–Shaver recalled the events of that night. He confessed to killing Horton. . . .”
8.–West was a defense witness who, instead, appears to have aided the prosecution: ” . . . . At the trial, West argued that Shaver’s truth-serum confession was more valid than any other. And West was testifying for the defense . . . .”
9.–Shaver’s behavior at the trial is further suggestive of mind control: ” . . . . One newspaper account said he ‘sat through the strenuous sessions like a man in a trance,’ saying nothing, never rising to stretch or smoke, though he was a known chain-smoker. ‘Some believe it’s an act,’ the paper said, ‘others believe his demeanor is real. . . .”
10.–Shaver’s medical records at Lackland Air Force base had vanished. ” . . . . But, curiously, all the records for patients in 1954 had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning with ‘Sa’ through ‘St’ had vanished. . . .”
11.–West posed leading questions to Shaver, who denied having ever taken the victim’s clothes off. ” . . . . West had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. ‘Tell me about when you took your clothes off, Jimmy,’ he said. And trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories: ‘Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before?’ Or: ‘After you took her clothes off, what did you do?’ ‘I never did take her clothes off,’ Shaver said. . . .”
12.–The interview was divided into thirds, the middle third of which was not recorded! ” . . . . The interview [with Shaver] was divided into thirds. The middle third, for some reason, wasn’t recorded. When the record picked up, the manuscript said, ‘Shaver is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.’ . . .”

Next, we review Luce’s beatification of Chiang Kai-shek in Life magazine, portraying the Generalissimo as a Christian martyr: “ . . . . Chiang Kai-shek has heretofore shown himself a man of remarkable courage and resolution. . . . He is a converted Methodist who has now for solace the examples of tribulation in the Christian bible. . . .”

Adding further depth to the Luce/Time Inc. meme of Chiang Kai-shek as an iconic Christian is his “brothel-hopping” behavior with his fellow Christian convert, Tu Yueh-sheng.

“ . . . . At the opposite end of the Shanghai social scale, Big-eared Tu enjoyed visiting the famous Blue Villa and cruising the other Green Gang brothels in the Blue Chamber District with a young, ill-tempered bravo by the name of Chiang Kai-shek. . . .”

he prostitutes in the brothels were subjects of the brutal practice of footbinding;

“ . . . . Since this netherworld consumed so much of Chiang’s and Tu’s attention, it requires a closer look. The Chinese brothels, almost without exception, were staffed by girls with bound feet—the ideal being less than three inches long. These were objects of extraordinary sexual excitement, and enjoyed a central role in any noisy evening. . . .”

More about the practice of footbinding, long-since forbidden in China.

“ . . . . Footbinding usually began at age four. A ten-foot long two-inch bandage was wrapped around the toes to force them in against the sole. Each day the bandage was tightened until the foot was folded under with only the big toe sticking out, a shape called the ‘Golden Lotus’ because it resembled a lotus pod with the petals removed. Flesh rotted and fell off, sometimes a toe or two, and the foot oozed pus, until the process of deformation was complete after two years, at which point the feet were practically dead. . . .”

FTR#1210 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, Part 17

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ November 1, 2021 ⋅ One comment

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.”

September 2, 1945: The American Deep State Rolls the Dice

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ August 7, 2021 ⋅ Post a comment

In FTR#1142, we detailed the little-known involvement of Chiang Kai-shek and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek in the 1943 conferences at Cairo and Teheran. (Mme. Chiang Kai-shek was the sister of T.V. Soong, one of Chiang’s finance ministers and the richest man in the world at one time.) This low-profile involvement apparently gave them considerable gravitas in helping to shape the postwar geopolitical agenda. While in Okinawa during Japan’s surrender in World War II, Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty was witness to the early commitment of decisive military resources to the wars that were to take place in Korea and Indochina/Vietnam. ” . . . . I was on Okinawa at that time, and during some business in the harbor area I asked the harbormaster if all that new material was being returned to the States. His response was direct and surprising: ‘Hell, no! They ain’t never goin’ to see it again. One-half of this stuff, enough to equip and supply at least a hundred and fifty thousand men, is going to Korea, and the other half is going to Indochina.’ In 1945, none of us had any idea that the first battles of the Cold War were going to be fought by U.S. military units in those two regions beginning in 1950 and 1965–yet that is precisely what had been planned, and it is precisely what happened. Who made that decision back in 1943–45? . . . .” WFMU-FM is podcasting For The Record–You can subscribe to the podcast HERE.

Narco-Bipartisanship

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ May 8, 2021 ⋅ Post a comment

In FTR#1175, we highlighted the career of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the powerful Wall Street lawyer described in that program as “America’s First ‘Man in Black.’ ” Insight into how what Peter Dale Scott calls “The American Deep State” operates can be gleaned from one of the political derivatives of CIA-supported drug traffic in Southeast Asia. U.S. Ambassador to Thailand William “Wild Bill” Donovan worked with OSS and CIA operative Paul Helliwell to distribute the laundered profits of Agency-backed drug operations to members of Congress, with Donovan gifting Republicans and Helliwell supporting Democrats.

FTR #1163 Farewell America, Part 2

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ November 26, 2020 ⋅ 5 comments

The program kicks off with a look at a full-page advertisement from The New York Times pledging resistance to Trump administration attempts at electoral nullification. The organization behind the ad is RefuseFascism.org. We note the first two signatories:

1.–Cornel West–a member of the [Bernie] Sanders Institute–advised after the 2016 Democratic National Convention that the Sanders voters had no choice but to cast their ballot for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.
2.–Noam Chomsky–whose work on generative linguistics (which established him as an academician) was financed largely by Navy and Air Force Intelligence–helped to neutralize recognition of the decisive role in the Vietnam War of JFK’s assassination. JFK was in the process of pulling the U.S. out of Vietnam. That was among the reasons he was killed. With his behavior following the Oliver Stone opus “JFK,” Noam Chomsky did much to perpetuate the institutionalized fascism that has possessed the U.S. since before the end of World War II. Generative linguistics proved most useful in teaching personnel at the Monterey Defense Language Institute, one of whose graduates was Lee Harvey Oswald.

On the back of the front section of that same edition of The New York Times is an obituary of Seymour Topping. A luminary of the “Gray Lady” for decades, he was Southeast Asian Bureau chief from 1963 until 1966, during the time that JFK was murdered and the Vietnam War, as a result, gained full momentum.

Much of the program sets forth material from a consummately important recent book: Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill.

O’Neill develops a strong, albeit circumstantial, case that the criminal activities of the Manson Family were the core of a domestic intelligence operation. Specifically, it appears that the Manson “op” was a key element of a domestic Phoenix program–an assassination and terror campaign in the South during the Vietnam War.

Designed to “win hearts and minds,” the Phoenix Program was realized by the CIA, and employed “false flag” terrorist incidents and the deliberate murders of non-combatants that were blamed on the Vietcong and North Vietnamese.

” . . . . A Special Forces soldier, Anthony Herbert, the single most decorated combat veteran of Vietnam, published a bestselling book, Soldier, that detailed typical orders from his Phoenix superiors: “They wanted me to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it appear as though the Viet Cong had done it themselves. The rationale was that the Viet Cong would see that other Viet Cong had killed their own and . . . make allegiance with us. The good guys. “. . . .” Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill; p. 228.

Exemplifying the fusion of CIA, Operation Phoenix and the Los Angeles law enforcement establishment, Lieutenant Edward Herrmann helped create a counterinsurgency program in L.A. and California as a whole, integrated and coordinated with federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Edward Herrman:

1.–Had a doctorate in psychology.
2.–Specialized in quelling insurgencies.
3.–Developed one of the first computer systems to track criminals and predict violent outbreaks in cities.
4.–Worked for many U.S. intelligence and military agencies, including: the Air Force, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, the President’s Office of Science and Technology, the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
5.–Appears to have worked for the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, using USAID for a cover.
6.–Worked for numerous defense contractors including: Electro-Dash Optical Systems, System Development Corporation and Control Data Corporation.

The concluding portion of the program consists of reading and analysis of O’Neill’s presentation of the career of one of the CIA’s most important MK-Ultra mind control operatives.

Louis Jolyon West was Jack Ruby’s psychiatrist, and presented the untenable hypothesis that Ruby killed Oswald because he had a brief psychomotor epileptic event in the basement of the Dallas jail. In fact, the evidence suggests strongly that West had helped to erase Ruby’s memory of having killed Oswald.

After detailing West’s involvement with Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA and one of the central figures of its mind control programs, the broadcast sets forth the murder of Chere Jo Horton, a three-year-old girl whose mutilation, rape and murder were pinned on 29-year-old Jimmie Shaver.

An obvious victim of mind control, apparently implemented in considerable measure by Louis Jolyon West, Shaver was programmed to take responsibility for the killing, despite enormous contradictions in the evidence.

Key Points of Discussion and analysis include:

1.–Shaver’s unusual behavior and demeanor at the initial scene of the crime: ” . . . . He was shirtless, covered in blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as ‘dazed’ and ‘trance-like’ . . . .”
2.–Shaver’s apparent lack of awareness of the immediate circumstances of the crime: ” ‘What’s going on here?’ he asked. He didn’t seem drunk, but he couldn’t say where he was, how he’d gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Horton’s body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she’s been raped. . . .”
3.–” . . . . Around four that morning, an Air Force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn’t drunk. One later testified that he ‘was not normal . . . . he was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances.’ . . .”
4.–Shaver didn’t recognize his own wife when she came to visit him. ” . . . . When his wife came to visit, he didn’t recognize her. . . .”
Initially, he believed someone else committed the crime. ” . . . . He gave his first statement at 10:30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: he could summon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. . . .”
5.–Eventually, he signed a statement taking responsibility: ” . . . . After the Air Force marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full responsibility. Though he still didn’t remember anything, he reasoned that he must have done it. . . .”
6.–Enter Jolly West: ” . . . . Two months later, in September, Shaver’s memories still hadn’t returned. The base hospital commander told Jolly West to perform an evaluation: was he legally sane at the time of the murder? Shaver spent the next two weeks under West’s supervision . . . While Shaver was under–with West injecting more truth serum to ‘deepen the trance’–Shaver recalled the events of that night. He confessed to killing Horton. . . .”
7.–West was a defense witness who, instead, appears to have aided the prosecution: ” . . . . At the trial, West argued that Shaver’s truth-serum confession was more valid than any other. And West was testifying for the defense . . . .”
8.–Shaver’s behavior at the trial is further suggestive of mind control: ” . . . . One newspaper account said he ‘sat through the strenuous sessions like a man in a trance,’ saying nothing, never rising to stretch or smoke, though he was a known chain-smoker. ‘Some believe it’s an act,’ the paper said, ‘others believe his demeanor is real. . . .”
9.–Shaver’s medical records at Lackland Air Force base had vanished. ” . . . . But, curiously, all the records for patients in 1954 had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning with ‘Sa’ through ‘St’ had vanished. . . .”
10.–” . . . . West had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. ‘Tell me about when you took your clothes off, Jimmy,’ he said. And trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories: ‘Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before?’ Or: ‘After you took her clothes off, what did you do?’ ‘I never did take her clothes off,’ Shaver said. . . .”
11.–” . . . . The interview [with Shaver] was divided into thirds. The middle third, for some reason, wasn’t recorded. When the record picked up, the manuscript said, ‘Shaver is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.’ . . .”

FTR #1076 Surveillance Valley, Part 2: Mauthausen on Our Mind

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ June 26, 2019 ⋅ One comment

The program begins with recap of the adaptation of IBM’s Hollerith machines to Nazi data compilation. (We concluded FTR #1075 with discussion of this.): ” . . . . Germany’s vast state bureaucracy and its military and rearmament programs, including the country’s growing concentration camp/slave labor system, also required data processing services. By the time the U.S. officially entered the war in 1941, IBM’s German subsidiary had grown to employ 10,000 people and served 300 different German government agencies. The Nazi Party Treasury; the SS; the War Ministry; the Reichsbank; the Reichspost; the Armaments Ministry; the Navy, Army and Air Force; and the Reich Statistical Office — the list of IBM’s clients went on and on.

” ‘Indeed, the Third Reich would open startling statistical venues for Hollerith machines never before instituted — perhaps never before even imagined,’ wrote Edwin Black in IBM and the Holocaust, his pioneering 2001 exposé of the forgotten business ties between IBM and Nazi Germany. ‘In Hitler’s Germany, the statistical and census community, overrun with doctrinaire Nazis, publicly boasted about the new demographic breakthroughs their equipment would achieve.’ . . . .

“Demand for Hollerith tabulators was so robust that IBM was forced to open a new factory in Berlin to crank out all the new machines. At the facility’s christening ceremony, which was attended by a top U.S. IBM executive and the elite of the Nazi Party, the head of IBM’s German subsidiary gave a rousing speech about the important role that Hollerith tabulators played in Hitler’s drive to purify Germany and cleanse it of inferior racial stock. . . .”

In that same article, Yasha Levine notes that the Trump administration’s proposed changes in the 2020 census sound as though they may portend something akin to the Nazi census of 1933: ” . . . . Based on a close reading of internal Department of Commerce documents tied to the census citizen question proposal, it appears the Trump administration wants to use the census to construct a first-of-its-kind citizenship registry for the entire U.S. population — a decision that arguably exceeds the legal authority of the census. ‘It was deep in the documentation that was released,’ Robert Groves, a former Census Bureau director who headed the National Academies committee convened to investigate the 2020 census, told me by telephone. ‘No one picked up on it much. But the term ‘registry’ in our world means not a collection of data for statistical purposes but rather to know the identity of particular people in order to use that knowledge to affect their lives.’ Given the administration’s posture toward immigration, the fact that it wants to build a comprehensive citizenship database is highly concerning. To Groves, it clearly signals ‘a bright line being crossed.’ . . .”

In the conclusion to Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine notes how IBM computing technology facilitated the Nazi slave labor operations throughout the Third Reich. The epicenter of this was Mauthausen.

The systematic use of slave labor was central to Nazi Germany’s industrial infrastructure: ” . . . . But in the 1930s, Mauthausen had been a vital economic engine of Hitler’s genocidal plan to remake Europe and the Soviet Union into his own backyard utopia. It started out as a granite quarry but quickly grew into the largest slave labor complex in Nazi Germany, with fifty sub-camps that spanned most of modern-day Austria. Here, hundreds of thousands of prisoners–mostly European Jews but also Roma, Spaniards, Russians, Serbs, Slovenes, Germans, Bulgarians, even Cubans–were worked to death. They refined oil, built fighter aircraft, assembled cannons, developed rocket technology, and were leased out to private German businesses. Volkswagen, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, BMW, Bosch–all benefited from the camp’s slave labor pool. Mauthausen, the administrative nerve center, was centrally directed from Berlin using the latest in early computer technology: IBM punch card tabulators. . . .”

Mauthausen’s IBM machines were, in turn, central to German industry’s use of slave labor: ” . . . . the camp had several IBM machines working overtime to handle the big churn of inmates and to make sure there were always enough bodies to perform the necessary work. These machines didn’t operate in isolation but were part of a larger slave labor control-and-accounting system that stretched across Nazi-occupied Europe connecting Berlin to every major concentration and labor punch card, telegraph, telephone, and human courier. This wasn’t the automated type of computer network system that the Pentagon would begin to build in the United States just a decade later, but it was an information network nonetheless: an electromechanical web that fueled and sustained Nazi Germany’s war machine with blazing efficiency. It extended beyond the labor camps and reached into the cities and towns, crunching mountains of genealogical data to track down people with even the barest whiff of Jewish blood or perceived racial impurity in a mad rush to fulfill Adolf Hitler’s drive to purify the German people, but they made the Nazi death machine run faster and more efficiently, scouring the population and tracking down victims in ways that would never have been possible without them. . . .”

In his book–one of the most important in recent memory–Yasha Levine sets forth vital, revelatory information about the development and functioning of the Internet.

Born of the same overlapping DARPA projects that spawned Agent Orange, the Internet was never intended to be something good. Its generative function and purpose is counter-insurgency. ” . . . . In the 1960s, America was a global power overseeing an increasingly volatile world: conflicts and regional insurgencies against US-allied governments from South America to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. These were not traditional wars that involved big armies but guerilla campaigns and local rebellions, frequently fought in regions where Americans had little previous experience. Who were these people? Why were they rebelling? What could be done to stop them? In military circles, it was believed that these questions were of vital importance to America’s pacification efforts, and some argued that the only effective way to answer them was to develop and leverage computer-aided information technology. The Internet came out of this effort: an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. . . .”

In this landmark volume, Levine makes numerous points, including:

1.–The harvesting of data by intelligence services is PRECISELY what the Internet was designed to do in the first place.
2.–The harvesting of data engaged in by the major tech corporations is an extension of the data gathering/surveillance that was–and is–the raison d’etre for the Internet in the first place.
3.–The big tech companies all collaborate with the various intelligence agencies they publicly scorn and seek to ostensibly distance themselves from.
4.–Edward Snowden, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jacob Appelbaum, the milieu of the Tor Network and WikiLeaks are complicit in the data harvesting and surveillance.
5.–Snowden and other privacy activists are double agents, consciously channeling people fearful of having their communications monitored into technologies that will facilitate that surveillance!

The program notes that counterinsurgency–the functional context of the origin of the Internet–is at the foundation of the genesis of Nazism. At the conclusion of World War I, Germany was beset by a series of socialist/Communist uprisings in a number of cities, including Munich. Responding to that, underground Reichswehr units commanded by Ernst Rohm (later head of the SA) systematically assassinated the leaders of the revolution, as well as prominent social democrats and Jews, such as Walther Rathenau. In Munich, an undercover agent for the political department of the Reichswehr under General Von Lossow infiltrated the revolutionaries, pretending to be one of them.

Following the crushing of the rebellion and occupation of the city by Reichswehr units, that infiltrator identified the leaders of the revolution, who were then summarily executed. The infiltrator’s name was Adolf Hitler.

After the suppression of the rebellion, Hitler, Rohm and undercover Reichswehr agents infiltrated a moribund political party and turned it into an intelligence front for the introduction of the supposedly de-mobilized German Army into German society for the purpose of generating political reaction. That front was the German National Social Workers Party.

The broadcast re-capitulates (from part of Miscellaneous Archive Show M11) Hitler’s speech to the Industry Club of Dusseldorf. This speech, which won the German industrial and financial elite over to the cause of the Nazi Party, equated democracy with Communism.

Manifesting a Social Darwinist perspective, Hitler opined that the [assembled] successful, accomplished were, by definition superior to others. If those, by definition, inferior people were allowed to control the political process, they would structure the social and economic landscape to their own benefit.

This, according to Hitler, would be counter-evolutionary.

FTR #1054, FTR #1055 and FTR #1056 Interviews #23, #24 and #25 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ February 14, 2019 ⋅ One comment

These are the twenty-third, twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth (and concluding program) in a long series of interviews with Jim DiEugenio about his triumphal analysis of President Kennedy’s assassination and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s heroic investigation of the killing.

The first interview begins with a telling editorial written for “The Washington Post” by former President Harry Truman.

. . . . On December 22, 1963, Harry Truman wrote an editorial that was published in the Washington Post. The former President wrote that he had become “disturbed by the way the CIA had become diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of government.” He wrote that he never dreamed that this would happen when he signed the National Security Act. he thought it would be used for intelligence analysis, not “peacetime cloak and dagger operations.” He complained that the CIA had now become “so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue–and a subject for Cold War enemy propaganda.” Truman went as far as suggesting its operational arm be eliminated. He concluded with the warning that Americans have grown up learning respect for “our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over out historic position and I feel hat we need to correct it.” . . . .

Former CIA Director (and then Warren Commission member) Allen Dulles visited Truman and attempted to get him to retract the statement. He dissembled about then CIA chief John McCone’s view of the editorial.

The focal point of the first two programs is the dramatic changes in U.S. foreign policy that occurred because of JFK’s assassination. Analysis in FTR #1056 continues the analysis of Kennedy’s foreign policy and concludes with riveting discussion of the striking policy undertakings of the Kennedy administration in the area of civil rights. Jim has written a marvelous, 4‑part analysis of JFK’s civil rights policy.

Discussion of JFK’s foreign policy and how his murder changed that builds on, and supplements analysis of this in FTR #1031, FTR #1032 and FTR #1033.

Lyndon Baines Johnson reversed JFK’s foreign policy initiatives in a number of important ways.

When the United States reneged on its commitment to pursue independence for the colonial territories of its European allies at the end of the Second World War, the stage was set for those nations’ desire for freedom to be cast as incipient Marxists/Communists. This development was the foundation for epic bloodshed and calamity.

Jim details then Congressman John F. Kennedy’s 1951 fact-finding trip to Saigon to gain an understanding of the French war to retain their colony of Indochina. (Vietnam was part of that colony.)

In speaking with career diplomat Edmund Gullion, Kennedy came to the realization that not only would the French lose the war, but that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh guerrillas enjoyed great popular support among the Vietnamese people.

This awareness guided JFK’s Vietnam policy, in which he not only resisted tremendous pressure to commit U.S. combat troops to Vietnam, but planned a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam.

Perhaps the most important change made after JFK’s assassination was Johnson’s negation of Kennedy’s plans to withdraw from Vietnam.

LBJ cancelled Kennedy’s scheduled troop withdrawal, scheduled personnel increases and implemented the 34A program of covert operations against North Vietnam. Executed by South Vietnamese naval commandos using small, American-made patrol boats, these raids were supported by U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, which were electronically “fingerprinting” North Vietnamese radar installations.

The electronic fingerprinting of North Vietnamese radar was in anticipation of a pre-planned air war, a fundamental part of a plan by LBJ to involve the United States in a full-scale war in Southeast Asia.

. . . . Clearly now that the withdrawal was imminent, Kennedy was going to try and get the rest of his administration on board to his way of thinking. Not only did this not happen once Kennedy was dead, but the first meeting on Vietnam afterwards was a strong indication that things were now going to be cast in a sharply different tone. This meeting took place at 3:00 p.m. on November 24. . . . Johnson’s intent was clear to McNamara. He was breaking with the previous policy. The goal now was to win the war. LBJ then issued a strong warning: He wanted no more dissension or division over policy. Any person who did not conform would be removed. (This would later be demonstrated by his banning of Hubert Humphrey from Vietnam meetings when Humphrey advised Johnson to rethink his policy of military commitment to Vietnam.) . . . . The reader should recall, this meeting took place just forty-eight hours after Kennedy was killed. . . .

. . . . Therefore, on March 2, 1964, the Joint Chiefs passed a new war proposal to the White House. This was even more ambitious than the January version. It included bombing, the mining of North Vietnamese harbors, a naval blockade, and possible use of tactical atomic weapons in case China intervened. Johnson was now drawing up a full scale battle plan for Vietnam. In other words, what Kennedy did not do in three years, LBJ had done in three months.

Johnson said he was not ready for this proposal since he did not have congress yet as a partner and trustee. But he did order the preparation of NSAM 288, which was based on this proposal. It was essentially a target list of bombing sites that eventually reached 94 possibilities. By May 25, with Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater clamoring for bombing of the north, LBJ had made the decision that the U.S. would directly attack North Vietnam at an unspecified point in the future. But it is important to note that even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Johnson had ordered the drawing up of a congressional resolution. This had been finalized by William Bundy, McGeorge Bundy’s brother. Therefore in June of 1964, Johnson began lobbying certain people for its passage in congress. . . .

National Security Memorandum 263

. . . . Johnson seized upon the hazy and controversial events in the Gulf of Tonkin during the first week of August to begin he air war planned in NSAM 288. Yet the Tonkin Gulf incident had been prepared by Johnson himself. After Kennedy’s death, President Johnson made a few alterations in the draft of NSAM 273. An order which Kennedy had never seen but was drafted by McGeorge Bundy after a meeting in Honolulu, a meeting which took place while Kennedy was visiting Texas. . . .

. . . . On August 2, the destroyer Maddox was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Although torpedoes were launched, none hit. The total damage to the Maddox
was one bullet through the hull. Both Johnson and the Defense Department misrepresented this incident to congress and the press. They said the North Vietnamese fired first, that the USA had no role in the patrol boat raids, that the ships were in international waters, and there was no hot pursuit by the Maddox. These were all wrong. Yet Johnson used this overblown reporting, plus a non-existent attack two nights later on the destroyer Turner Joy to begin to push his war resolution through Congress. He then took out the target list assembled for NSAM 288 [from March of 1964–D.E] and ordered air strikes that very day. . . .

. . . . For on August 7, Johnson sent a message to General Maxwell Taylor. He wanted a whole gamut of possible operations presented to him for direct American attacks against the North. The target date for the systematic air war was set for January 1965. This was called operation Rolling Thunder and it ended up being the largest bombing campaign in military history. The reader should note: the January target date was the month Johnson would be inaugurated after his re-election. As John Newman noted in his masterful book JFK and Vietnam, Kennedy was disguising his withdrawal plan around his re-election; Johnson was disguising his escalation plan around his re-election. . . .

In addition to noting that Hubert Humphrey, contrary to popular misconception, was an opponent of Johnson’s war strategy, we note that Robert McNamara was also opposed to it, although he went along with the Commander in Chief’s policies.

After detailed discussion of the human and environmental damage inflicted on Vietnam and the strategy implemented by LBJ after Kennedy’s assassination, the discussion turns to Johnson’s reversal of Kennedy’s policy with regard to Laos.

The fledgling nation of Laos was also part of French Indochina, and Jim notes how outgoing President Eisenhower coached President-Elect Kennedy on the necessity of committing U.S. combat forces to Laos.

Again, Kennedy refused to commit U.S. ground forces and engineered a policy of neutrality for Laos.

. . . . At his first press conference, Kennedy said that he hoped to establish Laos as a “peaceful country–an independent country not dominated by either side.” He appointed a task force to study the problem, was in regular communication with it and the Laotian ambassador, and decided by February that Laos must have a coalition government, the likes of which Eisenhower had rejected out of hand. Kennedy also had little interest in a military solution. He could not understand sending American troops to fight for a country whose people did not care to fight for themselves. . . . He therefore worked to get the Russians to push the Pathet Lao into a cease-fire agreement. This included a maneuver on Kennedy’s part to indicate military pressure if the Russians did not intervene strongly enough with the Pathet Lao. The maneuver worked, and in May of 1961, a truce was called. A few days later, a conference convened in Geneva to hammer out conditions for a neutral Laos. By July of 1962, a new government, which included the Pathet Lao, had been hammered out. . . .

Whereas JFK had implemented a policy affording neutrality to Laos–against the wishes of the Joint Chiefs, CIA and many of his own cabinet, LBJ scrapped the neutralist policy in favor of a CIA-implemented strategy of employing “narco-militias” such as the Hmong tribesmen as combatants against the Pathet Lao. This counter-insurgency warfare was complemented by a massive aerial bombing campaign.

One of the many outgrowths of LBJ’s reversal of JFK’s Southeast policy was a wave of CIA-assisted heroin addicting both GI’s in Vietnam and American civilians at home.

LBJ also reversed JFK’s policy toward Indonesia.

In 1955, Sukarno hosted a conference of non-aligned nations that formalized and concretized a “Third Way” between East and West. This, along with Sukarno’s nationalism of some Dutch industrial properties, led the U.S. to try and overthrow Sukharno, which was attempted in 1958.

Kennedy understood Sukarno’s point of view, and had planned a trip to Indonesia in 1964 to forge a more constructive relationship with Sukharno. Obviously, his murder in 1963 precluded the trip.

In 1965, Sukarno was deposed in a bloody, CIA-aided coup in which as many as a million people were killed.

Of particular interest in connection with Indonesia, is the disposition of Freeport Sulphur, a company that had enlisted the services of both Clay Shaw and David Ferrie in an effort to circumvent limitations on its operations imposed by Castro’s Cuba:

. . . . In Chapter 1, the author introduced Freeport Sulphur and its subsidiaries Moa Bay Mining and Nicaro Nickel. These companies all had large investments in Cuba prior to Castro’s revolution. And this ended up being one of the ways that Garrison connected Clay Shaw and David Ferrie. This came about for two reasons. First, with Castro taking over their operations in Cuba, Freeport was attempting to investigate bringing in nickel ore from Cuba, through Canada, which still had trade relations with Cuba. The ore would then be refined in Louisiana, either at a plant already in New Orleans or at another plant in Braithwaite. Shaw, an impressario of international trade, was on this exploratory team for Freeport. And he and two other men had been flown to Canada by Ferrie as part of this effort. More evidence of this connection through Freeport was found during their investigation of Guy Banister. Banister apparently knew about another flight taken by Shaw with an official of Freeport, likely Charles Wight, to Cuba. Again the pilot was David Ferrie. Another reason this Freeport connection was important to Garrison is that he found a witness named James Plaine in Houston who said that Mr. Wight of Freeport Sulphur had contacted him in regards to an assassination plot against Castro. Considering the amount of money Freeport was about to lose in Cuba, plus the number of Eastern Establishment luminaries associated with the company–such as Jock Whitney, Jean Mauze and Godfrey Rockefeller–it is not surprising that such a thing was contemplated within their ranks. . . .

LBJ reversed Kennedy’s policy vis a vis Sukarno. It should be noted that Freeport had set its corporate sights on a very lucrative pair of mountains in Indonesia, both of which had enormous deposits of minerals, iron, copper, silver and gold in particular.

. . . . Shortly after, his aid bill landed on Johnson’s desk. The new president refused to sign it. . . .

. . . . In return for not signing the aid bill, in 1964, LBJ received support from Both Augustus Long and Jock Whitney of Freeport Sulphur in his race against Barry Goldwater. In fact, Long established a group called the National Independent Committee for Johnson. This group of wealthy businessmen included Robert Lehman of Lehman Brothers and Thomas Cabot, Michael Paine’s cousin. . . . Then, in early 1965, Augustus Long was rewarded for helping Johnson get elected. LBJ app[ointed him to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This is a small group of wealthy private citizens who advises the president on intelligence matters. The members of this group can approve and suggest covert activities abroad. This appointment is notable for what was about to occur. For with Sukarno now unprotected by President Kennedy, the writing was on the wall. The Central Intelligence Agency now bean to send into Indonesia its so called “first team.” . . . .

. . . . Suharto now began to sell off Indonesia’s riches to the highest bidder. Including Freeport Sulphur, which opened what were perhaps the largest copper and gold mines in the world there. . . . Freeport, along with several other companies, now harvested billions from the Suharto regime. . . .

Yet another area in which JFK’s policy outlook ran afoul of the prevailing wisdom of the Cold War was with regard to the Congo. A Belgian colony which was the victim of genocidal policies of King Leopold (estimates of the dead run as high as 8 million), the diamond and mineral-rich Congo gained a fragile independence.

In Africa, as well, Kennedy understood the struggle of emerging nations seeking freedom from colonial domination as falling outside of and transcending stereotyped Cold War dynamics.

In the Congo, the brutally administered Belgian rule had spawned a vigorous independence movement crystallized around the charismatic Patrice Lumumba. Understanding of, and sympathetic to Lumumba and the ideology and political forces embodied in him, Kennedy opposed the reactionary status quo favored by both European allies like the United Kingdom and Belgium, as well as the Eisenhower/Dulles axis in the United States.

. . . . By 1960, a native revolutionary leader named Patrice Lumumba had galvanized the nationalist feeling of the country. Belgium decided to pull out. But they did so rapidly, knowing that tumult would ensue and they could return to colonize the country again. After Lumumba was appointed prime minister, tumult did ensue. The Belgians and the British backed a rival who had Lumumba dismissed. They then urged the breaking away of the Katanga province because of its enormous mineral wealth. Lumumba looked to the United Nations for help, and also the USA. The former decided to help, . The United States did not. In fact, when Lumumba visited Washington July of 1960, Eisenhower deliberately fled to Rhode Island. Rebuffed by Eisenhower, Lumumba now turned to the Russians for help in expelling the Belgians from Katanga. This sealed his fate in the eyes of Eisenhower and Allen Dulles. The president now authorized a series of assassination plots by the CIA to kill Lumumba. These plots finally succeeded on January 17, 1961, three days before Kennedy was inaugurated.

His first week in office, Kennedy requested a full review of the Eisenhower/Dulles policy in Congo. The American ambassador to that important African nation heard of this review and phoned Allen Dulles to alert him that President Kennedy was about to overturn previous policy there. Kennedy did overturn this policy on February 2, 1961. Unlike Eisenhower and Allen Dulles, Kennedy announced he would begin full cooperation with Secretary Dag Hammarskjold at the United Nations on this thorny issue in order to bring all the armies in that war-torn nation under control. He would also attempt top neutralize the country so there would be no East/West Cold War competition. Third, all political prisoners being held should be freed. Not knowing he was dead, this part was aimed at former prime minister Lumumba, who had been captured by his enemies. (There is evidence that, knowing Kennedy would favor Lumumba, Dulles had him killed before JFK was inaugurated.) Finally, Kennedy opposed the secession of mineral-rich Katanga province. . . . Thus began Kennedy’s nearly three year long struggle to see Congo not fall back under the claw of European imperialism. . . . ”

In the Congo, as in Indonesia, LBJ reversed JFK’s policy stance, and the corporate looting of the Congo resulted under General Joseph Mobutu, himself a beneficiary of the piracy.

. . . . But in October and November [of 1963], things began to fall apart. Kennedy wanted Colonel Michael Greene, an African expert, to train the Congolese army in order

to subdue a leftist rebellion. But General Joseph Mobutu, with the backing of the Pentagon, managed to resist this training, which the United Nations backed. In 1964, the communist rebellion picked up steam and began taking whole provinces. The White House did something Kennedy never seriously contemplated: unilateral action by the USA. Johnson and McGeorge Bundy had the CIA fly sorties with Cuban pilots to halt the communist advance. Without Kennedy, the UN now withdrew. America now became an ally of Belgium and intervened with arms, airplanes and advisers. Mobutu now invited Tshombe back into the government. Tshombe, perhaps at the request of the CIA, now said that the rebellion was part of a Chinese plot to take over Congo. Kennedy had called in Edmund Gullion to supervise the attempt to make the Congo government into a moderate coalition, avoiding the extremes of left and right. But with the Tshombe/Mobutu alliance, that was now dashed. Rightwing South Africans and Rhodesians were now allowed to join the Congolese army in a war on the “Chinese-inspired left.” And with the United Nations gone, this was all done under the auspices of the United States. The rightward tilt now continued unabated. By 1965, Mobutu had gained complete power. And in 1966, he installed himself as military dictator. . . . Mobutu now allowed his country to be opened up to loads of outside investment. The riches of the Congo were mined by huge Western corporations. Their owners and officers grew wealthy while Mobutu’s subjects were mired in poverty. Mobutu also stifled political dissent. And he now became one of the richest men in Africa, perhaps the world. . . .

In FTR #1033, we examined JFK’s attempts at normalizing relations with Cuba. That, of course, vanished with his assassination and the deepening of Cold War hostility between the U.S. and the Island nation, with a thaw of sorts coming under Barack Obama a few years ago.

There is no more striking area in which JFK’s murder reversed what would have been historic changes in America’s foreign policy than U.S.-Soviet relations.

JFK had implemented a ban on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, bitterly opposed by the Pentagon, In a June, 1963 speech at American University, JFK called for re-evaluating America’s relationship to the Soviet Union, and cited the U.S.S.R’s decisive role in defeating Nazi Germany during World War II.

JFK was also proposing joint space exploration with the Soviet Union, which would have appeared to be nothing less than treasonous to the Pentagon and NASA at the time. After JFK’s assassination, the Kennedy family used a backchannel diplomatic conduit to the Soviet leadership to communicate their view that the Soviet Union, and its Cuban ally, had been blameless in the assassination and that powerful right-wing forces in the United States had been behind the assassination.

Perhaps JFK’s greatest contribution was one that has received scant notice. In 1961, the Joint Chiefs were pushing for a first strike on the Soviet Union–a decision to initiate nuclear war. JFK refused, walking out of the discussion with the disgusted observation that “We call ourselves the human race.”

In FTR #‘s 876, 926 and 1051, we examined the creation of the meme that Oswald had been networking with the Cubans and Soviets in the run-up to the assassination. In particular, Oswald was supposedly meeting with Valery Kostikov, a KGB official in charge of assassinations in the Western Hemisphere.

This created the pretext for blaming JFK’s assassination on the Soviet Union and/or Cuba. There are indications that JFK’s assassination may well have been intended as a pretext for a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union.

. . . . As JFK may have recalled from the National Security Council meeting he walked out of in July 1961, the first Net Evaluation Subcommittee report had focused precisely on “a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.” Kennedy was a keen reader and listener. In the second preemptive-war report, he may also have noticed the slight but significant discrepancy between its overall time frame, 1963–1968, and the extent of its relatively reassuring conclusion, which covered only 1964 through 1968. . . .

. . . . In his cat-and-mouse questioning of his military chiefs, President Kennedy had built upon the report’s apparently reassuring conclusion in such a way as to discourage preemptive-war ambitions. However, given the “late 1963” focus in the first Net Report that that was the most threatening time for a preemptive strike, Kennedy had little reason to be reassured by a second report that implicitly confirmed that time as the one of maximum danger. The personally fatal fall JFK was about to enter, in late 1963, was the same time his military commanders may have considered their last chance to “win” (in their terms) a preemptive war against the Soviet Union. In terms of their second Net Report to the President, which passed over the perilous meaning of late 1963, the cat-and-mouse game had been reversed. It was the generals who were the cats, and JFK the mouse in their midst.

The explicit assumption of the first Net Report was “a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.” The focus of that first-strike scenario corresponded to the Kennedy assassination scenario. When President Kennedy was murdered in late 1963, the Soviet Union had been set up as the major scapegoat in the plot. If the tactic had been successful in scapegoating the Russians for the crime of the century, there is little doubt that it would have resulted in “a period of heightened tensions” between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Those who designed the plot to kill Kennedy were familiar with the inner sanctum of our national security state. Their attempt to scapegoat the Soviets for the President’s murder reflected one side of the secret struggle between JFK and his military leaders over a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union. The assassins’ purpose seems to have encompassed not only killing a President determined to make peace with the enemy, but also using his murder as the impetus for a possible nuclear first strike against that same enemy. . . .

With the GOP and Trump administration openly suppressing voting rights of minorities, African-Americans in particular, the stellar efforts of JFK and the Justice Department in the area of civil rights is striking. JFK’s civil rights policy was exponentially greater than what had preceded him, and much of what followed.

The conclusion of the discussion in FTR #1056 consists of Jim’s discussion of his marvelous, 4‑part analysis of JFK’s civil rights policy.