The latest UN Emissions Gap Report provides psychological advice for defeating political opposition to carbon pricing, and suggests discouraging farming by taxing agricultural land.
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6.3.3 Political and behavioural factors
Ensuring broad and stable support for carbon pricing and the phasing-out of fossil fuel subsidies requires more than addressing distributional, competitiveness and leakage impacts. A number of additional success factors can be identified (Klenert et al., 2018a) and table 6.1 provides country examples for addressing these. The challenge is particularly significant where trust in government is limited (Klenert et al., 2018a; Rafaty, 2018). And yet, where trust is strong, there is a tendency for citizens to question problems if policy solutions challenge their world views, e.g. on the State’s role in the economy (“solution aversion”) (Campbell and Kay, 2014; Cherry et al., 2017). Designing policies that are consistent with the prevailing world views of specific societal groups therefore requires extensive communication and consultation prior to implementation.
To secure popular support for carbon pricing, the public needs to be informed about its positive effect on emissions reduction targets, as well as the co-benefits of cleaner air, health and fiscal sustainability (Hsu et al., 2008; Bristow et al., 2010; Kallbekken et al., 2011; Baranzini et al., 2014; Baranzini and Carattini, 2017). Timing is also important: a gradual reform is more likely to be successful than sudden and drastic price increases. Similarly, if several fossil fuel subsidies are being reformed, this can best be done by sequencing the reforms (Beaton et al., 2013; Rentschler and Bazilian, 2017b). Language matters too, with terms such as ‘fee’ or ‘contribution’ likely to meet with popular support compared with ‘tax’ (Kallbekken et al., 2011; Drews and van den Bergh, 2016; Baranzini and Carattini, 2017).
Carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidy reform generate public revenues, the use of which can strongly impact support for carbon pricing. This is discussed in the section 6.3.4.
6.3.4 Use revenues from carbon pricing to foster sustainable development
Raising revenue through energy tax reforms relaxes constraints on broader fiscal policy, creating opportunities to stimulate more productive and socially inclusive economic development. With respect to carbon pricing, its potential for contributing to public budget is illustrated in figure 6.2b. In developing and emerging economies, where tax revenue-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratios rarely exceed 20 percent,an additional €60/ tCO2 carbon price on top of existing measures would generate revenues worth more than 2 percent of gross domestic product(GDP). These revenues would not be available under non-fiscal climate policies like emission standards or ETS that do not auction permits.
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Better alignment of broad tax policy can help reduce carbon emissions. Subsidies or tax deductions related to commuting (Su and DeSalvo, 2008), company cars (Harding, 2014) and the aviation sector (Gössling et al., 2017) are common in many developed countries and tend to encourage carbon-intensive transport choices. Replacing property taxes with land value taxes can reduce urban sprawl and increase housing density, which in turn reduces the need for longer commutes (Banzhaf and Lavery, 2010).
I’m horrified at the ongoing UN and green attacks on agriculture. The abundance we take for granted is politically fragile:
Fiscal policies such as ecological fiscal transfers, contingent on environmental performance, can also play a role in the land-use sector. They could be a way to implement REDD+6 when international pay-for-performance or carbon market finance flows to the national or state government level (Loft et al., 2016). There is growing experience with ecological fiscal transfers, including transfers of tax revenues to support protected areas and forests in Portugal (Santos et al., 2012), several Brazilian states (May et al., 2011) and India (Busch and Mukherjee, 2018). Land taxes on agricultural land can also help reduce agricultural land use and deforestation (Kalkuhl and Edenhofer, 2017).
Is it possible to ‘loan’ something back to the person or place you stole it from? The British Museum in London, which houses one of the biggest permanent collections of world art and artifacts, certainly seems to think so.
Last week, responding to an emotional plea from the governor of Easter Island, the museum generously announced that it would consider “loaning” an 800-year-old statue back to the territory, which is now part of Chile.
The Hoa Hakananai’a was stolen — or “taken without permission” as The Guardian more delicately put it — in 1868 by the British HMS ‘Topaze’ and delivered to Queen Victoria. The museum itself uses even more sanitized language. Its online information page about the statue explains that it was “collected” during the frigate’s expedition to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and was “gifted” by the Queen to the museum a year later.
“This statue would have originally stood on a specially built platform on the sacred site of Orongo,” the museum explains. “It would have stood with giant stone companions, their backs to the sea, keeping watch over the island.”
The reason it doesn’t still serve this purpose, is because the museum refuses to give it back. The 2.4-meter statue has no cultural or emotional significance to British people. To the Rapa Nui people, on the other hand, the Hoa Hakananai’a is extremely culturally and spiritually significant.
“We are just a body. You, the British people, have our soul,” Governor Tarita Alarcon Rapu said through tears during a visit to the museum last week. “You have kept him for 150 years. Just give us some months and we can have it there.”
The Hoa Hakananai’a is just one example of many when it comes to spoils of the British Empire which sit permanently in UK exhibitions. The museum has also refused to return the Rosetta Stone, something the head of Egypt’s new national museum recently called for, and the Parthenon Marbles. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras recently raised the issue with Theresa May, saying that their “natural place” is at the Parthenon. In 2013, India called for the return of the Koh-i-noor diamond, which was taken and given to Queen Victoria in 1850. David Cameron dismissed the notion, saying he did not believe in “returnism.”
Just this week, news reports said that the London museum would temporarily return some of the iconic ancient Benin bronze sculptures to Nigeria. There are more than a thousand of the bronzes sitting in museums across Europe, and successive Nigerian governments have sought their return for decades. France is set to give back 26 of the sculptures permanently, a decision made after a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron called for thousands of African artworks to be returned.
“I cannot accept that a large part of the cultural heritage of several African countries is in France,” Macron said last year in Burkina Faso. “There are historical explanations for this but there is no valid, lasting and unconditional justification.”
According to the French report, about 90 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is situated outside of the continent. When the British Museum returns “some” of their 700 Benin bronzes, however, it will only be on loan.
In a recent article for The Guardian, Tiffany Jenkins, the author of an entire book about why Western museums should refuse to return their stolen treasures, writes that when the first wave of Benin bronzes were created, Benin was an empire and the objects were crafted on the back of the slave trade. Maybe the descendants of the Benin king should apologize for slavery before they are approved as “morally worthy owners of the artefacts,” she writes, rather ironically.
Jenkins argues reductively that history is ugly and tussling over the rights and wrongs of the past is a pointless exercise. If Western countries start returning artifacts looted during the colonial era, she says, “there could be no end to competitive claim-making.”
Well, so be it.
It is not any British or European museum’s right to withhold plundered treasures while it decides who is “morally worthy” of possessing them. The very suggestion reeks of colonial arrogance. Ultimately, Jenkins writes, artifacts in Western museums “enlighten us about the world” and that is the job of our museums. How lovely; stolen cultural heritage enlightens us deserving Westerners, so of course, it has fulfilled its one, true purpose.
The fact that repatriating colonial loot is complicated and uncomfortable is no good reason to avoid facing reality and doing the bare minimum to atone for past sins. This is cultural property we are talking about. It belongs to the peoples and cultures where it originated — and to quote Macron, there is “no valid, lasting and unconditional justification” for refusing their return.
Of course, it is not only British or French museums that house looted art and cultural objects. There has been an ongoing dispute between Russia and Germany over artwork looted when the Red Army conquered Berlin in 1945. Much of the looted items were returned to East Germany after 1945, but not all of them. Moscow claimed the looting was a legitimate response to Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union and its destruction of Soviet national treasures. Germany begged to differ.
In October, the British Museum launched an initiative to counter the perception that everything within its walls is looted treasure — but Twitter users quickly made fun of the effort. ‘We didn’t steal all of it’ is hardly a very persuasive or positive-sounding plea.
That campaign came after art historian Alice Procter made headlines for giving ‘Uncomfortable Art Tours’ in British museums. The tours focus on slavery and colonialism and Porter encourages participants to wear ‘Display It Like You Stole It’ badges as they wander the exhibitions to advocate for more honest descriptions under artifacts. “On most text panels there’s little or no mention of how objects came to be there. Euphemistic language of ‘acquisition’ obscures the truth,” Procter wrote in a piece for The Guardian.
“You can look at the Gweagal shield in the British Museum and have no idea that it is considered crucial to the story of indigenous and settler relations in Australia, that its position in the museum is extremely controversial, and it’s sought by Gweagal people today,” she adds.
Another argument those against repatriation frequently use is that indigenous people, in some cases, offered or sold cultural objects to colonizers in exchange for something they needed more — money or tools, for example. Those items, they argue, can’t be said to be ‘stolen’ — but this completely ignores the power imbalance of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.
“Collected,” “acquired,” and “taken without permission” in this context are simply euphemisms for “stolen.” It is clear that the British Museum and people like Jenkins are worried about setting a precedent. Returning just one item would open the floodgates.
The British Museum is nothing short of a temple to colonial theft. If it concedes in one case, where does it end? It will never happen, of course, but in an ideal world, that would be just one extremely tiny — and wholly inadequate — price to pay for hundreds of years of colonial massacre and plunder.
The recent hysteria over a Russian standing for the presidency of Interpol was only the latest example of how Cold War ideologues are seeking to politicize everything in pursuance of their obsessive anti-Russian crusade.
World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). And now the election for Interpol president. These international organizations, which do valuable work, should be free from geopolitics. The representatives of some Western countries, I’m afraid, think differently.
The problem, for the US and its closest allies, has been that international bodies don’t always do exactly what they want. Other countries, including horror of horrors Russia, also have a say in them.
That is most undesirable as only the voices of the self-righteous, self-appointed ‘world policemen’ should be heard. Then a geopolitical agenda can be pursued through these hitherto impartial and well-respected organizations.
Let’s take WADA first. World sport needs an anti-doping agency which is independent and will apply the rules and regulations equally to all nations, including, if need be, against the US. But the anti-Russian countries want an anti-doping agency that will single Russia out for special treatment. In July 2016, Reuters revealed how the heads of the US and Canada’s anti-doping bodies had drafted a letter to WADA calling for ALL Russian athletes to be banned from the Rio Olympic Games.
Just imagine if the Russian anti-doping agency had sought to get all US or Canada athletes banned, whether or not they had been found guilty of cheating. They would be accused of playing politics and being terribly unsporting. But it seems it’s OK if Uncle Sam and his allies do it.
It was a similar story with the football World Cup in Russia. That really got the neocons hyperventilating. The process by which FIFA awarded Russia the World Cup had to be ‘illegitimate’. The tournament must be taken away from Russia demanded John McCain and 12 other US Senators.
Russia is a football-loving nation which had never before hosted a World Cup. Its status as host nation was actually long overdue, regardless of one’s views of the policies of the Russian government. But for the Russophobes politics is everything. They never take a break from bear-baiting.
The OPCW has also been affected by the new outlook, whereby everything has to conform to the Western elite’s foreign policy goals.
The UK has pushed (successfully) for a change in the role of the chemical weapons watchdog. Frustrated that the OPCW has, up to now, only been able to say whether or not a chemical weapons attack has taken place, the UK government has managed to politicize the OPCW so that it now will be able to attribute blame for an attack.
We can only imagine the enormous pressure, public and private, that will be put on it to declare ‘guilty’ those who the UK and its allies wish to bomb. “The OPCW is a Titanic which is leaking and has started to sink,” Russian Industry Minister Georgy Kalamanov said. He wasn’t being overly dramatic.
Having ‘done’ the OPCW, the hawks then turned their attentions to Interpol and sabotaging the election of a Russian, Alexander Prokopchuk, as the agency’s president. Prokopchuk was regarded as the frontrunner for the job at the international police agency and rightly so.
He was already Interpol vice-president, the vice-chair for Europe since 2016, and well-respected by his colleagues.
But others were horrified at the prospect of a Russian winning. Financier Bill Browder tweeted a letter from twelve US Senators attacking the candidacy. Unsubstantiated claims were made that Prokopchuk was ex-KGB. If elected he would be ‘Putin’s puppet.’
“This is really quite an extraordinary situation, to find ourselves with the possibility of not just a fox in charge of the hen coop, but actually the assassin in charge of the murder investigation,” fumed MP Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the UK’s House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee and a former member of the Intelligence Corps.
There were threats to set up a rival organization to Interpol if Prokopchuk was elected.
But the smear campaign against him succeeded. Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin press secretary, spoke of “interference in the electoral process of an international organization”. Of course, as it was interference from the UK and the US it didn’t really count. Again, just imagine the uproar if Russian parliamentarians tried to block the election of a British or US candidate.
As if the interference was not enough, we’ve now got Browder calling for countries such as Canada to help kick Russia out of Interpol altogether.
If that sounds familiar, then think back to John McCain’s calls for a ‘League of Democracies’ (i.e. the US and approved allies), to get round Russia’s UNSC veto.
Russia’s great crime is not ‘human rights’ abuses, but the fact that it has effectively blocked the Western elite’s plans for regime change in Syria and has sought to reclaim its self-respect at home and abroad since the disastrous days of the oligarch-friendly Boris Yeltsin.
As a response, the war against Russia, and we have to call it that, has been waged on a number of fronts. Neocon think tanks and commentators urge Russian media, such as RT, to be taken off air and for more sanctions to be imposed.
They call for increased military buildup on Russia’s borders under the guise of ‘protecting European security’. They urge European nations to pull out of beneficial gas pipeline projects with Russia and buy US LNG instead. They cheer on the most anti-Russian forces in Ukraine.
They also seek to get Russia banned or sidelined in international organizations. Which is inimical to the whole notion of internationalism. As Mary Dejevsky wrote last week in the Independent, “what happened over the Interpol presidency should not be dismissed so lightly. It raises questions that deserve answers – questions that may not even be asked, now that a result has been achieved that is deemed satisfactory by the vocal Western world.”
Bodies that only include the US and its allies, or only follow the geopolitical agendas of certain countries, cannot be accepted as the norm. We need to hear all voices and not just the loudest ones.
Amid warming relations with Chad, Israel is reportedly working to normalize relations with Sudan and other African states as the regime steps up its push to strengthen its foothold in the continent.
A senior Israeli official told Channel 10 TV channel that a visit on Sunday by Chadian President Idriss Deby to the occupied territories was laying the groundwork for normal ties between Tel Aviv and the Muslim-majority African states of Sudan, Mali and Niger.
The unnamed official also noted that Israel was seeking to shorten flight times from the occupied territories to Latin America through normalizing relations with African countries.
Deby became the first Chadian leader to visit Israel on Sunday, 46 years after the two sides severed ties.
After meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Chadian president pledged a new era of cooperation with “the prospect of reestablishing diplomatic relations.”
Israeli media cited sources in N’Djamena as saying that Deby’s visit was focused on “security,” and that the regime in Tel Aviv had already been supplying weapons and other military equipment to Chad.
Netanyahu, however, declined to comment on potential Israeli weapons sales to Chad.
During his visit, Deby said the future resumption of ties with Israel “does not make us ignore the Palestinian issue.”
The Palestinians, however, protested Deby’s trip to Israel.
Wasel Abu Youssef, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee, voiced displeasure over the visit.
“All countries and institutions must boycott the extremist government of Israel and impose a siege on it because of its settlement activities, its occupation of Palestinian land,” Youssef was quoted as saying by Reuters.
Over the past two years, Netanyahu has traveled to several African states in a bid to end decades of hostility against the occupying entity and convince them to stop voting against the Israeli regime at the United Nations in favor of Palestinians.
According to Channel 10, Israeli is now in talks with Sudan in a bid to improve relations with the African state.
The Israeli push comes almost two years after Sudan joined Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in cutting relations with Iran.
At that time, Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Tel Aviv had urged the US and other countries to improve their relationship with Sudan in response.
In a 2016, Sudanese Foreign Minister Ibrahim Ghandour said Khartoum was open to the idea of normalizing ties with Israel in exchange for lifting US sanctions.
Israel is also said to be seeking to take advantage of the insurgency and Takfiri militancy gripping parts of Africa to sell advanced military equipment to conflict-ridden states in the continent.
Israel in contact with Persian Gulf Arab states
Meanwhile, reports have emerged recently of Israel’s attempts to make its secret ties with Persian Gulf Arab governments public and establish formal relations with them.
On Sunday, Israeli news sites reported that Tel Aviv is working to normalize ties with Bahrain, hours after Netanyahu hinted he would soon travel to unspecified Arab states.
Israeli Economy Minister Eli Cohen said on Monday he had been invited to attend a conference next year in Bahrain.
Netanyahu met with Oman’s Sultan Qaboos in Muscat last month, but the controversial visit was kept secret until after the Israeli premier returned to the occupied territories.
The visit to Muscat was the first by an Israeli prime minister since 1996.
On Sunday, Israel’s Hadashot television news reported that Netanyahu had secured reassurances from Oman that airlines flying to and from the occupied territories would be permitted to fly over the kingdom’s airspace.
Activists with a pro-Palestine boycott campaign against Israel said Monday that the meeting between Sultan Qaboos and Netanyahu may have breached a long-dormant Israeli boycott law.
“Since 1977, official records stopped mentioning the Law of Boycotting Israel, neither denying it nor confirming it,” an Omani activist with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement told the Middle East Eye news portal.
“This happened when the country took a neutral policy in foreign affairs, including accepting normalizing ties with the Zionist entity,” the activist added.
Another activist said several prominent activists had been arrested shortly before the Israeli prime minister’s visit to Muscat for pro-Palestinian posts on social media, adding, however, that they were freed after disassociating themselves from BDS Oman.
“There is no clear legal path of how to implement the law. But even discussing this topic is a risky business, because there is no political free speech,” he said.
The activist also noted that BDS Oman had sent its “sincerest apologies” to the Palestinian people after a visit by “criminal” Netanyahu.
Ever since Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey, the Post has pressed hard to show that the murder was a state-sponsored assassination orchestrated by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
If only the Post had shown the same diligence, determination, and perseverance in the assassination of President Kennedy that it is displaying in the Khashoggi assassination. Instead, like many other U.S. mainstream newspapers, the Post has long taken the same position on the Kennedy assassination that President Trump is taking with respect to the Khashoggi assassination: obtuse denial.
This was especially true during the tenure of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. You couldn’t find a better example of journalistic indifference than what happened during that period of time. The following are just two examples of this phenomenon.
First, though, the background:
In 1991 Oliver Stone came out with his movie JFK, which posited that the assassination of President Kennedy was actually a highly sophisticated regime-change operation at the hands of the U.S. national security establishment, i.e., the military and the CIA.
The mainstream press went after Stone with a vengeance. Although they didn’t dispute the fact that the U.S. national-security establishment carried out assassinations and regime-change operations against foreign leaders, they were indignant and outraged over the suggestion that such an operation would be carried out against a U.S. president.
At the end of Stone’s movie was a blub informing people that despite the passage of almost 30 years since the assassination, the national-security agencies were steadfastly continuing to keep their records relating to the Kennedy assassination secret from the American people, most of whom had never accepted the official lone-nut theory of the assassination.
That blurb produced such outrage among the public that Congress was pressured into enacting the JFK Records Act, which mandated that the national-security agencies disclose their long-secret records to the public.
But there was a major oddity about the law: While the ARRB was charged with enforcing the JFK Records Act, the law also prohibited it from investigating any aspect of the assassination. That is a very bizarre provision. If newly discovered evidence is discovered that incriminates the national-security establishment, why wouldn’t Congress want it investigated?
Did the Post write any editorials questioning that particular provision? Nope. Unlike the Khashoggi assassination, about which the Post has published multiple editorials and op-eds, the Post didn’t see fit to issue even a mild criticism of that no-investigation provision.
Did the ARRB come up with evidence that incriminated the national-security establishment? You bet it did. The following are just a few examples.
The two brain examinations
The military pathologists who conducted the autopsy on President Kennedy’s body claimed that there was only one examination of President Kennedy’s brain as part of the autopsy. The general counsel for the ARRB, an attorney named Jeremy Gunn, and an ARRB staff member named Douglas Horne discovered, however, that that was a lie. They discovered that were actually two brain examinations, the second which could not possibly have involved the president’s brain and instead was almost certainly a brain specimen that had been brought over from the Bethesda Medical School.
How did Gunn and Horne discover the military pathologists’ lie? They did it by examining the testimony and the timelines of the two brain exams.
The first brain examination was held within a couple of days after the assassination. It was attended by the two military pathologists who were falsely claiming that there was only one brain examination, Navy Commanders James Humes and J. Thornton Boswell.
That first brain exam was also attended by the official autopsy photographer, John Stringer, who taught medical photography at the Bethesda Medical School. Stringer told the ARRB that at that brain examination, which almost certainly involved President Kennedy’s brain, the pathologists “sectioned” the brain. That meant that they cut it like one would cut a loaf of bread. That is standard procedure in gunshot wounds to the head, especially to examine the trajectory of the bullet. Once a brain is sectioned, there is no way to put it back together. It remains cut into slices.
The second brain examination was held about a week later. How do we know that? Because the third military pathologist who conducted the autopsy, Army Lt. Col. Pierre Finck, told the ARRB that he attended that brain examination. Also attending that second brain exam were the two lying pathologists, Humes and Boswell.
Thus, Humes and Boswell participated in both brain exams, which they were falsely conflating into one brain exam.
Stringer told the ARRB that Finck was not at the brain examination. Finck told the ARRB that Stringer was not at the brain examination. That’s how Gunn and Horne figured out that Humes and Boswell were lying when they claimed that there had been only one brain examination.
Here’s something important about the second brain examination: The brain in that examination was fully intact. That means that it had to be a brain specimen of someone other than President Kennedy because, again, a brain that has been sectioned cannot be put back together.
Here’s something else to note about the second brain examination: The second brain weighed 150 grams more than an average person’s brain, which would have been impossible if it were President Kennedy’s brain. That’s because the gunshot that hit Kennedy in the head destroyed one-fourth to one-third of his brain. Thus, there is no way that Kennedy’s brain could have weighed more than an average person’s brain after having lost so much brain mass from the gunshot.
That again confirms that the second brain could not possibly have been President Kennedy’s brain. Yet, a photograph of that second brain is what is in the official autopsy record. The photograph of the second brain shows that the brain is damaged but without major loss of brain tissue. In other words, the military’s photograph of President Kennedys’ brain in the official autopsy record is bogus.
But here’s the kicker: Remember that provision in the JFK Records Act, the one that the Washington Post didn’t see fit to criticize when the law was enacted. It prohibited the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the Kennedy assassination. It was a provision of the law that the board of commissioners of the ARRB strictly enforced on the staff, making it very clear that any staff member who was caught violating that restriction would be immediately fired.
Thus, after discovering that there were, in fact, two separate brain examinations, the second of which could not possibly have involved the president’s brain, Gunn and Horne were absolutely prohibited from investigating the matter.
Did the Washington Post investigate the issue? After all, here was clear circumstantial evidence pointing in the direction of a fraudulent autopsy having been carried out on the body of the deceased president on the very day of the assassination. Isn’t that something that any self-respecting investigative newspaper or journalist would relish checking into? Like maybe just a telephone call to Humes and Boswell asking them to explain why Stringer and Finck were both claiming to be at the brain exam at completely different times and denying that the other was there.
And it’s not like the Post was unaware of what Gunn and Horne had discovered. Take a look at these two articles, both of which detail Gunn’s and Horne’s discovery of the two brain examinations:
Did the Post follow up on these two articles by assigning an investigative reporter to investigate the matter? Did it publish a slew of editorials and op-eds demanding that the military explain what was going on here, as it has with the Khashoggi assassination? Did it publish critiques of the provision in the JFK Records Act that prohibited the ARRB from investigating the matter and request Congress to amend the law to allow such an investigation?
No, no, and no.
The Saundra Spencer testimony
During its tenure in the 1990s, the ARRB summoned a woman named Saundra Spencer to testify. In November 1963, Spencer was a U.S. Navy Petty Officer who was working in the U.S. Navy’s photography lab in Washington, D.C. She had a top-secret security clearance and helped developed top-secret photographs. She worked closely with the White House. No one has ever questioned the integrity, veracity, or competence of Saundra Spencer. It would be virtually impossible to find a more credible witness.
Spencer told the ARRB an astounding story. On the weekend of the assassination, she was asked to develop, on a top-secret, classified basis the military’s autopsy photographs for President Kennedy. Given that she had been led to believe that the matter was classified, Spencer had kept her secret for some 30 years.
The ARRB’s general counsel, Jeremy Gunn, showed her the official autopsy photographs in the JFK autopsy record. Spencer carefully examined them. She then told Gunn in direct and unequivocal terms that those official autopsy photographs were not the ones she developed on the weekend of the assassination. The records she developed, she stated, showed a massive exit-sized wound in the lower back of Kennedy’s head. The military’s official autopsy photographs show no such wound and show the back of Kennedy’s head to be fully intact.
There is something important to note about Spencer’s testimony: It matched what the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital in Dallas said immediately after the president was declared dead. It also matched what bystanders stated who were situated to the rear of the presidential limousine and who had been splattered with brain tissue. It also matched what two of the Parkland nurses stated. It also matched what Secret Service agent Clint Hill stated. It also matched the bone fragment from the lower rear of the president’s skull that was found the day after the assassination. It also matched what two FBI agents said, one of whom told the ARRB that the official autopsy photographs appeared to be “doctored.” It also matched what many of the official autopsy participants had secretly told the House Select Committee in the 1970s.
That could only mean one thing: The military’s autopsy photograph of the back of President Kennedy’s head was bogus, as bogus as the military’s autopsy brain photograph.
But keep in mind something important: Notwithstanding Spencer’s sworn testimony, the ARRB was prohibited from investigating the matter because of the no-investigation provision that someone had slipped into the JFK Records Act.
Did Spencer’s testimony motivate the Washington Post to launch a journalistic investigation into the Kennedy autopsy? Did her testimony motive the Post to call for a modification of the JFK Records Act to enable ARRB to investigate the matter?
No and no.
You see, only national-security establishments of other countries carry out assassinations and regime-change operations against their own leaders. In the eyes of the U.S. mainstream press, our national-security establishment would never do such a thing. Therefore, there was and is no reason to investigate the manifest fraud in the Kennedy autopsy that was carried out by the U.S. military on the very evening of assassination as well as the origin and purpose of that fraudulent scheme.
US citizen of Pakistan descent David Headley, despite pleading guilty of plotting the Mumbai terror attack, was not extradited to India as part of a plea bargain with the US administration in 2010. Indian security agencies were not allowed access to Headley for a second time, despite repeated requests.
The US has announced a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction in any country of any individual who committed, conspired, aided or abetted the terror attacks in Mumbai, India on 26 November 2008. This is the second time that the US is announcing such reward, as the first such announcement did not yield any result.
“We call upon all countries, particularly Pakistan, to uphold their UN Security Council obligations to implement sanctions against the terrorists responsible for this atrocity, including Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and its affiliates,” Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state, said.
But why was David Headley, the American spy who allegedly hatched the conspiracy for the attacks, converted into an “Approver” by the US? This question continues to haunt the Indian security agencies, as the US has never explained to India in the last 10 years why it entered into a plea bargain with Headley in 2010 that helped him escape the death penalty.
The plea bargain said that he would not be extradited to India, Denmark (where he hatched terror conspiracy), or Pakistan for any offenses for which he has been convicted under the plea, including conspiracy to bomb places of public use in India.
David Headley’s plea bargain, according to India’s intelligence officers who did not wish to be quoted, made the case weaker as “Indian intelligence only received such information, which was already out there in public domain.”
India’s National Investigative Agency only once interacted with David Headley in 2010 to record his statement and that, too, 10 days after the Indian official landed in the US. Since then, Indian agencies were not able to catch hold of Headley until 2016, when he deposed before a Mumbai court through video conferencing from a US jail, but despite making attempts, the US authorities never disclosed the whereabouts of Headley.
There has been a perception among certain section in the Indian administration that the US had every detail of Headley’s movement and that is why the US administration never allowed Indian agencies to question him independently.
Not getting access to Headley was one of the main reasons why the Indian agencies could not get answers to key questions including “who were the ‘state actors’ Headley was close to?”
It is believed that Headley visited Mumbai several times citing the reason as “for setting up of immigration office” but the key question that remains unanswered is — “how did the US citizen manage to sneak into India several times on false pretext?”
The “Resistance” – the loose affiliation of liberals, progressives and neo-conservatives dedicated to opposing Donald Trump – is NOT a grass-roots movement. They don’t speak for the everyman or the poor or the oppressed. They are a distraction, nothing more. A parlor game. The face to Trump’s heel.
The Resistance is the voice of the Deep State – Pro-war, pro-globalisation, pro-Imperialism. It just hides its true face behind a mask of “progressive values”. They prove this with their own actions – opposing Trump’s moves toward peace with North Korea and finding common ground with Russia.
In fact, though the resistance lives to criticize the Trump administration, they have been notably quiet – even in favour of – three key issues: The bombing of Syria, the tearing up of the INF treaty and the prosecution of Julian Assange.
They tell us, in clear voices, who they are and what they want and millions of people refuse to listen. So totally brain-washed by the “Orange Man Bad” hysteria, that they will side with anyone hitting the same talking points, spouting the right buzzwords, using the same hashtags.
… and Robert Mueller receives a glowing write-up in the Guardian, being praised as “America’s straightest arrow”.
The painful prose paints a blurry picture of Mueller. Slapping ounces of vaseline onto the lens of reality. It praises his hair and his clothes and his 35 dollar watch. It declares him a soldier “forged in combat”, regaling us with tales of the bravery of Mueller’s marine regiment – “The Magnificent Bastards”.
Vietnam is reduced to a movie set – nothing but a backdrop for Mueller’s courage under fire. He won a bronze star, you know. Apparently while “The Magnificent Bastards” strode around the Vietnamese jungle, burning villages down and watching the napalm fall from the sky, a couple of angry farmers shot back and Mueller was wounded.
Taking a bullet in the leg from a terrified peasant who just wants you to sod off out of his country will always win you medals, but it shouldn’t.
Voluntarily signing on to enforce Imperial foreign policy in a war of conquest will always have the media paint you as a hero, but it shouldn’t.
What flaws the author does ascribe to Mueller are those we all happily admit to having ourselves. He’s a “micromanager” and he’s “too tough”.
Yes, and I’m sure he works himself too hard and doesn’t suffer fools gladly and always speaks his mind as well.
Read the column if you want, but I’d suggest not eating for a few hours first. A more nauseating panegyric I have not witnessed, at least since Barack Obama left office.
Far more telling than what it does say… is what it does not say. It mentions Mueller’s role as head of the FBI during the launch of the “war on terror”, but doesn’t go into any of the abuse of human rights that accompanied (and still accompanies) the increasingly authoritarian powers granted to US intelligence agencies by the Patriot Act.
Let’s be clear: Mueller’s FBI was complicit in rendition, torture, Gitmo. All of it.
Given that, it’s rather unsurprising that the article doesn’t mention the word “Iraq” once. A breath-taking omission, considering Mueller’s testimony in front of congress played a key role in spreading the lie of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction”:
It doesn’t matter how many Vietnamese peasants took pot-shots at him, it doesn’t matter how tidy his hair is, or how cheap his watch. It doesn’t matter if he looks like Cooper or speaks like Eastwood or walks like Wayne. He is a proven liar – a man culpable in the greatest crime of the 21st century. He is, and always will be, a servant of the Deep State.
A proven liar. A proven killer. An Imperialist. A criminal.
Is this the stuff of which political heroes should be made?
Only in “the Resistance”.
Obviously, Trump’s administration is dangerous – it still stokes warlike approaches to Iran and Russia. It has directly threatened Venezuela and Cuba. But you can’t fight the right-hand of the Deep State by clasping the left. They all join in the middle. They’re the same monster.
Anti-Trumpers, all over the world, need to take a good look at WHO they’re fighting alongside, and ask themselves WHAT they are fighting for.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he’s forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
Israel has officially admitted that its military ordered a deadly attack on a Lebanese ship carrying refugees during the regime’s invasion of the country more than three decades ago.
An Israeli submarine fired missiles at the refugee ship in northern Lebanon in the summer of 1982, killing 25 refugees and foreign workers on board, the Israeli Channel 10 reported on Thursday, after the regime lifted a 36-year-old gag order on the incident.
The report said that the commercial ship, carrying dozens of Lebanese refugees to Cyprus, apparently tried to take advantage of a brief ceasefire and flee the area.
But an Israeli Navy Gal-type submarine, which was following the ship for about an hour after leaving Tripoli, said the report, had fired torpedoes at the boat and killed the refugees and foreign workers.
It alleged that the submarine’s captain, identified as Maj. A, had mistakenly ordered the attack because he was convinced that the ship was carrying Palestinian fighters.
Ten years later, Israel said it had launched an investigation into the incident. The probe, however, ruled that the captain had made a mistake, but that he was within his operational orders.
Israeli armored personnel carriers are seen near a mosque on the outskirts of the Lebanese capital of Beirut, on June 16, 1982.
The Palestinians and the Lebanese never realized that the boat was sunk by Israeli.
The Israeli regime has waged three wars on Lebanon — in 1982, 2000, and 2006. It has also carried out assassinations in the Lebanese territory.
The Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah, which was founded in the 1980s following the Israeli invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon, has since helped the army defend Lebanon both in the face of foreign aggression, including in the 2000 and 2006 wars, and against terrorism.
Lebanon and Israel are technically at war due to the latter’s occupation of the country’s Shebaa Farms since 1967.
Fifty-five years ago, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Although there has been a great deal written about this event over the years, I want to draw attention to one exceptionally important article, originally delivered as a talk on November 20, 1998. Vincent Salandria gave this talk in Dallas at the invitation of the Coalition on Political Assassinations. (See Sources.)
Salandria had been a high school teacher at the time of the assassination (he later became a lawyer) and was one of the first people in the US to write essays expressing dissent from the government narrative of lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, maverick leftist.
In his 1998 talk Salandria went through over a dozen of the famous obstacles to the government story—the grassy knoll witnesses, the “magic bullet,” the testimony of the doctors at Parkland Hospital, and so on—but he did not let himself get sidetracked into detailed debates on any of these. By 1998 he had already seen, and participated in, 35 years of such debates. He had long ago concluded that, “the national security state at the very highest level of its power killed President John F. Kennedy for his efforts at seeking to develop a modus vivendi with the Soviets and with socialist Cuba.”
In 1998 he felt it was time to warn researchers about the danger of wasting time in “false debates,” where the essential facts had clearly been established and the wrangling served only the purposes of the assassins. Rather than repeat the debates, Salandria decided in 1998 to outline his basic approach. I will call this the Salandria Approach. I draw attention to it because I believe it helps us find our feet when we tackle not only the JFK killing but many of the killings in the 21st century’s War on Terror.
Here are Salandria’s words:
I began to sift through the myriad facts regarding the assassination which our government and the US media offered us. What I did was to examine the data in a different fashion from the approach adopted by our news media. I chose to assess how an innocent civilian-controlled US government would have reacted to those data. I also envisioned how a guilty US national security state which may have gained control of and may have become semi-autonomous to the civilian US governmental structure would have reacted to the data of the assassination.”
He adds that,
only a guilty government seeking to serve the interests of the assassins would consistently resort to accepting one improbable conclusion after another while rejecting a long series of probable conclusions.”
Let us take two cases from Salandria’s list of over one dozen in order to see what he was getting at.
The Grassy Knoll
Dozens of witnesses thought there were shots from an extended grassy rise, containing several structures, situated west of the famous Texas School Book Depository Building. Salandria, refusing to get drawn into the familiar debate, says:
Let us assume arguendo [for the sake of argument] that all of the eyewitnesses who had concluded that shots were fired from the grassy knoll were dead wrong. But an innocent government could not and would not at that time have concluded that these good citizens were wrong and would not have immediately rushed to declare a far-fetched single assassin theory as fact.”
Note that Salandria’s emphasis is not on the details of the grassy knoll discussion but on the method the government followed in its investigation. And he is right, both about the immediate claim that Oswald acted alone— presented, as he explains, by a government representative on November 22 itself—and about the identical statement presented later by the Warren Commission.
In both cases the claim flew in the face of the eyewitness evidence. For example, despite the fact that there are references to dozens of witnesses to shots from the grassy knoll in the 26 volumes of evidence appended to the Warren Report, the Commission itself displayed little interest in them. And when the Commission dismissed every single one of the grassy knoll witnesses to protect its lone gunman theory it did so without bothering to make a sustained argument.
It chose instead to play a credibility game. It pronounced:
No credible evidence suggests that the shots were fired from the railroad bridge over the Triple Underpass, the nearby railroad yards or any place other than the Texas School Book Depository Building” Warren Report, p. 61
In other words, the Commission decided to gather together into one great agglomeration the credibility of its seven well dressed and high-ranking white men associated with government and use this to crush the credibility of the “good citizens” who were present in the Plaza and witnessed, with their senses, the unfolding of events.
It was a breathtaking move. But in what way could it be said to characterize an innocent government? How could any serious investigator pretend to solve an evidential problem by playing a credibility game? Standard practice in a homicide investigation would be to find all witnesses, to interview them, and to record their statements impartially, making sure to ask each one of them where they thought the shots came from and why they reached their conclusion. How would the opinions of congressmen, spies and the like possibly be relevant to the case when these gentlemen declined to offer adequate counter-evidence or to give a serious argument to support their peculiar conclusion?
Readers who have never had the opportunity to see and hear for themselves the good citizens in question may benefit from Mark Lane’s documentary:
Well, where, in such a case, does the Salandria Approach lead us? We have no choice but to conclude that the Warren Commission’s investigation was not what we would expect from “an innocent civilian-controlled US government.”
It was more characteristic of “a guilty government seeking to serve the interests of the assassins.” There was a predetermined perpetrator and an insistence on the guilt of this perpetrator, while evidence suggestive of a conspiracy was systematically ignored, distorted or suppressed.
Suppose we were to apply the Salandria Approach to events of the 21st century–to the eyewitnesses at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, for example? We have over 150 witnesses who reported that they saw, heard or felt explosions at the time of the beginning of destruction of the Twin Towers. (See Sources for assertions in this and the following paragraph.)
Their testimony constitutes very significant support for the theory that the Trade Center was blown up and did not undergo collapse from structural failure caused by airplane collision. We are not simply talking about loud sounds here. We are talking about sounds that experienced firefighters suspected were caused by bombs. We are talking about patterns of explosions seen pulverizing the buildings. We are talking, in some cases, about witnesses who say these explosions threw them through the air. Now, avoiding the debates about the details of this testimony, let us follow Salandria and ask: What did the government’s 9/11 Commission do with these eyewitness accounts, all of which were in its possession?
The answer is that it called for no comprehensive search for eyewitnesses (neither did the FBI, as far as I can discover), nor did it have such witnesses asked the appropriate questions. It devoted to these witnesses a single line in the roughly 585 pages of its Report. And that single line is both dismissive and extremely misleading.
What about the National Institute of Standards and Technology, assigned by government the task of looking in detail at the destruction of the Trade Center and sorting out the reasons for its destruction? In the thousands of pages of its reports on the Twin Towers we find not a single mention of the explosion witnesses. Despite NIST’s pride in its interviewing techniques, and despite its access to all the relevant information, it somehow missed over 150 witnesses. It made no attempt to find them, to sort out their testimony, or to discover how their words might illumine the mystery of the so-called “collapses.”
We should recall that the efforts of the 9/11 Commission and NIST were mere follow-through. A strenuous attempt to promote the structural failure hypothesis was begun on the very day of September 11, 2001, in the absence of serious evidence in its favour and in bold contradiction to what large numbers of witnesses were saying. (Sources)
When we adopt the Salandria Approach we must, to paraphrase Salandria, conclude that, “an innocent government could not and would not at that time have concluded that these good citizens were wrong and would not have immediately rushed to declare a far-fetched [structural failure] theory as fact.”
The Magic Bullet
In his essay Salandria explains the absurdity of the single bullet (“magic bullet”) theory, according to which one bullet passed entirely through the president’s body and then caused all of Governor Connally’s wounds, emerging after its adventure in near-pristine condition. This bullet evidently had no difficulty changing direction in mid-air, nor did it balk at losing mass in Connally’s body and then regaining this mass at the end of its journey. Salandria concludes:
“our Cold War government in the context of the assassination had declared a moratorium on the science of physics.”
Remember: the issue before us is not merely he single bullet theory itself but the behavior of government representatives in investigating this hypothesis. So it is in those moments when we read the Warren Commission transcripts and watch counsel Arlen Specter leading and pressuring witnesses into accepting the single bullet theory that we realize we are seeing the handiwork of a guilty state.
Now, what might we find if we were to apply the Salandria Approach to the destruction of the World Trade Center? To restrict ourselves, for the sake of this discussion, to World Trade 7, what would the approach of an innocent government to this building destruction look like? Would we not expect a thorough search for eyewitnesses?
Would not all of the recoverable steel be preserved carefully and made accessible to civilian experts? Would there not be a serious attempt to explain evidence of corrosion and vaporization of the steel? Would there not be the most rigorous examination of the Trade Center dust, searching for evidence that would allow ascertainment of temperatures reached during the building’s destruction and searching as well for residue of explosives and incendiaries?
Would there not be frank astonishment at the fact that the descent of this 47-storey building, not hit by a plane, began rapidly, symmetrically, and at free fall acceleration? Would not physicists openly debate this astounding event, troubled by the fact that the vertical columns of this well constructed steel-framed high-rise offered no resistance whatsoever when, for mysterious reasons, the collapse began?
Surely an innocent government sincerely probing for the truth would not choose, instead of taking the path outlined above, to construct a computer simulation that, even with manipulation, could not replicate the historical event clearly preserved on video? Surely investigators would not bring the simulation to an abrupt end before it was able to represent total collapse, and surely they would not refuse to release the complete data set used in their simulation, claiming it might compromise national security? (Sources)
When we ask these questions and contemplate the answers we see at once what game NIST has been playing in its account of World Trade 7. In the 21st century there is, perhaps, no more obvious demonstration that the US government, for the sake of its War on Terror, has “declared a moratorium on the science of physics.”
There is an entire organization, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which has taken as its task for over a decade the pointing out of such violations of the laws of physics in the US government’s account of the September 11, 2001 crime. The organization is to be praised for its creativity and persistence. Yet the false debate continues, and the intelligentsia continues to insist that the Emperor is well dressed, thank you very much.
Political Implications of Grassy Knolls and Magic Bullets
There is something I have always found arresting about the grassy knoll, and my concerns extend to the suppressed witnesses of September 11. In both cases we have ordinary folks—people like ourselves—who are, supposedly, citizens of a democracy. They are also, as far as we can tell, of sound mind and body, able to perceive with their senses and assess with their minds. Yet, all of a sudden, when their bodies and minds tell them something that conflicts with a government dictum, they are considered by government of no more political competence than cattle. I find it hard to think of a greater insult to these “good citizens” and to the notion of democracy, and I find it hard to think of a more brash assertion of the principle of authority.
This is why witnesses from the grassy knoll and the World Trade Center should be at the centre of the current debate about state deception and its relation to democracy.
As for magic bullets in Dealey Plaza and the mysterious collapse of World Trade 7, they are, I suggest, of comparable political importance to the abused witnesses. We face a collection of gentlemen in suits and ties (seven gentlemen in the Warren Commission and ten in the 9/11 Commission) telling us that their stories are more potent than the laws of the universe. How poor must be our self-confidence that we can put up with this guff? How defective must be our educational systems if they produce citizens who accept this?
Here we are, then, at the 55th anniversary of the murder of a president who was moving away from Cold War thinking and entering a different path. As we reflect on the direction in which his assassins have steered the United States of America, to the detriment of all of us, US citizens and otherwise, let us reflect on Salandria’s words:
By coming to understand the true answer to the historical question of who killed President Kennedy and why, we will have developed a delicate and precisely accurate prism through which we can examine how power works in this militarized country. By understanding the nature of this monumental crime, we will become equipped to organize the struggle through which we can make this country a civilian republic in more than name only.”
Graeme MacQueen is the former director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University. He is a member of the 9/11 Consensus Panel, former co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, and an organizer of the 2011 Toronto Hearings, the results of which have been published in book form as The 9/11 Toronto Report. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Sources
The Salandria essay that is the basis of my article, “The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes,” can be found here.
3. The list of 156 eyewitnesses to explosions in the Twin Towers can be found here. A discussion of the method used to arrive at the list as well as the treatment of these witnesses by the 9/11 Commission and NIST can be found in my article, “Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in the Twin Towers” in The 9/11 Toronto Report, ed. James Gourley, International Center for 9/11 Studies, 2012.
For a discussion of Kennedy’s turn away from the Cold War see James Douglass’s brilliant JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008).
Washington’s attempt to “isolate Putin’s Russia” has failed and had the opposite effect.
On the fifth anniversary of the onset of the Ukrainian crisis, in November 2013, and of Washington “punishing” Russia by attempting to “isolate” it in world affairs — a policy first declared by President Barack Obama in 2014 and continued ever since, primarily through economic sanctions — Cohen discusses the following points:
1. During the preceding Cold War with the Soviet Union, no attempt was made to “isolate” Russia abroad; instead, the goal was to “contain” it within its “bloc” of Eastern European nations and compete with it in what was called the “Third World.”
2. The notion of “isolating” a country of Russia’s size, Eurasian location, resources, and long history as a great power is vainglorious folly. It reflects the paucity and poverty of foreign thinking in Washington in recent decades, not the least in the US Congress and mainstream media.
3. Consider the actual results. Russia is hardly isolated. Since 2014, Moscow has arguably been the most active diplomatic capital of all great powers today. It has forged expanding military, political, or economic partnerships with, for example, China, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, India, and several other East Asian nations, even, despite EU sanctions, with several European governments. Still more, Moscow is the architect and prime convener of three important peace negotiations under way today: those involving Syria, Serbia-Kosovo, and even Afghanistan. Put differently, can any other national leaders in the 21st century match the diplomatic records of Russian President Vladimir Putin or of his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov? Certainly not former US Presidents George W. Bush or Obama or soon-to-depart German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nor any British or French leader.
4. Much is made of Putin’s purportedly malign “nationalism” in this regard. But this is an uninformed or hypocritical explanation. Consider French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently reproached Trump for his declared nationalism. The same Macron who has sought to suggest (rather implausibly) that he is a second coming of Charles de Gaulle, who himself was a great and professed nationalist leader of the 20th century, from his resistance to the Nazi occupation and founding of the Fifth Republic to his refusal to put the French military under NATO command. Nationalism, that is, by whatever name, has long been a major political force in most countries, whether in liberal enlightened or reactionary right-wing forms. Russia and the United States are not exceptions.
5. Putin’s success in restoring Russia’s role in world affairs is usually ascribed to his “aggressive” policies, but it is better understood as a realization of what is characterized in Moscow as the “philosophy of Russian foreign policy” since Putin became leader in 2000. It has three professed tenets. The first goal of foreign policy is to protect Russia’s “sovereignty,” which is said to have been lost in the disastrous post-Soviet 1990s. The second is a kind of Russia-first nationalism or patriotism: to enhance the well-being of the citizens of the Russian Federation. The third is ecumenical: to partner with any government that wants to partner with Russia. This “philosophy” is, of course, non- or un-Soviet, which was heavily ideological, at least in its professed ideology and goals.
6. Considering Washington’s inability to “isolate Russia,” considering Russia’s diplomatic successes in recent years, and considering the bitter fruits of US militarized and regime-change foreign policies (which long pre-date President Trump), perhaps it’s time for Washington to learn from Moscow rather than demand that Moscow conform to Washington’s thinking about—and behavior in—world affairs. If not, Washington is more likely to continue to isolate itself.
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University and a contributing editor of The Nation.
It is rare that Thanksgiving falls on a significant date, as it does this year, November 22, the date President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. When we gather to give thanks, we should remember the extraordinarily courageous John F. Kennedy and the absent presence of a man whose death, dark and bloody as it was, is a sign of hope in these dark times.
For if John Kennedy had not had the spiritual conscience to secretly carry-on a back channel letter correspondence with the courageous Nikita Khrushchev, facilitated by Pope John XXIII, we very well might not be here, having been incinerated in a nuclear holocaust.
As then, so today, do we desperately need such a meeting of minds as the U.S. continually pushes Russia into a defensive posture that makes a nuclear confrontation so much more likely.
A true war hero twice over, John Kennedy risked his life to save his men in World War II, and then, after a radical turn toward peace-making in the last year of his life, he died in his own country at the hands of his domestic enemies as a soldier in a non-violent struggle for peace and reconciliation for all people across the world.
Hope? Not because he was assassinated, but why he was assassinated.
We know who killed him: the national security state, led by the CIA, killed him, not Lee Harvey Oswald. It was a coup d’état purposely conducted in plain sight to send a message that every president since has heeded: Your job is to make war and threaten nuclear annihilation for the Deep State elites. Follow orders or else. And they have followed.
If you find my assertion about the CIA audacious and absurd, first read James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, a book widely regarded as the best book on the assassination and its meaning. Read it very closely and slowly. Check all his sources, read his endnotes, and analyze his logic. Approach his meticulous research as if you agreed with Gandhi’s saying that truth is God and God is truth. Try to refute Douglass. You will be stymied.
Then read David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government for further clarification. You will come away from these two books profoundly shaken to your core. Be a truth-seeker, if you are not one already.
Or if you prefer, call me a “conspiracy theorist,” as the CIA wants, since it was the Agency that produced CIA Dispatch # 1035-960. “Most Americans,” writes Professor Lance deHaven-Smith of Florida State University, “will be shocked to learn that the conspiracy theory label was popularized as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a propaganda campaign initiated in 1967.”
This program was aimed at critics of the Warren Commission. The CIA requested that its own people and corporate media accomplices, including all its many journalist assets, besmirch the good names of anyone who dared to point out the absurdities in the government claim that Lee Harvey Oswald, a man working for the CIA as a fall guy, could have killed Kennedy.
So be careful how you use the term, if you don’t want to be working with the assassins to silence their critics.
But my intention here is not to debate the obvious. In a season of thanksgiving and hope, I want to remind you to remember and honor JFK. Because he knew the horror of war and grasped the systemic evil of its proponents within his own government, John Kennedy grew out of the war machine – in James Douglass’s words in JFK and the Unspeakable, when he was assassinated, JFK “was turning, Teshuvah, ‘turning,’ the rabbinic word for repentance,” against war and toward peace as his actions in the last year of his life make crystal clear. As a result, the unspeakable deep-state forces murdered him. He knew they would, but as a man of great courage, he knew he must follow the words of Abraham Lincoln dear to his heart: “I know there is a God – and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”
Hope comes from facing the truth, not from fleeing from it. The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, called our denial of the truth about JFK and his turn toward peace that led to his murder by forces within his own government, the “unspeakable”: “the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.”
We are living in that abyss today. But we can still speak; we can refuse to be silenced. And in speaking up we will find hope.
Jim Douglass asks: “How can we take hope from a peacemaking president’s assassination by his own national security state?”
He answers: “The story of why John Kennedy died encircles the earth. Because JFK chose peace on earth at the height of the Cold War, he was executed. But he turned toward peace, in spite of the consequences to himself, humanity is still alive and struggling. That is hopeful, especially if we understand what he went through and what he has given us as his vision.”
His life’s story is the story of the courage to change radically and turn toward truth and peace-making no matter what the cost.
We should all raise our glasses in a Thanksgiving toast to John Kennedy. In his story is ours; the hope he bequeathed to us through his courageous death is one of hope for life. Our gratitude to JFK must follow with our commitment to oppose the killers in our own government who want to silence us all, now and forevermore.
Manlio Dinucci in this carefully documented Pandora TV production focuses on US-NATO military deployment in Italy and around the World in what might described as “Global NATO”.
Manlio Dinucci, distinguished Italian author, geopolitical analyst and geographer is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization CRG).
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
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A senior Israeli official told Channel 10 TV channel that a visit on Sunday by Chadian President Idriss Deby to the occupied territories was laying the groundwork for normal ties between Tel Aviv and the Muslim-majority African states of Sudan, Mali and Niger.
Aletho News 