Just after midnight of June 6, 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated in a backroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just been celebrating his victory at the California primaries, which made him the most likely Democratic nominee for the presidential election. His popularity was so great that Richard Nixon, on the Republican side, stood little chance. At the age of 43, Robert would have become the youngest American president ever, after being the youngest Attorney General in his brother’s government. His death opened the way for Nixon, who could finally become president eight years after having been defeated by John F. Kennedy in 1960.
John had been assassinated four and a half years before Robert. Had he survived, he would certainly have been president until 1968. Instead, his vice-president Lyndon Johnson took over the White House in 1963, and became so unpopular that he retired in 1968. Interestingly, Johnson became president the very day of John’s death, and ended his term a few months after Robert’s death. He was in power at the time of both investigations.
And both investigations are widely regarded as cover-ups. In both cases, the official conclusion is rife with contradictions. We are going to sum them up here. But we will do more: we will show that the key to solving both cases resides in the link between them. And we will solve them beyond a reasonable doubt.
As Lance deHaven-Smith has remarked in Conspiracy Theory in America:
“It is seldom considered that the Kennedy assassinations might have been serial murders. In fact, in speaking about the murders, Americans rarely use the plural, ‘Kennedy assassinations’. […] Clearly, this quirk in the Kennedy assassination(s) lexicon reflects an unconscious effort by journalists, politicians, and millions of ordinary Americans to avoid thinking about the two assassinations together, despite the fact that the victims are connected in countless ways.”[1]
John and Robert were bound by an unshakable loyalty. Kennedy biographers have stressed the absolute dedication of Robert to his elder brother. Robert had successfully managed John’s campaign for the Senate in 1952, then his presidential campaign in 1960. John made him not only his Attorney General, but also his most trusted adviser, even on matters of Foreign or Military affairs. What John appreciated most in Robert was his sense of justice and the rectitude of his moral judgment. It is Robert, for example, who encouraged John to fully endorse the cause of the Blacks’ civil rights movement.[2]
Given this exceptional bond between the Kennedy brothers, what is the probability that the two Kennedy assassinations were unrelated? Rather, we should start with the assumption that they are related. Basic common sense suggests that the Kennedy brothers have been killed by the same force, and for the same motives. It is, at least, a logical working hypothesis that Robert was eliminated from the presidential race because he had to be prevented from reaching a position where he could reopen the case of his brother’s death. Both his loyalty to his brother’s memory, and his obsession with justice, made it predictable that, if he reached the White House, he would do just that. But was there, in 1968, any clear indication that he would?
Did Bobby plan to reopen the investigation on his brother’s assassination?
The question has been positively answered by David Talbot in his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, published in 2007 by Simon & Schuster. Robert had never believed in the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin of his brother. Knowing too well what to expect from Johnson, he had refused to testify before the Warren Commission. When its report came out, he had no choice but to publicly endorse it, but “privately he was dismissive of it,” as his son Robert Kennedy, Jr. remembers.[3] To close friends who wondered why he wouldn’t voice his doubt, he said: “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.” [4]
From 22 November 1963, Robert was alienated and monitored by Johnson and Hoover. Although still Attorney General, he knew he was powerless against the forces that had killed his brother. Yet he lost no time beginning his own investigation; he first asked CIA director John McCone, a Kennedy friend, to find out if the Agency had anything to do with the plot, and came out convinced that it hadn’t. In March 1964, he had a face-to-face conversation with mobster Jimmy Hoffa, his sworn enemy, whom he had battled for ten years, and whom he suspected of having taken revenge on his brother. Robert also asked his friend Daniel Moynihan to search for any complicity in the Secret Service, responsible for the President’s security[5]. And of course, Robert suspected Johnson, whom he had always mistrusted, as Jeff Shesol documents in Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade (1997).
In fact, a mere week after JFK’s death, November 29, 1963, Bill Walton, a friend of the Kennedys, travelled to Moscow and passed to Nikita Khrushchev, via a trusted agent who had already carried secret communications between Khrushchev and John Kennedy, a message from Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy; according to the memo found in the Soviet archives in the 90s by Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali (One Hell of a Gamble, 1998), Robert and Jackie wanted to inform the Soviet Premier that they believed John Kennedy had been “the victim of a right-wing conspiracy,” and that “the cooling that might occur in U.S.-Soviet relations because of Johnson would not last forever.” [6]
Robert also contacted a former MI6 officer who had been a friend of his family when his father was Ambassador in London. This British retired officer in turn contacted some trusted friends in France, and arrangments were made for two French Intelligence operatives to conduct, over a three-year period, a quiet investigation that involved hundreds of interviews in the United States. Their report, replete with innuendo about Lyndon Johnson and right-wing Texas oil barons, was delivered to Bobby Kennedy only months before his own assassination in June of 1968. After Bobby’s death, the last surviving brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, showed no interest in the material. The investigators then hired a French writer by the name of Hervé Lamarr to fashion the material into a book, under the pseudonym of James Hepburn. The book was first published in French under the title L’Amérique brûle, and was translated under the title Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK. Its conclusion is worth quoting:
“President Kennedy’s assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and fake mirrors, and when the curtain fell, the actors, and even the scenery disappeared. […] the plotters were correct when they guessed that their crime would be concealed by shadows and silences, that it would be blamed on a ‘madman’ and negligence.”[7]
Robert had planned to run for the American Presidency in 1972, but the escalation of the Vietnam War precipitated his decision to run in 1968. Another factor may have been the opening of the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1967. Garrison was allowed to view Abraham Zapruder’s amateur film, confiscated by the FBI on the day of the assassination. This film, despite evident tampering, shows that the fatal shot came from the “grassy knoll” well in front of the President, not from the School Book Depository located behind him, where Oswald was supposed to be shooting from.
When talk of the investigation began, Kennedy asked one of his closest advisors, Frank Mankievitch, to follow its developments, “so if it gets to a point where I can do something about this, you can tell me what I need to know.” He confided to his friend William Attwood, then editor of Look magazine, that he, like Garrison, suspected a conspiracy, “but I can’t do anything until we get control of the White House.” [8] He refrained from openly supporting Garrison, believing that since the outcome of the investigation was uncertain, it could jeopardize his plans to reopen the case later, and even weaken his chances of election by construing his motivation as a family feud.
In conclusion, there can be little doubt that, had he been elected president, Robert Kennedy would have done everything possible to reopen the case of his brother’s assassination, in one way or another. This fact certainly did not escape John’s murderers. They had no other option but to stop him. This first conclusion is a sufficient reason to conduct a comparative analysis of both Kennedy assassinations, in search of some converging clues that might lead us to the trail of a common mastermind.We begin with Robert’s assassination.
Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian motivated by hatred of Israel?
Just hours after Robert’s assassination, the press was able to inform the American people, not only of the identity of the assassin, but also of his motive, and even of his detailed biography.[9] Twenty-four-year-old Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was born in Jordania, and had moved to the United States when his family was expelled from West Jerusalem in 1948. After the shooting, a newspaper clipping was found in Sirhan’s pocket, quoting favorable comments made by Robert regarding Israel and, in particular, what sounded like an electoral commitment: “The United States should without delay sell Israel the 50 Phantom jets she has so long been promised.” Handwritten notes by Sirhan found in a notebook at his home confirmed that his act had been premeditated and motivated by his hatred of Israel.
That became the story line of the mainstream media from day one. Jerry Cohen of the Los Angeles Times wrote a front page article, saying that Sirhan is “described by acquaintances as a ‘virulent’ anti-Israeli,” (Cohen changed that into “virulent anti-semite” in an article for the The Salt Lake Tribune), and that: “Investigation and disclosures from persons who knew him best revealed [him] as a young man with a supreme hatred for the state of Israel.” Cohen infers that “Senator Kennedy […] became a personification of that hatred because of his recent pro-Israeli statements.” Cohen further revealed that:
“About three weeks ago the young Jordanian refugee accused of shooting Sen. Robert Kennedy wrote a memo to himself, […] The memo said: ‘Kennedy must be assassinated before June 5, 1968’—the first anniversary of the six-day war in which Israel humiliated three Arab neighbors, Egypt, Syria and Jordan.”[10]
After September 11, 2001, the tragedy of Robert’s assassination was installed into the Neocon mythology of the Clash of Civilizations and the War on Terror the story. Sirhan became a precursor of Islamic terrorism on the American soil. In a book entitled The Forgotten Terrorist, Mel Ayton, who specializes in debunking conspiracy theories, claims to present “a wealth of evidence about [Sirhan’s] fanatical Palestinian nationalism,” and to demonstrate that “Sirhan was the lone assassin whose politically motivated act was a forerunner of present-day terrorism” (as written on the back cover).
In 2008, on the 40th anniversary of Robert’s death, Sasha Issenberg of the Boston Globe recalled that the death of Robert Kennedy was “a first taste of Mideast terror.” He quotes Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz (best known as Jonathan Pollard’s lawyer), as saying:
“I thought of it as an act of violence motivated by hatred of Israel and of anybody who supported Israel. […] It was in some ways the beginning of Islamic terrorism in America. It was the first shot. A lot of us didn’t recognize it at the time.”[11]
The fact that Sirhan was from a Christian family was lost on Dershowitz. The Jewish Forward took care to mention it on the same occasion, only to add that Islamic fanaticism ran in his veins anyway:
“But what he shared with his Muslim cousins — the perpetrators of September 11 — was a visceral, irrational hatred of Israel. It drove him to murder a man whom some still believe might have been the greatest hope of an earlier generation.”
“Robert Kennedy was the first American victim of modern Arab terrorism,” the Forward journalist hammered; “Sirhan hated Kennedy because he had supported Israel.” [12]
This leitmotiv of the public discourse begs the question: Was Bobby really a supporter of Israel? But before we answer that question, there is on more pressing one: Did Sirhan really kill Bobby?
Did Sirhan Bishara Sirhan really kill Robert Kennedy?
If we trust official statements and mainstream news, the assassination of Robert Kennedy is an open-and-shut case. The identity of the killer suffers no discussion, since he was arrested on the spot, with the smoking gun in his hand. In reality, ballistic and forensic evidence show that none of Sirhan’s bullets hit Kennedy.
According to the autopsy report of Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Thomas Noguchi, Robert Kennedy died of a gunshot wound to the brain, fired from behind the right ear at point blank range, following an upward angle. Nogushi restated his conclusion in his 1983 memoirs, Coroner. Yet the sworn testimony of twelve shooting witnesses established that Robert had never turned his back on Sirhan and that Sirhan was five to six feet away from his target when he fired.
Tallying all the bullet impacts in the pantry, and those that wounded five people around Kennedy, it has been estimated that at least twelve bullets were fired, while Sirhan’s gun carried only eight. On April 23, 2011, attorneys William Pepper and his associate, Laurie Dusek, gathered all this evidence and more in a 58-page file submitted to the Court of California, asking that Sirhan’s case be reopened. They documented major irregularities in the 1968 trial, including the fact that the bullet tested in laboratory to be compared to the the one extracted from Robert’s brain had not been shot by Sirhan’s revolver, but by another gun, with a different serial number; thus, instead of incriminating Sirhan, the ballistic test in fact proved him innocent. Pepper has also provided a computer analysis of audio recordings during the shooting, made by engineer Philip Van Praag in 2008, which confirms that two guns are heard.[13]
The presence of a second shooter was signaled by several witnesses and reported on the same day by a few news media. There are strong suspicions that the second shooter was Thane Eugene Cesar, a security guard hired for the evening, who was stuck behind Kennedy at the moment of the shooting, and seen with his pistol drawn by several witnesses. One of them, Don Schulman, positively saw him fire. Cesar was never investigated, even though he did not conceal his hatred for the Kennedys, who according to his recorded statement, had “sold the country down the road to the commies.” [14]
Even if we assume that Sirhan did kill Robert Kennedy, a second aspect of the case raises question: according to several witnesses, Sirhan seemed to be in a state of trance during the shooting. More importantly, Sirhan has always claimed, and continues to claim, that he has never had any recollection of his act:
“I was told by my attorney that I shot and killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy and that to deny this would be completely futile, [but] I had and continue to have no memory of the shooting of Senator Kennedy.”
He also claims to have no memory of “many things and incidents which took place in the weeks leading up to the shooting.” [15] Some repetitive lines written of a notebook found in Sirhan’s bedroom, which Sirhan recognizes as his own handwriting but does not remember writing, are reminiscent of automatic writing.[16]
Psychiatric expertise, including lie-detector tests, have confirmed that Sirhan’s amnesia is not faked. In 2008, Harvard University professor Daniel Brown, a noted expert in hypnosis and trauma memory loss, interviewed Sirhan for a total of 60 hours, and concluded that Sirhan, whom he classifies in the category of “high hypnotizables,” acted unvoluntarily under the effect of hypnotic suggestion: “His firing of the gun was neither under his voluntary control, nor done with conscious knowledge, but is likely a product of automatic hypnotic behavior and coercive control.” [17]
We know that in the 1960s, American military agencies were experimenting on mental control. Dr Sidney Gottlieb, son of Hungarian Jews, directed the infamous CIA MKUltra project, which, among other things, were to answer questions such as: “Can a person under hypnosis be forced to commit murder?” according to a declassified document dated May 1951.[18] According to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, author of Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (Random House, 2018), in 1968, an Israeli military psychologist by the name of Benjamin Shalit had concocted a plan to take a Palestinian prisoner and “brainwash and hypnotize him into becoming a programmed killer” aimed at Yasser Arafat.[19]
If Sirhan was hypnotically programmed, the question is: Who had some interest in having a visceral anti-Zionist Palestinian blamed for the killing of Robert Kennedy? Israel, of course. But then, we are faced with a dilemma, for why would Israel want to kill Robert Kennedy if Robert Kennedy was supportive of Israel, as the mainstream narrative goes?
Was Robert Kennedy really a friend of Israel?
The dilemma rests on a misleading assumption, which is part of the deception. In fact, Robert Kennedy was definitely not pro-Israel. He was simply campaigning in 1968. As everyone knows, a few good wishes and empty promises to Israel are an inescapable ritual in such circumstances. And Robert’s statement in an Oregon synagogue, mentioned in the May 27 Pasadena Independent Star-News article found in Sirhan’s pocket, didn’t exceed the minimal requirements. Its author David Lawrence had, in an earlier article entitled “Paradoxical Bob,” underlined how little credit should be given to such electoral promises: “Presidential candidates are out to get votes and some of them do not realize their own inconsistencies.”
All things considered, there is no ground for believing that Robert Kennedy would have been, as president of the US, particularly Israel-friendly. The Kennedy family, proudly Irish and Catholic, was known for its hostility to Jewish influence in politics, a classic theme of anti-Kennedy literature, best represented by the 1996 book by Ronald Kessler with the highly suggestive title, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded.[20]
Robert had not been, in his brother’s government, a particularly pro-Israel Attorney General: He had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a “foreign agent” subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would had considerably hindered its efficiency (after 1963, the AZD escaped this procedure by changing its status and renaming itself AIPAC)[21].
In conclusion, it is only with outstanding hypocrisy that The Jewish Daily Forward could write, on the 40th anniversary of Bobby’s death:
“In remembering Bobby Kennedy, let us remember not just what he lived for, but also what he died for—namely, the precious nature of the American-Israeli relationship.”[22]
Robert Kennedy’s death had not been a bad thing for the precious “American-Israeli relationship.” Rather, it was a great loss for the Arab world, where Bobby was mourned just as had his brother John before him.
Of course, the fact that the Zionist media lied when granting Robert Kennedy some posthumous certificate of good will toward Israel, and thereby provided Israel with a fake alibi, is not a sufficient reason for concluding that Israel murdered Robert. Even the fact that the masterminds of the plot chose as their programmed instrument an anti-Zionist Palestinian, and thereby stirred a strong anti-Palestinian feeling among Americans at the same time as getting rid of Robert, does not prove that Israel was involved. What is still lacking for a serious presumption is a plausible motive.
The motive of Robert’s assassination must be found, not in what Robert publicly declared in an Oregon synagogue during his presidential campaign, but rather in what he confided only to his most close friends: his intention to reopen the investigation on his brother’s death. Our next question, therefore, is: What would an unbiased investigation, conducted under the supervision of Robert in the White House, have revealed?
Did the CIA assassinate Kennedy?
It is obvious to anybody just vaguely informed that a genuine investigation would first establish that Oswald was a mere “patsy”, as he said himself, a scapegoat prepared in advance to be blamed for the crime and then be slaughtered without a trial. We will not here review the evidence that contradicts the official thesis of the lone gunman. It can be found in numerous books and documentary films.
Just as notorious is the theory that the plot to kill Kennedy originated from a secret network within the CIA, in collusion with extremist elements in the Pentagon. That conspiracy theory looms the largest in books, articles and films that have been produced since John Kennedy died.
That CIA-Pentagon theory, as I will call it (add the military-industrial complex if you wish) has a major flaw in the motive ascribed to the killers: besides getting rid of Kennedy, the theory goes, the aim was to create a pretext for invading Cuba, something the CIA had always pushed for and Kennedy had refused to do (the Bay of Pigs fiasco). With Oswald groomed as a pro-Castro communist, the Dallas shooting was staged as a false flag attack to be blamed on Cuba. But then, why did no invasion of Cuba follow Kennedy’s assassination? Why was the pro-Castro Oswald abandoned by the Warren Commission in favor of the lone nut Oswald? Those who address the question, like James Douglass in his JFK and the Unspeakable, credit Johnson with preventing the invasion. Johnson, we are led to understand, had nothing to do with the assassination plot, and thwarted the plotters’ ultimate aim to start World War III. This is to ignore the tremendous amount of evidence accumulated against Johnson for fifty years, and documented in such groundbreaking books as Phillip Nelson’s LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination (2010) or Roger Stone’s The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ (2013).
Another weakness in the CIA-Pentagon theory is the lack of agreement about the mastermind of the plot. In fact, one of the names that comes up most often is James Jesus Angleton, the head of Counter-Intelligence within the CIA, about whom Professor John Newman writes in Oswald and the CIA :
“In my view, whoever Oswald’s direct handler or handlers were, we must now seriously consider the possibility that Angleton was probably their general manager. No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot.”[23]
But there is plenty of evidence that Angleton, who was also the head of the CIA “Israel Office,” was a Mossad mole. According to his biographer Tom Mangold, “Angleton’s closest professional friends overseas […] came from the Mossad and […] he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death.” [24] No less that two monuments were dedicated to him at memorial services in Israel during ceremonies attended by chiefs of Israeli Intelligence and even a future Prime Minister.[25]
Another aspect must be taken into account: if the trail of the CIA is such a well-trodden path among Kennedy researchers, it is because it has been cut and marked by the mainstream media themselves, as well as by Hollywood. And that began even before the assassination, on October 3, 1963, with an article by the New York Times’ chief Washington correspondent Arthur Krock. The article denounced the CIA’s “unrestrained thirst for power” and quotidian unnamed “very high official” who claimed that the White House could not control the CIA, and that:
“If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government, it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon. The agency represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.”[26]
In such a way, The New York Times was planting a sign, a month and a half before the Dallas killing, pointing to the CIA as the most likely instigator of the upcoming coup. The sign said: “The President is going to fall victim of a coup, and it will come from the CIA.”
One month after Kennedy’s assassination, it was the turn of the Washington Post to use a very similar trick, by publishing an op-ed signed by Harry Truman, in which the former president said he was “disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment.” “I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations,” at the point of becoming across the globe “a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue […] there are now some searching questions that need to be answered.” [27] Truman was hinting at the CIA’s role in toppling foreign governments and assassinating elected leaders abroad. But given the timing of his article, one month to the day after Dallas, it could only be understood by anyone with ears to hear, and at least subliminally by the rest, as an indictment of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination. This article, widely reprinted in the 1970s after the creation of the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, is regarded as Truman’s whistleblowing. Yet its mea culpa style is quite unlike Truman; that is because it was not written by Truman, but by his longtime assistant and ghostwriter, a Russian born Jew named David Noyes, whom Sidney Krasnoff calls “Truman’s alter ego” in his book, Truman and Noyes: Story of a President’s Alter Ego (1997). Truman probably never saw the article prior to its publication in the Washington Post morning edition, but he may be responsible for its deletion from the afternoon print runs.[28]
So the two most influential American newspapers, while ostensibly defending the official theory of the lone gunman, have planted directional signs pointing to the CIA. Most Kennedy truthers have followed the signs with enthusiasm.
In the 70s, the mainstream media and publishing industry played again a major role in steering conspiracy theorists toward the CIA, while avoiding any hint of Israeli involvement. One major contributor to that effort was A. J. Weberman, with his 1975 book Coup d’État in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, co-authored by Michael Canfield. According to the New York Jewish Daily Forward (December 28, 2012), Weberman had “immigrated to Israel in 1959 and has dual American-Israeli citizenship,” and is “a close associate of Jewish Defense Organization founder Mordechai Levy, whose fringe group is a spin-off of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane’s militant right-wing Jewish Defense League.” Weberman acknowledged Neocon Richard Perle’s assistance in his investigation.[29] The Weberman-Canfield book contributed to the momentum that led the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to reinvestigate in 1976 the murders of JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King.
It is also in this context that Newsweek journalist Edward Jay Epstein published an interview of George De Mohrenschildt, a Russian geologist and consultant for Texan oilmen who had befriended Oswald and his Russian wife in Dallas in 1962. In this interview, De Mohrenschildt admitted that Oswald had been introduced to him at the instigation of Dallas CIA agent J. Walton Moore.[30] That piece of information is dubious for several reasons: First, Moore was officially FBI rather than CIA. Second, De Mohrenschildt was in no position to confirm or deny the words that Epstein ascribed to him: he was found dead a few hours after giving the interview. In fact, De Mohrenschildt’s interview published by Epstein contradicts De Mohrenschildt’s own manuscript account of his relationship to Oswald, revealed after his death.[31] De Mohrenschildt’s death was ruled a suicide. The Sheriff’s report mentions that in his last months he complained that “the Jews” and “the Jewish mafia” were out to get him.[32] Needless to say, Epstein didn’t mention anything about this. More suspicions arise from the fact that Epstein’s main source for his 1978 book, Legend: the Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, was James Jesus Angleton, who was actively spreading disinformation at the time of the HSCA, defending the theory that Oswald was a KGB agent with CIA connections.
That Israeli agents have been instrumental in spreading conspiracy theories targeting the CIA is also evidenced by Oliver Stone’s film JFK released in 1991, starring Kevin Costner in the role of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. This film, which shook public opinion to the point of motivating the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, was produced by Arnon Milchan, described in a 2011 biography as being from his youth “one of the most important covert agents that Israeli intelligence has ever fielded,” involved in arms smuggling from the US to Israel.[33] In 2013 Milchan publicly revealed his extended activity as a secret agent of Israel, working in particular to boost Israel’s nuclear program.[34] It is therefore no wonder that Stone’s film gives no hint of the Mossad connection that Garrison stumbled upon.
Who killed JFK?
By a strange paradox, the authors who stand for the consensual conspiracy theory of a CIA plot against Kennedy build their case on the biography of Oswald, while at the same time claiming that Oswald had almost nothing to do with the killing. If Oswald was “just a patsy,” as he publicly claimed, the quest for the real culprits must logically begin by investigating the man who silenced Oswald.
Oswald’s assassin is known as Jack Ruby, but few people know that his real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, and that he was the son of Jewish Polish immigrants. Ruby was a member of the Jewish underworld. He was a friend of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, whom he had known and admired since 1946. Cohen was the successor of the famed Benjamin Siegelbaum, aka Bugsy Siegel, one of the bosses of Murder Incorporated. Cohen was infatuated with the Zionist cause, as he explained in his memoirs: “Now I got so engrossed with Israel that I actually pushed aside a lot of my activities and done nothing but what was involved with this Irgun war”.[35] Mickey Cohen was in contact with Menachem Begin, the former Irgun chief, with whom he even “spent a lot of time,” according to Gary Wean, former detective sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department. So there is a direct line connecting Jack Ruby, via Mickey Cohen, to the Israeli terrorist ring, and in particular to Menachem Begin, a specialist in false flag terror. We also know that Ruby phoned Al Gruber, a Mickey Cohen associate, just after Oswald’s arrest; no doubt he received then “an offer he couldn’t refuse,” as they say in the underworld.[36] Ruby’s defense lawyer William Kunstler wrote in his memoirs that Ruby told him he had killed Oswald “for the Jews,” and Ruby’s rabbi Hillel Silverman received the same confession when visiting Ruby in jail.[37]
That is not all. At every level of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, we also find the fingerprints of the Israeli deep state. JFK’s trip to Dallas, being officially “non political,” was sponsored by a powerful business group known as the Dallas Citizens Council, dominated by Julius Schepps, “a wholesale liquor distributor, member of every synagogue in town, and de facto leader of the Jewish community,” as described by Bryan Edward Stone in The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas.[38] Kennedy was on his way to the reception organized in his honor when he was shot.
The “host committee” inviting Kennedy was chaired by another influential figure of the wealthy Jewish community in Dallas: advertising executive and PR man Sam Bloom. According to former British Intelligence Officer Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, it was Bloom who suggested to the Police “that they move the alleged assassin [Oswald] from the Dallas police station to the Dallas County Jail in order to give the newsmen a good story and pictures. ”Oswald was shot by Ruby during this transfert. Hughes-Wilson adds that,“when the police later searched Ruby’s home, they found a slip of paper with Bloom’s name, address and telephone number on it.” [39]
After the Dallas tragedy, Israel’s sayanim were also busy fabricating the official lie. Apart from its chairman Earl Warren, chosen for his figurative role as Chief Justice, all key people in the investigative Commission were either personal enemies of Kennedy—like Allen Dulles, the CIA director fired by Kennedy in 1961—or ardent Zionists. The man who played the key role in fabricating the government lie purveyed by the Warren Commission was Arlen Specter, the inventor of what came to be called the “magic bullet” theory: a single bullet supposed to have caused seven wounds to Kennedy and John Connally sitting before him in the limousine, and later found in pristine condition on a gurney in Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Specter, who with an ironic touch of chutzpah titled his autobiography Passion for Truth, was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and, at his death in 2012, was mourned by the Israeli government as “an unswerving defender of the Jewish State,” and by AIPAC, as “a leading architect of the congressional bond between our country and Israel.” [40]
So, at all stages of the plot, we find a Zionist cabal including business men, politicians and Irgun-connected gangsters, not forgetting media executives, all devoted to Israel.
The most plausible motive for Israel to kill Kennedy has been revealed by two books: Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option in 1991, then Avner Cohen’s Israel and the Bomb in 1998, and the lead has been followed up in 2007 by Michael Karpin in The Bomb in the Basement. What these investigators reveal is that Kennedy, informed by the CIA in 1960 of the military aim pursued at the Dimona complex in the Negev desert, was firmly determined to force Israel to renounce it. With that purpose in mind, he replaced CIA Director Allen Dulles by John McCone, who had, as Eisenhower’s chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), leaked to The New York Times the truth about Israel’s Dimona project; the story was printed on December 19, 1960, weeks before Kennedy was to take office. As Alan Hart writes, “there can be no doubt that Kennedy’s determination to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb was the prime factor in his decision to appoint McCone.”[41] Then Kennedy urged Ben-Gurion to allow regular inspections of Dimona, first verbally in New York in 1961, and later through more and more insistent letters. In the last one, cabled June 15, 1963 to the Israeli ambassador with instruction to hand it personally to Ben-Gurion, Kennedy demanded Ben-Gurion’s agreement for an immediate visit followed by regular visits every six months, otherwise “this Government’s commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized.” [42] The result was unexpected: Ben-Gurion avoided official reception of the letter by announcing his resignation on June 16. As soon as the new Prime Minister Levi Eshkol took office, Kennedy sent him a similar letter, dated July 5, 1963, to no avail. Did Ben-Gurion resign in order to deal with Kennedy from another level?
Five months later, Kennedy’s death relieved Israel of all pressure (diplomatic or otherwise) to stop its nuclear program. Faced with Johnson’s complete lack of interest in that issue, John McCone resigned from the CIA in 1965, declaring: “When I cannot get the President to read my reports, then it’s time to go.”
Kennedy’s determination to stop Israel’s Dimona project was only part of the “Kennedy problem”. During his first months in the White House, Kennedy committed himself by letters to Nasser and other Arab heads of State to support UN Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Ben-Gurion reacted with a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Washington, intended to be circulated among Jewish American leaders, in which he stated:
“Israel will regard this plan as a more serious danger to her existence than all the threats of the Arab dictators and Kings, than all the Arab armies, than all of Nasser’s missiles and his Soviet MIGs. […] Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man.’”[43]
Kennedy behaved warmly toward Nasser, Israel’s worst enemy. Historian Philip Muehlenbeck writes:
“While the Eisenhower administration had sought to isolate Nasser and reduce his influence through building up Saudi Arabia’s King Saud as a conservative rival to the Egyptian president, the Kennedy administration pursued the exact opposite strategy.”[44]
After Kennedy’s death, American foreign policy was reversed again, without the American public being aware of it. Johnson cut the economic aid to Egypt, and increased the military aid to Israel, which reached 92 million dollars in 1966, more than the total of all previous years combined.
For 50 years, the Israeli trail in the Kennedy assassination has been smothered, and anyone who mentioned it was immediately ostracized. American congressman Paul Findley nevertheless dared write in March 1992 in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs: “It is interesting to note that in all the words written and uttered about the Kennedy assassination, Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned.” One single author has seriously investigated that trail: Michael Collins Piper, in his 1995 book Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy. Piper was largely ignored by the mainstream of the Kennedy truth movement. But his work has made its way nevertheless. In 2013, Martin Sandler wrote about Piper’s work in his edition of letters by Kennedy, which included those addressed to Ben-Gurion about Dimona: “Of all the conspiracy theories, it remains one of the most intriguing.” It is, in fact, a theory widespread in Arab countries.[45]
The case against Lyndon Johnson
Several investigators have identified Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice-president, as the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination. It is, at least, beyond doubt that the plotters acted with the foreknowledge that Johnson, who automatically stepped in as head of State after Kennedy’s death, would cover them. The context of national crisis enabled him to bully both Justice and the press while achieving his life’s ambition. Johnson not only benefitted from the plot; he participated in its elaboration. As a former senator from Texas, he could mobilize high-ranked accomplices in Dallas to prepare the ambush. Johnson also had his men in the Navy. In 1961, Texan senator John Connally had been appointed as Navy Secretary at the request of Johnson. When Connally resigned eleven months later to run for governor of Texas, Johnson convinced Kennedy to name another of his Texan friends, Fred Korth.
Johnson’s privileged control over the Navy is an important aspect of the case because the Navy was critical in the setting up and in the cover-up of the plot. First, contrary to a widespread but erroneous belief, Lee Harvey Oswald had been recruited by the Navy and not by the CIA. He was a Marine, and as a Marine he had worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Secondly, it is at the Naval Hospital in Washington, under the control of Navy officers, that Kennedy’s autopsy was performed, after his body had been literally stolen at gunpoint from Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The report of this autopsy stated that the fatal bullet had entered the back of Kennedy’s skull, which contradicted the testimonies of twenty-one members of the Dallas hospital staff who saw two entry bullet-wounds on the front of Kennedy’s body. This was critical because Oswald was presumably shooting from behind Kennedy, and could not possibly have caused these bullet wounds.
It is noteworthy that Johnson had actually taken advantage of his connections in the Navy to participate in the greatest corruption case ever recorded at that time. His accomplice Fred Korth was forced to resign as Navy Secretary in November 1963, only weeks before the Dallas coup, after the Justice Department headed by Robert Kennedy had implicated him in a fraud involving a $7 billion contract for the construction of 1,700 TFX military aircraft by General Dynamics, a Texas company. Johnson’s personal secretary, Bobby Baker, was charged in the same case.
Because of this mounting scandal and other suspicions of corruption, Kennedy was determined to change Vice-President for his upcoming reelection campaign.[46] While in Dallas the day before the President’s visit, Nixon publicized the rumor of Johnson’s removal, and the Dallas Morning News was reporting on November 22nd: “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.” Instead, Johnson became president that very day.
Many Americans immediately suspected Johnson’s involvement in the Dallas coup, especially after the publication in 1964 of a book by James Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, which portrayed Johnson as deeply corrupt. According to his biographer Robert Caro, Johnson was a man thirsting “for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will.” [47]
The evidence incriminating Johnson does not conflict with the evidence against Israel, quite the contrary. First, both trails converge in the person of Jack Ruby, whom Nixon identified a one of “Johnson’s boys,” according to former Nixon operative Roger Stone.[48] The hypothesis that Ruby acted on Johnson’s orders is a likely explanation for some of his odd statements to the Warren Commission:
“If you don’t take me back to Washington tonight to give me a chance to prove to the President that I am not guilty, then you will see the most tragic thing that will ever happen.” “There will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don’t take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don’t suffer because of what I have done.”
He said that he feared that his act would be used “to create some falsehood about some of the Jewish faith,” but added that “maybe something can be saved […], if our President, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me.” [49] With such words, Ruby seems to be trying to send a message to Johnson through the Commission, or rather a warning that he might spill the beans about Israel’s involvement if Johnson did not intervene in his favor. We get the impression that Ruby expected Johnson to pardon him.
Yet Johnson did nothing to get Ruby out of jail. Ruby’s sense of betrayal would explain why in 1965, after having been sentenced to life imprisonment, Ruby implicitly accused Johnson of Kennedy’s murder in a press conference: “If [Adlai Stevenson] was Vice-President there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy.” [50]
Ruby died from a mysterious disease in his prison in 1967.
A Crypto-Zionist president?
Ruby is not the only link between Johnson and Israel, far from it. In truth, Johnson had always been Israel’s man. His electoral campaigns had been funded since 1948 by Zionist financier Abraham Feinberg, who happened to be president of the Americans for Haganah Incorporated, which raised money for the Jewish militia. It is the same Feinberg who, after the Democratic primaries in 1960, made the following proposal to Kennedy, as Kennedy himself later reported to his friend Charles Bartlett: “We know your campaign is in trouble. We’re willing to pay your bills if you’ll let us have control of your Middle East policy.” Bartlett recalls that Kennedy was deeply upset and swore that, “if he ever did get to be President, he was going to do something about it.” [51]
It is on record, thanks to Kennedy insider Arthur Schlesinger (A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House, 1965), that the two men who convinced Kennedy to take Johnson as his running mate, were Philip Graham and Joseph Alsop, respectively publisher and columnist of the Washington Post, and strong supporters of Israel.[52] Schlesinger doesn’t reveal Graham and Alsop’s arguments, and states that Kennedy’s final decision “defies historical reconstruction”—a curious statement for a historian so well informed on the topic. But Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy’s personal secretary for twelve years, had her own idea about it. She believed that Kennedy was blackmailed with proofs of his many infidelities to his wife: “Jack knew that Hoover and LBJ would just fill the air with womanizing.” Whatever the details of the blackmail, Kennedy once confided to his assistant Hyman Raskin, as an apology for taking Johnson, “I was left with no choice […] those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems and I don’t need more problems.” [53]
In 2013, Associated Press reported about newly released tapes from Johnson’s White House office showing LBJ’s “personal and often emotional connection to Israel,” and pointed out that under Johnson, “the United States became Israel’s chief diplomatic ally and primary arms supplier.” An article from the 5 Towns Jewish Times “Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson?” recalls Johnson’s continuous support of Jews and Israel in the 1940s and 50s, and concludes: “President Johnson firmly pointed American policy in a pro-Israel direction.” The article also mentions that, “research into Johnson’s personal history indicates that he inherited his concern for the Jewish people from his family. His aunt Jessie Johnson Hatcher, a major influence on LBJ, was a member of the Zionist Organization of America.” And, in an additional note: “The line of Jewish mothers can be traced back three generations in Lyndon Johnson’s family tree. There is little doubt that he was Jewish.” [54]
Whatever was the reason of Johnson’s loyalty to Israel, it is a fact that, thanks to Johnson, Israel could continue its military nuclear program undisturbed, and acquire its first atomic bomb around 1965. Historian Stephen Green writes: “Lyndon Johnson’s White House saw no Dimona, heard no Dimona, and spoke no Dimona when the reactor went critical in early 1964.” [55]
Thanks to JFK’s death, Israel was also able to carry out its plan to annex Palestinian territories beyond the boundaries imposed by the United Nations Partition plan. By leaning on Pentagon and CIA hawks, Johnson intensified the Cold War and created the climate of tension which Israel needed in order to demonize Egyptian president Nasser and reinforce its own stature as indispensable ally in the Middle East.
During the Six Day War of 1967, Israel managed to triple its territory, while creating the illusion of acting in legitimate defense. The lie could not deceive American Intelligence agencies, but Johnson had given a green light to Israel’s attack, and even authorized James Angleton of the CIA to give Israel the precise positions of the Egyptian air bases, which enabled Israel to destroy them in just a few hours.
Four days after the start of the Israeli attack, Nasser accepted the ceasefire request from the UN Security Council. It was too soon for Israel, which had not yet achieved all its territorial objectives. On June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a NSA spy ship stationed in international waters off Sinai, was bombed, strafed and torpedoed during 75 minutes by Israeli Mirage jets and three torpedo boats, with the obvious intention of sinking it without leaving any survivors. (Even the rescue channels were machine-gunned.) Meanwhile, Johnson, from the White House, intervened personally to prohibit the nearby Sixth Fleet from rescuing the USS Liberty after the crew, despite the initial destruction of its transmitters, had managed to send off an SOS.
The attack would have been blamed on Egypt if it had succeeded, that is, if the ship had sunk and its crew had all died. The operation would then have given Johnson a pretext for intervening on the side of Israel against Egypt.
But it failed. The USS Liberty affair was suppressed by a commission of inquiry headed by Admiral John Sidney McCain II, Commander-in-Chief of US Naval Forces in Europe (and Father of Arizona Senator John McCain III). Johnson accepted Israel’s spurious “targeting error” explanation. In January 1968 he invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, to Washington, and warmly welcomed him to his Texas ranch. What’s more, Johnson rewarded Israel by lifting the embargo on offensive military equipment: US-made tanks and aircraft immediately flowed to Tel Aviv.
This failed false flag attack is evidence of the secret complicity of Johnson and Israel, implying high treason on the part of Johnson.
Conclusion
Let’s now conclude our overview of the evidence: beside the fact that John and Robert were brothers, their assassinations have at least two things in common: Lyndon Johnson and Israel.
First, their deaths are precisely framed by Johnson’s presidency, which was also the context for other political assassinations, such as Martin-Luther King’s. Johnson was in control of the State during the two investigations on John and Robert’s murders.
Secondly, in both cases, we find the fingerprints of Israel’s deep state. In the case of Robert, it is the choice of the manipulated patsy, which was obviously meant to disguise Robert’s assassination as an act of hatred against Israel. In the case of John, it it is the identity of the man asked to kill the patsy, a Jewish gangster linked to the Irgun.
Johnson and Israel, the two common elements in the Kennedy assassinations, are themselves closely linked, since Johnson can be considered as a high-level sayan, a man secretly devoted to Israel, or owned by Israel, to the point of committing high treason against the nation he had been elected to lead and protect.
The causal link between the two assassinations then becomes clear: even if Robert had been pro-Israel, which he was not, Israel and Johnson would still have had a compelling reason to eliminate him before he got to the White House, where he could—and would—reopen the investigation on his brother’s death.
What should have been obvious from the start now appears brightly clear: in order to solve the mystery of the assassination of John Kennedy, one has simply to look into the two other assassinations which are connected to it: the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man whose trial could have exposed the hoax and possibly put the plotters into the light, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the man who would have reopened the case if he had lived. And both these assassinations bear the signature of Israel.
At his death in 1968, Robert Kennedy left eleven orphans, not counting John’s two children, whom he had somewhat adopted. John’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., aka John John, who had turned three the day of his father’s funeral, embodied the Kennedy myth in the heart of all Americans. The route seemed traced for him to become president one day. He died on July 16, 1999, with his pregnant wife and his sister-in-law, when his private plane suddenly and mysteriously nose-dived into the ocean a few seconds after he had announced his landing on the Kennedy property in Massachusetts.
John John had long been portrayed as a superficial, spoiled and harmless young man. But that image was as misleading as young Hamlet’s in Shakespeare’s play. John had serious interests in mind, and, at age 39, he was just entering politics. In 1995 he founded George magazine, which seemed harmless until it began to take an interest in political assassinations. In March 1997, George published a 13-page article by the mother of Yigal Amir, the convicted assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The article was supporting the thesis of a conspiracy by the Israeli far-right. So JFK Jr. was eliminated while following in the footsteps of his father, entering politics through the door of journalism and taking an interest in the crimes of the Israeli deep state. Canadian-Israeli journalist Barry Chamish believes John Kennedy Jr. was assassinated precisely for that.[56]
The nonsensical notion of a mysterious curse on the Kennedy family is an obvious smoke screen. The unsolved murders of JFK and his two legitimate heirs—his younger brother and his only son—require a more rational explanation. The sense that the official stories about their deaths amount to a huge cover-up is obsessing the American psyche, a bit like a repressed family secret affecting the whole personality from a subconscious level.
President John Kennedy and his brother are heroic, almost Christ-like figures, in the heart of a growing community of citizens who have become aware of the disastrous longtime effect of their assassinations. Only when the American public at large come to grips with the truth of their deaths and honor their legacy and sacrifice will America have a chance to be redeemed and be great again.
Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014, and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018. ($30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).
Footnotes
[1] Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America, University of Texas Press, 2013,kindle 284-292.
[2] John Lewis’ testimony is in the PBS documentary American Experience Robert F. Kennedy.
[3] Associated Press, “RFK children speak about JFK assassination,” January 12, 2013, on http://www.usatoday.com
[4] David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 278-280, 305.
[5] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., 2007, p. 21-22.
[6] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p. 25-7.
[7] James Hepburn, Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK, Penmarin Books, 2002, p. 269.
[8] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p. 312-314.
[9] Extract of TV news in the documentary film Evidence of Revision: Part 4: The RFK assassination as never seen before, 01:11:42
[10] Jerry Cohen, “Yorty Reveals That Suspect’s Memo Set Deadline for Death,” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1968, pages 1 and 12, on latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2008/06/june-6-1968.html. Jerry Cohen, “Jerusalem-Born Suspect Called An Anti-Semite,” The Salt Lake Tribune, June 6, 1968, on http://www.newspapers.com. See also Harry Rosenthal, “Senator Kennedy’s support for Israel promoted decision declares Sirhan,” The Telegraph, March 5, 1969, on news.google.com
[11] Sasha Issenberg, “Slaying gave US a first taste of Mideast terror,”Boston Globe, June 5, 2008, on http://www.boston.com
[12] Jeffrey Salkin, “Remember What Bobby Kennedy Died For,” Forward.com, June 5, 2008. Also Michael Fischbach, “First Shot in Terror War Killed RFK,” Los Angeles Times, June 02, 2003, on articles.latimes.com
[13] Frank Morales, “The Assassination of RFK: A Time for Justice!” June 16, 2012, on http://www.globalresearch.ca; watch on YouTube, “RFK Assassination 40th Anniversary (2008) Paul Schrade on CNN.”
[14] Philip Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations On the Conspiracy And Cover-Up, S.P.I. Books, 1994, p. 25. For a full overview, watch Shane O’Sullivan’s 2007 investigative documentary RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy. For more detail, read his book Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, Union Square Press, 2008. See also Don Schulman’s testimony in The Second Gun (1973), from 42 min 40.
[15] In a parole hearing in 2011, failing to convince the judges for the fourteenth time. Watch on YouTube, “Sirhan Sirhan Denied Parole”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsm1hKPI9EU
[16] Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, Union Square Press, 2008, p. 5, 44, 103.
[17] Jacqui Goddard, “Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert F.Kennedy, launches new campaign for freedom 42 years later,” The Telegraph, December 3, 2011, on http://www.telegraph.co.uk/search/
[18] Colin Ross, Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists, Manitou Communications, 2000,summary on http://www.wanttoknow.info/bluebird10pg
[19] David B. Green, “Brainwashing and Cross-dressing: Israel’s Assassination Program Laid Bare in Shocking Detail,” Haaretz, February 5, 2018.
[20] Ronald Kessler, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.
[22] Jeffrey Salkin, “Remember What Bobby Kennedy Died For,” op. cit..
[23] Michael Collins Piper, False Flag, op. cit., p. 78.
[24] Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: the CIA’s Master Spy Hunter, Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 318.
[25] Michael Howard Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of COunterintelligence, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, p. 153.
[26] “Assassination studies Kennedy knew a coup was coming,” on Youtube. Image of Arthur Krock’s article is shown on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snE161QnL1U at 1:36.
[27] “Harry Truman Writes: Limit CIA Role to Intelligence,” Washington Post, December 22, 1963, quoted in Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK, Skyhorse Publishing, 2011, p. 246.
[28] Thomas Troy, “Truman on CIA,” September 22, 1993, on http://www.cia.gov ; Sidney Krasnoff, Truman and Noyes: Story of a President’s Alter Ego, Jonathan Stuart Press, 1997.
[29] Michael Collins Piper, False Flags: Template for Terror, American Free Press, 2013, p. 67.
[30] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Touchstone, 2008, p. 46.
[31] George de Mohrenschilldt, I am a Patsy! on jfkassassination.net/russ/jfkinfo4/jfk12/hscapatsy.htm
[32] Read the Sheriff’s Office report on mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death2.txt
[33] Meir Doron, Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon – Arnon Milchan, Gefen Books, 2011, p. xi.
[34] Stuart Winer, “Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan reveals past as secret agent,” The Times of Israel, November 25, 2013, on http://www.timesofisrael.com ; Meir Doron, Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon – Arnon Milchan, Gefen Books, 2011, p. xi
[35] Mickey Cohen, In My Own Words, Prentice-Hall, 1975, p. 91-92.
[36] Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy, American Free Press, 6th ed., ebook 2005, p. 133-155, 226.
[37] William Kunstler, My Life as a Radical Lawyer, Carol Publishing, 1994, p. 158; Steve North, “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Killer ‘Jack Ruby’ Came From Strong Jewish Background,” The Forward, November 17, 2013, on forward.com
[38] Bryan Edward Stone, The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas, University of Texas Press, 2010, p. 200.
[39] John Hughes-Wilson, JFK-An American Coup d’État: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination, John Blake, 2014.
[40] Natasha Mozgovaya, “Prominent Jewish-American politician Arlan Specter dies at 82,” Haaretz, October 14, 2012, on http://www.haaretz.com.
[41] Alan Hart,Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2009, p. 273.
[42] Warren Bass, Support any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance, 2003, p. 219.
[43] Quoted in George and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present, W.W. Norton & Co., 1992, p. 51.
[44] Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders, Oxford UP, 2012.
[46] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination, XLibris, 2010, p. 372.
[47] Quoted in Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind, op. cit., p. 17.
[48] Patrick Howley, “Why Jack Ruby was probably part of the Kennedy conspiracy,” The Daily Caller, March 14, 2014, on dailycaller.com
[49] Read Ruby’s deposition on jfkmurdersolved.com/ruby.htm
[50] See on YouTube, “Jack Ruby Talks.”
[51] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, p. 94-97.
[52] Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House (1965), Mariner Books, 2002, p. 56; Alan Hart, Zionism, vol. 2, op. cit., p. 257.
[53] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind, op; cit., p. 320.
[54] Morris Smith, “Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson? – an update!!,” 5 Towns Jewish Times, April 11, 2013, on 5tjt.com.
[55] Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel, William Morrow & Co., 1984, p. 166.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN are 3 examples of the selective amnesia from which nearly every mainstream media news source seems to suffer when it comes to the subject of Israel. It doesn’t take much digging to discover the actual truth – the context that completely changes the story.
Palestinians of Gaza have been peacefully protesting for 2 months, unarmed, demanding only their human rights. They have been met with Israeli sniper fire week after week, killing at least 118.
And the United States hasn’t done anything.
Grant Smith points out on antiwar.com that “a stunning 81.5% of Americans say they never heard about the massacre through any channel,” which perhaps explains our apparent apathy.
Source: IRmep poll of 1,506 US adults through Google Surveys May 25-27, RMSE 4.1%. Raw data and demographic filters at Google
On May 29, 2 weeks after the bloodiest day of protesting – in which at least 60 Palestinians were killed and thousands were injured – several factions in Gaza had enough and began shooting rockets toward Israel. Israel naturally responded with airstrikes from warplanes.
Mainstream media, with its short-term memory loss in all matters Israeli, forgot about the context of unarmed Palestinian protest and sniper fire, describing the Gazan rockets almost as though they represented an unprovoked attack on a peaceful state.
It is not hard to see that, when there is coverage, MSM tends to come down firmly on the side of Israel. In the interest of accurate education of American readers, we provide the following corrections of recent articles.
Gaza Militants Barrage Israel With Mortars and Rockets
NYT: Islamic militants in Gaza attacked southern Israel with rockets and mortars on Tuesday and Israel responded instantly with a wave of airstrikes across the Palestinian territory, a sharp escalation of violence after weeks of deadly protests, arson attacks and armed clashes along the border.
Everything about this paragraph is problematic.
Let’s talk chronology first: since March 30th there have been 9 weekends of nonviolent protests by Gazans, which were met by Israeli sniper fire, killing at least 118 and injuring 13,000. The number of Israeli casualties: three. The “deadly protests” were only deadly for Palestinians, who were unarmed. During this time, no rockets or mortars were fired out of Gaza. When “militants” responded after 2 months of Israeli violence, the NYT called it “an attack,” and Israel’s action “a response.”
NYT: The exchanges were the most intense cross-border hostilities in Gaza since the two sides fought a 50-day war in the summer of 2014.
“Cross-border hostilities” refers again to an unarmed population, protesting for their rights, vs. snipers. Palestinians never crossed any borders, but Israelis did. Likewise, Palestinians were not hostile, but Israelis were.
Similarly, the “two sides” that fought in 2014 included 34,000 unguided shells shot into Gaza by Israel (including 19,000 high-explosive artillery shells, which form a crater 50 feet wide and 36 feet deep, penetrate up to 15 inches of metal or 11 feet of concrete), and 4,500 rockets shot into Israel by Gaza. No wonder 72 Israelis (mostly military) vs. 2,200 Palestinians (mostly civilians, including 500 children), died in that “war.”
The “cross border hostilities” in 2014 and this week were similarly lopsided.
Israeli Air Force MK-84 crater from 2014 incursion on Gaza, “Operation Protective Edge.”
NYT: By 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Israel said there had been 70 rockets or mortars fired from Gaza throughout the day.
This may sound frightening, and it would indeed be unnerving to endure. But context matters: in 14 years of rockets from Gaza, only 17 Israelis have been killed during peacetime, and 44 total.
NYT: Tensions have been spiraling along the border in recent weeks during a series of Palestinian protests against the 11-year blockade of the Gaza Strip and to press Palestinian claims to lands in what is now Israel. Israel insisted that it was not seeking to escalate, and that it was up to Hamas to decide whether to ratchet things up or stand down.
NYT: Early Wednesday, Israel announced a new wave of airstrikes against 25 more Hamas targets in Gaza, saying it was holding Hamas responsible for conducting and allowing a “wide-scale attack against Israeli citizens.”
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The United States called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the latest attacks on Israel from Gaza and said it expected the session to be held on Wednesday afternoon… [US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said], “The Security Council should be outraged and respond to this latest bout of violence directed at innocent Israeli civilians.”
It’s puzzling that the US sees Gaza’s nonlethal rockets as worthy of outrage, but Israel’s snipers killing over 100 as unworthy of comment.
NYT: As many as 120 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since March 30, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, mostly by snipers during the protests and half of them in a single day, May 14, the peak of the campaign.
Israel said it was defending its border and the nearby communities against a mass breach by the protesters, adding that Gaza militants intended to use unarmed civilian protesters as cover to infiltrate Israeli territory and attack Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Oh, NYT, you started strong there, acknowledging the Palestinian deaths and the snipers. But then you gave your readers only Israel’s explanation (“Gaza militants intended to use unarmed civilian protesters as cover”) as though this was an indisputable fact instead of an opinion. A comment from a Palestinian spokesperson would have been in order at this juncture.
The Washington Post was similarly one-sided in its May 29 coverage:
Tensions rise as Gaza militants fire more than 70 mortars, rockets into Israel
WaPo: “This is something we cannot tolerate,” said [Israeli army spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan] Conricus. “Hamas is turning the fence into an active combat zone, and we cannot tolerate attacks on Israeli civilians and military targets.”
Interestingly, even Ha’aretz has conceded that the Great March of Return is not a “Hamas project,” but a grassroots movement by people who are deeply invested in resistance and return. But WaPo prefers the official Israeli spin, that “Hamas is turning the fence into an active combat zone,” in spite of the obvious fact that one side of the fence has no combat weapons. There is also, apparently, nothing noteworthy in the statement, “we can not tolerate attacks on Israeli civilians and military targets” (as if Palestinians do not have the same right to be intolerant of violence being perpetrated on their people).
WaPo: Tensions have been soaring between Israel and Gaza for the past few months. Residents of the coastal enclave, which has been under land and sea blockade by Israel and Egypt since Hamas wrested power over the strip more than a decade ago, have been holding weekly demonstrations at the Israeli border fence. They are demanding a right to return to land that now sits inside Israel and expressing frustration over a growing humanitarian crisis in what they describe as an open-air prison.
WaPo came so close to getting the paragraph right. Fact is, Hamas did not “wrest power over the strip.” Rather, Hamas won a free and open election – which the US encouraged.
CNN likewise managed, on May 29, to miss the point:
Gaza militants launch mortars, rockets at Israel, which responds with airstrikes
CNN: In a statement, the IDF said the [launching of mortars and rockets by Gazans] was a “severe, dangerous, and orchestrated act of terror, aimed at Israeli civilians and children.”
The degree of self-deception required for the IDF to make such a statement is staggering. The “severity” and “danger” of Gaza rockets is minor in comparison to Israel’s snipers; the label “act of terror” belongs with the side that has been killing unarmed protesters; likewise, the targeted “civilians and children” were the ones killed (at least 12 children out of 118 dead) and injured (about 1,000 children out of over 13,000 injured).
CNN: UN chief Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov expressed his deep concern at what he called “indiscriminate firing” by Gaza militants toward communities in southern Israel.
“Such attacks are unacceptable and undermine the serious efforts by the international community to improve the situation in Gaza.”
Israeli soldiers take aim as they lie prone over an earth barrier along the border with Gaza
Bottom line, these mainstream media articles were not aberrations, but business as usual. Every day in Gaza has yielded either similarly inaccurate news, or radio silence – the one exception perhaps being May 14, 2018. On that day there was opportunity for a dazzling visual display on every news channel: a split-screen exhibition contrasting the high-class, clueless crowd at the opening ceremony of the US embassy in Jerusalem, with the Israeli violence and Palestinian carnage at the Gaza border. For that brief moment, many commentators pointed out Israeli aggression against a besieged people group.
Shortly after that day, reporters’ memories were erased, and Gazans are once again aggressors and followers of Hamas. Avigdor Lieberman is correct again: there are “no innocent civilians in Gaza.”
The fact that the United States favors Israel in its decades-long “conflict” with the Palestinians is not a subjective or abstract question; it’s a well-established empirical fact. The US gives over $3 billion a year in military aid to Israel (more than the US spends on aid for the last seven countries it’s bombed combined ), and defends it from sanction almost uniformly at the UN Security Council. Israel’s support from the US Congress borders on sycophantic. The US, on the other hand, gives no military aid to Palestine, and opposes resolutions that even acknowledge Palestine exists—much less support its resistance to Israeli occupation. The US gives some aid to the Israeli-approved and corrupt Palestinian Authority, but this largely serves to buy off the docile and unpopular PA.
None of these simple, clear-as-day facts however, seem to be known—or at least acknowledged—by those who make up the New York Times editorial board.
New York Times editorial (5/14/18): “For generations the Americans, the honest brokers in seeking peace, withheld recognition of either side’s claims.”
In an otherwise decent scolding of President Donald Trump for moving the US embassy, the Times (5/14/18) fired off this cartoonishly naive and ahistorical gem:
Mr. Trump’s announcement that he was recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and moving the embassy from Tel Aviv, swept aside 70 years of American neutrality.
It’s difficult to imagine any of the seemingly knowledgeable and healthy adults at the Times editorial board actually thinking the US has been “neutral” in its dealings with Israel and Palestine. Perhaps not 100 percent lockstep. Perhaps sometimes pushing back against the most right-wing elements in Israel. But “neutral”? It flies in the face of decades of evidence to the contrary.
This isn’t the first time the New York Times has played the part of a kindergartener finding out Santa Claus isn’t real. As FAIR noted last December (12/30/17), Times reporter Mark Landler used the specter of Trump to totally whitewash America’s aggressive and violent past, in a manner that crosses from jingoistic to outright goofy:
Above all, Mr. Trump has transformed the world’s view of the United States from a reliable anchor of the liberal, rules-based international order into something more inward-looking and unpredictable. That is a seminal change from the role the country has played for 70 years, under presidents from both parties, and it has lasting implications for how other countries chart their futures.
How they know this wasn’t made clear. Perhaps Landler and his editors at the Times did a secret poll and found out the United States has been viewed by “the world” as a “reliable anchor of the liberal, rules-based international order,” rather than a superpower bully that defends rogue apartheid states and launches wars of aggression without UN sanction. But in the article, this “view” was simply asserted, all the ideological lifting being done by the reporter’s back-of-the-napkin editorializing.
In a similar bout of amnesia (FAIR.org, 2/9/17), the Times editorial board argued earlier that year that America’s wars over the past decades were started for purely noble intentions:
At least in recent decades, American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy, sometimes with extraordinary results, as when Germany and Japan evolved after World War II from vanquished enemies into trusted, prosperous allies.
Again, one is compelled to ask, how do Times editors know what’s in the hearts of our beloved leaders? What’s the evidence that their motives were benevolent, their empire an earnest, aw shucks effort to help out the little guy?
It’s understandable wanting to impress upon readers how dangerous and flagrant President Trump’s actions are and have been. But in doing so, there’s no reason to rewrite history and whitewash America’s crimes, or its prior bad-faith actions with regard to Palestine—if not for the sake of history, at least for the sake of their paper’s credibility.
During his US PR tour in March, Saudi prince and de facto ruler of the absolute monarchy Mohammed bin Salman (often referred to as “MBS”) touted the progress the kingdom was making in the area of “women’s rights”—namely letting women drive and combatting nebulous reactionary forces that were somehow separate from the regime.
Since then, at least seven major women’s rights advocates—Eman al-Nafjan, Loujain al-Hathloul, Aziz al-Yousef, Aisha al-Manea, Madiha Al-Ajroush, Walaa Al-Shubbar and Hasah Al-Sheikh—have been detained by Saudi authorities and, according to at least one report (Middle East Eye, 5/22/18), may face the death penalty.
Two of the biggest media corners that helped sell bin Salman as a feminist reformer during the trip and the months leading up to it—the New York Times opinion pages and CBS News’ 60 Minutes—have not published any follow-up commentary on bin Salman’s recent crackdown on women’s rights campaigners (Independent, 5/22/18). Let’s review their past coverage:
“In some ways, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who serves as defense minister, is just what his country needs…. He would allow concerts, and would consider reforming laws tightly controlling the lives of women.” —New York Times editorial board (“The Young and Brash Saudi Crown Prince,” 6/23/17)
“I never thought I’d live long enough to write this sentence: The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia….There was something a 30-year-old Saudi woman social entrepreneur said to me that stuck in my ear. ‘We are privileged to be the generation that has seen the before and the after.’ The previous generation of Saudi women, she explained, could never imagine a day when a woman could drive and the coming generation will never be able to imagine a day when a woman couldn’t.” —Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 11/23/17)
“He is emancipating women…. He has curbed the powers of the country’s so-called ‘religious police,’ who until recently were able to arrest women for not covering up.”—Norah O’Donnell (60 Minutes, 3/19/18)
The 60 Minutes interview was panned by many commentators at the time. “A crime against journalism,” The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan (3/19/18) called it. “Embarrassing to watch,” insisted Omar H. Noureldin, VP of the the Muslim Public Affairs Council (Twitter, 3/20/18). “It was more of an Entertainment Tonight puff piece than a serious interview with journalistic standards.”
The New York Times editorial, while not quite as overtly sycophantic as Friedman and O’Donnell, still broadly painted the ruler as a “bold” and “brash” “reformer.”
Since the mass arrests of women’s group’s on Saturday, the Times news section has run several AP stories (5/18/18, 5/22/18) on the crackdown and one original report (5/18/18), but the typically scoldy editorial board hasn’t issued a condemnation of the arrests. They did, however, take time to condemn in maximalist terms the “violent regime” of Venezuela (5/21/18), insisting on “getting rid” of recently re-elected president Nicolas Maduro, and ran a separate editorial cartoon (5/22/18) showing Maduro declaring victory over the corpses of suffering Venezuelans.
Nor did MBS’s biggest court stenographer, Thomas Friedman, find room in his latest column in his latest column (5/22/18) to note the crackdown. Given Times opinion page editor James Bennet was clear his paper was axiomatically “pro-capitalism” (3/1/18), one wonders whether he views Latin American socialists as uniquely worthy of condemnation, whereas Middle East petrol dictatorships that invest in American corporations and hosts glossy tech conferences deserve nuance and mild “reform” childing. We have to “get rid of” the former, and the latter simply need “guidance” from the US—their respective human rights records a total non-factor.
CBS ran a 50-second story on the “emancipating” MBS’s crackdown on its web-only news network, CBSN (5/21/18), and an AP story on its website (5/19/18), but CBS News has thus far aired nothing on the flagrant human rights violation on any of the news programs on its actual network, and certainly nothing in the ballpark of its most-watched prime time program, 60 Minutes.
If influential outlets like the Times opinion section and CBS News are going to help build up bin Salman’s image as a “reformer” and a champion of women’s rights, don’t they have a unique obligation to inform their readers and viewers when the image they built up is so severely undermined? Shouldn’t Bennet’s editorial board and Friedman—who did so much to lend legitimacy to the Saudi ruler’s PR strategy—be particularly outraged when he does a 180 and starts arresting prominent women’s rights advocates? Will 60 Minutes do a comparable 27-minute segment detailing these arrests and their chilling effect on activism?
This is all unlikely, since US allies’ crackdown on dissent is never in urgent need of clear moral condemnation; it’s simply a hiccup on the never-ending road to “reform.”
Israel massacred 60 Palestinians on Monday, including seven children, bringing to 101 the total number of Palestinians Israel has killed since Palestinians began the Great March on March 30. In that period, Israel has killed 11 Palestinian children, two journalists, one person on crutches and three persons with disabilities.
Monday’s casualties included 1,861 wounded, bringing total injuries inflicted by Israel to 6,938 people, including 3,615 with live fire. Israel is using bullets designed to expand inside the body, causing maximum, often permanent damage: “The injuries sustained by patients will leave most with serious, long-term physical disabilities,” says Médecins Sans Frontières (Ha’aretz, 4/22/18).
On the 70th anniversary of Israel’s so-called “declaration of independence,” the United States opened its new embassy in Jerusalem—a city Israel claims as its own, despite what international law says on the matter—and Palestinians undertook unarmed protests in reaction to the move and as part of the Great Return March. Although to this point, the only Israeli casualty during the entire cycle of demonstrations has been one “lightly wounded” soldier, considerable space in coverage of the massacres is devoted to blaming Palestinians for their own slaughter.
NBC (5/14/18) mentions “what Palestinians refer to as their ‘right of return’”; actually, it’s what international law calls it, based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Two of the first three paragraphs in an NBC report (5/14/18) provided Israel’s rationalizations for its killing spree. The second sentence in the article says that the Israeli military
accused Hamas of “leading a terrorist operation under the cover of masses of people,” adding that “firebombs and explosive devices” as well as rocks were being thrown towards the barrier.
A Washington Post article (5/14/18) devoted two of its first four sentences to telling readers that Palestinians are responsible for being murdered by Israel. Palestinian “organizers urged demonstrators to burst through the fence, telling them Israeli soldiers were fleeing their positions, even as they were reinforcing them,” read one sentence. “At the barrier, young men threw stones and tried to launch kites carrying flames in hopes of burning crops on the other side,” stated the next one, as though stones and burning kites released by a besieged people is violence remotely equivalent to subjecting people to a military siege and mowing them down.
The New York Times (5/14/18) said that “a mass attempt by Palestinians to cross the border fence separating Israel from Gaza turned violent, as Israeli soldiers responded with rifle fire,” painting Israel’s rampage as a reaction to a Palestinian provocation. Like FAIR (2/21/18) has previously said of the word “retaliation,” “response” functions as a justification of Israeli butchery: To characterize Israeli violence as a “response” is to wrongly imply that Palestinian actions warranted Israel unleashing its firing squads.
A Yahoo headline (5/14/18) described “Violent Protests in Gaza Ahead of US Embassy Inauguration in Jerusalem,” a flatly incorrect description in that it attributes the violence to Palestinian demonstrators rather than to Israel. The BBC (5/15/18) did the same with a segment called “Gaza Braced for Further Violent Protests.”
In Bloomberg‘s account (5/14/18), the fence seemed to be the real victim.
One Bloomberg article (5/14/18) by Saud Abu Ramadan and Amy Teibel had the same problem, referring to “a protest marred by violence,” while another one (5/14/18) attributed only to Ramadan is headlined “Hamas Targets Fence as Gaza Bloodshed Clouds Embassy Move,” as though the fence were Monday’s most tragic casualty. Ascribing this phantom violence to Palestinians provides Israel an alibi: Many readers will likely conclude that Israel’s lethal violence is reasonable if it is cast as a way of coping with “violent protests.”
The second paragraph of the Bloomberg article solely written by Ramadan says that
Gaza protesters, egged on by loudspeakers and transported in buses, streamed to the border, where some threw rocks, burned tires, and flew kites and balloons outfitted with firebombs into Israeli territory.
This author—like the rest in the “Palestinians were asking for it” chorus—failed to note that Israel’s fence runs deep into Palestinian territory and creates a 300-meter “buffer zone” between Palestinians and Israeli forces, which makes it highly unlikely that the kites and balloons of the colonized will have an effect on their drone-operating, rifle-wielding colonizers, let alone on people further afield in Israeli-held territory.
The New York Times editorial board (5/14/18) wrote as though Palestinians are barbarians against whom Israel has no choice but to unleash terror:
Led too long by men who were corrupt or violent or both, the Palestinians have failed and failed again to make their own best efforts toward peace. Even now, Gazans are undermining their own cause by resorting to violence, rather than keeping their protests strictly peaceful.
The board claimed that “Israel has every right to defend its borders, including the boundary with Gaza,” incorrectly suggesting that Palestinians were aggressors rather than on the receiving end of 100 years of settler-colonialism.
Moreover, like the Times and Bloomberg articles discussed above, the editorial attempts to legitimize Israel’s deadly violence by saying that it is defending a border that Palestinians are attempting to breach, but there is no border between Gaza and Israel. There is, as Maureen Murphy of Electronic Intifada (4/6/18) pointed out, “an armistice line between an occupying power and the population living under its military rule” that Palestinians are trying to cross in order to exercise their right to return to their land.
The Washington Post (5/15/18) condemned the “cruel, cynical tactic” of trying to exercise the internationally guaranteed right of return.
A Washington Post editorial (5/15/18) called the Palestinians hunted by Israel “nominal civilians.” Apart from being a logical impossibility (one either is or isn’t a civilian), the phrase illuminates how too much of media think about Palestinians: They are inherently threatening, intrinsically killable, always suspect, never innocent, permanently guilty of existing.
A Business Insider piece (5/14/18) by columnist Daniella Greenbaum described “Palestinian protesters who ramped up their activities along the Gaza strip and, as a result, were targeted by the Israeli army with increasing intensity.” Greenbaum’s use of the phrase “as a result” implies that it was inevitable and perhaps just that Palestinians’ “ramped up activities” led to Israel mowing down a population it occupies, 70 percent of whom are refugees Israel refuses to allow to return to their homes.
Greenbaum then climbs into the intellectual and moral gutter, claiming that
absent from the commentary that children have unfortunately been among the injured and dead are questions about how they ended up at the border. On that question, it is important to recognize and acknowledge the extent to which Palestinians have glorified violence and martyrdom — and the extent to which the terrorist organization Hamas has organized the “protests.”
In her view, dozens of Palestinians died because they are primitive savages who take pleasure in sacrificing their own children, not because Israel maintains the right to gun down refugees in the name of maintaining an ethnostate.
In a rare instance of a resident of Gaza allowed to participate directly in the media conversation, Fadi Abu Shammalah wrote an op-ed for the New York Times (4/27/18) that offered an explanation of why Palestinians are putting their lives on the line to march. Life for the people of Gaza, including for his three young sons, has been “one tragedy after another: waves of mass displacement, life in squalid refugee camps, a captured economy, restricted access to fishing waters, a strangling siege and three wars in the past nine years. ” Recalling the concern for his safety expressed by his seven-year-old child, Shammalah concludes:
If Ali asks me why I’m returning to the Great Return March despite the danger, I will tell him this: I love my life. But more than that, I love you, Karam and Adam. If risking my life means you and your brothers will have a chance to thrive, to have a future with dignity, to live in peace with all your neighbors, in your free country, then this is a risk I must take.
Palestinians have a right to liberate themselves that extends to the right to the use of armed struggle, yet as Shammalah wrote, the Great Return March signifies a “nearly unanimous acceptance of peaceful methods to call for our rights and insist on our humanity.” Nevertheless, based on media coverage, readers could be forgiven for concluding that it was Palestinians, not Israel, who carried out what Doctors Without Borders called “unacceptable and inhuman” violence.
The best evidence that Russia-gate is sinking beneath the waves is the way those pushing the pseudo-scandal are now busily covering their tracks. The Guardiancomplains that “as the inquiry has expanded and dominated the news agenda over the last year, the real issues of people’s lives are in danger of being drowned out by obsessive cable television coverage of the Russia investigation” – as if the Guardian’s own coverage hasn’t been every bit as obsessive as anything CNN has come up with.
The Washington Post, second to none when it comes to painting Putin as a real-life Lord Voldemort, now says that Special counsel Robert Mueller “faces a particular challenge maintaining the confidence of the citizenry” as his investigation enters its second year – although it’s sticking to its guns that the problem is not the inquiry itself, but “the regular attacks he faces from President Trump, who has decried the probe as a ‘witch hunt.’”
And then there’s the New York Times, which this week devoted a 3,600-word front-page article to explain why the FBI had no choice but to launch an investigation into Trump’s alleged Russian links and how, if anything, the inquiry wasn’t aggressive enough. As the article puts it, “Interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the FBI was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known.”
It’s Nobody’s Fault
The result is a late-breaking media chorus to the effect that it’s not the fault of the FBI that the investigation has dragged on with so little to show for it; it’s not the fault of Mueller either, and, most of all, it’s not the fault of the corporate press, even though it’s done little over the last two years than scream about Russia. It’s not anyone’s fault, evidently, but simply how the system works.
This is nonsense, and the gaping holes in the Times article show why.
The piece, written by Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, and Nicholas Fandos and entitled “Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation,” is pretty much like everything else the Times has written on the subject, i.e. biased, misleading, and incomplete. Its main argument is that the FBI had no option but to step in because four Trump campaign aides had “obvious or suspected Russian ties.”
‘At Putin’s Arm’
One was Michael Flynn, who would briefly serve as Donald Trump’s national security adviser and who, according to the Times, “was paid $45,000 by the Russian government’s media arm for a 2015 speech and dined at the arm of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.” Another was Paul Manafort, who briefly served as Trump’s campaign chairman and was a source of concern because he had “lobbied for pro-Russia interests in Ukraine and worked with an associate who has been identified as having connections to Russian intelligence.” A third was Carter Page, a Trump foreign-policy adviser who “was well known to the FBI” because “[h]e had previously been recruited by Russian spies and was suspected of meeting one in Moscow during the campaign.” The fourth was George Papadopoulos, a “young and inexperienced campaign aide whose wine-fueled conversation with the Australian ambassador set off the investigation. Before hacked Democratic emails appeared online, he had seemed to know that Russia had political dirt on Mrs. Clinton.”
Seems incriminating, eh? But in each case the connection was more tenuous than the Times lets on. Flynn, for example, didn’t dine “at the arm of the Russian president” at a now-famous December 2015 Moscow banquet honoring the Russian media outlet RT. He was merely at a table at which Putin happened to sit down for “maybe five minutes, maybe twenty, tops,” according to Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein who was just a few chairs away. No words were exchanged, Stein says, and “[n]obody introduced anybody to anybody. There was no translator. The Russians spoke Russian. The four people who spoke English spoke English.”
The Manafort associate with the supposed Russian intelligence links turns out to be a Russian-Ukrainian translator named Konstantin Kilimnik who studied English at a Soviet military school and who vehemently denies any such connection. It seems that the Ukrainian authorities did investigate the allegations at one point but declined to press charges. So the connection is unproven.
Page Was No Spy
The same goes for Carter Page, who was not “recruited” by Russian intelligence, but, rather, approached by what he thought were Russian trade representatives at a January 2013 energy symposium in New York. When the FBI informed him five or six months later that it believed the men were intelligence agents, Page appears to have cooperated fully based on a federal indictment filed with the Southern District of New York. Thus, Page was not a spy but a government informant as ex-federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has pointed out – in other words, a good guy, as the Times would undoubtedly see it, helping the catch a couple of baddies.
As for Papadopoulos, who the Times suggests somehow got advance word that WikiLeaks was about to dump a treasure trove of Hillary Clinton emails, the article fails to mention that at the time the conversation with the Australian ambassador took place, the Clinton communications in the news were the 30,000 State Department emails that she had improperly stored on her private computer. These were the emails that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about,” as Bernie Sanders put it. Instead of spilling the beans about a data breach yet to come, it’s more likely that Papadopoulos was referring to emails that were already in the news – a possibility the Times fails to discuss.
FBI ‘Perplexed’
One could go on. But not only does the Times article get the details wrong, it paints the big picture in misleading tones as well. It says that the FBI was “perplexed” by such Trump antics as calling on Russia to release still more Clinton emails after WikiLeaks went public with its disclosure. The word suggests a disinterested observer who can’t figure out what’s going on. But it ignores how poisonous the atmosphere had become by that point and how everyone’s mind was seemingly made up.
By July 2016, Clinton was striking out at Trump at every opportunity about his Russian ties – not because they were true, but because a candidate who had struggled to come up with a winning slogan had at last come across an issue that seemed to resonate with her fan base. Consequently, an intelligence report that Russia was responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee “was a godsend,” wrote Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in Shattered, their best-selling account of the Clinton campaign, because it was “hard evidence upon which Hillary could start to really build the case that Trump was actually in league with Moscow.”
Not only did Clinton believe this, but her followers did as well, as did the corporate media and, evidently, the FBI. This is the takeaway from text messages that FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok exchanged with FBI staff attorney Lisa Page.
Andrew McCarthy, who has done a masterful job of reconstructing the sequence, notes that in late July 2016, Page mentioned an article she had come across on a liberal web site discussing Trump’s alleged Russia ties. Strzok texted back that he’s “partial to any women sending articles about nasty the Russians are.” Page replied that the Russians “are probably the worst. Very little I finding redeeming about this. Even in history. Couple of good writers and artists I guess.” Strzok heartily agreed: “f***ing conniving cheating savages. At statecraft, athletics, you name it. I’m glad I’m on Team USA.”
The F’ing Russian ‘Savages’
This is the institutional bias that the Times doesn’t dare mention. An agency whose top officials believe that “f***ing conniving cheating savages” are breaking down the door is one that is fairly guaranteed to construe evidence in the most negative, anti-Russian way possible while ignoring anything to the contrary. So what if Carter Page had cooperated with the FBI? What’s important is that he had had contact with Russian intelligence at all, which was enough to render him suspicious in the bureau’s eyes. Ditto Konstantin Kilimnik. So what if the Ukrainian authorities had declined to press charges? The fact that they had even looked was damning enough.
The FBI thus made the classic methodological error of allowing its investigation to be contaminated by its preconceived beliefs. Objectivity fell by the wayside. The Times says that Christopher Steele, the ex-MI6 agent whose infamous, DNC and Clinton camp paid-for opposition research dossier turned “golden showers” into a household term, struck the FBI as “highly credible” because he had “helped agents unravel complicated cases” in the past. Perhaps. But the real reason is that he told agents what they wanted to hear, which is that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years” with the “[a]im, endorsed by PUTIN, … [of] encourage[ing] splits and divisions in [the] western alliance.” (which can be construed as a shrewd defensive move against a Western alliance massing troops on Russian borders.)
What else would one expect of people as “nasty” as these? In fact, the Steele dossier should have caused alarm bells to go off. How could Putin have possibly known five years before that Trump would be a viable presidential candidate? Why would high-level Kremlin officials share inside information with an ex-intelligence official thousands of miles away? Why would the dossier declare on one page that the Kremlin has offered Trump “various lucrative real estate development business deals” but then say on another that Trump’s efforts to drum up business had gone nowhere and that he therefore “had had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather than business success”? Given that the dossier was little more than “oppo research” commissioned and funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, why was it worthy of consideration at all?
The Rush to Believe
But all such questions disappeared amid the general rush to believe. The Times is right that the FBI slow-walked the investigation until Election Day. This is because agents assumed that Trump would lose and that therefore there was no need to rush. But when he didn’t, the mood turned to one of panic and fury.
Without offering a shred of evidence, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a formal assessment on Jan. 6, 2017, that “Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election … [in order] to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”
The New Yorkerreports that an ex-aide to John McCain hoped to persuade the senator to use the Steele dossier to force Trump to resign even before taking office. (The ex-aide denies that this was the case.)
When FBI Director James Comey personally confronted Trump with news of the dossier two weeks prior to inauguration, the Times says he “feared making this conversation a ‘J. Edgar Hoover-type situation,’ with the FBI presenting embarrassing information “to lord over a president-elect.”
But that is precisely what happened. When someone – most likely CIA Director John Brennan, now a commentator with NBC News – leaked word of the meeting and Buzzfeed published the dossier four days later, the corporate media went wild. Trump was gravely wounded, while Adam Schiff, Democratic point man on the House Intelligence Committee, would subsequently trumpet the Steele dossier as the unvarnished truth. According to the Times account, Trump was unpersuaded by Comey’s assurances that he was there to help. “Hours earlier,” the paper says, “… he debuted what would quickly become a favorite phrase: ‘This is a political witch hunt.’”
The Times clearly regards the idea as preposterous on its face. But while Trump is wrong about many things, on this one subject he happens to be right. The press, the intelligence community, and the Democrats have all gone off the deep end in search of a Russia connection that doesn’t exist. They misled their readers, they made fools of themselves, and they committed a crime against journalism. And now they’re trying to dodge the blame.
Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics.
In my last piece, I wrote that one of the downsides of the probable D-Notice slapped on the Skripal Case was that we may well be deprived of our daily dose of farcical nonsense, such as whether the poison was administered in the restaurant, the car, the cemetery, the flowers, the luggage, the bench, the porridge, the door handle or – and I’m surprised nobody has thought of it yet – perhaps the cat. There is no doubt an FSB manual waiting to be found which explains how cats can be safely used as conduits for “Novichok”, and it has almost certainly been put together by the dashingly handsome, astonishingly intelligent, but inexplicably bitmapped ruthless ex-KGB assassin, “Gordon”, who was apparently a suspect a couple of weeks ago, but is no longer deemed a person of interest.
But despite the D-Notice, on the morning of 5th May it seemed that the torrent of patent absurdities was actually not about to cease anytime soon. In an interview with the New York Times, the Director General of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Ahmet Uzumcu, said the following:
“For research activities or protection you would need, for instance, five to 10 grams or so, but even in Salisbury it looks like they may have used more than that, without knowing the exact quantity, I am told it may be 50, 100 grams or so, which goes beyond research activities for protection.”
My immediate reaction was to ask why only 50-100 grams (which the New York Times helpfully tells its readers is between about a quarter-cup to a half-cup of liquid)? Why not a whole bucketful of Novichok, splashed indiscriminately over the front door of Mr Skripal’s house?
It is testimony to the truly uninquisitive minds of the dutiful stenographers at the New York Times and the rest of the media which ran with the same story, that none of them appear to have wondered to themselves something along these lines:
“Huh? 100 grams of military-grade nerve agent? Of a type said to be 5-8 times more lethal than VX, which itself has a median lethal dose of 10 milligrams. And we’re now apparently talking about 100,000 milligrams! And yet not only are the Skripals alive (well at least they were when last Yulia got hold of a phone) but the population of Salisbury seems to be doing okay as well. In fact no-one died (apart from the cat and the guinea pigs). Does Mr Uzumcu know what he’s talking about?”
My next reaction was to wonder whether actually he knows exactly what he’s talking about. But I’ll come back to that in a moment.
“In response to questions from the media, the OPCW Spokesperson stated that the OPCW would not be able to estimate or determine the amount of the nerve agent that was used in Salisbury on 4 March 2018. The quantity should probably be characterised in milligrams. However, the analysis of samples collected by the OPCW Technical Assistance Visit team concluded that the chemical substance found was of high purity, persistent and resistant to weather conditions.”
As an aside, I’d love to know which media asked the questions. My guess is that it wasn’t any of those organisations who had repeated the claims made in the New York Times.
But what of the statement itself? Taken at face value, along with Mr Uzumcu’s original statement, it is very odd for a number of reasons:
1. Firstly, it says that the OPCW would not be able to estimate or determine the amount of the substance used. But of course this is exactly what Mr Uzumcu did appear to say, when he mentioned the quantities 50 and 100 grams.
2. Secondly, the statement says that the quantity should probably be characterised in milligrams. Not bucketfuls then? But of course the problem with this is that it does appear to leave Mr Uzumcu looking rather stupid, as if he:
a) Doesn’t know his grams from his milligrams and
b) Doesn’t realise that a cupful of military grade nerve agent 5-8 times more toxic than VX would kill people – like, lots and lots and lots of people
3. And thirdly, the milligrams for grams exchange completely undercuts the whole point Mr Uzumcu was making. He was saying that it appeared from the amount used that it could not have been produced in any old laboratory, as he had admitted a week before when he had said it could be produced “in any country where there would be some chemical expertise.” Rather, the point he was making was that quantities like 50-100 grams could only point to military production of the agent, rather than simply for research purposes.
This is all very bizarre. That’s hardly surprising, though, since there is almost nothing about this case that has not been extremely odd. From what I can tell, there are only really two possible explanations for this latest bout of strangeness.
One possible explanation is that Mr Uzumcu is simply incompetent, and so lacking in knowledge that he doesn’t know his grams from his milligrams, nor that half a cup of deadly nerve agent would wipe out hundreds, if not thousands, of people (not to mention being impossible to put on a door handle in the first place, at least not without the kind of protection that might just draw attention). However, this seems to me fairly unlikely. I assume that you don’t become Director General of the OPCW and remain in the position for eight years if you really are that inept.
But is there another more revealing explanation?
If you go back and read Mr Uzumcu’s statement, it is very noticeable that he does not actually state that he personally believes the quantity of the poison used in Salisbury was 50 or 100 grams. What he actually said is:
“For research activities or protection you would need, for instance, five to 10 grams or so, but even in Salisbury it looks like they may have used more than that, without knowing the exact quantity, I am told it may be 50, 100 grams or so, which goes beyond research activities for protection” [my emphasis].
It looks likethey may have used more than that? From what does it look like that? From the months long, multi-million pound clean up job being undertaken, by any chance?
And of the quantity, he says he was told this. But the question is, who told him?
I can’t be sure, but my hunch is that he does know his grams from his milligrams; that he is well aware that 50-100 grams of the stuff would be enough to have killed the Skripals outright, along with hundreds or possibly thousands of others in the surrounding area; and also that he understands full well that the current multi-million pound clean up operation in Salisbury, which is precisely intended to give the impression that there was so much of the stuff that it might make up half a cupful, or perhaps even a whole bucketful, is something of a farce.
And so even though his original statement at first seems absurd, I’m fairly convinced that it was not a display of incompetence on his part. Rather, together with the subsequent clarification, it was very likely a signal that he believes his source for the claim to be either incompetent or – shall we say – economical with the actualité. And it may be that his real aim was – as diplomatically as possible – to let certain folks in Britain know that he’s not as convinced by some of their claims as they might like him to be.
In a New York Times news analysis (4/29/18) examining how the overthrow of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi after he agreed to halt his nuclear program might influence North Korean thinking about disarmament, the Times’ Peter Baker writes that “President Barack Obama and European allies launched military action against Libya in 2011 to prevent a threatened massacre of civilians.” Later, Baker recounts that Gadhafi “vowed to crush his opponents, including civilians, prompting Mr. Obama and European allies to intervene to stop him.”
But did Gadhafi actually threaten to massacre civilians? A radio broadcast by the Libyan leader in which he declared he would show “no mercy” in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi was offered as justification for the UN Security Council vote that authorized “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians. “Gadhafi Vows ‘No Mercy’ as UN Eyes Action,” was how AP (3/17/11) reported on the Security Council deliberations.
But when the New York Times (3/17/11) itself reported on the speech, it described it as a threat against rebel combatants, not against civilians: Gadhafi “promised amnesty for those ‘who throw their weapons away’ but ‘no mercy or compassion’ for those who fight,” the Times’ David Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim reported.
The myth that Gadhafi had openly threatened civilians and thus necessitated international military intervention sprang up quickly as the US and its NATO allies launched an attack on Libya’s government. “What obviously changed [Obama’s] mind” about using force, reported the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman (4/3/11), “was the fear that Moammar Gadhafi was bent on mass slaughter — which stemmed from Gadhafi’s March 17 speech vowing ‘no mercy’ for his enemies.” But the claims that Gadhafi was intending to slaughter tens or hundreds of thousands were, wrote Chapman, outlandish scenarios that go beyond any reasonable interpretation of Gadhafi’s words. He said, “We will have no mercy on them”—but by “them,” he plainly was referring to armed rebels (“traitors”) who stand and fight, not all the city’s inhabitants.
Elsewhere in his Times article, Baker refers to the nuclear deal Iran made with the United States:
Iran was not known to have weapons but did have a nuclear program that seemed intended to develop them when it signed an agreement with Mr. Obama’s administration in 2015 to give up its program.
This too contradicts earlier New York Times reporting: “American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb,” wrote James Risen and Mark Mazzetti (2/24/12), under the headline “US Agencies See No Move by Iran to Build a Bomb.” They reported that US intelligence agencies were standing by their 2007 assessment that “Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier.”
Baker’s piece ends with the observation that “each side sees its own very different lessons” from the Libyan history. It’s easier to draw correct lessons from history when the paper of record reports history as it happened.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (or via Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Bret Stephens is a political commentator who works for The New York Times and NBC News. Stephens was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post between 2002 and 2004.
His Jewish identity is mentioned hand-in-hand with his political orientation by The Times of Israel : “In criticizing Trump even after his electoral victory, Stephens joins other leading Jewish conservative voices, including Brooks, Jennifer Rubin and William Kristol.” His Jewish identity is pertinent because he is known as a neocon and a strong supporter of Israel. The one seems to reinforce the other. Furthermore, his position on Iraq was criminal and disastrous and now he’s advocating a position on Syria that would also be criminal and disastrous. We should be extremely skeptical of the objectivity of someone like him who comes across as a shill for Israel and the Empire all-in-one.
Strong criticism of his position on Syria appears in an article by Robert Rabil dated yesterday that quotes him as follows: “U.S. should target Assad and his senior lieutenants directly in a decapitation strike, just as the U.S. attempted in Iraq in 2003, and against Osama bin Laden in 2011… if we [Americans] are serious about confronting Iran, Syria remains the most important battlefield.” What may result from such an aggression and war crime as decapitating Syria? I quote the article:
“It is mind boggling that someone as astute as Stephens would call for the decapitation of the regime in the same way U.S. had done in Iraq without providing an alternative to the regime. No less significant, does ‘our’ seriousness about confronting Iran require decapitating the Syrian regime? Is punishing the Syrian regime a pretext to confront Iran? This is a dangerous and flawed logic divorced from the harsh reality of the Levant. How could anyone invoke what the U.S. attempted in Iraq without admitting and internalizing the staggering human and financial cost the U.S. has paid? Has the notion of what may happen the day after the decapitation strike and confronting Iran crossed Stephens’ mind, or of those echoing him?
“Undoubtedly, Syria will further descend into anarchy and wretchedness, leading up to regional and international strife. A decapitating strike against the Syrian regime and/or an open confrontation with Iran in Syria would most likely put Moscow and Washington on a path of armed conflict. Russia made its position clear that it will respond to any game changing attack on Syria…
“Most importantly, is it in the national interest of Washington to risk a war over Syria, and by extension Iran, with Moscow after what United States has gone through in Iraq and Afghanistan with little to show for the enormous sacrifices Americans have made?”
Stephens was born in New York City in 1973. Stephens is said to be “brilliant”. He has several awards, indicating he’s a smart fellow, but being smart doesn’t make you wise, right or someone whose ideas should be followed. He strongly endorsed the war on Iraq:
“Stephens was a ‘prominent voice’ among the media advocates for the start of the 2003 Iraq War, for instance writing in a 2002 column that, unless checked, Iraq was likely to become the first nuclear power in the Arab world. Although the weapons of mass destruction used as a casus belli were never shown to exist, Stephens continued to insist as late as 2013 that the Bush administration had ‘solid evidence’ for going to war. Stephens has also argued strongly against the Iran nuclear deal and its preliminary agreements, arguing that they were a worse bargain even than the 1938 Munich Agreement with Nazi Germany.”
Stephens’ advice on Syria is easily as criminal as his advice on Iraq. Keeping the covenant with Iran is productive of peace. Breaking it is productive of war.
The neocon world view fails to recognize the the tremendous injuries the U.S. is inflicting on peoples in other lands. It fails to recognize either their property rights or rights to self-determination. The neocons fail to recognize the long-term ill-will and retaliation that the U.S. is producing. The neocons naively and wrongly think that democracy is a wonderful institution, that the U.S. has a right to overthrow regimes and set up democratic governments. They wrongly think that they are capable of building states when they are not. The neocons fail to recognize the military capabilities, including the nuclear weapons, of other powers. The neocons overestimate the efficacy of the U.S. military. The Jewish neocons are influenced strongly by Israeli right-wingers, and they are not of a mind to devise peaceful solutions to the nagging problems associated with Israel. The neocons do not comprehend that the world can progress peacefully and without a dominant superpower attempting to impose its standards and form of government. The neocons fail to recognize the faults of the U.S. government. The neocons ignore the inflation of the domestic police state as a feature of the Empire, just as they ignore the mounting U.S. debt. The neocons fail to see or appreciate other peoples as persons, instead viewing them as pieces they can move on a world chess board.
Ideologues of US power, notably those ensconced in the editorial offices of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, believe that the United States has an imprescriptible right to exercise an absolutist tyranny over the world, to define the boundary between civilization and barbarism, and that Washington is unbound by international law, but free to wield it as a tool against the barbarians. In the ideology of US despotism, the compass of civilization includes states that submit to “US leadership”, a euphemized version of “US tyranny,” while states which favor an international order based on the UN Charter’s ideal of the sovereignty and equality of states (Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela are among the supporters of this alternative, democratic, order) are relegated to the category of barbarism. Once a state has been located outside of civilization, Western legal traditions—testing accusations against evidence and the assumption of innocence until culpability is credibly demonstrated— no longer apply. The “barbaric” state becomes guilty of all acts of which it is accused, regardless of whether there exists credible evidence to corroborate the accusation.
In a 9 April editorial “In Syria, Trump faces the limits of bluster” The New York Times attributes a global leadership role to the United States, which it urges the Trump administration to exercise by creating “an independent investigation that could lead to prosecution” of the Syrian leadership “in a tribunal like the International Criminal Court,” a court the United States itself rejects and refuses to be bound by.
The New York Times’ editors lay out steps Washington ought to take if “the Syrian regime’s guilt is determined,” but conclude all the same that the Syrian government is guilty on all charges, contrary to the reality that the US State Department, British Foreign Office, and its own reporters, have acknowledged that the chemical attack allegations against the Syrian government are unverified and unconfirmed. What’s more, the sources of the allegations are the White Helmets and Syrian American Medical Society, partisan outfits, funded by Western governments, and allied with anti-government insurgents, who have an interest in fabricating atrocities to defame their enemy and to justify continued and even elevated Western intervention in Syria.
Additionally, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, at a 2 February news conference, admitted that the Pentagon has no evidence that the Syrian military has ever used chemical weapons. This, however, didn’t stop the New York Times’ editors from declaring that Syria has failed to honor its agreement to destroy its chemical weapons under a 2013 pact or that it is responsible “for most of the 85 chemical attacks in the country over the past five years.” A newspaper which proclaims itself to live up to the highest standards of journalism, indeed, to set the gold standard, appears to have no trouble creating facts out of thin air.
The editors lay out steps the Trump administration should take once a legal imprimatur is conferred upon a pre-judgement of guilt. Inevitably, military action is called for. “If a Russian veto prevents Security Council action, then Mr. Trump needs to work with our allies, through NATO or otherwise,” the editors counsel—a call for the US administration to violate international law (again.)
“The use of poison gas,” the newspaper of record observes one paragraph later, “is a war crime under international law,” a curious observation given the editors’ dim view of international law as evidenced by their urging Washington to act without Security Council authorization in order to exercise “America’s traditional leadership role.” It should be recalled that the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan also claimed leadership roles, to say nothing of imperial Britain and imperial France, the latter of which is eager to rehabilitate its colonial tyranny over its former Syrian mandate under the guise of punishing the “barbarian” Assad for outrages against civilization.
The Pentagon has the world’s largest stockpile of weaponized poison gas. The point of having it is to possibly use it, despite its prohibition under the very same international law the New York Times condemns Syria (without evidence) of violating. Thus, the ideologues of US tyranny reveal that international law is a matter of significance only to countries the United States defines as its enemies (the barbarians), and not to the United States itself, which is free to act as it pleases against the barbarians, according to its own laws, as the guarantor of a global moral order. Needless to say, the idea that the United States, the principle source of disorder, suffering and decay in the world, has even a soupcon of moral authority, is risible, if not a sick joke—a truth of which most of the world’s population is only too aware.
In 1970, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2625, which, inter alia, declared that “States have the duty to refrain from propaganda for wars of aggression,” a resolution of apparently no significance to the New York Times, which is only too happy to spread propaganda for wars of aggression in the service of a US tyranny which, far from exercising moral authority, continues to spread its dark wings over the whole world, led by a madman at the top of a system of global oppression and exploitation, from which has sprung a program of neo-colonial warfare and escalating confrontation with China and Russia.
Fifteen years ago today, March 20, the “Coalition of the Willing” declared war on Iraq. We now know that war was based on a monumental and inexcusable lie about Iraq possessing “weapons of mass destruction”, and that the war itself was a crime under international law. But we tend to forget that WMDs wasn’t the only lie told to us at the time. There was also the lie about the anthrax attacks in the USA, which in some ways can be counted even more egregious and cold-blooded.
We were told the anthrax that killed five people and harmed 17 others had been positively identified as originating in Iraq. Colin Powell’s famous “test tube full of washing powder” was a bit of theatre designed to sell us on this alleged fact. But it wasn’t true.
Almost immediately after the attacks the FBI knew the anthrax must have been homegrown, or at least produced somewhere with sophisticated laboratory equipment. But since this fact didn’t fit with the al Qaeda narrative it was suppressed from public knowledge. By October 2001 the Guardian was reporting “Iraq ‘behind US anthrax outbreaks’.” All the usual suspects in promoting imperialist war soon followed suit.
The narrative at this time was clearly intended to be that Iraq was the state-sponsor of al Qaeda terror, and had not only been a supporter of the 9/11 attacks but had provided Osama’ boys with the goods to murder even more Americans with anthrax. This, obviously, was intended to act as the rationale for attacking those two vitally strategic countries in the the US’s project for dominance in the Middle east and Asia – Iraq and Afghanistan.
But, as so often seems to happen, this narrative was almost immediately undermined by official White House statements (perhaps originating in elements of the government anxious to preserve the administration from outright association with a lie) that the anthrax in question showed no signs of coming from Iraq, because they specifically lacked an ingredient called bentonite. Which, as we now know, was true.
This official denial, based on solid scientific evidence, should have been an end to the story. But, as the film above shows, owing to a vast campaign of distraction and deception by politicians and the media, the completely discredited story of Iraqi responsibility for the anthrax attacks continued to flourish and even gain momentum. Outlets such as ABC and, most prominently, from Judith Miller (whose pre-2001 prescience about the dangers of anthrax in the US seems truly breathtaking) in the New York Times, brazenly continued to sell the idea in feature articles, specials and endless repetition in the nightly news.
And what was the central “fact” on which the media story of Iraq’s guilt was built?
Nothing less than the completely and provably false claim the White House had already denied – that there was bentonite in the anthrax.
Even the White House, the same White House that had officially denied the presence of bentonite and therefore ruled out Iraq involvement, continue to use implications, lies by omission and weasel words to enable the opposite view to become lodged in the public mind.
These people didn’t just bend the truth, or fudge or obfuscate. They lied. They invented whole narratives, they made up whole back stories, they looked us in the camera’s eye on TV and completely deceived us. The media’s Anthrax Meme never existed. Not one single part of it. And even while Colin Powell was allowing us to believe the story he had known for more than a year that it was a complete fabrication
The UK government is currently lying to us about the Skripal poisoning. We know that already to be beyond doubt. The only question is how deep the lie goes this time.
When we look back at 2001 we have to realise it could be very deep indeed.
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
— Primo Levy
On March 17th, 1968, The New York Times ran a brief front page lede headed, “G.I.s’ in Pincer Movement Kill 128 in Daylong Battle;” the action took place the previous day roughly eight miles from Quang Ngai City, a provincial capital in the northern coastal quadrant of South Vietnam. Heavy artillery and helicopter gunships had been “called in to pound the North Vietnamese soldiers.” By three in the afternoon the battle had ceased, and “the remaining North Vietnamese had slipped out and fled.” The American side lost only two killed and several wounded. The article, datelined Saigon, had no byline. Its source was an “American military command’s communique,” a virtual press release hurried into print and unfiltered by additional digging.
Several days later a more superficially factual telling of this seemingly crushing blow to the enemy was featured in Southern Cross, the weekly newsletter of the Americal Division in whose ‘area of operation’ the ‘day long battle’ had been fought. It was described by Army reporter Jay Roberts, who had been there, as “an attack on a Vietcong stronghold,” not an encounter with North Vietnamese regulars as the Times had misconstrued it. However, Roberts’ article tallied the same high number of enemy dead. When leaned on by Lt. Colonel Frank Barker, who commanded the operation, to downplay the lopsided outcome, Roberts complied, noting blandly that “the assault went off like clockwork.” But certain after action particulars could not be fudged. Roberts was obliged to report that the GIs recovered only “three [enemy] weapons,” a paradox that surely warranted clarification. None was given. It was to be assumed that, either the enemy was poorly armed, or that he had removed the weapons of his fallen comrades – leaving their bodies to be counted – when he retired from the field. Neither of the news outlets cited here, nor Stars and Stripes, the semi-official newspaper of the U. S. Armed Forces which ran with Robert’s account, makes reference to any civilian casualties.
It would be nearly eighteen months later when, on September 6, 1969, a front page article in the Ledger-Enquire in Columbus, Georgia reported that the military prosecutor at nearby Ft. Benning – home of the U. S. Army Infantry – was investigating charges against a junior officer, Lieutenant William L. Calley, of “multiple murders” of civilians during “an operation at a place called Pinkville,” GI patois for the color denoting man-made features on their topographical maps in a string of coastal hamlets near Quang Ngai.
With the story now leaked, if only in the regional papers – it would migrate as well to a daily in Montgomery, Alabama – the Ft. Benning public information officer moved to “keep the story low profile,” and “released a brief statement that The New York Times ran deep inside its September 7, 1969 issue,” limited to three terse paragraphs on a page cluttered with retail advertising. The press announcement from the Army flack had referred only to “the deaths of more than one civilian.” In the nation’s newspaper of record, which also mentioned Calley by name, this delicate ambiguity was multiplied to “an unspecified number of civilians.” Yet, once again, the Times was enlisted to serve the agenda of a military publicist, and failed to approach the story independently.
An Army recon commando named Rod Ridenhour had taken it upon himself to do just that. While still serving with the Americal Division’s 11th Light Infantry Brigade from which Task Force Barker – named for its commander – was assembled for the attack on Pinkville, Ridenhour documented accounts of those who had witnessed or participated in a mass killing. A year later in March 1969, now stateside and a civilian, Ridenhour sent “a five page registered letter” summarizing his findings to President Richard Nixon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and select members of the U.S. Congress urging “a widespread and public investigation.” General William Westmoreland, who had commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam until June 1968, reacted to Ridenhour’s allegations with “disbelief.” The accusations were, he told a Congressional committee, “so out of character with American forces in Vietnam that I was quite skeptical.” Nonetheless an inquiry was launched.
The Times, although forewarned, had once again squandered a chance to scoop for its global readership what was arguably the most sensational news story of the entire Vietnam War. The two regional reporters had done their legwork, then, bereft of big city resources had nowhere else to go. But in late October, a seasoned freelance journalist in Washington named Seymour Hersh, acting on a colleague’s anonymous tip from inside the military, immediately “stopped all other work and began to chase down the story,” which by mid-November 1969 would be revealed to the American public and the world at large as the My Lai massacre.
This outline of the massacre’s initial falsification and suppression, followed by its eventual disclosure, is cobbled from My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness (Oxford, 2017), a thorough retreatment of the infamous Vietnam War atrocity by Howard Jones, a professor of history at the University of Alabama. The question is, to what end? Has the voluminous, careful study in the literature devoted to the My Lai massacre left something out? It’s not a matter of omissions, the historian argues, but that the record is replete with conflicting interpretations. To tell the “full story” required Jones to reorder events in their “proper sequence,” he says. His other reasons for taking us back to Pinkville are equally vague, and casually embedded among several floating asides in the author’s Acknowledgments. His debts are many, but foremost among them Jones recognizes his Vietnamese-American graduate assistant who “emphasized the importance of incorporating the Vietnamese side into the narrative and remaining objective in telling the story.”
I took this profession of objectivity as a signal to be on the alert for its potential subjective or editorial opposite. Jones insists that “everyone who has written… about My Lai has had an agenda.” The suspicion that a subtle revisionist agenda, nurtured perhaps by the resentments of a partisan of the losing side [his assistant], might underlie Jones’ intentions for revisiting this much examined massacre was heightened by the anecdote he tells about his wife’s emotionally fraught response when listening to his grim descriptions of the slaughter. However revolting, the atrocities must be detailed she insists. To do otherwise, the author agrees “would leave the mistaken impression that nothing extraordinary took place at My Lai.”
That My Lai was extraordinary I hold beyond dispute. But the privileged attention given to the massacre by historians and other commentators – not to mention its impact on the general public – which by far prefers vivid superlatives to cloudy comparisons – hangs like a curtain and obscures the broader and far grizzlier picture of the U.S. driven horrors of the Vietnam War that were commonplace and quotidian. Would the historian tell that story too, I wondered, as I plunged into his text? Or was the only purpose to take up this subject again five decades on to ensure that the censorious curtain remained firmly in place?
Quang Ngai was a hot bed of resistance under the Viet Minh independence movement during French colonial rule. With the transition to the American War, resistance fighters – now reconstituted as the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong – remained capable of striking at will throughout the province, which, until 1967, was under the jurisdiction of the South Vietnamese Army. But the American command found its native allies unreliable, without ever asking if perhaps their reluctance to challenge the local resistance rested, not on fear or cowardice, but familiarity or even kinship. U.S. soldiers possessed no such scruples.
After “intelligence sources” targeted the area around My Lai as “an enemy bastion for mounting attacks” on Quang Ngai City and its surroundings, American forces were concentrated under Task Force Barker, “a contingent of five hundred soldiers” to bring the troublesome province under control of the government of South Vietnam.[i]
On the evening before the assault, Captain Earnest Medina – like Calley a principal target of the Army’s subsequent investigation – briefed the hundred men of Charlie Company under his command. “We’re going to Pinkville tomorrow… after the 48th Battalion,” he told them. “The landing zone will be hot. And they outnumber us two to one… expect heavy casualties.” Charlie Company had already taken “heavy casualties” in the two months they’d been humping the boonies of Quang Ngai. The local guerrilla unit, the lethal, elusive 48th, was all the more feared since the GIs had never seen the face of a single combatant behind the sniper bullets or booby traps that bloodied and killed their comrades. “By the last week of February,” Harold Jones reckons, “resentment and hostility had spread among the GI’s, aimed primarily at the villagers.”
Pinkville had been declared a free fire zone. The mission for the assault was to search and destroy. If the soldiers encountered non-combatant villagers the text book regulations dictated they be detained and interrogated as to the whereabouts of the enemy, and then moved to safety in the rear. But the various strands of intelligence-gathering that guided Task Force Barker were interpreted to suggest there would be no non-combatants, because the villagers had been warned to evacuate, or, given that the assault was on a Saturday, those residents who’d defied evacuation would be off to the market in Quang Ngai City. This was all Intel double talk. The true military objective was that the residents have no village to return to because the GIs were primed to slay all livestock, lay waste to every dwelling and defensive bunker, destroy the crops and foul the wells, that is, to ensure that My Lai and its contiguous hamlets were left uninhabitable, and thus utterly untenable as bases to support the guerrillas.
Beginning just before 8 a.m. on March 16th, the three platoons of Charlie Company were airlifted to the fringes of the Vietnamese hamlets where they expected to encounter fierce enemy resistance. The hail of bullets from helicopter gunships that churned up the earth around them and aimed at suppressing potential enemy fire, created for many of these soldiers who had never experienced combat the impression that they’d been dropped in the midst of the “hot landing zone” Captain Medina had promised them. But as Army photographer Ron Haeberle, assigned to document the assault, would later testify, there was “no hostile fire.” The headquarters of the 48th and what remained of its fighters had taken refuge west into the mountains after being decimated during the Tet Offensive a month before. And the few VC who had been visiting their families around My Lai, hardly ignorant of American movements, had gotten out by dawn on the 16th.
In a state of confusion as to exactly what they were facing, Charlie Company’s platoons stepped off from opposing positions to sweep through the village, already partially damaged by artillery, intending to squeeze the enemy between them. Instead they soon confronted, not the guerrilla fighters they were sent to dislodge, but scores of inhabitants who weren’t supposed to be there. GIs immediately shot several villagers who panicked and attempted to flee. In this war such trigger happy killings were not far from the norm. But Lieutenant Calley “had interpreted Medina’s briefing to mean that they were to kill everyone in the village… Since it was impossible to distinguish between friend and foe, the only conclusion was to presume all Vietnamese were Viet Cong and to kill them all.” Calley, moreover, was being relentlessly spurred by Medina over the radio to quicken the pace of the 1st platoon’s forward sweep, and therefore, would later claim, he could neither evacuate the non-combatants, nor, for reasons of security, leave them to his rear.
Jones offers from the record a facsimile of the field radio transmission between Calley and his commander:
“What are you doing now?” Medina asked.
“I’m getting ready to go.”
“Now damn it! I told you now. Get your men in position now.”
“And these people, they aren’t moving too swiftly.”
“I don’t want that crap. Now damn it, waste all those goddamn people! And get in the damn position.”
“Roger.”
The idea of questioning orders, comments Jones dryly, never crossed Calley’s mind, particularly during combat.
One brief panel of the horror show will suffice to roil the imagination toward grasping what Jones styles a ‘descent into darkness,” which, given the scale of the ensuing carnage that morning, has elevated the My Lai massacre to the extraordinary status in the Vietnam War that history has bestowed upon it.
Calley, in the grip of all his embedded demons – his mental and moral mediocrity, his cracker barrel knee jerk racism, his incompetence as a leader, his slavish kowtowing to authority which clearly disgusted his commander and his troops, everything that conspired to create the monster that was him – returned from his latest whipping by Medina to where one group of villagers sat on the ground, and demanded of two members of his platoon, “How come you ain’t killed them yet?” The men explained they understood only that they were to guard them. “No,” Calley said, “I want them dead… When I say fire… fire at them.” Calley and, Paul Meadlo – whose name would become almost as closely associated with the massacre as Calley’s – “a bare ten feet from their terrified targets… set their M-16s on automatic… and sprayed clip after clip of deadly fire into their screaming and defenseless victims… At this point, a few children who had somehow escaped the torrent of gunfire struggled to their feet… Calley methodically picked off the children one by one… He looks like he’s enjoying it,” one soldier remarked, who moments before had been prevented by Calley from forcing a young woman’s face into his crotch, but who now refused to shoot.
The mass killing, which Harold Jones parades scene by scene with exhaustive precision, was repeated throughout the morning until the bodies of hundreds of villagers lay scattered across the landscape. Not just those killed by Calley’s platoon, but by others throughout the rest of Charlie Company. And not just at My Lai 4, but also at My Khe 4 several miles distant by members of Bravo Company. “In not a few cases, women and girls were raped before they were killed.” Jones dutifully chronicles the accounts of the few who resolutely refused to shoot, and of one man who blasted his own foot with a .45 to escape the depravity. “Everyone except a few of us was shooting,” Pfc. Dennis Bunning of the second platoon would later testify.
But there was another man that morning who didn’t just seek to avoid the killing, he attempted to stop it.
Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson piloted his observation helicopter, a three seater with a crewmember on each flank armed with a machine gun, several hundred feet above My Lai. Thompson’s mission was to fly low and mark with smoke grenades any source of enemy fire, which would prompt the helicopter gunships tiered above him – known as Sharks – to swoop down and dispense their massive fire power on the target. Spotting a large number of civilian bodies in a ditch, Thompson at first suspected they’d been killed by the incoming artillery. Hovering near the ground for a closer look Thompson and his crew, Gary Andreotta and Larry Colburn, were stunned to witness Captain Medina shoot a wounded woman who was lying at his feet. Banking closer to the ditch, Thompson “estimated he saw 150 dead and dying Vietnamese babies, women and children and old men… and watched in disbelief as soldiers shot survivors trying to crawl out.”
Against regulations, Thompson landed and confronted Lieutenant Calley, asking him to help the wounded and radio for their evacuation. Calley made it clear he resented the pilot’s interference and would do no such thing. Thompson stormed away furiously warning Calley “he hadn’t heard the last of this.” With Medina again at his heels, Calley ordered his sergeant “to finish off the wounded,” and just as Thompson was taking off the killing resumed.
Aloft again Thompson saw “a small group… of women and children scurrying toward a bunker just outside My Lai 4… and about ten soldiers in pursuit,” and felt “compelled… to take immediate action.” He again put his craft down, jumped out between the civilians and the oncoming members of the second platoon led by Lieutenant Stephen Brooks. When Thompson asked Brooks to help evacuate the Vietnamese from the bunker, Brooks told him he would do so with a grenade. The two men screamed at each other. Like Calley, Brooks was unyielding, and Thompson warned his two gunners, now standing outside the chopper, “to prepare for a confrontation.”
“I’m going to go over to the bunker myself and get those people out. If they [the soldiers] fire on those people or fire on me while I’m doing that. Shoot ‘em.” That moment has been cast in the My Lai literature as a classic armed standoff. But Thompson’s two gunners had not aimed their weapons at Brooks and his men who stood fifty yards away, a bit of manufactured drama several chroniclers of that confrontation, among them Sy Hersh, have chiseled into the record. Harold Jones in this instance had gone beyond the dogged task of compilation. While researching his book, he had spent many hours with Larry Colburn, and befriended him. And it was Larry who told Jones that he and Andreotta did not aim their weapons directly at the soldiers who faced them. They tried to stare then down, “while carefully pointing their weapons to the ground in case one of them accidentally went off.” This verisimilitude restores a dimension of realism to a scene imagined by those who’d never been soldiers.
Checking Brooks, but failing to get his cooperation, Thompson took another extraordinary step. He radioed Warrant Officer Danny Millians, one of the pilots of the gunships, and convinced him to also defy the protocols against landing in a free fire zone. Then, in two trips, Millians used the Shark to transport the nine rescued Vietnamese, including five children, to safety. Making one final pass over the ditch where he’d locked horns with Calley, Thompson “hovered low… searching for signs of life while flinching at the sight of headless children.” Thompson landed a third time, remaining at the controls. He watched as Colburn, from the side of the ditch, grabbed hold of a boy that Andreotta, blood spilling from his boots, had pulled from among a pile of corpses. Do Hoa, a boy of eight, had survived.
Livid and in great distress at what he had witnessed, Thompson, on returning to base, and in the company of the two gunship pilots, made their superior, Major Frederic Watke, immediately aware of “the mass murder going on out there.” From that moment, every step taken to probe and verify “the substance of Thompson’s charges almost instantly came into dispute.” Although Watke would later tell investigators he believed Thompson was “over-portraying” the killings” owing to his “limited combat experience,” the major had realized that the mere charge of war crimes obliged him “to seek an impartial inquiry at the highest level.” The Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) required that field commanders investigate “all known, suspected or alleged war crimes or atrocities… Failure to [do so] was a punishable offense.” Having reported Thompson’s allegations to Task Force commander Barker, Watke had fulfilled this duty. But there was a Catch-22 permitting command authority to ignore the MACV directive if they “thought” a war crime had not been committed.
The trick here was for Barker and several other ranking officer in the division and brigade chain of command to assess if civilians had been killed during the assault, and if so, how many. Captain Medina – in addition to contributing to the fictional enemy body count – would supply a figure of “thirty civilians killed by artillery.” The division chaplain would characterize these deaths as “tragic… an operational mistake… in a combat operation.” For this line of argument to carry, however, it had been necessary for the commander of the Americal Division, Major General Samuel Koster, the “field commander” who alone possessed the authority to prevent the accusations from going higher, to put his own head deep into the sand.
When Colonel Orin Henderson, who commanded the 11th Infantry Brigade from which Medina’s Charlie Company had been detailed to the Task Force, ordered LTC Barker in the late afternoon of March 16th to send Charlie Company back to My Lai 4 to “make a detailed report of the number of men, women and children killed and how they died, along with another search for weapons… Medina strongly objected.” It would be too dangerous, he said, to move his men “in the dark through a heavily mined and booby trapped area… where the Vietcong could launch a surprise attack.” Monitoring the transmission between Barker and Medina, General Koster countermanded Henderson’s order. Later claiming he was “concerned for the safety of the troops,” Koster saw “no reason to go look at that mess.” Medina’s estimate of the number of civilian deaths, Koster ruled, was “about right.”
Not only had Koster’s snap judgement given Barker license to cook up the initial battlefield fantasy of 128 enemy dead, it ensured that the internal investigations into the charges of “mass murder,” notably by Henderson and other high ranking members of Koster’s staff, would not deviate from the conclusion voiced by the division commander. By navigating each twisting curve along a well camouflaged path toward the fictive end those in command were seeking, Harold Jones lays bare a virtual text book case of conspiracy, which must be read in its entirety to capture the intricate web of fabrication and self-deception the conspirators constructed to assure themselves the crypt of the cover-up had been sealed.[ii]
When discussing the massacre later at an inquiry, the Americal Division chaplain, faithful to the Army but not his higher calling, claimed that, had a massacre been common knowledge, it would have come out. That the massacre was “common knowledge” to the Vietnamese throughout Quang Ngai Province on both sides of the conflict (not to mention among their respective leadership on up to Hanoi and Saigon) goes without saying. Indeed low ranking local South Vietnamese officials attempted to stir public outrage about the massacre (not to mention negotiate the urgent remedy of compensation for the victims), and were suppressed by the Quang Ngai Province Chief, a creature of the Saigon government who fed at the trough of U.S. materiel and did not wish to risk the good will of his American sponsors. My Lai was quickly recast as communist propaganda, pure and simple.
While this proved a viable method of suppression for South Vietnamese authorities, it could not still tales of the massacre in the scuttlebutt of the soldiers who had been there, who had carried it out. From motives said to be high minded, but not fueled by an anti-military agenda, and in the piecemeal fact-gathering manner typical of any investigation, the whistleblower Ron Ridenhour had thus resurrected the buried massacre, and bestowed on Sy Hersh the journalistic coup of a lifetime.
As the articles and newscasts about what took place at My Lai were cascaded before the public in November 1969, efforts to manage the political fallout by various levels of government were accelerated with corresponding intensity. Pushing back at the center of that storm were Richard Nixon and other members of the Executive; congressional committees in both the House and Senate; and not least, and in some cases with considerably more integrity than their civilian political masters, members of the professional military.
Not surprisingly, if one understands anything about American society, a substantial portion of the public, in fact its majority, expressed far greater sympathy for William Calley than for his victims. One could cite endemic American racism as a contributing factor for this unseemly lack of human decency. More broadly speaking, an explanation less charged by aggression would point to a level of provincialism that apparently can only afflict a nation as relatively pampered as my own. In such an arrangement, turning a blind eye for expedience sake toward the pursuit of global power, consequences be damned, is as good as a national pastime.
Despite the spontaneous public sympathy for Calley, Nixon, fretted that news of My Lai would strengthen the antiwar movement and “increase the opposition to America’s involvement in Vietnam.” Nixon, true to form, lashed out with venom at the otherness of his liberal enemies. “It’s those dirty rotten Jews in New York who are behind this,” Nixon ranted, learning that Hersh’s investigation had been subsidized by the Edgar B. Stern Family Fund, “clearly left-wing and anti-Administration.” Nixon was strongly pressed to “attack those who attack him… by dirty tricks… discredit one witness [Thompson] and highlight the atrocities committed by the Viet Cong.” Only Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird seemed to grasp that manipulation of public opinion would not perfume the stink of My Lai. The public might tolerate “a little of this,” Laird mused, “but you shouldn’t kill that many.” There was apprehension in the White House because calls for a civilian commission had begun to escalate. Habituated to work the dark side, and unbeknownst to his Secretary of Defense, Nixon formed a secret task force “that would seek to sabotage the investigative process by undermining the credibility of all those making massacre charges.”
Nixon found a staunch ally for this strategy in Mendel Rivers, the “hawkish” Mississippi Democrat who chaired the House Armed Services Committee. As evidence from the military’s internal inquiries mounted to prove the contrary, members of River’s committee sought to establish that no massacre had occurred, and that the only legitimate targets of interest were Hugh Thompson and Larry Colburn (Gary Andreotta having been killed in an air crash soon after the massacre), who were pilloried at a closed hearing, virtually accused of treason for turning their guns on fellow Americans.
During a televised news conference on December 8th – with Calley’s court martial already under way for three weeks – Nixon announced that he had rejected calls for an independent commission to investigate what he now admitted for the first time “appears to have been a massacre.” The President would rely instead on the military’s judicial process to bring “this incident completely before the public.” The message the Administration and its pro-war allies would thenceforth steam shovel into the media mainstream wherever the topic was raised, was that My Lai was “an isolated incident,” and by no means a reflection of our “national policy” in Vietnam.
As maneuvers to re-consign the massacre to oblivion faltered, the Army was just then launching a commission of its own under a three-star general, William Peers, whose initial charge was to disentangle the elaborate cover-up within the Americal Division that had kept the massacre from exposure for almost two years. In order to reconcile the divergent testimonies among its witnesses, the scope of the Peers Commission soon necessarily expanded to gather a complete picture of the event the cover-up sought to erase. The Army’s criminal investigation by the CID, on which charges could be based, and which would guide any eventual legal proceedings, continued on a separate track and beyond the public eye as a matter of due process.
After Lieutenant General Peers had submitted the commission’s preliminary report, Secretary of the Army, Stanley Resor moved to soften the “abrupt and brutal” language. He requested that Peers not refer “to the victims as elderly men, women, children and babies,” but as “noncombatant casualties.” And might Peers “also be less graphic in describing the rapes?” Resor further edited the word “massacre” from the report, and when presenting it to the press, had the chair of his commission describe My Lai rather as “a tragedy of major proportions.” Peers was reportedly indignant, but complied. It required no such compulsion to ensure that Peers toe the line on a far more central theme. Responding to questions from the media, Peers insisted there had been no cover-up at higher levels of command beyond the Americal Division, and echoed his Commander in Chief’s mantra that My Lai was an isolated incident. When Peers was questioned about what took place at My Khe that same day, he insisted it was inseparable from what occurred at My Lai. No reporter followed up with a challenge to that assertion.
Investigators had a long list of suspects deployed at My Lai and My Khe in Task Force Barker, as well as those throughout the Americal chain of command, who they believed should be charged and tried. Some forty enlisted men were named, along with more than a dozen commissioned officers. [iii] Only six among them, two sergeants and four officers would ultimately stand trial. There would be no opportunity to enlarge the scope of the massacre through the spectacle of a mass trial that would, moreover, conjure images of Nuremburg and Tokyo where America dispensed harsh justice on its defeated enemies only two decades earlier. It was agreed upon by both Nixon and the Pentagon Chiefs that defendants would be tried separately and at a spread of different Army bases.
If the elaborate subterfuge employed to cover-up the massacre had been the work of individuals desperate to protect their professional military careers, the court martial proceedings reveal how an entire institution operates to protect itself. George Clemenceau, French Prime Minister during the First World War, is credited with the droll observation that ‘military music is to music what military justice is to justice.” Harold Jones, using the idiom of the historian, demonstrates in his summaries of the trials the disturbing reality behind Clemenseau’s quip.
First before the bar at Fort Hood, Texas in November 1969 was Calley’s platoon sergeant David Mitchell, that witnesses described as someone who carried out the lieutenant’s orders with a particular gusto. Then in January it was Sergeant Charles Hutto’s turn at Fort McPhearson, Georgia. Hutto had admitted turning his machine gun on a group of unarmed civilians. These two men were so patently guilty in the eyes of their own comrades that theirs were among the strongest cases the investigators had constructed for the prosecution. Both men were acquitted in trials that can only be described as judicial parodies.
At Mitchell’s trial the judge, ruling on a technicality, did not allow the prosecution to call witnesses with the most damning testimony, like Hugh Thompson. Hutto had declared in court that “it was murder,” but claimed “we were doing it because we had been told.” When the jury refused to convict him because Hutto had not known that some orders could be illegal, Harold Jones nails how the court was sanctioning “the major argument that had failed to win acquittal at Nuremburg.”
Shortly after Hutto’s trial, the Army dropped all charges against the remaining soldiers, fearing their claims to have been following orders would likewise find merit in the prevailing temper of the military juries. Heeding the judicial trend, Lieutenant General Jonathan Seaman, a regional commander exercising jurisdiction over officers above the rank of captain, dropped all charges against Major General Koster. By some opaque calculation which convinced no one, Seaman had concluded that Koster was not guilty of “intentional abrogation of responsibilities.” A hue and cry followed in the press and on Capitol Hill denouncing Seaman for “a white wash of the top man.” The outcry did prod the Pentagon to take punitive action against Koster. The general had already been dismissed as the commandant of West Point, and he was now demoted to brigadier general and stripped of his highest commendation.
Seaman informed Koster through internal channels that he held him “personally responsible” for My Lai, a kind of symbolic snub among gentlemen. But in exonerating the Americal commander, Seaman had, by design it can be argued, inoculated the higher reaches of command straight up to General Westmoreland from being held responsible for the actions of their subordinates, a blatant act of duplicity in light of the ruling at the Tokyo trials following World War II where lack of knowledge of atrocities committed by his troops had not prevented General Yamaschita from being hanged.
With Calley’s court martial already in progress, only three other officers, Medina and the Task Force Barker intelligence officer, Captain Eugene Kotouc, for war crimes, and 11th Brigade commander Henderson, for the cover-up, remained to be tried. Harold Jones deftly unspools how the flawed and self-protective system of military justice enabled trial judges in each case to provide improvised instructions to their juries which had all but dictated the acquittal of all three men. Kotouc had been charged with murdering a prisoner, whom, given the available evidence, he almost certainly had; still the jury found him not guilty in less than an hour. Asked if he would stay in the military, Kotouc gushed, “Who would get out of a system like this… it’s the best damn army in the world.”[iv]
Henderson’s and Medina’s trials were media spectacles in their own right, but mere side shows compared with the main event at Fort Benning, Georgia. The Calley trial opened in November, soon after the My Lai revelation. By the middle of March when the talented young prosecutor, Captain Aubrey Daniel, began his closing argument, a great majority of Americans had been glued to the courtroom drama for four months. Calley had a courtly elderly gent, George Latimer, a former Chief Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, and later an original member of the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, to lead his defense. Clearly Latimer knew his way around the arcana of military justice; moreover as a veteran of World War II who had achieved the rank of colonel, he was of the very caste. Latimer was confident he’d prevail. As the trial progressed, the testimony of nearly one hundred witnesses so prejudiced his client that Latimer desperately veered the defense toward an insanity plea, a strategy which foundered after three Army psychiatrists judged the accused to possess “the mental capacity to premeditate.” Finally Calley took the witness stand and quickly blundered. Under a rigorous cross-examination, Captain Daniel marched Calley back across the killing fields of Pinkville, at each step recapping eyewitness accounts, including the testimony of Hugh Thompson. Before he grasped the significance of his misstep, Calley had confessed to shooting into the ditch filled with Vietnamese victims. The verdict seemed ordained.
Yet, it was no slam dunk for the prosecution. The jury took eighty hours to deliberate, in the end finding Calley guilty of murder by a vote of four to two, one ballot shy of a mistrial, if not an outright acquittal. As a capital felony, Calley might have received the death penalty, but Daniel argued only for life imprisonment. On March 29, 1970 the judge agreed and passed sentence. Calley appeared shaken as he faced the court. Surely the shrinks had gotten it wrong in not certifying a case of mental dissociation as acutely obvious as Calley’s? He seemed the perfect robotic tool of the Cold War. Hadn’t he been madly insisting all along that he had not been killing humans, but only communists, including babes at the breast who would grow up one day to be communists themselves? Then again, maybe Calley wasn’t as clueless and out of touch as he came across. In addressing the judge at sentencing, one could read in Calley’s plea, “I beg you… do not strip future soldiers of their honor” as he had been stripped of his, a message defending the common man and shrewdly aimed at a wider audience beyond the courtroom that the defendant must have known was substantially in his corner.
The polls quickly confirmed this. 79% of the public opposed the conviction. Across an ideological divide embracing both the war’s supporters and opponents, a large majority saw Calley as a scapegoat, one man custom-made to bear the blame for the entire Vietnam fiasco. Nixon played this public frustration to his advantage. There was little opposition when the President saw fit to have the prisoner removed from the stockade, where he’d spent just one night, and returned to his own Ft. Benning apartment. Calley would serve only three and a half years under house arrest before going free, but, after the trial, he quickly faded into anonymity.
At the White House, only a week after the verdict, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger reassured Nixon that “the public furor… [had] quieted down… Let the judicial process… take its normal course,” counselled Kissinger. Liberal efforts to stir “a feeling of revulsion against the deed,” and turn the trial into a referendum against the war, had failed. “In fact the deed itself didn’t bother anybody,” Kissinger added. “No,” Nixon agreed, picking up eagerly on his advisor’s cynical drift. “The public said, ‘Sure he was guilty but, by God, why not?’ ” Both laughed.[v]
The “deed” these two twisted political misanthropes found so amusing is memorialized at a shrine today in the My Lai township listing the names of the massacre’s 504 victims, more than half of whom were under the age of twenty, to include “forty-nine teenagers, 160 aged four to twelve, and fifty who were three years old or younger.”
In reflecting on the sordid tale he has chosen to historicize anew, and on its reduction by the U.S. political and military establishments to a judicial farce, Harold Jones explains how, “My Lai made it imperative nonetheless that the army institute major changes in training.” And further that “to understand the importance of restraint in combat, soldiers and officers must learn to disobey illegal orders… and the importance of distinguishing between ‘unarmed civilians… and the people who are shooting at us.’” Jones documents the extensive effort undertaken to incorporate this thinking by updating the rules of war, to “make them more specific, then teach, follow and enforce them.”
But in examining the next most infamous atrocity of modern memory committed by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib during the recent Iraq War, Jones concludes that “the central problem… lies less in writing new laws and regulations than in having officers who enforce those already in effect.” That officers may not be inclined to such enforcement underscores the apparently insoluble dilemma of an autocratic institution, the military, at the heart of a civilian democracy to which it is, in principle, subordinate. But we have already been shown over a panoply of legal proceedings that, at least in its capacity to dispense justice, the military is a power unto itself.[vi] Jones does not follow that thought directly, but rather indulges in a philosophical aside which dilutes the unhappy subject of his history in the horrors that attend all wars, concluding darkly that, in the right situation, we are all “one step away from My Lai.”
It’s not that the historian entirely buys Nixon’s aberration line; Jones does refer to other reported atrocities in VN. But he does buy Peers’ “right situation” explanation for why My Lai stands out, quoting the Peers Commission report that “none of the other [investigated] crimes even remotely approached the magnitude… of My Lai.” That would depend on how one defines “magnitude.” Peers had failed to do the math, and so has Jones. The American invasion, and occupation for over a decade, left a trail of bloodshed and destruction throughout Vietnam that led elements of the antiwar movement worldwide to level the charge of genocide against the U.S.
What one pro-war historian lamented as a veritable “war crimes industry,” had sprung up within the U.S., not from the campuses of the middle class protestors, but among the ranks of returning veterans, who for roughly two years after My Lai was exposed, brought accounts of atrocities they had participated in or witnessed before the American public. Harold Jones, to demonstrate historical balance, provides a cursory account of this effort, referring to a “sizeable segment of Vietnam veterans who considered… that My Lai was not an isolated incident and that Calley had become a scapegoat for the high ranking civilian and military officials who drew up the policies responsible for the atrocities.”
Having already established that Nixon denied the link between My Lai and “national policy,” Jones does not engage the argument further. But the war veterans (including the present writer) were not suggesting that the policy of genocide was etched in a secret covenant buried in a Pentagon vault. We were saying, in effect, don’t just look at the record body count attached to the slaughter at Pinkville, and imagine you have a true picture of American crimes in that war. Count the day to day toll of Vietnamese civilian deaths that resulted from premeditated frames like “mass population transfers” – the Strategic Hamlet program, or “chemical warfare” – the saturation of the countryside with phenoxy herbicides like Agent Orange, that were already prohibited by the conventions of war to which the U.S. was a signatory.
Other strategic tools, the Air War, and the relentless, not atypically indiscriminate, bombardment by artillery and naval guns, were employed by American forces against the “unpacified” countryside with unprecedented savagery.[vii] While these displays of massive fire power are thought to have created the highest proportion of civilian casualties during the war, the battlefield tactics – search and destroy operations in free fire zones, systematic torture and murder of prisoners, the “mere gook rule,” that turned every dead Vietnamese into an enemy body count, were a close second. These are facts available to anyone who cares to know them.[viii]
In both detail and presentation Harold Jones, with My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness, has produced a work of considerable value, and it is fair to acknowledge that the work, as recently characterized in a brief note by the New York Times Book Review, must now be considered the standard reference for the massacre. As for the scale and volume of terrors inflicted on the Vietnamese people during the American War, Jones, hewing close to official doctrine in the U.S., fails to acknowledge that My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg.[ix]
Michael Uhl served with the 11th Light Infantry Brigade as leader of a combat intelligence team eight months after the My Lai massacre. On return from Vietnam he joined the antiwar movement, and organized fellow veterans to make public their personal accounts of American atrocities in Vietnam. He presents this history in the war memoir, Vietnam Awakening (McFarland, 2007).
Notes.
[i]. Heonik Kwon, in his study, After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (University of California Press, 2006), attributed to allied forces operating in Quang Ngai Province, notably units of the ROK (Republic of Korea) Marines (p.44), “at least six large scale civilian massacres during the first three months of 1968… Two secret reports made by the district communist cells to the provincial authority recorded nineteen incidents of mass killings during this short period. The tragedy of mass killings had already been witnessed in Quang Ngai in 1966.”
In their recent documentary film series on the Vietnam War, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick reported that no province suffered more than Quang Ngai during the war, and no place was more dangerous for operating militarily.
[ii]. The author’s account of the cover-up reads as definitive; Harold Jones here follows closely Seymour M. Hersh in Cover Up (Random House, 1972).
[iii]. This would not include Barker, himself, who had died a month after the massacre when his helicopter crashed during a combat mission.
[iv]. This quote (p. 347) is from Four Hours in My Lai, by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, (Penguin, 1993), the standard work on the massacre for the past twenty-five years.
[v]. Harold Jones is reporting here from what he heard on the Nixon tapes recorded on April 8, 1971.
[vi] . One portrait of what has been called the West Point Protective Association embodying the Army’s Spartan ethic, can be found in a highly charged expose, co-authored by a former academy graduate, West Point: America’s Power Fraternity, by Bruce Calloway and Robert Bowie Johnson (Simon and Schuster, 1973).
[vii]. An extensive account of the Air War in Quang Ngai Province is found in The Real War by Jonathan Schell (Da Capo Press, 1988).
[viii]. The Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. with the names of the 58,282 American war dead is 475 feet long; a wall inscribed with the names of the Vietnamese war dead would go on for miles.
[ix]. Herbicide poisoning and unexploded ordnance are legacy issues of the war that continue to take their toll on Vietnamese victims to this day.
New documentary about journalist Seymour Hersh uncovers the pathologies of US imperialism
By Leon Hadar | The American Conservative | January 2, 2026
Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s new film Cover-Up is more than a documentary about the legendary journalist Seymour Hersh—it is an inadvertent chronicle of the pathologies of American empire. As a foreign policy analyst who has long advocated for realist restraint in U.S. international engagement, I find this film both vindicating and deeply troubling. It documents, through one journalist’s extraordinary career, the pattern of deception, overreach, and institutional rot that has characterized American power projection for over half a century.
What makes Hersh’s reporting invaluable from a realist perspective is that it consistently exposed the gap between stated intentions and actual policy outcomes. CIA domestic surveillance, the My Lai massacre, the secret bombing of Cambodia, Abu Ghraib—each revelation demonstrated what realists have long understood: that idealistic rhetoric about spreading democracy and protecting human rights often masks cruder calculations of power, and that unchecked executive authority in foreign affairs inevitably leads to abuse.
The documentary’s treatment of Hersh’s Cambodia reporting is particularly instructive. Here was a case where the American government conducted a massive bombing campaign against a neutral country, killing tens of thousands of civilians, while lying to Congress and the public. This wasn’t an aberration, but the logical consequence of what happens when a superpower faces no effective constraints on its use of force abroad. In exposing the scandal, Hersh also documented how empire actually functions when stripped of its legitimating myths. … continue
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