Back Story to a
Tragedy: JFK Revisited..
by Mark Arnold
Note: What I present here is really the third in a series of
articles delving into the history of how our nation as arrived at its current
crisis state of decline. The other two were published earlier in this blog (“From
a Native Son”) and are entitled “Some Comments on War” and “How Tax Exempt
Foundations Have Destroyed the United States”. While this article can be read
on its own I do recommend reading the other two first as some terms and
concepts are discussed in those that would be helpful in understanding what I
cover here. I have put quite a bit of effort into ferreting out the information
I cover here. You won’t find it in regular history books of the period. If you
are truly interested in how we have nearly lost our country; if you really want
to help turn it to a better course and bring about a better tomorrow, then this
is information you need to know. MA
n the morning of Friday, November 22nd
1963, a New York City attorney named Mark
Lane was busy defending a client being tried at the Criminal Court Building
in lower Manhattan. At 1pm the judge declared a lunch recess and Lane left the Court
building and headed toward a favorite Chinese restaurant a few blocks away.
After lunch as he walked back to the courthouse he observed people on the
street gathered by radios listening intently. He asked one of the people what
was going on and was told that President
Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Lane ran back to the courthouse and headed
straight to the press room where he found a number of reporters, bailiffs and
attorneys all listening to the radio. After a few minutes the announcement was
made to the stunned crowd…the President was dead. Like everyone else, Mark Lane
stood there in shock, only then realizing that for the first time in his life
he was late for a court appearance; the trial of his client was to have resumed
5 minutes earlier. Lane dashed to the courtroom; half thinking the judge would
cancel the afternoon session due to the tragedy that had unfolded in Dallas.
The judge, however, had other ideas and ordered that the trial continue.
 |
| President John F. Kennedy |
Later
that afternoon, with his client acquitted, Lane rushed from the courtroom to
find a TV so he could get updated on the momentous occurrences that had
transpired while he was in court. As he ran down the steps of the Criminal
Court Building he encountered a judge he knew who was also walking down the steps.
The judge turned toward him and said, “Well,
Lane, do you think he did it alone?”
Being out of the loop on the afternoon’s happenings Lane responded, “Who, sir? Did what?”
“Do you think this Oswald killed the
President?” he asked.
Lane
explained that he had been trying a case all afternoon and had heard nothing of
the details of the assassination. The judge, ignoring Lane’s explanation of his
ignorance, just looked at him and said:
“He couldn’t very well shoot him from
the back and cause an entrance wound in his throat, could he?”
Not waiting for a response from Lane, the judge continued:
“The doctors said the throat wound was
an entrance wound. It’ll be an interesting trial. I want to see how they answer
that question.”
In
November of this year 50 years will have passed since John F. Kennedy’s
assassination and the question that Mark Lane’s judge friend asked him on the
Court Building’s steps in 1963 has still not been adequately answered. Indeed,
it remains the central illogic at the heart of the JFK murder case. How could Oswald have shot Kennedy from the front causing a throat
entry wound if he was behind the President shooting from the Texas School Book
Depository? In the hectic first few minutes after the assassination, before
the full cover story of Oswald as a lone nut killer had taken hold in the media,
some truth had leaked out. One of the emergency room doctors trying to save
Kennedy’s life told a reporter that the small, round bullet hole they observed
at the front of JFK’s throat before they cut across it in performing a
tracheotomy, was an entry wound. All of these doctors were seasoned trauma room
professionals who knew gunshot wounds. They had also observed a large, gaping
wound at the rear of Kennedy’s skull, which they identified as an exit wound. In
addition grassy knoll witnesses interviewed referred to shots coming from up
the knoll behind the fence and a number of them went running up the hill right
after the shots had been fired to find who had pulled the trigger. Lane’s judge
friend had caught some of these initial reports on the radio or TV and had,
like a good jurist would, immediately spotted the contrary facts of the case.
Oswald was in the Book Depository behind the President. He couldn’t have caused
a throat entry wound and rear skull, exit wound from that location.
 |
| JFK and Mark Lane in 1960 |
Seeing the illogic his friend had pointed out, Mark Lane immediately
took on the JFK assassination case as his personal mission and like a pit bull
has never let go. Being a defense attorney, he had a unique perspective. He
knew that no jury of his peers would have convicted Oswald of Kennedy’s killing
based on the evidence presented in the Warren Report. A competent defense would
have picked that case apart easily. He was also personally impacted by
Kennedy’s death, having met JFK and his brother Robert on several occasions.
Lane had been elected to the New York state legislature in 1960 with Kennedy’s
endorsement and also had helped to organize JFK’s campaign for the Democratic
Party Presidential nomination in 1959. For these reasons as well as a
commitment to justice, Lane took on the task of getting at the truth of JFK’s
assassination. His most recent book on the subject was written 2 years ago and
is entitled “Last Word”. His first was 1965’s bestselling “Rush to Judgment”. In between are nearly
50 years of Lane and others striving to get at the facts and we owe him and
these other researchers a debt of gratitude.
This
is, however, not an article about Mark Lane. In an earlier blog I made mention
of the radical decline we are now witnessing in the United States as a nation.
I also stated that decline has a number of elements to it; it didn’t just
spring into being full bloom during the Obama
Administration. What is happening today is the sum of what has happened
before, and a huge part of THAT was the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy. It is very important, therefore, that we understand what happened on
November 22nd, 1963, not just to Kennedy but to our nation.
The
illogical presentation of data pointed out by Mark Lane’s judge friend above,
is but a small fraction of the array of contrary and conflicting facts to be
found when one starts digging in to the mass of evidence on the Kennedy
assassination. Besides the doctors’ statement of the throat wound being an
entry wound, consider the home movie of the assassination taken by a guy named Abraham Zapruder. He was standing just
to the left of the grassy knoll shooting his film as Kennedy’s motorcade passed
in front of him. Zapruder’s film clearly shows Kennedy being shot and slumping
forward and then being hit by a fatal head shot and being thrown backward and
to the left by the force of impact of the bullet. The only way he could be
thrown backward is by a bullet striking him in the head coming from the front.
Yet Oswald was supposedly in the Book Depository to the rear. Watch the film
yourself. It really is all you need to know to understand there was a
conspiracy involved in JFK’s death. While there were shots fired from behind,
as all the wounds received by Texas Governor John Connally seem to indicate, the fatal head shot and throat shot
were from the front, and as the judge pointed out, Oswald could not shoot the
President from the front and behind at the same time.
This
leaves two possibilities. The first is that two assassins, each unaware of the
other, chose to kill the President in Dallas at the same time and in the same
place completely and entirely accidentally. And of course the obvious other
option is that at least two, and probably more, people conspired to kill the
President. We do not even need to look at the fact that Oswald was known to be
an average marksman at best; that the shoddy, WW II vintage, Italian rifle he
supposedly used had a defective scope and was also known as the “humanitarian” rifle for its poor
performance in battle; that FBI sharpshooters could not duplicate Oswald’s supposed
accuracy in their own re-enactments of the assassination or that the official
autopsy photos do not show the large, exit wound observed by the doctors on the
rear of Kennedy’s head, indicating the photos had been tampered with so as to
create the illusion of only shots from the rear. (This last fact points to
Government involvement in the cover-up, if not the assassination itself.) We do
not need to know that a piece of Kennedy’s skull from the occipital (rear)
region of his head was retrieved the next day from the grass next to the road
in Dealey Plaza or that a man was seen by an eyewitness behind the picket fence
at the top of the knoll breaking down a rifle and handing it to another man in
the first seconds after the shooting…or that a number of witnesses reported
hearing from 4 to 6 shots that day, while the Warren Commission says there were
only 3. (In the duration of the shooting, as documented by the Zapruder film,
Oswald would have been hard pressed to get off the 3 shots; 4 to 6 was out of
the question, indicating there must have been a second shooter.) I could go on
and on with this sort of thing but there is no real reason to. In light of all
the above we should just be done with any debate about if there was a
conspiracy and instead just concentrate on the question “Why?”. Why was Kennedy
killed?
To
understand this one must have some understanding of the context of the times.
Remember the principle from “Report from
Iron Mountain on the Possibility and
Desirability of Peace”; that war and preparation for war provide the means
by which a government can maintain control over its population. World War II
ended in August 1945 with the explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With those explosions, not only was the war ended but a
new age ushered in; the atomic age. The face of war was changed forever. All
out war, as had been waged in WWI and WW II, was no longer a viable option. It
would destroy the planet and everyone on it. What were the “puppet masters” to
do? No problem; war and threat of war could still be used; it would just be a
Cold War. Our former WWII ally, Soviet
Russia, was turned in to the antagonist and off we went. The USSR shortly developed nuclear weapons and
imposed its political system on the countries it wound up in control of after
WWII, which was most of Eastern Europe. The
term “Iron Curtain”, first coined by Winston Churchill in a famous speech he
gave in the late ‘40s, was used to describe the border between the Soviet
controlled eastern European countries and the “free” western European
countries.
In 1947
Congress, largely in response to the perceived Soviet threat, passed the National Security Act. This law created
our current Department of Defense
with a single secretary as its head, three independent branches of armed force
(Army, Navy, and Air Force), the National
Security Council and lastly the
Central Intelligence Agency. It
was signed into law by then President Harry
Truman. The original mandate of the CIA per the law was to operate as an
information coordination apparatus, its chief role being to take the
information coming in from the various intelligence arms of the military and
government and coordinate it into a useful, coherent package. In the beginning
that is largely what it did. But by the early ‘50s the CIA was increasingly
involved as a policy making and covert operations activity and performing
actions that went far beyond its original intended purpose.
 |
| Allen Dulles |
Under
director Allen Dulles, through the
1950’s, and using the justification of countering the Soviet threat, the CIA
bit by bit garnered more and more power. Since its activities were secret, as
well as its budget, it became harder and harder to control. The National
Security Council, originally intended as the controlling entity of the CIA and the
group the CIA reported to, in a role reversal ended up being itself manipulated
through the effective controlling of information by the CIA and director
Dulles. By the early 50’s the CIA was involved in covert operations in the Philippines supposedly in response to
the communist HUK guerilla movement
there. The acronym “H.U.K”. stands
for “Hukbo ng Bayan Leban sa Hapon”.
In native Filipino tongue this means “Peoples
anti-Japanese Army”. The Philippines had been occupied by the Japanese in
World War II and the HUKs resisted them. In 1946, when the Philippines were
granted independence by the U.S., elections were held. Some HUKs won seats in
the Filipino Congress but were then
unseated by the ruling party after the elections. The HUKs retreated to the
jungle and started their rebellion. As they had Communist leadership and the
Cold War was in full bloom they became logical targets of the CIA. In reality
the HUKs were not the threat they appeared to be as will be seen.
Now
enters legendary CIA operative Ed
Lansdale. During WW II Lansdale was with the wartime Office of Strategic Services. He had been stationed in the western
Pacific and the Philippines at the end of the war and so was familiar with the
area and people. Now working for the CIA, Lansdale was able to create the
illusion of a much larger communist insurgency in the Philippines than the HUKs
actually were by getting a military group he controlled to stage mock attacks
on villages and take them over only to be driven off by another military group
he controlled, which were the Government backed forces under a handpicked
military officer named Ramon Magsaysay.
They would stage a battle, complete with fake dead, as a result of which
Magsaysay would emerge the hero for driving out the HUKs. In such a way
Magsaysay developed a national reputation and soon became the President of the
country, the real HUK leadership was arrested and jailed and the CIA announced
another Cold War victory over the communists. In the Philippines the CIA and
Lansdale learned valuable lessons and strategies to be applied later in another
South East Asian country called Vietnam.
At the
end of World War II a Vietnamese leader named Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese people looked forward to their
country of Vietnam being at long last run by Vietnamese. The French had
dominated Vietnam for generations prior to the war and it was, in effect, a
French colony during that time. With World War II the Japanese invaded and
subjugated Vietnam until they were defeated in 1945. During the war Ho had
established a Vietnamese army called the Viet
Minh (from a Vietnamese term meaning
“League for the independence of Vietnam”.)
which teamed with the Allies and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in
fighting the Japanese. With the end of the war the French attempted to
re-assert their control of the country and by 1946 they were at war with Ho Chi
Minh and the Viet Minh in what became known as the First Indochina War. In 1954, the Viet Minh defeated the French at
the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and it looked as though the country
of Vietnam was about to throw off its European colonial shackles at last and
for the first time in generations Vietnam would be run by Vietnamese. But as Ho Chi Minh, had pro communist ties and
possibly was communist, Vietnam was chosen as the CIA’s next theatre of operations
for the energetic Ed Lansdale. A theory was concocted known as the “Domino Theory” to justify these
actions. The Domino Theory held that communism was an international and
monolithic movement systematically trying to take over the world and that if
one country in Southeast Asia fell to communism then they all would, like
dominoes falling.
After
the French had lost at Dien Bien Phu,
a peace treaty was signed that temporarily divided the country into north and
south zones. An election was to be held in two years which would determine the
future of the country and reunite it. Meantime Ho Chi Minh and his victorious Viet
Minh consolidated power in the north and a U.S. and CIA backed regime under a
man named Ngo Dinh Diem was installed
in the south. Enter once again, Ed Lansdale. He and a team of CIA operatives
entered the northern zone and through rumors and covert actions of one kind or
another raised havoc there. This ranged from putting sugar into the gas tanks
of Viet Minh vehicles to dropping millions of propaganda leaflets opposing the
Viet Minh to spreading rumors that Ho and his group intended to massacre
Catholics living in the north. This was the famous Saigon Military Mission brought to light in the Pentagon Papers scandal in the early
‘70s.
 |
Allen Dulles (L) with
Ed Lansdale (C) |
As a
result of all this Catholics began fleeing the north by the thousands and in
the end over a million relocated and settled in the south, dislocating in the
process people who had lived had lived in the southern area for generations.
Long story short, the intended elections to reunite the country never occurred,
the CIA installed and backed Diem consolidated power in the south using the
blank checkbook of the CIA and the southern indigenous people displaced by the
northern refugees formed the foundation of what would become the Viet Cong. The seeds of the Vietnam War
had been sown, a war from which the U.S. would not extricate itself for twenty
years. That war was entirely a creation of the CIA. The Saigon Military Mission
was six years in the rear view mirror when JFK was elected in 1960 and he
inherited all of its ramifications.
Another
major event occurred in the late 50’s and that was the overthrow of the corrupt
Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro and his band of guerillas
in 1959. Shortly after this Castro announced his alignment with communism and
proceeded to set up a communist style dictatorship on Cuba. In the Cold War
climate of the 50s this was considered a huge threat to the U.S. and of
course justified CIA sponsored covert operations to undo Castro’s revolution.
The plot the CIA hatched to do this was to create a brigade of disaffected Cubans,
train them, equip them and then send them storming back into Cuba to retake it
from Castro. By 1960 this operation was well under way in its formation and
training stages. Kennedy also inherited this operation when he was elected in
1960.
So you
can see that by 1960, the foreign policy situation that Kennedy inherited was
soon to be dominated by these two CIA created scenarios in Vietnam and Cuba.
The CIA itself was now far removed from its original mission of intelligence
coordination and was full blown into covert military operations. Over the prior
ten years under Allen Dulles it had consolidated its power and more and more
operated in a fashion that did not really answer to the President but went
according to the dictates of Dulles himself and whoever was influencing him.
Therefore it is important to know a little about this guy Allen Dulles. Who was
he?
To be continued…
Copyright
© 2013
By
Mark Arnold
All
Rights Reserved
