By now there's not nearly
as much disagreement regarding what happened to John and Robert Kennedy as
major communications corporations would have you believe. While every
researcher and author highlights different details, there isn't any serious
disagreement among, say, Jim Douglass' JFK and
the Unspeakable, Howard Hunt's deathbed
confession, and David Talbot's new The
Devil's Chessboard.
Jon Schwarz says The
Devil's Chessboard confirms that "your darkest suspicions about
how the world operates are likely an underestimate. Yes, there is an amorphous
group of unelected corporate lawyers, bankers, and intelligence and military
officials who form an American 'deep state,'
setting real limits on the rare politicians who ever try to get out of
line."
Link: http://bit.ly/1kwQfbo
For those of us who were already convinced of that up to our
eyeballs, Talbot's book is still one of the best I've seen on the Dulles
brothers and one of the best I've seen on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Where it differs from Douglass' book, I think, is not so much in the evidence
it relates or the conclusions it draws, but in providing an additional
motivation for the crime.
JFK and the Unspeakable depicts Kennedy as
getting in the way of the violence that Allen Dulles and gang wished to engage
in abroad. He wouldn't fight Cuba or the Soviet Union or Vietnam or East
Germany or independence movements in Africa. He wanted disarmament and peace.
He was talking cooperatively with Khrushchev, as Eisenhower had tried prior to
the U2-shootdown sabotage. The CIA was overthrowing governments in Iran,
Guatemala, the Congo, Vietnam, and around the world. Kennedy was getting in the
way.
The Devil's Chessboard depicts Kennedy, in
addition, as himself being the sort of leader the CIA was in the habit of
overthrowing in those foreign capitals. Kennedy had made enemies of bankers and
industrialists. He was working to shrink oil profits by closing tax loopholes,
including the "oil depletion allowance." He was permitting the
political left in Italy to participate in power, outraging the extreme right in
Italy, the U.S., and the CIA. He aggressively went after steel corporations and
prevented their price hikes. This was the sort of behavior that could get you
overthrown if you lived in one of those countries with a U.S. embassy in it.
Yes, Kennedy wanted to eliminate or drastically weaken and rename
the CIA. Yes he threw Dulles and some of his gang out the door. Yes he refused
to launch World War III over Cuba or Berlin or anything else. Yes he had the
generals and warmongers against him, but he also had Wall Street against him.
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Of course "politicians who ever try to get out of line"
are now, as then, but more effectively now, handled first by the media. If the
media can stop them or some other maneuver can stop them (character
assassination, blackmail, distraction, removal from power) then violence isn't
required.
The fact that Kennedy resembled a coup target, not just a
protector of other targets, would be bad news for someone like Senator Bernie
Sanders if he ever got past the media, the "super delegates," and the
sell-out organizations to seriously threaten to take the White House. A
candidate who accepts the war machine to a great extent and resembles Kennedy
not at all on questions of peace, but who takes on Wall Street with the passion
it deserves, could place himself as much in the cross-hairs of the deep state
as a Jeremy Corbyn who takes on both capital and killing.
Accounts of the escapades of Allen Dulles, and the dozen or more
partners in crime whose names crop up beside his decade after decade,
illustrate the power of a permanent plutocracy, but also the power of
particular individuals to shape it. What if Allen Dulles and Winston Churchill
and others like them hadn't worked to start the Cold War even before World War
II was over? What if Dulles hadn't collaborated with Nazis and the U.S.
military hadn't recruited and imported so many of them into its ranks? What if
Dulles hadn't worked to hide information about the holocaust while it was
underway? What if Dulles hadn't betrayed Roosevelt and Russia to make a
separate U.S. peace with Germany in Italy? What if Dulles hadn't begun
sabotaging democracy in Europe immediately and empowering former Nazis in
Germany? What if Dulles hadn't turned the CIA into a secret lawless army and
death squad? What if Dulles hadn't worked to end Iran's democracy, or
Guatemala's? What if Dulles' CIA hadn't developed torture, rendition, human
experimentation, and murder as routine policies? What if Eisenhower had been
permitted to talk with Khrushchev? What if Dulles hadn't tried to overthrow the
President of France? What if Dulles had been "checked" or
"balanced" ever so slightly by the media or Congress or the courts
along the way?
These are tougher questions than "What if there had been no
Lee Harvey Oswald?" The answer to that is, "There would have been
another guy very similar to serve the same purpose, just as there had been in
the earlier attempt on JFK in Chicago. But "What if there had been no
Allen Dulles?" looms large enough to suggest the possible answer that we
would all be better off, less militarized, less secretive, less xenophobic. And
that suggests that the deep state is not uniform and not unstoppable. Talbot's
powerful history is a contribution to the effort to stop it.
I hope Talbot speaks about his book in Virginia, after which he
might stop saying that Williamsburg and the CIA's "farm" are in
"Northern Virginia." Hasn't Northern Virginia got enough to be ashamed
of without that?
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