November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001

November 22 comes once a year, every year.
By David Neal

People disagree about who killed JFK. Many think there was a conspiracy, and some don’t. I can’t say who killed JFK, but I suspect the government did it. Why would I give credence to such a thing? So much research has gone into the death of JFK that it is tiresome at this stage to rehearse and regurgitate the scenarios that negate Oswald’s guilt. Could he have done it? Probably. Did he do it? No. That is not to say he wasn’t in the Book Depository, nor is it to say a shot from the depository could not have hit the President. The arguments against conspiracy involve minute calculations with laser and computer technology stressing where and how the President was hit from behind by a shot from the sixth floor, now a museum, with a "magic bullet". Once the debate centers on that bullet, unfortunately, forensic and logical discussion take a hike. I’ll explain in a second.

It seems to me the assassinations of the sixties, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy are the starting points of a pattern of control by the government that has become more sophisticated, subtle and obviously dangerous as time goes on. I know these are outrageous things to hear in some corners. Bear with me. Although I’m not going to convince you that John Kennedy was killed by the government anymore than I can convince you that you were wrong in voting for George Bush, I think I can show you that forensics and logic indicate not only that Oswald was probably a patsy, but that all the machinations of the government investigation worked to cover-up truth and perpetuate a lie, as well.

For one thing, John Kennedy was hit in the throat from the front. Drs Malcolm Perry, and Carrico and Nurse Henchliffe, all who saw the wound in the throat before Dr. Perry opened it wider for a tracheotomy, described it as an entry wound. But that wasn’t all. They gave measurements. Dr. Perry said, in writing, the hole was about a quarter inch in size. (3-6mm) No one disputes this. That was smaller than the Specter-created magic bullet, a 6.5 mm missile that was supposed to have gone in Kennedy’s back and come out his throat. But this simply didn’t happen. An autopsy of Kennedy’s body was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital on Friday night and Saturday morning after the assassination and it was determined that no missile went through Kennedy’s back, nor was there evidence of a bullet going out of the throat, except for the appearance of the the surgical wound caused by the Dallas doctors trying to save his life the day before.

Warren Report apologists such as Gerald Posner have implied all the Dallas doctors said Kennedy was hit from the back. This is not true. They all said there was a large hole in the back of Kennedy's head. The facts are there for anyone to see. Dr. Perry described several times in public and in private, to Harold Weisberg, for one, that the throat wound was an entry wound. I don’t know Malcolm Perry and I will not attempt to explain his later hedging about the nature of the wound. It is not relevant because one would have to explain the Secret Service’s intentions in trying to convince him with a controversial autopsy report from Bethesda that disputed his own eyes that a bullet did not enter Kennedy’s throat from the front. I can’t do that. I will stick with his original statements, as Gerald Posner so correctly recommends, ironically.

If all of this begins to sound like all the other conspiracy theory arguments you ever heard about every conspiracy theory you ever heard, it’s not surprising. The discrepancies between official stories and what actually happened in the sixties’ assassinations and even later controversies like Waco or the crash of TWA 800 in 1996 are enough to write books and make movies. Few of us have time or patience to wade through evidence, if we can get it from the government, as in the TWA800 case in particular, so the best we can do is try to listen to those who have done a lot of searching for the truth and give them the benefit of the doubt when they disagree with official pronouncements. Unfortunately the History Channel will not help here. It tends to echo the official line. But I digress.

The point here is a bullet entered Kennedy’s throat from the front. Whether or not the infamous head shot depicted so graphically in the Zapruder film came from the front or back only reinforces your predetermined persuasion: from the front- a conspiracy; from the back- Oswald. Since a front shot in the throat, with a little investigation of the forensics and the Dallas doctor’s original statements, is relatively easy to prove, I’m going to leave it on the table as true for now and expand upon the government’s ability to control information and public thought right up to our times. After small basic truths are manipulated in or out of the public mind the official stories are fairly easy to sell.

For example, let’s look a little closer at how this has been accomplished since the sixties with just a few of the so-called conspiracy-type events with which I am familiar. John Kennedy’s assassination: a front throat shot, proving a conspiracy of some kind, lost early on and covered up by the Warren Commission. King’s assassination: a shooter in the bushes, and Army snipers on nearby rooftops, still being argued about, but suggesting a major conspiracy; Robert Kennedy’s assassination: gunshots to the back and within an inch or so behind his right ear- proving Sirhan didn’t do it, and thus a major conspiracy.

Jump forward and leave out Malcolm X’s assassination, 1965, George Wallace’s wounding, 1972, Reagan’s wounding, 1981 and many others that I have not studied in great detail and move to Vince Foster’s death, 1993: forensics and an independent investigation by Attorney John Clarke suggest Foster was shot in the side of the neck and was pushing a gun away with both hands at the time, which establishes a homicide and not a suicide. Did Hillary do it, the Mossad, CIA, ISI? Who knows? But Vince didn’t kill himself.

Now look at TWA800, 1996. 100 eyewitnesses saw missiles going up from the surface to the plane and blowing it up. It was important to keep the eyewitnesses from ever telling their stories in public, and that is exactly what the government did, even arresting a journalist who tried to find out the truth. Waco, Oklahoma City, the blind sheik and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? All fraught with conspiracy. If you like your debunking neat and tidy you can find it on the networks or in the official explanations by either John Danforth or Kenneth Starr. Discrepancies suggest rather that Waco was an urban warfare exercise gone bad. The first WTC bombing? A case involving an FBI informant warning his handlers that terrorists under his control were building a bomb, only to be ignored or worse. And Oklahoma City, a possible inside job.

Now let’s take a deep breath and look at the Mother of all conspiracies: 911. What bits of fact have been shoved out of reach or off the table in this one? Just about all of them. And it’s too fresh and too real to us now to engage in rational debate about it, but it is odd that the President would not testify under oath about his actions on that day despite the rather glaring misstatements about the events he made in public. He was not warned? He saw a plane hit the building before he went into the classroom? He acted quickly? He made our defenses act quickly? One does not have to be a Michael Moore fan to see some serious problems here. And Moore, I don’t think, even takes on the big questions addressed in books by David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor, and others that the WTC buildings appear to have been taken down by demolition, especially building 7, and that a plane made some amazing acrobatic loops to hit the under-populated and under-construction side of the Pentagon while being flown by an incompetent pilot.

But the victors write the history, and have been writing it since 1963. This is the pattern I see. We should have a healthy respect for the truth. But we don’t. We are a country basically dominated by marketing ideas. Marketing is not truth, of course, but a perception perpetuated to make us think and act a predetermined way. It works. Maybe we are happy with just being consumers. I can live with a lie as long as I don’t know what the truth is. This is a fact that the government a long time ago realized and is exactly why you can’t find the truth in their official debunkings, including the 911 Commission’s recent report.

Truth died with Kennedy it seems. In 1962 the generals presented Kennedy with a plan to fabricate reasons to invade Cuba. They genuinely thought Cuba had to be invaded and the only way to get the American people to go along with it was to fool them. It was called Operation Northwoods and was signed off by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kennedy and McNamara, Secretary of Defense at the time, patted them on the head and said nice work boys, now go sit in the corner, as the two of them must have been howling incredulously in private at the crazy plan to shoot down our own airliners and blame it on Castro, blame John Glenn’s possible disaster, if it happened, on Cuba and a host of other insane ideas that would have been impossible to sell to the public at large. Anyway, this attitude toward the guys with guns may have been what precipitated Kennedy’s removal. Just a thought.

Today it seems those guys who would have been sent to the corner by a Kennedy are being promoted by a Bush. We don’t know enough at this time to go into the details, because Bush has gone out of his way with Executive orders to stifle and actually stop the flow of information back to the public. (Try and look into his father’s presidential papers, especially relating to Iran-Contra. They will only be released if either Bush, or their relatives says they can.)

Nevertheless we can look clear-headedly at what we do know: the Government went to war after scaring us to death. Why has no one investigated properly the anthrax attacks right after 911? Why did Congress get fed all that bogus intelligence about Iraq? Why did the American people come to think Iraq was responsible for 911, and therefore should be invaded? Good Marketing. Marketing is not the actual competition of ideas; it is the successful campaign to convince. If you can control the information and channel the direction of the public mind, then you can sell almost anything. Right now we don’t have much real competition in this marketplace of the truth. But I am being obtuse.

It all boils down to this: Kennedy was killed and the military essentially took over. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were serious threats to the military and the intelligence communities agendas in Vietnam. They had to be removed. Those are pretty much facts, but to continue on you have to let your mind open up a bit. When I say the military, I mean not only the military industrial complex, which by the way pays a lot of salaries and mortgage payments, but also the larger institutions of government. It is not lost on future leaders, if they are circumspect, that this government will not tolerate too much monkeying with its military budgets or foreign policy agendas. Think about how vital to business the Cold War was. Think about the amount of government defense spending, (almost $700 billion for this budget year), that would not be needed without War. You see where I’m going. We need a reason to prepare for war, and if we don’t have one we may have to create a new one. Actually we already have. The War on Terrorism to me is sort of the Mother of all Marketing ideas. Getting to this point in history started on November 22, 1963.
A Few Interesting links:
The Zapruder Film: http://www.assassinationresearch.com/zfilm/?NF=1
Wikipedia Overview of JFK Assassination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_assassination
JFK Forum: http://jfklancer.com/index.html This site is abundant with research and info.
Vince Foster: http://www.fbicover-up.com/proof/index.php

David Neal is a free-lance writer
and a founding member of Flight 800 Independent Research Organization, http://www.flight800.org/

Able Danger and Arlen Specter

D.L.Neal 10-25-05

As Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter approaches his 76th year, having beaten cancer, as well as conservatives and liberals during a long career of politics, one epitaph will always be attached to whatever good he may have done. He orchestrated and manipulated the Warren Commission into unequivocally concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald, apparently a lone nut, killed John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Even though the demographics of the country push 42-year-old history farther and farther off the radar screen, the murder of JFK still looms as a seminal event in American History. Trust in government is often seen beginning to slip with Nixon and Watergate, crimes of the seventies, but many will point to The Warren Report as the beginning of the end for the “America” as Hollywood knew it. Like the bad dream in the 1946 Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, where Jimmy Stewart saw his town turned into a Potter’s Field of crass commercialism, indecency, and loss of self-respect by the greed and evil of the owner of the local bank, Mr. Potter, many saw America slide into a nightmare of nihilism and self-doubt as the official report sanctioned by Lyndon Johnson tried to tell us that all was well: just go back to work and don’t worry about what your gut is telling you- that something was horribly wrong with this picture of one crazy nut wiping out Camelot with a twelve dollar gun.
Arlen Specter’s job, as a young Philadelphia lawyer, was to manage the evidence, as a prosecutor would, to convince the American people that Oswald acted alone. As staff counsel to the Presidential Blue Ribbon Commission headed by a reluctant Chief Justice, Earl Warren, Specter was the hands-on guy in charge of what would be put in, and what would not be included in the official report. It has taken forty years of wandering in the wilderness of obfuscation, many books, even a couple of movies to realize that we had all been had by Specter’s work.
In 1964 it was imperative that the American people not be told the truth that men who viewed him as a threat to our national security killed Kennedy. Who those men were and how they did it has been an obvious fact since 1963, rather like the proverbial elephant in the room, but publicly admitting it was, (and may still be,) impossible. Many feared it would cause most Americans to question every truth, ideal, creed, or conviction that they ever held. Not to mention that the possibility of either civil war, or worse, martial law, might be the result of telling the people the truth.
All those, like Specter, who assisted in the duping of the American people have probably convinced themselves they were involved in a higher purpose of protecting the people from a truth, which indeed might lead to anarchy. But this is doubtful. More realistically they were just doing their jobs. How could the public understand the complexities of Kennedy’s foreign policy, meant to bring the world together in peace, yet denigrated by realists who had been brought face to face with annihilation and conquered it in World War II and The Korean War. These were military men who could only see appeasement, diplomacy, and compromise as tools of fools in a cruel and dangerous world run in some quarters by not people like us, but “them”? How could the public digest the consequences of not building fortress America strong enough to withstand any threat, real or potential? How could the normal political system of adversarial argument and majority rule possibly react to an enemy who could annihilate us in a moment? In this atmosphere, could even the most idealistic, honest and intelligent young lawyer in the world attempt to educate America about the Potter’s Field that the military industrial complex, (that bugaboo which Eisenhower had seen looming), had in store for us? Specter couldn’t.
In his defense you could say he saw the big picture and was working to save America from itself. He controlled most of the testimony of witnesses before the Warren Commission. His efforts to cut them short, withhold important evidence, structure sentences so ridiculous that only the desired answer would be possible, were, in the best sense, only serving to put the tragedy behind us, to get on with the tasks at hand, to pacify us into a dreamland of copasetic ignorance. But with an incredible dearth of integrity and honesty among that group authorizing and producing The Warren Report, and with the complicity of the very institutions which should have checked the imbalance of bias, prejudice and partiality, it is probably too much to ask that Specter would have done anything more or less than he did. He was just doing his job, what he was told to do.
Who told him? Does it matter that it came down from a chain of command starting with who ever told Lyndon Johnson what to do, (probably the Joint Chiefs), down through Assistant Attorney General Katzenbach, to Specter’s boss Lee Rankin and then to Specter himself? Not all of these people were involved in the assassination, obviously, but all worked toward keeping a lid on the truth for reasons which can only be explained by those individuals themselves. There were those on the Commission and staff who should have resigned in protest, but like today there will always be those to fill the gap and do the job, no matter how contrary to their principles and convictions. Maybe Specter instinctively realized this.
That John F. Kennedy was removed by forces that saw him as a threat to national security, that saw him as a hindrance to plans in place to counter the perceived dangers of the ism of the day is not in doubt by anyone who has decided to look into the assassination with any degree of inquisition or honesty. One would find: an entrance throat wound turned into an exit wound thereby creating a cottage industry of theories that still manage to produce speakers and books which amuse and entertain us; a manipulation of people and evidence to make a government agent appear to be nothing more than a psycho loner; an autopsy botched so incredibly that it took the Joint Chiefs’ orders to make sure it could never be objectively researched. And the end result: A massive build up of military industrial complexities which like today not only made millionaires of those in the right places but furthered the game plan of those who could not argue their case openly and successfully in public, because they did not trust the public to side with them.
More specifically John Kennedy had begun to view the military men around him with not only suspicion but also disdain. Heroes of World War II, like Lyman Lemnitzer and Curtis Lemay, were not listened to in peacetime and were often overruled and ignored by young bright ex-ceos, Ivey leaguers, upstarts. Their plans to confront the Ism which they knew, unconfronted, would lead to America’s demise were not being taken seriously. Operation Northwoods, a plan Kennedy shelved, would have saved us from a nuclear face-off that almost started World War III, or so the Joint Chiefs thought. And as the end of Kennedy’s first term approached it even appeared he might be backing out on what seemed the logical approach to confronting the Soviet Union and Communist China in their own back yard.
It is doubtful Arlen Specter was party to these grand schemes, which eventually removed Kennedy. Instead, he was probably just the young opportunist that he appeared to be. But it would be impossible to imagine with hindsight that he has not been able to see the damage done by allowing the perpetuation of a lie that opened doors to a war in Viet Nam, a loss of trust in Government, a forty year misdirection of American treasure which has finally culminated in the obscene situation which we now find ourselves: a military budget that is nine or ten times larger then any rival and which saps our infrastructure, our schools, our institutions of life-blood instead feeding the largest war machine in world history. Again, all in order to fight an ism, a battle that cannot be successfully argued in public, but must be waged through fear and propaganda.
Now we are faced with a difficult choice, again. Amazingly Arlen Specter has a second chance in the crosshairs of history. We have learned that the esteemed 911 Commissioners may have pulled one over on us much like the Warren Report. It seems information they should have received, and which lowly operatives claim they delivered, did not make it into the final report. Namely that people who were identified as high-jackers had been known to and have been watched by agencies of the government. The fact that the program, Able Danger, which tracked them was shut down in February of 2001 smacks of conspiracy theory so heavily that only a Specter of the 1964 mold might be able to spin it into some kind of innocent incompetence which at least some portion of America might be able to swallow. But not the family members of victims of 911. Not those who are paying attention. Not those who will not accept another lie in their lifetimes.
It is beyond the imagination of mainstream America, what ever that really is, that our government, or at least highly placed people in it were able to violently remove a sitting President and get away with it, or to somehow facilitate a new Pearl Harbor. Put that thought over in the trash file because we simply don’t want to go there. And since we haven’t, we are unprepared and ill-equipped to question authority when it dissembles, distorts, denigrates or ignores truths that are begging to be known. It is no doubt not common knowledge that the commission put together by Bill Clinton to review the Assassination Records of the 1963 murder concluded that there were apparently two brains claiming to be Kennedy’s at his autopsy. It is even farther out on the branch of known history that President Kennedy’s personal doctor, Admiral George Burkley offered through his attorney to give information to the 1977 HSCA Committee that there had to be others involved in Kennedy’s murder. But when he finally testified, in 1978, he kept basically to the official line, not elaborating on his apparent earlier doubts. (In 1997, the AARB was unable to get his family to release access to his papers, and by then his attorney had also died. http://www.jfklancer.com/Dr_Burkley.html)
No one will know what Dr. Burkley had to say about others involved, but it is not his fault. We somehow allowed George Bush to be casually interviewed in the White House with no notes taken and obviously not under oath regarding his knowledge, activities, motivations, thoughts and dreams on 9-11. The incredible fact that we allowed this with Dick Cheney sitting beside him is testament to our comatose and stupefying self-denial. As others have noted, (see Harper’s Magazine article about the whitewash of the
911 commission : http://www.harpers.org/WhitewashAsPublicService.html) Bush simply played innocent to the charge that he was forewarned of plans and impending dangers- that his administration’s incompetence and dereliction was simply a result of ignorance and being caught by surprise. At least under oath he could have been legally liable as Condeleeza Rice recited the title to the August PDB which was practically an indictment itself: Osama Bin Laden plans to attack America. No lesson needs to be hammered home here, other than without the spirit of skepticism, distrust of official pronouncements, and serious questioning of the Pentagon and its programs like Able Danger, and God knows what else, we will not only fail at George Santayana’s test of not learning from history but continue to experience a repetition of knowable, predictable and deadly events, only to have their causes white washed by unchallenged official reports.
Arlen Specter has a chance to redeem himself. But it will be costly. Suggesting the Pentagon is obstructing Congress by withholding information, keeping witnesses from testifying, those are serious charges he has made. But to follow this investigation to the truth might suggest that indeed people who think they know what’s best for the rest of us were able to get the Pearl Harbor they needed to galvanize America into becoming the war machine they always wanted. And they were able to accomplish this without proper public debate or discussion in our institutions either in Congress or the fourth estate.
Specter’s committee could demand honesty and truth. He could get us to a point where the American people could handle truth. We could with Arlen Specter’s help learn that leaders are only human, that sometimes they forsake the people’s right to know for a narrow vision which they think the people can not understand, and consequently would not pay for. We could with Arlen Specter’s searching for truth clear the air, indeed learn from our mistakes and maybe even wake up from this forty year old nightmare, like Jimmy Stewart did in a 1946 movie where redemption, salvation, and unselfishness actually won the day. Jimmy Stewart was given a second chance, in a movie at least, to make things right. Arlen Specter has been given a second chance as well. What will history do with him? More importantly, what will history do with us?



Notes:
There are good websites for every persuasion concerning the JFK assassination. Books by Harold Weisberg, John Newman, Vincent Salandria; recent works by Larry Hancock, William Law, Joan Mellen, Gerald McKnight and many others produce a general outline of the elephant in the room. Go to Amazon.com and enter any of these names for descriptions of their works. The apparent murder of people like Navy audio-visual specialist William Pitzer in 1966 remains an interesting footnote. The strange killings of several organized crime figures in the seventies, just before they were to testify, as well as an exhausting list of other strange deaths, some possibly not related to the assassination, but so many coincidentally important to the investigation, that it has made it harder to successfully debunk the conspiracy theories than to realize that there may be something to them after all. The journalist and TV star Dorothy Kilgallen stands out particularly; she had announced she had broken the case after her exclusive jailhouse interview with Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer. She died shortly thereafter, as well as her best friend, before she was able to tell her story.
The wounds to Kennedy’s body were not examined properly. Evidence from the autopsy, such as the brain, and important photographs, are missing. The military control of the handling of the body and the manipulation of the autopsy stands out today as the clearest indication of an institutional command of the situation, starting from people in the highest offices and the military.
Kennedy’s throat wound, a small entrance wound about 3-5 mm, approximately ¼ inch in diameter, was seen by doctors and nurses at Parkland Hospital where he was first taken. Controversy has risen ever since because of the large gaping wound that was seen later after doctors performed a tracheotomy through the original small entrance wound. Dr. Malcolm Perry first called it an entrance wound and then after being shown the so-called official autopsy by the secret service, which contradicted what he saw, changed his mind. He later discussed this with Harold Weisberg and suggested it again appeared to be an entrance wound. He was a hunter, familiar with weapons, and had extensive experience with gunshot wounds. Fortunately others saw the wound as well before it was cut larger. Nurse Margaret Henchcliffe and others called it an entrance wound. No one disputes the small original size of the wound. More importantly, the whole single bullet theory rests on the assumption that a bullet went through Kennedy’s back and out his throat. There was no such back to front wound. It was never properly probed; in fact the back wound did not go deeper than about an inch. When the doctors at the Navy hospital in Bethesda tried to probe it, military officers in the autopsy room told them not to at the time. It is interesting that Curtis Lemay, Air Force General and one of the Joint Chiefs, with his lit cigar, was in the gallery during at least part of the autopsy, according to Paul O’Connor, a young Navy man who assisted with the autopsy. A few helpful links:
New Pearl Harbor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Pearl_Harbor
Operation Northwoods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Able Danger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger
Arlen Specter’s bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlen_Specter
Senate takes on Pentagon over Able Danger
http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/37074-1.html
Articles on Able Danger: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-prs/abledanger.html
Able Danger to get second hearing: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,170267,00.html