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/
