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