CIVILITY, TOLERANCE, NIXON, AND AMERICA: Michael Goldfarb's FRDH podcast

My friend Michael Goldfarb has posted an excellent essay on his FRDH (First Rough Draft of History) podcast. It's called Civility and the 'Paradox of Tolerance' and it's worth a 12-minute listen before you proceed here because I will be talking about some of its points (not spoilers, exactly). Anyway you won't find many people weaving together Newt Gingrich, Sarah Sanders' dinners, Karl Popper and the Sidney Lumet movie The Hill in such an entertaining, and chilling, fashion. You can link to the website here.

Back already? Michael's jumping off point was an essay in Politico, the Sporting News of False Equivalence, by Rutgers professor David Greenberg. As Michael says, Greenberg warns about the 'last time' the left got 'uncivil', pointing to a 1970's bomb explosion which killed members of the Weather Underground in New York. You can read the piece here if you must. How this equates to a mother berating former cabinet member and arch-grafter Scott Pruitt at his latest expensed dinner, or the owner asking Sarah Sanders to leave a restaurant, or diners forcing Mitch McConnell, in his mom jeans, to skedaddle from his night out, is only the peak of the piece's fatuousness. In terms of incivility we could point to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, Nixon's October Surprise, the Chicago Eight trial, Nixon's plumbers, Watergate, the intelligence scandals of the 70s, Reagan's October Surprise, Iran-Contra, militia bombing federal facilities or shooting it out with federal marshals, assassinations of abortion-providing doctors, and other acts of political incivility, all of which pre-date Newt Gingrich's arrival in Congress to fight the second civil war.

Michael and I have had this discussion many times: I like to trace the modern Republicans back to the Goldwater fiasco in 1964, but more importantly to the Civil and Voting Rights legislation which brought about a re-balancing of American politics. Formerly, each party had its moderate wing; the Dems also had the racist southern Dixiecrats, loyal to hating the party of Lincoln. The Republicans had the John Birch, Ayn Rand, cowboy money faction who got Goldwater the nomination. When civil rights brought black people the vote, the Dixiecrats moved swiftly to the Republican party: all the right-wingnuts were now in the same canoe. And yes, it took them until Gingrich, and the 1994 shut down of government, for them to begin to understand what they had.

You wouldn't get any of this from David Greenberg, and I knew why. 15 years ago or so I reviewed a book of his, Nixon's Shadow, for the TLS. The book was about the way Nixon was portrayed in media, and I criticised it for the mess of selective assumption, historical blindness, false equivalence, and twisted values that it was. The editor who commissioned the review loved it, but it was spiked by the then-editor of the TLS, who as it turned out was also an unreconstructed Nixon-supporter. They do survive. The review appeared in the estimable political magazine Lobster, but when I started this blog I reprinted it, and you can find it here. It will give a decent idea of why Michael found the Politico essay so irritatingly off-base.

We are living in an age of determinedly minority government. I am used to it in the UK, but in America
gerry-mandering, voting repression, and the onslaught of propaganda disguised as news had led Fintan O'Toole in the Irish Times to make a compelling case about seeing the growth of a fascist state.  You can find that here; it's worth a read.

Michael, through Karl Popper, asks how far we should extend tolerance to the intolerant. In 2016 I screamed in frustration as Obama sat still and allowed Mitch McConnell to sideline his nominee for the Supreme Court. I wanted him to force a Constitutional crisis, bring events to a head, stand up to the intolerant. As I read O'Toole, I was reminded I am reading a book called The Trial Of Adolf Hitler right now; it's about the Beer Hall Putch and the trial that followed, and it is all about the tolerance of those who didn't feel the threat about which O'Toole is writing.

Anyone listening to Michael quote Popper: "for it may turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument. They may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive" and not thinking of Trump, Fake and Fox News, has been living in a cave. The kinds of things like Greenberg's Politico piece are the other side of the coin, seeming rational, but encouraging a 'tolerant' acceptance of the intolerant. This must not be allowed to happen. 

TORTURE, SPIES, LIES & THE WAR ON TERROR

A slightly revised version of the essay I wrote here on 10 December about the US Senate's CIA Torture Report has been published at Lobster; you can link to that version here. Lobster, edited by Robin Ramsey, is a site well worth following. 

Thinking about it reminded me of a book review I did for Lobster five years ago, which seems even more relevant now, not just in light of that report but also the steady progression of just the problems the book, and my essay, were talking about then. I posted that review here back in 2009, but re-reading at it today I added a couple of things to update it, so I'll to reprint it here, as a sort of year-end warning:

SPIES, LIES AND THE WAR ON TERROR 

This book is published as the debate rages in America about whether or not the activities of the Bush regime, specifically the torture of various combat detainees and suspects rendered from various parts of the world, should be subject to some sort of investigation, if not a truth and reconciliation commission. The larger issues, involving the systematic bending of the tasks of the intelligence community from analysis of facts to manufacture of an excuse for war, but also concerning both the morality and legality of such a war of aggression, lie dormant behind the sexier images of torture and Abu Ghraib. But the odd thing is that, in America's public debate, 'the facts' of the past eight years remain contentious and debatable, whereas, as this book clearly illustrates, they are part of a policy continuum, whose boundaries had been set out clearly in the decades before 9/11, and, on a broader scale, whose basic premises continue to threaten civil liberties in the West.

The strength of this book is the way it considers a spectrum of issues, and draws the lines which connect them. It starts by examining the threat of 'Islamism', not in the wake of 9/11 but tracing it back to its roots in the Carter administration's support for Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion. The simple point, that the US and Britain now find themselves just as mired in that country as the Russians did three decades ago, barely needs to be stated. That the architects of an earlier alliance of 'creative destruction' (in the brilliant terminology of neo-con apparatchick Michael Ledeen), the makers of Iran Contra, should be setting the agenda for the second President Bush came as no surprise, but that there was such a continuum through the Clinton years perhaps should. Depending now on a Sunni 'arc of moderation' has simply inflamed the area further, with Pakistan, rapidly destablising, at the fulcrum of this divide.

Having set out broadly the strategies responsible for creating this mess, and made clear that those responsible remain determined to make it worse in the interests of their concept of American (and British) ascendancy, the book sets out briefly but comprehensively the nature of the alternative intelligence (and media) structures created to massage the facts into justifications for enacting those plans. Bush, Chaney, and Rumsfeld devised their own intelligence apparatus, not only to produce the desired results, but also to wage a propaganda war on their own population.

Of course, this material that has been out there for years, but what is interesting in this new look at it is the way it is put into the context of an overall approach to the 'threat of Islamism'. Besides revealing the smoke and mirrors behind this essential charade, the book's examination of other key long-term links, such as those between the Project for the New American Century and Benjamin Netanyahu's first Israeli government, whose focus continues into the second Natanyahu era, indicate the absurdity of believing the present policies of the West have any desire, much less possibility, of actually achieving a 'solution' in the Middle East.

That Richard Perle was, in the early 1970s, passing classified information to the Israelis from Senator 'Scoop' Jackson's office, where Paul Wolfowitz also worked, simply reinforces the idea that we are seeing a 'long war' whose modus operandi, as the authors make clear, we've seen before. The phony intelligence estimates of the Soviet threat, produced in the 1970s by the so-called Team B, were drafted largely by Wolfowitz. The neo-con movement was experienced at phony excuses for military chest-thumping thirty years ago; they simply got better at it with practice.

After a discussion of the eroding of civil liberties during this 'war on terror', the authors move to a specific discussion of Europe. The US used the 9/11 'attack' to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, and create a platform from which to launch many of its covert operations. One question the authors do not address is the parallel between the way the Pentagon sought to control intelligence, and thus create a policy-making platform for itself, and the way NATO has itself become an autonomous policy-making body, rather than an alliance treaty-bound for mutual defense. They do trace another parallel, in the way the European Union has morphed from a trade and travel agreement into a vast non-elected form of government. They trace in great detail the growing and most worrying aspect of control acquired by unelected bodies, bureaucrats, and indeed failed or disgraced politicians from member countries. Though in Britain we look to Europe to protect human rights through its courts, the amount of intelligence currently shared automatically by its members is staggering, and puts projects like the introduction of ID cards in this country into an even more-worrying perspective.

In the light of Jeb Bush recently (in 2014) declaring an interest in becoming President, it's tempting to look at the Bush family as a brand-name in the service of the intelligence community, and Shrub Bush as an unelected bureaucrat.It was Jeb who engineered the most crucial bit of fraud in the 2000 Presidential election; it was Jeb who pardoned the Cuban-exile terrorist Orlando Bosch.

Early in the days of 'axis of evil' and 'war on terror' those of us who alluded to George Orwell and his notion of perpetual war were derided, while the David Frums of the world inhabited the BBC's analysis programmes. If one were to further draw connections to the paranoid work of Philip K Dick in today's electro-magnetic world, one would be similarly marginalised. Yet, as this book concludes, 'calls are monitored, travel circumscribed, and torture is again being routinized (sic). All this is done in the name of security in the War on Terror.' That this has increased exponentially during the administration of a man elected in large part because of his apparent opposition to it remains a source of great shame and frustration for American voters.

What was most worrying about the recent (ie, 2009) G20 protests in London was the way the police have been encouraged to distance themselves from the citizenry, whether protestors or passersby, and consider them uniformly as threats. This is the enduring legacy of the war on terror, and it begins, and ends, with the twisting of intelligence to suit the purposes of bureaucrats with power. This is the chilling warning this book provides.

Spies, Lies, and the War On Terror

by Paul Todd, Jonathan Bloch, and Patrick Fitzgerald

Zedbooks, £14.99, ISBN 9781842778319

PETER MATTHIESSEN REDUX: THE CIA ,PARIS REVIEW, MODERN ART AND LOBSTER

My discussion of Peter Matthiessen, following my obit of him for the Guardian (see the preceding post and follow the link to catch up) have generated quite a bit of comment (sadly, not on the blog itself). Most of it had two strands. One came from a few people who felt Matthiessen was not a great fiction writer, that travel and the natural world in non-fiction was his strength. I'm inclined to agree with them--I've always found his fiction a bit studied, perhaps too much influenced by the kind of awareness of American literary roots espoused by his second cousin (once removed) F.O. Matthiessen. It's tempting to see the Shadow Country trilogy as marking a change in that.

The other point, made by many on the Guardian's comments page, as well as in emails to me, was about the CIA link. They ranged from the paranoid to an excellent comparison by my friend Michael Goldfarb to Norman Mailer's much underrated Harlot's Ghost. But Mailer's novel is less about the politics of the CIA than the old boy network, centered on Yale, that formed the early CIA. I have no doubt the CIA funded the Paris Review, as I implied in the obit, but I don't know what kind of spying Matthiessen did for the agency. Keeping an eye on lefties in Paris seems innocuous enough, but of course that's the way Matthiessen would have wanted it to seem.

Robin Ramsey, the editor of Lobster, for whom I have written a number of pieces, forwarded me an article from Lobster 50, 'The Fiction Of The State' (you can find it at Lobster, here) which I either missed or don't recall. It's by Richard Cummings, who was a part of that circle in some ways, and is best known for a controversial biography of Allard Lowenstein, Pied Piper, which alleged that the anti-war Democratic congressman, head of Americans for Democratic Action and an early critic of the official verdict in the Robert Kennedy assassination, had been a CIA agent (and a closeted gay). Lowenstein was murdered in 1980 by a student he had befriended in the 60s. Cummings was accused of relying on guilt by association to make his case--he has apparently confirmed his thesis with CIA files--but you'll see guilt by association makes up a part of the basis of 'The Fiction Of The State' as well. Which is to be expected, because the whole business is about associations.

It's a fascinating, if  impressionistic, article (a lot of the names would mean nothing to most of you reading it, but they encapsulate the New York literary world of the 50s and 60s). It's interesting because anyone involved in that world remains captivated by it yet somehow able to see themselves apart from it...which applies to Cummings every bit as much as to Matthiessen. The influence of this group resembles that of the British upper classes via Oxbridge. For example, Cummings' editor at Brazilier was Ned Chase. Ned's son is Chevy (like Wallace Shawn or Carly Simon, the entertainment world is littered with the children of  New York editors!). More importantly, people in big New York law firms, often Yalies themselves, were the core of the CIA.

But if Cummings be correct, and the CIA was seriously fighting communism by trying to control what writers wrote, or ensure that certain ideas got spread through magazines like The Paris Review or Encounter, it makes you wonder what they were thinking, who they thought the real enemy was. Of course James Jesus Angleton edited a poetry magazine at Yale, and it's tempting to think he and the agency thought they could save the world from communism by simply improving on their undergraduate publications. But it's more realistic to think that they feared uppity intellectuals outside their waspy sphere more then they did the threat of godless communism in Russia.

Cummings is believable on the way Matthiessen forced out Harold Humes, (pictured right) and quotes two of Matthiessen's wives as confirming the wider extent of Matthiessen's CIA work--Cummings believes his own book about the CIA's covert war against Ethiopa, and his Lowenstein book, were both victims of CIA plots initiated by Matthiesen. It's easy to accept, because it reinforces the idea that all this energy might have been better directed elsewhere, and it speaks to the essential banality of the authoritarian mindset which is behind intelligence, working as an arm protective of corporate interest.

There's so much gossip about who married whom or had affairs with whom or got their money from whom that Cummings becomes very hard to follow. You can't help but think there's an element of jealousy that he himself wasn't ever fully admitted to the club. But what I find most interesting isn't Matthiessen or Plimpton as much as the idea the CIA considered Clement Greenberg to be in the front line against communism, which basically validates the thesis of Serge Guibault's book How New York Stole The Idea Of Modern Art. I'd always thought Guibault over stated his case, and certainly failed to give enough credit to the art, because to do so would weaken his argument, but if Cummings be right, Guibault if anything understates his case.

Basically the CIA seems to have wasted a lot of money in terms of political gain. On the other hand, their artistic judgement seems better than, say, that of the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Arts Council. So maybe their mission statement and budget ought simply to be adjusted?

DOUGLAS HORNE INSIDE THE ASSINATION RECORDS REVIEW BOARD: THE LOBSTER REVIEW

My review of the fourth volume of Douglas Horne's Inside The Assassination Review Board has just been published in issue 59 of Lobster, which is now an online-only publication. You can find it here, and it is highly recommended.

Editor Robin Ramsey has again kindly allowed me to post my own review here, and it follows, but I do recommend you check out the rest of the magazine, and its back issues (1-57 were printed). The book in question is an important, but frustrating, study of the JFK assassination. You'll see my take on it is somewhat different than I imagined it might be when I wrote about an interview with Horne which I'd read back in December; you can find that post here.

As a comprehensive examination of just two aspects of the Kennedy assassination, Douglas Horne's Inside The Assassination Records Review Board, Volume IV (henceforth IA4) symbolises the ultimate difficulty of moving through the rabbit hole of minutiae, some five decades after the killing. This is the fourth volume of a projected five-volume series, pages 987-1378, or two chapters of the whole. Apparently the entire book runs 1880 pages, which is only two-thirds the length of Vincent Bugliosi's apologia for the Warren Commission. But in his admirable effort to get at the absolute truth, Horne might as well have extended to the realms of Bugliosity. Because once you have cut through the prolix information, with every minor point of research, debate, opinion stated and repeated and footnoted, once you've realised that a good copy editor could have cut these 400 large pages considerably, and tightened the argument, you realise that the argument itself resolves into another cul de sac. Horne, who was a researcher into military records for the ARRB (remember the autopsy was a military event), has done research that is exhaustive, but despite providing us with much fact about what happened, he moves us no closer to any real understanding. The advantage the Bugliosis and Posners have is that they don't need to do that, and the reviewers who praise their books in the maintream media don't really need to read them at all.

Basically, Horne deals with only two points, both crucially concerned with the manipulation of evidence. The first is the infamous Bethesda autopsy. The second is possible alteration of the Zapruder film itself. The latter,which is admittedly not his own area of expertise, has become a hot potato of charge and counter-charge among researchers, and the further I delved beyond Horne's book the more exhausted I became.

And even more frustratingly, Horne, who comes off as being scrupulously honest and open about arguments, accepts that his position (that the film is not 'authentic') is still the minority one, diametrically opposed to that of the ARRB's expert, Roland Zavada.The arguments around the evidence are too technical for me to even begin to summarise here, and they have been debated hotly before Horne even got to them.

What seems incontestable is Horne's finding that the National Photo Intelligence Center in Washington received the Zapruder film from a CIA lab at Kodak in Rochester, and that the anonymous 'Bill Smith' who delivered it said it had been 'developed' there, which would mean it was Zapruder's original film. Or, it occurred to me, perhaps some other original film created and altered while the 'other' Zapruder footage was being moved around Dallas. Or, it also occurred to me, that a CIA agent posing as a Secret Service agent acting as a delivery boy might not have known or cared about the difference between 'developed' and 'printed'. After examining all these conundra, however, suffice it to say that regardless of how and by whom the Zapruder film may or may not have been altered, what was left was STILL compelling enough evidence of a conspiracy. The real question then becomes whether, having done such a bad job of covering up the ultimate evidence of the frontal shots, they might have been trying to cover up SOMETHING ELSE.

The more compelling section deals with the autopsy, and here Horne goes far beyond David Lifton's original research in Best Evidence to prove there were two separate brain examinations, there were three copies of Doctor James Humes' autoposy report, and, most importantly, that post mortem surgery was performed in Bethesda to change the nature of the appearance of the wounds. Horne breaks down the time line of the shell game played by Roy Kellerman and the Secret Service with the president's body, and with the various testimonies of doctors Humes, J Thornton Boswell, and Pierre Finck, particularly where Boswell actually contradicts the official autopsy findings. The conclusion is inescapable, these doctors were ordered to destroy or suppress evidence of a frontal shot.

The problem in both cases is that what has been proved is ultimately a post-facto conspiracy, one designed to protect organisational failures, cover bureaucratic asses, hide complicity by agents or assets, or indeed even avoid what may have been presented to people like military doctors and secret service agents as the possibility of global nuclear war if the truth, or what may have been suggested as wild speculation, became public. But we knew all that a long time ago and although Horne marks out the turf, and puts paid to the Posner/Bugliosi argument once and for all, none of it gets us any closer to the places the orders originated, which would be where the evidence of the actual assassination conspiracy lies. The implications are clear, that the conspiracy must have reached deep into the government itself. And perhaps that is where my ultimate frustration lies, in that after nearly fifty years, we are counting the conspirators on the head of the pin, but only fiction writers have come close to sticking the pin into the donkey's behind.

This was the argument being presented by James Douglass in JFK and The Unspeakable, which I reviewed here (you can follow this link or use the Bullseyes list to the right) and in Lobster 58, an effort to try to narrow what might be called suspects in the macro conspiracy. Work like Horne's is admirable, because of his devotion to honesty and completeness. We could ask for it to be more concise, better written, easier to follow. But that's not the real point, the reason why this book brought on such a feeling of frustration. We need clarity, and after five decades, we continue to dive deeper and deeper and the water gets muddier and darker, with the wreck at the bottom nowhere in sight.

INSIDE THE AARB, Volume IV Douglas P Horne privately printed, $25 ISBN 9780984314430

DOUGLAS HORNE'S NEW LOOK AT THE JFK ASSASSINATION

Robin Ramsey, editor of Lobster (to which I contributed occasionally, and which is soon to re-appear as an on-line journal) forwarded on a link to some background information about a new JFK assassination book. Oh no, I hear you groan, but Inside The Assassination Records Review Board, Vol IV, by Douglas Horne, is a comprehensive review of the medical evidence, written by an AARB staffer. You can get some background to the book in the review posted here, at the JFK Countercoup blog, but following that is an interview with Horne in which he sets out the major pieces of new evidence, or new interpretation, he uncovered, you can link straight to that here.

Reading that interview, I'd be tempted to put Horne's book up with James Douglass's JFK And The Unspeakable (my essay on that book from Lobster can be linked to from the Bullseye's listings on the right, or just bang it here) and the LaFontaines' Oswald Talked as the past decade's most substantial and convincing books showing a conspiracy and a cover-up (not necessarily in concert) in the JFK assassination. He's very convincing on the autopsy, and though there aren't any answers provided, when you combine it with the long-ignored evidence in Douglass' book, and the strong case the LaFontaine's make for Oswald's thinking he was a government agent infiltrating subversives, the conclusion that the assassination was not the work of a lone crazed assassin, or even a few crazed assassins, becomes inescapable.

SPIES, LIES AND THE WAR ON TERROR: The Lobster Review

The following appears in the current issue, no 57, of Lobster (£3 from 214 Westbourne Hill Avenue, Hull HU5 3JB) which will be the last in hard-copy format. The issue features a piece on pre-emptive war by Paul Todd, one of the authors of the book I reviewed, a wrap of recent material on the JFK, RFK and Wallace assassinations, a deconstruction of Martin Jacques and Marzism Today's part in the rise of the New Labour Thatcherism, and two amusing pieces, one by Anthony Frewin reminding us that Richard Nixon never confessed anything to David Frost and another drowning in the morass of D. Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories, about which I will eventually write here as well. Lobster will continue in some format on the web, so please keep posted.

Spies, Lies, and the War On Terror
by Paul Todd, Jonathan Bloch, and Patrick Fitzgerald
Zedbooks, £14.99, ISBN 9781842778319

This book is published as the debate rages in America about whether or not the activities of the Bush regime, specifically the torture of various combat detainees and suspects rendered from various parts of the world, should be subject to some sort of investigation, if not a truth and reconciliation commission. The larger issues, involving the systematic bending of the tasks of the intelligence community to create enough of an excuse for war, but also concerning both the morality and legality of such aggressive war, lie dormant behind the sexier images of torture and Abu Ghraib. But the odd thing is that, in America's public debate, 'the facts' of the past eight years remain contentious, and debatable, whereas, as this book clearly illustrates, they are part of a policy continuum, whose boundaries had been set out clearly in the decades before 9/11, and, on a broader scale, whose basic premises continue to threaten civil liberties in the West.

The strength of this book is the way it considers a spectrum of issues, and draws the lines which connect them. It starts by examining the threat of 'Islamism', not in the wake of 9/11 but tracing it back to its roots in the Carter administration's support for Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion. The simple point, that the US and Britain now find themselves just as mired in that country as the Russians did three decades ago, barely needs to be stated. That the architects of an earlier alliance of 'creative destruction', in the brilliant terms of neo-con apparatchick Michael Ledeen, the makers of Iran Contra, should be setting the agenda for the second President Bush came as no surprise, but that there was such a continuum through the Clinton years perhaps should. Depending now on a Sunni 'arc of moderation' has simply inflamed the area further, with Pakistan, rapidly destablising, at the fulcrum of this divide.

Having set out broadly the strategies responsible for creating this mess, and made clear that those responsible remain detemined to make it worse in the interests of promoting their concept of American (and British) ascendancy, the book sets out briefly but comprehensively the nature of the alternative intelligence (and media) structures created to massage the facts into justifications for enacting those plans. Bush, Chaney, and Rumsfeld devised their own intelligence apparatus, not only to produce the desired results, but also to wage a propaganda war on their own population.

Of course, this material that has been out there for years, but what is interesting in this new look at it is the way it is put into the context of an overall approach to the 'threat of Islamism'. Besides revealing the smoke and mirros behind this essential charade, the book's examination of other key long-term links, such as those between the Project for the New American Century and Benjamin Netanyahu's first Israeli government, whose focus continues into the second Natanyahu era, indicate the absurdity of believing the present policies of the West have any desire, much less possibility, of actually achieving a 'solution' in the Middle East.

That Richard Perle was passing information to the Israelis from Senator 'Scoop' Jackson's office, where Paul Wolfowitz also worked, in the early 1970s, simply reinforces the idea that we are seeing a continuum of policy, a 'long war' whose modus operandi, as the authors make clear, we've seen before. The phony intelligence estimates of the Soviet threat, produced in the 1970s by the so-called Team B, were drafted largely by Wolfowitz. The neo-con movement was experienced at phony excuses for military chest-thumping thirty years ago; they simply got better with practice.

After a discussion of the eroding of civil liberties during this 'war on terror', the authors move to a specific discussion of Europe. The US used the 9/11 'attack' to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, and create a platform from which to launch many of its covert operations. One question the authors do not address is the parallel between the way the Pentagon in the US sought to control intelligence, and thus create a policy-making platform for itself, and the way NATO has become an autonomous policy-making body, rather than a mutual defense treaty. They do trace another parallel, in the way the European Union has morphed from a trade and travel agreement into a vast non-elected form of government. They trace in great detail the growing and most worrying aspect of control acquired by unelected bodies, bureaucrats, and indeed failed or disgraced politicians from member countries. Though we look to Europe to protect human rights through its courts, the amount of intelligence currently shared automatically by its members is staggering, and puts projects like the introduction of ID cards in this country into an even more-worrying perspective.

Early in the days of 'axis of evil' and 'war on terror' those of us who alluded to George Orwell and his notion of perpetual war were derided, while the David Frums of the world inhabit the BBC's analysis programmes. If one were to further draw connections to the paranoid work of Philip K Dick in today's electro-magnetic world, one would be similarly marginalised. Yet, as this book concludes, 'calls are monitored, travel circumscribed, and torture is again being routinized (sic). All this is done in the name of security in the War on Terror.'

What was most worrying about the recent G20 protests in London was the way the police have been encouraged to distance themselves from the citizenry, whether protestors or passersby, and consider them uniformly as threats. This is the enduring legacy of the war on terror, and it begins, and ends, with the twisting of intelligence to suit the purposes of bureaucrats with power. This is the chilling warning this book provides.

Between the time I wrote that, and its appearance, I attended the book's launch, where a number of speakers elaborated on the issues raised by Spies, Lies. Tony Bunyan of Statewatch, who wrote The Political Police in Britain some thirty years ago, was the most forceful, pointing out that what was an exceptional situation when he wrote that book has become permanent, everday reality, and with chips in automobiles, medical records, and fingerprinted passports, it can only get worse, as the EU is way ahead of Britain in pioneering the one-card-fits-all model. He pointed out the uses of terror; when police raided the 'ricin factory' in Harringey, they never notified public health authorities, to prepare for a possible emergency; when it turned out there was never any ricin, the news was not released for three years. He pointed out two ironies: that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have perfected the means of surveillance we always accused them of using to cripple liberty, and that the prime use of torture has not been to gain information but to systematically generation further justifications for additional state control and power. In the face of governments harnessing what he called a 'digital tsunami' terrorism doesn't threaten our way of life, but the reaction to terrorism certainly does.

Since then, as well, Barack Obama has made a stirring speech implying a new American position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the same time, his promise to shut down Guantanemo has proven to be riddled with loop-holes, and we've just learned Obama's government plans to 'resettle' some 17 Uighurs, Chinese muslims sold for bounty money to US forces happy to accept any warm bodies as trophies in the war on terror, to the Pacific island of Palau. Palau appears to have discovered some 200 million good reasons for risking the wrath of China and accepting them, but according to the State Department, the gift of such monies was purely coincidential. Really. The rest of the Guantanemo prisoners, who have had done to them things we hung Japanese for back in 1945, remain in limbo. It's hard to determine exactly where Obama's priorities lie, but it seems clear that the progress of the machine seems to be beyond the control of anyone, no matter how stirring their oratory.

JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE: THE LOBSTER ESSAY

My essay on James Douglass' JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE is out now in the current issue of Lobster (number 56) which is published bi-annually. It's the most important book about the JFK assassination since the LaFontaines' OSWALD TALKED, and already one of the key texts for those dissenting from the mainstream's one crazed assassin myth. The review isn't available online, but editor Robin Ramsey has kindly allowed me to post it here. Lobster is a valuable magazine; the current issue includes a fascinating update on the Cecil King 'coup' against Harold Wilson in 1968, an important look at UK connections growing out of the revelations from FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds, Colin Challen MP on crony capitalism, and some curious facts about New Labour networking. The back issue catalogue is full of important material. You can order the magazine (one year, two issues, £8 UK, £9 Europe, £10 ROW) from 214 Westbourne Avenue, Hull HU5 3JB. Its website, which does include some useful older articles, can be found here.


I am writing this immediately after Barack Obama’s victory in the US Presidential election, almost half a century after John Kennedy became the first, and thus far only, Roman Catholic to capture the office. The 1960 election is the first I remember clearly, and the issue of Kennedy’s Catholicism, while perhaps not as dramatic as that of Obama’s race, was a contentious one, and not just in my school-yard. It was presented more along the lines of Obama’s alleged hidden loyalty to Islam: a Catholic president, it was argued, would be subservient to his master in Rome. That Kennedy’s own political strategists brought the issue into play, in order to appeal more to fair-minded Americans, reminds us that Kennedy was first and foremost a creature of politics, of power, and never a creature of religion. Yet when it comes to discussing his assassination, the most striking feature of those who propagate the official ‘lone, crazed assassin’ line is their omission of the crucial, wider issue of political motive.

The logical first question that should be asked, when seeking motive in a murder, is who benefits? In JFK’s case, the answers to that question have sometimes led researchers down blind alleys. While Douglas may not ‘solve’ the assassination, his book’s focus is the careful consideration of motive, which he approaches from a starting point of Catholic theology, specifically that of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose devotion to peace and liberation was often at odds with his own church, not to mention the so-called American religious mainstream. Far from leading Douglas down blind alleys, this approach opens doors for him, because if you can demonstrate clearly, as he does, that Kennedy had made a conscious decision to end the Cold War, the whole issue of Cui bono? becomes much more sharply focused, and the enemies of Kennedy’s policy turnaround step to the fore.

The argument about a conversion of Kennedy the cold-warrior has often been a key point of contention, not least from those on the left, who dismissed John Newman, or Oliver Stone and their insistence on JFK’s desire to pull out of Vietnam as the root cause of his killing. What Douglass has done is take that argument far deeper, by establishing Kennedy’s real desire to move to a more peaceful world, and by detailing the depth of the establishment’s resistance to those ideas.

His centrepiece and starting point is the famous speech at American University in June of 1963, where Kennedy stepped back publicly from his position as a reckless cold warrior who had marched the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Douglass goes from there into great detail, not only on negotiations with the Russians, and the test-ban treaty, or on opening a back-channel of communication with Cuba, but also lesser-known steps toward peace in Africa and southeast Asia, most notably the negotiated settlement with the Pathet Lao. Douglass spends a great deal of time presenting convincing evidence not only of Kennedy’s building of ‘back-channels’ for negotiation with the Soviets and with the Cubans, but that these channels were becoming effective, with the potential to allow Kennedy to by-pass the cold warriors who wanted no dealings with Kruschev or Castro. Douglass’s contention that Kennedy did this out of a real interest in making peace may at first seem naïve, or even sentimental, but as he stacks up the evidence it becomes convincing.

While establishing his thesis of a Kennedy newly devoted to the cause of peace, he also stakes his ground quickly on Oswald, establishing his credentials in intelligence – a familiar argument to anyone who knows the JFK case – but also showing that, far from hating Kennedy or seeing him as a target to propel him to fame, Oswald had been studying the President, reading his books, and admired him. What Douglass does, in constructing these parallel journeys, is establish both men as victims.

But if they were victims, victims of whom? Here it is harder to be specific, but what Douglass establishes beyond any doubt is the pattern of betrayal of Kennedy within the military, intelligence, and even diplomatic corps. In this sense, the real villain of the piece may be Henry Cabot Lodge, loser to Kennedy in the 1952 Senate race, Richard Nixon’s running mate in 1960, and appointed by Kennedy as Ambassador to Vietnam, possibly to keep him out of the running for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. Lodge would drag his heels at reaching any accommodation with Vietnam’s President Diem, while the CIA’s Lucien Conein was busy organising the coup against him, just as the generals dragged their feet on troop withdrawal. With the CIA engineering ‘Quiet American’ style terrorism, bombing a Buddhist monastery in Hue to make it look like the Catholic Diem was responsible, they could back Kennedy into a position from which he could not escape, exactly as they had hoped to do with the Bay of Pigs, and create a pretext for a full-scale invasion of Cuba.

Having set out both Kennedy’s vulnerability, and the desirability of his removal within large portions of the ‘military-industrial complex’, Douglass also sets out the nature of the assassination plot. He draws strands together that become virtually unimpeachable once he’s put them into context. Unlike his secondary research into the politics of Kennedy’s administration, here he draws on his own research, along with some others whose work has been marginalised outside the specialist field. His advantage is that he is looking for a much different sort of proof: simply to show the reach of the plot to kill Kennedy, and again he does it with a parallel construction.

Oswald’s mysterious phone call to Raleigh, North Carolina, while in custody, becomes evidence that he was still involved in intelligence work, since Naval Intelligence maintained a training school there, for false defectors to the Soviet Union. An Oswald still enmeshed in intelligence made the perfect patsy; but Douglass goes a step further, detailing the story of Thomas Vallee, the designated scapegoat for an aborted attempt on Kennedy’s life, had he attended the Army-Air Force football game at Soldier Field in Chicago. Vallee (whose background was similar to Oswald’s, including work at U2 bases in Japan) while driving a car whose registration was closed off by the FBI, was arrested by Chicago police who had strong intelligence connections. After Kennedy’s trip was cancelled, U.S. Treasury agent Abraham Bolden, who questioned the parallels with the situation in Dallas, was persecuted and eventually jailed. Meanwhile, two snipers had been arrested, and three more sought, in Chicago; but no mention was made of this plot in the aftermath of the Dallas investigation.

Similarly, Douglass’s book is particularly convincing on the existence of the second Oswald(s). Ralph Yates picked up an Oswald lookalike hitchhiker carrying ‘curtain rods’ to the Texas School Book Depository –- but two days before the assassination. Yates would wind up being given 40 shock treatments in a state mental hospital. Even better, Douglass builds a convincing case that there was a second Oswald at the Texas Theatre at the time of Oswald’s arrest, and that he was taken out the theatre’s back door as Oswald was led out the front. About ten minutes later, this man was seen nearby, in a car whose plates had been switched, but which traced to a man who was both a friend of J. D. Tippit’s and a contractor for CIA boats smuggling guns into Cuba.

And, in what may be the most fascinating story of all, Douglass traces the intelligence connections of the Paine family, with whom Marina Oswald stayed, and their efforts in keeping Oswald in his dead-end job at the Texas School Book Depository. The simple conclusion, of these and dozens of other facts which Douglass has pieced together, is that there was an operation going on in Dallas, far too complicated to be a simple act by one or even a handful of crazed nuts, and that there had been duplicate plans in place as contingencies. The discarded testimonies of other witnesses take on new and powerful validity when the strength of this hypothesis is accepted.

When news of Kennedy’s death reached Castro he said ‘everything is going to change’. Had he not felt progress was being made with Kennedy, this would make no sense. Douglass will probably be accused of painting a romantic picture of Kennedy as Galahad, but the reality is that his Kennedy is operating not from heroic delusion but from cold reality, in the self-interest of himself, his country and humanity. One cannot escape the sense that he felt himself invulnerable, as a Kennedy, as President of the United States, even if he sought to pursue policies completely counter to the vested interests who had put him where he was.

In contrast, those interests had motive, opportunity, means, and certainly the ruthlessness to proceed with getting him out of the way. They had their patsies ready and waiting; and that is perhaps the most chilling part of Douglass’s analysis: the realisation that these assets were in place for just this sort of eventuality. They had,in Lyndon Johnson, a president they knew would take no steps to upset the Cold War status quo. These are the forces which Merton called ‘the unspeakable’, and they remain with us today.

Toward the end of Kennedy’s 1963 American University speech he reminded the world that ‘the United States will never start a war’. Forty years later, one of the results of his assassination was that the United States proved him wrong. In many ways, James Douglass has produced a book on the Kennedy assassination which ought to serve as a corrective for those not interested in conspiracy theory. It ought to be set against the Posners and Bugliosis who have had mainstream attention lavished on their lawyerly fabrications. It’s one of the most important books on the subject in the past decade, and it’s the one you would give to anyone for whom you wanted to set a starting point of scepticism about the official story.

Watching Barack Obama speak, with the bullet-proof plinths at each side, I was reminded by this just how compelling the interests of those who propagate war can be.

JFK And The Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters
James W. Douglass, Orbis Books, 2008, $30.00 ISBN 9781570757556