From nyt@blythe.org Thu Jul 29 15:21:46 1993 Date: Sat, 10 Jul 93 11:49:51 EDT From: NY Transfer News To: cov@blythe.org, covpub@blythe.org, act@blythe.org, actpub@blythe.org, gen.newsletter@conf.igc.org, alt.activism@conf.igc.org Cc: alt.conspiracy@conf.igc.org Subject: JFK:Open Letter to Noam Chomsky/1 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit From: M.MORRISSEY@ASCO.central.de (Mike Morrissey) AN OPEN LETTER TO NOAM CHOMSKY from Michael Morrissey Kassel, Germany (Part 1 of 2 parts) July 8, 1993 Dear Noam, Based on our private correspondance and your _Z_ magazine article ("Vain Hopes, False Dreams," Oct. 1992), I want to respond publicly to your views on JFK, and this is the best way I know. I haven't got hold of _Rethinking Camelot_ yet, but when and if I find anything there that changes the view I will express here, I'll let you know--same channel, different time. I'm not afraid to admit I'm wrong. In this case, however, much as I admire your work and agree with you on virtually everything else I can think of, I am convinced that you are wrong, and crucially wrong, on two issues: the assassination and the withdrawal policy. As I understand you, you see no political significance in the assassination, no evidence that it was a coup d'itat, and no reversal of the withdrawal policy by Johnson after the assassination. The political significance of the assassination is nil, of course, if the Warren Report is correct. If it is incorrect, as it seems to me the evidence overwhelmingly indicates, some version of the Garrison (coup d'itat) theory MUST be correct, and the significance of that is clear. I say it must be correct because I see no possibility that anyone could have pulled off the coverup without the complicity of the government and the press. Not pro- or anti-Castro Cubans nor Russians nor the Mafia nor "renegade" US intelligence agents. None of these groups could have faked the autopsy, manipulated the Warren Commission, sabotaged the House investigation, etc. and managed the press non-coverage for more than a quarter of a century. However that complicity operates--by "manufacturing consent," as you put it, by conscious conspiracy, or (more likely) by a combination of the two, it is real. What Garrison's theory does not explain, but your propaganda model [cf. _Manufacturing Consent_] does, is the refusal or inability of the intelligentsia to take Garrison et al. seriously--a prime example of what you call Orwell's problem (Why do we know so little?) and of education as the best form of propaganda in a "free" society. Why else would 99% of elite opinion be so vehemently against the Stone film, when half the US population thought Garrison might be right (i.e. that the CIA or military may have been involved)--even before they saw the film (Time, 1/13/92:40, European ed.)? If we had "won" the war in Vietnam, ` la Gulf, maybe the truth could have been allowed to emerge. Then one could conceivably argue that "victory" was so important that Kennedy's assassination was necessary for "national security" reasons. But as things turned out, this excuse is impossible. Theoretically, one could still say, "Well, we thought the Vietnam War was so important that JFK had to be sacrificed,' but it wouldn't work. In reality, it is impossible to admit the truth about the assassination because it violates the necessary illusion (to use your term; cf. Necessary Illusions) that "such things don't happen in the USA." The irony is that exactly the same excuse is acceptable, as long as the president's assassination is omitted: "Well, we thought the Vietnam War was so important that 58,000 Americans and a couple of million Vietnamese had to be sacrificed." That is a perfectly acceptable truth, violating no illusions, since it is quite normal for us to sacrifice our own lives and other worthless entities for the good of the State--but not the life of a president. I do not share the "Camelot" illusions, though one cannot help but observe that JFK was the last president to have any charisma and independence of mind whatsoever--neither of which are desirable qualities of leadership in a national security state. He did stand up to the Mafia and the CIA, which doesn't necessarily make him any less of a thug or less dangerous, but in fact it made him more dangerous--to his handlers. He bucked the Joint Chiefs and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs by refusing to send in the Navy and the Marines, and there was similar pressure to attack the Russian ships during the missile crisis. He defied them again ('them'=the military-industrial-intelligence-complex) with the Vietnam withdrawal decision. It was the Bay of Pigs all over again. My theory about the Bay of Pigs is that the CIA sabotaged it themselves. The purpose was to put Kennedy in exactly the position he ended up in: send in the troops or face disaster. The scenario was repeated in 1963 in Vietnam. The clandestine involvement had built up since at least 1954 and probably since 1945 (when Ho Chi Minh was still an ally), climaxing in the fall of 1963, when again it was: call it war or call it quits. Kennedy refused again, for the last time. These snafus don't occur any more. In the Gulf War, it was not necessary to manoeuvre Bush, the CIA's own, into position; it was only a matter of getting congress into position, which was accomplished by Jan. 12: fight or be humiliated (after drawing a 500,000-man line in the sand and months of name-calling). I have no inclination to defend Kennedy's record otherwise. He probably did what was expected of him on most occasions, but in that office you can't make too many mistakes. Witness Noriega, Saddam, etc., who also got out of line. Even Bush can make mistakes, like his hesitation about sending the troops into Iraq last April [1991]. Whatever the particularities were in that case, I doubt that it was a coincidence that Bush changed his mind the day after the Times published Gary Sick's October Surprise story (after ignoring the whole thing for years). In the end, JFK was a victim, just like the rest of us. He may have been a thug, but he was an inconvenient thug, and not enough of a thug for the people who really run the show. If others want to play up the significance of the test ban treaty, the rapprochement with Cuba and the Soviets, JFK's (albeit reluctant) commitment to civil rights, his opposition to Big Oil, the Federal Reserve, the Mafia, and the CIA, and so on, frankly I don't mind, because the arguments are going in the right direction. I doubt that any of those factors alone could have brought about the assassination and coverup, but the war was bigger than all of them put together. It's interesting to note that the JFK reviews (Alexander Cockburn being an exception in this respect) do their best to obscure this point, usually burying the Vietnam issue in the middle of a paragraph in the middle of the article among all the "other possible" reasons for the assassination. There are no headlines that read: "Was JFK Killed Because He Wanted to Withdraw from Vietnam?' This is the main message of the film, as most people who see it will confirm, but it presents an impermissible question--ok for the movies but not for the newspapers. Let me risk an analogy. Suppose Roosevelt had accepted his advisers" recommendation not to drop the bomb, and made this policy by issuing a NSAM to that effect. "The war is going well and I don't want to kill that many Japs," he supposedly thought. He is murdered. Truman immediately orders a major review of the no-bomb policy and shortly thereafter, citing unforeseen developments in the progress of the war, he drops the bomb. Of course, the analogy is weak because we are talking about Japs as the victims instead of 58,000 of our own red-blooded, but still, would you be comfortable saying Truman's decision to drop the bomb was a matter of "tactics"? Would you say there was no policy change, that Truman did not reverse Roosevelt's decision, that Roosevelt and Truman in fact had the same policy about dropping the bomb? Would you insist on saying this, as opposed to saying "Truman reversed Roosevelt's no-bomb policy because conditions changed"? Add to this fictive scenario the fact that Roosevelt's murder occurred under very suspicious circumstances, much of the evidence (and lack of it) pointing to the military-industrial-intelligence establishment, who badly wanted the bomb dropped for various (the usual) reasons. Would it be unreasonable to suspect a connection between the smaller crime of the murder and the larger one of the dropping of the bomb? It might be true that if all of the claims about JFK's alleged policies and intentions collapse, then so does the interest of the assassination (not collapse but probably diminish), but so is the converse: If interest in the assassination collapses, so does the interest in JFK's Vietnam policy. Likewise, as the Stone movie shows, the more interest in the assassination, the more interest in Vietnam. In my opinion, this is why the assassination coverup has been maintained so long. People may not care too much about the murder of a president, even if it was a coup, but they still care about Vietnam. This is why it has taken a quarter of a century for people (including me) to start thinking about the possible connection, and why it is so important for the Establishment to denounce the Stone movie. The idea that the conspirators not only took over the government and killed JFK and dozens of witnesses is one thing; the idea that they killed 58,000 Americans, not to mention millions of Southeast Asians, is quite another. In any case, the issues of the assassination and Vietnam will not be separated until the assassination is clarified--which may take a while. It is not possible to separate them by asking what JFK would have done in Vietnam, because the answer is unknowable. We are left with the fact of the policy change, which is now, thanks to the movie, entering the realm of permissible knowledge, the fact of the assassination, the many facts (and lack of them) that implicate the government, and the many as yet unknown, but knowable, facts such as how big is the hole is the back of JFK's skull, which could be ascertained simply by exhuming the body. (They dug up Zachary Taylor last year, but they are not likely to dig up JFK until he is as important to us as Zachary Taylor is, i.e. not at all.) Here's another way of looking at it. Suppose there was as much uncertainty in 1963 among certain powerful elements about what JFK would do in Vietnam as there is now about what he would have done. If the war was important enough to them, this uncertainty could have been enough to bring about the coup. This has to be taken into account too: ultimately we are dealing with the question not so much of JFK's actual intentions but of how those intentions were perceived by the (possible) coup plotters. I agree with you that some of Kennedy's public statements contradict his policy. That is quite normal. A president who wanted to get out of Vietnam and didn't care about losing face or maintaining the support of his own administration, the military, the ruling elite, and the conservative elements in Congress and the population at large, would not have had to dissemble. But JFK was indeed a political animal. He could not ignore the powerful forces opposing withdrawal. His problem was to get out under the pretext of success, if not victory. That was still possible in 1963, when only about 50 Americans had died in Vietnam. When I said that Stone deserves credit for informing people about the withdrawal plan, I meant the general public today. Despite the press reports at the time, and despite the Pentagon Papers (Gravel, but not the NYT edition), the consensus of historians has been that JFK got us into Vietnam, and Johnson got us in deeper. I'm sure that if one had taken a survey before the film came out, one would have found that almost everyone thought this, and that almost no one knew about JFK's withdrawal plan--unless they had read some of the assassination literature. The deception need not have been as elaborate as you think. All you need are a few key people to keep the screws on, and I can't think of any organization where this should be easier than in the military or the CIA. It's easy to spread lies from the top. The Warren Commission is a prime example of that. For every "authority" who lies, there can be thousands or millions who assume these lies are the gospel truth. If there is a huge edifice of deception, it does not mean everybody is lying, just that everybody is deceived. Even within the Warren Commission, half the members may have been merely deceived, with just the other half (Dulles, Ford, Warren, McCloy) the deceivers. Accepting, believing and repeating lies is not the same as lying, though the effect may be the same. My point about "stupidity" was that this is what the public is often left with as an "explanation" of the messes the government makes, though of course it is expressed differently. Vietnam was an "unfortunate mistake." April Glaspie made an "unfortunate mistake" when she told Saddam the US didn't care about Arab-Arab border disputes. This is what we are asked to believe: that our bright guys in Washington (Glaspie too had her instructions from Washington) make these stupid but well-intentioned errors, and we stumble into war. I don't believe it. Saddam was sandbagged. Washington wanted that war for the same reason they wanted Vietnam--to protect the US corporate hegemony, generate dollars for the warmongers, stimulate the domestic economy, and distract the population from internal troubles. You say there is no evidence for the coup theory of the assassination, that it is remote from the factual record and would have required phenomenal discipline of thousands of people. Wrong on all points. We needn't get into the morass of details on the assassination; there are plenty of books on that. But I see no place where it deviates from the "factual record," inasmuch as there is one, including the "fact" we are discussing here but do not seem to be able to agree on: that Johnson reversed the withdrawal policy. The murder in Dallas did not have to involve thousands of people-- maybe a couple of dozen. Nor did (does) the coverup. Take the people present at the autopsy, for example. (Not all of them have even been identified, which is in itself evidence of conspiracy.) Nearly all of them, even Humes at one point--have described wounds quite different from those shown in the official photos and X- rays. This means the latter are fakes, as many of the medical personnel have unequivocally said. Who could have done that? Not most of the people present at the autopsy, only some. And so it goes. It doesn't take many people to manipulate others, just the right ones. Fear, intimidation, propaganda, a false sense of duty, ideological blindness, etc. do the rest. Nevertheless, over the years, people have come forward, and much evidence has come out. Aren't you applying a much more restrictive standard for "evidence" in this case than in others? The Church committee turned up no evidence that the CIA had ever assassinated anyone or been involved in any assassination plots other than the one to kill Castro, but does this mean there really was no evidence? Is there more evidence for US government involvement in the assassinations of Diem, Lumumba, Trujillo, Allende, etc. than in the case of Kennedy? Yet US complicity in these coups is common knowledge, even in America. On the larger scale, what "evidence" is there that US foreign policy is guided by economic and not humanitarian interests? What evidence is there that the US was not fighting for the freedom of the South Vietnamese, or the freedom of the Kuwaitis? What makes the evidence in these cases better than the evidence in the JFK assassination? What the National Academy of Sciences said about the acoustic evidence is inconclusive, and I for one don't give a damn how respectable its members are. The Warren Commission was respectable too. Suppose the National Academy of Sciences concluded--as they probably would--that there is no "evidence" that the US is an imperialistic country or that Washington is the terrorist capital of the world, as you have written. Would that settle the matter, relegating all claims to the contrary to the realm of pure speculation? You say in reference to the coup theory that "all counterevidence can be eliminated simply by appeal to the assumption"--I guess meaning the assumption that the theory is correct. But surely you will agree that this is how all theories are investigated and tested. How do you investigate and test the theory (or assumption) that the Vietnam War was a war of aggression by the US against the South Vietnamese people for global strategic and economic reasons? Do you not eliminate the counterevidence by appeal to the assumption? Do you really think there is more evidence for this than for the theory that the assassination was a conspiracy, or a coup d'itat? Your position on the assassination puzzles me greatly. Why should the assassination of Fred Hampton be more politically significant than that of Martin Luther King or the Kennedy brothers? The two great popular movements of the sixties, civil rights and antiwar, were historically intertwined, and in terms of their political impact remained a combined threat to the Establishment beyond their ideological split. The largest common denominator was the war. King was killed not long after he (finally) came out against it, RFK likewise. It's not difficult to imagine the enormity of the threat posed to the ruling elite by MLK, with blacks and the poor behind him, and RFK, with the white middle-class antiwar movement rallying behind him (after McCarthy chickened out), both at the height of their popularity in the summer of 68. One may say that the "Wise Men" had already decided to start winding down the war by then, but it wasn't just the war that was at stake. I don't want to get into another discussion over whether RFK would have ended the war any quicker than Nixon did(!), but from my recollection of the temper of the times, and confirmed by everything I've read, if I had been one of the 1% running the country at that time I would have been scared to death. Scared that the war would end too soon and too abruptly, scared that the truth about it (that it never should have occurred) would come out too fast, scared that the truth about the JFK assassination would come out, scared that too many people might get the idea they really can change the government if they get together, scared that that "pushy bleeding-heart knee-jerk liberal phony little Kennedy brother" might give that "Commie bimbo King" the idea that blacks are people too, etc.--in short, that all hell would break loose. I know that the record shows that Johnson did much more for blacks than either Kennedy did, but that is not the way they were perceived. Nobody doubted that Johnson was a racist; there was some doubt (justified or not), even among many blacks, about the Kennedys. For keeping blacks in place, i.e. running in place behind the carrots that new legislation offered them, Johnson was a safer bet than the Kennedys, and I'm sure this was the consensus not only among Texas oilmen. continued in part 2... + Join Us! Support The NY Transfer News Collective + + We deliver uncensored information to your mailbox! + + Modem:718-448-2358 Fax:718-448-3423 E-mail: nyt@blythe.org +