Hello, suckers! This is Lee Harvey Oswald, speaking to you from--Nah, I'm not telling. A lot of you think I'm burning in hell for what the late CIA vet E. Howard Hunt, in a taped confession that he left with his son, called "the big event" in Dallas, for which Hunt was a "benchwarmer." Hate to disappoint you, suckers, but I'm not in hell, 'cause I didn't off anyone. (Can't speak for Hunt. Ha, ha, ha! More on him in a minute.)
I was set up big-time, as most Americans, according to the polls, agree. 1 Trouble is, most Americans don't care. That's why all of you--those who buy the government's lone-nut crap and those who don't--are suckers. Who was it who said the price of liberty is "eternal vigilance"? 2 Ha, ha, ha! So from Dallas they go on to Memphis to off Martin Luther King, Jr., then from there to LA to off Senator Robert F. Kennedy (running for prez as if his brother's assassins wouldn't notice). 3 They know from Dallas that you folks are suckers who let 'em get away with this stuff.
And who exactly are "they"? That's a no-brainer. They're operatives of what's called the national security state. After World War II, see, we had the Cold War to fight. To do this, President Truman proposed, and Congress passed, the National Security Act of 1947, creating the CIA, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 4 (We already had J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, which Truman himself called "dangerous.") 5 Sound kind of scary? While the Act was scary enough to a lot of Americans in 1947, the Communist menace scared people too. But though the Act had good intentions, critics feared it might create an American Frankenstein's monster. Well, guess what, by 1954 the CIA, which was supposed to collect information on foreign governments, was busy overthrowing 'em. President Eisenhower warned us in vain about the dangers of "the military industrial complex" (he should have said, more properly, "the military industrial intelligence complex") in his 1961 farewell address. Then a monster hit Dallas in '63, and it wasn't me.
Oh, and who likes to put horses' heads in people's beds? Yeah, the Cosa Nostra was involved in the Dallas thing too, at least for diversion (a "false sponsor," as they call it) and to give to the world Jack Ruby. Sam Giancana and other Mafiosi had already helped the CIA try to off Castro. 6 The Mob was pleased as punch to help do Dallas, what with JFK's attorney general--none other than brother Robert--trying to have 'em all jailed (or deported, as in the case of New Orleans don Carlos Marcello in 1961), while JFK, by the way, was sleeping with Giancana's girlfriend Judy Campbell. 7 (Real smart, guys!) The illegally deported Marcello, whose territory included Dallas, was stateside again in two months, but, boy, was he ticked.
Hey, wanna play a game? I call it blown cover. That's when something goes wrong, exposing some party or part in a covert operation. Ready? Okay, on that day in Dallas, who was the guy with Secret Service credentials, encountered on the Grassy Knoll, right after the shooting, by motorcycle cop Joe M. Smith, when according to the government there were no SS agents anywhere on the ground in Dealey Plaza? (Smith later said that he should have checked this character closer: Showing his SS credentials when he saw Smith's drawn pistol, the guy "looked like an auto mechanic," casually dressed and with "dirty fingernails.") 14 Blown cover! But it didn't matter. Smith let the guy go on about his business--which by that time probably meant getting out of Dallas.
Then there's Seymour Weitzman, a county deputy constable, who also looked around behind the Grassy Knoll fence right after the shooting. Researcher Michael Canfield visited Seymour years later--this was after Watergate--in a VA hospital (Seymour was undergoing treatment for schizophrenia), to try to find out who that Secret Service imposter on the Grassy Knoll was. When Canfield showed Seymour a photo of E. Howard Hunt's fellow Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, the schizoid patient said, "That's him." 15 (Wait a minute! Was Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon in Dallas too that day? As a matter of fact, he was--representing Pepsi at a bottlers convention. 16 Ha, ha, ha! I'll bet they used Pepsi bottles for target practice. He left town, though, before the shooting, which was just as well, since Nixon couldn't shoot straight anyway.)
Why was Army intelligence officer James Powell in Dealey Plaza taking pictures? He even snapped a pic of the Texas School Book Depository Building--from which I did all the shooting (ha, ha, ha!)--right after the shots. (Maybe he was trying to get a picture of me, suitable for framing.) Where are his other pics?
Powell told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he was off duty that day, but Colonel Robert Jones, from the same Army intelligence group as Powell, told the committee that Powell was on duty. 17 Anybody know? (Why didn't the committee find out who was lying?) Jones also called the FBI in Dallas right after my arrest and gave them info on me from an Army intelligence file. (What? An intelligence file on little ol' me?) When the House Committee asked for that file, the Department of Defense said that unfortunately it had been destroyed. 18 Ha, ha, ha! (The committee found this "extremely troublesome.")
How come suspected Mob figure Eugene Hale Brading (alias Jim Braden) happened to be in the plaza's Dal-Tex Building (as did one of the shooters) when JFK was offed (Brading was briefly arrested after the shooting for acting suspiciously), then five years later happened to be registered at the Century Plaza Hotel in LA on the night Robert was offed, at the Ambassador just a few blocks away? 19 Boy, Mr. Brading got around. What would an assassination be without him?
I could go on and on with little things that suggest there was almost a convention of conspirators in Dallas that day. But what's the point? Do nothing about it. That's the legacy of Dallas. Give 'em free rein. Might as well have an Arkansas gangster in the White House, one with ties to the CIA. You know, all that Contra arms/drug-smuggling business through the Mena, Arkansas airport. 20 And if Clinton lawyer Vince Foster turns up dead from lead poisoning, and the First Lady has certain files removed before police are allowed in Foster's White House office, just call it suicide and good housekeeping. 21 See the book on Ron Brown, though, if you think, like the establishment media accepts without question, that Brown's death (while he reportedly was about to be indicted for corruption) was an accident. 22
And look at Capitol Hill. Those clowns make me puke and I'm dead. They argue about what is a lie and if real sex can be oral, and pass bills like the Patriot Act and trillion-dollar budgets without even reading them, but mum's the word about who may have murdered whom. I call this the Boggs Syndrome. Rep. Hale Boggs was the Warren Commission member who later told a researcher that he had "strong doubts" about the single-bullet theory and that the question had never been resolved. 24 (That was the "magic bullet" theory that allowed the commission--after it moved the wound in JFK's back up six inches--to pin all the shooting on me.) 25 Boggs, who in 1971 accused the FBI of tapping his phone, was a loose cannon among the Warren Commission alumni. So one day his airplane disappeared, with him on it. 26
Yeah, you're not dumb, you're just suckers, 'cause you don't care. "Eternal vigilance," right. The truth is, "It's the economy, stupid," like Clinton man James Carville said. That's what's important to the American people, not justice, not doing the right thing or getting your elected representatives to do it (ha, ha, ha!) or else voting their butts out of office.
So here's your civics lesson for today. Presidents, by ballot, bullet, impeachment, or resignation, come and go, some more corrupt than others, but the real powers that be, thanks to the Cold War and the '63 coup d'etat, are entrenched. They don't care who the hell's president unless he threatens their interests--as Johnny Carson's Art Fern used to say (breaking his pointer for emphasis), "Then we care!" First it was JFK, who likely would have pulled out of Nam, talked about scattering the CIA to the winds, and had no intention of exempting the FBI's Hoover from retirement. Well, we saw who got scattered and who didn't retire. Then they offed Robert Kennedy, who they knew would be holding a grudge, before he could even get elected. How could Bobby be so dumb? He must have hoped they were out of magic bullets. Fat chance. Fired from the front, the fatal shot circled around and hit him behind the ear, complete with powder burns. Blown cover, but it didn't matter, except to coroner Tom Noguchi, who after performing the autopsy wanted an inquest. He got suspended from his job. 27
Then there was Tricky Dick Nixon himself, who, once elected, got friendly with China, negotiated for peace in Vietnam, and started his own domestic intelligence agency, the lawless White House "Plumbers." Ha, ha, ha! Now you know who set him up with the bungled Watergate burglary. The poor jerk didn't know what hit him. 28 But hey, on Nixon and Dallas, remember Nixon's seemingly nonsensical references in the Watergate tapes to the Bay of Pigs (site of a 1961 botched CIA-backed invasion of Cuba, an infamous failure that the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans bitterly blamed on JFK)? Nixon puzzles White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman by saying, "Tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans (jailed Watergate burglars) is tied to the Bay of Pigs," and "When you get the CIA people in, say: 'Look, the problem is that this (Watergate investigation) will open the whole Bay of Pigs thing again. So they should call the FBI in and (tell them) . . . don't go any further into this case. Period.'" 29 When Haldeman dutifully conveyed Nixon's "Bay of Pigs" message to CIA director Richard Helms (to get him to call off the FBI), Helms, to Haldeman's bafflement, exploded in anger, saying, "This has nothing to do with the Bay of Pigs!" 30 Haldeman later concluded that Nixon used "Bay of Pigs" as a code term for the JFK assassination. 31 In other words, some or all of the Watergate burglars, according to Nixon, had been involved in the JFK hit. It's a safe bet that Tricky Dick, at that bottler's convention in Dallas, knew that something was going down that day, and it wasn't just Pepsi.
After the ephemeral Ford (who is mainly remembered for pardoning Nixon), Georgia cracker Carter pretty much stayed out of trouble, except for the Ayatollah and an attack by a killer rabbit. With Reagan and Bush it was down and dirty again, with the CIA's Iran/Contra operation--helped out by the Arkansas governor--arming terrorists and at best turning a blind eye to drug trafficking. When the whole mess unraveled, there was a fall guy in place, right there in the White House: Colonel North had been a bad boy. Ronald "I Didn't Know" Reagan was still the loveable Gipper, and George H. "Out of the Loop" Bush got his turn in the White House. (Bush would have gotten it sooner, but for once a magic bullet--it curved around a car door to hit Reagan--didn't do the job.) 32 Bush wound up with one term only, because the Arkansas governor, for his help in Iran/Contra, had been promised a turn in the White House too.
As for Slick Willie, I've already mentioned two of the most notable casualties (Foster and Brown) of the Clinton regime. I'll also mention all the men, women, and children who were gassed with CS dissolved in methylene chloride, then burned alive or dead, by the FBI at Waco in 1993. CS produces deadly hydrogen cyanide when burned, and has been banned in warfare, but Clinton's attorney general said that it's okay to use it on our own people. 33 Shades of Saddam Hussein.
As for George W. Bush and his neocon junta, or Barack Obama and his "change" (which includes keeping an 8-year-old war in Afghanistan going strong for the military industrial complex, while the rest of the country goes broke), don't get me started. Does it matter? The way the national security state, its media lackeys, and its cowards in Congress play you for suckers, time's running out on your democracy anyway. It's dying, ambushed in Dallas and left bleeding to death ever since. Whose fault is it? To quote Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
So long, suckers. It's time for this dead Commie rat to go crawl back under his rock. Ha, ha, ha!
With contempt,
Lee Harvey Oswald
Footnotes:
1. 70 percent of American adults believe that the assassination was part of a larger plot, according to an ABC News poll conducted in November 2003 (Penny Cockerell, "JFK Conspiracy Theories Abound 40 Years after Assassination," Associated Press, November 22, 2003). According to a Fox News poll conducted in October 2003, 66 percent of the public think the assassination was part of a larger conspiracy (Dana Blanton, "Poll: Most Believe 'Cover-Up' of JFK Assassination Facts," Fox News, November 21, 2003).
2. Attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
3. See William Pepper, The Plot to Kill King (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016); William W. Turner and Jonn G. Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993); and William Klaber and Philip H. Melanson, Shadow Play: The Murder of RFK, the Trial of Sirhan Sirhan, and the Failure of American Justice (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997); Shane O'Sullivan, "Did the CIA Kill Bobby Kennedy?," The Guardian, November 20, 2006.
4. Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
5. Ibid., p. 255.
6. For information on the CIA-Mafia attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, see Debra Conway, "U.S.-Cuba Relations: Castro Assassination Plots," JFK Lancer Online Resources, 2003.
7. On Marcello's humiliating deportation, see John H. Davis, Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), pp. 101-113; on JFK's affair with Judith Campbell Exner, see Davis, pp. 320-321, 406-407; James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Manhattan, KS: University Press of Kansas), pp. 148-149; and Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker, All American Mafioso: The Johnny Roselli Story (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 207-209.
8. Noel Twyman, Bloody Treason: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Rancho Santa Fe, CA: Laurel Publishing, 1997), pp. 799-809; John Delane Williams and Debra Conway, "The Don Reynolds Testimony and LBJ," Kennedy Assassination Chronicles 7(Spring 2001):15-24.
9. See James M. Carter, "War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq." Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth, Texas, with a 1966 federal contract for 2,110 UH-1 Iroquois helicopters (www.helis.com), and General Dynamics, whom LBJ helped secure for its Fort Worth plant the $7-billion contract for the TFX fighter plane (see Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK [Berkeley: University of California Press], pp. 220-221), were also among the financial beneficiaries of the Vietnam War. The national security state is synonymous with what President Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address, called the military-industrial complex, "the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry" made permanent by World War II, Korea, and the Cold War. "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought," Eisenhower warned, "by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
10. On Hoover's sexual orientation and the mandatory retirement issue, see Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 159, 179-180, 192, 240, 536; and Mark North, Act of Treason: The Role of J. Edgar Hoover in the Assassination of President Kennedy (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991), pp. 13-14, 23-24, 130.
11. Erik Hedegaard, "The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt," Rolling Stone, March 21, 2007; "Hunt Blames JFK Hit on LBJ," New York Post, January 14, 2007; E. Howard Hunt, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond (New York: Wiley, 2007); "Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies at 88," Associated Press, January 24, 2007. To hear an audio clip from Hunt's 2004 taped confession, played during an April 28, 2007 interview of his son Saint John Hunt on Coast to Coast AM radio, click here.
12. Philip H. Melanson, Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence (New York: Praeger, 1990).
13. Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (New York: Carroll & Graff, 1989), p. 586.
14. U.S. House of Representatives, House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), 1979, I:184; Anthony Summers, Not in Your Lifetime (New York: Marlowe & Co., 1998), pp. 36-37.
15. Alan J. Weberman and Michael Canfield, Coup D'etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (San Francisco: Quick American Archives, 1992), pp. 55-57; for Seymour's version of Canfield's visit, see HSCA Document 180-10088-10083. In his Warren Commission testimony (VII:105-109) and 11/23/63 FBI interview, Weitzman mentioned no one suspicious encountered on the Grassy Knoll.
16. Dallas Morning News, November 22, 1963, section 4, page 1.
17. See Debra Conway, "The Secret Service Agent on the Knoll," JFK Lancer Online Resources, 2001. Colonel Jones even misstated to the committee his own duty position with the 112th Intelligence group: he was never its operations officer as he claimed (Larry Hancock, "Mysteries of the 112th Intelligence Corps Group," 2001 November in Dallas Conference Presentation [JFK Lancer Productions and Publications], p. 4).
18. HSCA, I:221-224.
19. G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings, Fatal Hour: The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime (New York: Berkley Books, 1992), pp. 429-431.
20. See Terry Reed and John Cumming, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA (New York: Spibooks, 1994).
21. See Christopher Ruddy, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster (New York: Free Press, 2002).
22. Jack Cashill, Ron Brown's Body: How One Man's Death Saved the Clinton Presidency and Hillary's Future (Nashville, TN: WND Books, 2004).
23. Lee Israel, Kilgallen (New York: Dell, 1979), pp. 350-356, 422-427.
24. Edward Jay Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), p. 155.
25. Stewart Galanor, Cover-Up (New York: Kestrel Books, 1998), pp. 22-23.
26. Robert J. Groden, The Killing of a President (New York: Viking, 1993), p. 129.
27. Turner and Christian, pp. 162-165.
28. See Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: Acacia Press, 2000).
29. H. R. Haldeman, with Joseph DiMona, The Ends of Power (New York: New York Times Books, 1978), pp. 25, 33.
30. Ibid., p. 37-38.
31. Ibid., p. 39.
32. "Did John Hinckley Jr. Really Shoot Reagan?", AboveTopSecret.com, November 25, 2005.
33. Jack Wheeler, "Waco and America's Saddam," The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 41, October 18, 1999.
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