I am something of a connoisseur of the extensive literature of the
Kennedy assassination. Over the last few years I have devoured almost
every important book on the subject, including, I regret to say, quite
a few that I now feel certain were disinformation efforts - for
example, Dick Russell's
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1992) and Barr McClellan's
Blood, Money, and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK (2003). Although from a strictly literary standpoint Russell's
Man Who Knew Too Much
is quite the best book relating to the assassination - I am referring
to the tightened-up revised edition published in 2003, not the original
loose and baggy monster - the sad fact is that in this work nothing is
revealed other than that Richard Case Nagell, the so-called 'man who
knew too much' of the book's title, may have known something about the
assassination before it occurred. Since we never find out who Nagell
was working for - you'd think Russell would have managed to establish
at least that fact - there is no reason to credit any of his claims,
such as that he went to New Orleans to dissuade Oswald from
participating in the assassination and that a photo of himself with
Oswald taken on that very occasion is preserved in a secure location
outside the United States.
Having read around 120 books on the
assassination, I would say that broadly speaking assassination
literature can be divided into two classes. First, there are books,
articles and websites that purport to dispense new information, such as
revelations from people who claim to have been involved themselves
(e.g., Nagell, James Files) or to have known people who were involved
(e.g., Jack Ruby), or people who may have been involved (like Lee
Harvey Oswald). The public is justifiably sick of books like these,
partly because they have been surfeited with them over the years and
partly because there is no means of assessing their veracity.
Information deriving from unidentified sources is obviously suspect,
but, unfortunately, almost always necessary in the case of a person
possessing genuine information about the 'crime of the century.' This
means that a great deal of assassination literature is effectively a
cul-de-sac.
In the second category are synthetic accounts, efforts to achieve an overall picture, like Matthew Smith's
JFK: The Second Plot.
Such books are often useful for challenging one's existing frame of the
assassination, but the more such books one reads, the more one becomes
aware of how much pertinent information they leave out. How can one
accept, for instance, an account of the assassination which presents
Oswald as a participant (as does Russell's), when there is actually no
evidence to prove that he knew anything about the assassination at all?
(I do not mean to rule out the possibility that he was involved, only
to point out that there is no evidence proving that he was.)
The
fact is that while many such syntheses make enthralling reading, there
is very little that would permit the reader to privilege one writer's
view of the assassination over another. None can be regarded as
entirely satisfying. By far the most important genuine investigation of
the assassination is David Lifton's
Best Evidence (1981). In
this book, Lifton focused on hitherto neglected aspects of the
assassination, and demonstrated how the assassination cover up was made
possible by the faking the autopsy evidence. Whether this was done by
altering the president's body or simply by faking the autopsy notes and
X-rays, as some JFK researchers believe (because the idea is less
macabre?), is a secondary matter. However, in my view Lifton presents a
mass of evidence - gathered, it must be said, by exemplary
investigative means - that compels the conclusion that Kennedy's body
was altered. Many of the events of November 22, 1963 are wholly
inexplicable if they were not being engineered in order to create an
opportunity for this to happen.
The passage of time has only been good to Lifton. As Douglas Horne wrote recently in
The Assassination of JFK (2004):
David
Lifton's thesis in his 1981 book "Best Evidence" has been validated by
the work of the ARRB [Assassinations Records Review Board] staff. Our
unsworn interviews and depositions of Dallas (Parkland Hospital)
medical personnel and Bethesda autopsy participants confirm that the
President's body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital in a markedly
different condition than it was in when seen at Parkland for
life-saving treatment. My conclusion is that wounds were indeed altered
and bullets were indeed removed prior to the autopsy at Bethesda Naval
Hospital. This procedure altered the autopsy conclusions and presented
a false picture of how the shooting took place. In most essential
details, David Lifton "got it right" in his 1981 bestseller.
If you leave aside Lifton's outstanding book, the only major contribution to the case has been Mark Lane's
Plausible Denial, which, while less gripping than
Best Evidence, convincingly demonstrates by means of a court case involving the
Spotlight magazine that the CIA had something to do with the assassination. Exactly what remains unclear, however.
After
forty years of independent investigation - and the official
investigations have been utterly worthless - what has accumulated is a
vast amount of evidence of connections between people who were
apparently involved in the assassination is some way. Evidence of
connections, unfortunately, is of limited value as a window on the
assassination. Until the publication of Michael Collins Piper's book
Final Judgment
(first edition in 1994), it was virtually impossible to discern any
interest underlining even the most solidly attested
assassination-related connections. There seemed to be some secret
agenda that remained utterly concealed from view. It is perhaps for
this reason that Peter Dale Scott has spoken of 'deep politics,' a
concept which is so elusive that I still haven't grasped it, but which
seems to be an allusion to the interests of the military industrial
complex. A less charitable interpretation is that Scott uses the term
to obfuscate politics that are not really so deep after all, but which
he would probably prefer to keep buried deeply.
Piper's
Final Judgment
represents the culmination of the tradition of exploring the
assassination by means of analysing the connections between individuals
who can legitimately be suspected of involvement in the assassination.
What's more, Piper succeeds where no one has done before in identifying
an interest that would unite most if not all of the actors suspected of
involvement: Israel. Piper's theory, by far the most comprehensive of
any presented so far, essentially identifies Israel, its close
supporters inside the CIA and Jewish-American organized crime as the
perpetrators of the atrocity in Dealey Plaza. The issue that
crystallized Jewish-Israeli opposition to JFK was his determination not
only to prevent nuclear proliferation, but to prevent the situation in
the Middle East from developing into a situation that would destabilize
the entire region (as, in fact, it has). While JFK was therefore
opposed to Israel acquiring nuclear weapons, Israeli Prime Minister
David Ben-Gurion was convinced - as were most of the Israeli power
structure - that possession of nuclear weapons was the only way to
assure the country's survival.
It is for this latter reason that
Piper's book cannot be dismissed as an anti-Zionist conspiracy theory.
Anyone who knows anything about the history of Zionism knows that
Zionists were willing to go to any lengths to bring about the creation
of a Zionist state, while those who oversaw the birth of that state,
like Ben-Gurion, were willing to go to any lengths to protect it.
Attempts to disparage Piper's book look to me like specious attempts to
prevent the public from learning what anyone with a good knowledge of
history does in fact already know.
This does not mean that Piper
provides a smoking gun: he brandishes no crumpled notes scribbled in
Ben-Gurion's handwriting reading 'Reminder: must get the Mossad to hit
JFK!'. The idea that definitive proof of complicity could ever emerge
in this case is, of course, utterly naive. Most evidence would probably
have been destroyed, while anything incriminating that survives would
be safe in the hands of agencies tasked with covering up the crime.
That leaves identification of the interests binding all the known and
probable participants as the only means of working out who was behind
the assassination. It is this task that Michael Piper Collins has
accomplished superbly. What's more, since the publication of the book,
the essential thesis - the Mossad did it - has been confirmed by
another one of the Mossad's victims, nuclear scientist
Mordechai Vanunu.
Due to his mistreatment by the Israeli state, Vanunu has a motive for
going public with information critical of Israel, but not a motive for
lying. (Vanunu seems to be a man of immense integrity whose only
weakness is the bizarre notion that if the Israeli authorities would
allow him to leave Israel he would find a safe haven in the U.S. In
fact, he's probably safer in Israel. In the U.S. would have been gunned
down by now by someone from the Jewish terrorist organization the JDL.)
On
the basis of Vanunu's statement alone, we can regard the JFK case as
closed. Michael Collins Piper can therefore take the credit for having
done what no one else could do: provide a wholly convincing portrait of
the network of interests behind the assassination, the first that has
ever been written. The startling fact is that Piper's is not apparently
the most brilliant mind which has ever exerted itself on the case; the
irony is that the case was solved not by brilliant detective work, but
because someone was prepared to go where the evidence led instead of
being thwarted by the taboo that has long since grown up around Israel.
In short, Piper's achievement represents the triumph not of individual
genius, but of free and unfettered intellectual enquiry - the sort that
seems to be virtually illegal these days.
Piper's book is the great suppressed book on the assassination. Although it has sold
quite respectably, and would probably rank in sales terms among the top
ten books about the case, there is an eery silence about the book from
within the JFK conspiracy establishment, from people like Jim Fetzer,
editor of some of the most fascinating books published recently about
the case, Debra Conway, who runs the JFK 'research community'
JFK Lancer, and the new Mary Ferrell Foundation JFK research
website.
The latter website strikes me as particularly in your face attempt to suppress
knowledge of Piper's book. This website offers JFK conspiracy devotees
a list of 311 books about the assassination, yet Piper's is the only
important book on the assassination that cannot be found among them; on
account of its impressive sales alone,
Final Judgment deserves
to be mentioned. Even more importantly, it should be mentioned as a
work that is regarded by unbiased minds as the best and most objective
overview of the forces that brought about the conspiracy to kill JFK.
The absence of this book from the website is a case of the
emperor having no clothes if ever there was one. What assassination
researcher would benefit from visiting a website that ignores the most
important book on the subject Mary Ferrell spent the best part of her
life seeking to unravel?
In short, if you want to know why JFK
was assassinated 42 years ago today, ignore the character assassination
and disinformation that is spread over the Web like an intractable
mildew and get hold of
Final Judgment. If you think Israel
would never have tried to do such a thing, or could never have gotten
away with it if it had, then keep taking those blue pills and go back
to sleep. The rest of us will ponder the most striking piece of
information which goes unrecorded in
Final Judgment but which I
learned from David Weaver on JFK Lancer - that, according to his wife,
Yitzhak Rabin, then Chief of Operations and Deputy Chief of Staff of
the Israeli Defense Forces and future prime minister of Israel (yes,
the one who was himself assassinated ten years ago) was in Dallas on
November 22, 1963. (
SOURCE). Allow me to quote from the book
Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy by Leah Rabin, pp. 119-20:
Our
first joint visit to the United States (Yitzhak had been there before)
took place in November 1963, just before Yitzhak was appointed chief of
staff of the IDF. In preparation for that appointment, Yitzhak embarked
on a high-level orientation trip to America. I can appreciate now how
momentous it was to have visited the United States at that precise
time. We went to New York and Washington, and Yitzhak traveled to
several other cities, mainly military centers and installations - all
so exciting and awesome and the source of many important new ideas. ...
Our 1963 trip to the United States lasted three weeks. ... Dalia and
Yuval, along with a number of officers, met us at Lod Airport in Tel
Aviv upon our return. We were told that President Kennedy had been shot
- his condition was as yet unclear. We had never met the Kennedys, but
we could sense how the promise of John Kennedy's future had stirred
Americans and imagined how devasting it would be if something serious
had happened to him. Just as we walked in the door of our home, I
picked up the phone to hear shocking news: John F. Kennedy was dead. To
have just returned for the United States and for Yitzhak to have been
in Dallas just hours before - albeit as mere coincidence; Fort Bliss
was a stop on his military briefing tour - was disorienting. Yitzhak
was about to become chief of staff and had just completed an intensive
study of state-of-the-art defense and security practices from the most
powerful nation in the world, and suddenly we learned that this
country's chief executive was slain by a lone gunman.
It beggars
belief that Rabin's presence in the U.S. in the three weeks immediately
prior to the assassination, his presence in Dallas 'just hours before'
the assassination, and his departure from the U.S. at more or less the
time the assassination occurred could have merely been a coincidence.
Yet JFK researchers seemed too intimidated by the implications to
assign the fact any importance (while other references to, for example,
extremely minor actors in the Bay of Pigs invasion are the subject of
intense interest on Lancer, regardless of whether they were even in
Dallas on November 22, 1963). Weaver states, 'To make it clear from the
beginning of this topic, this is not intented to start a "the jews
[sic] did it" discussion.' Perhaps on account of this opening
stricture, the JFK Lancer thread on Rabin's presence in Dallas petered
out inconsequentially, after one participant, Nancy Eldreth, wondered
whether Rabin could possibly have met with Nixon, who would have flown
out of Dallas at around the same time as Rabin, on the same flight.
It's actually a very good question.
Weaver and other JFK
researchers may not want to 'go there,' as they say, but there is no
reason why those of us who genuinely want to know what happened in
Dallas on November 22, 1963 should also be afraid of going there. After
all, Jack Ruby was very afraid that people would say that 'the Jews did
it' and he would have had no reason to worry about this if Jews had
really had nothing to do with it.
Is there any evidence to
support the suggestion that the assassination was perpetrated by
'Jews'? There is plenty, and it is Piper's great achievement to have
marshalled a great deal of it together in one place. Incredibly,
however, he has overlooked certain pieces of information that would
only reinforce his thesis. In
Plausible Denial, for example,
Mark Lane recounts a striking exchange he had with Abraham L. Wirin,
the (Jewish) chief counsel for the Southern California Chapter of the
ACLU. Lane writes,
On December 4, 1964, when I debated in
Southern California with Joseph A. Ball ... [of the Warren Commission
and] A. L. Wirin. ... Wirin made an impassioned plea for support for
the findings of the commission. ... He said, his voice rising in an
earnest plea:
‘I say thank God for Earl Warren. He saved us from
a pogrom. He saved our nation. God bless him for what he has done in
establishing that Oswald was the lone assassin.’
The audience
remained silent. I asked but one question: ‘If Oswald was innocent, Mr.
Wirin, would you still say, “Thank God for Earl Warren” and bless him
for establishing him as the lone murderer?’ Wirin thought for but an
instant. He responded, ‘Yes. I still would say so.’ (p. 52)
Since
the word ‘pogrom’ refers to large-scale outbursts of violence against
Jews, Wirin’s remarks can be interpreted as a de facto admission that
Lee Harvey Oswald had to be fingered as Kennedy’s assassin in order to
prevent Jews from being so identified. If the identification of the
real assassins would have triggered a ‘pogrom,’ the only legitimate
conclusion to draw is they were Jewish. At least part of the
explanation for the cover up may have been fears than an infuriated
American public would have difficulty, in the heat of the moment, from
distinguishing between Zionist Jews involved in the assassination like
Ruby and ordinary, law-abiding Jews who would have been appalled by it.
There could well have been anti-Jewish pogroms across America.
Oh yes, back to the question: what
was Yitzhak Rabin, future prime minister of Israel, doing in Dallas on November 22, 1963? Only
Final Judgment will tell you.
BELOW:
A frame from a film of the assassination depicting the moment JFK was
fatally wounded by a gunshot to the head, a moment captured in the
famous Polaroid taken by Mary Moorman (the woman in the black
overcoat). Unfortunately, this film (like other available footage) has
a great many suspicious features, and it cannot be taken for granted
that any of the frames it contains, including this one, are authentic.
The stocky-looking feminine figure in the bottom right hand corner apparently filming the assassination, the so-called Babushka lady, is not Beverly Oliver, or indeed any other
woman, but a male intelligence officer in drag. The film in this camera, which has never been released, almost certainly still exists. Whether in the hands of the CIA or the Mossad,
it assuredly shows what
really happened that day:
