Glenn Greenwald on JFK and the CIA

The truth is finally coming out about the JFK assassination. Glenn Greenwald just gave my book The Devil's Chessboard high praise on his weekly videocast. ("I can't recommend the book highly enough.") As readers of The Devil's Chessboard know, the book peers inside the national security state created by Allen Dulles and his espionage accomplices during the Cold War. I make the case that Dulles's national security cabal carried out the assassination of President Kennedy -- who was determined to end the nuclear nightmare of the Cold War, a lucrative racket for the military-industrial complex -- as well as the JFK cover-up. (Dulles conveniently served on the Warren Commission and largely directed its investigation, pinning the crime on espionage agent Lee Harvey Oswald, a hapless "patsy" -- as he called himself -- framed by the CIA.)

Despite the CIA's outrageous refusal to abide by the law and fully release all JFK documents, the truth about President Kennedy's killing is finally emerging. The government and corporate media's JFK cover-up, which has led to the erosion of public faith in established institutions, has now been largely rejected by independent media pundits like Greenwald.

Btw, the CIA's fallback position has long been that the Mafia killed JFK (and perhaps a few "rogue" CIA agents in league with the mob). This is an absurd line of propaganda -- one embraced by Kennedy "experts" like the scholar David Kaiser. The faulty reasoning behind this theory is plain: Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a highly aggressive hunter of organized crime figures, would have gone tooth and nail after the Mafia conspirators if they had organized his brother's assassination. Nor did the mob -- which long served the intelligence community, carrying out some of its dirtiest work -- have the government and media power to create a suffocating cover-up of the monstrous crime. Yes, Jack Ruby -- who silenced Oswald -- was a Mafia errand boy. But the assassination of President Kennedy and the massive deception around the crime was carried out at a much higher pay grade. Scholars like Kaiser are too timid to go that high. The New York Times and the rest of the media establishment is even more cowardly.

Here's the transcript of Greenwald's January 1 JFK commentary:

Let me move now to the second story I want to cover, which is the, I think, rather remarkable fact that just this week the CIA released some documents from its archives regarding the assassination -- the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy -- so, almost 60 years ago. And I think the news here is not so much that they released similar documents, but that they continue to conceal at least 4000 documents that are still marked top secret and that they refused to release about the Kennedy assassination.

How can anybody consider that justifiable? It's not designed to protect anybody. Almost all of those people involved are dead. We're talking about an event 60 years ago. And yet, the CIA has so little respect for democratic values or for the law, that they just refuse to release these documents, even though the law requires them to do so.

Some of you may recall, those who were old enough, that in the early nineties, Oliver Stone, then the most successful and influential directors in Hollywood, he had won three Academy Awards for Platoon and other films he directed, had produced a film about JFK that imagined, not asserted, but just imagined fictionally a different scenario about how to understand what happened, suggesting it was highly unlikely that the president of the United States was killed by a single gunman, acting alone, who just so happened to have all kinds of connections to the CIA and, then, right before he could speak, the day after the day of the murder, someone just was able to walk right up to him, Jack Ruby, and shoot him. And ever since that film and the success of it, there has been a lot more awareness on the part of the American people that they know the truth has been kept from them.

This film ended with a screen noting that documents that would shine light on what actually happened -- that the Warren Commission used to conclude that this was a lone gunman, there was no conspiracy, that the House used to investigate -- would mark top secret and would not be released until 2037. And the pressure that got created in the wake of that film basically forced the hand of Congress, and Congress enacted a law that required all documents to be declassified and released to the public relating to the JFK assassination by 2017, five years ago, and yet, to this day, there are still 4000 documents the CIA refuses to release, just in blatant violation of that law that required them to release it.

Now, what entitles the CIA to do that, to act as its own government and to simply ignore the law? Apparently, they're getting away with it.

One of the videos that we produced here on Rumble prior to beginning this show about seven or eight months ago, asked the question, “Why is it that Donald Trump failed to pardon Julian Assange and Edward Snowden?” Despite reports -- and I was getting these reports privately at the time that he was very, very close to pardoning at least Snowden, not quite as close to pardoning Assange, but strongly considering it.

One of the things I explained was that the reason they initiated that second impeachment against him, even though he was leaving office and there was no reason to do it, it would never have gotten him out of office, was because it was a sword of Damocles over his head to control him, because Republicans in the Senate, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, the kind that serve the National Security State, were petrified and angry that Trump was even considering pardoning people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, and basically said to him, If you do that, we will vote to convict you and you will never be able to run again. But what they were also worried about was not just the pardons of Assange and Snowden, but also the fact that Trump was very likely to declassify all of these documents he'd been vowing to for years, and he left office without doing so, and I regard that as one of the main reasons why.

Now, there is a book about the CIA and the post-World War II history of the U.S. National Security State that I cannot recommend highly enough. The book is by David Talbot, whom I know because he was a founder of Salon. I ended up writing at Salon. The book is entitled The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, and it tells the story of how we ended up with this permanent power faction in Washington, the intelligence community that operates completely in the dark, without any democratic accountability and with complete secrecy to the point where they continue to keep secret the truth about what happened in one of America's most important historical events, the assassination of our president because they simply wanted to.

And there's nobody that has the power, evidently, to force them to abide by the law. This book, along with a second book I will recommend to you by Vincent Bevins, the journalist Vincent Bevins called The Jakarta Method, that talks about what the CIA has been doing in secret since the end of World War II, tells the story of why this is such a menacing and insidious agency. But how are we not out in the streets, furious, that the CIA just refuses to reveal these documents we have the right to see when the law requires them to do so?

JFK’s nephew, Robert Kennedy Jr, the son of JFK's brother, Robert Kennedy, who also was assassinated, posted this week a tweet about a segment Tucker Carlson did on the CIA and he wrote: “The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA's murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.”

As I said, Allen Dulles, as I talked about this last night, was probably the second or third most powerful person in Washington, maybe the most powerful in the 1950s when he ran the CIA until John Kennedy fired him, in 1961, because he blamed Dulles for the fiasco in the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. And Dulles had every reason in the world to want to kill Kennedy, as did a lot of people in the CIA.

But here, let me show you part of what Tucker Carlson said about why, under the Trump administration, these documents were not released, despite the law requiring that they should be, and despite Trump's repeated promises to do so.

Tuck Carlson: Americans have trusted their government less with every passing year since the killing of John F Kennedy. Maybe this is why. And people have known this for a long time. The people who knew would include every director of the CIA since November of 1963. And that list would include Obama's CIA director, John Brennan, one of the most sinister and dishonest figures in American life. That list would also include, we are sad to say, our friend Mike Pompeo, who ran the CIA in the last administration. Mike Pompeo knew this. We asked Pompeo to join us tonight, and though he rarely turns down a televised interview, he refused to come. We hope he will reconsider.

First of all, I'm really glad that Tucker emphasized the role that Mike Pompeo played here because Mike Pompeo has deceived a lot of trusting Trump supporters who assumed that -- because he was Trump's CIA director and then Trump made him Secretary of State -- Mike Pompeo must be a believer in America First or MAGA foreign policy. Mike Pompeo is everything but that. He is the most standard old-school establishment Republican that exists. His foreign policy is indistinguishable from Dick and Liz Cheney's. His foreign policy is everything that Donald Trump ran against.

One of Trump's major weaknesses, as I think most people know, is that he's very susceptible to flattery by smart people. Pompeo is smart. There's no denying that. And he easily deceived Trump by pretending to be on his side and getting into his good graces, always remaining loyal, but every step of the way, subverting what Trump wanted to do. Pompeo is an old-school warmonger and neo-con, and his voting record in the House leaves no doubt about that.

He was also the primary official in the Trump administration most responsible for the destruction of WikiLeaks and the prosecution of Julian Assange. That was Mike Pompeo's dirty work when he was at the CIA. And also, as Tucker says, Pompeo was the person who impeded and refused to release when he was at the CIA these documents that all of us have the right to know. Why would you ever trust Mike Pompeo with anything after what you know?

Now, let me just make one point about this secrecy regime that we're seeing with the CIA, that they think they have the right to keep everything from you even 60 years later. One of the things that was obviously the most important experience journalistically in my career was the work that I did with Edward Snowden and the gigantic archive of top-secret documents he gave me from the U.S. Security State that came from the NSA.

And although I've never put an exact number on how many documents we received, I've often said that is many, many, many hundreds of thousands of pages of top-secret documents, a huge archive. And yet you can go and look at how many we published over the course of three or four years of reporting on that archive and you will see the number is a tiny fraction of many hundreds of thousands. I think we ended up publishing maybe 2,000, or 2,500. And people often ask me why. ‘Why did you publish so few of those documents?’

One reason was that my source, Edward Snowden, imposed conditions on us when he brought us these archives: he made it very clear that he did not want the entire archive published. If he wanted that archive published in full, indiscriminately, he didn't need to work with us. He could have just dumped it on the Internet or given it to WikiLeaks to publish it in full.

He asked us to curate it very carefully to make sure that no programs that were genuinely or legitimately necessary to protect American lives would be exposed and that we did not reveal anything that could put innocent people in harm's way. And we honored those wishes, we would have adopted them ourselves anyway. We think that's the ethical way to conduct journalism. We didn't just go around the world indiscriminately releasing documents. We only did release documents we believe were necessary to inform the public.

But the other reason was that most of the archive was just boring. It was banal and uninteresting. And what was so amazing about that fact -- I'm talking about instructions on how to get parking credentials at NSA facilities or how to put in requests for vacation days, or what kind of staffing would be at the lowest levels of NSA on the administrative level. These kinds of documents have no interest to anybody, they're just even too boring to want to read. Every one of those documents was marked top secret or classified or secret, meaning it was a crime to reveal them, even though they are not conceivably sensitive in any way. And what does this show? Something very important.

It shows that the U.S. security state regards everything they do -- everything they do -- as presumptively secret. That's not how that's supposed to work. Classified information. We're supposed to have a government that is presumptively transparent. We're supposed to have access to everything the government is doing, except in those rare cases when they need to make it secret for legitimate reasons, like troop movements or to protect things that are genuinely sensitive to national security. I don't even put this another way, a kind of broader and more principled way. I think this is a crucial point to understand. If you think about it this way, it's a reason why I talk so much about the U.S. Security State and the dangers it poses.

If you think about a healthy society, and how a healthy democracy functions, we would know -- we, the citizenry would know -- essentially everything that our government is doing. That's why they're called public servants or the public sector. It's supposed to be public and open and transparent. We're supposed to know what our government is doing because they're doing it with our money and in our name, and it's supposed to be a democracy, which can only happen if we know what our government is doing, so, we can make informed decisions.

And by contrast, they're supposed to know basically nothing about us. That's why we are called private citizens. Our lives are supposed to be private. So, we should know everything that the government is doing and except in those rare cases -- when they have a legitimate right to secrecy -- and except in very rare cases -- like when they get a search warrant because they can prove that we're likely to have been involved in a crime -- they're not supposed to know anything about us. We're supposed to be private citizens and they’re not supposed to keep dossiers on us.

And yet what we've learned is that is completely reversed. The U.S. government has built an almost impenetrable wall of secrecy around it so that even the most banal documents or the oldest documents, from 60 years ago, are kept secret so we know nothing about what that government is actually doing and, at the same time, they know everything about us. They track our movements. They track our telephone calls. They surveil our conversations, all without warrants. That was the point at the start of the story. That is all continuing to go on.

So, think about that power dynamic where we're supposed to have power over our government, they're supposed to be our public servants, but -- because we know nothing about what they're doing, because they hide it all behind a wall of secrecy, and they know everything about what we're doing since we're subject to mass, indiscriminate warrantless surveillance -- the power dynamic has completely reversed. And that to me was the point of the Snowden story and it's the point of this latest refusal of the CIA to release all of the documents that are required under the Law of Release and instead releasing just enough to make us think that they're complying with this process, five years after the law required the full disclosure of the entire archive.