JFK (63 page)

Of course, national leaders wish to justify their actions and to cloak them in legality. President Lyndon B. Johnson felt the need for such support as he attempted to escalate the long, warlike action in Indochina from its emergent underground stages to an all-out overt military confrontation.

With the statement that U.S. Navy vessels had been fired upon ringing in his ears, President Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress on August 5, 1964, to request a Southeast Asia Resolution, broad enough “to assist nations covered by the SEATO treaty.” Congress responded quickly and affirmatively.

The Constitution provides that “the President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” However, congressional authorization is necessary before the President can use the armed forces without a declaration of war.

In response to Johnson’s request, Congress passed the Southeast Asia Resolution, providing:

This resolution was passed in August 1964, nineteen years after the United States became actively involved in the affairs in Indochina. The time of preparation and development had been long. At times it seemed as though things were at a standstill, and at other times the tip of a covert-action iceberg would reveal another step along the way.

After the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a series of air strikes, called “Flaming Dart,” was carried out against North Vietnam. On February 22, 1965, General Westmoreland recommended that American troops be landed on the east coast of Vietnam, at Da Nang. After considerable internecine hassling, it was decided that the marines would make the first landing, and two U.S. Marine Corps Battalion Landing Teams were selected. They landed at Da Nang on March 8, 1965.

This was the first time in almost twenty years of American involvement that members of the armed forces of the United States had entered combat zones under the command control of their own officers. For the first time, the CIA’s role as the operational command in Vietnam was being shared with the military. Despite this development, the “War in Vietnam” was still a strange and unprecedented creation and a clear example of the CIA’s master role as Cold War catalyst.

According to the science of war, as defined by Carl von Clausewitz, when diplomacy and all else fails, the army takes over. Despite nearly a century and a half of this doctrine, the management of the “War in Vietnam” broke all of the rules.

For one thing, the ambassador in Saigon was the senior, and highest-ranking, American official there, and the military and CIA officials ranked below him. This was a novel way to wage war, that is, with an ambassador over and senior to the general in command. And it did not stop there.

While testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the latter part of the sixties, Sen. Stuart Symington revealed that the U.S. ambassador in Vientiane, Laos, had the authority to order bombings and to specify where the bombs were to be dropped. This led the senator to declare that the diplomat was virtually a “military proconsul.” In these terms, the ambassador in Saigon had been given “military proconsul” powers for more than a decade.

Any consideration of leadership in time of war must inevitably lead to the question of the objective. Why was the United States involved in military action in faraway Southeast Asia?

Professor Moore addresses this question in
Law and the Indo-China
War
, stating: “. . .the principal United States objective in the IndoChina War was to assist Vietnam and Laos (and subsequently Cambodia) to defend themselves against North Vietnamese military intervention. ”

This is as reliable a statement of the U.S. national objective as any other; but it fails to state a military objective. In an all-out attempt to do this, after the enactment of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, President Johnson built up the strength of the U.S. Army in Vietnam to 550,000 men, brought the air force to enormous strength in terms of bombing capacity [more tonnage was dropped than during all of WWII ], and made the Navy Seventh Fleet the most powerful force afloat. Yet this did not get the job done. Despite all this, to put it simply, the United States lost the war; it failed to achieve its goal.

In actual practice, the tactical objective of the war had been the “body count.” In Asia, that is not a good indicator of success, and it played right into the hands of General Giap. Guerrilla style, he spread the action out as much as he could, all over the landmass of Indochina. This made the tremendous U.S. military force impotent, diluted as it now was over wide areas.

One of the best examples of this was the battle for Anloa Valley. The “pacification” of Anloa Valley was part of Operations Masher and White Wing, in which about 12,000 men of the U.S. Army First Cavalry Division, Vietnamese airborne units, and South Korean marines took part. They succeeded in capturing the valley and heralded it in Saigon as “a breakthrough in winning the Vietcong-controlled people to our side. ”

In announcing this “victory” officially, Saigon officials would say only that the Anloa operation was successful because it killed a lot of “Vietcong.” In fact, Anloa Valley was captured, lost, recaptured, etc., at least eight times—for no purpose other than to “kill lots of Vietcong.” That does not win wars.

Recall General Taylor’s order to Westmoreland: “. . .fight the war right, the way we did in France. ” Gen. George S. Patton, the hero of the Third Army’s march across France in the face of an experienced German military machine, must have spun in his grave over those instructions for that type of guerrilla war.

It does little good to review the history of a war by basing it on the one time strategic objectives of the victor and the vanquished. What counts is the achievement: What was accomplished by winning that war?

Before WWII, Stalin had purged the Ukraine and wiped out millions of his own people. During WWII Stalin diverted his armies, with Hitler’s in hot pursuit, away from Moscow and across this same “heartland of Mother Russia,” the Ukraine. By the time the war was over, more than 20 million Russians had been killed, and the once vital Ukraine had been reduced to rubble.
⁴

Although the Soviets have claimed victory over Hitler in that war, it would be hard to say that the Russian people won, on any count. Clearly, it had been someone’s strategic objective to wipe out the natives of the Ukraine and to destroy their homeland, in the process completing Stalin’s work and ending Hitler’s dream.

How, then, can one assess the accomplishments of the thirty-year war in Vietnam? It is clear that the United States did not achieve its limited objective of helping the South Vietnamese establish a free democratic nation. What about the yardstick of “accomplishment”? On that score, millions of people in Indochina were killed and removed from the overhang of the Malthusian equation of world population density. Certainly no ideological, “Communist vs. anti-Communist” issues had been settled, and the domino theory and “bloodbath” projections (except in the special case of Cambodia) have not occurred, and the United States initiated that with its massive B-29 bombardment.

This leaves one more enormous accomplishment of the warfare in Indochina to be considered. As R. Buckminster Fuller has stated, “Jointly the two political camps have spent $6.5 trillion in the last thirty-three years to buy the capability to kill all humanity in one hour.”

The American share of this enormous sum expended on the Cold War was spent under the leadership of the CIA, “Capitalism’s Invisible Army,” and no less than $220 billion went to the CIA’s war in Indochina. That has been its accomplishment. Because of the success of that type of “money-making” war, it is not too difficult to be persuaded that a similar and more costly excursion lies not too far in the future.

THE ASSASSINATION of President John F. Kennedy was one of the truly cataclysmic events of this century. The murder of a President was traumatic enough; but the course of events that followed and that have affected the welfare of this country and the world since that time has, in many ways, been tragic.

That assassination has demonstrated that most of the major events of world significance are masterfully planned and orchestrated by an elite coterie of enormously powerful people who are not of one nation, one ethnic grouping, or one overridingly important business group. They are a power unto themselves for whom these others work. Neither is this power elite of recent origin. Its roots go deep into the past.

Kennedy’s assassination has been used as an example of their methodology. Most thinking people of this country, and of the world believe that he was not killed by a lone gunman. Despite that view, the cover story created and thrust upon us by the spokesmen of this High Cabal has existed for three decades. It has come from the lips of every subsequent President and from the top media representatives and their spokesmen. They are experienced, intelligent people who are aware of the facts. Consider the pressure it must take to require all of them, without exception, to quote the words of that contrived cover story over and over again for nearly three decades.

This is the evidence we have of the significance of the Kennedy assassination. But it is only one example. Other major events, such as the development and escalation of the Vietnam War, have been manipulated in a similar manner. In bringing this work to a close I shall provide, briefly, a look at a few of the other events during the Cold War that have taken place because the power elite planned things that way.

As a result, I am aware I may be attacked in the same fashion as Oliver Stone even before his movie
JFK
appeared in the theaters. The attack consists of words like
conspiracy
and
paranoia
similar to the verbal accusations during the Inquisition. To attack someone as conspiracy prone because he does not believe the cover story that one lone gunman killed the President is ridiculous. By now it has become clear that there was a plan to murder Kennedy in order to escalate the Vietnam war and decimate most of the less-developed countries through a form of banker-managed, predatory economic warfare.
Conspiracy
is far from the operative word. This is planning at its best or worst, depending on your point of view. Furthermore,
paranoia
cannot properly be used to define someone who studies economics and history and reveals certain facts. As a matter of proper definition, such findings are the result of the opposite of “paranoia.” Having said this, let’s take a look at a few recent examples of how the game plan of the High Cabal, Winston Churchill’s phrase for the power elite, operates.

Ever since the murder of the President we have been told by the highest authorities that JFK was killed by one man, who fired three shots from a mail-order Italian-made rifle. Quite naturally most Americans have wanted, at first, to believe the word of their government, especially when it involved such an important matter.

Many of the most earnest of these researchers who do not believe that one man killed the President with three shots from a rifle have mistakenly spent almost three decades researching and studying the cover story and not the facts. More than six hundred books have been written on this subject. In them you can find a myriad of obscure trivia dug up by these tireless researchers. But to no avail. That is not the path to the answer to the main question, “Why was Kennedy killed?” No one will ever know who killed the President. In that business, the “mechanics” are faceless and have chameleon identities that are skillfully shielded by the system.

It is easy for anyone to learn that President Kennedy was murdered in a burst of gunfire, as reported by able and on-the-spot newsmen, that hit him at least twice, struck Governor Connally at least once and more likely two times, and that a fragment created by a stray shot hit a man named Tague who was standing on the curb of a street about a block away from where Kennedy was shot. Those are more than the “three shots” on which the Warren Commission builds its case. “More than three shots” is all the evidence needed to prove that the accounts of the crime given by the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Warren Commission are wrong.

What does it take to convince able, intelligent people that the contrived cover story published by our government is nothing more than that? If nothing else a recent episode from the pages of the
Journal of the American Medical Association
should alert the public to the seriousness of the cause underlying the decision to assassinate JFK almost thirty years ago.

This powerful, wealthy association, one of the most influential in the country, has required its spokesmen to proclaim, once again, that a bullet entered the back of the neck of the President and exited through his throat and then traveled on to seriously injure Governor Connally. “How utterly absurd,” we might say; and of course it is. But that is not the point. Here is this prestigious organization being forced by a higher power, under some form of duress, to play a distasteful role before the American public by repeating a story that is untenable.