Something to think about on this 50th anniversary of the JFK Assassination: What is going on here? In America we are now approaching a consensual state of mind about the Kennedy assassination that is perhaps as bizarre as the assassination itself. Increasingly, it is admitted that the facts of the Presidents murder are not fully known, let alone understood. Some of the major findings of the first official investigation, the Warren Commission in 1964, have now been authoritatively demolished by the second, the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979. The new findings prove that there was something seriously wrong, not just with the initial investigation (i.e., a cover-up) but with the legal and political systems that needed a cover-up to conceal their criminal shortcomings. For example, we now know that one of the Warren Reports discredited propositions, that Lee Harvey Oswalds killer, Jack Ruby, was not involved with Chicagos criminal element (WR 785), was the result not of inadequate intelligence but of a deliberate deception of the Warren Commission by the FBI, designed to keep organized crime out of the picture. There are allegations of deliberate deception on even more central matters, such as the handling of the Presidents autopsy and the physical evidence. Most of these allegations are hotly disputed. The physical and medical evidence present ordinary citizens with a profound dilemma of credibility. Either the evidence is true, in which case the President and Governor John Connally were hit by only two bullets causing a total of eight wounds; or, if this result defies our credulity, we must accept that there has been massive falsification of the evidence. But with respect to the Warren ReportS portrait of Jack Ruby as a loner there is now no such dilemma: this portrait was false, and the FBI had gone out of its way to conceal Rubys organized-crime connections. If considered objectively, the acceptance that the Warren Commission findings were falsified, even in this one area, should lead to questions about the political succession of the United States that was ratified by the Commissions findings. Outside the United States one customarily does find such questioning, if not indeed a complacent cynicism that without either knowledge or curiosity simply assumes guilt on the part of the U.S. political establishment itself. And yet within the United States there is not only disinterest but psychological resistance, from the right and left as well as the mainstream, to examining the question further. As a result there is still little or no institutional will to address and deal with the highest-level American political crime of this century. Instead the search for the truth has been left, by default, to a small band of seH-selected critics, usually derided as buffs or assassinologists. These, often disagreeing among themselves, have certainly failed to produce a generally persuasive alternative account of how the President was killed. Indeed their often strident disagreements may have only strengthened the general impression that the Presidents murder was a mystery which will never be solved. I believe this failure has been an unnecessary one, caused by the tunnel vision of most critics and their opponents. They have been too fixated on the least answerable question, Who really killed the President? And they have paid far too little attention to the contextual question, both more important and paradoxically more easy to answer; What were the structural defects in governance and society that allowed this huge crime to be so badly investigated (or, in other terms, to go unpunished)? In simpler words, how could American institutions harbor and protect such evil? Let us for a moment consider two revealing areas in which false claims put forward in the Warren Report have been definitively and finally refuted by the Report of the House Committee. Significantly, these do not bear on the hotly contested question of the Presidents murder; instead they concern Jack Ruby, the murderer of the Presidents alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. The first false claim by the Warren Commission was that Ruby acted alone and spontaneously in killing Oswald. The House Committee showed quite convincingly that Rubys entry to the Dallas police basement had been assisted by members of the Dallas police department. Ruby probably entered the basement through an unlocked and unguarded stairwell; yet this disturbing probability was obscured by a false alternative story corroborated by at least four police officers. One of these officers failed a polygraph test on these questions in 1964, yet this failure was kept a secret until the House Committee revealed it in 1978. What is now known about Rubys entry into the basement suggests collusion and corruption among the Dallas police. The second false claim of the Warren Commission, that the evidence does not establish a significant link between Ruby and organized crime (WR 801), indicates corruption of our political institutions at the highest national level. The FBI had transmitted to the Commission the assurance of one of Rubys friends that Ruby was not outfit connected (22 WH 372); only those knowledgeable about crime who bothered to consult the footnoted citations could learn that this friend was Dave Yaras, one of the syndicates top killers at the time, and that a similar assurance given to the FBI had come from a head of organized crime in Chicago-two sources who should not have been considered persuasive. The FBI did not tell the Warren Commission that these interviews exonerating organized crime came from organized crime itself. Thanks to the revelations of the House Committee, which produced a staff report of over one thousand pages on Rubys organized-crime connections, we can now see that in 1964, as on many other occasions, the FBI, in blandly transmitting such worthless assurances, was covering up the existence of organized crime in America. But it is hard for most Americans to accept that there was such collusion and corruption at the top of the u.s. government, paralleling that in the Dallas police. Such an acceptance would compel most Americans, particularly those with status in the present regime, to alter their conscious relations to the society which protects them. The collective response to the Kennedy assassination, in short, has been marked by psychological denial. This denial is even shared by those of the assassination critics or buffs who have spent years looking for external killers of the President: whether Communists, Cubans, Corsicans, the CIA, or even organized crime itself, if demonized and projected outward as some kind of external enemy rather than an integral element of our domestic deep-political economy. This need to deny ugly facts about our civilization is a universal one. Through writing poetry I have come to accept its presence in myself. My own early researches into the Kennedy assassination, as into the related topic of the Vietnam War, focused on external conspiratorial forces, impacting on a victimized body politic. What none of us (myself included) wish to accept is that the unsolved assassination is a symptom of something wrong today, not just in 1963, in the heart of the society in which we live. And now we come to the heart of the paradox. Today virtually everyone concedes that there is something profoundly wrong with American society. Psychological denial cannot repress this fundamental perception. Try, however, suggesting that the Kennedy assassination was a symptom of something structurally wrong in American society, and you will see this suggestion rejected, energetically, by intellectuals from the right, center, and left of the American political spectrum. Rejected, indeed, with an almost desperate energy. What is going on here? In this book I will argue that, just as repression of these ugly facts is psychological, so the exploration of them can be psychotherapeutic, for both the writer and the audience, and in the end for society itself. (From Prof. Peter Dale Scott, *Deep Politics and the Death of JFK*)
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 22:10:01 +0000
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