Sunday, December 27, 2009

Homeland Security Considers Making People Fly Naked by Andy Borowitz


WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) - Responding to the botched terrorism attempt on board Delta flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, the Department of Homeland Security announced today that it was considering a new rule that would force passengers to fly naked.

"They won't be able to hide any powders or liquids, and they'll speed right through security," said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. "This is a win-win."

Anticipating complaints from chilly travelers, she said that the Homeland Security Dept. would force the airlines to institute a "Snugglies for Purchase" plan once the aircraft doors are closed.

Ms. Napolitano expressed no embarrassment at having ignored a warning from the Delta terror suspect's dad made weeks before the terror attempt: "Our official policy is that we have to be warned by both the mom and dad before taking it seriously." More here.

Palin Rising by Matt Patterson



I have in the past been a skeptic of Sarah Palin. Not of her political talent, which is considerable, but of her grasp of – and even interest in – substantive policy issues.



When she abruptly resigned the governorship of Alaska on July 3rd, I wondered if she simply hadn’t the stomach for national politics. And the rambling, disjointed speech she gave that day left me wondering if she even knew why she was making such a momentous and potentially career-crippling decision.

But then a funny thing happened: In November, Mrs. Palin debuted her memoir “Going Rogue” with great sales, which was not a surprise, but also with a luminous and successful press tour, which was. The interviews she gave in promotion for her book (at least the ones that I saw) were much improved from those given during the 2008 presidential campaign. Palin seemed to speak about both herself and national issues with greater verve and confidence.

Other stars are aligning for Palin:


Several of her potential rivals for the 2012 Republican nomination find themselves suddenly, perhaps fatally, compromised by recent events.

Mitt Romney, for example, is watching the national health care debate work against his presidential ambitions, as the tortured and torturous Senate bill resembles more and more the regime he helped institute in Massachusetts – not something that will endear him to conservative primary voters enraged at Democrats’ health care offensive.

And there is Mike Huckabee, who charmed his way into a television hosting gig at FOX News after the campaign. Revelations that a man suspected of shooting and killing four police officers in Washington state had been granted clemency years ago by Huckabee, then governor of Arkansas, are widely believed to have seriously damaged his future electoral chances.

As a result, should they decide to run again both Romney and Huckabee will certainly find their respective tenures as governor under renewed and perhaps unwelcome scrutiny.

Meanwhile, Palin appears to be having a ball, trading comedic blows with William Shatner on the Tonight Show, receiving throngs of adoring fans at bookstores across the heartland, and weighing in on global warming in the pages of The Washington Post.

Could she be preparing, in a serious way, to become a serious candidate? It certainly looks that way to this amateur Palin watcher. If she can convince independent voters that she understands the issues, has thought them through and come to reasonable judgments about possible courses of action…if, if, if.

A lot of stars have yet to align for Palin’s path to the presidency to be illuminated. But that no longer seems impossible to me. In fact, I can now quite clearly imagine that someday, someone may say the words “Madam President,” to a moose-hunting mom from Alaska.

Wouldn’t that be something?

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Happy Holidays

"I already got what I wanted for Christmas"

Ten Political Lessons for The New Year by Terance Samuel




This year was full of scandals, blunders, and miscalculations. Here's what Washington can learn from its mistakes.

The world at the start of 2010 looks a lot different than it did when it was on the verge of 2009. For one, we have avoided economic collapse. It's also likely that in the new year, President Barack Obama will have delivered on his campaign promise to reform American health care -- somewhat. If he is lucky, we will begin to see an economic resurgence that will steady his job approval rating and calm Democratic fears of a GOP rout in the fall midterm elections. Republicans, looking better now than they did six months ago, will continue to attack Democrats for the exploding deficit and the decision to try to spend America out of the recession. And if Republicans are lucky, the economy will not recover quickly. But we will have to wait to see how all that turns out.

We already know how 2009 unfolded, though, and some lessons are worth remembering in the coming year. Here are the top 10:

Bipartisanship makes for good rhetoric but bad politics. Health care is the chief victim of this botched strategy. The president made early concessions -- the public option became negotiable -- in order to attract GOP votes, and it was all for naught. All he did was weaken his hand and lose a big chunk of his base.

Celebrity is not the same as politics. So don't worry about Sarah Palin, who has locked down the anti-intellectual, George W. Bush wing of the GOP and is doing everything in her power to drive everyone else out. She has fans, not votes.

When you skip town, leave forwarding info. This will henceforth be known as the Mark Sanford Doctrine. Love, we are told, can move mountains, but the Appalachian Trail is not now and has never been in Argentina. If you're the sitting governor of a state, you can't just pull Houdini for five days and then come back only to talk about how much you've cried the past week.

Resist cold hard cash. Rep. William Jefferson's decision to crassly sell out the Louisianans he was supposed to represent in Congress -- poor black people who desperately needed representation, I might add -- for the sum of $90,000, which he amateurishly hid in a freezer, is the kind of noxious betrayal of the public trust that makes it harder for the government to get anything done. Jefferson spent 18 years in Congress and is now serving a 13-year sentence for 11 counts of corruption. We'll call it even at the end.

Stop fooling around with your parents' money. The story was already bad enough: Arizona Sen. John Ensign, widely regarded as a rising star in the GOP, had to publicly confess that he had an affair with a woman on his staff, who happened to be married to a man on his staff. The story got downright ludicrous when it was revealed that Ensign somehow got his parents to pay $96,000 of what looks an awful lot like hush money to the couple, who, of course, did not hush.

Stick to the text. Chief Justice John Roberts has a simple task: Read the same oath of office that had been delivered 55 times before to 43 previous presidents over the past 220 years. But when it was Barack Obama's turn to put his hand on Abraham Lincoln's Bible, Roberts flubbed it. The Chief left out a word here, changed a word there, and forced America's first black president to retake the oath a day later, just in case. Strict constructionist, indeed.

We can't miss you if you don't go away: My recommended reading for Dick Cheney in the coming year is the Dr. Seuss classic, Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! Cheney has taken on the role of the paranoid, defending the castle well after the war is over. All he has done in the last year is to make it harder for people to take Republicans seriously.

Getting in is only half the battle. Politicians have known this forever, but apparently Tareq and Michaele Salahi did not. The couple crashed Obama's first state dinner, only to find themselves at the center of a rather embarrassing media frenzy: The pair became a national joke practically overnight, and has since been subpoenaed by the committee on Homeland Security. And on this note, a quick word of advice to the White House Social Office: Make your best people your bouncers.

Panic is not a political strategy: Democrats, particularly those of the Blue Dog breed, should not go into 2010 playing defense on the tough issues -- health care, climate change, and job creation. The imperative for those in power is to govern, and that requires decisive action. So even if pushing legislation forward involves a high degree of difficulty and requires taking uncomfortable political risks, our leaders should not dither and hide. For Democrats, that means that health care was a fight worth having: Despite the bad poll numbers and the threat of losing in 2010, things might be a lot worse if the public's perception was that they came, stalled, and stumbled.

Self-righteousness is not principle. And therefore there should be no negotiating with Joe Lieberman. It's one problem to have to deal with genuinely conservative Democrats who have to worry about winning re-election in tough swing districts. It's another altogether to be making deals with a reliably unreliable "ally" whose only goal is to be the center of attention all while accentuating his contrariness.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Government Solutions




"A Trillion Troubles Ahead"

by Bert Dohmen

"Not too long ago, a billion dollars in a governmental budget was a lot of money. Then we got into hundreds of billions. People understood that this was a lot, just because of all the zeros. Now, unfortunately, the number has become small: the world "trillion," as in $1.2 trillion for health care reform, seems so tiny. But it has 12 zeroes behind it, which is so easy to forget.

What is a "trillion?" According to the Web site www.100777.com, if you laid 1 dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from Earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills! One trillion dollars would stretch nearly from the Earth to the sun. It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out 1 trillion dollar bills.

If the government stays on the course it's been on for the past forty years without a radical change, the federal government will soon have a $10 trillion budget. In other words, the federal budget deficit will be $1.4 trillion. Just to make the size more visible, that's $1,400 billion.

Our colleague Rob Arnott, who always does terrific research, wrote in his recent report that "at all levels, federal, state, local and GSEs, the total public debt is now at 141% of GDP. That puts the United States in some elite company- only Japan, Lebanon and Zimbabwe are higher. That's only the start. Add household debt (highest in the world at 99% of GDP) and corporate debt (highest in the world at 317% of GDP, not even counting off-balance-sheet swaps and derivatives) and our total debt is 557% of GDP. Less than three years ago our total indebtedness crossed 500% of GDP for the first time." Add the unfunded portion of entitlement programs and we're at 840% of GDP.

The world has not seen such debt levels in modern history. This debt is not serviceable. Imagine that total debt is 557% of GDP, without considering entitlements. The interest on the debt will consume all the tax revenues of the country in the not-too-distant future. Then there will be no way out but to create more debt in order to finance the old debt.

It assures a period of economic devastation. In a last, desperate attempt, politicians at the federal and local levels will raise taxes to astronomical heights to raise revenues. And that only assures destruction of the economy. Forget the fable of economic recovery. Unless there is a change in Washington by next year's election, there will be no way to turn back.

Japan's recession is now 19 years old. It has the highest debt-to-GDP level (227%) of any industrialized country. The Fitch rating agency is talking about a potential downgrade of Japan's debt. Japan's stock market is still down 75% from the high in 1990. We predict it will make new bear market lows next year. That will make it a 20-year-long bull market on the way to 25 years. The bulls in the U.S. should consider that possibility in the formerly great United States of America. I do not believe the bullish theory that the U.S. situation is different than Japan's. Ours is so much worse. Is it any wonder that our biggest creditors, China, Russia and the Middle East, are diversifying out of the dollar and into gold?"

- Bert Dohmen,

Editor of "Bert Dohmen's Wellington Letter" and founder of Dohmen Capital Research Institute.

- http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/18/government-budget-deficit-personal-
finance-financial-advisor-network-treasury-debt.html

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Presidential Security- Kennedy, Epic Fail.


"Despite a treasure-trove of new information having emerged over the last forty-six years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. There are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald "lone-nut" explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. Both groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred almost a half-century ago, so let's move on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as James Douglass shows in his extraordinary book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" (Orbis Books, 2008). It is clearly one of the best books ever written on the Kennedy assassination and deserves a vast readership. It is bound to roil the waters of complacency that have submerged the truth of this key event in modern American history.

It's not often that the intersection of history and contemporary events pose such a startling and chilling lesson as does the contemplation of the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed with the situations faced by President Obama today. So far, at least, Obama's behavior has mirrored Johnson's, not Kennedy's, as he has escalated the war in Afghanistan by 34,000. One can't but help think that the thought of JFK's fate might not be far from his mind as he contemplates his next move in Afghanistan.

Douglass presents a very compelling argument that Kennedy was killed by "unspeakable" (the Trappist monk Thomas Merton's term) forces within the U.S. national security state because of his conversion from a cold warrior into a man of peace. He argues, using a wealth of newly uncovered information, that JFK had become a major threat to the burgeoning military-industrial complex and had to be eliminated through a conspiracy planned by the CIA - "the CIA's fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it" - not by a crazed individual, the Mafia, or disgruntled anti-Castro Cubans, though some of these may have been used in the execution of the plot.

Why and by whom? These are the key questions. If it can be shown that Kennedy did, in fact, turn emphatically away from war as a solution to political conflict; did, in fact, as he was being urged by his military and intelligence advisers to up the ante and use violence, rejected such advice and turned toward peaceful solutions, then, a motive for his elimination is established. If, furthermore, it can be clearly shown that Oswald was a dupe in a deadly game and that forces within the military/intelligence apparatus were involved with him from start to finish, then the crime is solved, not by fingering an individual who may have given the order for the murder or pulled the trigger, but by showing that the coordination of the assassination had to involve U.S. intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA . Douglass does both, providing highly detailed and intricately linked evidence based on his own research and a vast array of the best scholarship.

We are then faced with the contemporary relevance, and since we know that every president since JFK has refused to confront the growth of the national security state and its call for violence, one can logically assume a message was sent and heeded. In this regard, it is not incidental that former twenty-seven year CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, in a recent interview, warned of the "two CIAs," one the analytic arm providing straight scoop to presidents, the other the covert action arm which operates according to its own rules. "Let me leave you with this thought," he told his interviewer, "and that is that I think Panetta (current CIA Director), and to a degree Obama, are afraid - I never thought I'd hear myself saying this - I think they are afraid of the CIA." He then recommended Douglass' book, "It's very well-researched and his conclusion is very alarming."

Let's look at the history marshaled by Douglass to support his thesis. First, Kennedy, who took office in January 1961 as somewhat of a Cold Warrior, was quickly set up by the CIA to take the blame for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. The CIA and generals wanted to oust Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. Kennedy refused to go along and the invasion was roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy. But it was all a sham.

Though Douglass doesn't mention it, and few Americans know it, classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had learned of the date of the invasion more than a week in advance, had informed Castro, but - and here is a startling fact that should make people's hair stand on end - never told the President. The CIA knew the invasion was doomed before the fact but went ahead with it anyway. Why? So they could and did afterwards blame JFK for the failure.

This treachery set the stage for events to come. For his part, sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (as in a bad joke, later to be named to the Warren Commission) and his assistant General Charles Cabell (whose brother Earle Cabell, to make a bad joke absurd, was the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed) and said he wanted "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." Not the sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within a government whose power was growing exponentially.

The stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, in opposition to nearly all his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in U.S. foreign policy. In 1961, despite the Joint Chief's demand to put troops into Laos, Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman, his representative at the Geneva Conference, "Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don't want to put troops in." Also in 1961, he refused to concede to the insistence of his top generals to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in Berlin and Southeast Asia. Walking out of a meeting with top military advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, "These people are crazy."

He refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Afterwards he told his friend John Kenneth Galbraith that "I never had the slightest intention of doing so." Then in June 1963 he gave an incredible speech at American University in which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end of the Cold War and the "Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war," and movement toward "general and complete disarmament." A few months later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev. In October 1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from Vietnam by the end of the year and a total withdrawal by the end of 1965.

All this he did while secretly engaging in negotiations with Khrushchev via the KGB , Norman Cousins, and Pope John XXIII , and with Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist Jean Daniel. In an interview with Daniel on October 24, 1963 Kennedy said, "I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear." Such sentiments were anathema, shall we say treasonous, to the CIA and top generals.

These clear refusals to go to war and his decision to engage in private, back-channel communications with Cold War enemies marked Kennedy as an enemy of the national security state. They were on a collision course. As Douglass and others have pointed out, every move Kennedy made was anti-war. This, Douglass argues, was because JFK, a war hero, had been deeply affected by the horror of war and was severely shaken by how close the world had come to destruction during the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout his life he had been touched by death and had come to appreciate the fragility of life. Once in the Presidency, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peace maker. He came to see the generals who advised him as devoid of the tragic sense of life and as hell-bent on war. And he was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA. On numerous occasions he spoke of the possibility of a military coup d'etat against him. On the night before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, "But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it." And we know that nobody did try to stop it because they had planned it. Watch treason with your own eyes:




But who killed him? Douglass presents a formidable amount of evidence, some old and some new, against the CIA and covert action agencies within the national security state, and does so in such a logical and persuasive way that any fair-minded reader cannot help but be taken aback; stunned, really. And he links this evidence directly to JFK's actions on behalf of peace.

He knows, however, that to truly convince he must break a "conspiracy of silence that would envelop our government, our media, our academic institutions, and virtually our entire society from November 22, 1963, to the present." This "unspeakable," this hypnotic "collective denial of the obvious," is sustained by a mass-media whose repeated message is that the truth about such significant events is beyond our grasp, that we will have to drink the waters of uncertainty forever. As for those who don't, they are relegated to the status of conspiracy nuts.

Fear and uncertainty block a true appraisal of the assassination - that plus the thought that it no longer matters. It matters. For we know that no president since JFK has dared to buck the military-intelligence-industrial complex. We know a Pax Americana has spread its tentacles across the globe with U.S. military in over 130 countries on 750 plus bases. We know that the amount of blood and money spent on wars and war preparations has risen astronomically. There is a great deal we know and even more that we don't want to know, or at the very least, investigate.

If Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not "a lone-nut" assassin. Douglass marshals a wealth of evidence to show how from the very start Oswald was moved around the globe like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters.

As he begins to trace Oswald's path, Douglass asks this question: "Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?" After serving as a U.S. Marine at the CIA's U-2 spy plane operating base in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher than top secret but a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission), Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union. After denouncing the U.S., working at a Soviet factory in Minsk , and taking a Russian wife - during which time Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union - he returned to the U.S. with a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow, only to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by a man, Spas T. Raikin, a prominent anti-communist with extensive intelligence connections, recommended by the State Department. He passed through immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted, moved to Fort Worth, Texas where , at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was met and befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset. De Mohrenschildt got him a job four days later at a graphic arts company that worked on maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy missions over Cuba.

Oswald was then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt who, in 1977, on the day he revealed he had contacted Oswald for the CIA and was to meet with the House Select Committee on Assasinations' Gaeton Fonzi, allegedly committed suicide. Oswald then moved to New Orleans in April 1963 where got a job at the Reilly Coffee Company owned by CIA-affiliated William Reilly. The Reilly Coffee Company was located in close vicinity to the FBI,CIA, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence offices and a stone's throw from the office of Guy Bannister, a former FBI agent, who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services, supplying and training anti-Castro paramilitaries meant to ensnare Kennedy. Oswald then went to work with Bannister and the CIA paramilitaries.

During this time up until the assassination Oswald was on the FBI payroll, receiving $200 per month. This startling fact was covered up by the Warren Commission even though it was stated by the Commission's own general counsel J. Lee Rankin at a closed door meeting on January 27, 1964. The meeting had been declared "top secret" and its content only uncovered ten years later after a lengthy legal battle by researcher Harold Weisberg. Douglass claims Oswald "seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI," as a provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960-64, in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said, "It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency."

When Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963, de Mohrenschildt exited the picture, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly given a $285,000 contract to do a geological survey for Haitian dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier, which he never did , but for which he was paid. Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the picture on cue. Douglass illuminatingly traces in their intelligence connections. Ruth later was the Warren Commission's chief witness. She had been introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In September 1963 Ruth Paine drove from her sister's house in Virginia to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald and bring her to her house in Dallas to live with her. Thirty years after the assassination a document was declassified showing Paine's sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her father traveled throughout Latin America on an Agency for International Development (notorious for CIA front activities) contract and filed reports that went to the CIA. Her husband Michael's step-father, Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell helicopter and Michael's job there gave him a security clearance. Her mother was related to the Forbes family of Boston and her lifelong friend, Mary Bancroft, worked as a WW II spy with Allen Dulles and was his mistress. Afterwards, Dulles questioned the Paines in front of the Warren Commission, studiously avoiding any revealing questions. Back in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently got Oswald a job in the Texas Book Depository where he began work on October 16, 1963.

From late September until November 22, various Oswalds are later reported to have simultaneously been seen from Dallas to Mexico City. Two Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theatre, the real one taken out the front door and an impostor out the back. As Douglas says, "There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald than the Warren Report could use or even explain." Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that Oswald impostors were used, as he told LBJ concerning Oswald's alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He later called this CIA ploy, "the false story re Oswald's trip to Mexico...their ( CIA's) double-dealing," something that he couldn't forget. It was apparent that a very intricate and deadly game was being played out at high levels in the shadows.

We know Oswald was blamed for the President's murder. But if one fairly follows the trail of the crime it becomes blatantly obvious that government forces were at work. Douglass adds layer upon layer of evidence to show how this had to be so. Oswald, the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans could not have withdrawn most of the security that day. The Sheriff Bill Decker withdrew all police protection. The Secret Service withdrew the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president's car where they had been the day before in Houston; took agents off the back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire. They approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November 18) where the car came, almost to a halt, a clear security violation. The House Select Committee on Assasinations concluded this, not some conspiracy nut.

Who could have squelched the testimony of all the doctors and medical personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in his neck and head, testimony contradicting the official story? Who could have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the White House detail by JFK, who warned that he feared the president was going to be assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden seven times and his evidence on the aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago on November 2 - a story little known but extraordinary in its implications - is riveting.) The list of all the people who turned up dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched, distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up - clearly point to forces within the government, not rogue actors without institutional support.

The evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in such depth and so logically that only one hardened to the truth would not be deeply moved and affected by his book. He says it best: "The extent to which our national security state was systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we absorb and think in a system. We lack the independence needed to judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy's murder and immediate cover-up."

Speaking to his friends Dave Powers and Ken O'Donnell about those who planned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, JFK said, "They couldn't believe that a new president like me wouldn't panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong." Let's hope for another president like that, but one that meets a different end."