It is all something to behold this morning on X (Twitter). Numerous people, many assisted by AI are trying to make sense of the JFK assassination documents released at the direction of Donald Trump. I’d already seen credible accounts that suggest many CIA connections to JFK’s assassination.
An excellent place to start is The Devil’s Chessboard, by David Talbot. Glenn Greenwald comments:
Reading Talbot’s book is like getting a kick in the stomach. I’m partway through the book and I am convinced more and more that JFK’s assassination was a CIA coup. And I am more and more convinced that most of our presidential elections have been orchestrated by the CIA through the use of powerful tools of propaganda and censorship that heavily influence (if not outright control) legacy “news” outlets.
The CIA history is deep and terrifying. Consider this tweet by David Swanson, who raises question after question, each one suggesting answers more and more horrifying. The elephant is the room is that for 60 years the CIA has controlled the informational ecosystem so incredibly tightly that critically important facts and these issues have been wrestled out of public view. Further, those who dare to inquire into these matters have been made radioactive (or in some notable cases, dead) by convincing the public that they are “conspiracy theorists.” I’m going to print Swanson’s tweet in full:
Why Allen Dulles Killed the Kennedys – November 13, 2015
By now there’s not nearly as much disagreement regarding what happened to John and Robert Kennedy as major communications corporations would have you believe. While every researcher and author highlights different details, there isn’t any serious disagreement among, say, Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable, Howard Hunt’s deathbed confession, and David Talbot’s new The Devil’s Chessboard.
Jon Schwarz says The Devil’s Chessboard confirms that “your darkest suspicions about how the world operates are likely an underestimate. Yes, there is an amorphous group of unelected corporate lawyers, bankers, and intelligence and military officials who form an American ‘deep state,’ setting real limits on the rare politicians who ever try to get out of line.”
For those of us who were already convinced of that up to our eyeballs, Talbot’s book is still one of the best I’ve seen on the Dulles brothers and one of the best I’ve seen on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Where it differs from Douglass’ book, I think, is not so much in the evidence it relates or the conclusions it draws, but in providing an additional motivation for the crime.
JFK and the Unspeakable depicts Kennedy as getting in the way of the violence that Allen Dulles and gang wished to engage in abroad. He wouldn’t fight Cuba or the Soviet Union or Vietnam or East Germany or independence movements in Africa. He wanted disarmament and peace. He was talking cooperatively with Khrushchev, as Eisenhower had tried prior to the U2-shootdown sabotage. The CIA was overthrowing governments in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, Vietnam, and around the world. Kennedy was getting in the way.
The Devil’s Chessboard depicts Kennedy, in addition, as himself being the sort of leader the CIA was in the habit of overthrowing in those foreign capitals. Kennedy had made enemies of bankers and industrialists. He was working to shrink oil profits by closing tax loopholes, including the “oil depletion allowance.” He was permitting the political left in Italy to participate in power, outraging the extreme right in Italy, the U.S., and the CIA. He aggressively went after steel corporations and prevented their price hikes. This was the sort of behavior that could get you overthrown if you lived in one of those countries with a U.S. embassy in it.
Yes, Kennedy wanted to eliminate or drastically weaken and rename the CIA. Yes he threw Dulles and some of his gang out the door. Yes he refused to launch World War III over Cuba or Berlin or anything else. Yes he had the generals and warmongers against him, but he also had Wall Street against him. Of course “politicians who ever try to get out of line” are now, as then, but more effectively now, handled first by the media. If the media can stop them or some other maneuver can stop them (character assassination, blackmail, distraction, removal from power) then violence isn’t required.
The fact that Kennedy resembled a coup target, not just a protector of other targets, would be bad news for someone like Senator Bernie Sanders if he ever got past the media, the “super delegates,” and the sell-out organizations to seriously threaten to take the White House. A candidate who accepts the war machine to a great extent and resembles Kennedy not at all on questions of peace, but who takes on Wall Street with the passion it deserves, could place himself as much in the cross-hairs of the deep state as a Jeremy Corbyn who takes on both capital and killing.
Accounts of the escapades of Allen Dulles, and the dozen or more partners in crime whose names crop up beside his decade after decade, illustrate the power of a permanent plutocracy, but also the power of particular individuals to shape it.
What if Allen Dulles and Winston Churchill and others like them hadn’t worked to start the Cold War even before World War II was over? What if Dulles hadn’t collaborated with Nazis and the U.S. military hadn’t recruited and imported so many of them into its ranks? What if Dulles hadn’t worked to hide information about the holocaust while it was underway? What if Dulles hadn’t betrayed Roosevelt and Russia to make a separate U.S. peace with Germany in Italy? What if Dulles hadn’t begun sabotaging democracy in Europe immediately and empowering former Nazis in Germany? What if Dulles hadn’t turned the CIA into a secret lawless army and death squad? What if Dulles hadn’t worked to end Iran’s democracy, or Guatemala’s? What if Dulles’ CIA hadn’t developed torture, rendition, human experimentation, and murder as routine policies? What if Eisenhower had been permitted to talk with Khrushchev? What if Dulles hadn’t tried to overthrow the President of France? What if Dulles had been “checked” or “balanced” ever so slightly by the media or Congress or the courts along the way? These are tougher questions than “What if there had been no Lee Harvey Oswald?” The answer to that is, “There would have been another guy very similar to serve the same purpose, just as there had been in the earlier attempt on JFK in Chicago. But “What if there had been no Allen Dulles?” looms large enough to suggest the possible answer that we would all be better off, less militarized, less secretive, less xenophobic. And that suggests that the deep state is not uniform and not unstoppable. Talbot’s powerful history is a contribution to the effort to stop it.
I hope Talbot speaks about his book in Virginia, after which he might stop saying that Williamsburg and the CIA’s “farm” are in “Northern Virginia.” Hasn’t Northern Virginia got enough to be ashamed of without that?
Now here’s something new. Consider the newly released report by Arthur Schlessinger, as noted by Mike Benz and others on X:
Nothing like a good dose of history to give meaningful context to today’s blips of news. Or yesterday’s. Consider Barack Obama’s decision regarding the Smith–Mundt Act.
A tweet by Wall Street Ape summarizes this discussion involving Mike Benz and Joe Rogan. How did Obama damage the U.S. by repealing part of the Smith–Mundt Act?
Mike Benz talks with Joe Rogan about what Barack Obama really did by repealing the Smith–Mundt Act
It’s SO MUCH BIGGER than just allowing use of propaganda on Americans, it allowed for:
– Infiltrate and co-opt the universities
– The unions
– The media
– The politicians
– The judgesIt allowed
– Foreign policy establishment can fund groups that effectively work with prosecutors domestically or that work at media, dual sort of dual use
– To give them foreign grants to do media propaganda abroad but they operate here, or social media censorship to coerce foreign countries to pass foreign censorship laws that explicitly and are intended to attack US social media companies and in US peer-to-peer speech“1948, Congress recognized the Frankensteinian monster they were creating by authorizing a covert permanent department of dirty Tricks. And this is their phrase, not mine, to do this cloak and dagger to infiltrate and co-opt the universities, the unions, the media, the politicians, the judges, the whole swarm army. You know what I have been calling for a long time, the USAID Truman Show”
“That are effectively a movie set being constructed by the US State Department and its sister influence orgs — The CIA”
“So the Smith–Mundt Act was always designed to say, listen, you can do this dirty stuff abroad, but it can’t come home. We have that protection, which lasted for 70 years and only, we only lost it a decade ago.” By BARACK OBAMA
ALL THESE THINGS and more were to be allowed to be used OVERSEAS ONLY, the Smith–Mundt Act was created to ensure that
But then Barack Obama got installed, he repealed the Smith–Mundt Act and now ALL THESE TOOLS were used against the American people and we paid for it all
I will be awaiting further analysis of the newly released documents. There might be far more than mere corroborations of the things we already know and suspect.
Supp . .
Glenn Greenwald: “We interviewed David Talbot, the author of “Devil’s Chessboard” — the best historical account of the rise of the CIA and the secretive Deep State — in November, 2023 about CIA and JFK killing.
Really worth re-visiting in light of these new releases”
Quote of the day by Clandestine: “If they are willing to do this, what else are they willing to do?”
How is this not treasonous?
[Supp March 26, 2025]
Tucker Carlson opens my eyes about Richard Nixon, Watergate and the Warren Commission: