Reply #3: Jim Garrison was right. Joan Mellen documented it. [View All]

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http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2880126

Octafish (1000+ posts) Sun Feb-17-08 12:08 PM
Response to Original message
6. Jim Garrison was right. Joan Mellen documented it.
Here's what we do know, courtesy of Prof. Mellen:




WHO RULES AMERICA? HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Joan Mellen
Stewart Mott House, Washington, D.C., September 14, 2007.

I like to begin my talks with a mantra. It goes like this. Jim Garrison, district attorney of Orleans Parish, whose investigation into the Kennedy assassination is the subject of my book, “A Farewell To Justice,” after it was all over and Clay Shaw was acquitted, was asked: how could you ever have believed that you could convict CIA operative Clay Shaw for participation in the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy in a state court in Louisiana?

“I guess I thought I was living in the country I was born in,” Garrison said.

This line has particular resonance today. Many of us were not born in a country where martial law was legitimized; where the President could countermand any law he wanted to with promiscuous signing statements; where there was illegal government surveillance of citizens accompanied by neither warrants nor probable cause; where what library books you took out could become known to the government; where America, having legalized the use of torture, was defined as a country inevitably pursuing preemptive foreign wars, and where, as in George Orwell's “1984,” war was a permanent part of the country's identity. You all know the litany.

It also has become clear even to those in deepest denial that the Democrats are not about to reverse these assaults on the U.S. Constitution. In policy, in principle and in action, the Democrats are revealing themselves as offering no substantive difference from the party in power. Howard Zinn made the point that there was little difference between the two parties in “A People's History of the United States,” first published in 1980. Zinn's observation is more true than ever today as some people, albeit half-heartedly, continue to be tempted to place their faith in a change of administrations in the hope of reversing the damage to the democratic fabric we have witnessed in the past eight years.

In our continuing attempt to understand when this assault on the Constitution began in earnest, so that in the administration of George W. Bush it accelerated at so astonishing a pace, I would like first to raise the question of whether it is in to fact true that with Bush and Cheney we have seen an inflation of the power of the Executive. Or has the power of the president in fact shrunk so drastically that it is entirely inappropriate to blame Bush for the war, or for the assault on the Constitution? Let me suggest that it is the organ grinder with whom we have to be concerned, rather than the monkey.

Sometimes there is a historical moment where a society suffers a dramatic reversal in political direction.

I would place that moment at the assassination of President Kennedy. At that instant, the Bushes and the Cheneys, serving so diligently the Bechtels and Halliburtons and their multifarious cohort, mostly in the western part of the country, seized the political control of this country. This is why discussion of the murder of President Kennedy is as relevant today as it was in 1963 and 1964, and why there has never been nor will there ever be an honest investigation of this crime so long as that investigation is government-sponsored. That the Kennedy family, in particular Robert Kennedy, opposed any open investigation of President Kennedy's death is one dimension of the story that has led me to the conclusion that we must not look today to the Democratic Party for redress.

I spent seven years on my investigation of the Kennedy assassination. I went beyond Jim Garrison's work to include the thousands of documents released after his death to the National Archives under the JFK Act passed by a Congress with some interest in transparency. We are not likely to see similar legislation to open the records of the 9/11 Commission. That is not speculation. Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, admitted on NPR that he was not about to make the same mistake the Warren Commission did; he was not about to release for public and scholarly scrutiny the documents his commission collected. When Lieutenant Colonel Tony Shaffer came forward with information about the “Able Danger” unit of military intelligence, he was swiftly discredited. The “New York Times” buried his astonishing revelations in its back pages. Col. Shaffer told me when I met him at the office of his attorney, Mark Zaid, that he had lost his job.

I interviewed more than a thousand people in my effort to contribute to the question of who planned the murder of President Kennedy. Among them was a former mercenary and soldier-of-fortune named Gerald Patrick Hemming, a shrewd former CIA asset, who remarked to me in passing, that “John F. Kennedy was the last president who thought he could take power.” In his youth, inexperience and sense of entitlement, Kennedy could not imagine that his CIA enemies would eliminate him.

President Kennedy knew that the CIA's clandestine service was undermining him at every turn. He knew that Richard Helms and his underlings were his blood enemies (you know the line, “I'll splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and cast them to the winds”), but he and we were astonished that the CIA and its military confreres would have so little respect for the office that represented the identity of the country that they would murder the head of state on the streets of an American city in broad daylight.

CONTINUED...

http://www.joanmellen.net/whorules.html

Mirage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAyLRNsiJw8