Now we have Trump The pits of hell

THE ABSURD TIMES

Remember, remember, the 5th of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot;
I see of no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Dulles v. Democracy

by

Czar Donic

We have just about had it for awhile. There are simply too many things our "free-market" system of arms distribution and "Nation Building," sine we can not even rebuild Detroit or Baltimore, refugees, wars, etc. to keep up with. Furthermore, there are other things to think about and, when the spirit moves, we will publish those in another forum, made available the same way or through the same channels.  Now we have Trump.

We once looked back here in order to find out why each President seemed worse than the last. Of course, Carter was a bit of a relief after Nixon and Obama at least speaks English after 8 years of Georgie and his Oedipus complex, but the serious decline came with the death of JFK. It led to Viet Nam and then eventually Ronald Reagan. How did it come about?

A new book of the Dulles brothers in action sheds some more light on the monumental event. In order to follow, we need to unravel some history and that is never fun. In addition, the careers of the Dulles brothers are so murky that they may never be untangled. And anyway, who cares now? Right?

Allen Dulles was head of the CIA during Eisenhower and Kennedy. He once said that the CIA did nothing without the approval of the "Highest" levels of the government, which meant his brother, John Foster Dulles. Both were from San Francisco and had a law firm in D.C. And were very close to what emerged as Bechtel. Allen had the elected President of Iran overthrown and replaced by the Shah (who is the only leader in the Mideast, except Israel, to ever have any nuclear weapons program).

You may have had of Senator McCarthy and McCarthyism in the 50s. Well, the fascist McCarthy felt that there were "Communists" in the CIA and subpoenaed documents from them. Dulles not only resisted, had Eisenhower block him, but also broke into McCarthy's Senate office to plant "disinformation". We might say good for him, but we have to realize that it was Dulles, not CBS, that eventually "neutralized" McCarthy.

Jumping ahead a few years, JFK was elected and happy to see Lamumba elected President, the first democratically elected African leader. Dulles neutralized him, but Kennedy didn't know this until later. You might want to remember a scene from Godfather II that took place in Cuba: a meeting with a few mobsters, ATT, big food conglomerates, and so on, with Batista, then President of Cuba. Remember also some of the cleaned up scenes of decadent "entertainment" provided for United States investors and tourists. Then the revolution. All during Eisenhower.

Kennedy takes office and already several plots to assassinate Castro are underway and take place without his specific approval. By the Bay of Pigs, he finds out how deeply the CIA is involved and fires Allen Dulles and several of his operatives. Kennedy is knocked off in Dallas, and LBJ forms a "commission" to investigate, named after Warren, Chief Justice, but run by Dulles, one year after Dulles was fired by JFK. Bechtel makes a ton of money in Viet Nam and other wars (LBJ knew how to survive, if nothing else). Robert Kennedy resigned immediately as he had forced Hoover to report to him, not directly to the president (as it should be).

New we can here from the author:

From Democracy Now:

David Talbot, author of "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government," re-examines what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and looks at John F. Kennedy's relationship with his former CIA director. "The weekend of Kennedy's assassination, Allen Dulles is not at home watching television like the rest of America," Talbot said. "He's at a remote CIA facility, two years after being pushed out of the agency by Kennedy, called The Farm, in northern Virginia, that he used when he was director of the CIA as a kind of an alternate command post." Talbot also asks why the agency has refused to publicly release travel documents of CIA officials who have been identified for having a possible role in Kennedy's death.

---

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we continue Part 2 of our conversation with David Talbot on his new book,The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. I asked him why he was—why Allen Dulles was fired by JFK.

DAVID TALBOT: Well, he was fired after the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy realized he shouldn't have kept Dulles on from the Eisenhower years. They were philosophically too different. And the Bay of Pigs was the final straw for him. So he was pushed out after that.

And—but Dulles, as I say, continued to sort of set up an anti-Kennedy government in exile in his home in Georgetown. Many of the people he was meeting with, several of the people, including Howard Hunt and others, later became figures of suspicion during the House Select Committee on Assassination hearings in Washington in the 1970s. You know, most Americans don't know that that was the last official statement, the last official report, on the Kennedy assassination, not the Warren Report back in 1964. But the Congress reopened the investigation into John Kennedy's assassination, and they did determine he was killed as the result of a conspiracy.

So a number of the people who came up during this investigation by Congress were figures of interest who were meeting with Allen Dulles. They had no, you know, obvious reason to be meeting with a "retired" CIA official. The weekend of Kennedy's assassination, Allen Dulles is not at home watching television like the rest of America. He's at a remote CIA facility, two years after being pushed out of the agency by Kennedy, called The Farm, in northern Virginia, that he used when he was director of the CIA as a kind of an alternate command post. Well, he's there while Kennedy is killed, after Kennedy is killed, when Jack Ruby then kills Lee Harvey Oswald. That whole fateful weekend, he's hunkered down in a CIA command post. So, there are many odd circumstances like this.

I also found out from interviewing the children of another formerCIA official that one of the key figures of interest in the Kennedy assassination, a guy named William Harvey, who was head of theCIA-Mafia plot against Castro and hated the Kennedys, thought that they were weak and so on, he was seen leaving his Rome station and flying to Dallas, by his own deputy, on an airplane early in November 1963. This is a remarkable sighting, because to place someone like William Harvey, the head of the CIA's assassination unit, put there by Allen Dulles, in Dallas in November of '63 before the assassination is a very important fact. The CIA, by the way, refuses, even at this late date, to release the travel vouchers for people like William Harvey. Under the JFK Records Act, that was passed back in the 1990s, they are compelled by federal law to release all documents related to the Kennedy assassination, but they're still withholding over 1,100 of these documents, including—and I used the Freedom of Information Act to try and get the travel vouchers for William Harvey. They're still holding onto them.

AMY GOODMAN: How many calls are you getting in the mainstream media to do interviews?

DAVID TALBOT: Well, thank God, I was saying earlier, for alternative media, like this, Amy, because there is resistance to this book. First of all, I call out the mainstream media. I say that New York Times,CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, they were all under his thumb. They did his bidding.

AMY GOODMAN: Whose thumb?

DAVID TALBOT: Allen Dulles's thumb. So, when the Warren Report came out, I was saying that one of the editors, top editors, atNewsweek wrote to him and said, "Thank you so much, Mr. Dulles, for helping shape our coverage of the Warren Report." Well, of course, Allen Dulles was on the Warren Commission. In fact, some people thought it should have been called the Dulles Commission, because he dominated it so much. So, you know, it's way too cozy, the relationship between Washington power and the media. And—

AMY GOODMAN: What was the relationship between Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA?

DAVID TALBOT: Well, they were social friends, not just him, but other members of the Sulzberger family. I found, you know, cozy correspondence between them, congratulating him when he was inaugurated, Dulles, as CIA director. They called him "Ally," one of the Sulzberger families, in one letter. They would get together, you know, every year. Dulles would hold these media sort of drink fests for New Year's. And these were, you know, top reporters, top editors, would get together with the CIA guys and rub elbows and get a little drunk. And, you know, when Allen Dulles didn't want a reporter, because he felt he was being overly aggressive, covering, say, Guatemala—Sydney Gruson, the reporter—in the run-up to the coup there in 1954, he had—he made a call to The New York Times and had him removed. That was because of his relationship with Sulzberger, the publisher. So, that was the kind of pull that Allen Dulles had.

AMY GOODMAN: How did that work?

DAVID TALBOT: Well, they just took him out. They removed Gruson. They transferred him, I think to Mexico, at that point.