Alan Haber : Exposing the Dark Forces

As long as these forces operate, and are not pursued, there is no democracy, whatever the window dressings.

By Alan Haber / The Rag Blog / June 25, 2009

See ‘Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?’ by Shane O’Sullivan, Below.

I was stuck by the concluding paragraph in the article below from 2006 –- about the CIA and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy -- about the relevance now of this old story. Robert Kennedy's 81st birthday would have been last Sunday

My mind was on Iran. I was thinking we (such American movement as we are) should keep the focus on the United States’ role, grievous problems with our own elections, human rights, and covert operations and operators. Then I see this article, which underscores for me an urgency here to go after and expose the dark forces in this government, past and present, continuing to operate, both the covert ones connected with assassinations and coups, etc, and the overt ones like wars of choice in Iraq, and arming Israeli attacks on Palestine.

As long as these forces operate, and are not pursued, there is no democracy, whatever the window dressings. The Iranian democracy in the streets should be a spur to our own struggle, to root out the powers behind the powers here. Full investigations, no statute of limitations on criminal politics, no praise to the secret keepers, accountability forever. Here and Iran, both. Here, as there, the powers privatize the commons and steal the national wealth.

I hope those seeking a more open society can prevail in Iran. Moussavi and the other challengers will become captive to the increasingly principled -- meaning radical -- demands of the movement. Such insurgencies were put down in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, China. In other places they overwhelmed national authority, and stirred the people's desire to be free. I heard an Iranian student say, on a phone broadcast, "This is our best chance to be free. If we fail, it will be a long time before we have a chance again."

When the freedom call merges with "god is great," it can be a powerful force indeed: an underground organized from the rooftops. The people are furious, it can lead to an awakening of consciousness, rethinking everything, until there is no going back. Iranian young people chanting and marching against the government and for respect (drawing praise from the right wing government in Israel and the American right also).

I hope the youth of Palestine and in America take it to heart, that the voice of the youth be heard.

Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?

In 1968, Robert Kennedy seemed likely to follow his brother, John, into the White House. Then, on June 6, he was assassinated -- apparently by a lone gunman. But the author says he has evidence implicating three CIA agents in the murder.

By Shane O’Sullivan

[This article was originally published by The Guardian on Nov. 20, 2006. It was reposted on The Sixties website on June 21, 2009.]

At first, it seems an open-and-shut case. On June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy wins the California Democratic primary and is set to challenge Richard Nixon for the White House. After midnight, he finishes his victory speech at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles and is shaking hands with kitchen staff in a crowded pantry when 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan steps down from a tray-stacker with a "sick, villainous smile" on his face and starts firing at Kennedy with an eight-shot revolver.

As Kennedy lies dying on the pantry floor, Sirhan is arrested as the lone assassin. He carries the motive in his shirt-pocket (a clipping about Kennedy's plans to sell bombers to Israel) and notebooks at his house seem to incriminate him. But the autopsy report suggests Sirhan could not have fired the shots that killed Kennedy. Witnesses place Sirhan's gun several feet in front of Kennedy, but the fatal bullet is fired from one inch behind. And more bullet-holes are found in the pantry than Sirhan's gun can hold, suggesting a second gunman is involved. Sirhan's notebooks show a bizarre series of "automatic writing" -- "RFK must die RFK must be killed -- Robert F Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68" - and even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember shooting Kennedy. He recalls "being led into a dark place by a girl who wanted coffee," then being choked by an angry mob. Defence psychiatrists conclude he was in a trance at the time of the shooting and leading psychiatrists suggest he may have be a hypnotically programmed assassin.

Three years ago, I started writing a screenplay about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, caught up in a strange tale of second guns and "Manchurian candidates" (as the movie termed brainwashed assassins). As I researched the case, I uncovered new video and photographic evidence suggesting that three senior CIA operatives were behind the killing. I did not buy the official ending that Sirhan acted alone, and started dipping into the nether-world of "assassination research," crossing paths with David Sanchez Morales, a fearsome Yaqui Indian.

Morales was a legendary figure in CIA covert operations. According to close associate Tom Clines, if you saw Morales walking down the street in a Latin American capital, you knew a coup was about to happen. When the subject of the Kennedys came up in a late-night session with friends in 1973, Morales launched into a tirade that finished: "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard." From this line grew my odyssey into the spook world of the 60s and the secrets behind the death of Bobby Kennedy.

Working from a Cuban photograph of Morales from 1959, I viewed news coverage of the assassination to see if I could spot the man the Cubans called El Gordo -- The Fat One. Fifteen minutes in, there he was, standing at the back of the ballroom, in the moments between the end of Kennedy's speech and the shooting. Thirty minutes later, there he was again, casually floating around the darkened ballroom while an associate with a pencil moustache took notes.

The source of early research on Morales was Bradley Ayers, a retired US army captain who had been seconded to JM-Wave, the CIA's Miami base in 1963, to work closely with chief of operations Morales on training Cuban exiles to run sabotage raids on Castro. I tracked Ayers down to a small town in Wisconsin and emailed him stills of Morales and another guy I found suspicious -- a man who is pictured entering the ballroom from the direction of the pantry moments after the shooting, clutching a small container to his body, and being waved towards an exit by a Latin associate.

Ayers' response was instant. He was 95% sure that the first figure was Morales and equally sure that the other man was Gordon Campbell, who worked alongside Morales at JM-Wave in 1963 and was Ayers' case officer shortly before the JFK assassination.

I put my script aside and flew to the US to interview key witnesses for a documentary on the unfolding story. In person, Ayers positively identified Morales and Campbell and introduced me to David Rabern, a freelance operative who was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion force in 1961 and was at the Ambassador hotel that night. He did not know Morales and Campbell by name but saw them talking to each other out in the lobby before the shooting and assumed they were Kennedy's security people. He also saw Campbell around police stations three or four times in the year before Robert Kennedy was shot.

This was odd. The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and Morales was stationed in Laos in 1968. With no secret service protection for presidential candidates in those days, Kennedy was guarded by unarmed Olympic decathlete champion Rafer Johnson and football tackler Rosey Grier -- no match for an expert assassination team.

Trawling through microfilm of the police investigation, I found further photographs of Campbell with a third figure, standing centre-stage in the Ambassador hotel hours before the shooting. He looked Greek, and I suspected he might be George Joannides, chief of psychological warfare operations at JM-Wave. Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigating the death of John F Kennedy.

Ed Lopez, now a respected lawyer at Cornell University, came into close contact with Joann-des when he was a young law student working for the committee. We visit him and show him the photograph and he is 99% sure it is Joannides. When I tell him where it was taken, he is not surprised: "If these guys decided you were bad, they acted on it.

We move to Washington to meet Wayne Smith, a state department official for 25 years who knew Morales well at the US embassy in Havana in 1959-60. When we show him the video in the ballroom, his response is instant: "That's him, that's Morales." He remembers Morales at a cocktail party in Buenos Aires in 1975, saying Kennedy got what was coming to him. Is there a benign explanation for his presence? For Kennedy's security, maybe? Smith laughs. Morales is the last person you would want to protect Bobby Kennedy, he says. He hated the Kennedys, blaming their lack of air support for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

We meet Clines in a hotel room near CIA headquarters. He does not want to go on camera and brings a friend, which is a little unnerving. Clines remembers "Dave" fondly. The guy in the video looks like Morales but it is not him, he says: "This guy is fatter and Morales walked with more of a slouch and his tie down." To me, the guy in the video does walk with a slouch and his tie is down.

Clines says he knew Joannides and Campbell and it is not them either, but he fondly remembers Ayers bringing snakes into JM-Wave to scare the secretaries and seems disturbed at Smith's identification of Morales. He does not discourage our investigation and suggests others who might be able to help. A seasoned journalist cautions that he would expect Clines "to blow smoke," and yet it seems his honest opinion.

As we leave Los Angeles, I tell the immigration officer that I am doing a story on Bobby Kennedy. She has seen the advertisements for the new Emilio Estevez movie about the assassination, Bobby. "Who do you think did it? I think it was the Mob," she says before I can answer.

"I definitely think it was more than one man," I say, discreetly.

Morales died of a heart attack in 1978, weeks before he was to be called before the HSCA. Joannides died in 1990. Campbell may still be out there somewhere, in his early 80s. Given the positive identifications we have gathered on these three, the CIA and the Los Angeles Police Department need to explain what they were doing there. Lopez believes the CIA should call in and interview everybody who knew them, disclose whether they were on a CIA operation and, if not, why they were there that night.

Today would have been Robert Kennedy's 81st birthday. The world is crying out for a compassionate leader like him. If dark forces were behind his elimination, it needs to be investigated

Source / The Sixties

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Tom Hayden : Same Social Expectations Amid a Very Different War

'The similarities between the movements for RFK and Barack Obama (the fervor and the interracial character) have been often noted. If anything, the Obama constituency is larger because of the mobilization of so many more young people'
By Tom Hayden / August 15, 2008

As the Democratic National Convention approaches, people inevitably think about the parallels between 1968 and 2008.

The times are different. True, there were unpopular wars raging in those days, but the American casualties in Vietnam were 15 times more than in Iraq today. Every young man faced the draft. Those under the age of 21, like the college students for Eugene McCarthy, could not vote.

The demonstrations of the '60s finally opened the institutional channels that were closed to my generation of protesters.

Today, anti-war sentiment is occasionally expressed in the streets: There have been 11 protests over the war in Iraq with more than 100,000 participants — but it is diffused less visibly across the mainstream.

It is difficult to call for law and order or speak for a "silent majority" (as Richard Nixon did) against 55 percent of American voters who favor a one-year withdrawal, and impossible to indict the likes of Michael Moore, the Dixie Chicks or Cindy Sheehan.

If anyone should be indicted for urging riots at the Democratic National Convention, it would be Rush Limbaugh, who in April told listeners that he was "dreaming" of riots at the DNC. (U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar called Limbaugh's comments "incendiary.")

In 1968, the Democratic establishment was carrying out and defending the Vietnam War against rebellions in the ghettos, on campuses, and among its own rank and file. The Democratic delegate-selection system was rigged from within.

In that situation there arose a movement of African-Americans, Mexican-Americans and a "conscience" constituency on campuses around the candidacy of Robert Kennedy — who, shortly after Martin Luther King's assassination, was murdered at a moment when our history was beginning to turn around.

The similarities between the movements for RFK and Barack Obama (the fervor and the interracial character) have been often noted. If anything, the Obama constituency is larger because of the mobilization of so many more young people.

In both instances, the movements were more progressive on issues than the candidates themselves. Kennedy campaigned on a general anti-war pledge without proposing complete withdrawal. But onlookers had to be clueless not to know that Kennedy intended to end that war. The tide of anti-war feeling that first made Obama a viable candidate and now holds him to a timetable for withdrawal will continue to rise if he becomes bogged down in future quagmires.

Since the death of Robert Kennedy, I have never been inspired by an electoral movement like that for Obama. There are no certainties, however. He may not win because of the Electoral College's twisted logic, ironically rooted in our founding compromise over slavery. Many of my generation are haunted by the knowledge that there are killers out there in the shadowlands, making us admire Obama's audacity all the more.

If Obama does win, experience suggests that his victory might stimulate a new social movement like the one connected to another Kennedy in the early '60s, which was based on rising expectations after the dreary years of suspicious elections, fabricated wars, environmental denial, spreading inequality, Gilded Age corruption and Katrina-type disasters.

John F. Kennedy was at first cautious in the face of that movement. He disastrously invaded Cuba and sent Green Berets to Vietnam. He resisted the 1963 March on Washington but then embraced it fully. After the Cuban fiasco, he began to rethink the Cold War worldview and move along a path of domestic reform. Then came his murder, followed by the worst years of the '60s, which his brother Robert, in one brief moment, tried to reverse.

Our global generation revolted against the constrictions of the Cold War on all sides. We lived with the terror of atomic weapons, being told as children to crawl under our school desks and that our world might be incinerated over the Cuban missile crisis. We opposed a two-dimensional world, which made every country a satellite and every individual a dependent on two nation-states competing with the indescribable threat of nuclear weapons. The more the nuclear arms race grew, the more proxy wars were fought, the more the possibilities of dissent and democracy seemed to shrink.

It is forgotten that our generation knew terrorism, too. We struggled not only for human rights and peace in Vietnam, but for the end of the Cold War-approach of mutually assured nuclear destruction.

The long-term challenge for the Obama generation is not only to end the present wars and deal with new crises like global warming, but also to challenge the framework of the war on terror and the shadow it casts over the future.

A President Obama may have to go through a Bay of Pigs in Pakistan or Afghanistan before he begins, like the Kennedy brothers, to reconsider the assumptions of the war on terror. But the parallels are identical.

During the Cold War, the enemy threat was defined as a conspiracy in Moscow, carried out through hidden guerrilla armies across the world. Vietnam was only a pawn of Moscow and, it was added, perhaps China. To combat this menace, trillions of dollars were spent on the nuclear arsenal, conventional armed forces and secret operations from Iran to Guatemala. Expenditures on anti-poverty programs simply dried up, because it wasn't possible to afford both guns and butter. Anyone who protested the Vietnam War in the streets was considered by Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover to be an instrument of this internationally based conspiracy.

The recent conflict between Russia and Georgia reveals that the Cold War is not entirely over. A faction of neoconservatives, along with John McCain, have supported sending U.S. advisers and funds to support the fledgling state of Georgia in its efforts to dominate several breakaway areas on the Russian border. This policy of supporting Georgia's designs on South Ossetia, and promoting Georgia in an expanded NATO alliance, has been shaped by McCain and his foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, a lobbyist who has been on the payroll of Georgia for several years, according to a Washington Post story last week.

Scheunemann previously led the "Iraq lobby" as head of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and as a director of the Project for a New American Century. McCain and Scheunemann now are reviving a Cold War with Russia while at the same time pursuing multiple fronts in the war on terror. Their hardline ideological commitment, combined with lucrative lobbying contracts, fuels a dangerous and costly thrust toward a war until the last Communists and Islamic militants surrender.

If Vietnam was the focal point of the Cold War, Iraq and now Afghanistan are focal points in the new war on terror. The conspiratorial center, we are told, is an al-Qaeda headquartered in places like North and South Waziristan. Its agents are secretly feeding money and weapons to insurgents loyal to a global jihad. They must be annihilated by military force, at whatever expense to domestic programs and civil liberties. Our country will be devastated by nuclear suitcase bombs unless we crush al-Qaeda in its cave.

This is the same crackpot realism that passed for common sense in the '60s. It overemphasizes organizational targets while underestimating the forces of nationalism and religious hatred ignited by the nature of our policies toward Muslim countries. When we bomb wedding parties in Afghanistan, we give birth to hundreds of raging new jihadists. When we fail to act on the knowledge that Afghanistan is the 122nd-poorest country on the United Nations' development index of 127 nations, we set in motion the possible attacks on our country that we claim to fear.

If the Obama generation does not find a way to avoid this treadmill to death, there will never be more than token resources for economic development in our inner cities or a new green economy, to cite two urgent domestic priorities. Our young men and women will die in ambiguous quagmires. Most of the world will be hostile to our plight. If the only change is that a black man will be running our empire, is that change worth fighting for?

Obama himself cannot make this larger change. It will be difficult enough to withdraw from Iraq and eventually reach compromise on Afghanistan and Pakistan. As commander in chief and the person in charge of our superpower reputation, he will feel compelled toward military action even if his visionary instincts have to be set aside. It will take the movement, which is stirring now, to lead him in the direction of his dreams, as the movements of the '60s helped bring forth the greatness in the Kennedys.

Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society (sds) in the sixties, is a retired California state senator, author, and political and social activist. His latest book, with Ron Sossi and Frank Condon, is "Voices of the Chicago Eight: A Generation on Trial" (City Lights, July 2008).

Source / Denver Post

Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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Tom Hayden : Obama's Core Constituency is Progressive

Journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger.
With All Respect, John Pilger Is Wrong
By Tom Hayden

John Pilger's "Continuing the Tradition - Obama is a Hawk" was recently published in the British Economist and circulated widely. (See Pilger's article on The Rag Blog.) It oppossed those urging a vote for Obama.

John Pilger is one of my favorite critics in the world, but he's very wrong on Barack Obama. Not all wrong, though.

Take Robert Kennedy. Pilger says RFK, like Obama, was "a senator with no achievements to his name." What? He was US Attorney General during the Freedom Rides; after a token start, he became an important supporter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.. He initiated the community action programs that briefly offered hope until the Democratic establishment smothered them. His backdoor diplomacy defused the Cuban missile crisis. He raised hopes in South Africa through a controversial visit. We can disagree with these gestures, in whole or part, but to say RFK had "no achievements" is foolish by far.

Neither is it accurate to assert that Kennedy "continued to support [Vietnam] in private." What is true is that he was ambivalent in private and public, but determined to reverse a policy that was sinking 500,000 troops in a quagmire. At worst, as president he would have embarked on a gradual de-escalation combined with diplomacy. Pilger's clear implication is that Kennedy was faking his opposition to Vietnam to seduce the anti-war vote.

Pilger says Kennedy's motive was to rescue the Democrats from the "threat of real change." And so he visited Indian reservations, Appalachian hollows, hunger-striking California farmworkers, and the streets of Watts in a deceptive campaign filled with "vacuities."

To believe this narrative is to deny the living examples of Ted Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, junior, and the leaders of black and latino communities who apparently continue the delusion of living out this pattern of "politricks" decade after decade.

Could Bobby Kennedy have been more antiwar? Yes? Was he too hopeful about the remedies to Bedford-Stuyvesant? Yes. But that doesn't make him a vacuous politician peddling false hope. He would have appointed hundreds of progressives to civil rights, anti-trust, and anti-poverty offices, and been at least responsive to the winds of change which he himself helped to stimulate. For Pilger, it apparently wouldn't matter if Kennedy, Humphrey or Nixon were president.

Now to Obama. It's plain crazy to argue that Obama and John McCain are "almost united" on Iraq. It is a truism of politics that rival candidates tend toward the center to win uncommitted votes. That doesn't obscure the obvious, that their differences on the Iraq war are wide and deep. Further, Pilger sees no differences between the two on domestic issues either. Why? Because Obama takes Wall Street money, apparently eclipsing the unprecedented sums his campaign has raised online.

For Pilger, tens of millions of Americans who either love or hate Obama are victims of mass manipulation, since Obama is neither their savior or enemy, but only another politician "exploiting the electoral power of delusion"...and so on.

Sorry for the unintended sarcasm, but there is an alternative to sitting on the sidelines waiting for people to wake up from their electoral fantasies.

It's called www.progressivesforobama.blogspot.com.

It's a network for people who strongly support Obama, or Obama's movement [myself], or who think Obama is the "best option", or who simply want to stop McCain and the neo-conservative renaissance. Or people who believe it important to be engaged in mass movements.

We disagree on certain fundamentals with Obama, which is why we are independent of his campaign. We agree that his anti-war proposal will leave tens of thousands of Americans trying to carry out counterinsurgency in Iraq. We believe diplomacy, not escalation, is the best approach to Iran and Afghanistan. We believe deep revisions must be made to NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA and WTO. Those policies must be reversed by the power of social movements, public opinion and the election of a more progressive Congress.

But we believe that Obama's core constituency is a progressive one, and the new voters he excites will be progressive political activists for years to come. We believe that certain presidential appointments matter to the progressive movement, such as the US Supreme Court, the civil rights division of the Justice Department, labor standards enforcers, appointments to the Federal Communications Commission, and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. And more.

As far as I know, none of us believe that a new president is a substitute for the education, organizing and movement-building that is the primary force in progressive social change. But experience teaches that who is president matters. And this is a major point of difference with Pilger, whose belief is that [a] an Obama victory will be "liberalism's last fling", and [b] that if Obama wins, "domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent."

It's also possible that an Obama defeat will accelerate domestic resistance, based on a larger, angrier constituency than ever before, and they won't be followers of those who sat by dismissing the Obama campaign. On the other hand, a November Obama victory, like the Obama primary victory, will energize a spirit that will lead to a new progressive cycle of organizing and movement building and trigger expectations that will surprise the new president.

Source. / Progressives for Obama

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