Mertz and Soutere were adversaries in the power struggle between Charles
de Gaulle and the OAS (right-wing former members of the French Army who believed
de Gaulle had betrayed them in Algeria) in the late Fifties and the early
Sixties. Both of them had connections with the Union Corse--the Corsican Mafia
that ran the Heroin trade out of Marseilles. One of them (Soutere) had worked
closely with the French SDECE against the OAS. The other (Mertz) had actively
supported the OAS. One of them was in Dallas on 22 November, 1963, under the
name Jean-Rene Soutere, and was deported four days later at the request of the
French government.
One of them was the shooter on the Grassy Knoll. Which one I do not know,
although Soutere, in an interview in 1999 (after Mertz's death) claimed that it
was Mertz (O'Leary and Seymour, op. Cit., pp.130-38). Given the OAS's dislike
for JFK, as well as Mertz's membership in the OAS, my vote goes to Michel Mertz
as well.
The use of sound suppressors is the reason no one can agree on the number
of shots. If you are beyond a certain range (50-100 meters), and outside of a
certain area (less than 90 degrees either side of the suppressed weapon,
depending on the quality of the suppressor), you will not hear the shot. You can
be certain that whoever was at Dealey Plaza that terrible afternoon, they had
the best suppressors the CIA and U.S. military had in their
inventory.
" Fiat justitia, et ruat caelum!" cried
Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesonius (upon
learning of the death of his son-in-law Julius Caesar) , "Let Justice
Be Done, though the Heavens May Fall!"
Most, if not all of the men I believe
met behind the closed doors of Clint Murchison's drawing room on Thursday,
November 21, 1963, are long dead. Even it that meeting did not take place (on a
large or a small scale), the people who I believe initiated the plot against
JFK, who joined together after they discovered their common hatred and fear of
our Thirty-fifth President: the right-wing Texas oil barons and other American
plutocrats; segregationists; rogue members of the CIA--current and former--who
were making a fortune in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia from opium, as
well as Dulles loyalists; members of Organized Crime--including the Mafia and the
Union Corse, who were enjoying the CIA's protection for so much of their drug
and illegal arms trade; have gone, I believe, to face a Higher Tribunal than any
that we might imagine. So too are most, if not all, of those who directly took
part in the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. If any are still alive,
they are over seventy years-old, and will soon be judged in a Higher Court than
any of this physical world. So where, at this late date, might we find
justice.
We can begin by undoing the effects of
the coup d'etat that took place that horrible afternoon in Dallas by taking from
the heirs of the plutocrats who financed and acquiesced to the murder of our
Thirty-fifth President the economic power that made their predecessors action
possible. In so doing, we have our best opportunity to avenge ourselves--if only
a little--against the plutocratic oligarchs whose heirs in spirit and blood so
horribly oppress us today.
I am always amazed by the oligarchs who
scream at the top of their lungs about the redistribution of wealth from the top
down, but have nary a word to say about money flowing from the bottom to the
top. If the redistribution of wealth is wrong in one direction, it is at least
equally wrong in the other.
We must remember the observation of
Voltaire in his Dictionnaire
Philosophique ( 1764), and I will paraphrase here: "In general, the
art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of
the citizens to give to the other." Our only choice is whether to redistribute
that wealth from the rich to the poor, or the poor to the rich. If it is from
the rich to the poor, it is called a democracy, which as Thomas Jefferson wrote
to Isaac Tiffany in 1816, is "...the only pure republic, but impracticable
beyond the limits of a town." An oligarchy on the other hand, was, to Aristotle,
like a "...tyranny, which is the worst of governments,...[and] oligarchy is
little better..." (Aristotle, Politics , Book 4, Part II). (When Aristotle writes of
"democracy," he means rule by the poor--what we would in modern parlance call a
mobocracy--not our modern, constitutionally limited, representative, democracy.
The modern form of democracy is what Aristotle calls a "polity,"--in Benjamin
Jowett's translation--rule by the middle class, the best form of government;
Politics , Book 4, Part XI.)
The destruction of American democracy and our middle-class is a direct
result of President Kennedy's assassination. LBJ attempted to carry through on
many of Kennedy's domestic initiatives--probably as part of his price for going
along with Kennedy's assassination. Whether or not he was one of the originators
of this crime--and I do not believe he was--his Great Society was an egotistical
attempt to out do both his hero FDR, and the arrogant Catholic Bostonian who he
felt had stolen the Presidency from him in 1960. Lyndon Johnson was not John
Kennedy, and he did not understand that he could not have guns and butter, i.e.,
increase defense spending for Vietnam and the Cold War, while beginning a "War
on Poverty."
" War is too
important a matter to be left to the military." -- Georges Clemenceau,
1886
President Kennedy--after his experiences with the CIA
in the Bay of Pigs disaster, and the American military during the Cuban Missile
Crisis--knew that if we were to maintain our democratic system of government,
both the CIA and the Pentagon would have to be brought to heel. This would mean
reducing their budgets by as much as 20%, so they had less discretionary
spending, and then using the savings the government realized for domestic
programs. JFK also knew he would have to wait until after he was re-elected to
accomplish his goals. President Kennedy was concerned about a coup d'etat, and
those two organizations--especially the upper echelons of the Pentagon--were where
such an action was most likely to
originate. (Paul B. Fay, Jr.,
The Pleasure of His Company ; New York, Harper Row,
1966; p. 190.)
The War Hawks in our government have never understood that in a modern
democracy, going to war is an admission of failure at some point in both our
foreign and military policy. The members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who
thought we should go to war over the missiles in Cuba--let alone the Bay of
Pigs--were living in the totalitarian fantasy world of "Might Makes Right," and
"Let's get them before they get us." The purpose of a military in a modern
democracy is to be both extraordinarily capable in terms of training and
organization, and sufficiently powerful in terms of mat é riel, so that no one wants to fight
you. The members of the Joint Chiefs and the intelligence community--like Air
Force General Curtis LeMay--who thought that 15-30 million American dead were
acceptable losses against 100 million Soviets, the destruction of the Soviet
Union, and the end of world Communism; were affected by what the Greeks called
hubris; the belief that one can make decisions for other human beings as
if you were one of the Gods of Olympus. It is a form of insanity, with which
those in positions of power often find themselves
afflicted.
There is no doubt in my mind that JFK
was
going to end U.S. involvement in Vietnam: he and his brother Bobby's personal experiences
in Indochina in 1951 had convinced him that it was not a place for the U.S. to
oppose Communist expansion, because the form of Communism in Vietnam under Ho
Chi Minh was in reality more a nationalist revolt against French colonialism
than an internationalist struggle. On top of that, General of the Army Douglas
MacArthur had advised him in the strongest terms to stay away from that waiting
quagmire. (See Thurston Clarke's 2013 book JFK's Last Hundred Days: The
Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great
President , for
more on this subject.) With JFK dead, LBJ and the rest of the War Hawks
escalated the war until almost 600,000 American troops were in the Vietnam
theater by 1968. As Army General Maxwell Taylor, last Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy, stated in a recorded interview with I.
J. Hackman, on November 13, 1969 (cited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in
Robert Kennedy and His Times ):
" I
don't recall anyone who was strongly against [sending ground troops into
Vietnam], except one man and that was the President. The President just didn't
want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do.... It was really the
President's personal conviction that U.S. ground troops shouldn't go
in."
JFK had acquiesced to the overthrow of the Diem brothers in Vietnam, but
only after they had proven that they did not care for the welfare of the people
of South Vietnam, by making light of the Buddhist monk who burned himself alive.
He knew that by allowing the Diem brothers and Madame Nhu to remain in power,
they would force the U.S. into intervening, against his wishes; but to the
applause of the Right, the Pentagon, and the rest of the Military-Industrial
Complex. America's War Hawks wanted a war in Vietnam, together with the hundreds
of millions of dollars in additional revenues that it would
mean.
LBJ's escalation eventually led to his
not running for a second term (after Walter Cronkite revealed the truth about
the four month long Viet Cong Tet Offensive to the American people). Nixon's
second nomination by the GOP for President, led to the first October Surprise
against Vice-President Humphrey, the Democratic Presidential Nominee. Nixon's
foreign adviser, Henry Kissinger, went to Paris for secret negotiations with the
North Vietnamese, which was, if not treasonous, at least illegal. There he told
the North Vietnamese that if they waited until Nixon became President, the peace
talks would come to what the North Vietnamese would consider a "favorable"
conclusion, including the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. The North
Vietnamese, trusting Kissinger and Nixon--and disliking LBJ's continued
insistence on an independent South Vietnam--adjourned the peace talks until after
the election. This, together with George Wallace's third party candidacy, is
generally held to be the reason that Nixon won by a very narrow
margin.
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