The conspiracy that killed JFK eats at my soul, and has for thirty-five years. Two of our three branches of government say it is a conspiracy in which elements of the third branch might have been complicit. The set-up for the assassination and cover-up afterwards says that elements of the Executive Branch were up to their necks in it. They wanted someone more pliant to their goals in the White House than JFK, like LBJ.

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I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilisation. It's a lout's game.

Rebecca West (1892-1983), British author. Introduction to 1982 edition of The Meaning of Treason (first published 1949).

It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.

Sun Tzu (6th-5th century B.C.), Chinese general. The Art of War, chapter 13, axiom 27 (c. 490 B.C.; edited by James Clavell, 1981).

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Bible: New Testament. John 8:32. These words of Jesus are inscribed on the wall of the main lobby at the C.I.A. headquarters, Langley, Va.

After my February 4, 2010 article "Pacem in Terra" for OpEdNews.com, there was so much which was left unsaid about the assassination of President Kennedy and the probable complicity of members of our own intelligence and military communities, as well as many of the corporate elite, I felt that some more questions needed to be asked and answered about that coup d'etat in 1963.

The need for this was demonstrated in an article by Glenn Greenwald on Salon.com on February 4, 2010, "On the Claimed War Exception to the Constitution," about articles in the Washington Post and the Washington Times. These articles reported that Admiral Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence, admitted to a Congressional committee that President Bush's policy of "targeting selected American citizens for assassination if they are deemed to be terrorists" was being continued.

(See http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2010/02/04/assassinations)

It doesn't surprise me; but if elements of our government are willing to assassinate a President, what hope do any of the rest of us have. The carte blanche and lettre de cachet are far older than the French terms that we now use to describe them. Same with words like star chamber and indefinite detention: tyrants have used them under different names for centuries. Now we call them FISA Courts and Detention Camps at Guantanamo, but the purpose is the same.

Remember the letter given by Cardinal Richelieu to Milady in the elder Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, much to the Cardinal's later regret: "The bearer of this document has done what they have done, in my Name, and for the good of the State. Richelieu." Expediency has a cost far beyond that which most politicians ever count upon. If they are fortunate, it is escape to exile just ahead of a lynch mob.

Republicans are up in arms because the Christmas Day "Underwear" Bomber was read his rights by the FBI under the Miranda decision. Their refrain seems to be, "Please Dear Leader: give us more safety from all of the evil people who want to hurt us. We don't need our Miranda rights: we are good little boys and girls; completely unlike those people over there who want to hurt us and destroy our way of life. What way of life is that? We are the freest nation in the world with more rights and liberties than any other country. That is the reason we can afford to toss so many of them away."

Yeah, right.

Republics die by internal rot, not external force. Rich Republicans, George W. Bush's famous "haves and have mores," believe that the country can remain politically and financially strong, even as they deliberately remove every bit of what they believe is superfluous support and protection from the oversight of the nation's financial institutions and corporations in the name of ever higher profits. Bertrand Russell was quite correct in his essay "Freedom in Society," "Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate."

Thomas Paine foresaw the same long term object of these plutocrats machinations two hundred years ago: "They contend in favour of their own, that the portion of liberty enjoyed in England is just enough to enslave a country more productively than by despotism, and that as the real object of despotism is revenue, a Government so formed obtains more than it could do either by direct despotism, or in a full state of freedom, and is, therefore, on the ground of interest, opposed to both." (The Rights of Man, Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine, Signet Classics, 2003, p.180.)

As for the less wealthy Republicans, they have been manipulated into believing a series of great lies over the last eighty years. These lies are based on the premise that adherence to some ideological principle--abortion, gun control, lower taxes, being against affirmative action, the threat of Communism, segregation--is more essential for the long term good of the nation and themselves, than making certain that they, their families, their friends and their neighbors have the bare necessities of modern life. These necessities include quality jobs with reasonable pay and hours (including vacations and sick leave), decent housing, a good education, affordable comprehensive health care, protection from unfair competition in business and the workplace, and protection against old age and disability. On top of all this, there should be a tax system that made certain that those who could most afford to pay taxes--and by logical extension made the greatest use of the Commons, which is to say the infrastructure and natural resources owned by all of us--were the ones who did so.

The power elites have accomplished this deception by overemphasizing America's tradition of individualism in our various media, and underplaying the history of American community cooperation. A barn raising was a community affair, as were harvests, plantings, building dams and bridges, etc., not to mention providing a common defense against attacks by hostile native Americans or outlaws, in America's pioneer days. We have been left with what Theodore Dreiser wrote of in his 1932 article Individualism Seen in Destructive Phase: "...the American citizen"with his faith in individualism and what it will do for him"has now led him to the place where his fellow individualists of greater strength, cunning, and greed are in a position to say for how much, or rather, for how little, he shall work, for how long, and whether, he shall be allowed to make any complaint or even seek redress in case he is unhappy or dissatisfied, ill-treated, deprived, or even actually starved. In fact, his faith in this individualism"has caused him to slumber while his fellow individualists of greater greed and cunning have been seizing his wealth, his church, his press, his courts, his judges, his legislators, his police, and quite all of his originally agreed upon constitutional privileges so that, today, he walks practically in fear of his own shadow;" ( The Progressive, January 9, 1932.)

Many of the problems America faces today can be boiled down into a single underlying cause: the uncontrolled, unneeded, unrelenting growth of certain institutions. We have allowed parts of the political, economic, and social sectors of our nation to become dominated by a handful of oversized narcissistic institutions--both public and private--and the rise of overly influential, amoral, individuals whose sole interest is self aggrandizement. We the People are completely lacking, in any realistic form, a system of checks and balances to control these people and institutions, particularly to the degree required for a properly functioning constitutionally limited, democratically representative republic such as ours professes itself to be. The concentration of too much power in one place was why the Founders and Framers sought to limit our central government by dividing it into three seperate but equal branches. To quote James Madison, "The proposed Constitution"is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal constitution; but a composition of both." (Federalist Papers, no. 39 January 1788.)

The Founders and Framers could never conceive of many of our modern institutions, including multinational corporations, media monopolies, and the Internet; not to mention the bureaucratic monsters that have arisen in the last one hundred years: the Federal Reserve, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon. Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Paine, Madison, and the rest could never have conceived of corporations which would dwarf nations in terms of political and economic power; of a single state in our union being the eighth largest economy in the world; let alone government institutions that have, in effect, become the overreaching, unchecked fourth, fifth, and sixth branches of our central government.

In the United States, this concentration of unchecked power--political, economic, and social--has led to the establishment of private corporations who are, by their very nature, too big to allow them to fail. We also have three public institutions whose power has grown beyond the control of our three constitutional branches of government. Factions within any or all of these institutions may have been complicit in the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and several others. As Lewis Lapham stated in his book Money and Class in America (Chapter 4, 1988), "Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible."

And now the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, has had the audacity--or perhaps I should say the impudence--to admit in public what so many of us have feared for so many years, in our darkest, most closely held nightmares: that the government of the United States may order the murders of American citizens whom they deem to be terrorists, without proof, trial, or right of appeal. This at the very least violates the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, as well as the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth.

Before I continue, allow me to say that when I speak of the Pentagon, I am not speaking of the vast majority of individuals who constitute our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. Rather, I am speaking of those grandiose, self-important individuals whose state of mind and ambition is centered upon promotion, power, and position, rather than Duty, Honor, and Country; those military men who would rather look good to their superiors, than do the hard and dirty work required to do the job right; those commanders who would rather further their careers by sending another 500 men to their deaths in a frontal assault, rather than tell their superiors that they should never have tried to take that objective in the first place. I want our military to be led by men of honor and courage like William Tecumseh Sherman, John J. Pershing, Creighton Abrams, David Hackworth, Hal Moore, Chester Nimitz, Raymond Spruance, Smedley Butler, Billy Mitchell, and John Boyd; not strutting peacocks who think they are the second coming of MacArthur, Patton, Halsey or Le May.

The three unofficial branches of the modern American government--the Federal Reserve, the Pentagon, and the Central Intelligence Agency--are at the center of the Military-Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower warned us of in his farewell address. The three Constitutionally established branches of our government--Executive, Legislative, and Judicial--have in many cases been complicit in the three unofficial branches'--which they are technically supposed to control--usurpation of power. At other times, it is the checks and balances of the Constitution itself, which prevent our Constitutionally established branches from abusing their power, that have prevented the legitimate branches from holding the three unofficial branches in check.

Of these unofficial branches, I consider the Central Intelligence Agency to be the single most dangerous, because it is the most out of control. It has been the primary extortion arm of what John Perkins called the "economic hitmen" (in his book Confessions of an Economic Hitman) around the world since the 1960's. The CIA has deposed and/or killed dozens of leaders around the world including Mossadegh in Iran, Lumumba in Congo, Allende in Chile, Torrijos in Panama, Aristide in Haiti, and I believe, President John F. Kennedy.

To quote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." And a coup d'etat, such as the one that occurred on that late autumn day in November 1963, is the most brutal and final form of revolution there is from inside a government.

So what did JFK do to these men who undertook this coup against him in Dallas in 1963? Let us look at suspects and their motives, individually and in groups, to see if we can find an answer.

The first person we must consider as a possible suspect is the man who stood most to gain: Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

I hate to do this, because it was LBJ's "Great Society" programs that were responsible for dropping the poverty rate in the United States from 19% (1963) to 11% (1973) in ten years. He certainly aided and abetted in a cover-up, whether out of personal guilt, or fear that it was the Soviets and/or Cubans who did it (and that a public revelation of that fact would lead to World War III), or just plain fear, I do not know.

The fact that the assassination took place in Texas could be coincidence, or it could be corroborating evidence. Especially as it took place in Dallas, which was pretty much LBJ's home stomping grounds.

The answer to this question lies in one key piece of evidence:

Did the fingerprint left on the box found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository belong to long time LBJ associate (and convicted murderer) Malcolm E. "Mac" Wallace?

If the answer is yes, then I believe that we can only conclude that LBJ was directly or indirectly involved beforehand with JFK's murder, in some manner similar to that theorized in Barr McClellan's book, Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K.. Certainly, with his connections, LBJ had the motive, means, and opportunity to arrange for that tragic afternoon in Dallas.

If the answer is no, then it goes a long way in eliminating President Johnson as a suspect in the crime, although it regrettably does not provide complete exoneration.

We know that President Kennedy was seriously thinking about dropping LBJ from the ticket in 1964, replacing him with either Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina, or Ernest "Fritz" Hollings of South Carolina. Being dropped from the ticket would have left LBJ wide open to possible charges in the Bobby Baker/Billy Sol Estes corruption and fraud cases.

We also know that LBJ was much more in tune with the attitudes of the National Security State power brokers towards Vietnam, Cuba, the Soviet Union and the whole "Cold War" paradigm. As an example, take a close look at the men who made up the Warren Commission. With the exception of Earl Warren himself, the Commission was composed entirely of conservative, Cold Warriors, whose primary foreign policy interest was maintaining the status quo in terms of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. JFK did not have a trusted friend in the room.

The next group to be considered are the various factions within the National Security apparatus who despised Kennedy and his "weakness": high-ranking officers at the Pentagon who believed we had missed a decisive opportunity to destroy the Soviet Union in October 1962 and disagreed sharply with the Partial Test Ban Treaty; individuals in the various intelligence services--this includes the various Cuban nationalist groups trying to overthrow Castro--who blamed President Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs Fiasco; diplomats at the State Department who thought that Kennedy was abandoning South Vietnam (as, they believed, President Truman had China), and that he had sold out to Khrushchev; and all of the manufacturers of war matériel who thought that the end to the Cold War--and no intervention in Vietnam--meant an end to the gravy train they had been riding since the end of the Second World War. Altogether, they had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to kill JFK in Dallas, and then cover it up.

The next suspect is Organized Crime.

The Mafia has been the "prime suspect" for a number of conspiracy theorists since the time of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the mid-1970's. Certainly they had the motive and the opportunity.

Robert Kennedy's Justice Department had caused the Mafia more trouble than any other law enforcement effort in Mob history. RFK had thrown corrupt Mob ally and Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa in prison, thrown New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello out of the country, and was looking at doing the same thing to Tampa boss Santos Trafficante and Chicago underboss Sam Giancanna. In their minds, killing JFK was simply self-defense.

They certainly had the means for the assassination itself. What they did not have was the ability to set-up the operation (changing the motorcade route, ordering the 112 th Military Intelligence Battalion to stand down and not provide additional protection on the parade route, ordering the two Secret Service agents off their posts on the back of JFK's limousine in Dallas at the last minute), or initiate the cover-up afterwords (disappearing evidence, the carefully directed autopsy at Bethesda, etc.). This is not to say they did not play a role, they simply were not the brains behind the assassination, they were the muscle.

Now we come to the leaders of Industry, Wall Street, and the oil and gas syndicates.

Many CEO's and Boards of Directors of America's largest corporations were scared to death by JFK and his willingness to use his power as President to redirect Federal contracts, when members of an industry reneged on agreements to keep prices down, after agreeing with their workers to do just that in exchange for union concessions. The large steel corporations had learned that lesson the hard way in early 1963. As part of the Military-Industrial Complex, they had the ear of the Pentagon, and could easily apply pressure to the military establishment to do something about JFK.

Wall Street did not like JFK either. His executive order for the Treasury to directly issue "United States Notes" using Treasury bills as backing, broke the Federal Reserve's monopoly on non-specie backed currency for the first time in fifty years, hit the Wall Street plutocrats like a dead mackerel in the face. This, together with their lucrative double dipping in the issuing of the currency and the Treasury bills, would have cost the giant banks (and bankers) that constituted the Federal Reserve billions of dollars profit.

The oil and natural gas barons such as H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison, had seen their millions push toward that magic billion dollar mark, thanks to the oil depletion allowance of 27 percent which they had enjoyed for nearly half a century. This allowance reduced their taxable income by 27 percent before any other costs of production were considered, such as equipment, transportation, or labor. This depletion allowance was to "compensate" the oil and gas barons for having a finite resource that was being exhausted in its production.

In the new tax bill that President Kennedy was proposing, the oil depletion allowance would have been reduced to 14 percent. For most of the men like Hunt and Murchison, this would have represented more than a doubling of their Federal tax liability. And they would not stand for that.

So, all of these plutocrats certainly had motive, and opportunity. But to pull off the whole plot from set-up, to execution, to cover-up, by themselves, was beyond their capabilities, just as it was beyond the capabilities of the Mob. They would have needed help from inside the Federal government, someone or something in the National Security apparatus. But they did have one very useful tool for the conspiracy: money--lots of it--that would not show up in a Federal departmental audit.

The final suspect we must consider is the Soviet Union and/or Castro's Cuba. The Soviet Union certainly had the means, as well as the opportunity, to pull off the assassination of President Kennedy by themselves. The Cubans probably did as well. But where was their motive? The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty benefited the U.S.S.R. as much, if not more, than it did the United States. The sale of our grain surplus to the Soviets in the early summer of 1963 showed the Soviets could make use of the United States to prevent a repeat of the famines that killed more than five million Soviet citizens in the 1930's.

And when you consider the means of carrying out the set-up, execution, and cover-up of JFK's murder, the Communist bloc suffers from the same problem as the Mob and the American Plutocracy: they by themselves could not tear a hole in the Presidential security net for the assassination to take place.

The Soviets could not order the 112 th Military Intelligence Battalion to stand down from providing plainclothes security for the President; they could not order changes in the disposition of the President's Secret Service protection; They could not change the parade route so JFK would enter a convenient "kill zone."

In the post-assassination cover-up, neither the Soviets or Castro could order the pathologists doing the autopsy at Bethesda to not dissect the back and throat wounds; they could not make evidence from the autopsy (including the remains of JFK's brain) disappear; they certainly could not order two underqualified physicians to perform the autopsy. (The two physicians were pathologists, not forensic pathologists. The later specialize in autopsies involving murders. It is kind of like the difference between being a good driver, and being a championship Formula One driver.) In the single most important murder case in American history, the President's autopsy was performed by amateurs.

We are left with one inescapable conclusion: the conspiracy to assassinate--which two of our three legitimate branches of government say exists--John F. Kennedy, from beginning to end, could not have been accomplished without the active involvement of rogue elements of our National Security State. If LBJ was involved in the commission of this heinous crime, it reduces the number of individuals who needed to be fully aware of why something was happening, reducing the size of the circle of fully informed conspirators.

It would require two or three members of the Secret Service, assigned to the White House detail; half-a-dozen people at the Pentagon, including the Chief of Staff of one of the Armed Services, or someone who could send orders in the Chief of Staff's name; roughly the same number at the CIA, including the Director or his Deputy for Operations, or someone who could give orders in their names; one or two people at the FBI who could give orders without being questioned; plus mobsters and plutocrats who did not have to know how high the conspiracy went. Fifteen men who actually knew that a coup d'etat had taken place: a group far smaller than the number who murdered Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 B.C.E.. It might have taken as many as two dozen fully involved conspirators if LBJ was not involved in the conspiracy, simply because LBJ was a good central hub for such a conspiracy, able to easily move among its different factions without arousing suspicion.

So, why is this still important forty-seven years after President Kennedy's murder? As JFK himself said in his commencement address at Yale University on 11 June, 1962, "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."

Because it appears to me that since that grim day in November 1963, the three illegitimate branches of our Federal government: the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Federal Reserve; have, using the myth created by the Warren Commission, increasingly usurped the power of the three legitimate branches to themselves, destroying America's long-term hope for peace and prosperity in the world.

Since the death of President Kennedy, the richest Americans have, acting through the corporations, socialized their risk in increasing their wealth, while acting like good old capitalists raking in their profits. In 1963, the United States had only one billionaire: J. Paul Getty. We now have around one hundred.

The United States of America has been sold down the river by its richest citizens all in the name of profit. We have a larger defense budget than the rest of the world combined ($623,000,000,000 compared to $500,000,000,000), but as recently as 2004, we had to buy rifle ammunition from Israel because our own manufacturers could not keep up with the demand from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In spite of this, we are still the largest single exporter of military ordnance and equipment in the world.

Yet, without the manufacture of military equipment and automobiles, we would have little manufacturing capacity or capability in this country. History has shown that a strong manufacturing sector is required in a modern economy, in order to establish and maintain a vibrant middle class. It has been the actions of the three pillars of this illegitimate government, of the most Stygian aspects of our military-industrial complex, that are taking away our rights, our hopes, and most importantly, our children's future; pushing us inexorably down the dark road to becoming, in essence, a third world country.

President Kennedy once said he wanted to take the CIA, and "break it into a thousand pieces." For myself, I desire only to take the three illegitimate branches of our Federal government, and break them into enough pieces so that We the People are once again in control of our government, and not the reverse.

There is still time for us to peaceably accomplish this task, but only just barely. However, like the signers of the Declaration of Independence, we shall have to pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, if we are to succeed.

I believe that this nation is worth paying that price.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'