This is written in response to an article (copied below) by Jack Kelley of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, in which he talks about evidence presented in a recent German TV documentary related to the assassination of Jack Kennedy.

(Dear Mr. Kelley,)

A King was killed and nothing was done about it. The effect of this deepened the sense that nothing makes a difference, which made politics into a cess pool of quid pro quo corruption. As a nation, we lost hope, which gave us a future shaped by an attitude of, "so what?". We lost our belief that America was a place where the ideals of justice and equality under the law are respected and defended.

In January, we mourn Martin Luther Kind, an assassinated American statesman.

We needn't concern ourselves with the villains who kill men like MLK or JFK. Let their names be forgotten in the abyss of the history of the universe.

Let us remember what we did about the treasonous assassination of the spirit of America for which principles men and women like MLK and JFK were willing to stand.

The issue that should concerns us today is what became of the ideals that Kennedy and King stood for: the soul of America

.

Some, like Mr. Kelley, whose article I have reprinted below, publish revelations of conspiracy. Others have wasted volumes of words in debating whether or not JFK or MLK were perfect in their personal lives. They miss the point that JFK was elected because of the ideals he expressed, and MLK was lionized because of the hope he inspired.

Whether or not those gifted with articulate speech are vulnerable to human weakness, they have had the courage to walk like giants upon the stage of history, and whether or not JFK and MLK were the best mirrors of ideals they did inspire us and they said the unspeakable and lead us to believe that our lives are not in vain.

While men like McCarthy, Nixon, Bush and their ilk have before and since lead the nation in the traditions of racism, war and paranoia, those we honor are not among them. With the exception of the Carters and Clintons, a succession of regressives have occupied the Whitehouse since the JFK and MLK and RK and JL assassinations.

Let us notice, in our remebrance of these martyrs that what they had in common stands in contrast to the bizarre wars our government has recently been waging in our names.

Two things must be said because there are those who are pissing on their graves:

The assassins did not kill the ideals of freedom and democracy in America.

Those who have let freedom die are more to be feared and respected by everyone.

A generation of Americans witnessed the murder of democracy in the '60s.

In the '70s a generation said nothing because it didn’t pay to do so.

A generation in the 80s had little memory of what had been given up.

In the 90s a generation traded in their integrity for a mortgage and a Lexus.

In 2000, a generation leaves the spirit of America unspoken.

If you dig up their graves, will you find the martyrs cause?

Castro killed Kennedy?

Who killed freedom and integrity in America?

Neither Fidel Castro nor anyone like him can murder freedom in America. But the press can.

The press failed to go after the murderers.

They did not demand answers and transparency.

The press ignored the strange pronouncements of the Warren Commission. They did not question sealing records related to a murder. The press did not ask why should the murder of a President be treated differently? In the same way the press failed to criticize McCarthy and for the same reasons, press took a holiday from integrity.

An extended holiday.

McCarthy was stopped by a single journalist in a leadership position.

Apparently, media corporations learned not to grant that kind of power again.

A generation saw their votes nullified when JFK and MLK were murdered

No one said, "what did these men stand for such that they were killed because of it?"

The disenfranchised generation was followed by a generation indoctrinated by commercial media and a school curriculum written by historical revisionists,

The current generation doesn't understand that JFK's primary contribution to the world was that he challenged the myth that propelled the nuclear arms race. Single handedly, he gave the lie to a false threat that the Soviet Union was poised to send nuclear warheads on our cities. It was following this that the cold war unraveled.

Years have passed since JFK, JL, RK and MLK were murdered. Isn't it interesting that once again we stand upon a nuclear precipice and that we are being told again that the enemies of democracy are in distant lands, when in fact, they are much closer.
--

Michael Winn


From: (Withheld because the guy is afraid to associate his name with ideals he believes in.)
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 17:48:31 -0800
Conversation: DID CASTRO KILL KENNEDY?
Subject: DID CASTRO KILL KENNEDY?

DID CASTRO KILL KENNEDY?  

Written by Jack Kelly
Friday, 06 January 2006

In a documentary broadcast in Berlin Friday, German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann added a new twist to an old controversy.

In Dallas on Nov. 22nd, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, who himself was killed days later by small time mafioso Jack Ruby. The following September, a commission chaired by then Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded Oswald had acted on his own.

This finding was unsatisfying to millions of Americans, who didn't want to believe that so beloved a president could have his life snuffed out just because, the Warren Commission surmised, a fruitcake loser wanted some attention. There had to be more significance to the act. There had to be a deeper, darker conspiracy.

Critics seized on real and imagined shortcomings in the Warren Commission report to find "evidence" of that conspiracy, and a cottage industry was born. JFK assassination theories have titillated my generation for decades. Amazon lists 904 books on the subject.

The conspiracy theories have been all over the map. The CIA did it. The military-industrial complex did it. Lyndon Johnson did it. The Mafia did it. Most are persuasive only to the tinfoil helmet crowd.

Any new JFK conspiracy theory should be greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism. I mention Huismann's because it coincides with what I've suspected ever since the CIA's "family jewels" were exposed in 1975.

During his brief tenure (Feb-July, 1973) as CIA Director, James Schlesinger ordered an internal report on CIA operations which skirted or broke U.S. law.

A portion of that report, concerning surveillance of thousands of anti-Vietnam War protesters, was leaked to Seymour Hersh, then of the New York Times, who wrote a story about it on Dec. 22nd, 1974.

This led to investigations by the Senate (the Church Committee) and the House (the Pike Committee), and disclosure of the CIA's frequent, and frequently comic, attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

The assassination attempts were instigated by the brothers Kennedy (Attorney General Bobby was in charge of the effort) shortly after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961. There were eight plots in all, the last set in motion just days before President Kennedy was killed.

Since most of those the CIA recruited to assassinate Fidel Castro were double agents, he was well aware of the plots. It was reassuring in a way that the plots were so amateurish, because -- contrary to left wing mythology -- it indicated the CIA didn't have much experience in the assassination business. But the Kennedys were persistent, and Fidel had to worry that one day they'd get lucky.

I am persuaded the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone is correct. Gerald Posner's 1994 book, "Case Closed," is dispositive. But the Warren Commission was unpersuasive on motive, at least to me.

Two months before he shot the president, Lee Oswald traveled to Mexico City, where he visited the Cuban embassy. Putting that together with the plots to kill Fidel Castro, I suspected Fidel had had Kennedy killed before Kennedy could kill him.

This is the thesis of Herr Huismann's documentary. In it several former Cuban intelligence operatives claim Oswald was recruited to kill the president.

"You ask why we took Oswald?" said Oscar Marino, a former agent for the Cuban service G2. "Oswald was a dissident. He hated his country. He possessed certain characteristics..."

Mr. Marino acknowledged Oswald was an unstable loser, but said: "There wasn't anyone else. You take what you can get."

Retired FBI Agent Lawrence Keenan told Huismann he was sent to retrace Oswald's steps in Mexico, but was recalled after three days on the orders of President Johnson.

But in those three days, he found evidence linking Cuba to the Kennedy assassination, Mr. Keenan said: “President Johnson didn't want a possible Cuban connection made public, for fear it would lead to war.�

Gen. Alexander Haig, then a military aide in the White House, said LBJ also had a partisan motive for concealing evidence of a Cuban connection.

"(Johnson) said we simply must not allow the American people to believe that Fidel Castro could have killed our president," Gen. Haig told Herr Huismann. "The reason was there would be a right-wing uprising in America that would keep the Democratic party out of power for two generations."

So finally, after 42 years, the truth comes out: Fidel Castro is responsible for the assassination of President John Kennedy. And he got away with it.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.