Posts Tagged ‘FBI’
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on November 16, 2023 at 12:16 am
President Kennedy’s untimely death has since fueled arguments over how, if he had lived, he would have dealt with Vietnam.
In his memoirs, former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote: “Kennedy would have never let his country get bogged down in Vietnam.”
But David Halberstam, who covered the early years of the war for The New York Times, came to a different conclusion.
David Halberstam in Vietnam
In his bestselling 1972 book, The Best and the Brightest, he wrote that although Kennedy questioned the wisdom of a combat commitment, he had never shown those doubts in public.
In public, he had expressed doubts only about the Diem regime—whether it held enough support among the Vietnamese to win the war.
His successor had to deal with Kennedy’s public statements, all supportive of the importance of Vietnam.
And it was that successor, newly-elevated President Lyndon B. Johnson, who decided, in 1965, to commit heavy military forces to protecting “freedom-loving” South Vietnam.
In short: Even if Kennedy had intended to withdraw American forces after winning re-election in 1964, he made a fatal mistake: He assumed there would always be time for him to do so.
Historian Thurston Clarke, in his 2013 book JFK’s Last Hundred Days, reached a totally different conclusion: That Kennedy planned to quietly remove American military advisers regardless of the military situation.
Clarke believes that Kennedy intended to gradually withdraw troops from Vietnam—but felt he could not afford to inflame the Right during an election year.
Essentially, the question, “What would Kennedy have done?”—on Vietnam, civil rights, relations with the Soviet Union—lies at the heart of his continuing fascination among Americans.
For millions, the later turmoil of the 1960s remains such a traumatic memory that they assume: “America would have had to be better-off if Kennedy had lived.”
But much of Kennedy’s proposed legislation—such as his civil rights act—did not become law until President Johnson overcame conservative opposition to it.
Johnson had first been elected to the House of Representatives in 1937, where he gained influence as a protégé of its speaker, Sam Rayburn. In 1948, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and eventually became one of its most powerful members—especially after becoming its Majority Leader in 1954.
Johnson knew the strengths and weaknesses of his political colleagues, and he ruthlessly exploited this knowledge to ensure the passage of legislation he supported.
Kennedy had served in the House from 1946 to 1952, and from 1952 to 1961 in the Senate. But he had never been a major leader in either body.
It was as a Senator that he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage. But it was also as a Senator that he refused to vote on whether U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy should be censured by his Senatorial colleagues.
In 1954, the Senate voted to condemn McCarthy, whose slanders of Communist subversion had bullied and frightened Americans for four years. McCarthy’s influence as a political figure died overnight.
Joseph P. Kennedy, the family patriarch, was a strong McCarthy supporters. And Robert F. Kennedy had briefly worked for McCarthy’s Red-baiting Senate subcommittee.
JFK’s refusal to say how he would have voted on censuring McCarthy damaged his support among liberals during the 1960 election.
Eleanor Roosevelt famously said that Kennedy should show “more courage and less profile.”
Although Lyndon Johnson’s legislative achievements as Senator and President remain unprecedented, he remains a pariah figure among Democrats.
His 1965 decision to wage all-out war in Vietnam ignited nationwide protests and elected Richard M. Nixon as President in 1968.
Like a doomed character in George Orwell’s novel, 1984, he has largely become an un-person.
Meanwhile, John F. Kennedy continues to endlessly fascinate Americans. In poll after poll they continue to rate him highly—even though he served less than three years in the White House.
Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written about JFK. On the big screen he’s been depicted by actors such as Cliff Robertson (PT-109), Bruce Greenwood (Thirteen Days) and James Marsden (The Butler).
Movie poster for PT-109
On TV, he’s been portrayed by William Devane (The Missiles of October), William Petersen (The Rat Pack), Martin Sheen (Kennedy), James Franciscus (Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy) and Cliff De Young (Robert Kennedy and His Times).
William Devane as John F. Kennedy in The Missiles of October
Kennedy has even appeared on Saturday Night Live (perhaps most famously in a sketch where he chides then-President Clinton for his tawdry choices as a womanizer).
He even figured in a 1986 episode of the revised Twilight Zone episode where a history professor travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination. The result: JFK is saved but Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is murdered and World War III erupts.
In 2013, the Internet Movie Database listed a total of 94 movies, mini-series. TV dramas and even comedies featuring the character of John F. Kennedy.
Roads, bridges, tunnels, highways, parks, playgrounds and schools have been named after him.
As Thurston Clarke wrote in JFK’s Last Hundred Days: “There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is in of itself an index of majority opinion. By that standard, Kennedy was a great President.”
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on November 15, 2023 at 12:48 am
The Kennedy administration’s unprecedented attack on organized crime has led some law enforcement experts to believe the Mob engineered President Kennedy’s assassination.
One of these is G. Robert Blakey, father of the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. As the former Chief Counsel and Staff Director to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations (1977–1979) he oversaw the second official inquiry into the Kennedy assassination.
As a result, he believes the Mob had ample means, motive and opportunity to arrange for a “nut” to kill the President.
In his 1980 book, The Plot to Kill the President, Blakey asserted:
- Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President Kennedy.
- An unknown confederate of Oswald’s, firing from the “grassy knoll,” also shot at Kennedy but missed.
- The conspiracy was rooted in organized crime and involved Mafia boss Santos Trafficante of Miami and/or Mafia boss Carlos Marcello of New Orleans.
The 1983 TV mini-series, “Blood Feud,” clearly implied that the Mob was responsible. At its heart lay the 10-year conflict between Robert F. Kennedy and James R. Hoffa, then president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Union.
This was also the plot of American Tabloid, a 1995 novel by James Ellroy.
But investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote that during the five years he researched The Dark Side of Camelot, his expose of the hidden life of President Kennedy, he didn’t uncover any evidence of such a plot.
After Robert Kennedy left the Justice Department in 1964 to run for the post of U.S. Senator from New York, the Justice Department slacked off its push against the crime syndicates.
But the war was resurrected during the Nixon administration and has remained a top priority ever since.
Perhaps the most controversial legacy of the Kennedy administration remains the President’s dealings with the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.,
In 1954, the French—who had controlled Vietnam for 80 years—were forced to withdraw their military forces from the country. Their army had suffered a humiliating defeat at Dienbenphu and the French citizenry—still recovering from defeat and Nazi occupation during World War II—demanded an end to the disastrous conflict.
Into this political vacuum stepped the victorious North Vietnamese communist Ho Chi Minh.
Kennedy—then U.S. Senator from Massachusetts—had visited Vietnam while the French were still trying to hold onto one of their last colonial possessions. And he had urged them to withdraw and allow the Vietnamese to govern themselves.
But President Dwight D. Eisenhower was aware of Ho’s overwhelming popularity throughout Vietnam due to his battles against Japanese and French colonialists. In any nationwide election, Ho was certain to win the presidency.
But Eisenhower felt he couldn’t allow an avowed Communist to rule Vietnam. With the North under firm Communist control, America focused its attention on the South.
Searching for an acceptable alternative, Eisenhower found him in Ngo Dinh Diem—a mandarin in a nation swept by revolution, a Catholic in a nation with an 80% Buddhist population.
In 1954, America began backing Diem. Although his first years were marked by social progress, he later became increasingly oppressive toward the Buddhist majority. Corruption openly flourished among government and army officials.
Ngo Dinh Diem
In 1960, North Vietnam launched an aggressive campaign of infiltration and assassination across South Vietnam.
In 1961, President Kennedy sent 400 Green Berets and 100 other military advisers to South Vietnam to offer support.
Diem requested American financing of a 100,000-man increase in his army. Kennedy agreed to an increase of 30,000. Meanwhile, the Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that 40,000 U.S. troops would be needed to “clean up the Vietcong threat.”
Kennedy underestimated the reaction of North Vietnam, whose forces were fighting what they believed was a crusade. As American troop strength increased, the North escalated its own commitment.
From 1961 to 1963, the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam steadily rose from 685 to 16,732. American minesweepers patrolled the coasts while their aircraft engaged in surveillance.
For the first time, Americans became casualties of the war–especially those in helicopter combat-support missions.
Meanwhile, Diem—urged by his influential brother, Nhu, who ran the secret police—cracked down on the Buddhists.
Government troops fired on a peaceful demonstration in May, 1963. In protest, Buddhist monks burned themselves to death before TV cameras.
Nhu’s beautiful and powerful wife, Madame Nhu, fed growing world outrage by her ridicule of “monk barbecue shows.”
American efforts to stop Diem’s anti-Buddhist campaign failed. On August 21, 1963, Diem’s police shot their way into Buddhist pagodas, killing scores and arresting hundreds.
This finally convinced the Kennedy administration that Diem would never gain the popular support he needed to win the war against the Communist North.
As a result, the administration offered support to South Vietnamese military officers planning a coup against Diem.
On November 1, 1963, South Vietnamese army units stormed the presidential palace. Diem and Nhu fled, but were caught and shot. Madame Nhu, visiting the U.S. at the time, escaped death, accusing Kennedy of supporting the coup.
The administration issued a flat denial.
Diem’s assassination was followed 21 days later by Kennedy’s own.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on November 14, 2023 at 12:12 am
John F. Kennedy became President when civil rights suddenly became a burning issue throughout the Nation.
At Kennedy’s request, dozens of law firms sent lawyers South, so civil rights demonstrators would not lack counsel.
Prominent blacks such as Thurgood Marshall, Robert C. Weaver and George L.L. Weaver were appointed, respectively, to the Supreme Court, the Housing and House Finance Agency and the office of Assistant Secretary of Labor.
But Kennedy was highly reluctant to push for a civil rights bill addressing the overall issues of racial discrimination.
The reason: Most of the chairman of House and Senate committees were deeply conservative Southern racists–whether Republican or Democrat. They decided whether Kennedy’s foreign policy initiatives would be approved or opposed–especially his bills for increased foreign aid.
Kennedy believed he could not offend such men without jeopardizing the legacy he wanted to achieve in foreign policy.
This timidity, in turn, led many prominent blacks—such as Martin Luther King and Malcom X—to believe they would see no innovative moves on Kennedy’s part.
James Meredith
But events forced Kennedy’s hand.edn September 30, 1962, the President sent deputy U.S. marshals and National Guardsmen into Mississippi to restore order. Rioting had erupted when, by federal court order, James Meredith, a black, was enrolled at the state university.
Kennedy’s problems in winning support for his civil rights program arose in the folkways of the Nation. When laws run counter to a nation’s folkways, the laws lose.
In backing the admission of Meredith, the President chose an incident which would set off shockwaves for black rights.
Kennedy held mixed emotions about the demand for civil rights by blacks. On one hand, as an Irish Catholic, he grew up with stories about longtime discrimination against his ancestors (such as the “No Irish Need Apply” signs posted by numerous employers).
On the other hand, he had been born into a world of power and wealth, and he had to grope his way toward understanding the problems of the oppressed.
Another major confrontation broke out between Kennedy and the forces of segregation on June 11, 1963. Alabama Governor George C. Wallace personally blocked the entrance of two black pupils to the University of Tuscaloosa.
The President, watching on TV, federalized the Alabama National Guard, which Wallace had used to ring the school. Wallace withdrew and the students were admitted and enrolled.
That same day, Kennedy addressed the nation on the need for genuine equality for all Americans: “The question is whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”
JFK addresses the nation on civil rights
And he called on Congress to pass his civil rights bill, which had been stalled by the legislators.
On August 28, 1963, 200,000 civil rights demonstrators flooded Washington, D.C., for a massive rally.
Fearing that violence would erupt—embarrassing his administration and setting back the cause of civil rights—Kennedy had sought to persuade Dr. Martin Luther King, the march’s chief figure, to cancel the proposed march.
But King and his fellow organizers were determined to go through with it. They had, they said, waited too long for justice to be satisfied with anything less.
The dignity and peacefulness of the rally–and, most especially, King’s soaring “I Have a Dream” speech–won tremendous sympathy throughout the country. Kennedy met with civil rights leaders afterward to offer his support.
Martin Luther King during the March on Washington
But Kennedy’s civil rights bill remained stalled in Congress until 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson used the assassinated Kennedy’s new status as a martyr to gain enough support for its passage.
Meanwhile, on yet another front, the Kennedy administration was waging an unprecedented war against organized crime.
This was primarily the work of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. As chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (1957–59), he had interrogated about 800 mobsters who had been summoned by subpoena.
And he had learned, firsthand, how ineffective the FBI and Justice Department were at bringing such powerful criminals to justice. The FBI had long steered clear of organized crime investigations, largely because its director, J. Edgar Hoover, feared corruption of his agents.
Upon taking office as Attorney General, he greatly expanded the number of attorneys assigned to the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Section. And, more important, he used his status as brother to the President to jawbone FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover into attacking the Mob.
The FBI installed illegal microphones in Mob hangouts throughout the country and started building cases against such mobsters as Sam Giancana, Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello.
The administration’s attack on the Mob has led some historians to believe the assassination of President Kennedy was Mob-orchestrated.
The reasons:
- Joseph P. Kennedy, the family patriarch, solicited Mob money and influence for his son’s 1960 Presidential campaign.
- Through singer Frank Sinatra, the elder Kennedy assured Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana that the mob would get a free ride if his son were elected President.
- The CIA, seeking any way to topple Fidel Castro, enlisted the Mafia to assassinate him.
- But Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, ignored the Mob’s “contributions” and pressed his war against the syndicates
- As a result, mobsters felt betrayed and lusted for vengeance.
2012 PRESIDENTIAL RACE, ALTERNET, AP, BARACK OBAMA, BAY OF PIGS, BBC, BERLIN WALL, BILL CLINTON, BRUCE GREENWOOD, BUZZFEED, CARLOS MARCELLO, CBS NEWS, CIA, CIVIL RIGHTS, CLIFF ROBERTSON, CNN, CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, DAILY KOS, DAVID HALBERSTAM, DONALD J. TRUMP, FBI, FIDEL CASTRO, FRANK SINATRA, HERMAN CAIN, ICH BEN EIN BERLINNER SPEECH, INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE, J. EDGAR HOOVER, JAMES MARSDEN, JOHN F. KENNEDY, JOSEPH MCCARTHY, JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, LYNDON B. JOHNSON, MAFIA, MALCOM X, MARTIN LUTHER KING, MARTIN SHEEN, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MOVIES, NBC NEWS, NEWSWEEK, NEWT GINGRICH, NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, NPR, NUCLEAR TEST BAN TREATY, POLITICO, PT-109, RAW STORY, REUTERS, RICK PERRY, ROBERT F. KENNEDY, ROBERT S. MCNAMARA, SALON, SAM GIANCANA, SANTOS TRAFFICANTE, Sarah Palin, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, SEATTLE TIMES, SLATE, SOVIET UNION, THE ATLANTIC, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST, THE BUTLER, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE MISSILES OF OCTOBER, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE RAT PACK, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE WASHINGTON POST, THIRTEEN DAYS, TIME, TWILIGHT ZONE, TWITTER, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UPI, USA TODAY, VIETNAM WAR, WILLIAM DEVANE, WILLIAM PETERSON
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on November 13, 2023 at 12:10 am
By October, 1962, Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union, had supplied Cuba with more than 40,000 soldiers, 1,300 field pieces, 700 anti-aircraft guns, 350 tanks and 150 jets.
The motive: To deter another Bay of Pigs-type invasion.
Khrushchev also began supplying Castro with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
Their discovery, in October, 1962, ignited the single most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War.
John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis
On October 16, Kennedy was shown photographs of nuclear missile sites under construction on the island. The pictures had been taken on the previous day by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane.
Suddenly, the two most powerful nuclear countries—the United States and the Soviet Union—appeared on the brink of nuclear war.
Kennedy officials claimed they couldn’t understand why Khrushchev had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. “Maybe Khrushchev’s gone mad” was a typical musing.
The Kennedy administration never admitted that JFK had been waging a no-holds-barred campaign to overthrow the Cuban government and assassinate its leader.
Kennedy convened a group of his 12 most important advisers, which became known as Ex-Comm, for Executive Committee.
For seven days, Kennedy and his advisers intensely and privately debated their options. Some of the participants—such as Air Force General Curtis LeMay—urged an all-out air strike against the missile sites.
Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General (and the President’s brother) opposed initial calls for an air strike.
It would be, he said, “a Pearl Harbor in reverse.” And, he added: “I don’t want my brother to go down in history as the Tojo of the 1960s.”
Robert F. and John F. Kennedy
Others—such as Adlai Stevenson, the United States delegate to the United Nations—urged a reliance on quiet diplomacy.
It was Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara who suggested a middle course: A naval blockade—a “quarantine” in Kennedy’s softened term—around Cuba. This would hopefully prevent the arrival of more Soviet offensive weapons on the island.
The President insisted that the missiles had to go—by peaceful means, if possible, but by the use of military force if necessary.
Kennedy finally settled on a naval blockade of Cuba. This would prevent additional missiles from coming in and give Khrushchev time to negotiate and save face.
On October 22, President Kennedy appeared on nationwide TV to denounce the presence of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba.
He demanded their withdrawal, and warned that any missile launched against any nation in the Western hemisphere would be answered with “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
Kennedy ordered American military readiness raised to a level of Defcom-2—the step just short of total war.
The United States had about 27,000 nuclear weapons; the Soviets had about 3,000. In a first nuclear exchange, the United States could have launched about 3,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviets about 250.
Nuclear missile in silo
On October 28, Khrushchev announced that the missile sites would be destroyed and the missiles crated and shipped back to the Soviet Union.
In return, Kennedy gave his promise—publicly—to lift the blockade and not invade Cuba
Privately, he also promised to remove obsolete Jupiter II nuclear missiles from Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union. Those missiles were, in effect, the American version of the Russian missiles that had been shipped to Cuba.
The world escaped nuclear disaster by a hair’s-breath.
Khrushchev didn’t know that Kennedy had intended to order a full-scale invasion of Cuba in just another 24 hours if an agreement couldn’t be reached.
And Kennedy and his military advisors didn’t know that Russian soldiers defending Cuba had been armed with tactical nuclear weapons.
If warfare of any type had broken out, the temptation to go nuclear would have been overwhelming.
The Cuban Missile Crisis marked the only time the world came to the brink of nuclear war.
The Right attacked Kennedy for refusing to destroy Castro, thus allowing Cuba to remain a Communist bastion only 90 miles from Florida.
The Left believed it was a needless confrontation that risked the destruction of humanity.
For Kennedy, forcing the Soviets to remove their missiles from Cuba re-won the confidence he had lost among so many Americans following the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
It also made him face the brutal truth that a miscalculation during a nuclear crisis could destroy all life on Earth.
He felt he could now move—cautiously—toward better relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Ironically, the crisis had the same effects on Khrushchev—who had witnessed the horrors of Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and the subsequent loss of at least 22 million Soviet citizens.
Slowly and carefully, Kennedy and Khrushchev negotiated the details of what would become the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere.
Underground tests would continue, but the amounts of deadly strontium-90 radiation polluting the atmosphere would be vastly reduced.
The treaty was signed between the United States and the Soviet Union on July 25, 1963.
Kennedy considered it his greatest achievement as President, saying in a speech: “According to a Chinese proverb, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. My fellow Americans, let us take that first step.”
2012 PRESIDENTIAL RACE, ALTERNET, AP, BARACK OBAMA, BAY OF PIGS, BBC, BERLIN WALL, BILL CLINTON, BRUCE GREENWOOD, BUZZFEED, CARLOS MARCELLO, CBS NEWS, CIA, CIVIL RIGHTS, CLIFF ROBERTSON, CNN, CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, DAILY KOS, DAVID HALBERSTAM, DONALD J. TRUMP, FBI, FIDEL CASTRO, FRANK SINATRA, HERMAN CAIN, ICH BEN EIN BERLINNER SPEECH, INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE, J. EDGAR HOOVER, JAMES MARSDEN, JOHN F. KENNEDY, JOSEPH MCCARTHY, JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, LYNDON B. JOHNSON, MAFIA, MALCOM X, MARTIN LUTHER KING, MARTIN SHEEN, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MOVIES, NBC NEWS, NEWSWEEK, NEWT GINGRICH, NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, NPR, NUCLEAR TEST BAN TREATY, POLITICO, PT-109, RAW STORY, REUTERS, RICK PERRY, ROBERT F. KENNEDY, ROBERT S. MCNAMARA, SALON, SAM GIANCANA, SANTOS TRAFFICANTE, Sarah Palin, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, SEATTLE TIMES, SLATE, SOVIET UNION, THE ATLANTIC, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST, THE BUTLER, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE MISSILES OF OCTOBER, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE RAT PACK, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE WASHINGTON POST, THIRTEEN DAYS, TIME, TWILIGHT ZONE, TWITTER, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UPI, USA TODAY, VIETNAM WAR, WILLIAM DEVANE, WILLIAM PETERSON
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on November 10, 2023 at 12:10 am
During the 1960 Presidential campaign, then-Senator John F. Kennedy promised to build a Peace Corps to train people in underdeveloped nations to help themselves.
In March, 1961, the program went into effect, with the President’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, as director.
Starvation, illiteracy and disease were the enemies of the Corps. Any nation wanting aid could request it. The first group of volunteers went to the Philippines, the second to Ecuador and the third to Tanganyika.
The problems of the underdeveloped world were too great for any single organization to solve. But the Corps lifted the spirits of many living in those countries. And it captured the imagination of millions of Americans—especially those of thousands of idealistic youths who entered its ranks.
John F. Kennedy
To combat the growing Communist threat to Latin America, Kennedy established the Alliance for Progress. He defined the Alliance’s goal as providing “revolutionary progress through powerful, democratic means.”
Within two years he could report:
“Some 140,000 housing units have been constructed. Slum clearance projects have begun, and 3,000 classrooms have been built. More than 4,000,000 school books have been distributed.
“The Alliance has fired the imagination and kindled the hopes of millions of our good neighbors. Their drive toward modernization is gaining momentum as it unleashes the energies of these millions.
“The United States is becoming increasingly identified in the minds of the people with the goal they move toward: a better life with freedom,” said Kennedy.
Critics of the program, however, charged that the President was trying to “dress up the old policies” of Franklin D. Roosevelt in new rhetoric. Since FDR’s time, the United States has believed in giving economic aid to Latin America.
Much—if not most—of these billions of dollars wound up in the pockets of right-wing dictators, such as Anastasio Somoza and Rafael Trujillo.
Meanwhile, Kennedy was urging action on another front—that of outer space.
“This generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space,” declared the President. He committed the United States to putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
As indeed it happened less than six years after his death—on July 20, 1969.
Kennedy’s idealistic rhetoric masked his real reason for going to the moon: To score a propaganda victory over the Soviet Union.
Another of his anti-Communist goals: To remove Fidel Castro from power in Cuba at almost any cost.
Fidel Castro
Immediately after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy appointed his brother, Robert–who was then the Attorney General—to oversee a CIA program to overthrow Castro.
The CIA and the Mafia entered into an unholy alliance to assassinate Castro—each for its own benefit:
- The CIA wanted to please Kennedy by overthrowing the Communist leader who had nationalized American corporate holdings.
- The Mafia wanted to regain its lucrative casino and brothel holdings that had made Cuba the playground of the rich in pre-Castro times.
The mobsters were authorized to offer $150,000 to anyone who would kill Castro and were promised any support the Agency could yield.
“We were hysterical about Castro at about the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter,” then-former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara testified before Congress about these efforts. “And there was pressure from JFK and RFK to do something about Castro.”
Nor was everyone in the CIA enthusiastic about the “get Castro” effort.
“Everyone at CIA was surprised at Kennedy’s obsession with Fidel,” recalled Sam Halpern, who was assigned to the Cuba Project. “They thought it was a waste of time. We all knew [Fidel] couldn’t hurt us. Most of us at CIA initially liked Kennedy, but why go after this little guy?
“One thing is for sure: Kennedy wasn’t doing it out of national security concerns. It was a personal thing. The Kennedy family felt personally burnt by the Bay of Pigs and sought revenge.”
It was all-out war. Among the tactics used:
- Hiring Cuban gangsters to murder Cuban police officials and Soviet technicians.
- Sabotaging mines.
- Paying up to $100,000 per “hit” for the murder or kidnapping of Cuban officials.
- Using biological and chemical warfare against the Cuban sugar industry.
- Planting colorful seashells rigged to explode at a site where Castro liked to go skindiving.
- Trying to arrange for his being presented with a wetsuit impregnated with noxious bacteria and mold spores, or with lethal chemical agents.
- Attempting to infect Castro’s scuba regulator with tuberculous bacilli.
- Trying to douse his handkerchiefs, cigars, tea and coffee with other lethal bacteria.
But all of these efforts failed to assassinate Castro—or overthrow the Cuban Revolution he was heading.
“Bobby (Kennedy) wanted boom and bang all over the island,” recalled Halpern. “It was stupid. The pressure from the White House was very great.”
Americans would rightly label such methods as ”terrorist” if another power used them against the United States today. And the Cuban government saw the situation exactly the same way.
So Castro appealed to Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, for assistance.
Khrushchev was quick to comply: “We must not allow the Communist infant to be strangled in its crib,” he told members of his inner circle.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on November 9, 2023 at 12:10 am
November 22, 2023, will mark the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.
Today—62 years after he took office—millions of Americans bitterly contrast his memory with the character of the most hated President in American history: Donald John Trump:
JFK – A decorated war hero
DJT – A five-times draft-dodger
JFK – Youthful (43 upon taking office) and handsome
DJT – Old (77) and overweight
JFK – A fervent anti-Communist
DJT – Elected with support from Russian Communist Intelligence
JFK – Witty, self-mocking
DJT – Humorless, self-bragging
JFK – Optimistic, well-informed, appealing to the best in Americans
DJT – Doom-saying, uninformed, appealing to the “darker side” of his Right-wing base
Some have called the Kennedy administration a golden era in American history. A time when touch football, lively White House parties, stimulus to the arts and the antics of the President’s children became national obsessions.
John F. Kennedy
Others have called the Kennedy Presidency a monument to the unchecked power of wealth and ambition. An administration staffed by young novices playing at statesmen, riddled with nepotism, whose legacy includes the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam war and the world’s first nuclear confrontation.
The opening days of the Kennedy Presidency raised hopes for a dramatic change in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
But detente was not possible then. The Russians had not yet experienced their coming agricultural problems and the setback in Cuba during the Missile Crisis. And the United States had not suffered defeat in Vietnam.
Kennedy’s first brush with international Communism came on April 17, 1961, with the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. This operation had been planned and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency during the final months of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s term as President.
The U.S. Navy was to land about 1,400 Cuban exiles on the island to overthrow the Communist government of Fidel Castro. They were supposed to head into the mountains—as Castro himself had done against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1956—and raise the cry of revolution.
The invasion would occur after an American air strike had knocked out the Cuban air force. But the airstrike failed and Kennedy, under the pressure of world opinion, called off a second try.
Even so, the invasion went ahead. When the invaders surged onto the beaches, they found Castro’s army waiting for them. Many of the invaders were killed on the spot. Others were captured—to be ransomed by the United States in December, 1962, in return for medical supplies.
It was a major public relations setback for the newly-installed Kennedy administration, which had raised hopes for a change in American-Soviet relations.
Kennedy, trying to abort widespread criticism, publicly took the blame for the setback: “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan….I’m the responsible officer of the Government.”
The Bay of Pigs convinced Kennedy that he had been misled by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Out of this came his decision to rely heavily on the counsel of his brother, Robert, whom he had installed as Attorney General.
The failed Cuban invasion—unfortunately for Kennedy—convinced Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev that the President was weak.
Khrushchev told an associate that he could understand if Kennedy had not decided to invade Cuba. But once he did, Kennedy should have pressed on and wiped out Castro.
Khrushchev attributed this to Kennedy’s youth, inexperience and timidity—and believed he could bully the President.
On June 4, 1961, Kennedy met with Khrushchev in Vienna to discuss world tensions. Khrushchev threatened to go to nuclear war over the American presence in West Berlin—the dividing line between Western Europe, protected by the United States, and Eastern Europe, controlled by the Soviet Union.
Kennedy, who prized rationality, was shaken by Khrushchev’s unexpected rage. After the conference, he told an associate: “It’s going to be a cold winter.”
Meanwhile, East Berliners felt they were about to be denied access to West Berlin. A flood of 3,000 refugees daily poured into West Germany.
Khrushchev was embarrassed at this clear showing of the unpopularity of the Communist regime. In August, he ordered that a concrete wall—backed up by barbed wire, searchlights and armed guards—be erected to seal off East Berlin.
As tensions mounted and a Soviet invasion of West Berlin seemed likely, Kennedy sent additional troops to the city in a massive demonstration of American will.
Two years later, on June 26, 1963, during a 10-day tour of Europe, Kennedy visited Berlin to deliver his “I am a Berliner” speech to a frenzied crowd of thousands.
JFK addresses crowds at the Berlin Wall
“There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world,” orated Kennedy. “Let them come to Berlin.”
Standing within gunshot of the Berlin wall, he lashed out at the Soviet Union and praised the citizens of West Berlin for being “on the front lines of freedom” for more than 20 years.
“All free men, wherever they may live,” said Kennedy, “are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich ben ein Berliner.’”
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on October 26, 2023 at 12:11 am
There is a famous joke about racial profiling that’s long made the rounds of the Internet. It appears in the guise of a “history test,” and offers such multiple-choice questions as:
In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, athletes were kidnapped and massacred by:
- Olga Korbut
- Sitting Bull
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
In 1979, the US embassy in Iran was taken over by:
- Lost Norwegians
- Elvis
- A tour bus full of 80-year-old women
- Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
During the 1980s a number of Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by:
- John Dillinger
- The King of Sweden
- The Boy Scouts
- Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
In 1983, the US Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by:
- A pizza delivery boy
- Pee Wee Herman
- Geraldo Rivera
- Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
On September 11, 2001, four airliners were hijacked. Two were used as missiles to take out the World Trade Center; one crashed into the Pentagon; and the other was diverted and crashed by the passengers. Three thousand people were killed by:
- Bugs Bunny, Wiley E. Coyote, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd
- The Supreme Court of Florida
- Mr. Bean
- Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
* * * * *
It’s well to remember the bitter truth behind this joke, especially in light of comments by Arthur M. Cummings, the FBI’s former executive assistant director for national security.
Cummings had no use for such Politically Correct terms as “man-caused disasters” in referring to terrorism. Nor did he shrink from terms such as “jihadists” or “Islamists.”
“Of course Islamists dominate the terrorism of today,” he said bluntly. “I had this discussion with the director of a very prominent Muslim organization here [Washington, D.C.]. And he said ‘Why are you guys always looking at the Muslim community?’
“I can name the homegrown cells, all of whom are Muslim, all of whom are seeking to kill Americans,” replied Cummings. “It’s not the Irish. It’s not the French. It’s not the Catholics. It’s not the Protestants. It’s the Muslims.”
One man who did foresee the present conflicts with stunning clarity—and had the courage to say what has since become Politically Incorrect—was Samuel P. Huntington.
Samuel P. Huntington
A political scientist, Huntington taught government at Harvard University (1950-1959, then at Columbia University (1959-1962). He returned to Harvard in 1963, and remained there until his death in 2008.
The author of nine books, in 1996 he published his most influential one: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Its thesis was that, in the post-Cold War world, people’s cultural and religious identities would be the primary sources of conflict.
Among the points he makes:
- Modernization does not mean Westernization.
- Economic progress has come with a revival of religion.
- Post-Cold War politics emphasize ethnic nationalism over ideology.
- Civilizations are fundamentally differentiated from each other by centuries-old history, language, culture, tradition, and, most important, religion.
- As the world becomes smaller, different civilizations increasingly interact. These intensify civilization consciousness and the awareness of differences between civilizations.
- Economic modernization and social change separate people from age-old identities (such as hometowns and familiar neighbors). Religion has replaced this gap, providing a basis for identity, socialization and commitment that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations.
- The West, at the peak of its power, is confronting non-Western countries that increasingly have the desire, will and resources to shape the world in non-Western ways.
- Cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones.
The most controversial part of The Clash of Civilizations focuses on Islam. Huntington points out, for example, that Muslim countries are involved in far more inter-group violence than others.
And he warns that the West’s future conflicts with Islamic nations will be rooted in the Islamic religion:
“Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”
Huntington argues that civilizational conflicts are “particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims.” Among the reasons for these conflicts: Both Islam and Christianity have similarities which heighten conflicts between their followers:
- Both seek to convert others.
- Both are “all-or-nothing” religions; each side believes that only its faith is the correct one.
- The followers of both Islam and Christianity believe that people who violate the base principles of their religion are idolators and thus damned.
Other reasons for the Western-Islamic clash are:
- The Islamic revival, which began in the 1970s and is manifested in greater religious piety and in a growing adoption of Islamic culture, values, dress, separation of the sexes, speech and media censorship.
- Western universalism—the belief that all civilizations should adopt Western values—infuriates Islamic fundamentalists.
These are not differences that will disappear—overnight or even over the span of several centuries. Nor will they be sweet-talked away by Politically Correct politicians, however well-meaning.
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In History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on October 19, 2023 at 12:07 am
On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a massive invasion of Ukraine.
To Ukrainians, it was a matter of life-or-death.
To Americans, Europeans and Westerners generally, it was a horrific, unfolding tragedy.
But to nonwhites—and especially Islamics—the sympathies of these nations was a sign of racism and Islamophobia.
One reason many Westerners feel greater sympathy for Ukrainians than Arabs: Islamics have routinely blamed the West—especially Americans—for their own internal conflicts.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights—which is safely located in Great Britain—the total number of dead from the Syrian civil war is more than 600,000 people.
The Observatory blamed the West for this Islamic self-slaughter:
“The silence of the International community for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Syria encourages the criminals to kill more and more Syrian people because they have not found anyone that deter them from continuing their crimes that cause to wound more than 1,500,000 people; some of them with permanent disabilities, make hundreds of thousands children without parents, displace more than half of Syrian people and destroy infrastructure, private and public properties.”
In short: It’s the duty of non-Muslims to bring civilized behavior to Islamics.
And why are all these murderers eagerly slaughtering one another? Because of a Muslim religious dispute that traces back to the fourth century.
Yes, it’s Sunni Muslims, who make up a majority of Islamics, versus Shiite Muslims, who comprise a minority.
Shiite Muslim women
Each group considers the other takfirs—that is, “apostates.” And, in Islam, being labeled an apostate can easily get you murdered.
This is, in short, not a conflict that can be resolved by driving an aggressor country out of another. It will never end—because both Sunnis and Shiites believe “God is on our side” in an inner-religious war that dates back centuries.
“We are wondering, why were Ukrainians welcome in all countries while we, Syrian refugees, are still in tents and remain under the snow, facing death, and no one is looking to us?” asked Syrian refugee Ahmad al-Hariri, who fled the war in his country for nearby Lebanon 10 years ago.
In an ideal and rational world, factors like religion, economics and race would not matter when large numbers of people are threatened by war. But this is not a rational and ideal world, and human emotions and prejudices usually play a deciding role in people’s behavior.
People identify and feel comfortable with those who most resemble themselves. In prisons, black inmates sit with blacks; whites with with whites; Hispanics with Hispanics.
Most Ukrainian refugees are highly-skilled and -educated Christians—meaning they will easily meld into the populations that make up most of Europe. Many of them already have relatives scattered throughout such countries as Poland, Hungary and Romania. Which means they can call on those relatives for support while settling in.
Much has been made—by nonwhites—of the fact that Ukrainians are Caucasians. This is undoubtedly one factor that leads other Caucasians to identify with their plight. But when Syrians identify with Palestinians, no doubt their own shared skin color and religion apply just as much.
Another reason why this conflict has riveted the attention of the world: Millions believed that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the Cold War.
Vladimir Putin
Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
But Vladimir Putin has brutally notified the world that it’s on again. Europeans—and Americans—fear that Putin’s attack on Ukraine, like Adolf Hitler’s attack on Poland, is simply the first of a series of conquests to come.
In 1935, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini set out to create a second Roman Empire by invading Ethiopia. The conflict pitted poorly-armed Ethiopian forces against Italians armed with radio, bombers and even mustard gas. Even ambulances and hospitals became targets for Mussolini’s air force.
Ethiopia’s emperor, Haile Selassie, appealed in person to the League of Nations for aid in repelling the invasion. His plea was greeted by laughter from the Italian and German delegates—and ignored by the rest of the world.
The war ended in 1937 with an Italian victory.
Haile Selassie
By contrast: The Spanish Civil War proved a magnet for international commitment. The conflict pitted Fascists under General Francisco Franco against the new Spanish Republic. Adolf Hitler and Mussolini sent troops and planes to aid Franco.
Tens of thousands of volunteers from about 50 countries poured into Spain to support the Republican cause—among them, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States.. Writers Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos lent their propaganda talents to the Republic.
American liberals sensed that this civil war was a testing ground for the weapons of Fascism—as it proved to be. By 1939, the superior numbers and weapons of Franco and his allies prevailed.
When Hemingway returned to the United States he tried to warn all who would listen that a far greater war was coming: World War II.
People see conflicts in the light of their own priorities. No two conflicts are the same—and will never be seen the same. What was true for the ones in Ethiopia and Spain remains true for the ones in Syria and Ukraine.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on October 18, 2023 at 12:43 am
On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a massive invasion of Ukraine.
To Ukrainians, it was a matter of life-or-death.
To Americans, Europeans and Westerners in general, it was a horrific, unfolding tragedy.
But to nonwhites—and especially Islamics—throughout the world, the sympathies of these nations was a sign of racism and Islamophobia.
The day after the invasion began, CBS News senior correspondent in Kyiv Charlie D’Agata said: “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilised, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”
CBS
On social media, his comment was strongly criticized as dehumanizing non-white, non-European peoples.
One Twitter user wrote: “Atrocities start with words and dehumanization. Atrocities unleashed upon millions in the ME [Middle East], fueled by dictators labeled as reformists in the west. The racist subtext: Afghans, Iraqi & Syrian lives don’t matter, for they are deemed inferior—’uncivilized.'”
In fact, conditions in Ukraine have been relatively peaceful. Afghanistan has never actually been a nation, simply a patchwork of feuding warlords. This has been true from the time of Alexander the Great to the Taliban today. Dictators have always been the rulers of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
On February 25, Sky News broadcast a video of people in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro making Molotov cocktails, explaining how grating Styrofoam makes the incendiary device stick to vehicles better 
A Twitter user wrote: “If this was done by Palestinians, Afghanistan or other nations resisting occupation, it would be terrorism. And during Mandela’s anti-apartheid era, it was also dubbed terrorism. For Europeans facing similar situations, it is resistance! Western duplicity knows no bounds.”
“Terrorism” is defined as “The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.”
Defending one’s country from attack by another country is not terrorism. In fact, from ancient times, it has been seen as the highest virtue, calling forth loyalty and courage.
Palestinians have repeatedly targeted civilians—not soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces—for death. In Afghanistan, women and children have been routinely massacred by warring factions.
There are solid reasons for fears of Islamic terrorism.
In his 2011 book, The Secrets of the FBI, Ronald Kessler notes the refusal of the Islamic community to identify known or potential terrorists within its ranks.
Said Arthur M. Cummings, then the Bureau’s executive assistant director for national security: “I had this discussion with the director of a very prominent Muslim organization here in [Washington] D.C. And he said, ‘Why are you guys always looking at the Muslim community?’”
“I can name the homegrown cells, all of whom are Muslim, all of whom were seeking to kill Americans,” replied Cummings. “It’s not the Irish, it’s not the French, it’s not the Catholics, it’s not the Protestants. It’s the Muslims.”
On BFM TV, France’s most-watched cable news channel, journalist Philippe Corbe said: “We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin, we’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.”
This was heavily criticized: “This war is just revealing the western hypocrisy and racism at its peak.”
There is a difference between a Syrian dictator waging war against his own citizens, and a nuclear-armed country waging all-out war on a smaller, democratic nation. The skin color of the peoples involved has nothing to do with either action.
“These are not the refugees we are used to… these people are Europeans,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov told journalists of the Ukrainians. “These people are intelligent, they are educated people…. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists…
“In other words,” he added, “there is not a single European country now which is afraid of he current wave of refugees.”
Kiril Petkov
President.bg, CC BY 2.5 BG <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/bg/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons
This was treated as racism by Islamics: “A refugee is a refugee, whether European, African or Asian,” Syrian journalist Okba Mohammad said.
In fact: By early 2021, 10 years after Syria’s civil war erupted, European Union states had taken in one million Syrian refugees and asylum seekers; Germany alone took more than half. In 2016, the European Union paid billions of euros for Turkey to continue hosting 3.7 million Syrians.
On February 6, 2016, The World Post carried this story: “Geneva III: The Stillborn Conference and the Endemic Failure of the International Community.”
The first paragraph read:
“While approaching the fifth anniversary of the Syrian civil war on March 15 — which claimed more than 300,000 lives, approximately 700,000 wounded, 4 million fled the country, and another 6 million displaced within Syria — the international community has failed to put an end to bloodshed in this war-torn country.”
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights—which is safely located in Great Britain—the total number of dead by 2023 is more than 600,000 people.
And who did the Observatory—and The World Post-–blame for this Islamic self-slaughter?
Why, the West, of course.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on October 13, 2023 at 12:13 am
Americans are suckers for children. Even if many of them might come wrapped in suicide vests.
On September 2, 2015, the body of a three-year old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi washed ashore on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey.
He and his family had boarded a small rubber boat to reach Europe amid the carnage of the Syrian civil war. The boat capsized.
The resulting photo flashed around the world and triggered international demands by humanitarian organizations that the West “do something.”
Drowned Alan Kurdi lies on a Turkish beach
Only eight days later, on September 10, 2015, the administration of President Barack Obama announced that it would take in at least 10,000 displaced Syrian refugees over the next year. That was in addition to the 2,000 Islamic refugees the United States had already accepted.
Almost one year later—on August 17, 2016—another photo captured the world’s attention.
It depicted a five-year-old Syrian boy named Omran Daqneesh sitting in an ambulance. Covered head to toe in dust, his face bloodied, he seemed dazed. He had been pulled out of a building hit by an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria.
Once again, demands arose among liberal interventionists, especially in the United States: “We must do something.”
All of which overlooks the increasing threat posed to the United States by Islamic terrorism.
According to U.S. Census data, America legally welcomes about 100,000 Muslim immigrants each year. This represents the fastest growing segment of immigrants coming to the United States.
The Pew Research Center estimates there are 2.5 million Islamics in the United States. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) puts the figure at seven million.
Meanwhile, the FBI is being overwhelmed by the demands of countering Islamic terrorism against the United States.
On July 8, 2015, then-FBI director James Comey testified before Congress about the increasing burdens his agency faced in combating terrorism.
“We are stopping these things [Islamic terror plots] so far through tremendous hard work, the use of sources, the use of online undercovers. But it is incredibly difficult. I cannot see [the FBI’s] stopping these [plots] indefinitely.”
The FBI has only 35,000 agents and analysts—against seven million potential suspects. And only a portion of those agents and analysts are charged with investigating terrorism.
And even children, for all their supposed innocence, are not to be ignored as potential weapons of Islamic terrorist organizations.
On August 20, 2016, a suicide bomber aged between 12 and 14 attacked a Kurdish wedding party in Gaziantep, Turkey, killing at least 51 people. Preliminary evidence indicated that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was behind the attack.
Palestinian child suicide bomber
America may well become a similar target for child suicide bombers. Especially since children are not required to submit to through screenings at airports as adults are.
How did all of this come to be?
On March 15, 2011, protests broke out in Syria, with demonstrators demanding political reforms and the ouster of dictator Bashar al-Assad.
These protests, met with government repression, continued to grow into a wholesale civil war. By March, 2023, an estimated 503,064 to 613,407 Syrians had so far died in the conflict.
Put in a positive way:
- More than a half-million potential or actual Islamic terrorists will never again pose a threat to the United States or Western Europe.
- Additional thousands are certain to follow their example.
- And the United States cannot be held in any way responsible for it.
But Americans and Europeans have chosen to see these positives as negatives.
The United Nations refugee Agency, UNHCR, estimated that the number of forcibly displaced and stateless people in Europe rose to 21.8 million by the end of 2022,
And while the West has thrown open its doors to fleeing Syrians, the reaction of neighboring Islamic nations has been entirely different.
This was brutally but accurately depicted in a cartoon of wealthy Arab rulers looking on indifferently at the body of Alan Kurdi.
While European nations are being swamped by hundreds of thousands of these uninvited “guests,” the Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing almost nothing for Syria’s refugees.
According to Amnesty International, the “six Gulf countries—Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain—have offered zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees.”
These nations are far closer to Syria than are Europe and the United States. And they contain some of the Arab world’s largest military budgets and its highest standards of living.
Note the contradiction: Democratic, non-Islamic countries are exposing themselves to increasing numbers of potential—if not actual—Islamic terrorists.
Meanwhile, the Arab world—awash in petrodollars and land—is closing its own doors to Syrian refugees.
The Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing next to nothing for Syria’s refugees – The Washington Post
* * * * *
During the 1980s, the United States saw the terroristic acts of Islamic nations as mere crimes, and not acts of war.
The September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center changed that.
For the last 22 years, the United States military has actively fought Islamics in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. And now Syria.
To be admitting huge numbers of a population with which the United States is now waging all-out war is worse than stupid. It is a guarantee of national suicide.
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JFK: “CAMELOT” ENDED SIXTY YEARS AGO: PART SIX (OF TEN)
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on November 16, 2023 at 12:16 amPresident Kennedy’s untimely death has since fueled arguments over how, if he had lived, he would have dealt with Vietnam.
In his memoirs, former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote: “Kennedy would have never let his country get bogged down in Vietnam.”
But David Halberstam, who covered the early years of the war for The New York Times, came to a different conclusion.
David Halberstam in Vietnam
In his bestselling 1972 book, The Best and the Brightest, he wrote that although Kennedy questioned the wisdom of a combat commitment, he had never shown those doubts in public.
In public, he had expressed doubts only about the Diem regime—whether it held enough support among the Vietnamese to win the war.
His successor had to deal with Kennedy’s public statements, all supportive of the importance of Vietnam.
And it was that successor, newly-elevated President Lyndon B. Johnson, who decided, in 1965, to commit heavy military forces to protecting “freedom-loving” South Vietnam.
In short: Even if Kennedy had intended to withdraw American forces after winning re-election in 1964, he made a fatal mistake: He assumed there would always be time for him to do so.
Historian Thurston Clarke, in his 2013 book JFK’s Last Hundred Days, reached a totally different conclusion: That Kennedy planned to quietly remove American military advisers regardless of the military situation.
Clarke believes that Kennedy intended to gradually withdraw troops from Vietnam—but felt he could not afford to inflame the Right during an election year.
Essentially, the question, “What would Kennedy have done?”—on Vietnam, civil rights, relations with the Soviet Union—lies at the heart of his continuing fascination among Americans.
For millions, the later turmoil of the 1960s remains such a traumatic memory that they assume: “America would have had to be better-off if Kennedy had lived.”
But much of Kennedy’s proposed legislation—such as his civil rights act—did not become law until President Johnson overcame conservative opposition to it.
Johnson had first been elected to the House of Representatives in 1937, where he gained influence as a protégé of its speaker, Sam Rayburn. In 1948, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and eventually became one of its most powerful members—especially after becoming its Majority Leader in 1954.
Johnson knew the strengths and weaknesses of his political colleagues, and he ruthlessly exploited this knowledge to ensure the passage of legislation he supported.
Kennedy had served in the House from 1946 to 1952, and from 1952 to 1961 in the Senate. But he had never been a major leader in either body.
It was as a Senator that he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage. But it was also as a Senator that he refused to vote on whether U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy should be censured by his Senatorial colleagues.
In 1954, the Senate voted to condemn McCarthy, whose slanders of Communist subversion had bullied and frightened Americans for four years. McCarthy’s influence as a political figure died overnight.
Joseph P. Kennedy, the family patriarch, was a strong McCarthy supporters. And Robert F. Kennedy had briefly worked for McCarthy’s Red-baiting Senate subcommittee.
JFK’s refusal to say how he would have voted on censuring McCarthy damaged his support among liberals during the 1960 election.
Eleanor Roosevelt famously said that Kennedy should show “more courage and less profile.”
Although Lyndon Johnson’s legislative achievements as Senator and President remain unprecedented, he remains a pariah figure among Democrats.
His 1965 decision to wage all-out war in Vietnam ignited nationwide protests and elected Richard M. Nixon as President in 1968.
Like a doomed character in George Orwell’s novel, 1984, he has largely become an un-person.
Meanwhile, John F. Kennedy continues to endlessly fascinate Americans. In poll after poll they continue to rate him highly—even though he served less than three years in the White House.
Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written about JFK. On the big screen he’s been depicted by actors such as Cliff Robertson (PT-109), Bruce Greenwood (Thirteen Days) and James Marsden (The Butler).
Movie poster for PT-109
On TV, he’s been portrayed by William Devane (The Missiles of October), William Petersen (The Rat Pack), Martin Sheen (Kennedy), James Franciscus (Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy) and Cliff De Young (Robert Kennedy and His Times).
William Devane as John F. Kennedy in The Missiles of October
Kennedy has even appeared on Saturday Night Live (perhaps most famously in a sketch where he chides then-President Clinton for his tawdry choices as a womanizer).
He even figured in a 1986 episode of the revised Twilight Zone episode where a history professor travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination. The result: JFK is saved but Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is murdered and World War III erupts.
In 2013, the Internet Movie Database listed a total of 94 movies, mini-series. TV dramas and even comedies featuring the character of John F. Kennedy.
Roads, bridges, tunnels, highways, parks, playgrounds and schools have been named after him.
As Thurston Clarke wrote in JFK’s Last Hundred Days: “There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is in of itself an index of majority opinion. By that standard, Kennedy was a great President.”
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