Reading the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

                       

 By Reginald Johnson

 

  NEW HAVEN, CT ---- The annual reading of  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s great anti-war speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” will take place tomorrow in City Hall.

  The reading, sponsored by several peace organizations, will be held at 12 noon on the second floor of City Hall, 165 Church Street.

  Wednesday is the anniversary of Dr. King’s birthday. The nation officially observes King’s birthday on Monday, January 20.

 In the speech, given on April 4, 1967 before an audience of 3,000 people at the Riverside Church in New York City, the civil rights leader came out strongly against the war in Vietnam and condemned US militaristic policies around the world. He deplored the fact that the country was spending so much money on war while ignoring crumbling cities and poor people at home.

 “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” he said.

  A number of leaders and pundits at the time denounced King for his criticism of the Vietnam War (in which the US had been fighting communist guerillas for several years resulting in hundreds of thousands of casualties) and said that he had ruined his legacy as a civil rights leader by venturing into foreign affairs.

 But in his speech King said memorably, “There comes a time when silence is betrayal. And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”

 Exactly one year after King spoke those words, he was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee.

 The public reading of Dr. King’s speech is taking place as the United States is again involved in wars overseas even though these wars are considered so-called “proxy wars” where the United States does not actually have troops on the ground. But the US is still spending hundreds of billions dollars to fund the two countries fighting the wars.

 In Gaza, Israel is waging a genocidal attack on Palestinians and in Ukraine, that nation is locked in a now three-year-old conflict with Russia.

  The war in Gaza, by all accounts, has triggered a humanitarian disaster for civilians. Some 45,000 people have been killed, according to official estimates. But many experts believe that figure is much higher and the real total is over 200,000 deaths. Infrastructure has been devastated with hospitals, schools and residences bombed or burned to the ground.

  Thousands have been displaced and are living in tents. Heavy rains and freezing temperatures have created intolerable living conditions and a number of children have frozen to death. Human rights observers claim Israel has conducted a systematic campaign to wreck Gaza’s health care system with the destruction of medical facilities and doctors and staff shot or abducted.

 Hunger is widespread in Gaza with the Israeli military blocking the entry of aid convoys.

 A flier put out by the organizers of the reading in New Haven said, “On the anniversary of Martin Luther King Junior’s birth, we refuse to stand by and allow tens of thousands of our fellow human beings to be flooded, frozen and burned alive by Israel and the US, as if their lives meant nothing.  We join millions in the US and throughout the world demanding a permanent cease-fire and massive humanitarian aid be allowed to enter Gaza.”

 The Greater New Haven Peace Council, Veterans for Peace, the New Haven Peace Commission and the Connecticut Peace and Solidarity Coalition are sponsoring the public reading.

 For more information, email grnhpeacecouncil@gmail.com

 

  

Secret files said to link CIA to JFK assassination

 

      By Reginald Johnson

 

   In an astonishing newscast last week dealing with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, FOX’s Tucker Carlson said a source who has access to still-unreleased CIA files on the case stated “unequivocally” that the agency “was involved” with Kennedy’s murder.

 “We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained,” said Carlson. “We asked this person directly,  ‘did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American president?’ And here’s the reply we received, verbatim: ‘The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.’ “

   “It’s hard to imagine a more jarring response than that,” Carlson said. “Again, this is not a conspiracy theorist that we spoke to. Not even close. This is someone with direct knowledge of the information that once again is being withheld from the American public. And the answer we received was unequivocal --- ‘yes. the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.’ ”

  Carlson’s show ran the same day that the Biden administration opted to release some of the secret CIA files dealing with the assassination ----- but not all.  Some of the most sensitive documents are still hidden, despite the fact that a congressional act was passed more than 30 years ago mandating that all the records relating to Kennedy’s assassination should be made public by the year 2017. That has not taken place, with successive administrations, Republican and Democrat, slow-walking the process.

  It’s long been speculated that the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) was involved with the JFK assassination, which took place on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Tex. Thousands of books and articles and been written about the case, and many authors have either speculated about the CIA’s responsibility, or in some cases pointed the finger directly at the CIA. Kennedy had a bad relationship with the agency, after he faulted the CIA for the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.

  Oliver Stone’s film, “JFK,” also told a story about FBI, CIA and military officers being involved in the murder, in what was portrayed as a coup d’etat.

   However, no one in the mainstream press, in Congress or in the government bureaucracy has ever dared to come out and say that the CIA might have been tied to the president’s killing. The establishment view on the assassination for years has remained that the Warren Commission --- which reviewed Kennedy’s murder in 1964 --- was correct in concluding that the 35^th president was murdered by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, and there was no conspiracy involving other actors or government officials.

  Carlson’s show therefore was unusual --- a highly rated commentator on a mainstream channel voicing the strong possibility that a branch of the United States government was involved in the murder of a sitting president.

 The FOX commentator also said if what the source is saying is true, it confirms the belief held by many over the years --- that the US has a democracy in name only.

  “It means that within the US government, there are forces wholly beyond democratic control. These forces are more powerful than the elected officials that supposedly oversee them,” Carlson said. “These forces can affect election outcomes. They can even hide their complicity in the murder of an American president. In other words, they can do pretty much anything they want. They constitute a government within a government, mocking by their very existence the idea of democracy. As cynical as we have become after 30 years of watching government officials ignore the voters who employ them, we were shocked to learn of this. It’s not acceptable,” Carlson stated.

  Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy who, like his brother, was also assassinated, called the Carlson show,  “The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.”

  Sen. Kennedy was killed in 1968, also allegedly by a lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan. Sirhan, now in his late 70s, is serving a life sentence.

 Robert Kennedy Jr. has said previously that he believed that neither Oswald nor Sirhan acted alone in the two murders.

  In a follow-up show on the JFK case on Dec. 16, a lawyer who is pushing for the full release of the CIA files on Kennedy, told Carlson the Biden administration’s decision to only release part of the files was “very disappointing, frustrating and infuriating.”

  New York Law School Adjunct Prof. Lawrence Schnapf said, “Essentially what we got yesterday was old wine packaged in new bottles. The 13,000 records released yesterday were basically records that had already been released and maybe with less redactions.”

  He added “the spin that the CIA is doing is unfortunately (something) that the New York Times and the Washington Post have taken hook, line and sinker … this is a big nothing burger.”

  The Mary Ferrell Foundation, the nation’s largest nonprofit repository of the assassination records has sued the administration to make all the documents public. The foundation says the CIA is withholding most of the records at issue.

 The Assassination Records Review Board that was established under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 has also tried to obtain more Kennedy files from NBC that it says the company is holding,  according to Schnapf.

 “To show you the level of obstruction in our government, the review board prepared a subpoena to serve on NBC and the Department of Justice refused to serve it,” Schnapf said.

  The attorney urged Carlson and his listeners to pressure leaders of the new incoming Congress to hold hearings and subpoena CIA officials to come and testify why they are not turning over the Kennedy files as required by law.

  The last few years have seen more calls for Congress to set up a new "Church Committee" to investigate abuses by the intelligence community, including the CIA, FBI and NSA.

  In the 1970s, a Senate committee headed by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho conducted a sweeping investigation of irregularities at the agencies and that triggered a number of reforms.