I want to thank Sue Serpa and Alfred Magaletta for this invitation to talk with Boston 9/11 Truth and to see if the struggles some of us have gone through with JFK’s assassination can be of help in your efforts. I think the JFK assassination is particularly relevant to your efforts, because in the JFK assassination and in 9/11 we have two crimes that were carried out by the US warfare state, crimes against peace and in the service of war.

↑ Some highlights from the struggle against President Kennedy’s Assassination

Let me begin by recounting some of my experiences in the struggle against the President’s assassination. In 1996 I self-published a book called History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy and the complete book is available free online.

I self-published it, because when I showed it to a couple of publishers, they responded that they weren’t sure this was what people would want to read. And when I told them, “I can absolutely assure you that this is not what people want to read”, they said, “Well publishing things people don’t want to read is not really our thing.”

• The Warren Report Analysis of Shots, Trajectories, and Wounds: A Lawyer’s Dissenting View, The Legal Intelligencer, 2 Nov 1964
• A Philadelphia Lawyer Analyzes the Shots, Trajectories, and Wounds, Liberation Jan 1965

Over the years I had tired of talking to people who pretended to want to know, but really didn’t want to. So I decided to write the book and tell anyone who said they were interested, “Here’s the book. It provides you with everything you need to know. Read it and come to your own conclusions.” And I stopped talking to people about the case.

Then one day about two years later my son, Sy, who was about 10 years old asked me, “Hey Dad, what’s all this stuff about the Warren Report?” I couldn’t very well tell him to read the book, so I told him, “Well when President Kennedy was killed the government investigated what happened and published a report called ‘The Warren Report’. And in the report they said that this bullet had gone into Kennedy’s back and came out his throat, and then had gone into Governor Connally’s back and out his chest and smashed through his wrist...” At which point Sy broke in and said, “Come on, Dad, They didn’t say that. That’s ridiculous! No one would believe that!”

So what we have is The Emperor’s New Clothes in real life. A 10-year-old can see that the Warren Report is ridiculous, but our entire political establishment acts as if the report has substance. No history department in any college or university can say, “The Warren Report is a fraud.” What is going on?

In his book, 1984, George Orwell speaks of something he calls ‘Crimestop’. Quoting Orwell:

Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]... and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

But this ‘Crimestop’ or protective stupidity is greatly aided by a certain means of mind control, which goes on in our society through orchestrated debates. How does this work? It is important to understand that debates are always based on premises or assumptions which are either explicit or implicit and are not subject to debate. For instance if you are willing to participate in a debate as to whether the US will or won’t be able to bring democracy to Vietnam by prosecuting the Vietnam war, you have implicitly accepted the premise the US is trying to bring democracy to Vietnam. If you engage in a debate over whether there was or wasn’t a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, you are accepting the premise that there is uncertainty, that we aren’t sure if there was a conspiracy. You wouldn’t debate whether the President was assassinated, because you know this as a fact. If anyone doubted he had been assassinated, you would simply tell them to look at the film of the murder .

So the powers-that-be, through their mass media, fill our society with certain questions that they want the public to debate and disagree on. The powers-that-be don’t care which side of the debate you take as long as you buy into the debate. It is the premise underlying the debate that they want instilled in everyone.

And it turned out that this was the main means by which our society participated in the cover up concerning President Kennedy’s assassination. The main means of cover-up was not the story of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin, but the debate over this story. Did he do it or didn’t he? Was there a lone assassin or a conspiracy? Did the Warren Commission miss an assassin here or there? Did the Mafia or did the Cubans do it? All these questions are thrown out there by our media with the intention that the public agree to the premise that we don’t know for sure. You can have a “theory”, a belief, but you can’t say you know. You are a “conspiracy theorist”, if you don’t accept the Warren Report. All of these supposed questions and uncertainties are designed to convince people that all we have are beliefs, not knowledge. This has been going on for more than half a century. To this day we have people signing up to websites that are supposedly trying to throw significant light on the President’s assassination. I discussed this matter in a talk in 1998, “The Waters of Knowledge versus the Waters of Uncertainty: Mass Denial in the Assassination of President Kennedy.”

So let’s be clear. What I am saying is not a theory of a conspiracy. It was easy to establish from the beginning the fact of a conspiracy. Once having done that, you look at Oswald’s history, and it is clear that he was a low level US intelligence agent.

Furthermore, we know from reports by historian Theodore H. White and the President’s Press Secretary, Pierre Salinger, that there were communications between Washington and Air Force One and Washington and the Cabinet plane on their flights back to Washington on the afternoon of the assassination. On the afternoon of the assassination Air Force One was informed Oswald was the assassin and there was no conspiracy. This not the activity of an innocent government.

There is no “conspiracy theory” here. We know President Kennedy was murdered by agents of our own government. He was murdered because he had made a radical turn against the Cold War, toward peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union and toward a step by step process toward complete conventional and nuclear disarmament. This is highlighted in the President’s American University commencement address on June 10, 1963.

There is nothing to debate. There is no need for more investigations. No need for the release of more secret files.

The President of the United States was murdered in broad daylight. And the Congress of the United States was captured by ‘crimestop’. All the major media were captured by ‘crimestop’. Being captured by ‘Crimestop’ in many instances they helped to cover up the crime without being aware they were doing so. And if you try to point this out to them, you are viewed as paranoid and crazy. This is the mental reality of the established institutions of our society for more than half a century. As distinct from this mental reality is the true reality. The true reality is that a criminal conspiracy by a militarist wing of our national security state prevented President Kennedy from moving our country onto the path of world peace, and it has never been called to account. Most people don’t want to face up to this and prefer protective stupidity.

↑ Implications for the 9/11 Truth Movement

What light might this shed on your efforts? First of all I would say the fact that the buildings were blown up on 9/11 is absolutely clear. The 9/11 truth movement has proven this beyond any reasonable doubt in its investigations, through the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, in books such as those by David Ray Griffin, and in a film such as the documentary film on Building “Seven.” As far as I am concerned there is nothing to debate here. Anyone who looks at what your movement has produced and can’t see this obvious fact, such a person is operating with ‘Crimestop’. You don’t need more investigations. You don’t need more debates. You can just refer anyone who claims to want to know, to what you have already done.

So if we agree that there is no debating that the buildings were blown up, we next must ask who had the means and motive to rig these buildings with explosives? There is only one answer: a militarist element in the national security state in the heart of the US government.

For anyone who thinks such an idea is wild, let us recall something else from President Kennedy’s administration, Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was developed by the US military. It was a plot to murder US citizens and blame it on Cuba in order to serve as a justification for a military invasion of Cuba and the overthrow of the Cuban government. US military officials presented the plan to President Kennedy asking for his approval. And it was not the only plan of its kind. There were others over the years involving elements of the CIA and the US military.

In other words, although President Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods out of hand, projects like Operation Northwoods have been standard operating procedure when it comes to the certain elements within the CIA and the US military. If this is the case, do you think Dick Cheney would have rejected “Project 9/11” when it was presented to him, Let’s remember that the neocon “Project for a New American Century”, a neocon project for US world domination, came into being after the collapse of the Soviet Union and explicitly stated that a “new Pearl Harbor” would be necessary to organize the US public for war and to carry out the project.

↑ What are we to do?

So what do we do? Here I want to talk about the best book on President Kennedy’s assassination, James Douglass’, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

This is the best book for two reasons. First, up until Douglass’ book, all fully truthful accounts of the assassination were marginalized. But Douglass was able to capture the truth in such a way that the truth began to make its way out of the margins of our society. Not only does Douglass truthfully detail what happened and why, he does something else quite extraordinary. In his book Douglass resurrects President Kennedy in the reader and challenges his reader to carry forward the struggle for which JFK died, the struggle for world peace.

While JFK was killed, his ideas about world peace and how to achieve it live on in his extraordinary American University speech of June 10, 1963. I think it is impossible to overstate the importance of this speech, and if you are not familiar with it, I highly recommend that you study it carefully. In this speech the President of the United States laid out a very sophisticated analysis of the principles of world peace and how it might gradually be achieved. He said explicitly that there is no simple key to the process, no grand solution. He said the struggle for world peace must be dynamic not static, changing with the times. Nevertheless I believe the principles he lays out are universal and eternal.

I am a member of the JFK Peace Speech Committee, the goal of which is to have this speech known throughout the nation. This is one thing we are doing to struggle against the assassination of the President. The committee has also developed a paper “Ten Principles in President Kennedy’s Vision of World Peace.”

What about the 9/11 movement? You have exposed the fact that there is a militarist wing of the US national security state that is not only a danger to the rest of the world, but also a great danger to the people of the United States as well. You have shown that the US Congress as well as the corporate mass media will not challenge the crimes of this militarist wing of the US national security state, if the crime is big enough. If a way is to be found to counter events such as 9/11 the people of the United States must seek out a way of defending themselves. Given the success of ‘Project 9/11’ there is no reason to believe that it won’t be repeated. I must say that I am not well informed on the various activities of the 9/11 Truth movement. One question I would pose is whether it is possible for the 9/11 Truth movement to announce the formation a people’s investigative body that is independent of the government and the corporate media, that is prepared to investigate any attack on the United States that the powers-that-be want to use as a cause for the US going to war.

In my book, History Will Not Absolve Us, I suggested that JFK was “a de Klerk without an ANC”. I was referring to the roles of F.W. de Klerk, the President of South Africa, and the African National Congress in the dismantling of apartheid. President de Klerk was able to lead the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, because one way or the other the African National Congress with its Freedom Charter was organizing a mass movement to get rid of the apartheid regime, a mass movement that had both national and international support. The white power structure of South Africa was confronted with a choice—do it de Klerk’s way or do it the ANC’s way. Under those circumstances the white power structure agree to de Klerk’s plan.

President Kennedy was trying to move against the US warfare state, but he didn’t have an organized movement that was going to dismantle the US warfare state one way or the other. Just as the South Africans needed an African National Congress with its Freedom Charter organizing a mass movement to disassemble the oppressive system of apartheid, so the people of the United States need an American National Congress with a Freedom from Militarism Charter that will organize a mass movement to disassemble our warfare state. Could the 9/11 Truth movement contribute to a convention of peace groups which aimed to found such an organization?

I would like to leave you with the words of A. Philip Randolph, the famous African American labor leader: “At the banquet table of nature there are no reserved seats. What you can’t take, you can’t have. And what you can’t hold, you can’t keep. And no one can take anything without organization.”