the conspiracy continues unraveling

Rating: 10/10 (31 July 2005)

Some people contend that Oliver Stone's movie "suggested" that the government was behind the Kennedy assassination, but I wish to assert that it proved that the government was behind it, as were the Mafia and the Cuban exiles. Kevin Costner plays New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, who sought to expose the conspiracy: the generals were angry at Kennedy for trying to get out of Vietnam, the Cuban exiles blamed JFK for being "soft" on Castro (which he really wasn't), and after the assassination, everyone who should have investigated was sent out of the country.
There's another interesting part here. Recently, Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles was arrested for illegally entering the United States. A cop during Batista's reign, he fled to the US and was trained at Ft. Benning, Georgia. In 1976, he blew up the airplane carrying Cuba's LaCrosse team, killing everyone on board. He never repented. In 1997, he set off several bombs in Havana hotels, killing an Italian tourist, and then in 2000 was arrested after he tried to assassinate Castro while the Cuban leader was making a speech in Panama. Acquitted by Panama's outgoing president in 2004, he made his way to the US. Now that he's been arrested, reports have been coming out about him. One was titled "Who has what to hide about Luis Posada Carriles?" It says that he may have been in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, and that George H.W. Bush may have also been there.
I don't know for certain that Posada was there, but it begs the question: if more information about the Kennedy assassination comes out, what are we going to learn about whom? Now that most Americans believe that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone, what else is out there? Even the "official" story about Oswald is sketchy. He supposedly defected to the Soviet Union, but he'd never had any pro-Communist sympathies during his youth. Apparently, around the time when he "defected", U2 spy planes began flying missions over the USSR. One was shot down on May Day, 1960, forcing a cancellation of a summit between Eisenhower and Khrushchev. According to what I've read, it sounds like the CIA deliberately sent the plane over there in order to cripple possibilities that Cold War tensions would ease. But just how does this relate to Oswald and the assassination? Who all was involved? As it is, it sounds like some Nazis were also involved.
I feel that I should also discuss John Kennedy himself. He has been known as progressive, but if one looks at his record, one becomes cynical. He made a conscious effort to overthrow Castro, even approving Operation Mongoose to destabilize Cuba. He increased the number of US troops in South Vietnam. Known as involved in the Civil Rights Movement, in reality he tried to stop the March on Washington, and even sent LBJ to Norway that day, believing him to be "too pro-civil rights" (which Johnson wasn't). Probably most perfidious of all, when a pro-democracy movement arose in Guatemala against the terrorist regime installed by the CIA, Kennedy made sure to crush the movement. So why did certain elements want to eliminate him? Because he wasn't an extremist. He didn't want to use US troops to invade Cuba (and so the CIA embarrassed him into taking the blame for the Bay of Pigs debacle), and he was planning to remove US troops from Vietnam by 1965. This is why they decided to get rid of him. It seems that the same sentiments existed in the Soviet bureaucracy: less than a year after the Kennedy assassination, Soviet hardliners overthrew Khrushchev, probably the most moderate Soviet leader until Gorbachev.
If we continue investigating this, who knows what we'll discover. But the overall point is that "JFK" proved (not implied) that there was a conspiracy.