Guest Post by Edward Curtin
On December 15, the night that the Biden administration released some of the remaining JFK files while withholding others with another half-assed excuse, Tucker Carlson, the most-watched cable news television host, delivered a monologue about the JFK assassination.
It garnered a great deal of attention.
Although I don’t watch Carlson’s television show, I received messages from many friends and colleagues, people I highly respect, about his monologue’s great significance, so I watched that episode. And then I watched it many more times.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man whom I hold in the highest esteem, tweeted that it was:
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.”
While I completely agree with his second sentence, I was underwhelmed by Carlson’s words, to put it mildly. I thought it was clearly “a limited hangout,” as described by the former CIA agent Victor Marchetti:
Spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.
Or listens carefully.
Carlson surely said some things that were true, and, as my friends and many others have insisted, he was the first mainstream corporate journalist to say that “the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”
But “involved” is a word worthy of a lawyer, a public relations expert, or the CIA itself because it can mean something significant or nothing. Or a little of both. It is a weasel word.
And the source for Carlson’s claim was an anonymous source, someone who he said “had access” to the JFK files that were never released. We know, of course, that when The New York Times and its ilk cite “anonymous sources,” claiming that they have told them this or that, this raises eyebrows. Or should.
Anyone who closely follows that paper’s claims knows that it is a CIA conduit, but now, those who know this are embracing Tucker Carlson as if he were the prophet of truth, as if a Rupert Murdock-owned Fox TV host who is paid many millions of dollars, has become the Julian Assange of corporate journalism.
In a 2010 radio interview, Mr. Carlson said, “ I am 100 % his bitch. Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do.”
The obvious question is: Why would Fox News allow Carlson to say now what many hear as shocking news about the JFK assassination?
So let me run down exactly what Carlson did say.
For five minutes of the 7:28 minute monologue, he said things that are obviously true: that Jack Ruby killed Oswald and that the claim that both acted alone is weird and beyond any odds; that the Warren Commission was shoddy; that the CIA weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” in 1967 according to Lance De Haven-Smith’s book Conspiracy Theory in America; that the CIA’s brainwashing specialist psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West visited Jack Ruby in jail and declared him insane, contrary to all other assessments of Ruby’s mental state; and that the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that there was probably a conspiracy in the president’s assassination.
All of this is true but not news to those knowledgeable about the assassination. Nevertheless, it was perhaps news to Carlson’s audience and therefore good to hear on a corporate news site.
But then, the next few minutes – the key part of his report, the part that drew all the attention – got tricky.
Carlson said that just that day – December 15, 2022 – when all the JFK documents were due to be released but many were withheld, “we spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents.” Who would have such access, and how, is left unaddressed, but it is implied that it is a CIA source, but maybe not. It is strange to say the least.
Carlson then said he asked this person, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy?” And the answer was “I believe they were involved.” Carlson goes on to say, “And the answer we received was unequivocal. Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”
Note the words “hand,” “believe,” “involved,” and then “unequivocal.”
“Hand” can mean many things and is very vague. For example, in front of his wife, a man tells his friend, “I had a hand in preparing Christmas dinner.” To which his wife, laughing, replies, “Yes, he did, he put the napkins on the table.”
To “believe” something is very different from knowing it, as Dr. Martin Schotz, one of the most perceptive JFK assassination researchers, has written in his book, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy
On Belief Versus Knowledge
It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.
And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth — as opposed to only believe the truth — is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being empowered and confident in one’s rational powers.
“Involved,” like the word “hand,” can mean many things; it is vague, slippery, not definitive, and is used by tabloid gossip columnists to suggest scandals that may or not be true.
“Unequivocal” does not accurately describe the source’s statement, which was: “I believe.” That is, unless you take someone’s belief as evidence of the truth, or you wish to make it sound so.
Note that nowhere in Carlson’s report does he or his alleged source say clearly and definitively that the CIA/National Security State murdered President Kennedy, for which there has long been overwhelming evidence.
Such beating-around-the-bush is quite common and tantalizes the audience to think the next explosive revelation will be dispositive. Yet no release of documents is needed to confirm that the CIA killed Kennedy, as if the national security state would allow itself to be pinned for the murder.
Waiting for the documents is like waiting for Godot; and to promote some hidden smoking gun, some great revelation is to engage in a pseudo-debate without end. It is to do the killers’ bidding for them. And it is quite common. There are many well-known “dissident” writers who continue to claim that there is not enough evidence to conclude that the CIA/national security state killed the president.
And this is so for those who question the official story. Furthermore, there are many more pundits who maintain that Oswald did the deed alone, as the Warren Report concluded and the mainstream corporate media trumpet. This group is led by Noam Chomsky, whose acolytes bow to their master’s ignorant conclusions.
Maybe we’ll know the truth in 2063.
While it is true that some people change dramatically, Tucker Carlson, the Fox Television celebrity, would be a very unlikely candidate. He defended Eliot Abrams and praised Oliver North; supported the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; went to Nicaragua to support those Contras; smeared the great journalist Gary Webb while defending the CIA; supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq; and much more.
Alan MacLeod chronicled all this in February of this year for those who have known nothing of Carlson’s past, including his father’s work as a U.S. intelligence operative as director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the body that oversees government-funded media, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Martí and Voice of America – all U.S. propaganda outlets.
Now we are being asked to accept that Carlson is out to show how the CIA is “involved” in the murder of JFK. Why would so many fall for such rhetoric?
No doubt any crumb of national news coverage about the CIA and the assassination by a major corporate player elicits an enthusiastic response from those who have tried for many years to tell the truth about JFK’s murder. One’s first response is excitement. But such reactions need to tempered by sober analyses of exactly what has been said, which is what I am doing here. I, too, wish it were a breakthrough but think it is more of the same. Much ado about nothing. A way to continue to foster uncertainty, not knowledge, about the crime.
I see it as a game of false binaries in the same way the Democrats and Republicans are portrayed as mortal enemies. Yes, there are some differences, but all-in-all they are one party, the War Party, who agree on the essential tenets of U.S. imperial policy. They both represent the interests of the upper classes and are financed by them. They both work within the same frame of reference. They both support what Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst, rightly calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).
If one asks a dedicated believer in the truthfulness of The New York Times Corporation or NPR, for example, what they think of Tucker Carlson, they will generally dismiss him with disdain as a right-wing charlatan. This, of course, works in reverse if you ask Carlson’s followers what they think of the Times or NPR.
Yet for those who think outside the frame – and they are all non-mainstream – a different picture emerges. But sometimes they are taken in by those whose equivocations are extremely lawyerly but appeal to what they wish to hear. This is exactly what a “limited hangout” is. Snagged by some actual truths, they bite on the bait of nuances that don’t mean what they think they do.
Left vs. right, Fox TV vs. The New York Times, NPR, etc.: Just as Carlson’s father Dick Carlson ran the CIA-created U.S. overseas radio propaganda under Reagan and George H. W. Bush, so too the present head of National Public Radio, John Lansing, did the same under Barack Obama.
See my piece, Will NPR Now Change its Name to National Propaganda Radio. Birds of a feather disguised as hawks and sparrows in a game meant to confuse and create scrambled brains.
Lastly, let me mention an odd “coincidence.” On December 6 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., nine days before the partial JFK files release and Tucker Carlson’s monologue, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an organization devoted to JFK research, gave a presentation showcasing what was advertised as explosive new information about the Kennedy assassination.
The key presenter was Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and prominent JFK assassination researcher who has sued the CIA for documents involving Lee Harvey Oswald and CIA operative George Joannides.
On November 22 Morley had published an article titled “Yes, There is a JFK Smoking Gun.” It was subtitled: It will be found in 44 CIA documents that are still “Denied in Full.” The documents he was referring to allegedly concern contacts between Oswald and Joannides in the summer and fall of 1963 in New Orleans and in Mexico City. “They [the CIA] were running a psychological warfare operation, authorized in June 1963, that followed Oswald from New Orleans to Mexico City later that year,” wrote Morley.
Well, the “smoking gun” documents were not released on Dec 15, although on November 20 and then again at The National Press Club on December 6, Morley spoke of them as proving his point about the CIA’s involvement with Oswald, which has been obvious for a long time.
Although he said he hadn’t seen these key documents but was awaiting their release, he added that even if they were not released that will still prove him correct. In other words, with this bit of legerdemain, he was saying: What I don’t know, and may not soon not know, supports what I’m claiming even though I don’t know it.
And even if the files were released, he writes, “As for the conspiracy question, the massive withholding of documents makes it premature to draw any conclusions. The undisclosed Oswald operation was not necessarily part of a conspiracy. It might indicate CIA incompetence, not complicity. Again, only the CIA knows for sure.” So the smoking gun is not a smoking gun and the waters of uncertainty roll on and on into the receding future.
CIA incompetence, not complicity. Of course. It ain’t necessarily so. Or it is, or might be, or isn’t.
Morley is one of many who still cannot say that the CIA killed the president. Tucker Carlson can speak of its “involvement” just like Morley. We need more information, more files, etc. But even if we get them, we still won’t know. Maybe by 2063.
My question for Tucker Carlson: Who was your anonymous source? And did your source see the documents that were never disclosed? What specific documents are you referring to? And do they prove that the CIA killed Kennedy or just suggest “involvement”?
Finally, as I said before, even as there has long been a mountain of evidence for the CIA’s murder of JFK (and RFK as well, although that is never mentioned), many prominent people continue to play as if there is not. Listen to this video interview between Chris Hedges and former CIA officer John Kiriakou. It is all about the nefarious deeds of the CIA.
Right toward the end of the interview (see minutes 32:30-33:19), Hedges says, “So I have to ask [since he has to answer] this question since I know Oliver Stone is convinced the CIA killed JFK … I’ve never seen any evidence that backs it up …” and they both share a mocking laugh at Stone as if he were the village idiot when he knows more about the JFK assassination than the two of them put together, and Kiriakou says he too has not seen such evidence.
It’s a disgusting but typical display of arrogance and a “limited hangout.” Criticize the CIA only to make sure you whitewash them for one of their greatest achievements: the murder of President John F. Kennedy. This is straight from Chomsky’s playbook.
Beware double-talkers and the games they play. They come in different flavors.
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I believe Carlson said what he was able to say based on the statements of the source.
I believe you can’t judge a person’s character based on what they show you, but on what you find for yourself.
after more than fifty years of withholding information based on national security and nothing significate comes from it
we’re being played
Carlson, Petersen, Musk, Malone, Trump, DeSantis, Putin, Xi…
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
Watched the whole thing myself. Its long but it ties all the pieces together. Who paid for the hit, the shooters, the bankers and the history leading up to the Kennedy assassination. The why’s. Well worth a view
“Although I don’t watch Carlson’s television show, …”
The author makes a lot of assumptions about Tucker while admitting he’s not really familiar with his show. I’ve watched him off and on over the years and believe he has woken up in recent years. He questions everything including the Ukraine war. He was slow to discuss the vaccines but he’s there now. I don’t know his motives but he spews more truth than most in his occupation.
As they say … ‘Change is inevitable, growth is optional’.
I agree … Tucker, like others, seems to have finally come to realize the truth of what’s happening — what’s being done — to US … and, for that, I laud him.
you completely miss the controlled opposition psyop thats being played. He hasn’t had an awakening, he’s merely giving bread crumbs to the hungry.
For now, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt — after all, whether he’s right or wrong or even a part of it, what difference will it make in my life (or yours, for that matter)?
Oh Adunno… maybe like the whole covid scam. Controlled opposition is NO different from the propaganda served up by the mockingbird controllers. Different sides of the same coin. So you have to ask, is the propaganda on the right more virtuous than that of the left?? Its all propaganda, designed to get you either emotionally involved or desensitized and complacent. Regardless of which side of the fence you place yourself. So yeah, it makes a difference.
Yawn. Not everyone is either openly evil or “controlled opposition,” pal. That tin foil hat is on too tight and is killing your brain cells.
If its coming from the media its controlled. You might want to go get your booster and have another nap, both are safe and effective.
“The truth is that we are sustained by stories – oral, written, existential …”
Which is why health is so poor. Stories aren’t sustenance. Stories are Faucis et al “ouchies” (hitting your own thumb with a hammer, over & over again).
And if you need a script, or several, storylines to tell you who you are, how to be, you are an actor in somebody else’s play or movie. You’re not a person (or much of one). You’re an empty vessel somebody has poured “story” into.
Look around. This is all story time.
Auld lang syne would have it that the story was better before. Or before “Camelot” bit the dust (& another one gone & another one gon ~ cue Queen). But it is all one same story. No compartments or separations.
It wasn’t better before. It was bad before as the story “progressed” to the worse here it was always on its way to.
“To live to buy” including sales pitch stories “is to tell” ~sell~ “them lies.”
Yes, that is the same old story.
Consumption of symbols does a lot of creation-replacing, too. Digestion of those symbols more often than not do not assimilate into action/s described, no matter how artfully, by the symbols.
Why? Because symbols, like dreams, “are real” while reality isn’t. Symbols are shortcuts. To nowhere. The preferred place to be.
Each person is what, who, s/he actually-really is & symbols do not, cannot, change that. To proselytize otherwise is just another facet of all the illusion of control stuff. And so is just another part of story-thyme. And parsley, sage & rosemary. Seasonings. Guess whose coming to dinner … & who as dinner.
Magicians do sleight of hand, misdirection. They don’t do magic. Magic words, strung in magic stories, are magician stuff. For the credulous. For the diverted-seeking. For the slow. For the prey.
Matt Taibbi Reflects On “Repulsive, Horrifying, Dystopian” World Run By ‘Anti-People’
Other-“taught thinking skills” are second hand, second rate (at best) & can always be out-thought & maneuvered. And if not, when the final time comes ~ Houdini’s last corner ~ faced. Like a human. Like a person. Not like, or within wheelhouses of, personas.
Thinking is not something that can be, is, or ever was, subcontract-taught. School? Mr. T(hink) pities the fools.
Learners, self-teachers, are born. Not made.
In environments unsubsidized no bs is brooked & them not born ~ conceived ~ with the right stuff perish, do not “pass it on.”
But even with that winnowing, “do not pass go do not collect 200” *still* gets its dies cast. It is random. Even if there is some tilt, some bias, it is still random.
I couldn’t care less about twitter/files, jfk paperwork, 9/11 nomenclature, or anything else written under title “classified,” etc ad infinitum. That’s not the reading that does, or ever could, matter. The rev•ablution ain’t televised or scripted/filed. Not ever.
Smoking gun seekers of the “show me the files” sort have smoked their own, or somebody else’s taped-handle loaner, guns.
Or, another/same pic, these “truth-to-“power”-is-power” types are all playing the Piggy role in Lord of the Flies never-ending.
(And Piggybanks is made to be cracked open & looted … or left skull-fractured/ventilated dead on the ground, as case may be.)
Makework. Look how busy I am. And proper. Respectable. What a mensch.
Lillies that continuously guild themselves ain’t no daisies (Kilmer’s Holiday) & so, pretending otherwise, just bury themselves. They’re guildy parties of whatever extended, elongated, part & a lot of them know it.
More importantly I know it.
And I know Tucker rhymes Fucker. And that those empty vassal- vessels he tucks into could not & will not be otherwise. Cur•ageous? No dog is such a mutt.
Peter Finch / Howard Beale, the Network ranter, was scripted to go balls out off-reservation-script & his scripted bosses were also script-permissioned to allow that performance.
It’s all entertaining symbolism that the predigested Cranium wall shadow-starers redigest into ob/literal su/reality. And they cannot stop.
The funny thing about life in the fast lane is that the lane is stationary … & that the shadow-starers are the lane that the shit-stirrers race to the bottom on. Because sunken shit isn’t low enough. Because the sunken treasure is even lower than that.
Some stories are better than others? Some are so much better that they should be taken literally & all the method actors should lose themselves in those characterizations & plots forever? You’re doomed if you think “yes” is the correct, human person answer to that/those question/s.
What’s the big deal ? Mark Lane wrote in PLAUSIBLE DENIAL some 30 years [?] ago of the Miami federal trial of the CIA’s involvement. CIA agent Margarita Lopez was a part of the Cuban group from Miami, led by agent Frank Sturgis of Watergate fame who received an envelope of cash from agent E. Howard Hunt in the Dallas motel the night before the hit. Additional information as to the sources of the shots among much more is given by John Groden in ACT OF TREASON.
Tucker is cool, for a talking head.
Notice he does not talk about the “election?” He has limits and works hard to tell the truth.
But never forget he is one hook away from being gone.
Tucker believes in Flying Saucers–Unidentified Foolish Objects, as I call them. He’s got saucers spinning around in his silly, ego-infested head instead of bats. Lately he plays better on Moscow TV than he does back home.
Oh, give it a rest. Carlson, being a responsible journalist, had to report what he KNEW based on his source’s claims. He could not overstate his case.
The question is not who murdered JFK, but “where is JFK’s corpse?”
The CIA was “involved” for sure, but they can sell a fake assassination just as well, if not better, as conducting a real one.
JFK was a card carrying member of the trillionaire elite class. In their world, assassination is not how they “do business” with each other. They save that for the hoi polloi.
I still haven’t heard anything that makes me change my mind. Oswald part of a psi-ops activity in Mexico City?
talk about vague nothingness. I don’t believe any of it. I’m a CASE CLOSED kind of guy and there remains nothing to indicate a larger effort by anyone.
the magic bullet is explained by the modification to the front seat in the limo placing Connolly more inboard and lower than normal. the bullet isn’t perfect, it’s flat on the side you never see.
workers a floor below heard the deafening booms just above their heads through the plywood temporary flooring. three booms, with click click, chinkle, click click in between. no other shots. white plaster dust snowed down into their afros.
in Moscow Oswald cut his wrists when told he wouldn’t be allowed to emigrate there. is that CIA tradecraft at work?
I’ve sampled some of the ‘research’ books: over-written, arm-twisting me to believe, introducing another shmuck who agrees practically every paragraph…in one large book exactly one and a half pages is about Oswald. yes yes. I believe, lord!
is that you allan? anyone still believing the warren commission drivel after decades of exceptional research proving a conspiracy is also BRAIN CLOSED.
Even the manipulated zapruder film shows a shot from the front, a fact which renders meaningless the magic bullet fantasy and proves a conspiracy. hearing shots above does not prove that oswald killed anyone, and in any event that story is nonsense about ceiling plaster. witnesses heard casings fall and they were not from oswald who was down stairs in the domino room and then later possibly on the stair well.
yes oswald was in moscow at the behest of angleton. there are still classified documents on the “lone nut” and plenty PROVING that he was on cia pay roll. and no, he never went to mexico city. that was another one of angleton’s and goodpasture’s charades giving lbj the ammunition to twist warren into a coverup.
you might do better stitching samplers than reading them.
Fair points all; but Carlson may have avoided being more specific to protect the identity of his source(s). This is certainly not the last word on the matter; perhaps it will inspire questions from people empowered to compel complete and truthful answers.
You dam sure wont hear any talk like that on CNN. So, there’s that.
“he said things that are obviously true: that Jack Ruby killed Oswald”
that is not true. ruby did not kill oswald. ruby did not die in prison. he went to israel and live into the 1980s. oswald was murdered by dpd and cia after the fake made for tv shooting.
cia was but one branch of the many-tentacled beast operated by permindex which murdered kennedy. the money behind the murder was jewish.
If I paid good money to own and then watch a TV…I still wouldn’t watch Carlson.
Fox News is owned by the globalists.
Here’s Tucker promoting bugs for dinner.
I have studied the JFK assassination for many years. From what I have learned it was a CIA/Mafia collusion, but several other people signed off on it including LBJ, Nixon, and Ford. Paradoxically, the next three Presidents.
LBJ and Nixon were both connected to Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, who lost millions when Castro came into power in Cuba. Nixon was also connected to Jack Ruby who worked for Giancana. Oswald also worked for Giancana. Watergate burglar CIA agent E. Howard Hunt died, leaving behind a taped “confession” in which he claimed knowledge of the plot to kill Kennedy but not active participation, describing himself as a “benchwarmer.” Hunt named names – including Lyndon Johnson, Tracy Barnes, William Harvey, Frank Sturgis, and others.
All of them are tied together in the bay of pigs invasion, in which they blamed Kennedy for failing due to his refusal to give air support. The CIA and Military considered Kennedy a threat to National Security for giving up missile bases in Turkey and Italy, they also considered Kennedy a traitor and a dupe who was leading America to defeat at the hands of the communists.
When Nixon was vice president, he and then CIA agent Hunt were principal secret planners of the invasion of Cuba. Nixon and Hunt were key leaders of an associated— and ill- fated—plot to assassinate Castro.
For that mission, potential assassins were recruited from Mob ranks, so that if any of their activities were disclosed, organized crime could be blamed. It is quite possible top elements of the Mob and the CIA decided to send their hired guns against Kennedy instead of Castro.
Helms as then director of the CIA’s covert operations was a key participant in the Castro assassination plots. The plotters also enlisted the support of billionaire Howard Hughes. Like Nixon, Hughes despised the Kennedy’s and had strong links to both the CIA and the Mob. The mysterious and reclusive Hughes had made large, secret payoff s to Nixon and his brother Donald over most of Nixon’s political career. Nixon routinely referred to the JFK assassination as the pay of pigs.
Nixon told H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, before their meeting with Richard Helms, the director of CIA, on 23rd June 1972, that they should insist on talking about the involvement of Hunt and the Bay of Pigs operation as a lever to get the CIA to help in the cover-up of Watergate. “Hunt… will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things… tell them we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further… Tell them it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it’s likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA.”
Between the Bay of Pigs and Watergate Scandal was E. Howard Hunt as he was involved in both events. Hunt also took control of the negotiations of “hush money”. Dean told Nixon that Hunt wanted “by the close of business yesterday” a payment of $122,000 in cash. Otherwise he would tell all about the Ellsberg break-in and other “seamy things” that he had done for the White House. Dean admitted that it would be a continual blackmail operation by Hunt and Liddy and the Cubans”. He added: “These people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years.”
Hunt remained silent although his wife Dorothy Hunt threatened to reveal details of who paid him to organize the Watergate break-in. “Of the more than a dozen suspicious deaths in the case of Watergate… perhaps the most significant death was that of Dorothy Hunt in the crash of United Air Lines in December 1972. The crash was investigated for possible sabotage by both the FBI and a congressional committee, but sabotage was never proven. Nevertheless, some people assumed that Dorothy Hunt was murdered (along with the dozens of others in the plane)… Howard Hunt, dropped all further demands on the White House and agreed to plead guilty.