Politics Why Is the Establishment Ignoring the Recently Declassified JFK Files? Documents released this year expose how CIA spymaster James Angleton concealed Lee Harvey Oswald’s movements, hid a secret Israeli liaison, and lied to Congress, while the U.S. government spent decades redacting his ties to Israel. Getty Images Overshadowed by the recent revelations in the Epstein files, the 62nd anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination came and went with little notice. Yet new documents relating to that still-unsolved murder—released only recently by the Trump administration—deserve far more scrutiny than they have received from corporate media. From the moment the latest batch of disclosures emerged this past March, the Democratic Party and their allies in corporate media assumed their familiar role as CIA stenographers, either overlooking—or outright refusing to look at—what more than 60,000 documents revealed. At an April 1 House hearing, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX)—illustrating the Democratic Party’s loyalty to the U.S. security state—confidently insisted that the JFK files “show no evidence of a CIA conspiracy,” and complained that even hearing testimony from Oliver Stone, Jefferson Morley, and Jim DiEugenio amounted to “platform[ing] conspiracy theories.” The New York Times’ Julian Barnes echoed the Democratic congresswoman nearly word for word, announcing definitively that “the CIA did not kill JFK…Oswald acted alone,” despite the sheer volume of documents that no reporter could have seriously reviewed in such a short span of time. Speed-readers Lalee Ibssa and Diana Paulsen of ABC News likewise asserted that, by calling for Congress to reopen the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination, filmmaker Oliver Stone was “reviv[ing] unfounded conspiracy theories.” But despite committed insistence from Democrats and their corporate media allies, the Trump administration’s JFK disclosures, along with troves of previously released files, do in fact suggest a CIA conspiracy. We have ample documentation from unsealed congressional records of who worked hard to cover it up—among them a consortium of CIA officials who systematically lied to the Warren Commission, misleading the public investigation about the prime suspect in the president’s murder, Lee Harvey Oswald. Perhaps the main architect of that cover-up was the CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton, who, despite being the counterintelligence chief presiding over what was supposedly the worst intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, wound up deeply involved in the CIA’s official investigation into the assassination.  Though Angleton insisted that the agency was inattentive to Oswald and unaware of the purpose of his activities leading up to Dallas, it has since been disclosed through unclassified JFK assassination records that Angleton personally maintained a classified 201 intelligence/surveillance file on Oswald for the four years preceding Kennedy’s assassination, strictly controlling which officials inside the CIA were permitted to see it through compartmentalization.  Angleton’s deceptions to investigators are so numerous that 60 years later they are still being uncovered; in one notable instance only revealed this year, Angleton committed perjury before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, claiming he knew almost nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald before the shooting. In another, Angleton concealed the fact that Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City—a visit the CIA publicly claimed it only discovered after the assassination. As Jefferson Morley, author of The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, explained, the  counter-intelligence chief “preferred to wait out the Warren Commission rather than explain the CIA’s knowledge of and interest in Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate” in Mexico. Though Angleton left the CIA in disgrace, dismissed by many colleagues as a paranoid obsessive, his legacy has been consistently venerated by Israel’s intelligence services. In his memoir, the former director of the Mossad, Meir Amit, famously described James Angleton as “the biggest Zionist of the lot,” adding that “his total identification with Israel was an extraordinary asset for us.” As Morley writes, “Angleton’s loyalty to Israel betrayed US policy on an epic scale,” probably allowing the Israelis to build a nuclear bomb using stolen materials from the U.S.-based Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) facility at a time when it was the expressed policy of the U.S. government to prevent Israel from acquiring one.  Angleton had regular professional and personal contact with at least six men aware of Israel’s secret plan to build a bomb. From Asher Ben Natan to Amos de Shalit to Isser Harel to Meir Amit to Moshe Dayan to Yval Ne’eman, his friends were involved in the building of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. If he learned anything of the secret program at Dimona, he reported very little of it. If he didn’t ask questions about Israel’s actions, he wasn’t doing his job. Instead of supporting U.S. nuclear security policy, he ignored it. Among the most sensitive questions revived by the Trump administration’s releases is whether Israel may have had a role in or foreknowledge of the plot against Kennedy, who spent his final months battling the Israeli government over its nuclear program, its lobby power in the U.S., and the resettlement of Palestinians from the land the Israelis had expelled them from.  The mere suggestion that Israel may have been involved in Kennedy’s assassination, much more so than allegations against the CIA, produces the swiftest denunciations from across the establishment. When podcaster Theo Von made the allegation against Israel on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, for example, Israel loyalists like Amit Segal rapidly denounced the claim as a “blood libel” and  “antisemitic.” CyberWell, an Israeli-helmed censorship outfit staffed by former Israeli intelligence officials that partners with every major social-media platform, has likewise labeled the allegation an antisemitic conspiracy theory and worked with those platforms to censor it from the internet. The intensity with which critics denounce anyone who raises the question mirrors the vigor with which the government spent decades scrubbing any trace of the connection from its own files. For decades, dozens of references to “Israel,” “Tel Aviv,” and even the identities of Angleton’s Israeli operatives were blacked out of congressional testimony, including the Church Committee records. In his 1975 Church Committee testimony, now available with many of the old redactions removed, Angleton confirms that during the CIA’s “Cuban business”—the covert campaign of sabotage and assassination plots against Castro run through Bill Harvey and Task Force W—he arranged for an Israeli intelligence officer in Havana to act as Harvey’s secret channel. According to Angleton, this “Israeli man” sent reports from Havana to Tel Aviv, from where they were passed directly to Angleton and then to Harvey. This setup kept some of the agency’s most sensitive operations outside the normal CIA chain of command. A now-missing page of that same testimony uncovered by Aaron Good shows Angleton downplaying any need to brief CIA Director John McCone about his Israeli liaison, even while admitting that “what they were doing was enormous.” Good also highlights how Angleton’s Israeli channel intersected with Lee Harvey Oswald. The Counterintelligence Staff officer assigned to read Oswald’s mail and collect it for the 201 surveillance file that Angleton maintained before the assassination was Reuben Efron—a committed Zionist who had lived in Israel, published on espionage in a World Zionist Organization–affiliated journal, and, as Jefferson Morley notes, sat in on Marina Oswald’s Warren Commission interview with no official role listed. At the very moment a U.S. president was seeking to restrict Israel’s nuclear ambitions and limit the political power of its lobby in Washington, the CIA official in control of the Oswald file was secretly sharing intelligence channels, assassination communications, and off-the-books operatives with Israel—and lying to both Congress and potentially some of his own CIA colleagues about it. The government spent 60 years redacting those facts and Americans have a right to know why. The post Why Is the Establishment Ignoring the Recently Declassified JFK Files? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics How to Sell Peace Realists and restrainers must demonstrate not that wars or future wars are wrong, but that they are impolitic. Credit: Gints Ivuskans/Shutterstock In the late Soviet president’s memoirs, Andrei Gromyko says that Richard Nixon was a productive diplomatic partner because the man from Yorba Linda stuck to highly concrete particulars: “I cannot remember an occasion when he launched into a digression on the differing social structures of our states. He always presented himself as a pragmatist uninterested in the theoretical aspects of an issue, a man who preferred to keep discussions on a purely practical level.” The man from Queens, our own Donald Trump, has similar instincts; that’s all to the good. Politics is not the realm of geometry. Universals—we won’t negotiate with terrorists, we’ll back whomever for however long as it takes, autocracies versus democracies, and so on—tend not only to make for unsound policy, but retrospectively to be embarrassing and politically damaging.  Anyone might be forgiven for wishing Trump had just a touch more ideology, though. The realist and restrainer foreign policy camp has always overstated the degree to which Trump shares their priors; this has been well proven by interventions in Syria, Iran, Yemen, and elsewhere. They’re not alone in this: Social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and various breeds of libertarian have all been disappointed to varying degrees by Trump’s moderate-at-best attitudes about abortion, sexuality, policing, and deficit spending. Trump is, however, a politician and an opportunist; if the Republican primary field he’s facing has an ideological commitment to a long-running, deeply unpopular war, he’ll use that stick to smack his enemies. His hesitation about the use of armed force is as much a canny recognition of how badly long wars have gone for American politicians in his lifetime as it is some abstract commitment to peace, love, and understanding.  Trump is extraordinarily reactive to American public opinion. (An unexamined hypothetical is that his recent moderating statements on legal immigration are a response to the fabulously unpopular implementation of his immigration enforcement policy.) He is extraordinarily protective of his room for maneuver. This adds up to being—by modern standards—extraordinarily hesitant to take on long-term obligations with almost unlimited liability, such as foreign wars. But it is not a coherent policy, or even a coherent premise. If Trump thinks he can drop some bombs and get away with it, he is happy to do so; if some policy course is proving difficult and immediately unproductive, he will pursue apparent shortcuts and workarounds.  Related to this remarkable sensitivity to public opinion is the fact that Trump likes guys who seem like winners—Tiger Woods, Javier Milei, Shedeur Sanders (“great genes!”), Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Gulfis, the Israelis. He understands that the American people also like winners. (A peculiar American syndrome is affecting to like underdogs while always putting money on the favorite.) If he can bandwagon on someone who is on a hot streak—Zohran Mamdani, the Republic of Turkey—he will.  So, you’ll protest, this all is known; this is old stuff, there’s nothing fresh here. Fine. But it’s worth revisiting in the context of whatever the hell is going on in the Caribbean and the uncertain-but-not-quite-skunked Ukraine deal.  Trump is not going to be dissuaded from the use of force in Venezuela because of theoretical priors; he’s going to be dissuaded because the restraining faction kicks up an enormous and potentially politically damaging fuss, and especially because the American people articulate something like opposition to intervention. Restrainers must show that the use of force in Venezuela has a good chance of leading to some kind of chaos that demands further intervention, which in turn will have a very short shelf life that is more punishing than whatever rallying effects a war produces. By recent poll numbers, they seem to be on pretty firm ground here. The Russia–Ukraine war shows similar but somewhat more difficult dynamics. Something not often acknowledged by the realist-restrainer camp is that Russia winning the war by force of arms would be politically catastrophic for Trump. This is why, as long as the war is ongoing, it will be prohibitively difficult for Trump to cut bait and motor away; it is also why, in the long run, the president must compel some kind of deal. Total Ukrainian victory on the battlefield is not in the cards; total Russian victory is, and at an unpredictable time. Maybe it would fall on one of Trump’s successors, maybe not. The administration must be reminded that the brokered peace on the table now may be a mixed bag politically, but the other possible futures on offer at the moment would be political disasters.  Trump has, to the naked eye, much less of the statesman about him than Nixon did. But in this respect, he is a purer medium in which to measure any given faction’s political facility, and also to measure the collective prudence of the American body politic—a barometer, per the tired metaphor. Trump has few iron-clad priors. If those who favor a more humble policy abroad, whether in the Western Hemisphere or Eastern Europe, win the political contest, he is liable to respect that and act on it.  The post How to Sell Peace appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Dispatch from Tehran Iran is defiant yet open to diplomacy—but is anyone in Washington ready to talk? (Photo by Iranian Presidency/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images) The mood in Tehran’s halls of power is sober defiance. I arrived in the Iranian capital for the Tehran Dialogue Forum, organized by the Foreign Ministry’s think tank, the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS). This was my first trip since Israel’s surprise attack on Iran this June and the Twelve-Day War it kicked off.  The shadow of that conflict looms large, but it has not produced the panic or capitulation some in Washington and Jerusalem had hoped for. Instead, it has forged a grim national consensus: Iran is prepared for round two, convinced it has learned the right lessons. Yet it also remains convinced that a diplomatic solution could still be found to avert such a dreadful scenario. In extensive conversations with top officials, including Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s adviser Kamal Kharazi, a clear picture emerged of Iran’s transformed domestic politics and international diplomacy after the war with Israel.  Perhaps the most major change pertains to national consolidation. The direct external threat, Tehran’s officials conveyed, unified the political landscape around Iranian nationalism, an ideology that transcends the Islamic Republic. To subtly emphasize the point, the organizers placed the flyers with the story of Arash the Archer, a heroic secular figure of Iranian mythology, at the guests’ dinner tables. Another change is a validation of the importance and credibility of Iran’s missile capabilities. Officials project confidence that their defensive and deterrent posture was battle-tested and has proved credible. The point is not that Tehran seeks a wider war, but that it is ready for one.  This hardened confidence, however, masks a deep frustration and a sense of being trapped in a diplomatic dead end of Washington’s making. The door to talks with the United States, I was told repeatedly, is not closed. But there is a concern, if not a conviction, that there is no serious American partner on the other side to walk through it.A telling anecdote from the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York last September was relayed by the officials. Iranian diplomats, in a last-ditch effort to break the impasse over the nuclear program, presented what they saw as a major concession: a proposal to ship out all of its highly enriched uranium stockpiles. In return, they asked that the U.S. and E3 (France, Germany, and the UK) not invoke the “snapback” mechanism at the UN to reimpose international sanctions that were removed as part of the nuclear deal with Iran known as JCPOA, signed in 2015.The response was, from Tehran’s perspective, a deal-killer. The Western offer was for Iran to give up its most sensitive nuclear material, to be rescued from under the debris following the U.S. strikes on the key facility in Fordow, in exchange for only a months-long delay of the snapback threat, according to Iranian authorities. Iranians saw this not as a counterproposal, but as an insult—a clear signal that the goalposts were designed to keep moving. “Why would we make a tangible concession for a temporary reprieve?” one senior official asked. “It confirms they are not negotiating in good faith.”This has left the Islamic Republic in a dangerous limbo. The creative solutions discussed hitherto are dying on the vine. The idea of a regional consortium for uranium enrichment, once floated as a potential breakthrough in the talks between Araghchi and the U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, was described to me by a senior official as “dead.” It had been understood in Tehran as a recognition of Iran’s right to enrich uranium on its own soil, not as a substitute for that right. Under the scheme, Iran would enrich up to around four percent, which is only useful for civilian purposes, while stockpiles of highly-enriched uranium would be shipped abroad.Meanwhile, the pressure valve of public opinion is overheating. The Iranian people are grappling with a cascade of crises—water scarcity, climate change, and energy shortages—that are tangible and urgent. While these crises are blamed on corruption and mismanagement of the system, the nuclear standoff and related sanctions exacerbate them.  As for longer-standing forms of popular discontent, the authorities seem to have accepted a degree of de facto cultural liberalization: The uncovered heads of women have become normalized in Tehran to such an extent that they no longer are seen as a political statement against the system. However, the law on compulsory veiling is still officially on the books, with the authorities too afraid of both cracking down on the violations and repealing the law altogether. The latter action would align with the overwhelming social consensus but alienate the dwindling, but still powerful, ranks of hardline believers.  A similar kind of governmental indecisiveness is fueling public debate on the nuclear issue too. A growing segment of the public and political class sees the current path as a sucker’s bet: Iran faces severe punishment for maintaining a “threshold” civilian nuclear program on the cusp of weaponization while gaining little to no strategic advantage. The option of pursuing a nuclear deterrent—the bomb—is therefore gaining popularity. As one official noted starkly, “The Non-Proliferation Treaty is seen by many as not working in Iran’s interest.” Why remain in a treaty that only brings punishment without security?This is not a monolithic view. Some reformist academics argue precisely the opposite: If Iran has no intention of building a bomb, as its leaders insist, then why cling to 60 percent enrichment and invite crippling sanctions? Their argument is pragmatic—give up the high-grade uranium, secure sanctions lifting, and rescue the economy.But in the current climate, with no credible pathway offered by the West, the pragmatic argument is losing to the defiant one. The U.S. and its allies seem to believe that time and pressure are on their side. From Tehran, things look different. The passage of time is radicalizing the debate, and pressure is strengthening the hand of those who believe that the only language the West understands is the language of undeniable strength.Yet, in this climate of mistrust with Washington, one qualified success for Iran’s diplomacy is its regional détente. Saudi Arabia, a historic rival, was represented at the Tehran Dialogue Forum by a high-level official—a gesture that has become a new norm and that coincides with intriguing diplomatic maneuvers. Following Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to Washington, reports from well-informed Lebanese and Iranian media suggest he may have been asked by Donald Trump to act as a coordinator for dialogue between Washington and Tehran.While Tehran officially denies any negotiation-related content in recent exchanges, the speculation is not baseless. Saudi Arabia has a vested interest in de-escalation and, with its own nuclear ambitions, may perceive an interest in reviving the idea of a regional nuclear consortium. The arrangement would allow Iran to enrich uranium at low levels for a civilian energy program shared with Saudi Arabia, a win-win for the long-time rivals. The message from my trip is clear: Tehran is hunkering down, not buckling. It is preparing for the next military confrontation, but it is looking for a diplomatic off-ramp. The path through Washington remains blocked, but a new, unexpected route through Riyadh may be tentatively opening. Until Washington demonstrates a serious intention to engage with Tehran, the region remains on a countdown to a second, potentially far more devastating, round of hostilities. The post Dispatch from Tehran appeared first on The American Conservative.

Shots fired. The post The band that Damon Albarn called musical hypocrites: “That’s just idolatry” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Don't Miss This VERY Special Black Friday Offer

Is Civil War Inevitable?

by Lorenzo Maria Pacini, Strategic Culture: Few have noticed that, taken as such, Trump’s peace plan is more like a contract for a real estate investment. How much is this peace worth? We are all busy talking about the 28-point peace plan, but few have noticed that, taken as such, it is more like a […]