Jim Douglass interview

This is the transcript of one of Jim Douglass’ interviews on Black op radio.

Thanks to William Kelly for the transcript.

Jim Douglass on Black Op Radio with Len Osanic

http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2009.html

Show #406
Original airdate: Jan 8th, 2009
Part 1 Guest: Jim DiEugenio
Topics: Assassination Research

Part 2 Guest – Jim Douglass

Jim’s book JFK and the Unspeakable is now the #1 Kennedy book on Amazon
American intelligence was instrumental in the JFK Assassination
To say any one force (CIA, Mafia, Castro etc) was responsible is irresponsible
Douglass mentions Vincent Salandria as having the case solved many years ago
Salandria’s overview of the case makes the most sense
The Joint Chiefs wanted to win the Cold War
In fear of nuclear holocaust, Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War
Thomas Arthur Vallee, The Chicago Plot and Oswald
Jim’s message: Why was JFK assassinated?
Kennedy reached out to his enemy, Khruschev
Because of this we still exist. He prevented nuclear war
Kennedy was all but alone in Washington when he turned to peace
Jim thinks Lyndon Johnson had foreknowledge but didn’t participate personally
After the assassinations of JFK, MLK & RFK, he saw his own end and left office
The hope of Obama in the context of Kennedy’s American University speech
The task is to learn from the past to save the future
This will be difficult with all the disinformation getting better publicity

Len Osanic.: Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Black Op Radio. Today we are joined by Jim Douglas, noted author and researcher and well known in the community.

Jim Douglas: Hello, Len.

Len O: It’s a pleasure to speak with you again. From what I understand your book “JFK & the Unspeakable” is number one at Amazon.com.

JD: According to my editor and publisher it is the number one best selling “Kennedy” book at Amazon.com.

Len O. Yea, that’s what I meant. There are a lot of books out there, and for the lack of a better word, a lot of disinformation books that go nowhere, blaming Castro, there’s a new one blaming the mafia. If I could think of another word, but it’s pathetic, with all that is known, for anyone who has read your good work. Let’s sum up for people not familiar with your book, that I can’t recommend it highly enough. We had six interviews with you last fall – one on each chapter and a statement that I thought how important the book is, and dedicated an hour or so to each chapter, and it’s good that this has happened. Do you have an opinion how anyone could in this day and age could believe that Oswald a lone assassin, and write a book about that, or do a documentary?

JD: I believe it has government support and instigation actually. It’s beyond any competent authorship or any real work. We’ve known, in terms of available information for decades that the United States government was involved in killing the President. And the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, or for that matter Castro or the mob, that is irresponsible. That’s not to say they weren’t involved, there was a larger plot and they were involved, but to say that either Lee Harvey Oswald or the mob, or that Fidel Castro, was the instigator, not Castro, who was not involved, but to say the first two – Oswald or the mob, that they were the primary actors in the Kennedy assassination, is totally irresponsible.

LO: That’s a good word for it. Have you been traveling promoting the book?

JD: Yes, quite a bit. I’ve met people in Dallas, Northern California, New Mexico, Portland, Wisconsin, of course around here, Alabama, St. Louis, quite a few places, Denver, Colorado.

LO: Has anything come out regarding your book that you would call new information? Since you’ve written it and have been networking with researchers, is there anything new of note worth bringing up?

JD: I think the more one gets into the Kennedy assassination, the more the dots get connected. I don’t think there’s been any new information, really. I think the Assassinations Records Review Board and in particular members of the staff, made significant steps in the 1990s that will become more available as the people who worked on it bring out their own studies. But no, there hasn’t been any new significant information that I’m aware of.

LO: I just thought I would bring that up, as a researcher could have told you of some new tidbits of information.

JD: The Kennedy story is important – why he was assassinated, that’s why I wrote the book. There’s a lot of information about the assassination in the book, but the reason I included that was to connect the dots and to underline His story – John F. Kennedy’s story.

And I think we are kind of missing the point in the research community if we continue to feel the need for new information. We don’t need it. We’ve go enough information. What we need is to connect the dots – see the coherence of that information, and to show the irrelevance of the disinformation, and that we’ve already referred to.

I think Vince Salandria had it down decades ago as did other researchers. I refer to him because he’s sort of a meta-physician on the assassination. He has an overview that I think was right from the day after the assassination when he anticipated Oswald being killed as well, and when that happened it confirmed the overall nature of the scapegoating of Oswald by intelligence sources. So we’ve known for a long time, and new information can strengthen what is already obvious. You don’t really need to strengthen it.

Vince Salandria, one of the foremost researchers, and one who has had an overview of the assassination for decades that makes a great deal of sense, and it is that Lee Harvey Oswald was simply being used by the Central Intelligence Agency and he was being scapegoated. This was a National Security state assassination. Oswald was very much, in terms of the overall apparatus, a minor figure, but in the overall story of the assassination he is significant, because if you follow his story you can’t understand it except by his intelligence connections and by his being manipulated and being brought into a place where he was the scapegoat but also the scapegoat for larger scapegoats – the Soviet Union and Cuba. And fortunately that part of the assassination did not work. Had it did work, we would have had a nuclear war. And that is the reason why Kennedy was assassinated, because stood against it. He didn’t want to win a nuclear war, he wanted to stop it. And that’s an all together different objective from his Joint Chiefs and the Central Intelligence Agency.

LO: I think your book illuminates there were other patsies in the wings, and the idea that if Lee didn’t show up for work that day, there were other people there.

JD: Yes, and of course the first intended scapegoat was Thomas Arthur Valle in relation to the plot in Chicago. And Valle escapes that, thanks to Oswald himself, as well as some whistleblowers in Chicago, especially Abraham Bolden within the Secret Service. But had the plot worked in Chicago, we probably would have never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald.

LO: By the way, have you, speaking of patsies, I came across a book that had some details of someone with the name, have you heard the name Donald Wayne House?

JD: I may have, but if so I have forgotten it. I am not familiar with the books you are talking about.

LO: Well in some ways you say there is no new information, but to a seasoned researcher…

JD: No, I’m not saying there is no new information. There could be a lot of new information. I’m saying in order to understand the assassination of John Kennedy, it’s not critically necessary. But new information is not necessary. I think we have enough information to know what is going on. And I think it is fine that we have new information, but we don’t need it to understand what happened or we are missing the point.

LO: As one of my friends say they are cognitively impaired…Even with Vincent Bugliousi. It is really unbelievable, if he wasn’t motivated by money, that he could actually believe this, that he could put this giant book together, and after a 20 years effort, be embarrassed by researchers who pick him apart.

JD: Yes, I don’t know Vincent Bugliosi’s motives; I think it’s a shame that he put so much time and effort in trying to do the absurd.

LO: His work ends up speaking for himself, when he badgers and belittles people who have taken on an interest in researching this. There isn’t total agreement, but 80% people agree with each other to a point, then somebody else mentions something, and I don’t know about that, but there’s 80% agreement – more than enough to say exactly what is going on – the President was removed.

JD: In regards to Kennedy, what I have found most encouraging from going around talking about why he was killed and why it matters, many people are inspired by that story. When I was engaged in the research, friends would suggest that was a totally dark story that I was getting into. In some ways that’s true, but in other ways it’s not true at all. Here’s a person who gave his life in terms of the risk he took to turn the world towards peace instead of war, and he got the consequences of that – he was killed for that reason. But that is a story of hope, if somebody is willing to take those risks, and as a result we have a world to live in instead of a nuclear wasteland – that is a story of hope and of change and of inspiration, if you understand it.

The reason I wrote that story wasn’t to empower the government, because if you say well, the government succeeded because intelligence agencies killed the President and he wasn’t able to carry out his vision. There’s truth in that, but the primary truth is that if Kennedy was willing to work with his enemies – he reached out to Khrushchev at the height of the worst crisis of that war, the Cuban Missile Crisis. And because of that we have a world today, and we might even have a president who might carry out Kennedy’s vision.

Kennedy overcame those powers himself in the sense he resisted the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA and went to his death in that resistance. But this is a story of hope, it is not about those powers winning, it’s a story of hope, about a president reaching the point to where he was taken out, but to the point where we still have a world in which we can continue to work towards peace.

That’s why I end the book with the statement extended by Jacque Kennedy, that John F. Kennedy is dead, and as she put it to the Soviets Union representatives at the funeral, “Peace is up to us,” and though it’s always been up to us, it’s up to us to bring about Kennedy’s vision of peace. And that Kennedy gave his life for that should be inspirational.

LO: It’s interesting to go behind the scenes and see more than just the assassination but to understand what was really going on. You highlight those pressures, and I think that makes your book stand out from other books that are just about the assassination, as you try to get a total understanding.

JD: The pressures that Kennedy was under were almost unimaginable. Those were pressures for war, not for peace, for war. And other than his brother and a few advisors like Sorensen, he was alone. The national security state, the ideology which he had himself bought into at one time – he was not any apostle of non-violence, he was a Cold Warrior, so he had to turn. That’s why I emphasize the term “turn,” and I originally had the subtitle for the book “a story of turning,” but that seemed too oblique for book sellers. And then I had a subsequent effort called the “assassination of a vision,” and that too was not something that could be picked up quickly, and it was sort of negative, because the vision didn’t die with him. But we ended up with “Why He Died & Why It Matters,” and it is a story of turning, Kennedy turned towards peace and was therefore assassinated.

LO: And then we got LBJ, who…..

JD: Who had a different vision and was hopelessly compromised from day one, and who saw that, if you were to go behind the “evidence” that he was being given by the CIA, you see the CIA itself was the source of the mechanics of the assassination. I’m not saying they were the source of the order, they carried out the mechanics. And Johnson was unwilling to confront that, and he didn’t on the other hand, he didn’t want to accept the evidence on face value because that would have implicated the Soviet Union and Cuba, that Oswald, actually almost certainly an impersonator of Oswald, made at the embassies of Cuba and Soviet Union in Mexico City, and would end in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The CIA was presenting all that to Johnson on the weekend of the assassination, and Johnson was not a naive person. He saw immediately that this was CIA involvement.

Did Johnson have pre-knowledge of the assassination? I think he did. I don’t think he was a major player in carrying out the assassination. I think he was frightened to death by the whole thing. He went along with it, but I don’t think he was a major player in carrying it out. He had the foreknowledge of it, but he went with the lone assassin instead of the heavier direction that the CIA and the Joint Chiefs wanted.

LO: Of course later in his life he had a rare interview where he said he didn’t believe in the lone assassin and the quote he said was “we were running a Murder Inc in the Caribbean.”

JD: Yes, he was aware of all of that, and his own withdraw from the Presidency was a recognition; he was in deep waters all around him. Then when King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, Johnson was way over his head. And for him having been so profoundly complicent with the Vietnam War, he had to get out of there himself before it was too late.

LO: You could draw those conclusions as he dropped out. People have mentioned that he was four cars back and the bullets must have gone over his head maybe eighteen inches, he heard the shots and he saw how easy he could removed.

JD: I didn’t put the information from Madelyn Brown in my book because I tried to anchor everything as firmly as possible with corroboration and documents and such things, but I think that its very feasible hypothesis that Madelyn Brown’s information is correct and Johnson knew about it the night before.

LO: It’s possible, as some people in the research community are skeptical about it, fair enough.

JD: I think it’s wise to be skeptical about everything, and its best to seek out the best sources. There are all kinds of information that were probably true but were left out of JFK & the Unspeakable because it either didn’t have a solid enough source as far as corroboration, or it didn’t easily fit into the story. The book could have been 2,000 pages long, but that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was to write JFK’s story and to explain why he died, and not to write an exhaustive analysis of the assassination. That’s not what it is. The only reason the assassination itself is in there is because of the consequences of what he was doing. But everything that is in there, whether it is Kennedy’s story or the story of the assassination, it is backed up by as much confirmation as I could find.

LO: You mention we have a new President, and Kennedy represented hope, and you say how many people are hopeful that this new president can turn things around after the fraud of the last eight years.

JD: Yes. Well, it is a hope full moment, but only if we understand it in the context of Kennedy for example, and his story. It’s become possible for Obama do something hope full, say carry out the American University vision, only if there is a movement that’s pushing very, very hard to bring about that kind of realization. And if we are aware, and I’m talking more about more than just we in the research community – it must go Way Way beyond the research community, it must go into the movement that brought about Obama’s election victory. Unless we have an understanding of the Kennedy story, IT WILL BE REPEATED, and be repeated in the worst consequences of Obama being assassinated or being pushed by advisors into war or into decisions he will have to either resist at the risk of his life, or has to carry it out at the risk of everybody’s else’s life.

If we can understand Kennedy’s story, and raise the kind of support for bringing about Kennedy’s vision under Obama, that’s one possibility. But if we walk around with some kind of idea thinking Barrack Obama will save the world, that’s nonsense, that’s not going to happen. An understanding of our redemption of us from the powers of war, from oppression, manipulation, and lying, as the CIA has been doing and our propaganda forces have been doing for decades, if we are going to be liberated from those forces, it is up to us. And Obama can’t do it as President of the United States.

It has to be a movement, an international movement, especially a movement of consciousness of the past, an education as to what happened to John F. Kennedy, so it won’t be repeated. And I believe it WILL be repeated unless we understand and educate ourselves about the past. And we are way short with that right now with disinformation books getting far much more attention than we will get from this program. \

I don’t think it’s about getting new information on the Kennedy assassination, it’s telling the story of what we already know. That’s the task and it’s a task that’s very urgent at this moment in history…

Tags: JFK Assassination, jim douglass