The C.I.A and JFK; A Heritage of Stone

             Conspiracy for the Day -- July 22, 1993
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                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")

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The following is from *A Heritage of Stone* by Jim Garrison:
[Excerpts]

"All superstates engaged in efforts to gain power must maintain
extensive domestic intelligence operations at home. They must
seek to maintain control of individuals and ideas lest their
international war adventures lose the support of the populace at
home. That the domestic espionage operation may be illegal
according to the law of the land is irrelevant. The issue is
power, immense power, and it is not one which can be encompassed
in a single courtroom and in a single trial."

"The use of the coup d'etat -- the murder of a leader by forces
within his own government -- is as old as government, as old as
the struggle of men for power. From modern intelligence agency
techniques, however, there has come a new refinement. Through the
employment of cover devices and the controlled dissemination of
information, the role of the government in assassinations can be
effectively concealed."

"No one wants to recognize that somewhere along the line America
has ceased to be the home of the brave and the land of the free,
and that only in after-dinner speeches is it still the sweet land
of liberty. No one wants to recognize that there are assassins at
work in the land, systematically eliminating men who speak out
for the human race and for the future. No one wants to admit that
in America peace is a dangerous business. Better to have the
assassinations accompanied by wafer-thin deceptions, eagerly
accepted one after the other, than to have to face the truth."

"[When President Kennedy was murdered,] Americans were not yet
aware that deception had become a craft in their country, that an
intricate contrivance of men for the clandestine production of
illusion had become not only a part of but also manipulator of
America, its policies and its people. In the past, according to
the American tradition, evil was something which could be seen
and recognized. In our folklore, evil wore a low-slung gun,
confronted you in the open and was defeated by a virtuous heart
and a quicker draw."

"The assassination of President Kennedy demonstrated that many
people will believe the most unlikely inventions rather than
confront the fact that their government is lying to them. These
people have become conditioned to official announcements as rocks
of reality, and it is painful for them to consider that these
rocks are without substance."

"No matter how idealistic are the foundations of a government or
how virtuous its previous history, its accumulation of excessive
power transforms it into the superstate. The superstate is an
organism committed to maintaining its tremendous power in the
face of truth, in the face of history. The technicians of the
superstate, ignoring morality and the lessons of history, will
protect the superstate with whatever deception or destruction is
necessary."

"The superstate's rationale for attacking the truth will always
be national security, but the real reason is the preservation of
power. Its use of authority to defeat reason is undoubtedly
mankind's oldest way of winning a feud. Such use of authority
continues to be effective whenever the people have become
isolated from the government and cannot control it."

"In the superstate a witness offering substantive evidence is not
a necessity but merely a convenience. Consequently the quality of
the testimony of a witness is of no great importance. That can be
taken care of later by a press release or a government
announcement..."

"An individual cannot cope with the unseen forces of the
superstate. His perception is limited by his assumption that
things are as they appear to be and by his belief that he is
living in a world in which evil is easily recognized and in which
inhumanity is not tolerated by the law."

"The superstate is deaf to human voices, remote and unreachable;
its lethal machinery is hidden behind a masque of officials
uttering reassuring phrases."

"The effect of power upon men of honor is as old as the murder of
leaders for the acquisition of power. Since the beginning of
recorded time, the thwarting of justice has been virtually the
exclusive province of honorable men... All that is required for
distinguished men to participate in a crime is for them to be
able to rationalize that there is a higher virtue than justice
and that they will be serving this higher virtue. After that,
they can carry on their assignment with dignity, whether it be
merely the concealment of truth from the nation or actual
genocide. The most effective rationale to justify the destruction
of justice is the excuse of national security."

"Although the CIA was represented to the American people as
engaged in activities outside of the United States, it also
operated as a powerful secret police agency within the United
States. The primary activity of the CIA was deception -- not
merely red-blooded, patriotic deception of foreign people, but
domestic deception as well. The CIA also had developed skills in
the art of political assassination. The trademark of the CIA
assassination was that it never looked as if the CIA had done
it."

"The main reason for the inability of the American people and the
press to recognize the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy was
the fact that its operations all occurred in another dimension, a
dimension which generally is not known to exist in our nation.
Few Americans are aware that one of the by-products of the cold
war has been the development of a huge intelligence structure
within their country. This invisible monster serves not the
American people but the warfare complex. Its capabilities go far
beyond the gathering of secret information and embrace a variety
of services ranging from murder to the creation of misinformation
to be fed to the press to a multitude of refinements of thought
control. The rationale for its existence in an ostensibly open
society is national security, although it is difficult to
conceive of any greater threat to the security of a democracy
than a clandestine government agency which specializes in
deceiving the public."

"The invisibility of its domestic intelligence apparatus typifies
the modern warfare state's tyranny, which is also invisible to
the populace. Not only are most of the people unaware of the
repressive capabilities of their government but, to the contrary,
many of them believe that freedom flourishes. They are enjoying
their economic benefits and consider restrictions of individual
rights as negligible. The people are reminded that, to use former
President Johnson's words, they never had it so good. The
opponents of the warfare state must fight the war apparatus
without expecting widespread understanding of what is happening
by those around them. The apparatus victims are assumed to be
victims of fate. Heart attacks, falls, shootings by 'deranged'
men and dozens of other kinds of misadventures are skillfully
wrought by technicians of the warfare state to eliminate its
enemies without disturbing the lethargy of the multitude."

{Garrison, Jim. *A Heritage of Stone*. New York: G.P. Putnam's
   Sons, 1970}

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 Brian Francis Redman bigxc@prairienet.org "The Big C"
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"Justice" = "Just us" = "History is written by the assassins."
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