The legal authorities have been rounding up suspects in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Criminal prosecutions will follow. If those accused are found guilty, they were be punished with long terms in jail.
Ironically, however, if the CIA or the Pentagon had been the ones that assassinated Moïse, the situation would be completely different. There would be no arrests or criminal prosecutions. That’s because the CIA and the Pentagon wield the authority to do what private individuals are not allowed to do — the authority to assassinate political leaders and, well, for that matter, anyone else in the world.
Recall the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani. He was in charge of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus. The U.S. national-security establishment fired a missile at him, killing him instantly.
Unlike the recent assassination in Haiti, there were no arrests or prosecutions of any Pentagon or CIA official after Suleimani’s assassination. That’s because they wield the authority to snuff out people’s lives on grounds of national security.
Moreover, assassination is not some new power wielded by the CIA and the Pentagon. It actually stretches all the way back to the conversion of the U.S. government to a national-security state after World War II. As far back as 1953, the CIA was developing an assassination manual for its assassins. The manual trained the CIA’s assassins not only the art of assassination but also in the art of covering up the CIA’s role in assassinations.
The following year — 1954 — the CIA instigated a regime-change operation in Guatemala in which it prepared a list of Guatemalan officials to be targeted for assassination. While the CIA still will not release that top-secret list — on grounds of “national security” of course — there is no doubt that the democratically elected president of the country, Jacobo Arbenz, was at the top of the assassination list. Fortunately for him, he was able to escape the country before they could kill him.
In 1961, just before President Kennedy was sworn into office, the CIA conspired to assassinate Congo leader Patrice Lumumba. They actually rushed the assassination because they knew that Kennedy would oppose it. Lumumba was assassinated on January 17. Kennedy was sworn into office on January 20.
In 1970, CIA officials conspired with other U.S. officials to kidnap and assassinate Gen. Rene Schneider, the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. Although the CIA denied any role in the assassination at the time it was carried out, it later came out that the CIA had conspired to violently kidnap Schneider.
The CIA claimed that its conspiracy was limited to kidnapping, not assassinating, Schneider. However, that was clearly a lie because the CIA’s intent was to remove him from his position in the government because he opposed the U.S. plan for a coup in Chile. Thus, there was no way they ever would have returned him after kidnapping him. In any event, Schneider was shot dead on the streets of Santiago during the kidnapping attempt. The CIA was later caught paying hush money to the killers.
One of the things that has long fascinated me about all this assassination mayhem is how some Americans find it inconceivable that the CIA and Pentagon planned and carried out the assassination of President Kennedy. How can such an assassination be inconceivable when that’s what the Pentagon and the CIA do — they assassinate political leaders on grounds of protecting U.S. national security.
No one seems surprised when they learn about the Pentagon’s or CIA’s assassination of a foreign leader. In fact, most everyone seems pretty nonchalant about the matter. But when one brings up the Kennedy assassination, there is a segment in mainstream American society that goes absolutely ballistic. I don’t get it.
I suppose they would claim that the CIA and the Pentagon would never assassinate an American citizen. But that’s ridiculous. If the CIA or the Pentagon conclude that an American citizen poses a threat to national security, why would they hesitate to take him out? In fact, during the Chilean coup, they authorized Chilean officials to execute two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi. More recently, they assassinated two American citizens — Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman.
That leaves the final inconceivable argument — that it is simply inconceivable that the Pentagon and the CIA would exercise their power of assassination against a U.S. president. But what if they conclude that the president poses a grave threat to national security and that that country will fall to the communists or the terrorists or to Russia owing to the president’s policies? Would the Pentagon and the CIA really just let the country go down, or would they take the necessary steps to save the country?
We know the answer to that question from the coup in Chile. Like the United States, the Chilean Constitution did not allow for an assassination or coup to save the country from a president whose policies were deemed to pose a grave threat to national security. That’s why Gen. Schneider opposed a coup. The position of the Pentagon and the CIA was that regardless of the Chilean constitution, the Chilean national-security establishment had a moral duty to save the county by forcibly removing its democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, from office. After Schneider was removed from the scene through assassination, the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s view prevailed. The U.S.-inspired coup occurred on September 11, 1973, and left Allende dead.
Thus, the real questions are: (1) Did the Pentagon and the CIA conclude that Kennedy posed a grave threat to national security owing to the radically different direction he was taking America? (2) Does the evidence establish that Kennedy’s assassination was a highly sophisticated regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment?
Those are the two questions that the inconceivable crowd declines to confront and address. They remain stuck within their inconceivable doctrine.
The answers to those two questions were provided in FFF’s recent online conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination.” I have no doubts that anyone who watches the presentations delivered in that conference from beginning to end will conclude beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty that the Pentagon and the CIA exercised their power of assassination on November 22, 1963, to protect the country from a president whose policies they concluded posed a grave threat to national security,
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The Future of Freedom Foundation was founded in 1989 by FFF president Jacob Hornberger with the aim of establishing an educational foundation that would advance an uncompromising case for libertarianism in the context of both foreign and domestic policy. The mission of The Future of Freedom Foundation is to advance freedom by providing an uncompromising moral and economic case for individual liberty, free markets, private property, and limited government. Visit https://www.fff.org