The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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Jacob G. Hornberger

JFK, the CIA, and Secrecy

Wednesday November 22, 2017

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Today marks the 54th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who famously said,
The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings…
Isn’t that the ultimate of ironies, given that the “investigation” into his assassination was shrouded in secrecy and continues to be shrouded in secrecy?

It’s been that way since the day of the assassination. Everything was said to involve “national security,” which were (and are) the two most important words in the American political lexicon. Most of the proceedings of the Warren Commission, which was charged with pinning the assassination on Lee Harvey Oswald, were conducted in secret. The commission ordered that records relating to its proceedings be kept secret from the American people … for 75 years! When Warren was asked if Americans would ever be permitted to see the records, he responded, “Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime….”

Immediately upon JFK’s death, a team of Secret Service agents, following orders from new President Lyndon Johnson, forced their way out of Parkland Hospital, where the president had died. Brandishing guns and screaming profanities, they made it clear to Dallas Medical Examiner Earl Rose that they had absolutely no intention of complying with Texas law, which required that Rose conduct an autopsy.
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South Korea Should 'Brexit' the United States

Wednesday November 8, 2017

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With President Trump being accompanied by three U.S. carrier groups during his trip to Korea, South Koreans should pull a “Brexit” on the United States. As I counseled last April and August in two separate articles, South Korea should dissolve their alliance with the United States and kick all U.S. troops out of the country. (See “South Korea Should Give U.S. Troops the Boot” and “South Korea Should Give U.S. Troops the Boot, Part 2.) The time to do so is now, before it is too late.
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Oliver Stone Was Right About the CIA

Thursday November 2, 2017

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I can’t decide which is more amusing: the CIA’s use of “national security” to justify keeping secret its 50-year-old records in the JFK assassination or the mainstream media’s response to the continued secrecy.

On the one hand, the CIA’s use of “national security” to justify keeping 98 percent of the still-secret records is palpably laughable. However one defines that nebulous term “national security,” one thing is patently clear: Nothing — absolutely nothing — would have happened to the United States if the CIA had been forced to let the American people see its still-secret, 50-year-old JFK records on October 26, 2018, as the 1992 JFK Records Act mandated. The United States wouldn’t have fallen into the ocean. The federal government wouldn’t have turned Red.

After all, what happened to the United States when only 2 percent of the long-secret records were finally released last week? Nothing. The United States is still standing and the commies have not taken over the federal government. But don’t forget: For more than 50 years, the CIA has maintained, falsely as it turns out, that disclosing those 2 percent of its records would threaten “national security.”

Although the mainstream media doesn’t seem to be buying this national-security nonsense, they simply cannot bring themselves to reach the commonsense and logical conclusion: The 98 percent of the long-secret CIA records contain more circumstantial evidence of guilt — circumstantial evidence that demonstrates that Oliver Stone was right when he posited in his movie JFK that the CIA did, in fact, effect one of its storied regime-change operations right here in the United States on November 22, 1963.
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US Violence Abroad Begets Violence at Home

Tuesday October 3, 2017

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Although ISIS is claiming that Las Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock was one of theirs and was acting on its behalf, so far no independent evidence has surfaced to confirm ISIS’s claim. If such evidence does emerge, it will be one more of a long series of deadly “blowback” occurrences arising from US interventionism abroad.

But even if Paddock’s mass killing spree turns out to have no rational explanation, I continue to contend that these bizarre, unexplainable acts of violence are also rooted in the US government’s decades-long killing spree abroad.

Here is the critical question: If the Pentagon and the CIA are killing masses of people abroad, will that have an adverse effect on people here at home?

The standard answer is no. Ever since the US national-security establishment began killing people in foreign countries, the mindset has been that as long as the death and destruction is “over there,” there would be no adverse impact on American society. As US military and intelligence personnel wreaked death and destruction in faraway lands, Americans would continue to go to work, go on vacation, take their kids to soccer practice, attend sports events where they express thanks to troops, and just continue to live their lives in their regular ways.

The US media has played its part in all this by declining to display photographs of dead bodies and body parts that are the result of US shootings, bombings, or missile attacks. The notion has been that there is simply no good reason why Americans should be exposed to the effects of US violence abroad.
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America: The Dictatress of the World

Monday October 2, 2017

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On July 21, 1821, John Quincy Adams, who would go on to become the sixth president of the United States, warned that if America were ever to abandon its founding principle of non-interventionism in foreign affairs, she might well become the dictatress of the world.

Adams issued his warning in a speech he delivered to Congress, a speech that has gone down in history with the title “In Search of Monsters to Destroy.”

Adams was referring to the fact that the United States was founded as a constitutional republic, one whose military forces did not go around the world helping people who were suffering the horrors of dictators, despots, civil wars, revolutions, famines, oppression, or anything else. That’s not to say that America didn’t sympathize with people struggling to experience lives of freedom, peace, and prosperity. It was simply that the US government would not go abroad to slay such monsters.

Here is how Adams expressed it:
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
Adams was summing up the founding foreign policy of the United States, a policy of non-interventionism in the affairs of other nations, specifically Europe and Asia.
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North Korea Would Be Stupid to Trust the US

Thursday September 28, 2017

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To many mainstream pundits, the solution to the crisis in Korea is for US officials to sit down and “talk” to North Korea in the hopes of negotiating a mutually beneficial agreement. While it won’t guarantee that a deal will be worked out, they say, “talking” is the only chance there is to resolve the crisis.

They ignore an important point: Any deal that would be reached would involve trusting the US  government to keep its end of the bargain. And trusting the US government would be the stupidest thing North Korea could ever do. That’s because as soon as US officials found it advantageous, they would break the deal and pounce on North Korea, with the aim of achieving the regime change they have sought ever since the dawn of the Cold War more than 70 years ago.

Look at what US officials did to Libya. Its dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, agreed to give up his nuclear-weapons program in return for regime security. That turned out to be stupid move. As soon as US officials saw an opening, they pounced with a regime-change operation. Today, Qaddafi is dead and Libya is in perpetual crisis and turmoil. That wouldn’t have happened if Qaddafi had a nuclear deterrent to a US regime-change operation.
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The Worst Mistake in US History

Wednesday September 20, 2017

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The worst mistake in US history was the conversion after World War II of the US government from a constitutional, limited-government republic to a national-security state. Nothing has done more to warp and distort the conscience, principles, and values of the American people, including those who serve in the US military.
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Interventionism and the Korean Crisis

Wednesday September 6, 2017

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If war ends up breaking out in Korea, President Trump, the Pentagon, and the CIA will be announcing that it was all North Korea's fault. They’ll say that North Korea was “begging for war,” and that the United States was “forced” to act to protect “national security.” Of course, in the process they will be ignoring the interventionist sanctions that the United States and the United Nations have imposed on North Korea for decades, an indirect act of war that has targeted and killed countless North Korean citizens.

In the event of war, Trump and his national-security establishment will be speaking falsely and disingenuously. In fact, the root cause of another war in Korea will be interventionism, the philosophy of foreign policy that has held the United States in its grip for more than a century.

Notice something important about North Korea’s behavior: None of it is aimed at Switzerland, notwithstanding the fact that Korea is about 1,000 miles closer to Switzerland than the United States.
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One Way to End Drug War Violence

Saturday August 26, 2017

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Two police officers in Kissimmee, Florida, were recently shot and killed while investigating illegal drug activity in a dangerous part of town. According to the New York Times, government officials praised the officers for their service and asked Floridians to pray for other law-enforcement personnel. President Trump weighed in with a tweet in which he offered his thoughts and prayers for the Kissimmee police and their families.

There is one big thing about that picture, however: It is the drug war itself, which Trump and, no doubt, most of the Kissimmee police department, favor, that is the reason that those two police officers are dead. If drugs were legal, those two dead police officers would not have been investigating illegal drug activity because there would be no illegal drug activity.

Take a look at this very interesting and revealing article in yesterday’s New York Times about a DEA agent named Enrique Camarena. He too is dead, having been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in 1985 by a Mexican drug gang. Not surprisingly, the DEA went ballistic over the murder and pulled out all the stops, including violent kidnapping, to bring the malefactors to justice.

One big thing to notice, however: It is the drug war itself, which most DEA agents favor, that brought about Camarena’s death. If drugs had been legal, Camarena wouldn’t have been in Mexico investigating illegal drug activity because there wouldn’t have been any illegal drug activity.
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Unlike Trump, JFK Didn't Bend the Knee

Thursday August 24, 2017

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Like President Trump, President Kennedy was subjected to the same type of pressure by the Pentagon and the CIA to engage in military action overseas. Unlike President Trump, however, Kennedy stood his ground and refused to succumb to the will of the national-security establishment. In fact, Kennedy is the only president in the post-World War II era who has stood up to the demands of what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.”

After the CIA’s regime-change debacle at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, Kennedy never trusted the CIA again. It didn’t take long for him to have the same sentiment toward the Pentagon.

Like the CIA, the Pentagon was obsessed with regime change in Cuba. The national-security establishment was convinced that the United States would cease to exist with a communist “dagger” pointed at it from only 90 miles away. In the eyes of the Pentagon and the CIA, there was only one thing that could be done to save America — oust the communist regime in Cuba and replace it with a pro-US dictatorship, much like the Batista regime that that Fidel Castro had ousted from power in the Cuban Revolution.

The Pentagon understood the political and diplomatic problems associated with initiating a military attack another country, especially one that had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. After all, that’s what Japan had done with its undeclared surprise attack on US forces at Pearl Harbor, an act that US officials had vehemently condemned.

The CIA had tried to get around that problem with its Bay of Pigs invasion by trying to make it look like the invaders were simply an independent group of Cuban exiles rather than trained agents of the CIA.

The Pentagon got around the problem by coming up with a plan that would make it look like Cuba had started a war with the United States and that the United States was simply acting in self-defense. That’s what Operation Northwoods was all about. Unanimously approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the plan called for terrorist attacks to be carried out here in the United States and for hijackings of American planes.
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