Is Kennedy-Bashing Part of a CIA Playbook?
By Jeremy Kuzmarov, Special to The Kennedy Beacon
[Source: cartoonstock.com]
On August 6, The New York Times published a characteristic hit piece on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. by Peter Baker entitled “Anguish in Camelot: Kennedy Campaign Roils Storied Political Family.”
The piece featured statements by Kennedy family members who do not support Kennedy’s presidential campaign, including Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s only grandson, who said that the campaign is a “vanity project” that is “tarnishing the legacy of his grandfather and the Kennedy’s storied family.”
Particularly embarrassing to the family are what the Times characterizes as RFK Jr.’s “conspiratorial musings,” such as his “spurious assertions about the dangers of inoculations” and his belief that “the C.I.A. was involved in the assassination of his Uncle, John F. Kennedy, and possibly in the assassination of his father, Robert F Kennedy,” a “particularly sensitive area for [the Kennedy] family.”
But although the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy may indeed be a sensitive topic for the Kennedy family, it is not because RFK Jr.’s assertions are “spurious,” since there is ample evidence that the CIA was deeply involved in those murders—as RFK Jr.’s own investigations confirm.
Two high ranking military intelligence operatives, L. Fletcher Prouty and Victor Krulak,identified CIA agent Edward Lansdale walking away from Dealy Plaza in Dallas where JFK was shot a mere two hours after the assassination, while two other CIA agents, David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt, confessed to their families about their role in killing Kennedy.
The number of bullets fired, their angle of penetration, and nature of the wounds meanwhile make it impossible for Sirhan Sirhan to have killed Robert F. Kennedy. Instead, forensic evidence implicates one of Kennedy’s security guards, Thane Eugene Cesar, who described himself as a CIA contract agent.
As for RFK Jr.’s warnings about the dangers of Covid-19 vaccines, these are not “spurious” either, as this recent article by two eminent medical authorities makes clear.
The New York Times and other mainstream media malign Kennedy as a “conspiracy theorist,” but the term has a dubious pedigree, having long been used by the CIA as a political weapon to discredit people who exposed the agency’s unethical conduct or questioned official government narratives.
For example, journalist Gary Webb was labeled as a conspiracy theorist after he exposed the CIA’s involvement with Latin American drug cartels, and David Ray Griffin, a brilliant independent investigator and noted theologian, was called a conspiracy theorist for questioning the official government story about the destruction of the World Trade Towers on 9/11.
How the CIA succeeds in marginalizing and destroying the reputations of anyone who exposes its illegal activities or challenges the truth of government statements is clearly laid out in an infamous CIA memo of January 1967. This memo (marked “SECRET,” “RESTRICTED,” and “DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED”) was sent to the CIA’s secret army of media “assets,” covertly embedded in virtually every area of U.S. communications, from lowly copy boys all the way up to world famous columnists, bureau chiefs, managing editors, newspaper publishers and CEOs of major radio and television broadcasting networks.
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The CIA's infamous "Conspiracy Theorist" Memo of 24 January 1967. [Source: reddit.com]
Entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” the memo provided guidance for countering “conspiracy theorists” who challenged the Warren Report’s (false) conclusion that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald.
In addition to labeling critics as “conspiracy theorists,” the memo recommended smearing critics of the Warren Report by describing them as being financially motivated; or having “anti-American, far-left or communist sympathies,” or being hasty, inaccurate or ego-driven in their research.
The same strategy is clearly being deployed today—against RFK Jr.—who has not only challenged the Warren Report by stating that the CIA was involved in JFK’s assassination, but has also challenged the government’s false statements about Covid-19, and its equally false statements about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines being used to fight it.
The CIA is almost certainly involved in the current smear campaign against RFK Jr. Through the media, the CIA has orchestrated attacks on Kennedy’s statements about Covid-19, even though rapidly accumulating evidence reveals that it was the CIA and the Pentagon which colluded with Anthony Fauci to conduct dangerous—and illegal—gain-of-function experiments in a Wuhan, China lab (after President Obama had banned such experiments in the U.S. as too dangerous). Such experiments, research suggests, resulted in the leak of a deadly genetically modified virus that caused the worldwide outbreak of Covid-19.
In a twist on the old CIA playbook, a number of media hit pieces have disparaged RFK Jr. for “cavorting with right-wing [rather than left-wing] figures.” This is because many liberals today, in a bizarre switch, now support the CIA, whereas the pro-Trump right, in an equally bizarre switch, believes (with considerable accuracy) that the CIA and the rest of the “deep state” have been trying to bring their hero down.
Recent smear pieces imply that Kennedy’s support comes from right-wing funders, even though one of the allegedly right-wing donors, Timothy Mellon (an heir to the Mellon banking fortune), has not only donated to Republicans but also to Democrats such as Tulsi Gabbard and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Some of the media hit pieces are ludicrously self-contradictory, leading one to question the good faith of their authors. For example, a hit piece on RFK Jr. in The Atlantic by John Hendrickson is called “The First MAGA Democrat.” Yet buried way down in the piece is a quote from RFK Jr. saying he believes that “Trump could lead America down the road to darkness.”
This kind of self-contradiction by mainstream media is par for the course; their rote recycling of the old CIA playbook often leads them to undermine their own transparently tendentious claims.
Kennedy has been called a “conspiracy theorist” so often that the term no longer functions merely as an accusation; it has become almost a mandatory adjective, reflexively attached to his name whenever he is referred to, as if it were a title like Mr. or Dr. or Professor. Here are just a few examples:
“Woody Harrelson Appears To Endorse Conspiracy Theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr. In Bid To Unseat Biden” (The Independent);
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy theorist and Democratic presidential candidate …” (MSNBC.com);
“Anti-vaxx conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination despite having negligible support” (Business Insider)
“Quarterback Aaron Rodgers paid a visit to vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a recent trip to Santa Monica.” (Rolling Stone)
The examples are limitless.
We can see the dynamic at work in this July 11 New York Times audio article by columnist Farhad Manjoo in which he labels RFK Jr. a “conspiracy theorist” not once but twice in the first 8 seconds alone. Then he claims that Kennedy made inaccurate statements about vaccines on the Joe Rogan show, but doesn’t bother to say what those statements are and in what way they are inaccurate.
That, too, is standard CIA hit-piece style—never debate the substance of your accusations against a person; just keep repeating what a terrible person he is. And so, appropriately, the title of Manjoo’s article happens to be, “Why It’s a Bad Idea to Debate Conspiracy Theorists.”
Has the press of any totalitarian nation in history ever been better disciplined or more docile than ours in proclaiming, with one dutiful voice, whatever orders of the day have been handed down by its government overseers? It would be amusing if it were not such a chilling demonstration of how our supposedly independent Fourth Estate—explicitly intended by the Founding Fathers to be a watchdog over government—has instead become a captive of government and a purveyor of its self-serving propaganda.
The close symbiosis between the supposedly “liberal” media and intelligence services in maligning RFK Jr. was evident in a June 5 New York Times article which dismissed his suggestion that “Covid is a bioweapons problem” by citing the authority of American intelligence agencies who “do not believe there is any evidence indicating that is the case.”
But of course they would say that. The American intelligence agencies, as we know, lie all the time—whether about WMDs, Syria, Russiagate or Hunter Biden’s laptop. If the Pinocchio story were true, their noses would be longer than a city block.
The unfortunate truth is that Kennedy is on firm ground when he speaks of bioweapons, since we know for a fact that the Covid-19 virus was developed in unethical gain-of-function research supported by the CIA and other intelligence agencies in partnership with the Pentagon. We also know that the CIA began cultivating deadly viruses as bioweapons beginning in the early Cold War when germ warfare was reported to have been deployed by U.S. pilots in North Korea.
Reasonable people may disagree about some of Kennedy’s policy positions, but it is hard to deny that he has displayed rare political courage in challenging the CIA, the military-industrial complex, and Big Pharma—and paid the price for his independence of mind in the smears, denunciations and unprincipled attacks he has been forced to endure, even from his own family.
Kennedy’s compassion for others is evident in his willingness to stick his neck out for Sirhan Sirhan, who has served decades in prison for his father’s murder, but appears to have been set up as a decoy and patsy.
Kennedy has also spoken out forcefully against the U.S. and NATO-provoked war in Ukraine, which appears more and more like a Vietnam-type quagmire, when most of his family has rallied in support of the war.
In a foreign policy speech delivered at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire—on the 60th anniversary of a speech by his uncle at American University, in which he urged détente with the Soviet—RFK Jr. warned that U.S. military provocations towards Russia were leading the world to the brink of nuclear war in a scenario no less dangerous than the one we faced during the Cuban missile crisis.
JFK giving famous peace speech at American University that some historians believe marked him for death. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivering a speech at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire that invoked the legacy of his uncle. [Source: foryougamepc.netlify.ap]
Kennedy urged Americans to try and see the world more from the Russian perspective, which would hasten the possibility of diplomatic engagement. Peace, he said, can only come when Americans examine their own attitudes and begin to try to better understand and empathize with peoples around the world–– and abandon the reflex towards violence as a response for any and all crises.
Kennedy’s words contrast mightily with the anti-Russia hate-speech and American exceptionalist propaganda with which the public has been inundated during Biden’s presidency. Indeed, his words indicate that he intends to finish the historic campaign for a better America that his uncle and father began.
Stephen Brown contributed to this article.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce, by John Marciano (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018); Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Clarity Press, 2019) and the forthcoming book, War Monger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023).
No doubt it’s a Deep State CIA play. RFK Jr. is our last hope to rein in the totalitarian tidal wave that has already claimed so many nations.
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