Letter to the Editor

CONSPIRACY QUEEN

Editor,

Mae Brussell was a progressive and the undisputed queen of conspiracy theorists. She was the age I am now (66) when she died of cancer in early October 1988. Included in her legacy were 39 file cabinets full of raw data on everything from the assassination of JFK up to the atrocities and high crimes of the Reagan Administration. She was a tireless researcher, writer, lecturer and for the last 17 years of her life, she had a radio show on some public stations. This was how I came to know of her and deeply admire her. I would cuss up a storm whenever my radio couldn't pick up her broadcast clearly enough.

What drove Mae Brussell was the premise that "the United States is secretly run by powerful groups that will stop at nothing to maintain control," according to the Monterey (California) Herald, Oct. 4, 1988. Her work exposing the "shadow government," as it became known during the Iran-Contra investigations, started when President Kennedy was assassinated, "especially when Oswald was shot," according to one of her daughters.

My own suspicion about the murder of the century began the day before Oswald was shot when on black and white TV I saw a Dallas County deputy sheriff hold up the weapon the killer allegedly used to end the President's life. At the time, I owned a Mannlicher-Carcano carbine just like it and knew there was no way in the world it could have been used for such quick and accurate shots. As little as I knew about guns at the time, I knew by the price (I paid under $10) it was even dangerous to fire. Sure enough, in my research after the death of JFK, I learned this gun was the least accurate and most dangerous (to the shooters) of all small arms manufactured during WWII. Italian soldiers, who it was first issued to, called it the "humanitarian rifle" because so many blew up in the face of the shooters or missed targets. Sorry for the digression; we conspiracy "nuts" do get carried away from time to time.

The good news is that Mae Brussell lives — through a website someone maintains of much of her work (www.maebrussell.com). I discovered it searching for information about the CIA's campaign to "neutralize" the New Left in the Sixties and Seventies. You popular music lovers might be interested in this. In an essay titled "Operation Chaos" by Mae dated November 1976, she wrote, "American and British pop/rock music during the 60's created an art form that has been described as one of the most important cultural revolutions in history. Within a few years between 1968 and 1976, many of the most famous names associated with this early movement were dead."

I was never a fan of this music, but I did recognize many of the many names Mae cited like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Richard Farina. And I had known the cause of Jim Morrison's death in Paris was never discovered. The death three years later of his wife, Pamela, added to my suspicions. Then on Dec. 8, 1980 there was the murder of John Lennon under what has been described as "bizarre circumstances." Neither Abbie Hoffman nor his wife, Anita, were musicians, but I have my suspicions about their deaths too.

With what we know now about the Central Intelligence Agency, it shouldn't be too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe the Agency considered these entertainers threats to the established order and had them "neutralized" for good. Just look at the stakes Uncle Sam has been playing with all these years. Just $1 billion is one thousand million dollars. And of the 600 billionaires in the world, half are American.

As I wrote in my essay "JFK to Iraq" last September, "We did not just suddenly arrive here in 2003 with a criminally insane US administration playing master of the universe. The route has been a process called 'fascism' that began in earnest Nov. 22, 1963." I didn't mention it in that essay, but I believe one of the reasons JFK was assassinated was because he was determined to do away with the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the "activist" part of the "Company" responsible for assassinations, destabilizing countries and other "black ops" (clandestine operations). This work was never mandated by the CIA's charter of 1947. Even Pres. Harry Truman during whose administration the CIA was founded, one time referred to the Agency as the "Gestapo" and not just because of all the ex-Nazi intelligence operatives the Agency recruited immediately after WW II.

The CIA's charter only provides for intelligence gathering abroad while the FBI's work is supposedly intelligence gathering within the USA. But during the Sixties and Seventies, both agencies worked inside the country targeting mostly non-violent activists for peace and civil rights. "Operation Chaos" was the CIA's program to destabilize the New Left and COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) was the name of the FBI's goon squad. Although both agencies have Congressional oversight committees, they are in name only and a total waste of tax money.

In the Eighties, under the weight of much evidence of wrongdoing by COINTELPRO, the FBI claimed to have disbanded the program and the then director promised to never do such illegal work again. Yet in May 1990, two "Earth First" environmentalists, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, were badly injured by a car bomb which the FBI was quick to claim was their own that detonated accidentally. It took Bari and Cherney twelve years to win a lawsuit against the FBI who many of us believe planted the bomb.

Forgive me for digressing again. My purpose here is to introduce you to Mae Brussell via her website. Her work may be more relevant now than in her heyday. Like those of many other freedom fighters throughout history, the ghost of Mae Brussell will never rest till justice is served. And as Emile Zola wrote in J'Accuse, "Truth is on the march and nothing can stop it...When truth is buried in the earth, it accumulates there, and assumes so mighty an explosive power that, on the day it bursts forth, it hurls everything into the air."

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The author of this commentary has been an activist more than forty years. He was an analyst in US Air Force intelligence in the Fifties and is now a member of Veterans For Peace. In the late Sixties in San Antonio, Texas, he published an underground newspaper called Inferno in Spanish and English. While jailed for civil disobedience in 1968, he was beaten, gang-raped and otherwise tortured, possibly set up by COINTELPRO, according to two memos in his FBI files. In 1983, Cahill rescued a derelict organization called Stop Prisoner Rape with which he is still associated. On Sept. 4, 2003, in the Oval Office, he witnessed President Bush sign into law the Prison Rape Elimination Act. He is a long-time member of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), Earth First and other groups. Earlier this year, he was a human shield in Baghdad during the bombing.

Tom Cahill
Fort Bragg

Ed note: People who've visited Dealey Plaza tell me it's a lot smaller than it looks in film and photo. Oswald was shooting from less than 60 yards away with a high powered, bolt action rifle with a scope. He couldn't miss, and he didn't miss. As it happens, I was in the Marines at the same time in the same place Oswald was — boot camp in San Diego, infantry training at Pendleton, class of '58. Didn't know the guy, but I mention it because we were both trained on the M-1, a bolt action rifle like the Mannlicher. Oswald and I both qualified as "Marksman," the lowest rung on the Corps' qualification ladder, but not bad either. The point is the training was so good that even people like me, who'd never fired a gun of any kind prior to the Corps, could put most rounds in the black at 500 yards. Cranking off three bolt-action rounds at a slowly moving target with a scoped rifle from 50 to 60 yards hardly requires the shooting skills of Annie Oakley. Which isn't to say that Oswald wasn't just about the most implausible guy ever, which is to say all the stuff on the Kennedy Assassination that's sequestered until all of us now living are dead will undoubtedly reveal that Lee Harvey was some kind of government agent breathed into life by the CIA. I hadn't realized until I read another book recently on the pivotal event that Oswald had come back from Russia fluent in spoken and written Russian. Going to Russia in the 1950's was like a trip to the moon for most Americans, and a trip to moons several galaxies over for Marines of that era. Oswald was still only 24 when, with a national television audience looking on, he was knocked off in the sally port of the Dallas Police Department by a Mafia-affiliated pimp who said he did it because he loved Kennedy. So here's a very young man who nutted out of the Marines at age 20, then gets himself all the way to Russia as a so-called defector, masters the host country's difficult language in a mere three years, gets his potato-faced self married to the very beautiful, foot-taller-than-him niece of a Rooskie intelligence officer, returns with his unlikely bride to the US, associates with improbable crews of co-ed murks and lurks in Texas, New Orleans and Mexico, supposedly funding these adventures out of wages from a series of menial jobs, takes a warm-up shot one night at the rightwing screwball General Walker who was fully illuminated in his living room when Oswald cranked off a round at him from about 20 yards (I think), somehow managing to miss the General, and finally is in place with his scoped, mail order Mannlicher in the Book Depository when Kennedy drives by....Well, Lee Harvey may have acted alone that day, but it's unlikely he acted alone the five years prior. I think the most plausible explanation of the Kennedy murder is contained in Don DeLillo's excellent novel, Libra, a fictional recreation of the likely revenge the CIA sought against Kennedy for calling off air support during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Oswald probably was, as he claimed, the "patsy" of much more sophisticated men who saw Kennedy as betraying them during the failed attempt at a counter-revolution in Cuba. He was also, it's pretty clear to me, and insofar as I'm able to understand the ballistics arguments, the only person shooting at Kennedy that fatal day in '63.