There is a long tradition, whenever anything shady or horrible happens in the Middle East for CIA to turn around and say "What!? We would never do anything like that, that must have been the Israeli Mossad."
There is a long tradition, whenever anything shady or horrible happens in the America for all elements within the military from the JCS on down to turn around and say "What!? We would never do anything like that, that must have been the CIA."
There is a long tradition, whenever anyone serving in the US military is killed anywhere in the world, whilst doing anything at all for Libertarains and conservatives to turn around and say "What!? The Lying Marxist Negro killed yet more of our brave and noble Warriors!?"
CIA didn't kill Kennedy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff killed Kennedy.
And CIA secretly love the fact that everyone believes that they did it in the same way everyone thinks that the Mossad is way more powerful and ruthless than it is actually capable of being.
They are all privately Spetsnaz wannabes.
And anyone who thinks about it KNOWS that the Joint Chiefs of Staff killed Kennedy.
Lee Harvey Oswald, the Mafia, CIA - not ONE of those suspects is capable of gaining access to every single locked code book safe aboard every single B-52 under SAC in the air over Wright-Patteson as a fail safe against accidental nuclear war on 22/11/1963, and not a single one was found to be there when opened, nor on Air Force Two carrying the Kennedy cabinet back from Honolulu.
Only an Air Force General or Air Force Intelliegence under DIA could do that, which means the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Not CIA.
I'm not saying CIA didn't help.
And they certainty killed Diem and Nhu.
The in-house magazine of Skull & Bones prepares to dump Diem.
But if 20 CIA agents were in Dealey Plaza, they would all have needed to be pulled for other jobs and duties abroad in order to be there, and there is absolutely nothing to support the idea that that happened, especially as it was totally unnecessary, given that DIA had an existing pretext for being there.
An early televised debate between the DIA and the CIA.
Mark Lane, of course, with his background in US Army Intelligence (one he shares with both Lyndon LaRouche and Henry Kissinger), would clearly therefore come under the reporting and command structure of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (ironically, and tragically, a post-Bay of Pigs Kennedy creation ahead of breaking the CIA into a thousand pieces), rather than the Central Intelligence Agency (or Civilian Idiots Association, as it might be).
And Mark Lane, at least since 1981, in a staged court battle double act with E. Howard Hunt (who I have long believed had nothing to do with the Kennedy Assassination, at least directly), always speaks against the Central Intelligence Agency.
It's also, yet another discreet means of burying public discussion and talk of his personal actions and role in genocide, three years prior to Liberty Lobby vs. Hunt.
"They hold the line at the discrepancies in the Warren Commission and never tell you who did it"
- John Judge
And he always had for many years Christopher Hitichins of MI6 there to back him up in the credibility stakes.
Decades later, an invitation to a Hitch party is an American translation of a Bloomsbury gathering, so prized and bipartisan that Grover Norquist, the conservative activist, says he left Vice President Dick Cheney's Christmas party early one year for a get-together at Hitch's. "You'll find yourself sitting next to Salman Rushdie, Barbra Streisand, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis," says Christopher Buckley, a Hitchens pal and Washington satirist.
Buckley once got a call from Hitchens inviting him to a dinner and apologizing that he "must be a bit coy and elliptical about the guest of honor." The guest, Buckley learned, was the man Hitchens referred to as "The Inconvenienced One," none other than houseguest Rushdie, in hiding because of a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini.
Norquist met Rushdie for the first time at Hitch's, an encounter that he says led to him becoming the unofficial chairman of the unofficial "Get Salman Off the No-Fly List" committee. Buckley remembers Rushdie and E.J. Dionne, the Washington columnist and Brookings Institution senior fellow, competing to see who could recite more verses of Bob Dylan songs in blank verse with straight faces.
There's always a curiosity in store, and Hitch perpetuates the intrigue. "You're sworn to secrecy," says congressman Steve Cohen, a Memphis Democrat. They first bonded years ago over poolside bloody marys and eggs Benedict.
Ask any Hitch intimate to reminisce and -- once they've finished raving about his "beautiful mind" (Buckley) or "brilliance" (Cohen) or "raw tenderness of a poet" (former Vanity Fair colleague Ann Louise Bardach) -- the conversation inevitably turns to the dinner table. The natural habitat of The Hitch is a table fat with food and drink, where he holds forth with political observations, dirty limericks, literary recitations.
Graydon Carter, the vaunted editor who lured Hitchens to Vanity Fair, remembers "a glorious night of drinking, eating and smoking" years ago at the "21" Club, a night "enlivened by the fact that Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles and their wives were at the next table." Hitchens arrived without a tie and had to borrow one from the maitre d'.
"It was black with white lettering, and as wide as an AMC Pacer," Carter recalls. "A few months later, I was sitting at the kitchen table editing a manuscript, with the television on in the background. CNN's signature show "Crossfire" came on and Christopher was the representative from the left. I was only half-listening to the debate, and then at one point, I looked up and saw that he was wearing the same tie that '21' had loaned him. He looked quite smart in it, I thought."
Buckley once sat down for lunch with Hitch at Cafe Milano in Georgetown at 1 p.m. -- and left close to midnight. "I happily would have checked into Georgetown Hospital," Buckley recalls. "He probably went home and wrote a biography of George Orwell. He has not a wooden leg, but a wooden torso."
Hitchens, Buckley says, "has the gift of friendship." (Hitch's tendency to mention his famous friends -- with great frequency -- sometimes leaves him open to mockery. "He's just a gift to a satirist," says John Crace, author of the Guardian newspaper's "Digested Read" column. "What a pompous ass." Crace's spoof of Hitchens begins: "Before me is a photograph of Martin Amis, James Fenton and myself taken by the ravissante Angela in Paris 1979 and I am reminded of a letter I sent to Julian Barnes on the publication of Nothing to be Frightened Of, in which I congratulated him on his contrast -- almost certainly unintentional -- between Lucretius and Larkin.")
But, for all his enduring friendships, part of The Hitch's legacy will always rest on a few broken ones, especially his falling-outs with Gore Vidal over Sept. 11 conspiracy theories and with former Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal. In 1999, Hitchens issued a sworn statement saying that Blumenthal had called Monica Lewinsky "a stalker." The comment led to Republican calls for a perjury investigation of Blumenthal, and though he was never charged, the ensuing hubbub ended their chumminess.
Much of Washington's establishment left considered him a betrayer. "There was this terrible chill; there were people who weren't talking to him because of it," recalls Bardach. "It pained him tremendously. He's a very loyal person. Some people, at the time, hazarded that it was going to be in his obituary. It's a tremendous testament to him that he came back from the Sidney thing because it had fractured his universe of friends in the Washington left."
Later, he received a letter from Lewinsky, saying, in Hitchens's rough paraphrasing, "Thank you for pointing out what my boyfriend was like."
'A loophole in everything'
At La Tomate, waiters usher Hitchens to the covered patio, where he immediately lights a cigarette and orders another Scotch. A passing professor leans over the railing to say Hitchens's books are on his syllabus, and the author smiles warmly.
"It was absolutely revolting what the Clintons tried to do to Monica Lewinsky," Hitchens says, picking up where he had left off. "They tried to make it seem like she was a nut bag. That was the beginning of my strain with the left."
Hitchens beckons the waiter for wine and recoils when asked whether he wants a glass or a bottle. "Wine by the glass is a false economy," he says.
Between the first bottle of pinot noir and the second, Hitchens excuses himself from the table. When he returns, an attractive young woman calls out to him from a neighboring table.
"What do you think of Mark Lane?" she asks, referring to the author, lawyer and Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist.
Later, the woman comes over to deliver her contact information, revealing herself to be Pauley Perrette, an actress who stars on the hit television show "NCIS." Hitch doesn't recognize her. He almost never watches television.
I want to know if Hitchens, this eviscerator of debate opponents, has ever come across someone he considers a truly worthy opponent. He ponders this for a moment, and comes up, surprisingly, with Gore Vidal. But his feud with Vidal is moldering, a thing of the past, and it's now religion, those irrepressible questions of atheism and faith, that affords him an ample field of battle.
"They've never succeeded in squelching me," he says, workshopping his position.
Short pause.
"I won't say I've lost -- it's never been said. You can look it up yourself, don't take my word for it."
Short pause.
"I don't claim to have won or lost."
Short pause.
"Let's say I haven't been defeated."
