HMW wrote:Cockburn is 'anti-conspiracy theorist' and denies anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. He's also a 9/11 official story promoter, no surprise, and hosts government disinformationists like Manuel Garcia from Livermore Labs on his website.
That's why Cockburn, Like Noam Chomsky, has to deny the history of National Security Advisory Memorandum 263 which JFK signed on October 11, 1963 to begin the end of US military involvement in Vietnam with a token withdrawal to be followed by the rest after 1964. Kennedy was already besieged by rabid commie-haters and knew he couldn't get away with the full withdrawal until after his re-election. Lt. Col. L. Fletcher Prouty was involved in JFK's efforts to establish this change in policy and document it. NSAM 273 was drafted the day before JFK was killed and then signed a few days later by LBJ thereby putting the show back on the road for 10 more years of slaughterous profiteering.
The evidence that Oswald acted as part of a conspiracy is so overwhelmingly conclusive that to allege otherwise really can't be regarded as anything other than an agenda-driven suppression of a historical reality attested to by evidence of every conceivable kind, ranging from eye-witness accounts to documentary records to (duh) film of the shooting to medical and ballistic forensics, and much, much more.
Therefore, I want to emphatically preface the rest of this post with an unambiguous statement of my 100 percent conviction that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy among various factions of both governmental and technically extra-governmental domestic players, including but not limited to: the mob, Texas oil oligarchs, and anti-Castro Cubans, who -- wittingly or unwittingly -- were ultimately acting at the behest of what, in the interests of concision, let's call "the CIA," although in reality some participants were formally affiliated with other branches of the clandestine intelligence community.
Okay?
Okay.
That said, even if I totally detach NSAM 263 from the context of every single other piece of paper in the documentary record apart from the one it mentions -- ie, State's
cable to Henry Cabot Lodge, outlining WH-approved tactics (ostensibly) intended to pressure Diem into being a little less flagrantly corrupt, brutal and self-advancing and a little more attentive to the interests of the United States -- it's all but impossible for me to read NSAM 263 as signalling Kennedy's decision to reverse or even alter the foreign policy agenda he had consistently pursued wrt Vietnam from the time he took office to the day of his death.
Furthermore, when I read it in its real context, which is a
Taylor-McNamara memo most of which Kennedy approved in a meeting on Oct. 5, as reflected first by the incorporation of virtually all of its suggestions in the above-mentioned cable from the DOS to Lodge, which was sent later that day and begins by stating that the instructions it contains "have the President's personal approval," then again, six days later by -- of all things -- NSAM 263, I don't just find that reading all but impossible. I simply find it impossible, period.
Because the 1,000 troop draw-down appears to me, manifestly, to be nothing more and nothing less than the adoption of the highlighted part of the "
Recommendations" section of that memo, as excerpted below:
We recommend that:
1. General Harkins review with Diem the military changes necessary to complete the military campaign in the Northern and Central areas (I, II, and III Corps) by the end of 1964, and in the Delta (IV Corps) by the end of 1965. This review would consider the need for such changes as:
a. A further shift of military emphasis and strength to the Delta (IV Corps).
b. An increase in the military tempo in all corps areas, so that all combat troops are in the field an average of 20 days out of 30 and static missions are ended.
c. Emphasis on "clear and hold operations" instead of terrain sweeps which have little permanent value.
d. The expansion of personnel in combat units to full authorized strength.
e. The training and arming of hamlet militia to an accelerated rate, especially in the Delta.
f. A consolidation of the strategic hamlet program, especially in the Delta, and action to insure that future strategic hamlets are not built until they can be protected, and until civic action programs can be introduced.
2. A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.
3. In accordance with the program to train progressively Vietnamese to take over military functions, the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963. This action should be explained in low key as an initial step in a long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with trained Vietnamese without impairment of the war effort.
First of all, it strikes me as more than a little misleading to describe the goal of that plan as "the end of U.S. Military involvement in Vietnam." And not only because the explicitly stated goal of the entire memo is to formulate and implement a series of tactics capable of making Diem act like a more reputable and efficient partner-in-warfare. Because frankly, I find it way more problematic that there's not even a whisper of a hint of a suggestion in that passage that any of the men writing or reading it want, hope or expect to come anywhere close to bringing about "the end of U.S. Military involvement in Vietnam." On the contrary, it's perfectly clear on a prima facie basis that the one and only aim of recommendations (2) and (3) is to make U.S. military involvement in Vietnam
more rather than
less sustainable in the long term by making it more politically tenable in the short-term.
And even if it weren't, there's no way that the rest of the memo leaves any room at all for any doubt that the Kennedy administration's strategic goal in Vietnam at the time of its writing was, shockingly, to gain political and economic control of the territory by waging war against the Viet Cong through the VNR until the former was defeated and the latter was too heavily in the U.S.'s debt to be a meaningfully independent sovereign nation. (For example, scroll down to
Section I, Part B, (6)(a) through (6)(d).. Or, if you want something directly relevant to NSAM 263, try Section VII, Part C, (1) through (3), which I'd say go a pretty long way toward explaining where those token 1,000 troops are gonna be coming from.)
Furthermore, in light of how much of October 1963 Kennedy and his aides and advisors spent discussing
whether and how to support a military coup against Diem without appearing to have done so, in conjunction with the following bolded excerpt from NSAM 263's previously mentioned and much more detailed twin, DOS cable 534...
C. Congress, Press, and Public:
21. No public statement will be issued here for the present.
22. At President's next press conference, he expects to repeat his basic statement that what furthers the war effort we support, and what interferes with the war effort we oppose. If questioned on actions US may take, he expects to say only that US programs are being reviewed to insure consistency with this policy.
....I'd say it's at least debatable whether "the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963" referred to by NSAM 263 was even something Kennedy ever seriously intended to see carried out, as opposed to something he approved in order to send a plausibly deniable go-for-it message to the coup-plotting Vietnamese Generals.
Because for one thing, they did in fact understand it to be exactly that, consequent to which they went for it with such dispatch that the entire issue of pressuring Diem into doing anything was totally obsolete within three weeks of NSAM 263's date of issue. By then, as I'm sure you know, he was much too dead to be very responsive to U.S. pressure tactics, no matter how numerous and sincerely intended to succeed they would have appeared to be on paper.**
And finally, wrt the second-term and much larger force draw-down that Kennedy definitely didn't live to implement and which I've already quoted Taylor-McNamara as recommending:
That doesn't represent any kind of departure at all from the Kennedy administration's then-extant plans for tying things up and getting gone from South East Asia as they stood prior to NSAM 263. Let alone a sudden and unprecedented departure. McNamara had already proposed, Kennedy had already approved, and the JCS had already been asked to produce operational plans premised on a three-year period Vietnamization followed by the withdrawal of all but 1600 US personnel in
November 1962. Which was eleven months before NSAM 263 -- which was signed by McGeorge Bundy and not by Kennedy, incidentally -- tersely noted the President's approval of a 1,000-man cosmetic reduction in total manpower deployed in-country.
In short, I don't understand why you regard NSAM 263 as indicative of a sea change in Kennedy's strategic approach to the war. As a matter of public record, he had already been briefed on and approved one McNamara-devised tactical plan that called for spending a few years on Vietnamization, culminating in the withdrawal of all but a small number of U.S. troops from the field almost a full year before October 5, 1963. At which point he was briefed on and approved a newly-oriented-to-accommodate-facts-on-the-ground Taylor/McNamara-devised overhaul of what was, fundamentally, the exact same plan. As it happened, one part of that plan entailed an insignificant troop reduction, which was memorialized in writing six days later in the form of NSAM 263.
ON EDIT: THIS WHOLE FLIGHT OF FANCY IS BASED IN MY MISTAKEN ASSUMPTION THAT NSAM 273 DID ACTUALLY TAKE A DIFFERENT POLICY STANCE THAN NSAM 263. IT DOESN'T. THEREFORE....It does strike me as totally plausible that at some point following Diem's assassination, Kennedy may indeed have recognized that the McNamara-devised blueprint on which his long-held policy was based was just a rose-colored pile of untenable bullshit that no amount of tactical reorientation was ever going to make any more viable. And if he was unwilling to go the route LBJ did with NSAM 273, that might indeed have been a factor, perhaps even a key factor, wrt the timing of his assassination.
...THIS PARAGRAPH IS JUST NONSENSICAL CRAP. PLEASE IGNORE IT, AND READ MY SECOND POST FOLLOWING UP ON THIS ONE INSTEAD. THANKS. -- C2W
But that's purely speculative. And even if it were true, there couldn't possibly be any indication of it for conspiracy denialists stubbornly to ignore in the present that'd be dated any earlier than almost three weeks
after October 11, 1963. At the very earliest.
So what is it about that specific document that strikes you as such persuasive evidence of a conspiracy that Chomsky and Cockburn have to deny its existence in order to make the fiction that Oswald acted alone believable?
Because for the reasons stated above, I genuinely can't see how it signifies a turning point one way or the other.
** Which is not to say that I think Kennedy had any advance indication that the coup was going to include killing Diem. Because there's no evidence at all that he did. I just mean that since by October 11, 1963, Kennedy was well aware that a coup was being planned and that it might succeed, you (a) can't totally dismiss the possibility that NSAM 263 and the instructions to Lodge in DOS cable 534 were at least partly designed to provide cover for the coup itself and/or for the administration's support of it; or (b) take it for granted that Kennedy wasn't acting on the assumption that Diem would be out of power and in exile before the troop-withdrawal pressure tactic he approved in NSAM 263 had become a reality. But that doesn't even really matter very much. Because with or without the coup, it still wouldn't have been a sign of any kind of shift in policy for him to have approved that particular withdrawal of those particular 1000 troops.
