Reply #9: It seems obvious to me now that all three antiwar leaders--JFK, MLK & RFK--

[Peace Patriot]

were killed by assassins in the pay of U.S. corporate war profiteers.

1963: JFK did not agree with the CIA invasion of Cuba and refused to support it; later, he managed to defuse the Cuban missile crisis without nuclear war; his speech to the UN on nuclear disarmament and world peace at a time when the Russians were pounding tables and saying "We'll bury you!" was extraordinary for its time; his space program in particular--and the unusual project of putting a man on the moon--signaled a new vision for the U.S. role in the world, to which young people were especially responsive, of technical expertise and intelligence used for peaceful purposes instead of war; shortly before he died, JFK signed executive orders recalling U.S. military "advisers" from Vietnam.

Bang, bang. Shoot, shoot.

Shortly after JFK's death, his successor LBJ rescinded those executive orders, and, within a year, a phony incident was cooked up, in the Gulf of Tonkin, falsely alleging that the Vietnamese had attacked U.S. forces, which was used in Congress to escalate the Vietnam situation into a full scale war. Tens of thousands of people were slaughtered in the next several years, well below the radar of the American people until around 1966-67.

1967: MKL, a famous and charismatic civil rights leader, was advised not to associate the civil rights movement with the anti-Vietnam War movement, and held off for several years, but finally gave a powerful speech--one of the best speeches ever given--at the Riverside Church in NY, publicly opposing the Vietnam War for the first time. One year later...

Bang, bang. Shoot, shoot.

1968: The same year, RFK, a "cold war" hawk, who had at first supported LBJ's escalation of the Vietnam War, changed his mind about the war, and began a campaign for president to stop it, after study of what was happening there, and given his commitment to social justice as well as the country's growing revulsion at the senseless carnage. His change of heart was genuine and deeply felt; his campaign was extremely successful; he won the California primary, and was clearly headed to the White House.

Bang, bang. Shoot, shoot.

Follow the money. Always. Billions and billions and billions of dollars in rifles, bullets, bombs, helicopters, war planes, defoliation chemicals ("agent orange"), uniforms, tents, food, boots and body bags--to accomplish the slaughter of upwards of 2 million people in Southeast Asia before it was over. All three key leaders--all of them charismatic, all three very great leaders--who acted to prevent or stop this conflagration assassinated within the space of five years, at the outset of it.

Looking back at those years, from the perspective of the Bush Junta, I don't need any evidence. I know who killed JFK, MLK and RFK. It was operatives of the "military-industrial complex"--which Eisenhower had warned us about at the end of his presidency, just as JFK was being elected--and the purpose was war profiteering.

Our country never demobilized after WW II, and the war industries of that era went on to become the great leaches on our economy, which require blood--lots of blood--to be kept fat. They need a war every 20 years or so, to loot the American people with. We are seeing one now. Senseless war. Unjust war. Genocidal war with no other point except making certain people very, very rich. All the policy justifications are crap. Lies. Elaborate deceptions. Whole "think tanks" devoted to creating camouflage for war profiteers. And the tentacles of these war profiteers reaching into every aspect of our society get a grip on our politicians--and sometimes on workers and unions who need jobs--so that we cannot dislodge them. They run our country now. And the only thing we can do about it is, a) restore transparency to our election system so that we can vote out the War Party, and b) starve the beast--make peace with the world, and cut the military budget by 90%, down to a true defensive posture (no more wars of choice!).

They killed our best leaders in the 1960s. And I think they also killed Paul Wellstone in 2002--who had pledged to lead the battle in the Senate against the Iraq invasion, and who was also a charismatic leader headed for the White House.

Whatever the CIA may have done--or others (the Cuban mafia, southern bigots, Bush Cartel death squads)--by way of carrying out these assassinations--the real culprits sat in the boardrooms of the corporate war profiteers, the vampires of our age.