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Street Spirit Volume 16, No. 12 December 2010 $1.00 A publication of the American Friends Service Committee JUSTICE NEWS & HOMELESS BLUES IN THE B AY A REA CONFRONTING THE JFK ASSASSINATION Where do we find hope when a peace- making president is assassinated by his own national security state? President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office. Cecil Stoughton, White House photo When President Kennedy stood up to the Pentagon and the CIA, he was treated as a traitor. A president was murdered by our own government agencies because he was seeking a Amateur snapshot, made with Kodak Brownie, of the Kennedys and Connallys in the motorcade about two minutes before the shooting in Dealey Plaza. more stable peace than relying on nuclear weapons. by James W. Douglass murder. That document, National Security Council directive 10/2, on June 18, 1948, on December 22, 1963: n the years that I have spent in Assassinations in America “gave the highest sanction of the [U.S.] “For some time I have been disturbed by researching and writing my book, government to a broad range of covert the way the CIA has been diverted from its First in a three-part series on political JFK and the Unspeakable, I have original assignment. It has become an oper- operations” 1 — propaganda, sabotage, eco- assassinations by James Douglass. See learned about the hope that comes I nomic warfare, subversion of all kinds — ational and at times a policy-making arm of the January and February 2011 issues from our confronting the truth of the that were seen as necessary to “win” the the Government. This has led to trouble and of Street Spirit for parts 2 and 3. assassination of President John F. Cold War against the Communists. may have compounded our difficulties in Kennedy. Concerned friends have asked The government’s condition for those several explosive areas. president, but with no genuine account- me over the years if engaging in such a covert activities by U.S. agencies, coordi- “We have grown up as a nation, ability to anyone. probe into darkness hasn’t made me pro- nated by the CIA, was that they be “so respected for our free institutions and for Plausible deniability became a rationale foundly depressed. On the contrary, it has planned and executed that... if uncovered our ability to maintain a free and open for the CIA’s interpretation of what the given me great hope. the U.S. government can plausibly dis- society. There is something about the way executive branch’s wishes might be. But for As Martin Luther King said, the truth the CIA has been functioning that is cast- claim any responsibility for them.” 2 the Agency’s crimes to remain plausibly crushed to earth will rise again. Gandhi In the 1950s, under the leadership of ing a shadow over our historic position deniable, the less said the better — to the spoke hopefully of experiments in truth, 4 CIA Director Allen Dulles, the doctrine of and I feel that we need to correct it.” point where CIA leaders’ creative imagina- because they take us into the most power- Truman later remarked: “The CIA was “plausible deniability” became the CIA’s tions simply took over. It was all for the ful force on earth and in existence — set up by me for the sole purpose of get- green light to assassinate national leaders, sake of “winning” the Cold War by any truth-force, satyagraha. That is how I ting all the available information to the conduct secret military operations, and means necessary and without implicating think of this work, as an experiment in president. It was not intended to operate overthrow governments that our govern- the more visible heads of government. truth — one that will open us up, both as an international agency engaged in ment thought were on the wrong side in One assumption behind Kennan’s pro- personally and as a country, to a process strange activities.” 5 the Cold War. “Plausible deniability” posal unleashing the CIA for its war of nonviolent transformation. Truman’s sharp warning about the meant our intelligence agencies, acting as against Communism was that the I believe this experiment we are doing CIA, and the fact that his warning was paramilitary groups, had to lie and cover Agency’s criminal power could be con- into the dark truth of Dallas (and of published one month to the day after their tracks so effectively that there would fined to covert action outside the borders Washington, D.C.) can be the most hope- JFK’s assassination, should have given be no trace of U.S. government responsi- of the United States, with immunity from ful experience of our lives. But, it does this country pause. However, his state- bility for criminal activities on an ever- its lethal power granted to U.S. citizens. require patience and tenacity to confront ment appeared only in an early edition of widening scale. That assumption proved to be wrong. the unspeakable. We, first of all, need to The Washington Post, then vanished with- THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE take the time to recognize the sources in TRUMAN WARNS ABOUT THE CIA out comment from public view. 6 During the Cold War, the hidden our history for what happened in Dallas What George Kennan and Harry The man who proposed this secret, growth of the CIA’s autonomous power on November 22, 1963. Truman realized much too late was that, subversive process in 1948, diplomat corresponded to the public growth of what in the name of national security, they had ‘PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY’ George Kennan, said later, in light of its was called a fortress state. What had been unwittingly allowed an alien force to The doctrine of “plausible deniability” consequences, that it was “the greatest a struggling post-war democracy in our 3 invade a democracy. As a result, we now in an old government document provides us mistake I ever made.” President Harry country was replaced by the institutions of had to deal with a government agency with a source of the assassination of Truman, under whom the CIA was creat- a national security state. authorized to carry out a broad range of President Kennedy. The document was ed, and during whose presidency the plau- President Truman had laid the founda- issued in 1948, one year after the CIA was sible deniability doctrine was authorized, criminal activities on an international established, and 15 years before JFK’s had deep regrets. He said in a statement scale, theoretically accountable to the See Confronting the Unspeakable page 5 2 S TREET S PIRIT December 2010 Ugly Laws, Bum Blockades and Sundown Towns segments of the working and unemployed Today’s anti-homeless laws poor, scapegoating those from other places for the high unemployment and have their roots in the prej- long welfare rolls wracking the state. udicial laws that fueled Jim In 1936, Police Chief Davis took mat- ters into his own hands, enforcing an Crow segregation and anti- aggressive fingerprinting and deportation Okie discrimination. campaign for anyone arrested on vagrancy charges in Los Angeles. He also took the extraordinary measure by Paul Boden, WRAP of sending well over 100 officers to the he Quality of Life ordinances borders of California and Oregon, enacted in cities across the Arizona, and Nevada. Officers set up nation to outlaw and banish blockades to question incoming travelers homeless people from certain if they had money or work. If they didn’t, T they were told to either go back to from areas are our contemporary version of the vagrancy laws that have been with us for where they came or face hard labor. centuries. In the South, they were used to Around the same time, California put an force freed slaves back to the plantation. anti-Okie law on the books that made it a In the North, they were used to instill a misdemeanor to bring an “indigent per- Protestant work ethic in indigent whites. son” who wasn’t a resident into the state. This compulsion to control labor and Such measures directed at “Okies” separate the “worthy” from the “unwor- spurred John Steinbeck to write in The thy” is deeply ingrained in our culture and Grapes of Wrath, “Well, Okie use’ta institutions. By drawing comparisons mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it between today’s anti-homeless legislation means you’re a dirty son of a bitch. Okie and three specific episodes in U.S. histo- means you’re scum.” ry, we hope to shake the complacency The Bum Blockade eventually failed surrounding our present civil rights fail- because it was too expensive and the ures. If we don’t, future generations will Supreme Court struck down California’s surely ridicule our hypocrisies as we do anti-Okie Law as a violation of the those who came before us. Interstate Commerce Clause. A WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING Hailey Giczy writes, “In order to pre- serve the homogeneity of Los Angeles’ How ugly is too ugly? How dark is too ‘imagined community’ of wealthy and dark? How poor is too poor? These per- “The Lord Provides” Lithograph, 1934, by Jacob Burck, courtesy of M. Lee Stone Fine Prints culturally advanced Anglo-Saxons, tactics verse questions were at the heart of ugly used to exclude racial groups were laws, sundown towns, and the Bum employed to attack class groups, raising Blockade — unconstitutional predeces- L.A. Police Chief James Davis hurled invectives at Dust Bowl exclusionary sentiment in Angelinos sors of today’s Quality of Life ordinances. refugees. He linked the influx of “Okies” with crime and which fueled a fear of moral and aesthetic Unlike the above policies of segrega- degradation.” tion that brazenly named the objects of financial loss to scare up support for his “Bum Blockade.” their scorn — “masterless men,” “crip- AN EMPHATIC “NO!” ples,” “Negroes,” and “Bolshevik bums” ed, or in any way deformed, so as to be an Known as sundown towns, these white Vestiges of the ugly laws, sundown — today’s vagrancy laws are dressed up unsightly or disgusting object, or an supremacist redoubts got their name from towns, and Bum Blockade persist in our in post-civil rights legalese.

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