How ironic that the U.S. government’s war on ISIS, the group brought into existence by the U.S. national-security establishment’s war of aggression on Iraq, would provide insight into the U.S. national-security’s establishment’s relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy some 55 years ago.
As I emphasized in my 29-part video series on the JFK assassination and as I am emphasizing in my multipart series on the same subject in FFF’s monthly journal Future of Freedom, circumstantial evidence is just as valid as direct evidence. Equally important, sometimes we can glean just as much from what government officials fail to do as from what they do.
Consider the case of Hoda Muthana, a 23-year-old American citizen who traveled to Syria four years ago and became the wife of a member of ISIS. She had a baby and now wants to return to the United States.
It’s not going to happen if President Trump gets his way. He is steadfastly refusing to permit Muthana to return to the United States. As far as he is concerned, she is a traitor for having left the United States to join up with ISIS, which became an official enemy of the U.S. Empire after the U.S. conquest of Iraq.
What about Muthana’s American citizenry? Don’t citizens have a right to return to their home country regardless of what they have done abroad, even if they face the prospect of criminal charges? U.S. officials are questioning her citizenship, claiming that her father was a foreign diplomat residing in the United States when she was born, which would disqualify her from U.S. citizenship even though she was born in the United States. Her father denies that, saying that he had resigned his diplomatic position by the time she was born. According to an article in the New York Times, Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of George Washington Program on Extremism, “said the United States had an obligation to bring her home — ‘albeit in handcuffs.’”
The citizenship issue is now in court, but that issue is besides the point for purposes of this article. The point is that Trump and his national-security cohorts do not want this woman back in the United States. They want her to stay away. And they are fighting as hard as they can to keep her away. Moreover, if she is permitted back, she will undoubtedly return “in handcuffs.”
Muthana isn’t the only one in this situation. 19-year-old Shamima Begum is a British citizen who also traveled to Syria and joined up with ISIS. She has a baby boy and now wants to return to Britain.
The British government, which partnered with the U.S. government’s war of aggression on Iraq, is opposing Begum’s return to her home country as ferociously as the U.S. government is opposing Muthana’s return. Why, the British government has even stripped her of her British citizenship.
Some 59 Americans are believed to have joined ISIS. Even if any of them are permitted to return to the United States, they will almost certainly face criminal charges, either in U.S. district court or the military’s criminal “justice” system at Guantanamo Bay. According to an article on CNN.com, thirteen of them, “including a Texas man just last month, have faced terror-related charges after being returned to the US, according to research from the George Washington University Program on Extremism.”
None of this should surprise us. That’s how we would expect U.S. officials to behave given these facts and circumstances. We would be surprised if they instead took the opposite approach — one of forgiveness and red-carpet reentry into the United States.
Which brings us to Lee Harvey Oswald, the former U.S. Marine who U.S. officials have always said was a “lone nut” communist who killed President Kennedy.
How does Oswald’s case relate to those of the Americans who joined up with ISIS? The U.S. government’s treatment of Oswald, whose conduct was arguably as bad if not worse than that of the ISIS Americans, was exactly the opposite of how they are treating the ISIS Americans.
In fact, as I have note in my two series, there are but two reasonable possibilities: Either Oswald was a Cold War miracle story or he was what many assassination researchers have long contended: a U.S. intelligence agent whose official cover was a communist.
Don’t forget the official narrative. It begins with a supposed communist joining the U.S. Marine Corps. How many communists have you ever heard of who have joined the U.S. Marines? Why would a genuine communist join the Marines? The Marines hate communists. They kill communists.
When Oswald joined the Marines, the Marines had just helped kill millions of communists in the U.S. intervention into the Korean War. The war was never ended, only suspended. The war could have resumed on a moment’s notice. Why would a genuine communist join an organization in which he might suddenly be called upon to kill more of his fellow communists? Does that make any sense?
Moreover, why would the Marines permit a communist to join their ranks? Couldn’t he be spying on them and reporting their movements and actions to what the national-security establishment said was a worldwide communist conspiracy based in Moscow, Russia (yes, that Russia!).
Oswald learned fluent Russian while he was in the Marines. How did he do that without help, especially since his study would presumably be limited to evenings and weekends? He was also studying Marxism, even to the point that his military colleagues were calling him “Osvaldovitch.”
Would the Marines really have permitted a Russian-learning, Marxism-studying “Osvaldovitch” to remain in their ranks? Not a chance. The circumstantial evidence points in only one reasonable direction: Oswald was recruited and being trained to be a communist infiltrator, one who would later infiltrate not only the Soviet Union but also communist organizations here in the United States that the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI had targeted for infiltration and destruction, such as the U.S. Communist Party and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Then Oswald walked into the U.S. embassy in Russia and loudly announced that he is renouncing his U.S. citizenship—loud enough to ensure that Russian monitoring devices could pick up what he was saying. He handed over his passport to a U.S. official in the embassy and loudly declared that he intends to divulge all the secrets he learned in the U.S. military to the Russians. It was not an idle threat because the U.S. military had stationed this ostensible communist at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, which was where the CIA’s top-secret U-2 spy plane was based.
While in Russia, Oswald married a communist woman, one whose uncle had close ties to Soviet intelligence.
After a couple of years, Oswald suddenly had a change of heart, just like those ISIS wives. He decided that he now wanted to come home, along with his Red wife.
Now, how do you think that request would be handled by U.S. officials. Before you answer, remember: This was the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. That was the time when the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI had convinced Americans that the communists were coming to get us as part of their worldwide communist conspiracy to take over the world, a conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow. The fear of this conspiracy was about 1000 times greater than the fear that ISIS was going to come and get us and establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate that was going to force every American to learn Sharia law.
In fact, take the current animus that U.S. officials have toward both Russia and ISIS and multiply it by 1,000. That’s how they felt about commies during the Cold War.
So what did they do when Oswald, the purported communist ex-Marine who had renounced his American citizenship, joined up with America’s official enemy that was trying to conquer the United States, married a Red wife, and promised to violate his oath of secrecy by divulging U.S. military secrets to the Russians?
Did they tell him he wasn’t welcome to come back? Did they tell him to stay away? Did they threaten to prosecute him, torture him, or threaten to send him to Guantanamo Bay? Did they tell him he could come back in handcuffs?
Nope. None of those of things. In fact, in what can only be described as a Cold War miracle story, Oswald was given a red-carpet treatment during a period of time in which the U.S. national-security establishment was doing everything it could to ferret out, smear, and destroy any American who suspected to be a communist. A U.S. group called Traveler’s Aid even advanced Oswald the money to return with his Red wife. Upon his return, he wasn’t arrested, investigated, harangued, abused, or interrogated. Why, he wasn’t even summoned to appear before a federal grand jury, much less criminally indicted. And no handcuffs.
Instead, he found himself being mentored in Dallas by a right-wing elderly man who had U.S. intelligence stamped all over him. He also somehow secured a job with a photography company that did top-secret work for the U.S. government.
After he moved to New Orleans, Oswald somehow had the good fortune of securing a job with a coffee company whose owner was a fiercely right-wing anti-communist. Moreover, while Oswald was distributing pamphlets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which the U.S. national-security establishment was trying to destroy, he was associating with a former FBI agent whose office was located squarely within the U.S. intelligence establishment in New Orleans. Why, even some of Oswald’s FPCC pamphlets had the FBI’s agent’s address stamped on the pamphlets as the return address.
The attitude and treatment of Americans who joined ISIS by President Trump and the national-security establishment is precisely what we would expect. The U.S national-security establishment’s treatment of Lee Harvey Oswald is also how we would expect they would treat a U.S intelligence operative trained to pose as a communist.