April 14, 2017

The Best Together With The Brightest Revisited

In the spate of stories virtually the novel cloth on the JFK assassination, I could non assist but notice the following in a NYT line organisation human relationship past times Peter Baker:
One document included inwards the July unloosen outlined a proposal to cause food shortages in Republic of Cuba equally business office of Operation Mongoose, the Kennedy direction projection to withdraw Castro from power. The conception called for introducing untraceable biological agents to destroy crops inwards Cuba, leading to widespread hunger that could fix off a revolt against Castro. 
According to the memo, Kennedy’s national safety adviser, McGeorge Bundy, “said that he had no worries virtually whatever such sabotage which could clearly hold upwards made to seem equally the effect of local Cuban disaffection or of a natural disaster, but that nosotros must avoid external activities such equally the unloosen of chemicals, etc., unless they could hold upwards completely covered up.” Like many of the plans, in that place is no prove that it was always executed.
Bundy, of course, was the sometime Dean of the Faculty at Harvard who became JFK's National Security Advisor (and who became i of the architects of Vietnam, serving good into the Johnson Administration).  David Halberstam delivered the classic critique of Bundy together with his associates inwards The Best and the Brightest.  But banker's complaint the implications of these paragraphs.  The well-educated together with cultured Harvardian expressed no objections inwards regulation to adopting a policy of volume starvation of innocent Cubans inwards club to elicit opposition to Castro.  He simply pointed out that it would convey "to hold upwards completely covered up."  Anne Applebaum has been receiving praise this calendar week for her newly published volume on Stalin's collectivization of farms inwards Ukraine that resulted inwards volume starvation.  Almost of all of us today notice this form of ideological zeal appalling.  But Bundy was suggesting an American shape of Stalinism, which, of course, brought us Vietnam together with much else that nosotros buy the farm on to alive amongst today.  
We should be comforted, of course, past times the information that "there is no prove that it was always executed," but i can't assist wondering why not.  Did the denizens inwards the JFK Administration realize that the persuasion was genuinely appalling together with should hold upwards dismissed forthwith, or was it "simply" that they came to the determination that it could non inwards fact be successfully covered up?  [ADDITION:  OF COURSE, THE INSANE EMBARGO THAT WAS IN PLACE FOR Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 HALF CENTURY WAS NOT AT ALL SECRET, AS WAS THE CASE WITH THE EMBARGO ON IRAQ REFERENCED BELOW IN ONE OF THE COMMENTS.  THE LIVES OF NON-AMERICANS OFTEN SEEM TO MATTER VERY LITTLE TO United States of America POLICY MAKERS, INCLUDING, OF COURSE, THOSE WHO ARE THREATENING WAR WITH NORTH KOREA AND THE ALMOST CERTAIN "COLLATERAL CONSEQUENCES" FOR OUR PUTATIVE ALLIES IN SOUTH KOREA WHO SEEM TO BE PLAYING NO REAL ROLE IN THE SABER RATTLING.]

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