But your problem here is that almost all of that was approved or ordered by Presidents (Cointelpro was done by the FBI). E.g., the covert war on Cuba essentially ended after JFK was killed.
False. In fact, LBJ approved the execution of Che Guevara. The CIA continued supporting Cuban exile militias/terrorists into the 90s.
You can argue that LBJ dialed back our focus on Cuba after the Kennedy assassination but our covert operations against Cuba lasted throughout the Cold War and intelligence ops against Cuba continued into the Obama administration under USAID.
Why do you think that happened? Did you read the Weiner book on the CIA? The nasty stuff was on orders of Presidents. Ike, JFK, Nixon. I think that's why leftists like I.F. Stone and Chomsky, and a few others, didn't and don't believe in the "CIA did it" conspiracy. They knew who JFK was and they knew that many of the awful things the CIA did was on orders. It wasn't a rogue agency.
Have you read the unredacted Schlesinger-JFK memo?
How can you read that memo and not be convinced that the CIA went rogue in the 1960s? (I tend to believe they were more rogue prior to the Church investigations than they are today FYI)
How can you read President Truman's call for the CIA to be reeled-in a month after Kennedy's assassination as anything other than suggesting that Presidents don't fully control the agency? (Dulles, who was no longer officially with the agency at that time, tried to stop Truman from publishing the letter)
Truman in 1963:
"Limit CIA Role To Intelligence" -
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/TrumanLimitCIA.htmlYou seem like a smart guy so I assume it's that you're in denial, not naive.
The idea that the CIA did bad things A, B, and C (and they did terrible things) means they killed their own President and then others went along to cover it up is preposterous.
Did I say that? No. I said it's
plausible that they were involved. I remain open to other explanations but, no, I don't think it's implausible that the JFK assassination was an inside job.
There are many reasons why, including the pattern of unethical behavior by the CIA and the FBI over the course of the history of those agencies.
You are not talking about the national security state. You are talking about almost the entire government and news media.
I believe the mainstream news media has been complicit in the cover up over the last 60+ years.
I do not believe the entire government or the news media was complicit in the actual plot against JFK.
You don't actually think someone like Hersh would cover this up? The same people who exposed the abuses you mentioned have covered up for the murder of JFK?
I respect Sy Hersh's and Noam Chomsky's work on other topics but they are wrong about JFK. Everything we've learned in the declassification of JFK files since the 1990s has corroborated the claims that JFK didn't trust the CIA, or the Joint Chiefs, and that JFK wanted to get out of Vietnam.
Whether or not Kennedy would've followed through on pulling out of Vietnam had he not been killed is impossible to know. But there's now a mountain of evidence proving that he did in fact want our troops out of Vietnam.
