Unknown Knowns

It seems often said of the things that consume me, "We'll never know what really happened." Think of the murder of JFK, and lately the events of September 11. The suggestion is that we who feel something is not right have little more than our unease to guide us, and that the facts are buried daily by the piling upon of time, ignorance and disinformation.

Remember these words from the Pentagon's Baron Sardonicus:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

It's always great fun to make sport of a Rumsfeldism, but I find myself ashamed to admit I understand what he was saying. Though true to form, he didn't say enough. Rumsfeld neglected to add that there are also unknown knowns. That is, there are things we don't know we know.

Since the mutation of America into the National Security State, it has been bedeviled by dark magi with deep bags of tricks: masters of sleight of hand, misdirection and persuasion, who dazzle their citizen-audience and leave them gasping, Now how'd they do that? And while the tricked try to figure out the mechanics of deep black illusions, for years the magi have been getting away with murder. And they will continue to do so, until enough people take their eyes off the tricks, and look at the tricksters.

Someone pretending to be Lee Harvey Oswald made an incriminating series of telephone calls between September 28 and October 1, 1963, allegedly to the Cuban and Soviet consulates, and one supposedly between the Cuban and Soviet consulates at a time when the Cuban consulate was closed and empty. In one of the calls, the Oswald impersonator mentions having met with Valery Kostikov, a man known to the CIA as the chief of KGB assassination operations in the Western hemisphere.

The CIA has lied about the tapes for decades. It claimed they were routinely destroyed before the assassination. But FBI documents have been uncovered which detail how at least two of the tapes were listened to after the assassination by Bureau agents familiar with Oswald’s voice, who determined it wasn't Oswald. There is a tape of a telephone conversation between J Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson, made days after the murder, in which they discuss this monkey wrench. And the Assassination Records Review Board found CIA documents in which the CIA itself states that some of the tapes were reviewed after the assassination, contradicting its long-held public position.

Grassy Knoll or sewer grate? Three shots, four shots or five? It doesn't matter. The CIA was lying about Oswald before November 22, 1963, creating a legend for him that would be used to frame him as the sole assassin. That alone should be enough to open the eyes of all but the most wilfully blind.

We need to return to what first troubled us, because that should inform us what we ought be doing now to put things right. And the most troubling aspects of modern American history are the unrequited demands of justice. This, I believe, is where the investigation into the first Kennedy assassination faltered. Researchers got down on their knees on the knoll, examining blades of grass and calculating trajectories. They became consumed with the minutiae; with the how. After a little while of this, the murder of a President became a puzzle instead of a crime; a pursuit of hobbyists. And it's what I fear for the 9/11 truth movement.

At a certain point, when a critical mass of evidence was reached - and it may have been as early as Ruby silencing Oswald - Americans should have known enough, to say Enough, already. And they should have brought the United States to a standstill until they saw something like justice done.

Americans will only wake from their nightmare of watching their finest liberal leaders, witnesses to high crimes and sundry victims getting lonegunman'd, suicide'd and accident'd, treason unpunished and mass murder rewarded, if they learn that "We'll never know what really happened" is irrelevant. Because these are not puzzles; these are crimes. And crimes are never, in the end, How done its. They are Who done its. And here's the singular unknown known: we know enough, and have for years, to know who.

Now, do something about it.