EARL NASH
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If Richard Nixon had not ordered his assassination, John Lennon would have been 70 years-old today.
Anyone who still believes that John was killed by a random act by a loser obsesseed with the Beatles still believes that Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan-Sirhan were "lone nuts"--and they probably still believes that 9-11 had no connection to Cheney, his Neocon traitors, and the Israeli Mossad.
The film, The US vs John Lennon makes the case clearly:
John and Yoko had become a rallying point for the anti-war movement and also for the anti-Nixon campaign and, like LBJ, Nixon used his Presidential powers and his black ops assassins to kill John Lennon.
Q: If Mark Chapman was a such a fanatical Beatle/Lennon fan, who was obsessed with John, why didn't they find a single Beatle album in his apartment? Instead they found "heavy metal" music, often used by black ops for brainwashing and hypnotic suggestion operations.
Imagine: a young man being triggered by the book Catcher in The Rye, and who, like Oswald, wanted to travel to Russia as a representative of the US government, and a man who "visited Lebanon," where the CIA ran a training camp for assassins.
(SEE more below)
[www.heroturko.org/u/united-states--vs-johna-lennon-movie/]
The home front of Nixon's so-called Real War was the realm of ideals and ideas, and according to the perversity he actively promoted "we will have to compromise some of our cherished ideals" as long as the battle is waged "in the name of that supreme priority."26 Having extolled the virtue of waging a covert, unethical war to support friends and destroy enemies, Nixon essentially justified his absolute commitment to do whatever was necessary, including the need to murder a "peacnik" like John Lennon, because in the words of Nixon's absolute delusion, "in World War III there is no substitute for victory."27 Committed to contain communism through the methods and means that totalitarian states deploy, Richard Nixon was the sort who was even able to assert that "senseless terrorism is often not as senseless as it may seem. To the Soviets and their allies, [and to those who deploy their tactics] it is a calculated instrument of national policy."28 This is the logic which made Richard Nixon believe that the calculation behind the Kent State massacre was legitimate, and that is what makes him and his cohorts the biggest terrorists in American history.
This is not speculation or a conspiracy theory, it is his defined rules of engaging his enemies, clearly proclaimed through his stated, absolute determination to do whatever was necessary in the multi-fronted effort to win World War III, and sponsoring the murder of a so-called trendy like John Lennon, was par for the course. In his own words:
If America loses World War III, it will be because of the failure of its leadership class. In particular, it will be because of the attention, the celebrity, and the legitimacy given to the "trendies" -those overglamorized dilettantes who posture in the latest idea, fount the fashionable protests and are slobbered over by the news media, whose creation they essentially are. The attention given to them and their causes romanticizes the trivial and trivializes the serious. It reduces public discussion to the level of a cartoon strip.
Whatever the latest cause they embrace -whether antiwar, antinuclear, antimilitary, antibusiness -it is almost invariably one that works against the interest of the United States in the context of World War III.29Since Nixon believed that the murder of a "trendy" like John Lennon was absolutely vital to the successful prosecution of World War III, does anybody doubt his role in plotting the assassination of John lennon? Is anybody in fact that stupid? In Nixon's own terms, "in a less hazardous age we could afford to indulge the prancing of the trendies on the stage of public debate. But now our national survival depends on learning to distinguish between the meaningful and the meaningless."30 Has Richard Nixon convinces the world that the murder of John Lennon was "meaningful"?"
The road to the murder of John Lennon had a long history of intrusive, illegal surveillance and harassment. In particular, the Nixon White House sought to "neutralize" Lennon's capacity to organize an antiwar movement and Hoover's FBI "policed" Lennon while the Immigration and Naturalization Service tried to deport him because of a 1968 conviction for possession of cannabis in London. The FBI surveillance of Lennon produced a stack of papers twenty-six pounds in weight, not to mention documents which remain classified or are "withheld in the interest of the national defense or foreign policy."31 In 1969, John Lennon protested the Vietnam war by organising bed-ins for peace. In his own words:
The point of the bed-in, in a nutshell, was a commercial for peace as opposed to war, which was on the news everyday in those days. Everyday there was dismembered bodies, napalm, and we thought, "Why don't they have something nice in the papers?"32A proposed bed-in in New York did not materialize, because, as Lennon recounted:
We tried to do it in New York but the American government wouldn't let us in. They didn't want any peaceniks, so we ended up doing it in Montreal and broadcasting back across the border.33Indeed, the effort to politically silence Lennon was less than accommodating and Lennon's lawyer exposed the full score when he told him that "if he did anything more along the lines of this anti-war rock and roll campaign he would almost certainly be immediately deported, but if he cooled it, through various legal manoeuvres, he might be able to stay."34 John Lennon did what he had to do to avoid being deported. At the same time, even though he was politically silenced, FBI harassment persisted and he appeared on the Dick Cavett show to expose the fact that he was being followed by the FBI and that his phones were being tapped. The FBI had indeed mounted a major offensive operation against Lennon, but many thought he was crazy and Lennon related the common scepticism in the following terms: "Lennon, oh you big-headed maniac, who's going to follow you around?" Most people did not understand or fathom the fact that Hoover's FBI did not have anything better to do. It was not until after the resignation of Richard Nixon that Lennon's immigration case was thrown out of court and in 1976, his Green Card finally came through. For the next four years, Lennon retired from all forms of public life, and in 1980, the self-styled peace advocate came out of retirement and prepared to mount a crusade to "turn the world on to peace." At the same time. Richard Nixon and Bill Casey were setting the stage for the Reagan declaration of war against Communism in Central America, and peaceniks like Lennon were caught in the crossfire.
Reagan's foreign policy advocates prepared to satisfy the unfinished agenda of the Nixon White House and serious threats were promptly eliminated. The so-called lessons of the 1960's were very close to the hearts of "time warp patriots" who blamed the loss of the Vietnam war on the antiwar movement and they resented the influence of activists like Lennon to the point of paranoia. In short, Reagan's upcoming, anti-Communist crusade could simply not tolerate an invigorated John Lennon and "he had to be cut down before the reasons for his death became obvious: before Reagan took the oath of office on 20 January 1981, before the world realized that Lennon was coming back to being the old Lennon, the man who sang Give Peace A Chance.35
In 1969, the Vietnam war had prompted the largest anti-war demonstrations in the history of the United States and young people who rallied around Lennon's protest songs had infuriated the Nixon White House. Kent State massacre was immediately followed by protesters who circled the White House and chanted "all we are saying is give peace a chance" and Richard Nixon was obviously prepared to do the exact opposite, in 1980.
when Nixon was President, Hoover had dispatched his political police to "initiate discreet efforts to locate subject [John Winston Lennon] and remain aware of his activities and movements." Hoover died less that a year after the Republican convention in 1972, and Lennon's murder in 1980 was merely a product of "unfinished business".
An obvious casualty of the Nixon navigated, Reagan revolution, the dominance of Richard Nixon's influence is not doubted by anybody. Even Reagan noticed the fact that Nixon's extraordinary White House authority practically exceeded that of the official President.
Nixon did not physically occupy the White House, but "the replica" was indeed the actual source of White House power. When Richard Reeves interviewed Richard Nixon in his "exile sanctum" in New York in 1980, his apartment was arranged like the Oval Office. "The flags, the couch, the chairs were just like it..." Indeed, Richard Nixon was so obsesses with his role-play, that when the interview was concluded, he escorted Reeves to the supplies closet "because the closet door in the faux Oval Office was in the same place as an exit in the real Oval Office."37 It is therefore clear and obvious that the ultimate leader of the powerful, unaccountable, parallel government within-a-government that Oliver North operated was Richard Nixon himself -which probably explains the public controversy between Oliver North and Ronald Reagan. The secret government "was believed to have grown out of a group Mr. Casey set up during the final weeks of the 1980 presidential campaign, called the October Surprise Group.38 Casey and Nixon were evidently full of surprises and on the very day that the press headlined the announcement that a "local screwball" murdered Lennon, the political backdrop was the innocuous headline, Reagan set to announce cabinet.
The claim that John Lennon was the target of a political assassination is not original. In 1989, Fenton Bresler, an intelligent British Barrister wrote a book called The Murder of Lennon, and he raises many of the serious questions about Lennon's murder that have been almost totally ignored. In particular, he convincingly argues that Mark Chapman, Lennon's assassin was brainwashed by the CIA. Indeed, all the "traditional" motivations that are ascribed to Mark Chapman are relatively absurd compared to Bresler's analysis.
On December 17, 1992, Chapman was interviewed on Larry King Live, and that was certainly an eye opener in terms of exposing the real Mark Chapman. In a nutshell, Chapman reflected the demeanour of a cold, dispassionate, methodical, cold blooded murderer. In particular, Chapman ascribed a phoney motivation to account for Lennon's murder, and that is certainly the mark of a cover up. On the one hand, Chapman claimed that he "was so bonded with Lennon" and on the other, he boldly asserted that he "struck out at something he perceived to be phoney, and that extraordinary contradiction, reflects duplicity, deception and the fact that Mark Chapman was not a "lone nut", he was a consensus fanatic like Richard Nixon.
The most striking, consistent element in the short adult life of Mark Chapman is his affiliation to the YMCA. Indeed, he had given serious consideration to applying himself to a career with the International Division of the YMCA. When he was arrested, one of the few items that Chapman left "on display" for the police to find was the following letter of recommendation from David Moore, then stationed at the Geneva office of the World Alliance of YMCAs:
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERNIt is certainly not an exaggeration to assert that the YMCA was essentially Mark Chapman's surrogate family. But what is more significant however is the mysterious, troubling implications of the fact that Chapman was not a "lone nut." In 1967, Ramparts Magazine exposed the fact that the CIA used students to gather information from abroad and in the 1970's and 1980's, the CIA was evidently using YMCA patrons as spies.
This is to introduce Mark Chapman, a staff member of the U.S. International Division of the National Council of YMCAs. Mark was an effective and dedicated worker at the refugee camp in Fort Chaffe Arkansas following the mass influx of refugees after the change in governments in Indo-China in the spring of 1975. Mark was also the youth representative to the Board of Directors of the YMCA in his home town in Georgia. Mark will be visiting YMCAs in Asia and Europe and we look forward to his visit here in Geneva. I can commend him to you as a sincere and intelligent young man. Any assistance that you can give Mark during his travels will be greatly appreciated by this office.39
Philip Agee, the first-known CIA defector blew the cover on the CIA/YMCA link, and Mark Chapman's YMCA link was evidently too substantial and too "political" to preclude a CIA link as well. In 1975, Mark Chapman, the vehemently anti-Communist Southerner applied to represent the YMCA as a counsellor in the Soviet Union, but that bid was denied because Chapman did not speak Russian. Instead, Mark visited Lebanon, where, according to radio commentator, Mae Brussell,
the CIA maintained training camps for assassins at the time.40
Whether Chapman was a trained CIA assassin or not, his Beirut experience had a profound impact on his life, and following narrative indicates that Mark's harrowing overseas experience produced a very deep, psychological impact which was ripe for exploitation:
June 1975 seems to have been the first time that Mark heard gunfire, the whizzing of bullets, bombs bursting nearby and the screams of people in pain and dying. It etched deep into his consciousness. This "gentle" man, who hated violence, came back from Beirut with a cassette recording that he had actually made of the barbarous sounds of warfare. He played it time and again to anyone in Atlanta who would listen. Says Harold Blankinship: "He played us this recording he had made in his hotel room at the YMCA in Beirut of all the fighting going on. You could hear the shooting, etc. That could have affected him. He was real up-tight about it, I know that." Whether intentional or otherwise, Lennon's future killer had indeed been "bloodied" in war-torn Beirut.41
The violence of war-torn Lebanon was Chapman's first, it wasn't his last firsthand look at the miserable dislocation that war produced. After Beirut, Chapman worked with Vietnamese refugees in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where the YMCA was setting up services to accommodate them. Since the fall of Saigon, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled to the United States and in the eyes of "time warp" patriots, antiwar activists [phonies] like John Lennon were directly responsible for that particular "mess." And so, Mark Chapman, who travelled the world at the behest of the CIA-linked YMCA, was ripe for exploitation -he was an ideal brainwash victim -he had witnessed firsthand the world disorder that so-called phonies like John Lennon were responsible for. Indeed, Mark Chapman dabbled in the philosophy of "time warp" patriots who blamed the 1960's for every ill in society, and that sort of mentality is transmitted from "patriot" to receptive ear, it did not develop in Chapman alone.
Since he murdered John Lennon, Mark Chapman boasted: "I murdered a man. I took a lot more with me than just myself. A whole era ended. It was the last nail in the coffin of the '60's."42 After killing his target and simultaneously satisfying the paranoia of "time warp patriots" who are in a perpetual war against the so-called 1960's, Chapman did not flee the murder scene, he calmly started to read his copy of The Catcher in the Rye when amazed New York City police officers arrested him. Chapman obviously wanted to get caught -the implication being that he would plead guilty and the Lennon case would close without investigation. Over the years, when asked why he murdered Lennon, Chapman would direct attention to the book The Catcher in the Rye. That in turn, directs attention towards patriots like George Herbert Walker Bush, who claim to have been most influenced by the books War and Peace and The Catcher in the Rye.43 The Catcher in the Rye is about a "crusade against phoneyness" and Mark Chapman, who used the assassination of Lennon to promote the book, claimed that he was motivated by Holden Caulfield, the book's sixteen-year-old "crusader". In a nutshell, Holden Caulfield hated phonies and Mark Chapman's crusade against a "phoney" like Lennon was "ideologically" aligned with the agenda of overzealous "patriots" who were occupied by the obsession to neutralize the influence of popular antiwar activists. In the awkward words of Mark Chapman: "I have a small part in me that cannot understand the world and what goes on in it. I did not want to kill anybody... I fought against the small part for a long time. I'm sure the large part of me is Holden Caulfield. The small part of me must be the Devil."44 Seeking to activate the "big part" of Mark Chapman, his "handlers" could have easily exploited his evident compassion for children and made him believe that "phonies" like John Lennon were ultimately responsible for the horror and the dislocation of war. Friends and associates made a point of having observed a very close bond between Mark Chapman and children, and that certainly provided the opportunity to exploit his Achilles heel. In the words of Mark Chapman: "I never wanted to hurt anybody my friends will tell you that. I have two parts in me the big part is very kind, the children I worked with will tell you that."45 Chapman struggled to avoid hurting Lennon but his "big part won" and he took his gun out of his coat pocket and shot Lennon in the chest, in the left arm and in the head. Mark Chapman had evidently mustered up the courage he required to satisfy the agenda of patriots who considered themselves to be exempt from the normal restraint of the law, because in their eyes, the "big picture", the "big part", the national security interest or whatever else they chose to call it, was essentially a license to kill -and John Lennon was clearly a priority target.
In the final analysis, the terrifying reality is that the impressionable Mark Chapman is just one of hundreds of thousands of young people who are not appreciably distinct, in the absence of the "exposure" they receive. Under the circumstances, since Chapman travelled the world as a guest of the YMCA, it is reasonable to expect the organization that sponsored Chapman's psychologically harrowing adventures to assume at least some responsibility for the extraordinary mental transformation -from Mark Chapman, the compassionate young man, to Mark Chapman, the awkward, reluctant assassin who had to be prodded, to murder John Lennon.
If one looks at the foreign policy direction of the Reagan White House, it is glaringly obvious that "patriots" like Bill Casey and Richard Nixon were steering the course. Clearly, the "invisible prints" of the clandestine, foreign policy strategists who coordinated the entire intelligence apparatus of the government to mount a fierce, unprecedented war against dissent, belong to Casey and Nixon. Richard Nixon made that absolutely clear in The Real War, when he wrote: "I am confident that President Reagan and the members of his administration will have the vision to see what needs to be done and the courage to do it. Nixon's confidence obviously stemmed from the fact that Reagan's inclination to mount an anti-Communist crusade provided zealots like himself the opportunity to use the "acting President" to promote their vision. The Reagan/Bush years are certainly distinguished by the fact that "patriots" were routinely granted license to ignore the law as long as the intended consequence was to advance the President's anti-Communist crusade. The law was routinely violated in the process, and blatant, illegal acts of terror targeted domestic dissidents at home, and entire countries, abroad. Clearly, the CIA deployment of mines in the harbours of Nicaragua was an illegal act of war, and it is not possible to ignore the fact that the Reagan administration routinely disrespected and disregarded the law. Moreover, the paranoid, Nixon assertion that "we will do whatever is necessary" to win World War III, is a clear reflection of the violent, ominous assault that was deployed, to "neutralize" any influential activist who did not think like Richard Nixon's patriots. In the final analysis, the deaths of the people that Nixon targeted were as predictable, as they were tragic. Clearly, The Real War that Nixon waged produced Real Casualties, and "patriots" like Richard Nixon and Bill Casey were directly responsible for slaughter. One of the premises of The Real War was that the need to win on the battlefield was as vital as the need to control the public opinion arena, and the compromise of every worthy American ideal was deemed to be acceptable.
After Mark Chapman hammered the so-called final nail in "the coffin of the '60's", Richard Nixon had the audacity to write a book called The Real Peace, and he was so excited about it that he privately printed and distributed it to more than 100 government officials, journalists and friends, before it was published by Little, Brown & Co. Ronald Reagan was officially the President of the United States, but time evidently warped when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger stood before a battery of microphones in Washington to brief reporters about their "brain-dead" vision for peace and democracy in Central America. Nixon had just finished testifying before Kissinger's National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (no, Kissinger was not Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State), and one can safely assume that like any predictable ideologue, Nixon simply disseminated propaganda. He certainly did not expose the inspiration behind The Real Peace: Did he get the idea to disparage the word "peace" before or after John Lennon was murdered?
October 8, 2010
He and his wife, Yoko Ono, had been living in New York for a year, and they wanted to stay. But it happened also to be the year President Nixon was running for reelection. Opposition to the Vietnam War had reached a peak, and Lennon and Ono often showed up at antiwar rallies to sing "Give Peace a Chance" — and to tell their fans that the best way to give peace a chance was to vote against Nixon.
The Nixon White House responded by ordering Lennon deported.
The administration said Lennon had been admitted to the country improperly. He had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of cannabis possession in London in 1968, and immigration law at the time banned the admission of anyone convicted of any drug offense.
But unlike most migrants who have problems with their legal status, Lennon and Ono had powerful friends who petitioned the Immigration and Naturalization Service on their behalf.
In honor of what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday this month, I pulled a box from my garage containing documents I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request about Lennon's deportation case. The government's response included copies of hundreds of letters sent to the INS, and they revealed the different and fascinating ways artists, writers and others tried to make the case that Lennon, a rock musician and an antiwar activist, should not be kicked out of the country.
The letters were not a spontaneous expression of enthusiasm. Rather, they were part of an organized campaign of the country's cultural elite to stop the Nixon administration from deporting the ex-Beatle. Joan Baez wrote a letter; Beat poet Gregory Corso wrote one. So did novelists John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates, painter Jasper Johns and composer John Cage, Leonard Bernstein of "West Side Story" and Joseph Heller of "Catch-22."
Bob Dylan's offering, written sometime in 1972, was in his own bold hand. "John and Yoko inspire and transcend and stimulate," he wrote, and thereby "help put an end to this mild dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as artist art by the overpowering mass media." Then he added, "Let John and Yoko stay!"
Some of the letters couldn't help but preach: Baez's handwritten note informed the INS that "keeping people confined to certain areas of the world" was "one of the reasons we've had six thousand years of war instead of six thousand years of peace."
Others were more conciliatory: Oates, who had won the National Book Award in 1970 for "them," had never been part of the counterculture. She made that clear in a long letter that concluded, "I certainly don't endorse many of their publicly-expressed opinions, but I believe that they, and anyone else, have the right to those opinions."
Heller expressed "horror" at the deportation order, declaring: "The two of them are among our most valuable cultural assets."
Bernstein's telegram was brief: "John Lennon has been an important creative force in music and petry [sic]."
Dylan, Baez, Heller and Bernstein were well known as opponents of Nixon and the war, but Lennon's supporters included some surprising names. Updike in 1971 had just published a sequel to "Rabbit Run," titled "Rabbit Redux," which expressed some hostility toward "the sixties." Nevertheless, his typewritten letter declared his support for exemplary counterculture figures. Lennon and Ono "cannot do this great country any harm," he said, "and might do it some good."
Hollywood people were mostly missing from the list of supporters, with one notable exception: Tony Curtis, who had starred in more than 60 films by 1972, including "Some Like It Hot" with Marilyn Monroe and "The Defiant Ones," in which he played a racist convict chained to Sidney Poitier. His letter was brief: "The presence of John Lennon and Yoko Ono is of cultural advantage to our country."
Lennon also had some high-profile political support, including New York Mayor John Lindsay. Lennon and Ono's talent put them "among the greatest of our time," Lindsay wrote, and "a grave injustice is being perpetuated" by the deportation proceedings.
Finally there was Corso, the New York poet who was friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He wrote 12 words: "Artisans and universal megagalactic entities — Ergo, let my people go — stay — etc." That must have helped.
The "Let them stay in the USA" campaign also included thousands of ordinary young people. The 1972 Lennon-Ono album "Sometime in New York City" included a petition for fans to send to the INS, and lots of them did.
The campaign didn't change Nixon's mind. The Lennon deportation proceedings continued even after Nixon's reelection in 1972, and then through the Watergate crisis. In the end, of course, Nixon left the White House, and Lennon — and Ono — stayed in the U.S.
In October 1975, 35 years ago this week, a three-judge federal panel ruled in Lennon's favor, declaring that his conviction in Britain didn't meet American standards of justice.
"We have always found a place for those committed to the spirit of liberty and willing to help implement it," the court added. "Lennon's four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in the American dream."
But the resolution of Lennon and Ono's fight did little to loosen the way immigration officials handle the requests of cultural icons to visit or stay in the country. In the post- 9/11 world, things have gotten even tighter, with artists and musicians finding it difficult to get permission even to come to the United States. Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was denied entry in 2002, and Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki boycotted the New York Film Festival in protest. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma testified before Congress in 2006 about the difficulties foreign musicians face getting visas to perform in the U.S. Things seem to be better with President Obama in the White House, but it's not hard to imagine another moment in the not-too-distant future when leading artists will be petitioning the immigration service again.
Jon Wiener is a professor of history at UC Irvine and author of "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files." Copies of the letters he obtained protesting Lennon's deportation order are posted online at lennonfbifiles.com.
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times
