The reader has to just wonder about the ‘why’ of this piece of Warren Report retrograde apologetics appearing at Alternet. As Jim Garrison said over a generation ago: ‘Let Justice be done though the heavens fall’!
‘Conspiracy Theorists’, a propaganda invention of the CIA, as the in order to of discrediting the critics of the Warren Report, still hold sway in respectable bourgeois political circles. In fact, the Warren Report is the touchstone of the many apologists for America’s ‘Security Agencies’ whose machinations gave birth to the Kennedy assassination. One of the most egregious demonstrations of the Warren Report’s lies is the ‘Magic Bullet Theory’ presented as ‘truth’ by Arlen Specter, that defied the laws of physics, but served the purposes of self-exculpatory propaganda.
The Dreyfus Case was subject to the same kind of the self-serving lies used by the French State, and its many apologists: never an admittance that that State has made a mistake, and then covered up its mendacity, by convicting an innocent man! In sum, that it was wrong! Read Michael Wood’s essay at the London Review of Books on the letters between Dreyfus and Marie Arconati Visconti :
Mr. Wood’s concluding paragraph of his examination of the Dreyfus Affair is revelatory of the position of a State that favors self-exculpatory lies over truth!
The Dreyfus Affair teaches us, among many other things, that evidence is easily faked, and that when the fakes don’t work or you don’t want to use them, you can plead national security: you can claim to have documents you can’t show. There is a real difference between a document that isn’t produced and one that doesn’t exist, and that is what I mean by saying the truth is not damaged in this perspective. But we have to ask who can see or certify this difference, who controls its display, and what sort of model of probability or prejudice we are going to use in the absence of facts. ‘As for those who have made themselves my executioners,’ Dreyfus wrote in his diary while still on Devil’s Island, ‘ah, I leave their consciences to them as judges when the light is shed, when the truth is revealed, for sooner or later, everything in life is revealed.’ Not quite everything, perhaps.