George Galloway and Gayatri Pertiwi, “Sputnik: Orbiting the World with George Galloway (Episode 2)” (RT.com, 23 November 2013)
Broadcast on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, this episode partly focuses on the various conspiracy theories surrounding the death and whether any of these might be closer to the truth of what actually happened and if Lee Harvey Oswald really had been capable of shooting JFK on his own. Interviewee Michael Yardley, a weapons expert, talks at length on Oswald’s background and on the physical context of the shooting as it related to the wounds suffered by the President and the film evidence of the shooting. Yardley regards Oswald as a “deeply suspicious” character whose loyalties and ideological beliefs are extremely dodgy, and refers to a number of conspiracy theories revolving around Oswald in which the CIA and other organisations seem to be linked to him. Yardley discusses the logistics of the killing and finds that Oswald could have killed Kennedy. The interviewee also delves into the circumstances of Robert Kennedy’s killing in a Los Angeles hotel in 1968.
In the episode’s second half, the focus switches to the Chilcot inquiry into the British government’s conduct in the period leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 with interviewee David Davis, a Conservative Party politician. Davis refers to the snail pace at which the inquiry has proceeded due to the obfuscation thrown up by the political establishment and the embarrassment this has caused as the delays only confirm the public distrust of the government and its agencies. Davis looks at likely reasons as to why the Chilcot inquiry is blocked by the refusal of relevant institutions to co-operate with the inquiry. Despite having supported the intervention in 2003, Davis acknowledges that the invasion has failed in its supposed aims of delivering democracy to Iraq and freedom for its people, that it has caused much suffering to Iraqis and damaged US and British standing in the Muslim world, and that it has discredited the US and UK political establishments in the eyes of their people.
The switch from the JFK assassination to the Chilcot inquiry is rather abrupt – I was watching the episode on Youtube so all the advertisement had been removed – and I’d have liked the assassination to have taken up the entire episode rather than half. Admittedly while the details of the assassination are interesting, they add nothing new to the topic that most people already know. What really was interesting was Galloway and Pertiwi’s brief chat about the Kennedy brothers’ link to President Sukarno of Indonesia; whether the assassination marked a turning-point in Indonesia’s relationship to United States and might have led to Sukarno’s overthrow in 1965, and the subsequent bloodbath that followed as the Indonesian Army pursued, imprisoned, tortured and killed thousands of people suspected of Communist sympthaties, was not discussed and perhaps we shall never know. Perhaps if Galloway had steered Yardley away from the details of the shooting and the two discussed the conspiracy theories surrounding the killing, why they continue to persist and what the persistence of these theories suggest about people’s views of JFK himself, the discussion might have been much more riveting.
Both interviews are very absorbing and the time passes so quickly that when Galloway terminates both interviews, the shock that the minutes have sped by is truly disorienting.
As usual with these episodes, Galloway and Pertiwi converse a little about the topics under scrutiny and Galloway casually mentions that former US President George H W Bush, the then CIA Director, happened to be in Dallas at the time of JFK’s shooting.