“After the serial revelations about the CIA and FBI spending the last six years manipulating at least two elections to remove President Trump, wiretapping the presidential candidate, promoting made-up dossiers, and working directly with big tech and the legacy media to manipulate, cancel, lie, and manage the news, is it hard to accept that they were involved in the assassination of another troublesome sitting president?”
This past week the National Achieves released another nearly 14,000 pages of documents from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.
Inexplicably at least another 4,000 remain under seal nearly sixty years after the horrendous murder that ushered in the enormous social and political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970. Some have argued the assassination was the singular traumatic blow that forever changed how Americans viewed their government and country.
Enough is enough. The American public deserves to see the rest of the unredacted documents, regardless of who or what is embarrassed or implicated by the content. Most of us have already crossed the bridge to the worst-case scenario anyway.
There seems to be only one reasonable explanation for why the CIA and the FBI are reluctant to allow the release of the remaining documents when everyone officially involved in the event is dead. The remaining cache of records of the most profound event in post-World War II America demonstrates those agencies’ incompetence or complicity in the violent removal of a sitting president.
Importantly, it was a President who suggested he intended to reform or remake the CIA, borne out of the Bay of Pigs disaster, which President Kennedy believed failed because the CIA was incompetent and had deliberately misled him.
While there’s no verifiable source for the quote Wikileaks attributed to President Kennedy that he would “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” there is ample evidence that the sentiment was accurate. Only days after the Bay of Pigs invasion, JFK reached out to several people, including the previous President, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Meeting at Camp David on April 22, 1961, President Kennedy, prodded by President Eisenhower, explained that he had followed the advice of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the Cuban invasion. He then told “Ike” that he would be reshuffling the failed national security decision-making process to eliminate the CIA and military misdirection used to gain approval for the operation.
When former President Harry S. Truman visited JFK in the White House in early 1961, it’s not clear they discussed the CIA and its expanding role in directing and stage-managing national security policy. Yet the suggestion is evident in a Washington Post editorial written by President Truman only a month after the murder in Dallas. Mr. Truman, whose Administration established the CIA in 1947, wrote that he saw “something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic positions, and I feel that we need to correct it.” The agency attempted, through the intervention of John Foster Dulles, to get the former president to recant his article. When he wouldn’t, Mr. Dulles forged and circulated a letter from Mr. Truman stating that he had. President Truman’s comments became more caustic, and in an interview said, “I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven [1947] if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.”
Like so many other Americans, the murder of JFK marked the beginning of my journey of cynicism. I had generally believed in the broadest sense that my government was telling me at least a likeness of the truth until I actually read through the Warren Commission report (the official government investigation into the assassination released in September 1964). Like most reviewers, I found its conclusions implausible or worse.
My misgivings were based primarily on the single or “magic” bullet theory and the glaring contradictions between the autopsy results presented in the report to support the single-shooter finding. The findings of the Commission are directly contradicted by statements concerning the fatal wounds that President Kennedy received. These statements came from the attending medical personnel at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, the First Lady herself, the first Secret Service agent to reach President Kennedy after the gunfire, other law enforcement personnel, and several of the closest eyewitnesses.
Compounding those contradictions, one of the doctors assisting in the autopsy burned his notes, and another doctor’s notes disappeared. And there remains conflicting evidence concerning the authenticity of the autopsy photos released by the National Archives in 1988, while upward of a thousand photos remain under seal.
The most compelling contradictions may be the depositions of two FBI agents before the Assassinations Record Review Board in 1997. Agents Francis X. O’Neill, Jr. and James Silber, who were present at the autopsy yet never called to testify to the Warren Commission, were shown autopsy photos that they claimed had been doctored to conceal JFK’s gaping rear head wound.
We now know as a fact that the Warren Commission report was a patchwork of various national and international policy considerations and public relations objectives looking for a soft landing. Both the Director of the CIA, John McCone, and the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, actively hid evidence and manipulated facts presented to the Commission. Even the namesake of the report, Chief Justice Earl Warren, withheld critical information from the Commission, including access to the autopsy photographs, both of his own volition and at the request of the Kennedy family, with whom he was close friends.
The report was more wishful thinking than fact, as evidenced by four Commission members who expressed grave doubts about the report’s conclusions when released in 1964, not to mention many national politicians who were openly skeptical. In 1979 even the House Select Subcommittee on Assassinations, while supporting the single shooter theory, wrote that President Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”
In the succeeding years, The Warren Commission report was only the first of many deliberate lies and misdirection concerning the assassination that became obvious as more documentation became public and new details were revealed.
Ironically, the report that was supposed to inform and assure Americans instead morphed into exhibit A of the horrendous crime and the following cover-up of evidence – and what now seems at the very least an organized murder, at worst an outright coup d’état. We do know that the original storyline was simply a getaway vehicle used to flee from the terrible truth.
Everywhere one looks, the fingerprints of the CIA, FBI, the mob, and national politicians, especially former President Lyndon Johnson, are found. They collectively destroyed and withheld vital evidence, created fraudulent evidence, forged documents, peddled fake details to the media, and intimidated witnesses.
Now is the time to release every remaining record the National Archives maintains on the killing of JFK. The facts are stark and brutal. The sitting president was violently removed from office. A President – irrespective of his politics – who was breaking china in Washington and internationally, while his Justice Department was orchestrating the attack on organized crime, as well as the ongoing investigations of one of America’s most corrupt politicians, then Vice President Lyndon Johnson. The truth always dies first.
After the serial revelations about the CIA and FBI spending the last six years manipulating at least two elections in an attempt to remove President Trump, wiretapping the presidential candidate, promoting made-up dossiers, and working directly with big tech and the legacy media to manipulate, cancel, lie, and manage the news, is it hard to accept that they were involved in the assassination of another troublesome sitting president?
The importance of releasing all the remaining documents is crystal clear. The CIA, the FBI, and the larger intelligence community can never hope to regain any integrity and credibility unless they come clean about the past. The Federal intelligence community and law enforcement agencies have grown in size, scope, and power – for some good, but primarily ill. They and the new mass surveillance state unleashed by the Patriot Act (based on another lie to the American people) are only driving the concept of a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” further toward extinction.
Releasing the Kennedy files would be an excellent first step in restructuring the federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to their original purposes, starting with the CIA and the FBI.
