Two Major Annual JFK Research Conferences Launch Friday In Dallas

Following the historic release of new JFK assassination documents since this summer, two three-day annual JFK assassination research conferences in Dallas will focus on the latest insights beginning Friday.

Many of the nation's most prominent and committed experts are convening at the JFK Lancer Productions and Publications 21st Annual 2017 November In Dallas Conference at the historic Adolphus Hotel and at the Fifth Annual 2017 JFK Assassination Conference organized by author and lecturer Judyth Vary Baker and her team at the nearby Crowne Plaza Hotel on Elm Street.

The latter is several blocks from where President John F. Kennedy (shown at right with his daughter Caroline) was killed on that street on Nov. 22, 1963.

Two conferences with minimal overlap provide an extraordinary opportunity for speakers and audiences alike to hear in-depth presentations from notable, still-living witnesses, medical doctors, historians, legal experts and authors who are expert in the topic.

That expertise includes those sensitive matters that the mainstream media normally ignore or suppress because the evidence would, among other things, show how careless (at best) and dishonest their coverage has been since the shooting occurred.

Registration and speaker program details are here for the JFK Conference, whose program begins at 10:30 a.m. Friday, Nov. 17. That information can be found by clicking on the title here of the 21st Annual 2017 November In Dallas Conference, whose program begins at 1 p.m. on Friday. The conference is named for Kennedy's Secret Service code name "Lancer" and is led by a team of researchers, authors and book publishers that include Debra Conway and Larry Hancock. 

The Justice Integrity Project (JIP) and the Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), on whose boards this editor serves, supports each conference as important to both the public. 

Recapping The History For New Readers

The challenge for researchers is that we are steeped in evidence, facts, disputed facts, and even misinformation distributed by trolls, amateurs, provacateurs and fools on this topic. But we inevitably must start at the beginning and with basic facts in order to engage new audiences, particularly those born recently. So, in that spirit, here are a few paragraphs about the basics agreed upon by nearly all critics of the Warren Report and even many supporters of it:

Immediately after the shooting, law enforcement and the media spoke almost with one voice in stating that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in firing three shots from the president's rear and had no accomplices before or during the shooting. The seven-member presidentially appointed Warren Commission (shown at right with two staff attorneys) issued a report in 1964 claiming to confirm those and other dubious FBI findings.

But citizen critics, eye-witnesses and a few iconoclastic credentialled experts bravely withstood fear of reprisal to point out inconsistencies and even impossibilities in the official story: That the former U.S. Marine Oswald shot Kennedy from behind with three bullets in less than eight seconds for no known reason, and that nightclub owner Jack Ruby then killed Oswald on Nov. 25 in a Dallas police station for no known reason except Ruby's claim that he did not want the slain president's widow Jacqueline to have to endure a trial of Oswald. 

More than 2,500 books have since been published on the topic and more than four million pages of declassified documents have assisted the public in learning the falsity of major points in the official story. Critics claim the impossibility of Oswald's firing all the relevant shots by himself and that the Warren Report was at best in error when it stated that Ruby had no organized crime connections.

Opinion, Commentary and Analysis

Ruby's easily documented mob ties would have opened a Pandora's box if disclosed at the outset. Mob ties would have raised the liklihood that someone wanted Oswald silenced before he could talk. That shooting by Ruby, at right, is shown in the iconic photo adjoining.

More generally, even a superficial inquiry would have exposed then-covert ties between the New Orleans mob led by Carlos Marcello that controlled Dallas and the mob's sometime allies in the Cuban exile community, FBI and CIA who secretly shared the goal of overthrowing Fidel Castro's Communist government in Cuba.

Some critics would say the mob, Cubans, FBI and CIA, among others such as segregationists, many parts of Big Business and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and his allies shared also a goal of removing from power President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

This editor is one of relatively few speakers who deliver lectures at both programs. Mine are on similar topics and each seek to link this fall's revelations via JFK assassination document disclosures to patterns known about the 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK).

The 50th anniversaries of those assassinations next spring are expected to revive media interest in their circumstances and implications. My argument is that substantial evidence exists that the accused "lone nut" assassins, James Earl Ray for MLK and Sirhan Sirhan for RFK, could not have inflicted the fatal shot and thus did not act alone, and certainly had no power to confuse the public with cover-ups extending to the major media then and until now.

Thus, the patterns that we can discern from document declassifications and other solid evidence in the JFK assassination research can serve as inspiration for similar research and commentary regarding both the MLK and RFK deaths. Beyond that, the research illuminates more recent public mysteries, particularly involving pivotal and still-mysteries power shifts in the United States. It's this latter area that frequently guides my news reporting of public affairs in the nation's capital.

On Saturday, Nov. 18, the JFK Conferences event at the Crowne Plaza begins at 8:40 a.m. with opening remarks by conference moderator and longtime radio personality John B. Wells. Five minutes later, my talk begins on “Connecting Dots to Today: 2017’s JFK Secret Records and 2018’s 50th – RFK & MLK.”

The following day on Nov. 19, the JFK Lancer event begins at 8:30 a.m. with a lecture on "ZR/RIFLE: Origins and Realities" by Hancock and Bill Simpich, each authors and otherwise experts on "ZR/Rifle," the CIA code name for its secret plot to murder Castro. Some Warren Report proponents claim that these attempts prompted a desire for Castro for revenge. But most in the JFK research community do not believe that argument and that the forces that sought to kill Castro turned their attention to a president, whom they came to believe jeopardized American interests by refusing to invade Cuba or otherwise decisively oust its Communist leader.

At 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, I speak on "Be the Media: Connecting JFK Records Disclosures To Next Year's 50th Focus On MLK, RFK" The theme is the action-oriented theme of what each of us can do to overcome apathy and ignorance on topics that are not only fascinating and important on their own, but serve as a Rosetta Stone for current topics dominating the news.

There are many other vitally important topics and speakers, plus books and films for sale. So I hope that readers here will review the entire programs on the websites above, and make an effort either to attend or look for news reports on the speakers.

The annual events are timed also, of course, with similar events that we have previously reported. These include the mock trial of Oswald that CAPA and the South Texas College of Law Houston have organized at the law school from Nov. 16-17, a CAPA-organized lecture and book signing by TV star Alec Baldwin in a nearby Houston Hotel on Nov. 16, and a series of film screenings and lectures by film maker and former TV star John Barbour in Washington, DC on Nov. 15, 16, and 22.

Regarding the Dallas conferences, we reprint excerpts from the organizers' welcome overviews below.

First is that from Hancock, whose books include Shadow Warfare: the History of America's Undeclared Wars (with Stuart Wexler) and Nexus: The CIA and Political Assassination.

"Welcome to the 22nd annual November in Dallas (NID) Conference held by JFK Lancer," Hancock wrote. "Each year we honor the legacy of President Kennedy, and strive to better understand the facts of his assassination. Speakers and guests from all over the globe come together for this exciting event to share the latest findings in the case, revisit eyewitness testimonies, and dare to challenge the status quo. This year, our focus will be on the 3,000+ government documents that are being released just months before this year's conference."

Judyth Vary Baker's books include Me and Lee, which portrays what she describes as her friendship, collaboration in patriotic intelligence but non-assassination matters, and a romantic affair with her work colleague Oswald in the spring and summer of 1963:

 "Welcome to the 5th annual JFK Assassination Conference!" she wrote. "This fast-growing conference will bring you info on the latest secret records released, opportunities to hear and meet important witnesses, authors and researchers in the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations, as well as honest and reliable information necessary to understand and prepare for a world that was created by murdering a great President – an act of treason that changed our government and country forever.

 This is a priceless opportunity to meet first-hand witnesses and noted researchers of the first generation, who will not be with us much longer! Hear from their own lips what really happened – not what the government or schoolbooks tell you."

Contact the author This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Related JFK Assassination News Coverage

(News items and commentaries in reverse chronological order)

Nov. 15

The Wrap, Oliver Stone on Release of JFK Assassination Files: ‘Trump Got Rolled’ by ‘Deep State,’ Oliver Stone, Nov. 15, 2017. “As with everything else in the ‘Deep State,’ the Chief Priests told him, ‘You can’t do that,'” the filmmaker writes. I’ve been wrestling with how to deal with my response to these newly released files on the JFK assassination. Many people have asked me about my reaction to this release, and I’ve gleaned what I can from a very complicated release.

1. Trump got rolled. I think he truly wanted a release of all files, but as with everything else in the “Deep State,” the Chief Priests told him, “You can’t do that” and cited as cause “national security,” etc.; the et cetera going back to 1963.

2. The release was designed to be a mess. The rollout of deleted/undeleted/no longer redacted, and often illegible materials is meant to assure us that “you see, there’s nothing here.”

3. But some “stuff” has come to the surface like scum on a pond; the CIA/Angleton/Oswald file clearly goes back to 1959, and [former CIA head of counterintelligence James] Angleton clearly had a special interest in Oswald.Jeff Morley, who’s written a new biography of Angleton (“The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton,” St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and also works as the editor of JFK Facts, explains Oswald as a “marked card” in the game, i.e. a soldier/pawn to be used as needed, which, to my mind, very well fits the Oswald profile. (See full article for the rest of his seven points and conclusion.)

Nov. 14

WhoWhatWhy, Anatomy of a CIA Assassination, Part 1, Peter Janney, Nov. 14, 2017. The author finds out more and more about the elusive man who may have murdered President John F. Kennedy’s mistress. Who killed President John F. Kennedy’s mistress, and why?

In searching for the answers to this mystery, author Peter Janney came upon what seem to be the jagged fragments of an even bigger picture.

Previously, we posted excerpts from Janney’s remarkable book on the murder of Kennedy’s mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer — Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace: Third Edition (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016). The excerpts were from Chapter 2, which we broke up into three parts, here, here, and here.

We now present the first of two more excerpts, taken from Chapter 12 (but with added subheading).

Nov. 13

WhoWhatWhy, The JFK Files: New Light on Oswald and Mexico City, Dick Russell, Nov. 13, 2017. The mainstream media has been focusing on the well-worn narrative that Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly traveled to Mexico City and paid visits to the Soviet and Cuban consulates some months before the assassination of JFK. Was he secretly working for the communists, or is the media missing the real story? Those with a stake in avoiding the truth about John F. Kennedy’s assassination want you to believe Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut. If you won’t accept that, they have a fallback position: “It’s even worse. He was working for the commies.”

That “alternative” scenario revolves around a purported Oswald trip to Mexico City in the months before Kennedy’s death, when he allegedly visited Soviet and Cuban missions, met with a handler and sought his escape path to his beloved USSR.

There’s just one problem with this narrative. It probably isn’t true.

Nov. 10

Future of Freedom Foundation, The JFK Autopsy Cover-Up, Jacob G. Hornberger (shown at right), Nov. 10, 2017. A classic example of the obtuseness of the U.S. mainstream press regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy occurred recently on television station KARE in Minneapolis-St. Paul, when the station’s reporter, Chris Hrapsky, was interviewing federal Judge John Tunheim, who served as chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, the agency that Congress established in the 1990s to enforce the JFK Records Act.

Hrapsky is a reporter. As such, he had a professional duty to educate himself on the facts of the ARRB before conducting his interview with Tunheim. He also had a professional duty to follow up on critically important matters discovered by the ARRB that pointed in the direction of an official cover-up.

Hrapsky’s interview of Tunheim, which took place on November 2, arose within the context of the publicity generated by the October 26 deadline. During the interview, Hrapsky was presented with the opportunity to explore one of the “smoking guns” uncovered by the ARRB, one that pointed to the national-security state’s cover-up in the JFK assassination by conducting a fraudulent autopsy on the president’s body.

The full details of this episode are set forth in Volume 3, Chapter 10, of Douglas Horne’s five-volume work Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK. Horne (shown at left) served on the staff of the ARRB in the 1990s. The title of Chapter 10 is “Two Brain Examinations — Coverup Confirmed.”

Horne’s entire five-volume work is not an easy read. But anyone who takes the time to read and study it will inevitably conclude that the military’s autopsy of JFK was fraudulent. For an easy to read summary of Horne’s five-volume book, I recommend my book The Kennedy Autopsy.

Keep in mind also how it came to be that the military conducted the JFK autopsy. Texas law required that the Dallas County Medical Examiner conduct the autopsy. But Lyndon Johnson (shown in a file photo), who was elevated to the presidency on JFK’s death, ordered the Secret Service to get the body out of Parkland (in violation of state law) and immediately bring it to Dallas Love Field, where Johnson’s people were making room for the casket by removing seats from Air Force One.

As I point out in The Kennedy Autopsy, a team of Secret Service agents, brandishing guns and threatening the use of deadly force and screaming profanities, forced their way out of Parkland Hospital with JFK’s body in a casket, over the vehement objections of Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas County Medical Examiner. Loyally following Johnson’s order, despite the fact that they were violating Texas law, the Secret Service team took the body to Parkland and loaded it onto Air Force One, after which it was delivered into the hands of the military in Maryland.

Nov. 9

WhoWhatWhy, National Archives Releases 13,000+ JFK Records, WhoWhatWhy staff, Nov. 9, 2017. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) just released the largest number of JFK assassination files it has released thus far this year — 13,213 mostly CIA files — but then introduced a frustrating wrinkle, raising doubts about the coherence of the process and about their intent. Upon brief inspection, it appears that all of the files so far examined still contain redactions.

If the files have not been re-reviewed yet by either the specific agencies (such as the CIA, FBI, and NSA) or the National Archives themselves, then one wonders why they would release them now in their present redacted form. It’s Alice in Wonderland time.

Only four of the files are classified as fully-withheld, meaning that the public had never seen them before. A full 48 out of 52 pages are completely redacted.

National Archives, Latest Group of JFK Assassination Records Available to the Public, Staff report, Nov. 9, 2017. In the fourth public release this year, the National Archives today posted 13,213 records subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act). The majority of the documents released today were released previously in redacted form. The versions released today were prepared by agencies prior to October 26, 2017, and were posted to make the latest versions of the documents available as expeditiously as possible.

 On October 26, 2017, President Donald J. Trump directed agencies to re-review each and every one of their redactions over the next 180 days. As part of that review process, agency heads were directed to be extremely circumspect in recommending any further postponement of information in the records. Agency heads must report to the Archivist of the United States by March 12, 2018, any specific information within particular records that meets the standard for continued postponement under section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act.

The Archivist must then recommend to the President by March 26, 2018, whether this information warrants continued withholding after April 26, 2018. The records included in this public release have not yet been re-reviewed by the agencies as part of that process and have not been reviewed by the National Archives.

The National Archives released 676 documents on Nov. 3, 2,891 documents on Oct. 26, and 3,810 records on July 24.  The National Archives established the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in November 1992, and it consists of approximately five million pages of records. The vast majority of the collection has been publicly available without any restrictions since the late 1990s.

Nov. 7

Future of Freedom Foundation, Martin Luther King and Lee Harvey Oswald, Jacob G. Hornberger, Nov 7, 2017. The mainstream media and the acolytes of the U.S. national-security establishment continue to emphasize that there are no “smoking guns” in the tiny (2 percent) of the 50-year-old JFK records that President Trump, the National Archives, and the CIA have recently permitted the American people to see.

Of course, these people define “smoking gun” as a videotaped confession or a memorandum summarizing how and why the CIA orchestrated the November 22, 1963 regime-change operation. If the released records don’t contain a confession or such a memorandum, then in the minds of the people that means the official narrative must stand: A lone-nut former U.S. Marine communist with no motive suddenly decided to kill the president.

The records that the National Archives just released included a secret FBI analysis on civil-rights leader Martin Luther King.

The thrust of the analysis is that King was a communist, and an immoral communist at that. In a November 4, 2017, article entitled “In the Latest JFK Files: The FBI’s Ugly Analysis on Martin Luther King, Jr., Filled With Falsehoods,” the Washington Post writes: "The 20-page document, dated March 12, three weeks before King was assassinated in Memphis, is included in the latest trove of government files about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which the National Archives released Friday. It alleges that King’s political ideologies and the creation of his civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were heavily influenced by communists, specifically the Communist Party USA."

 One big question that arises, of course, is why the FBI chose to keep this 50-year-old analysis secret from the American people until now.

One possibility, of course, is that the FBI was just embarrassed about having published such a report.

A second possibility, however, is that the FBI orchestrated the assassination of King and decided that the analysis would constitute evidence of motive. After all, don’t forget, this was the era of the Cold War, when the CIA was targeting communists for assassination. Before anyone cries, “Conspiracy theory, Jacob!” let’s not forget that in a civil lawsuit brought by King’s family, after weighing all the evidence the jury found, in its official verdict,  that government agencies conspired to kill King.

Does the FBI analysis on King have any bearing on the Kennedy assassination? Actually, yes. That’s where critical thinking, circumstantial evidence, inferential thinking, and common sense come into play.

Nov. 4

Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), The intelligence community flips off America, Dan Hardway, Nov. 4, 2017. The author (shown at left) is an attorney in private practice and a former investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), created by the House in 1976 to reinvestigate the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

James Angleton (shown at right James Angleton at a 1975 senate intelligence hearing in a New York Times photo by George Tames) set the [CIA's JFK assassination HSCA] strategy in 1964: “Jim would prefer to wait out the Commission,” as one CIA memo about Warren Commission inquiries put it. They are still doing that as well as running their propaganda campaign against anyone who questions the lone-nut theory, their “best truth” according to [the CIA's historian] David Robarge.

NARA released some of the files that I have been waiting on yesterday, November 3, 2017....There has been no explanation, let alone a presidential certification, that the massive redactions in these “released in full” documents meet any of the mandatory exemptions that allow withholding.

No identifiable harm is specified. No rationale is given as to why the secrets protected outweigh the public interest in disclosure. These files are not in compliance with the law no matter what the main stream media says. They are an in-your-face flipped bird to the American public. They basically tell us that the CIA is saying that they don’t have to comply with the law of the land and that they will not tell us their secrets and that there is nothing we can do about it.

I’ve been here before. It was in a small room in CIA Headquarters in late 1978. I had been fighting to see a file generated by the CIA debriefing of John "Handsome Johnny" Roselli [shown at left, an influential mobster for the Chicago Outfit who helped control Hollywood and the Las Vegas Strip. He worked with CIA officers on anti-Castro assassination plots and was found dead in 1976 before his rescheduled testimony to Congress].

Scott Breckinridge and George Joannides had just handed me a highly redacted file that violated the HSCA/CIA Memorandum of Understanding mandating unexpurgated access by HSCA to CIA files. [Joannides, shown in a file photo, was a CIA official heavily involved in anti-Castro activities in the 1960s that, among other things, help fan anti-Kennedy sentiment among Cuban exlles. CIA later named Joannides to help the HSCA in the late 1970s understand operations, even though HSCA staff have said they were never informed by agency that Joannides was himself the key type of 1960s operative they were seeking to find and interview.)