This archive of assassination-related news and commentary for the calendar year 2017 by the Justice Integrity Project . The material below consists of selected excerpts from significant news stories or commentaries regarding alleged political assassinations or attempts. The materials are arranged in reverse chronological order and focus primarily upon news arising from the 1960s murders of President John F. Kennedy (shown in a file photo), his brother Robert Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Included also are several reports regarding other alleged political murders of prominent international leaders, or attempts.
The Indicter, Assessing New JFK Records, Alec Baldwin's Slam Of NBC Cover-up, Andrew Kreig, Dec. 31, 2017. The Indicter is a global human rights journal, founded and edited by Professor Emeritus Marcello Ferrada de Noli, Ph.D. (shown at left), a torture victim in the 1970s and retired medical school professor based in Sweden and Italy. This month's release of documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy continued the Trump administration's chaotic process that confuses the public under a guise of compliance with a 1992 law requiring full release this year.
Mary Ferrell Foundation President Rex Bradford has described the Trump release process as a "travesty" and Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger called it a "fiasco," as we have previously reported.
Fortunately, the famed actor Alec Baldwin (shown at right) courageously cut through the confusion last month with a bold, civic-minded revelation of how the NBC and MSNBC continue to support the disputed Warren Commission view of the murder — and to suppress alternative discussion.
This column also was reprinted here by The Education Forum, a UK-based global web encyclopedia and discussion group founded by John Simkin.
Dec. 29
Tribune Washington Bureau via MSN, With more to come, new JFK documents offer fresh leads 54 years later, Kevin G. Hall, Dec. 29, 2017. Half-a-dozen 2017 releases of long-secret documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have given plenty of new leads to those who don’t believe alleged gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
President Donald Trump promised via Twitter this fall that all the JFK assassination documents will be public by the end of April 2018 “to put any and all conspiracies to rest.”
Instead, the 34,963 documents released so far in 2017 have fed the fire tended by researchers and others who believe there is much more to the story how a U.S. president was assassinated in Dallas 54 years ago.
Dec. 24
JFKFacts.org, Echoes of Dallas: music inspired by JFK, Jefferson Morley, Dec. 24, 2017. Did you know JFK’s assassination “produced a mountainous range of forgotten, discarded and ghostly vinyl artifacts?” Some were briefly notorious: Bob Dylan’ rant about Oswald and Mick Jagger’s sneer, “Who killed the Kennedys?” Others were forgotten but popular music often echoed November 22. Collected here for the very first time are 20 of the strangest, most affectionate, controversial and insightful.
Dec. 21
WhoWhatWhy, Codebreakers and Killers: CIA Covert Ops and the JFK Assassination, Jimmy Falls, Dec. 21, 2017. To those not acquainted with the multifaceted narrative of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the idea that US intelligence was somehow involved sounds like wild speculation — an alternative reality deserving of the pejorative label “conspiracy theory.” But to those more familiar with the facts surrounding the case, and knowledgeable about the formation and history of operations of the various intelligence agencies — particularly the CIA — this doesn’t seem so far-fetched after all.
One of the more notorious CIA operations involved recruiting elements of the American mafia — no friends of Castro after he had closed down their casinos — to whack the dictator through famed mafioso and CIA liaison Johnny Roselli. These assassination attempts fell under the auspices of a top-secret assassination program, code name ZR/RIFLE, which was hidden in a strange place — inside the confines of a CIA signals intelligence section called “Staff D.” From what we can tell, Staff D was a kind of liason to the National Security Agency (NSA), which was in the business of breaking codes. Staff D’s goal was to provide the NSA with code books to decrypt foreign signals — by hook or crook. And the man in charge of this section was a notorious CIA figure — William “Bill” Harvey.
To help us understand who Harvey was, the origins and mission of these covert programs, and how Kennedy fell out of favor with the project’s leaders, esteemed JFK researchers Larry Hancock and Bill Simpich gave this joint in-depth talk (1:09:47 hrs. video here) at the recent JFK Lancer conference in Dallas.
Dec. 19
JFKFacts.org, From the JFK files, a spymaster’s dictum on national security, Jefferson Morley (biographer, shown at left, in the recently published book The Ghost of the late CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James J. Angleton, shown at right), Dec. 19, 2017. From the new JFK files comes the long-suppressed testimony of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton. Among other things, he spoke on the nature of the national security state: “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the Government has to comply with all of the overt orders of the Government.”The transcript of Angleton’s closed-door testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities in September 1975, was released for the first time 42 years later, on December 15, 2017.
But 15 years later in July 1978, the agency revealed that the fingerprints had gone missing in their vast archives. Dallas Police say they sent over the original fingerprints to the FBI, and that those prints were never returned to them.
Dec. 15
WhoWhatWhy, Breaking: National Archives Releases Yet Another 3,500+ JFK Files, Staff report, Dec. 15, 2017. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) today released its sixth 2017 batch of records that may in some way relate to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The agency’s press release states that this latest cache includes 3,539 documents. It appears that 1,240 files are labeled “withheld-in-full,” meaning the public has never seen these documents before, and 2,259 labeled “withheld-in-part”, meaning they had previously been released to the public, but with some information blacked out. Yet another 439 files on their index give no indication at all of their status.
The documents from this release appear to originate from a mix of government agencies including the FBI, CIA, Army, NSA, and various congressional committees — although approximately 35 percent of the documents listed are not labeled in NARA’s index with an originating agency.
It remains to be seen what percentage of the redactions the various agencies will unredact by the April deadline.
Thus far, only a few of the documents have drawn keen interest — in part, perhaps, because of the unlikelihood that any “smoking gun” documents ever existed, or if they did, the likelihood they have already been removed from government files. Still, experts and aficionados expect to find “breadcrumbs” that, put together, can help paint a better picture of what did happen on November 22, 1963 in Dallas. Polls have consistently shown that the public doubts the conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, was responsible.
WhoWhatWhy’s research team has been diligently sifting through these documents since the first release, sorting and analyzing them to try and understand their significance. Stay tuned as we bring you the latest.
National Archives, New Group of JFK Assassination Documents Available to the Public, Staff report, Dec. 15, 2017. In the sixth public release this year, the National Archives today posted 3,539 documents subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act). Released documents are available for download.
The versions released today were processed by agencies and, in accordance with the President’s guidance, are being posted expeditiously in order to make the documents available to the public, even before the 2018 deadline established by the President on October 26, 2017. This is the last release planned by the National Archives for this year.
At this point, with the exception of 86 record identification numbers where additional research is required by the National Archives and the other agencies, all documents subject to section 5 of the JFK Act have been released either in full or in part. Any information subject to section 5 of the Act, which has been redacted from documents in any of the six public releases this year, remains subject to further review by the agencies and the National Archives, in accordance with the President’s direction.
The National Archives will release additional documents in 2018 based on the outcome of the reviews conducted pursuant to the President’s direction.
The National Archives previously released 10,744 documents on Nov. 17, 13,213 documents on Nov. 9, 676 documents on Nov. 3, 2,891 documents on Oct. 26, and 3,810 documents 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. The vast majority of the collection has been publicly available without any restrictions since the late 1990s.
Related records site: National Archives, JFK Assassination Records: 2017 Additional Documents Release. The National Archives is releasing documents previously withheld in accordance with the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. The vast majority of the Collection (88%) has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s. The records at issue are documents previously identified as assassination records, but withheld in full or withheld in part. These releases include FBI, CIA, and other agency documents (both formerly withheld in part and formerly withheld in full) identified by the Assassination Records Review Board as assassination records. The releases to date are as follows:
July 24, 2017: 3,810 documents (read press release)
October 26, 2017: 2,891 documents (read press release)
November 3, 2017: 676 documents (read press release)
November 9, 2017: 13,213 documents (read press release)
November 17, 2017: 10,744 documents (read press release)
December 15, 2017: 3,539 documents (read press release)
Dallas Morning News, New JFK files show FBI misplaced Oswald's fingerprints, and CIA opened his mail -- and John Steinbeck's, Todd J. Gillman and Charles Scudder, Dec. 15, 2017. The 3,539 records include FBI and CIA reports on Soviet spies, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Lee Harvey Oswald's trip to Mexico City a few weeks before he murdered President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
This batch likely will be the last released pending a final review of records. Many remain sealed at the request of the FBI, CIA and other agencies that pressed for more time ahead of a deadline set a quarter century earlier.
For decades, debate has raged not only over whether Oswald acted alone but whether the FBI and CIA could have stopped him. The latest documents provide fresh proof that he was in their sights: a 1975 CIA memo marked "top secret" shows that Oswald was on a "watch list" of people whose mail would be intercepted from Nov. 9, 1959, to May 3, 1960, and again from Aug. 7, 1961, through May 28, 1962.
The same watch list included Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down on May 1, 1960. His mail was opened until two months after his release by the Soviets. CIA also opened the mail of Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party of the United States, playwright Edward Albee, novelist John Steinbeck, and a daughter of David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan bank.
Another revelation comes from a July 1978 memo to an attorney on the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations: The FBI was unable to locate the original fingerprints lifted from the rifle found at the sniper's perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
Dallas police turned those over a few days after the assassination and never got them back. Top FBI officials told House investigators that finding the prints would be a "mammoth research effort."
The head of the bureau's fingerprint section told House investigators that standard procedure would have required returning the original prints to Dallas police, but "this case was not routine, nor was it handled as such."
I just finished watching an interesting documentary film entitled The Searchers by Randolph Benson, who teaches at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. The film focuses on private researchers during the aftermath of the JFK assassination who have questioned and investigated the official narrative put out by the Warren Commission and the Washington, D.C., establishment.
According to an interview of Benson (Editor's note: shown in a photo by Noel St. John at a National Press Club lecture ignored by the mainstream media), his work “has appeared on the Bravo Network and Canal Plus-France, and his film Man and Dog received several awards, including a Gold Medal from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Student Academy Awards.” According to its home page, The Searchers is the 2017 Winner of the Orson Wells Award at the Tiburon International Film Festival, a 2017 Official Selection by the International Freethought Film Festival, and a 2017 Official Selection of the Let’s All Be Free Film Festival.
Early JFK researchers featured in the film include Mark Lane, John Judge, Cyril Wecht, Robert Groden, Josiah Thompson, Jim DiEugenio, Jim Marrs, Gary Aguilar, Rex Bradford, Penn Jones, Vincent Salandria, Debra Conway, Harold Weisberg, Mary Farrell, Lisa Peace, Walt Brown, Mae Brussell, Ray Marcus, Shirley Martin, Lisa Pease, and John Kelin, most, if not all, of whom would be recognized by people who have delved into the JFK assassination.
There were two things that struck me about the film.
One, how the researchers are ordinary, regular, down-to-earth people who came to the realization that there was something fundamentally wrong with the official narrative in the JFK assassination and who decided to devote much of their lives to seeking the truth about the assassination.
Two, how reporters and commentators within the mainstream media overwhelming did the opposite, automatically deferring to the official account and steadfastly declining to pursue any investigation to determine whether the official account was truthful.
Much of the film focuses on this unusual dichotomy. After all, ordinarily you would think that it would be enterprising reporters who would be investigating a story that is riddled with contradictions, anomalies, inconsistencies, secrecy, mysteries, and lies by federal and state officials and that everyone else would be content to read the results of their investigations.
In the JFK assassination, it was (and is) the exact opposite. The mainstream media rolled over, and a group of self-selected individuals has done the investigating and ferreting out of the truth.
Of course the obvious question arises, one that the film does not answer or try to answer: Why?
Why did the reporters and the mainstream media simply roll over and accept the official story from the very start? Why didn’t they consider the possibility that they were being lied to? Why didn’t they even consider the possibility that the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was telling the truth when he denied having committed the crime and, going a critical step further, alleged that he was being framed for the crime? Why did they leave it to ordinary citizens to uncover the vast amount of circumstantial evidence, most of which U.S. officials kept secret, that has ultimately pointed in the direction of a U.S. national-security regime-change operation conducted against Kennedy?
Why weren’t they even a bit suspicious about how the entire investigation into what was purportedly a lone-nut assassination was shrouded in national-security secrecy for decades? Why didn’t they at least wonder whether all that secrecy was designed to cover up evidence of a crime?
Dec. 4
JFKFacts.org,CIA conceals files on wiretapped newsman who broke a big JFK story, Jefferson Morley, Dec. 4, 2017. In this Washington Post piece, When the CIA bugged my dad in our Prince George’s home, Jim Scott tells the story of how the CIA wiretapped his father, news reporter Paul Scott, for decades. In the 1960s, Paul Scott and his partner Robert Allen wrote a syndicated column on Washington politics that was driven, not by punditry, but by investigations. One reason Scott was targeted: his JFK reporting.
In March 1967, Allen and Scott published a sensational item in their column. The then-secret records of the Warren Commission, held by the National Archives, contained a State Department cable about suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald dated October 11, 1963.
The scoop was a threat to the CIA’s cover story about Oswald. The cable first reported by Paul Scott is a verbatim copy of the CIA cable that Jim Angleton’s staff sent to Mexico City the day before, on October 10.
In early 1967, the agency was still claiming, falsely, that its personnel knew little about Oswald’s visit to Mexico City in October 1963. When Warren Commission staffers asked in March 1964 for copies of the cable traffic concerning Oswald, Angleton said he preferred to “wait out” the Commission.
The Agency was also mobilizing against the investigation of New Orleans District Attorny Jim Garrison. Leading publications such Life and Look, two of the country’s most popular magazines, were calling for reopening the JFK investigation.
When Mexico City station chief Win Scott (no relation) read the Allen-Scott report he immediately cabled Langley. He warned against declassification of the cable saying it would open the CIA and State Department to “criticism” over “poor security.”
Dec. 1
Washington Post, When the CIA bugged my dad in our Prince George’s home, Jim Scott, Dec. 1, 2017. Twenty-five years apparently is not enough time to properly review the most sensitive documents about the Kennedy assassination. Now the CIA and FBI require another 180 days to complete this extended vetting process. The agencies are running out of time to prevent us from viewing the long-held and perhaps embarrassing secrets regarding Lee Harvey Oswald and his activities prior to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
I can relate to this delaying tactic by the CIA and FBI. More than 54 years ago, the agencies started wiretapping my dad’s work phone and our home phone in Prince George’s County. I’ve been working since 2008 to get access to the papers that would help me understand why they wiretapped my father, nationally syndicated columnist Paul Scott — and what they heard. I won’t end my search until all critical material is made public.
The notable stories he covered before and after the wiretap included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy assassination.
I hoped the release of more JFK files would expedite the declassification and release of material I sought regarding my father. It’s frustrating enough that it takes years for agencies to make a determination, but their responses often contain bureaucratic language, redacted pages or statutory exemptions without detailed explanation.
In response to my most recent Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI for 40 pages in my dad’s files, the agency declassified the material but then applied a security exemption to prevent public release. I still have no idea of the time frame or subject matter of the documents that could be more than 50 years old. Why can’t the FBI simply redact sensitive or personal info and not delete entire pages? I also can’t imagine that sources and methods used more than 50 years ago can’t be disclosed.
It’s even more frustrating dealing with the CIA. I learned a few months ago that I could not inquire about the status of my latest FOIA request (initiated in 2015) until June 30. And, even if I uncover information useful in the search, the CIA makes it extremely difficult to contact a case manager. Since my request with the CIA focuses primarily on locating the wiretap transcript, I posed these questions to the CIA: Could a CIA historian explain whether the transcript still exists? Was it destroyed or transferred to another government agency?
His obituary in the Wichita Falls Times Record News made no mention of his brother's infamous place in history except to say "he spent his youth in Louisiana with his brothers Lee and John Pic before joining the Marine Corps in 1952 at age 18."
Oswald often said he believed the findings of most experts that his brother acted alone in killing the president on Nov. 22, 1963. Late in life, he said he still didn't understand why. "This is mind over heart," Oswald once told ABC News. "The mind tells me one thing, the heart tells me something else, but the facts are there."
Editor's note: Some experts in the JFK research community allege that the deceased sold out his brother's memory, wife and daughters, in part to achieve peace with the power structure.
November
Nov. 29
Madcow News, Jada & ‘the boys,’ Daniel Hopsicker, Nov. 29, 2017. Two hours before John Kennedy was murdered at 12:30 p.m. Central Time on Friday November 22 1963, something happened in Dallas which renders the official story that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut gunman as silly as arguments that the Earth is flat and astronauts never landed on the moon.
At 10:30 that morning Jada Conforto (shown at right), the burlesque queen headlining Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, was hurtling across Dallas in her bronze Cadillac convertible, in such a panic to leave town that she struck a pedestrian at an intersection less than a mile from Love Field, where JFK’s plane had earlier touched down.
The injured pedestrian later testified that Jada said she’d been in a hurry to leave. Jack Ruby’s top stripper caused an accident while desperately trying to get out of town. It never even made the papers. More on this in a moment.
Because this is just the first of two significant incidents involving Jada. Emphasizing how close she was to the plot to kill JFK, she was involved in a second incident whose import changes the story of the Kennedy assassination.
Nov. 27
Future of Freedom Foundation, America’s Bargain with the Devil, Jacob G. Hornberger (shown at right), Nov. 27, 2017. As many Americans know, the National Archives ended up releasing only about 5 percent of the CIA’s JFK-assassination-related records, notwithstanding the fact that the JFK Records Act, which is the law, required the release of all of them.
The CIA claims that the release of remaining JFK assassination records would threaten “national security,” but that claim is patently ridiculous, especially when we consider that these records are more than 50 years old. There is another reason for secrecy, the same reason that existed for secrecy back in 1963: the remaining records, especially those relating to Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico City, include additional pieces of circumstantial evidence implicating the CIA in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The few records that were recently released include a conspiracy that started out as a theory and ended up as fact: the CIA’s assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, the communist leader of Cuba. There is now no question but that the CIA conspired with the Mafia, the premier private-sector assassination organization in the world, to assassinate Castro.
As it turns out, however, Castro wasn’t the only Cuban the CIA conspired to murder. While Americans have long known about the CIA-Mafia conspiracy to assassinate Castro, the newly released records have revealed something new: Operation Bounty, which offered financial payments for “killing or delivering alive known [Cuban] Communists.”
To get a good sense of how the mainstream media reacts to such things, consider how the Washington Post reported on the discovery of Operation Bounty: “But the truly novel revelation are fairly minor. One such example is Operation BOUNTY, which targeted Cuban communists.” (See: What the JFK assassination files can tell us about the U.S. plot to kill Castro, Michael Poznansky, Oct. 30, 2017.
Minor? How can it possibly be minor when innocent people are being murdered by the U.S. government? Because that is precisely what assassination is: murder. In fact, even Lyndon Johnson, who wasn’t exactly the paragon or moral values, pointedly noted that the CIA was running a “damned Murder, Inc.” in the Caribbean.
Nov. 25
Quillettte, Are the JFK Conspiracies Slowly Dying? Craig Colgan, Nov. 25, 2017. The JFK conspiracy machine, which had showed some signs of slowing, was jolted back into life by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. Stone’s dazzling polemic is credited with the subsequent creation of the Assassination Records Review Board by Congress, which not only searched for un-released assassination documents but also deposed witnesses under oath. But Stone made the protagonist of his film Jim Garrison, the clownish New Orleans district attorney whose failed investigation is seen today, even by many conspiracists, as a sham. CAPA editor's note: The blog above is excerpted as a example of opinion and not for the accuracy of its judgments. Black Op Radio (shown #862), Topic: The Houston Trial in retrospect, Guests: Larry Schnapf and Jim DiEugenio, Nov. 23, 2017 (52:53 mins.). A discussion of the CAPA trial strategies in Houston Nov. 16 & 17, 2017. Also, Views of the Trial outcome: Pro and Con what can we learn. Play Jim DiEugenio (1:58:13 hrs.).
Nov. 22
Future of Freedom Foundation, Opinion: JFK, the CIA, and Secrecy, Jacob G. Hornberger (shown right), Nov. 22, 2017. Today marks the 54th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who famously said, "The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings...."
Isn’t that the ultimate of ironies, given that the “investigation” into his assassination was shrouded in secrecy and continues to be shrouded in secrecy?
It’s been that way since the day of the assassination. Everything was said to involve “national security,” which were (and are) the two most important words in the American political lexicon. Most of the proceedings of the Warren Commission, which was charged with pinning the assassination on Lee Harvey Oswald, were conducted in secret. The commission ordered that records relating to its proceedings be kept secret from the American people … for 75 years! When Warren was asked if Americans would ever be permitted to see the records, he responded, “Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime….”
Immediately upon JFK’s death, a team of Secret Service agents, following orders from new President Lyndon Johnson, forced their way out of Parkland Hospital, where the president had died. Brandishing guns and screaming profanities, they made it clear to Dallas Medical Examiner Earl Rose that they had absolutely no intention of complying with Texas law, which required that Rose conduct an autopsy.
They took the body to Dallas Love Field, where Johnson was waiting for it. The body was delivered into the hands of the military in Maryland, which conducted an autopsy under top-secret conditions. Military personnel who participated in the autopsy were required to sign secrecy oaths in which they promised never to reveal what they had seen.
In the 1990s, thanks to Oliver Stone’s movie JFK (Stone is shown at right), the American people came to the realization that the CIA, the military, and other national-security state agencies were still shrouding their assassination records in secrecy. Public pressure caused Congress to enact the JFK Records Act in 1992, which ordered the CIA, the military, FBI, Secret Service, and other national-security state agencies to show their assassination records to the American people.
That was when it dawned on a lot of Americans that the military had conducted a false and fraudulent autopsy on the president’s body.
WhoWhatWhy, What Could Have Been — JFK in His Own Words, Milicent Cranor, Nov. 22, 2017. On the anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, let’s not forget the man who was lost that day and think about how much he could have changed the world. It is a big year for those interested in the mysteries that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on this day in 1963 still poses. WhoWhatWhy has been a leader on this subject and our team of experts will spend this day — as it has so many others — scouring the newly released documents for interesting information.
However, on this anniversary, we wanted to take a step back from the minutiae of CIA cables, FBI memos and other documents related to the assassination. Instead, we want to focus on what sometimes seems to get overlooked as people try to put together the puzzle: John F. Kennedy, the person and statesman the world lost that day.
Peoples Internet Radio, John Barbour with Karl Golovin, Andrew Kreig and Brian Lloyd, interviewed by Catherine April Watters, Nov. 22, 2017. Crowd Source Radio, John Barbour with Brian Lloyd, interviewed by Jason Goodman, Nov. 22, 2017. Nov. 21 Kennedys and King (formerly CTKA), The State of Texas vs Lee Harvey Oswald: The JFK Autopsy Skull X-rays in John Fitzgerald Kennedy, David Mantik, Nov. 21, 2017. The complete visual essay prepared by expert witness David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., for the mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald held at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, November 16 - 17, 2017. We are pleased to be able to feature here in its entirety a PowerPoint presentation on the JFK X-rays which for reasons of time was not fully reviewed by the jury during the mock trial.
Dr. David W. Mantik has been studying these materials since the early 1990s. He is a radiation oncologist and also holds a Ph.D. in physics. He has visited NARA on nine separate occasions and is one of the few outside the government to have been granted access to the autopsy X-rays and photographs. He also has published extensively on these issues, perhaps most notably in the peer-reviewed Medical Research Archives.
But Lee Oswald spent nine years in Benbrook and Fort Worth. He still lies here.
More than a half-century after Kennedy was assassinated on Dallas’ Elm Street, the memory of both men is very much alive in Fort Worth, where an aging generation saw Kennedy’s spirited visit Nov. 21-22, 1963 and then whispered about their brawling school classmate who killed him.
“Fort Worth was as close to a home as he ever had,” said Stephen Fagin, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the museum built around Oswald’s sniper’s perch. “Benbrook is where we first see this pattern emerge of an emotionally disturbed little boy. And when he comes home years later [from the Soviet Union], Fort Worth is where we first see him being abusive to his wife.”
CAPA editor's note: The story above is cited as an example of mainstream coverage and not for the truth of the underlying claims.
Nov. 20
Primal Interviews via Vimeo, Cyril Wecht on Kennedy: The Endless Cover-Up, Interview of Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, Nov. 20, 2017. In this Primal Interview, Paul Guggenheimer talks with forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, a longtime critic of the Warren commission and its' finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing JFK on November 22, 1963. In 1972, Dr. Wecht was the first civilian given permission to examine the Warren Commission's evidence at the National Archives. JFKFacts.org, Top 5 JFK files that the CIA is still hiding, Jefferson Morley, Nov. 20, 2017. The government’s release of long-secret JFK assassination records is generating headlines and hype worldwide. But the truth is the majority of the JFK files that were supposed to be released last month remain secret — and may forever if the CIA has its way.
On October 24, President Trump tweeted that “JFK files are released long ahead of schedule,” which was not true, In fact, as Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, pointed out in WhoWhatWhy, only about 10 percent of the JFK files were public by the statutory deadline of October 26. The hype continued November 3, when the National Archives posted more than 553 CIA documents never made public before, which CNN described as a “horde.” On November 9, the CIA and NSA released another batch of files, which the Washington Post called a “huge trove.”
But as Bradford explained in an interview, the impressive-sounding numbers lacked context. Even after the latest file dump on November 9, at least two-thirds of the never-seen JFK files that were supposed to be released — some 2,538 records — remain secret, according to the foundation’s analysis.
At least one-third of the JFK files that were previously released with redactions — a total of about 12,000 files — have still not been made public in unexpurgated form, he said. Unlike mainstream news organizations, the Mary Ferrell Foundation monitors the National Archives database for the latest information on what has and has not been released. Bradford called the releases so far “a big roiling mess.”
RT via WhoWhatWhy, Dick Russell Speaks on the New JFK Assassination Files, WhoWhatWhy Staff, Nov. 20, 2017. Dick Russell talks to RT News about the recently released JFK assassination files and what we can learn from them. Acclaimed author and WhoWhatWhy contributor Dick Russell recently (Nov. 16, 2017 ) spoke to RT News’s
.be" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Watching the Hawks about the JFK assassination records that have been newly released by the National Archives. Russell talks about the true identity of Lee Harvey Oswald — is there evidence he was a US intelligence asset posing as a fake defector to the USSR?
Who was the “Mexico City mystery man” that was apparently posing as Oswald in the months leading up to the assassination? And despite President Donald Trump allowing these new documents to be released with significant redactions remaining — at least for now — what more can we learn? Watch the below video to find this out, and more.
Dick Russell is the author of many books, but he is perhaps best known for his thrilling, The Man Who Knew Too Much (Carroll & Graf, 2003).
University of Arkansas at Little Rock News, UA Little Rock professor reflects on investigation of JFK assassination records, Angelita Faller, Nov. 20, 2017. In 1991, the conspiracy-thriller film, “JFK,” reignited the public’s interest in a potential political conspiracy involving the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992, which created the Assassination Records Review Board, an agency that investigated and collected records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“As someone who taught public policy, I’m not surprised a movie started all of this,” said Dr. David Montague, director of eLearning at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, who served as the senior investigator of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board from 1995 to 1997.
“Once that movie came out in 1991, a lot of people were getting older and wondering what really happened to JFK,” he said. “You had a president killed on national TV, and then the Warren Commission comes out and said Lee Harvey Oswald, single bullet, lone gunman. A lot of people weren’t satisfied. People wondered why the government needed to keep so many records classified. Is it administrative red tape, national security, or something else?”
The legislation also required the government to release all files related to Kennedy’s assassination after 25 years. President Donald Trump released thousands of the last classified records Oct. 26, but delayed the release of hundreds of documents due to national security concerns. Those documents will receive a 180-day review of redactions from agencies. An additional batch of documents related to Kennedy’s assassination investigation was released Nov. 3.
As senior investigator, Montague investigated, identified, collected, and reviewed countless documents and interviews related to Kennedy’s assassination. Most of the files Montague reviewed have already been released to the public. While he is excited about the recent release of additional documents, he doesn’t think they will provide the answers people hope to find.
“Do I think the release of these documents will shut all the questions down? No. I think it will intensify the questions for some people, and there are always going to be those that think this (Kennedy’s assassination investigation) is a dead issue,” Montague said.
When Montague joined the review board, he didn’t realize how vastly complex the investigation and theories surrounding Kennedy’s assassination were.
“I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and I always had a commitment to public service,” Montague said. “I knew his death was a very big deal. What I didn’t realize is that it was enormously complex. I was very naïve at first. When I was first sitting in the executive director’s office, I started thinking about how we are a whole agency focused on the assassination of one person. Does that make sense? Then I realized how complex it has been for decades and the mystery that surrounded it.”
Nov. 18The Secret Truth, Interview of JFK Researcher and "Presidential Puppetry" author Andrew Kreig, George Butler, Nov. 18, 2017. George Butler spent three years in the U.S. Army, the last year in West Berlin, Germany, he witnessed the vulgarities and cruelties of the Berlin Wall. Today he speaks out about preserving our rights. His concerned about America's and the World's slide toward fascism motivated him along with Charlotte "Littlefield" Brown to launch the radio talk show program in the fall of 2006 "The Secret Truth." Today, America and the World are experiencing a great transformation and Mr. Butler is intent on trying to awaken the citizenry to present dangerous trends.
Nov. 17
National Archives, New Group of JFK Assassination Records Available to the Public, Staff report, Nov. 17, 2017. In the fifth public release this year, the National Archives today posted 10,744 records subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act).
All of the documents released today are from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Of the documents released today, 8,336 documents are released in their entirety and 2,408 are released with limited redactions. Also, this is the first release for 144 of the documents. Released records are available for download.
The versions released today were processed by the FBI and, in accordance with the President’s guidance, are being posted expeditiously in order to make the documents available to the public, even before the March deadline established by the President on Oct. 26, 2017. Any information that has been redacted from the records in this public release remains subject to further review by the FBI and the National Archives in accordance with the President’s direction.
The National Archives released 13,213 documents on Nov. 9, 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. 16
Black Op Radio (Show #861), Topics: Continued Redactions / JFK Conferences / Mock Trial, Guests: Dan Hardway / Larry Hancock / Bill Kelly / Chris Gallop / Mark de Valk, Nov. 16, 2017 (54:25 mins.). 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.
Future of Freedom Foundation, How to Understand JFK Conspiracy Theories, Jacob G. Hornberger (shown at right), Nov. 13, 2017. The recent October 26 deadline for releasing 50-year-old JFK-assassination records of the CIA and other federal agencies provided an opportunity for people to promote their favorite JFK assassination theories. The Russians did it. Fidel Castro did it. The U.S. national-security establishment did it. The Mafia did it. A lone nut named Lee Harvey Oswald did it.
The reaction among some people was predictable: “Oh, there are so many JFK assassination theories that I guess we’ll never know what really happened.” Or “It’s all so overwhelming and I just don’t want to be pulled into the rabbit hole.”
Actually, however, understanding the various conspiracy and non-conspiracy theories in the JFK assassination is really not that difficult. All it takes is some critical thinking, analysis, and common sense.
There are three major conspiracy theories and one non-conspiracy theory (i.e., the lone-nut theory). Let’s examine each one. I believe you’ll see why the matter isn’t as difficult as mainstream writers and commentators make it out to be.
Nov. 10
Future of Freedom Foundation, The JFK Autopsy Cover-Up, Jacob G. Hornberger, 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. Released records are available for download here.
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.
Black Op Radio (Show #860), Topics: Vietnam and Nixon / CIA and Oswald / Film Screening CITIZEN LANE by Pauley Perrette (2017), Guests: Jim DiEugenio (1:47:55 hrs.) / Steve Jaffe (35:07 mins.) / John Barbour (50:03 mins), Nov. 9, 2017. 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.
There is at least one potential smoking gun in the new JFK files, and it may soon come into public view. As I explained to the Washington Post: "one of the more interesting documents to emerge involves a CIA cable about Oswald’s contacts in Mexico City that had up until Friday been partially redacted. The Oct. 8, 1963 cable discussed Oswald’s interactions with a Soviet consular official named Valery Kostikov, the reputed head of the KGB’s assassinations operations. On Friday, the CIA cable’s slugline was finally declassified. The title: LCIMPROVE.”
If there is a “smoking gun” in the JFK files, it will be found in the FBI’s curious response to the October 8, 1963 cable. The next day, October 9, 1963, the FBI made a curious decision that has long puzzled JFK researchers and historians. Senior agents in Washington removed Oswald’s name from a list of persons of interest to FBI headquarters. Six weeks later, Oswald was arrested for shooting JFK.
In other words, the day after the CIA’s top counterintelligence official was informed that Oswald had met with possible KGB officer in Mexico City, the FBI decided that Oswald was no longer worthy of close scrutiny. The FBI files, scheduled for release, will likely shed light on this fateful decision. The FBI has previously released internal records about why the so-called “Flash” notice on Oswald was cancelled but they are filled with redactions. If and when those redactions are removed, we may learn who was shielding Oswald from law enforcement attention as he made his way to Dallas.
JFKFacts.org, Morley responds to CIA historian David Robarge, Jefferson Morley (shown at right), Nov. 6, 2017. In a great compliment to me, personally and professionally, CIA historian David Robarge has attacked my new biography of James Angleton, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (St. Martin’s Press. 336 pp. $27.99).
Robarge’s review is a compliment because it shows how my account of Angleton’s career is disturbing the CIA’s preferred narrative of Angleton, and especially the agency’s enduring cover story that Angleton was not paying close attention to Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1963. In fact, he was paying attention to Oswald, as I show in The Ghost. Robarge is discomfited by the JFK facts as I have presented them. He should be.
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 re-investigate the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.The important and much longer version of this column is on the AARC website and is highly recommended.
James Angleton (shown below at right 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 dismembered 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 exiles. 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.)
They stood by, grinning, as they watched my reaction upon opening the file to find it largely expurgated. They were grinning so hard because they knew they had waited out the HSCA and there was nothing I could do about it. The Angleton strategy still worked. It is still working today.
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 Johnny Roselli.
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. They stood by, grinning, as they watched my reaction upon opening the file to find it largely expurgated. They were grinning so hard because they knew they had waited out the HSCA and there was nothing I could do about it. The Angleton strategy still worked. It is still working today.
It appears our lawmakers are spineless in the face of the intelligence community. Joseph Burkholder Smith (shown at left), a retired CIA officer, told me and Gaeton Fonzi in 1978, “You represent Congress. What the f*** is that to the CIA? You’ll be gone in two years and the CIA will still be there.” To paraphrase that to fit the situation in which we now find ourselves: “You are the people that Congress supposedly represents. What’s that to the CIA? You’ll forget about it in a few weeks or so.”
But I won’t. I wrote a letter to my Senator yesterday before I saw the travesty that was the day’s release of JFK documents by NARA. Probably a futile gesture, but one I had to take anyway.
To my knowledge there has been no coverage or explanation of why the intelligence community has requested this delay of the President. It was made in secret. What reason have they given for the delay?
What kind of pressure have they brought to bear? How can they force a president to so blatantly disregard the law? If they can do this in regard to disclosure of fifty-year-old records, in what else can they exercise a like secret influence that corrupts the laws of the nation?
What affect does the existence and use of such secret power have on our democracy? If these things – not just the documents but the method of influence – remain always secret, then how can a citizenry be sufficiently informed so as to exercise their franchise to any real purpose? How can we have faith in our democracy, let alone our government, if this kind of practice is allowed to continue unchallenged?
These are the questions that I would like to have answered.
Nov. 3 Future of Freedom Foundation, The Cunningness of the CIA’s JFK Assassination Cover-Up, Jacob G. Hornberger (shown at right), Nov. 3, 2017. Whatever else might be said about the assassination of President Kennedy, one thing is for sure: The cover-up of this particular U.S. regime-change operation was one of the most ingenious and cunning plots ever designed. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, given that practically from its inception in 1947 the CIA was specializing in the arts of assassination, regime change, and cover-up.
As far back as 1953, the CIA published an assassination manual that the CIA succeeded in keeping secret from the American people for more than 40 years. It came to light in 1997 as a result of a Freedom of Information request. That was around the time that the Assassination Records Review Board, which was overseeing the mandatory release of JFK-related assassination records of the CIA and other federal agencies that had been kept secret from the American people since 1963.
Today, Americans can read the CIA’s assassination manual online. Titled “Study of Assassination,” the manual spells out various ways to assassinate people. Here is what the manual states in part regarding the use of firearms: "Firearms are often used in assassination, often very ineffectively…. Public figures or guarded officials may be killed with great reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion. The propaganda value of this system may be very high."
The manual also makes it clear that the CIA was studying ways to assassinate people without being detected. Note the following excerpt: "For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated."
It would be safe to assume that the CIA continued developing and expanding on the assassination principles enunciated in that early assassination manual. That’s what we would expect from an agency whose specialties included assassination. We can also assume that the CIA continued to refine the ways to avoid detection when assassinating someone.
The CIA published that secret assassination manual as part of its preparations for a U.S. regime-change operation in Guatemala, one that was designed to violently remove the nation’s democratically elected socialist president, Jacobo Arbenz, from office and replace him with an unelected, right-wing, pro-U.S. military general.
As part of the Guatemala regime-change operation, the CIA prepared a list of Guatemalan officials to be assassinated. While the CIA has never revealed the names of the people it targeted for assassination, there is little doubt that Arbenz, the president, was at the top of the list. There is something important to note: Neither Arbenz nor any other Guatemalan official had ever attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.
Nov. 2
Future of Freedom Foundation, Oliver Stone Was Right about the CIA, Jacob G. Hornberger (shown at right), Nov. 2, 2017. I can’t decide which is more amusing: the CIA’s use of “national security” to justify keeping secret its 50-year-old records in the JFK assassination or the mainstream media’s response to the continued secrecy.
On the one hand, the CIA’s use of “national security” to justify keeping 98 percent of the still-secret records is palpably laughable. However one defines that nebulous term “national security,” one thing is patently clear: Nothing — absolutely nothing — would have happened to the United States if the CIA had been forced to let the American people see its still-secret, 50-year-old JFK records on October 26, 2018, as the 1992 JFK Records Act mandated. The United States wouldn’t have fallen into the ocean. The federal government wouldn’t have turned Red.
After all, what happened to the United States when only 2 percent of the long-secret records were finally released last week? Nothing. The United States is still standing and the commies have not taken over the federal government. But don’t forget: For more than 50 years, the CIA has maintained, falsely as it turns out, that disclosing those 2 percent of its records would threaten “national security.”
Black Op Radio (Show #859), Topics: CAPA & Texas V. Oswald / Studio film screening, Guests: Cyril Wecht (23.37 mins. ) / Bill Simpich (37:02 mins.) / Larry Schnapf (38:10 mins.) / John Barbour (19:49 mins.), Nov. 2, 2017. CAPA (Citizens Against Political Assassinations). State Of Texas V. Lee Harvey Oswald: Nov. 16-17, Houston. The first time scientific evidence in this case will be presented. You do not have evidence in this crime of a sole shooter.
The documentary film The Parkland Doctors will premiere at this event. Alec Baldwin will speak at the banquet Thursday night. Cyril Wecht eagerly awaits all the contributions of his colleagues. This two-day event will be live-streamed. Disappointment that Trump's willingness to release all records was foiled. Eyeball-to-eyeball with the CIA, Trump seemed to cave a little bit. Black Op Radio (Show #860), Topics: Vietnam and Nixon / CIA and Oswald / Film Screening CITIZEN LANE by Pauley Perrette (2017), Guests: Jim DiEugenio (1:47:55 hrs.) / Steve Jaffe (35:07 mins.) / John Barbour (50:03 mins), Nov. 9, 2017. https://blackopradio.com/archives2017.html Walt Brown (1:29:19 hrs.) https://blackopradio.com/archives2017.html
October
Oct. 30
JFK Investigation Follow-up Mary Ferrell Foundation, Formerly withheld-in-full documents released on Oct. 26, 2017, Rex Bradford (shown in file photo), Oct. 30, 2017. These 52 documents, all formerly withheld in full, were released on October 26, 2017 (25 years after the passage of the JFK Records Act). They come from a variety of agencies. An additional 2839 formerly-redacted documents were also released on that day. See the 2017 Documents project page under the Resources menu for more information.
Sort by: Title NARA RIF Number Date Agency File Number
4. [No Title] RIF#: 124-90089-10094 (01/04/1961) FBI#: 2-1622-62, etc.
Consortium News, The Deep State’s JFK Triumph Over Trump, Ray McGovern (former CIA analyst, shown in a file photo), Oct. 30, 2017. Fifty-four years after President Kennedy’s assassination, the CIA and FBI demanded more time to decide what secrets to keep hiding – and a chastened President Trump bowed to their power.
It was summer 1963 when a senior official of CIA’s operations directorate treated our Junior Officer Trainee (JOT) class to an unbridled rant against President John F. Kennedy. He accused JFK, among other things, of rank cowardice in refusing to send U.S. armed forces to bail out Cuban rebels pinned down during the CIA-launched invasion at the Bay of Pigs, blowing the chance to drive Cuba’s Communist leader Fidel Castro from power.
It seemed beyond odd that a CIA official would voice such scathing criticism of a sitting President at a training course for those selected to be CIA’s future leaders. I remember thinking to myself, “This guy is unhinged; he would kill Kennedy, given the chance.”
JFK Countercoup, Adam Gopnik/New Yorker Annotated, Bill Kelly, Oct. 30, 2017. JIP Editor's Note: Assassination research expert Bill Kelly, board member of Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), debunks the pro-Warren Commission, lone-nut-did-it propaganda of New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik. Gopnik authored The J.F.K. Files, Trump, and the Deep State, published on Oct. 29, in which he reviewed in superficial fashion documents released last week by the Trump administration in partial compliance with a law requiring release of JFK assassination documents by Oct. 26. Gopnik claimed that the documents reaffirm his 2013 analysis that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and killed President Kennedy with three shots fired from the rear. Kelly (whose comments below are identified with "BK" contradicted Gopnik's claims, beginning with those below:
So far, the newly released documents on John F. Kennedy’s assassination seem only to confirm the wisest conclusions about the President’s death.
BK – Yes, that he was not murdered by one man alone.
The release last Thursday of previously classified, or at least unseen, government files of all kinds relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy is being heralded as Donald Trump’s decision—though it was simply his decision not to prevent their release, which had long been scheduled. In fact, at the last minute, Trump listened to requests from the intelligence services not to release some three hundred of the remaining three thousand files.
BK: You got your numbers wrong Gopnik – get it right please – this is important.
Georgetowner, Conspiracy Theories Old and New, Peggy Sands, Oct. 30, 2017. It’s Halloween 2017 and, perhaps appropriately, old and new mysteries of murder, collusion and conspiracy involving the highest realms of government — including the White House — have taken center stage.
On Friday, Oct. 27, the National Archives and Records Administration released 2,800 documents, held by the FBI and the CIA for 25 years, relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Hotly anticipated, this final document dump was supposed to definitively confirm or deny the Warren Commission’s official and controversial single-shooter, single-bullet conclusion about who shot JFK and why. But at the last minute on Friday, the National Archives held back the release of some records “for national security reasons”; these will be reviewed, re-redacted and released (perhaps) six months from now.
In the end, it may not matter what we know or what the facts are, at least according to [Andrew] Kreig, [who cites the former Georgetown University CSIS scholar and Reagan administration official Dr. Paul Craig Roberts as writing this week]: “The official story will never be changed. J. Edgar Hoover, along with LBJ, Earl Warren and the members of the Warren Commission understood that it was impossible to tell the American people that their president has been assassinated by the U.S. military and U.S. security agencies. At a dicey time of the Cold War, clearly it would have been reckless to destroy Americans’ trust in their own government.”
ABA Journal, JFK assassination documents digitized and made searchable by e-discovery firm, Jason Tashea, Oct. 31, 2017. The legal review software company iCONECT has digitized some JFK assassination records and is offering free access for 60 days. Launched Oct. 30, the company imported 6,701 public documents from the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection to its Xera platform, including audio files. A user can now search various fields to find relevant information. This is an improvement over the National Archives’ repository of these documents, which are in PDF format and non-searchable, according to a press release.
iCONECT also “built a search index, charts, graphs, quick-search folders and word-highlight reports for all the records,” according to the release. A user can even auto-mark CIA cryptonyms found throughout the document set.
The federal government released 2,800 new documents last week, according to CNN, after President Donald Trump declared on Twitter that he would do so.
“I am doing this for reasons of full disclosure, transparency and in order to put any and all conspiracy theories to rest,” Trump tweeted.
Full disclosure has so far proved illusive because of concerns from national security agencies that have kept many documents classified.
Not including the recent release of documents, “five million pages of assassination-related records” and other artifacts were already available online, according to the National Archives. All of the public records in the archive are free to the public.
Oct. 29
Secret Service Special Agent Clint Hill, at top left, climbs onto bumper of President Kennedy's limousine in Dallas after the fatal shooting in 1963. The president's wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, meanwhile reaches for brain matter on the car trunk in hope it could help doctors. OpEdNews, Opinion: The Kennedy Assassination, Paul Craig Roberts (conservative scholar and former Reagan Assistant Treasury Secretary), Oct. 29, 2017. J. Edgar Hoover, along with LBJ, Earl Warren and the members of the Warren Commission understood that it was impossible to tell the American people that their president has been assassinated by the US military and US security agencies. At a dicey time of the Cold War, clearly it would have been reckless to destroy Americans' trust in their own government.
Some are pushing me to continue with the Las Vegas shooting story while others are asking to know what to make of the release of files pertaining to President Kennedy's assassination. My answer is that we already know, thanks to exhaustively researched books such as James W. Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable (Simon & Schuster, 2008), far more than is in the released files. My answer is also that it doesn't matter what we know or what the facts are, the official story will never be changed.
Douglass concludes that Kennedy was murdered because he turned to peace. He was going to work with Khrushchev to end the Cold War. He refused the CIA US air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion. He rejected the Joint Chiefs' Operation Northwoods, a plan to conduct false flag attacks on Americans that would be blamed on Castro to justify regime change. He refused to reappoint General Lyman Lemnitzer as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He told US Marine commandant General David Shoup that he was taking the US out of Vietnam. He said after his reelection he was going to "break the CIA into 1,000 pieces."
All of this threatened the power and profit of the military/security complex and convinced military/security elements that he was soft on communism and a threat to US national security.
New Yorker, The J.F.K. Files, Trump, and the Deep State, Adam Gopnik, Oct. 29, 2017. [CAPA Editor's Note]: The following column is excerpted as an example of #JFKFakeNews, not for veracity]:
It’s always possible that some smoking gun of a document will reveal itself in the remaining files. Scrolling through the PDFs of the (very well presented) documents, though, mostly reveals just what one expected: rumors and scuttlebutt, with uncertain sourcing. We learn that, two days after the assassination, the F.B.I. was roiled by the possibility that Jack Ruby was identical to a Florida racketeer named Rubin. And that, two weeks before the assassination, one Robert C. Rawls overheard someone in a bar in New Orleans offering to bet a hundred dollars that President Kennedy would not be alive in three weeks’ time. But, the document reads, “He does not recall ever seeing the man before and is not certain that he would recognize him if he did. He admits being somewhat intoxicated at the time and said the man also was in an intoxicated condition.”
Perhaps that smoking gun may yet exist; God knows there are enough dogged assassination researchers out there to find it if it does. But, so far, the documents seem to confirm the wisest twin conclusions about the J.F.K. assassination: Oswald was guilty, and acted alone; and, at the same time, the intelligence services — the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the rest — were up to their armpits in bad acts that they were trying to keep concealed. These conclusions, as I wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, point to two more: that the Warren Commission is almost certainly the only plausible account of what happened on that day in Dallas, and that the underlife of the government was more sinister, or at least more complicit in guilty knowledge, than the image makers of the time, and the Kennedys, wanted to accept or to publicize.
Oct. 28
Mary Ferrell Foundation, Featured: What Happened Thursday with the JFK Records? Rex Bradford, Oct. 28, 2017. Rex Bradford (shown above in a 2013 interview on C-SPAN) is president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the world's largest private collection of JFK-related assassination documents. It is named for a late Dallas secretary, shown at right, who started it by collecting newspapers and documents out of disbelief in official reports.
A travesty. Most news reports correctly noted the release of about 2800 documents, but added that only a few were held back, in some cases saying "300 documents" remain withheld (see CNN, and Washington Post for example). They are off by a factor of 100. In fact, tens of thousands of documents, possibly as many as 30,000, remain sealed at the National Archives.
If President Trump had gone golfing at Mar-A-Lago and done absolutely nothing on Thursday, the National Archives (NARA) was set to release all the documents. See the relevant language in the Assassination Records Review Board's Final Report, quoting from the 1992 JFK Records Act.
This includes 3,147 "withheld in full" records never seen, and an unknown number of redacted documents estimated at about 30,000. Intensely lobbied by federal agencies including the CIA, Trump instead authorized the withholding of well over 90% of these documents. 52 of the 3,147 withheld-in-full records were released and put online by NARA, less than 2%, and 2,839 of the redacted documents were released, which is probably less than 10% of that set.
From the public metadata available for all these records, it's clear that the most-desired records were held back. Still withheld-in-full records among the 98% of those still withheld include, for example:
* Still-withheld Church Committee interview transcripts not included in the 1990s releases, including one with none other than CIA CounterIntelligence chief James Angleton.
* Lengthy CIA files on officers who played a role in Castro assassination plotting and/or the JFK story, including William Harvey, David Philips, E. Howard Hunt, James O'Connell, Richard Synder, and several others.
* A 167-page CIA document on Valeriy Kostikov, the Soviet agent stationed in Mexico whose name was used as part of the "World War III" scenario that the Warren Commission we now know was created to push back against.
* An interview the House Select Committee on Assassinations conducted with Orest Pena, the New Orleans bar owner who told the Committee that Oswald was an FBI informant and he often saw Oswald in the company of a particular FBI agent.
RT, Let's try this again: Trump vows full JFK files release to ‘put conspiracy theories to rest,’ Staff and wire reports, Oct. 28, 2017. Following Thursday's limited declassification of files relating to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, President Donald Trump tweeted on Friday that a complete release is imminent. “After strict consultation with General Kelly, the CIA and other Agencies, I will be releasing ALL JFK files other than the names and addresses of any mentioned person who is still living. I am doing this for reasons of full disclosure, transparency and in order to put any and all conspiracy theories to rest,” Trump tweeted.
BAIER: Let's talk about the FISA issue and other topics. Joining us now, here at the Department Of Justice, Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Attorney General, thanks for having us.
SESSIONS: Thank you, Bret. It's good to have you in our courtyard. Great building and great history, I work every day to be worthy of this great tradition to this department.
BAIER: Let me talk about the piece we just saw and that issue about FISA. There are concerns on Capitol Hill, a number of law makers think their need to be changes. What is your take, what is the administration's take?
SESSIONS: My view, and I’ve had it really embedded in me since I’ve been here in – in the department, is that this is a really important issue. We have to protect the fundamentals of 702. I really think if people understood it, they wouldn't think any changes needs to be made. But Congress is working at it, giving intensive review of it.
BAIER: Speaking of taking time, big story today, these JFK papers. The president says he wants to put them out. Then they come out redacted because of concerns from the CIA and FBI and there's a lot of people saying that after all these years, weren't you ready for this day?
SESSIONS: It's time to get it done, Bret. I've talked with the FBI. We've talked with our staff here. I think the president's right to say, let’s get these materials out. they are moving today very quickly. Some of documents have already been produced today and they will be moving faster, there will not be, I believe, any significant redactions – redaction that may have been suggested will not be in there. There's going to be virtually complete disclosure. Some people who are alive may not need their names or their current address’s revealed. Lot of it is extraneous entirely.
BAIER: You are trying to expedite it?
SESSIONS: We are working this weekend. We are going to be working every way possible to expedite the production of these documents as completely as possible and they will be virtually, completely revealed from the FBI files.
Associated Press, Trump frustrated by secrecy with JFK files, Staff report, Oct. 28, 2017. Thursday's release of 2,800 records from the JFK files was anything but smooth. An irritated Trump resisted signing off redaction requests, according to an account by two White House officials. It was a showdown 25 years in the making: With the world itching to finally get a look at classified Kennedy assassination files, and the deadline for their release just hours away, intelligence officials were still angling for a way to keep their secrets.
President Donald Trump, the one man able to block the release, did not appreciate their persistence. He did not intend to make this easy.
The tale of the final hours before the congressionally mandated 25-year release deadline adds a new chapter to the story of Trump's troubled relationship with his spy agencies. He again flashed his skepticism and unpredictability in dealing with agencies long accustomed to a level of deference. Intelligence officials, meanwhile, were again left scratching their heads about a president whose impulses they cannot predict.
And those officials had their own story tell, some rejecting the notion they were slow to act on Trump's expectations for the documents. The CIA began work months ago to get its remaining assassination-related documents ready for release on Thursday, according to a person familiar with the process. The person, who was not authorized to publicly to discuss the process and spoke only on condition of anonymity, said the goal was to have all the agency's documents ready to be released in full or with national security redactions before the deadline.
Late last week, Trump received his first official briefing on the release in an Oval Office meeting that included Chief of Staff John Kelly, White House Counsel Don McGahn and National Security Council legal adviser John Eisenberg. Trump made it clear he was unsatisfied with the pace of declassification. Trump's tweets, an official said, were meant as a signal to the intelligence community to take seriously his threats to release the documents in their entirety.
According to White House officials, Trump accepted that some of the records contained references to sensitive sources and methods used by the intelligence community and law enforcement and that declassification could harm American foreign policy interests. But after having the scope of the redactions presented to him, Trump told aides he did not believe them to be in the spirit of the law.
Los Angeles Times, Opinion: The latest JFK documents still don't show a Russian conspiracy, James Reston Jr., Oct. 28, 2017. The partial release of the remaining documents in the government’s Kennedy assassination archive has revived an old legend: the Russian orchestration of the president’s murder. All it took was a few new tidbits from CIA and FBI reports about Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in September 1963.
It is no mystery why the majority of Americans believe that some grand plot, probably orchestrated by a foreign power, was behind the assassination of President Kennedy. For the greatest crime of the 20th century and perhaps of all American history, we demand a conspiracy of equivalent magnitude. That is the comfortable and lazy thing to believe.
Unfortunately, the real answer still lies in the demented mind of a wretched little man with a ninth-grade education, whose life was hopeless, and who was driven by anger, grudges and delusion.
James Reston Jr. is the author of “The Accidental Victim: JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Real Target in Dallas.” A senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and an Army intelligence officer from 1965 to 1968, his latest book is “A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam Memorial.”
CAPA editor's note: The column above is included here for the sake of illustrating the degree of propaganda, misinformation and fake news still being provided by well-connected pseudo-experts about the death. Readers are encouraged to use the following Twitter hash tags to flag slanted articles such as this: #JFKFakeNews #MassmediaJFKLies.
Oct. 27
Noted forensic pathologist Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D., in his Pittsburgh lab, with a collage of book covers (Collage by WhoWhatWhy)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wecht faults Trump for delay in releasing all JFK assassination documents, Michael A. Fuoco, Oct. 27, 2017. Storied forensic pathologist Cyril H. Wecht, a longtime Warren Commission critic, reacted strongly Friday morning to President Donald Trump’s decision the preceding day to delay release of hundreds of secret government files related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Dr. Wecht wondered aloud if the president’s decision was a mutually beneficial deal with the CIA related to his ongoing problems involving Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Trump delayed release of about 300 of the 3,100 files — comprising thousands of pages — that have never been seen by the public after last-minute appeals from the CIA and FBI citing security concerns. About 30,000 documents were released previously with redactions.
“I think it was a poker game with the CIA. ‘You fellows want me to do this. What’s in it for me?’” said Dr. Wecht, who for decades has disputed the findings of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. “Why does Trump, after all of this time, change his mind about releasing everything?
“I believe he had the CIA over a barrel, that they were pushing him very hard not to release everything and I think they gave in, so to speak, and worked out a quid pro quo about all of this business with Russia.”
Dr. Wecht admitted his theory is only conjecture and acknowledged his bias. For decades, he has been one of the best known critics of the Warren Commission, arguing that the government twisted evidence to pin the assassination on Oswald because the truth of what occurred would be too much for the American public to take. Dr. Wecht speculates that "truth" is that rogue elements of the CIA had the Mafia kill JFK.
Future of Freedom Foundation, The JFK Cover-Up Continues, Jacob G. Hornberger (shown at right), Oct. 27, 2017. While the mainstream media was announcing for the past two weeks that President Trump was going to release the CIA’s long-secret records on the JFK assassination, I took a different position. On Monday of this week, I predicted that Trump would make a deal with the CIA that would enable the CIA to continue its cover-up of the JFK assassination. (See I Predict Trump Will Continue the CIA’s JFK Assassination Cover-Up and No Smoking Guns in the JFK Records?)
On Thursday, the day of the deadline established by law for releasing the records, Trump granted the CIA’s request for continued secrecy, on grounds of “national security,” more than 50 years after the Kennedy assassination.
Please, don’t start calling me Nostradamus. A blind man could see what was happening. Donald “Art of the Deal” Trump was obviously negotiating all week with the CIA, and he was obviously pushing to get what he wanted all the way up to the very last day. On Thursday, the deadline established by law for releasing the records, the CIA undoubtedly blinked and Trump presumably got what he wanted in return for granting CIA request for continued secrecy.
Some mainstream media commentators are criticizing the CIA for waiting until the very last day to make its case for continued secrecy. Displaying their naivete, they demonstrate their lack of understanding about how things work in Washington, D.C. As I indicated in my Monday article, when someone in the federal government needs a favor from someone else, the someone else is going to ask for something in return.
The fact is that the CIA put in its request to Trump for continued secrecy of its JFK records long before yesterday. But “Art of the Deal” Trump obviously sat on the request, undoubtedly hoping that he could get what he wanted in return if he just continued holding out and conveying that he was ready to release the records.
In the end, the CIA blinked, just as Trump knew it would. Contrary to what the mainstream press is asserting, the records undoubtedly contain more incriminating circumstantial evidence that fills in the mosaic of a U.S. national-security regime-change operation on November 22, 1963. That’s what the mainstream media, forever wedded to the official story no matter how ridiculous and illogical it is, simply cannot bring themselves to confront.
Trump knew that he had the CIA over a barrel. As I indicated in my two articles this week, the CIA was between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it could refuse to grant Trump what he wanted and let the records be released, which it knew would point to the CIA’s guilt in the assassination. On the other hand, it could give Trump what he wanted and have to suffer the obvious inference that people would draw — that the CIA was continuing to cover up incriminatory evidence.
What did the CIA give Trump in return for Trump’s extending the CIA’s 50-year-plus secrecy? We don’t know, but my hunch is that it pertains to Russia....
Kennedys and King (formerly CTKA), Rachel Maddow, JFK and Easy Money, James DiEugenio, Oct. 27, 2017. Maddow’s staff fished out some archival footage from NBC, did some research on Pettit, got permission to show parts of JFK and called up Shenon. This results in nothing but aimless and uninformed banter, and is pretty much symptomatic of the MSM’s attitude toward these releases.
In the lead up to the final declassification of the long awaited secret files on President Kennedy’s assassination, there were literally dozens of TV broadcast segments alerting the public to what President Trump had decided to do and what it all meant. Not one of these programs went beyond the surface of the event. And most of them relied on nothing but general information, questionable guests, and past clichés about the case to create their segments. Incredibly, the MSM even trotted out Mr. Plagiarism, Gerald Posner, for some appearances. No one noted that Posner has not done any work of the JFK case in twenty years. And his discredited book Case Closed was written and published before the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in 1994. Therefore, not only was Posner not familiar with the current batch of declassified files, he was not aware of what was in the two million pages declassified from 1994-1998. But that did not stop Michael Smerconish from hosting him on his CNN show as an authority.
But probably the worst of the segments happened to be one of the longest ones, timing in at almost ten minutes. This took place on October 25th, the day before the documents were supposed to be released. It was on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show.
MSNBC has a reputation, and a niche, in cable television as being a liberal haven. Compared to say Fox, that is true. But many would question just how liberal, and honest, the cable network is. For instance, Melissa Harris-Perry was an acute, well-informed host who really tried to book rarely heard voices onto her program. In fact, her show was the only Sunday talk show that did not utilize a majority of white males as guests. After four years, she was forced out in early 2016. She concluded that, since she was an African-American female, they did not want to hear her comments on election returns that year. Try and find anything online, or anywhere else, that Maddow said or wrote about Perry’s highly publicized dispute with management. My other point would be this: How liberal and honest can MSNBC be if Chris Matthews is the longstanding bellwether of the network? This is the man who actually wrote a book—Kennedy and Nixon—that tried to equate the political career of John Kennedy with that of Richard Nixon. He then wrote a completely inadequate biography of JFK. In all the years I listened to the Bay-area blowhard, I never heard anything but inside-the-beltway pabulum from the man. For this he makes five million a year. Nice work if you can get it.
Washington Post, Trump bowing to CIA on JFK files is a reminder of how the presidency changes people, James Hohmann, Oct. 27, 2017. Releasing all of the John F. Kennedy documents could add fuel to conspiracy theories about the former president's death. But it’s really hard to tell national security officials “no” when they’re warning you of potential dangers to the country and its intelligence apparatus. New York Times, In J.F.K. Files, a Peek Back at an Era of Secrets, Peter Baker, Oct. 27, 2017. Documents released this week recall the Cold War context against which the assassination of John F. Kennedy generated suspicion that still persists. How much does it cost to knock off a foreign leader? In 1964, the asking price to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro was $150,000. The Cuban exiles who were willing to pay felt that “was too high” and countered with $100,000 to seal the deal. As a bonus, the businessman who offered to arrange the assassin services also agreed to bump off Raúl Castro and Che Guevara for another $20,000 each — plus $2,500 for expenses, of course.
The haggling between Cuban exiles and criminal figures was recounted in a July 4, 1964, memo by the F.B.I. that was marked “SECRET” and released in full on Thursday as part of a stash of files related, if sometimes only theoretically, to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the end, of course, whatever came of the plot did not put either of the Castros or Guevara in the ground.
But that memo and many of the 2,800 once-secret documents that were made public harken back to an era of Cold War intrigue and spy-versus-spy contests, when assassinations and clandestine plots were a matter of tradecraft, not John le Carré novels. Some real, some fanciful, the schemes and stories contained in the newly divulged files help explain the backdrop against which the Kennedy killing stirred suspicions that persist to this day.
“It was a very different time, and you have to remember the context,” said Larry J. Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” published in 2013. “Almost everything revolved around this bipolar system we had” between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Washington Post, Strippers, surveillance and assassination plots: The wildest JFK Files, Michael E. Miller, Oct. 27, 2017 (with contributions below by Ian Shapira and others). More than a dozen reporters and editors for the Washington Post combed through the documents on Thursday night. Here are some of the wildest things they found, some of which have been reported about before and some new.
$100,000 to kill Fidel Castro: A 1964 FBI memo describes a meeting in which Cuban exiles tried to set a price on the heads of Fidel Castro, Raul Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. “It was felt that the $150,000.00 to assassinate FIDEL CASTRO plus $5,000 expense money was too high,” the memo noted. At a subsequent meeting, they settled on more modest sums: $100,000 for Fidel, $20,000 for Raul and $20,000 for Che.
Ted Cruz’s dad: Not one to shy away from conspiracy theories, then-candidate Trump himself had a hot take on the assassination he delivered to Fox News last year. Trump, who was at the time battling Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for the Republican presidential nomination, claimed that his opponent’s father, Rafael Cruz, had been spotted with Oswald before the shooting. “His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald being, you know, shot,” Trump said during a telephone interview. “I mean the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this? Right? Prior to his being shot. And nobody even brings it up. I mean, they don’t even talk about that — that was reported. And nobody talks about it.”
Trump appeared to be referencing an April 2016 National Enquirer article headlined “Ted Cruz Father Linked to JFK Assassination!” The story contained a photo that, according to the tabloid, showed Oswald and Rafael Cruz distributing pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans in 1963. Even after clinching the nomination, Trump stuck by the widely discredited story.
And the Killer Is: The records also reveal a deposition given before the presidential Commission on CIA Activities in 1975 by Richard Helms (shown in a file photo), who had served as the agency’s director. After a discussion of Vietnam, David Belin, an attorney for the commission, turned to whether the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s killing.
“Well, now, the final area of my investigation relates to charges that the CIA was in some way conspiratorially involved with the assassination of President Kennedy. During the time of the Warren Commission, you were Deputy Director of Plans, is that correct?” Belin asked.
After Helms replied that he was, Belin then asked: “Is there any information involved with the assassination of President Kennedy which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent or agent…”
Then, suddenly, the document cuts off.
WhoWhatWhy, JFK Assassination Triggered More Than Kennedy’s Death, Jeff Schechtman, Oct. 27, 2017. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and particularly its aftermath, was the first in a series of high-profile events that triggered an increased level of distrust of government among Americans. The ripples from that day have now turned into a wave, author David Talbot argues. In his conversation with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman, he makes the case that the cynicism from decades of lies about JFK, Martin Luther King, Watergate, and many more seminal events in recent US history is to blame in part for the divisions and the distrust of government we are witnessing today.
In addition to the government, Talbot holds the mainstream media accountable for its refusal to see what’s under its nose. The net result is, according to Talbot, a mixed bag. On the one hand, he claims, the “deep state” is coming apart. The destruction that is washing over so many institutions, both public and private, has impacted the security state as well. The bad news is that while cracks allow light to shine in, it leaves no one in charge.
Talbot talks specifically about what he’s going to be looking for in the thousands of pages of JFK documents, if and when they are all released, and where he thinks the threads may take us. He even thinks that, in a time when the president shooting someone on Fifth Avenue might only be a two-day story, when all the facts are out, people will care about who killed Kennedy and its broader implications for politics today. in many ways the government’s failure and refusal to come clean about the Kennedy assassination, among other major traumas to this country, has resulted in this great cynicism, public cynicism about authority in this country and has led to the rise of Donald Trump and the whole notion that you can’t believe establishment media outlets and official voices, authoritative voices.
So the New York Times and the Washington Post and the cable news networks love to trash Trump and his fake news, campaign, and the Russians and all that, but they really have failed to look at their own culpability in all this and why there has been such an erosion of public confidence over the last few decades in official sources of information.
Oct. 26
Paul Craig Roberts.org, Boston Marathon Bombing: A Case of Judicial Murder? Guest columnist John Remington Graham (attorney and former public defender), Oct. 26, 2017. I have been asked many times why I have intervened in the federal prosecution of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the young man who was convicted and sentenced to death in the Boston Marathon bombing case where two brothers, on April 15, 2013, allegedly detonated pressure cooker bombs on Boylston Street in front of the Forum Restaurant that killed or maimed many people. (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is shown at right and below, walking at the rear of with his older brother Tamerlain.)
As I wrap up my career of fifty years as a member of the bar, including service as a public defender in state and federal courts, co-founder of an accredited law school, and chief public prosecutor in Minnesota state courts, I am apprehensive that my country might be entering into an era of judicial murder.
Judicial murder is the practice of designing a trial to get a guilty verdict, regardless of the facts, and a death sentence carried out. It has happened in many countries in all ages. It has been recognized as a threat of public justice by the United States Supreme Court in Powell v. Alabama, 287 U. S. 45 at 72-72 (1932). Judicial murder is followed by corruption and destruction of society.
The judicial murder of Socrates was followed by loss of the classical civilization of ancient Greece. The judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth, whether son of God or venerable philosopher, was followed by the destruction of Jerusalem and the second temple. The judicial murder of Joan of Arc was followed by loss of most English lands in France. The judicial murder of Charles the First was followed by loss of the free constitution of England. The judicial murder of Louis XVI was followed by 150 years of defeat, ruin, suffering, and chaos in France. Judicial murder in the Third Reich was followed by humiliating defeat of Germany. Judicial murder in the Soviet Union was followed by collapse of the Soviet empire. If the justice system cannot be trusted, evil consequences follow.
My active intervention in the case began when I assisted the Russian aunt, herself a lawyer, of Dzhokhar file pro se papers in the federal district court in Boston, asking that she be recognized as a friend of the court so she could present evidence conclusively showing, by FBI-gathered evidence, incorporated by reference into the indictment, that Dzhokhar could not have detonated the bomb he was supposed to have detonated. I proceeded in this way as instructed by the bar liaison officer of the federal district court and the clerk’s office.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts wrote up this legal adventure in his column of August 17, 2015, in a way which draws from the judicial record, and portrays the scenario clearly enough. The link is here. Those unfamiliar with this case need to read that article.
The claim of the Russian aunt sounds fantastic only so long as one believes newspapers and does not pay attention to critical, undeniable facts gathered by the FBI, and the language of the indictment as returned on June 27, 2013, especially paragraphs 6, 7, and 24. A number of things have caused me to doubt Dzhokhar’s guilt.....
Black Op Radio (Show #858), Topics: The People v. Lee Harvey Oswald / Johnson and Vietnam, Guests: Walt Brown / Jim DiEugenio, Oct. 26, 2017. Black Op Radio (shown #862), Topic: The Houston Trial in retrospect, Guests: Larry Schnapf and Jim DiEugenio, (52:53 mins.). A discussion of the CAPA trial strategies in Houston Nov. 16 & 17, 2017. Also, Views of the Trial outcome: Pro and Con what can we learn. Play Jim DiEugenio (1:58:13 hrs.)
Facebook, Historian John Newman comments pro-war propaganda from media related to suppressed JFK documents, (Dr. John M. Newman, a longtime history professor and author of multiple major books related to the Kennedy assassination, is shown in a photo collage above published by WhoWhatWhy. Full bio below.) Oct. 26, 2017. As I predicted six months ago, we are up against a full court press by the Castro-killed-Kennedy psych-warfare frame op cooked up by the true perpetrators behind the president’s murder.
And, now, beginning with Shenon (prompted by Arlen Specter) in 2012, followed by other famous amazing experts like FOX’s O’Reilly, MSNBC’s Matthews, and UVA’s Sabato, it has been regurgitated again.
If that wasn’t enough, we are being fed that old canard again today by hundreds of news items written by youngsters whose entire perspective and information about the assassination has taken place in just the last two weeks. They say: “What?? You don’t think Castro was involved??” As if we are the lunatics.
LBJ’s steamrolling of Chief Just Warren to force him to head the commission and rubber stamp the Oswald-did-it-alone FBI cover-up was done at the “Top Secret” level to prevent a world-wide nuclear holocaust and the deaths of 40 million Americans. Decades ago, we were able to listen to the tape recording of LBJ boasting to Senator Russell about how he pulled it off, and watch Warren on Washington Public TV (WETA) confirm the story.
Author's Bio: Dr. Newman (shown in a photo at the National Press Club taken by Noel St. John at a CAPA conference in March on JFK records release) served in Army Intelligence in Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, and China. He served as an attaché in China. He served as the Military Assistant to the director of the National Security Agency (NSA). He was a faculty member of the University of Maryland, Honors College (1992-2012), and is currently Adjunct Professor of Political Science at James Madison University, where he teaches courses in International Terrorism, Counterterrosm, and America in the 60s.
Dr. Newman was a consultant for Oliver Stone's film JFK. He was one of the experts called upon to testify the U.S. House of Representatives. He was asked to assist the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. He has been a critic of the 9/11 Commission Report. Newman is the author of "JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power"(1992; 2017); "Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK" (1995; 2008); "Quest for the Kingdom: The Secret Teachings of Jesus in the Light of Yogic Mysticism" (2013); "Where Angels Tread Lightly: The Assassination of President Kennedy, Volume I" (2015, 2017); and "Countdown to Darkness: The Assassination of President Kennedy, Volume II (2017).
Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), What were they hiding and what should we look for? Dan L. Hardway, Oct. 26, 2017 (Dan Hardway, an attorney and former staff member for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, is a prominent JFK assassination researcher). As we go into the hysteria of a massive JFK document dump, there is one remarkably surviving document that has already been released that we should keep in mind – especially when reading news coverage of the documents scheduled for release today.
On April 1, 1967, the Head of the Covert Action Staff of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a dispatch to many of the CIA stations and bases around the world. That the document survived (Dispatch, Countering Criticism of the Warren Report, from Chief of CA Staff to Chiefs of Certain Stations and Bases, April 1, 1967, RIF 104-10009-10022) may be remarkable as it is clearly marked as “Destroy when no longer needed.”
Or, then again, maybe it is not remarkable that it has not been destroyed because the government and intelligence community’s efforts to silence those who question the official story about John Kennedy’s murder has never succeeded and, hence, the dispatch remains needful from their viewpoint.
The dispatch lays out a plan for defending the lone nut theory first advanced as the major theme of the government cover-up of the assassination investigation. The dispatch labels people who question the lone nut theory as “conspiracy theorists.” It plainly states the purpose of the dispatch “is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists…. Our play should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (i) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (ii) politically interested, (iii) financially interested, (iv) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (v) infatuated with their own theories.”
It goes on to suggest that critics be countered by advancing arguments such as they have produced no new evidence, that they overvalue some evidence while ignoring other evidence, that large scale conspiracies are “impossible to conceal in the United States,” that Oswald would not have been any “sensible person’s choice for a co-conspirator”, and by pointing out the comprehensive work of the Warren Commission which was composed of men “chosen for their integrity, experience, and prominence.”
New York Times, The J.F.K. Assassination: A Cast of Characters, Natalie Reneau and Peter Baker, Oct. 26, 2017 (video). As a new trove of documents about the killing of President John F. Kennedy is released, The Times's Peter Baker walks us through who’s who in this American tragedy.
New York Times, Theory That Hammarskjold Plane Was Downed Is Bolstered by U.N. Report, Alan Cowell and Rick Gladstone, Oct. 26, 2017 (print edition). More than 56 years after a plane crash killed Dag Hammarskjold, the secretary general of the United Nations, an authoritative report released on Wednesday said it appeared plausible that an “external attack or threat” may have downed the airplane carrying him and 15 others on an epochal peace mission in Africa.
The finding by Judge Mohamed Chande Othman, a senior Tanzanian jurist who was asked by the United Nations to review both old and newly uncovered evidence, gave weight to a longstanding suspicion that Mr. Hammarskjold (shown in his office) may have been assassinated.
The crash, during the overnight of Sept. 17-18, 1961, remains a painful open wound in the history of the United Nations and one of the 20th century’s most enduring mysteries. Judge Othman’s 63-page report offered a further rebuttal of the idea, advanced in inquiries soon after the crash, that pilot error or some other accident had caused Mr. Hammarskjold’s chartered DC-6 airplane to crash in what is now Zambia.
Moreover, Judge Othman’s conclusion reinforced the theory that the plane had been deliberately brought down, either by what the judge called “direct attack” or a distraction that diverted “the pilots’ attention for a matter of seconds at the critical point at which they were on their descent.”
At the time, Mr. Hammarskjold was flying to Ndola, in what was then Northern Rhodesia, for negotiations to end secession and civil war in the neighboring mineral-rich Congolese province of Katanga. The Katangese separatists were supported by Western political and mining interests not eager to see Mr. Hammarskjold’s diplomacy succeed.view of records and archives in their custody or possession, including those that remain classified, for potentially relevant information.”
Oct. 25
India America Today, Expert Applauds Trump Promise of Releasing JFK Files, Tejinder Singh (White House correspondent), Oct. 25, 2017. Tweeting from Air Force One, minutes before landing in Dallas, the city where the former president was shot and killed, [U.S. President Donald] Trump said, “The long anticipated release of the #JFKFiles will take place tomorrow. So interesting!” Trump was in Dallas to address a Republican Party fund-raiser.
Andrew Kreig, Justice Integrity Project Editor (www.justice-integrity.org) told India America Today, “Trump is taking a courageous stand on the side of the large majority of Americans who for decades have express disbelief in the findings of the Warren Commission, according to public opinion polls on the topic consistently reporting such disbelief as ranging from the mid-60s to more than 70 percent of Americans.”
“Release of documents over the needless objections of those obsessing over bogus “national security” implications also conforms with the views of many experts of diverse political views. These include such American conservatives as former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, progressives and several surviving staffers of the Warren Commission itself. My news report earlier this year summarized that impressive array of experts supporting the release that was announced today (JFK Experts Advocate Compliance With Records Release Deadline, published by the Justice Integrity Project and also by Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA),” noted Kreig, who is also CAPA Board member.
Welcoming the decision, Kreig added, “President Trump has upheld values of transparency and democracy in a way that should be applauded by freedom lovers around the world. The problems of political assassination and other persecution are a global problem. So, the unanswered questions surrounding the 1963 murder of America’s young president hold continuing importance around the world.”
The Hill, Trump teases release of JFK files: 'So interesting!' Jordan Fabian, Oct. 25, 2017. President Trump teased the release of thousands of government documents related to the assassination of former President Kennedy on Wednesday, minutes before landing in Dallas, the city where the former president was shot and killed.
“The long anticipated release of the #JFKFiles will take place tomorrow. So interesting!” Trump tweeted. The president headed to Dallas to attend GOP fundraisers and receive an update on the recovery from Hurricane Harvey. Trump has said he doesn’t plan to block the release of files related to Kennedy’s killing ahead of the National Archives’s Thursday deadline to make them public. Congress passed a law in 1992 mandating the release of the files within 25 years, but the president has the power to stop it in the interest of national security. Trump’s advisers have reportedly urged him to block at least some of the files. The White House has not said whether the president will do so. “Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened,” Trump tweeted over the weekend.
Future of Freedom Foundation, No “Smoking Guns” in the JFK Records? Jacob G. Hornberger (think tank leader, book publisher and attorney shown at right), Oct. 25, 2017. Most of the mainstream media continues telling their readers not to expect any “smoking guns” in the JFK records that are supposed to be released tomorrow.
That’s assuming, of course, that President Trump doesn’t change his mind at the last minute and grant the CIA’s request for continued secrecy. I stand by the prediction I made earlier this week. I think Trump will strike a last-minute deal with the CIA, perhaps one in which the CIA promises to bring its power and influence to bear on Congress to cease and desist about Russia. My hunch is that the deal will be announced in a fundraising speech that Trump is delivering today, not coincidentally, in Dallas.
There are several fascinating aspects to this controversy.
First of all is the mainstream media’s new-found discovery that the records are set to be released tomorrow. For the past year, some of us have been harping on the impending deadline and suggesting that the CIA would beseech Trump to keep its long-secret records secret, perhaps for another 25 years. The entire time, the mainstream media has largely remained silent about the matter … until just recently when the issue exploded into the public arena. Just Google “JFK Records” and you’ll see what I mean.
Most of the media articles, op-eds, and editorials fail to question a central issue: The fact that the CIA wants its 50-year-old records to continue to be kept secret. That should be big news, especially given that the reason the JFK Records Act was enacted in the first place was because of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, which posited that the CIA orchestrated the assassination of the president as part of its many Cold War national-security regime-change operations. At the end of JFK, there was a blurb about the fact that the U.S. national security establishment was continuing to keep its assassination records secret from the American people. This secrecy created such an uproar among the American populace that Congress was effectively forced to act. That’s what produced the JFK Records Act, which the national-security establishment vehemently opposed.
The Act required the CIA, Pentagon, FBI, Secret Service, and other federal agencies to release their assassination records. (Unfortunately, for some reason, the Secret Service intentionally and knowingly destroyed many of its records after the Act was enacted and despite the fact that the Act expressly prohibited the destruction of such records.) During the term of the Assassination Records Review Board, the CIA requested the Board to keep many of its records secret, which the ARRB denied. When the CIA appealed the ARRB’s decisions to President Clinton on grounds of “national security,” the president denied its requests and the records were released.
Nothing happened to the country when the records were released. The United States didn’t fall into the ocean. The communists did not take control over the federal government.
The ARRB, whose job it was to force the CIA and other agencies to comply, went out of existence in the late 1990s. However, someone had slipped a provision into the Act that enabled the CIA and other agencies to keep selected records secret for another 25 years. That 25-year period expires tomorrow … unless Trump decides to extend it today (which I still predict he will).
CrowdSource Radio via YouTube, , Jason Goodman, Oct. 25, 2017 (video interview, 69 mins.). Host Jason Goodman interviews Investigative reporter and author Andrew Kreig, a board member of Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), and author of a 42-part "Readers Guide to the JFK Assassination" online encyclopedia and commentary archive.
New York Times, A Half-Century Later, Papers May Shed Light on J.F.K. Assassination, Peter Baker and Scott Shane, Oct. 25, 2017 (print edition). With permission from President Trump, the federal government on Thursday will begin releasing the final documents on the 1963 killing of John F. Kennedy. Oct. 23 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Cyril Wecht: Prospect of release of new JFK files 'exciting,' Patricia Sheridan, Oct. 23, 2017. Have the Russians been meddling in our affairs for decades? When the classified National Archives files on the assassination of President John F.Kennedy are released by Thursday — assuming that President Donald Trump allows it — we may find out more about the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was said to have had ties to what was then the Soviet Union. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone and was influenced by his time in Moscow.
“If you buy the Warren Commission’s conclusion that nobody had any involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy except for Lee Harvey Oswald, then why would there be anything to hide?” asked Cyril H. Wecht, forensic pathologist, lawyer and former Allegheny County coroner. “Why keep these files classified?” he continued. “All the people involved are dead.”
Nine years after Kennedy’s Nov. 22, 1963, assassination in Dallas, Dr. Wecht examined the evidence available at the time.
“It was August 1972 and I was the first civilian given permission to do so,” he noted.
From what he was able to piece together, Dr. Wecht determined that the Warren Commission’s conclusion was, at best, flawed.
Dr. Wecht also was the first person to discover that the president’s brain was missing — no longer among the cataloged items at the National Archives.
“They tried to say that the Kennedys buried it, but it was there in April of 1965,” he said. “A year and a half later in October of 1966, the large container with the brain was no longer listed.”
But that fact went unnoticed until Dr. Wecht uncovered it.
“The brain is extremely important and significant to this case,” he said. “If it were properly preserved — which fixes it from the consistency of a soft-boiled egg to a hard-boiled egg — you could see the trajectory of the bullet.
“If this were anyone else, they would throw [the case] out because key evidence was destroyed. This case would be thrown out.”
Dr. Wecht has long maintained that the assassination, medical examination and Warren Commission were parts of a cover-up.
“It’s so obvious,” he said. As for the president’s brain, “it will be very interesting to see if there is any information about that,” he said.
The timing of the release of the files also is important for an event happening at the South Texas College of Law Houston, which Dr. Wecht and his organization, Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), will be presenting with the college on Nov. 16-17.
“It’s a two-day mock trial of Oswald,” he explained. “We will be showing the documentary, ‘The Parkland Doctors.’ The eight doctors present in the emergency room that day are interviewed and they describe in detail what they saw and did, and it is in contrast with the autopsy report.”
Negotiations. The art of the deal. The CIA desperately does not want to show the American people its long-secret JFK-related records. It has asked Trump to continue keeping at least some of them secret notwithstanding the passage of more than 50 years since the Kennedy assassination.
What Trump has done with his announcement is send a clear message to the CIA: “Give me what I want and I’ll give you want you want. Otherwise, I will let all your cherished long-secret records relating to the JFK assassination be shown to the American people.”
Make no mistake about it: A deal is about to be made. The CIA will cave. It will end up giving Trump whatever it is he wants. Trump is in the driver’s seat because the CIA cannot afford to permit the American people to see the records it wants to continue to be kept secret.
And once the CIA gives Trump what he wants, he will cave and give the CIA the continued secrecy it so desperately needs. All this will happen by this Thursday, the date set by law for release of all the JFK records that Trump has not blocked.
Mary Pinchot Meyer (WhoWhatWhy photo collage from JFK Library, Wikimedia and National Park Service) WhoWhatWhy, The Murder of John Kennedy’s Mistress, Part 3, Peter Janney (author of "Mary's Mosaic," shown at right),
Oct. 23, 2017. In the third and last installment of this series, the case against the black laborer continues to build. To make matters worse, a new witness comes forward. But something is quite wrong with his story about what he allegedly saw — and, it turns out later, about his own background. Who was he really?
In Part 3 of this mystery, the case against the black laborer, Ray Crump, for the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer continues to build, despite the lack of physical evidence, and despite the lack of an obvious motive. She was neither robbed nor raped. To make matters worse for Crump, a new witness comes forward — William L. Mitchell, an Army lieutenant stationed at the Pentagon. He claimed that, shortly before the murder, he passed a “negro male” who was following the victim, “about two hundred yards” behind her. His description of the man’s clothes matches what Crump had been wearing when arrested. The highly anticipated release of long-withheld US government documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is scheduled for this Thursday, October 26. In the runup to this event, the media has devoted more attention to this history-altering political murder than at any time since the Oliver Stone film “JFK” came out in 1991.
As one of the outlets digging deep into the tragedy, WhoWhatWhy has pointed out that many questions remain unanswered and many key issues are yet unresolved. Accordingly, we are dedicating more articles to the topic leading up to the highly-anticipated data dump, and have put together a crack team to analyze the documents once they are released. — WhoWhatWhy Staff
Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy pose in front of the Washington Monument with their two children, John and Caroline
According to Jackie Kennedy’s former Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, that’s exactly what the former first lady would have wanted. “It was my understanding that she wanted all the information released,” Hill tells People. “She wanted people to have as much information about what actually happened as possible.” Hill says that’s also one of the reasons why the first lady didn’t immediately change out of the clothes she was wearing when her husband was shot and killed while riding by her side in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Just hours after her husband was shot, Jackie wore her bloodstained, pink Chanel suit to the inauguration of Vice President Lyndon Johnson. “She told us she wanted people to see what had happened. She wanted people to see the blood-spattered clothing that she was wearing because she was sitting right next to her husband. Because she wanted everybody to understand that this was a tragic event,” explains Hill, who wrote the memoir Five Presidents about his time as a Secret Service agent for former commanders in chief Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
Hill says Jackie didn’t often speak of her husband’s assassination at age 46 and didn’t explicitly tell the agent she wanted all of the government documents related to his death released. “It was based on my understanding and knowledge of her,” he says. “I don’t think she would have denied access to any of the information from the public.” He adds, “Over the years, the entire family tried to put [the assassination] behind them. They didn’t want to recognize the fact that he had been assassinated.”
JFK Countercoup, Subject to Further Information - Trump Tweets on JFK Records, William Kelly, Oct. 23, 2017. President Trump tweeted that "subject to further information," he will not interfere with the scheduled release of the remaining sealed records on the assassination of President Kennedy according to the JFK Act of 1992.
The JFK Act requires the government release all of the remaining sealed records on the assassination of President Kennedy by Thursday, October 26, 2017, 25 years after the JFK Act was signed by President G. H. W. Bush. According to the JFK Act of 1992 it "remains in effect" until the Archivist of the United States informs the President, Congress and the citizens of the United States that the last remaining government record on the assassination of President Kennedy has been released to the public.If he does that on October 26th, it will be a lie because the CIA and other government agencies are stonewalling, destroying and illegally withholding records that supports the generally held belief that one man alone was not responsible for the murder and there was a conspiracy that the government and agencies will find embarrassing to their organizations.
A quarter-of-a-century - twenty-five years ago the JFK Act was unanimously passed by Congress and was reluctantly signed by President G. H. W. Bush, contingent upon adapting the objections in his signing statement.
Boston Herald, JFK record release stirs speculations, Brian Dowling, Oct. 22, 2017. Records related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy will be released Thursday. The highly anticipated release of a treasure trove of previously redacted or withheld records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has researchers of the long-questioned killing speculating about key details that could shed light on what the feds knew about the killer. The National Archives document dump slated to take place Thursday may include reams of documents on CIA agents and Soviet defectors, some of Lee Harvey Oswald’s financial records and even personal notes from first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, experts predict.
Atlantic, Conspiracy Theories Are for Underdogs, Adrienne LaFrance, Oct. 22, 2017. Donald Trump’s recent tweet about long-secret JFK files is a way for the president to try to reclaim a status that has repeatedly helped him. So when Donald Trump suggests he will help the public access long-secret JFK files in the name of transparency, he’s doing it with the same talent for identifying the kinds of stories that captivate people that he’s leaned on his entire career.
(Those who have studied the JFK assassination closely are mixed on the potential significance of these files. “I've always thought that the release of these documents is going to be something like what happened on New Year’s Eve 2000,” Josiah Thompson, the author of Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination, told me on Saturday. “A great big zero of happening!”)
Regardless of the files, though, Trump’s attention to them is a window into how he wants to be seen. In one dashed-off tweet, Trump positions himself as doing something noble — advocating for transparency, against the warnings of the intelligence community — while feeding at least two major conspiracies. One, that the press is “the enemy of the American people” working in cahoots with the deep state, and, two, by lending credibility to the idea that the official story of JFK's assassination is indeed suspect.
“Trump has built a coalition of conspiracy minded constituencies,” said Joseph Uscinski, a political science professor at the University of Miami and the co-author of American Conspiracy Theories. “Trump had no political experience, and he therefore had to justify his candidacy by appealing to conspiracy theories that impugned the establishment. Trump appealed to people who had conspiracy mindsets and who would normally be disinclined to vote, but Trump used conspiracy theories to motivate them.”
“Now, appealing to JFK conspiracy theories is a great idea for him,” Uscinski added, “because recent polls show that 60 percent of Americans believe in one form of JFK conspiracy or another.” Trump’s focus on JFK comes, too, at a moment when it would serve the president to have the American people talk about anything other than his false claims about comforting grieving military families.
Boston Herald, JFK record release stirs speculations, Brian Dowling, Oct. 22, 2017. Records related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy will be released Thursday. The highly anticipated release of a treasure trove of previously redacted or withheld records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has researchers of the longquestioned killing speculating about key details that could shed light on what the feds knew about the killer. The National Archives document dump slated to take place Thursday may include reams of documents on CIA agents and Soviet defectors, some of Lee Harvey Oswald’s financial records and even personal notes from first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, experts predict.
Washington Post, Trump plans to release JFK assassination documents despite concerns from federal agencies, Ian Shapira, Oct. 21, 2017. President Trump announced Saturday morning that he planned to release the tens of thousands of never-before-seen documents left in the files related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination held by the National Archives and Records Administration. “Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened,”
Trump tweeted early Saturday. Kennedy assassination experts have been speculating for weeks about whether Trump would disclose the documents. The 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act required that the millions of pages — many of them contained in CIA and FBI documents — be published in 25 years, by Oct. 26. Over the years, the National Archives has released most of the documents, either in full or partially redacted.
But one final batch remains and only the president has the authority to extend the papers’ secrecy past the October deadline. In his tweet, Trump seemed to strongly imply he was going to release all the remaining documents. But he also hedged, suggesting that if between now and Oct. 26, other government agencies made a strong case not to release the documents, he wouldn’t.
Also, Trump was not clear about whether he would publish all of the documents in full, or with some of them redacted. In the days leading up to Trump’s tweet, a National Security Council official told the Washington Post that government agencies were urging the president not to release some of the documents.
But Trump’s longtime confidant Roger Stone told conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars this week that he personally lobbied Trump to publish all of the documents. Stone also told Jones that CIA director Mike Pompeo “has been lobbying the president furiously not to release these documents.” Kennedy assassination experts say they don’t think the last batch of papers contains any major bombshells. They do suspect the papers will shed light on the activities of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin, while he was traveling in Mexico City in late September 1963, and courting Cuban and Soviet spies. Phil Shenon, who wrote a book about the Warren Commission, the congressional body that investigated Kennedy’s killing, said he was pleased with Trump’s decision. But he wonders to what degree the papers will ultimately be released.
New York Times, Trump Says He Will Release Final Set of Documents on Kennedy Assassination, Michael D. Shear, Oct. 21, 2017. President Trump has decided to release a final batch of thousands of classified government documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Trump announced in a tweet on Saturday morning. Mr. Trump has the power to block the release of the documents, and intelligence agencies have pressured him to do so for at least some of them.
The agencies are concerned that information contained in some of the documents could damage national security interests. The president did not make clear what he meant when he said in his tweet that the release of the documents would be “subject to the receipt of further information.” A White House official did not immediately respond to emails seeking clarification.
New York Post, What’s inside the secret JFK assassination files? Bill Sanderson, Oct. 21, 2017. Secret government documents to be released this week likely contain new details about what the CIA knew about Lee Harvey Oswald before he murdered President John F. Kennedy, assassination experts say. President Trump tweeted Saturday that he’ll allow the release of the documents, “subject to the receipt of further information.”
Eighty-eight percent of the Archives’ 5 million pages of JFK material are already public. Another 11 percent are partly public, with sensitive portions removed. Just 1 percent of the records remain fully secret. Revealing the secret details will help Americans grasp what happened in Dallas, said William Kelly [a CAPA board member], an assassination researcher from New Jersey. “It’s going to give us the final pieces of the puzzle,” Kelly said.
1) Call your Congressman and Senators and tell them to sign H. Res 556 and S. Res 281, introduced by Rep. Walter Jones and Sen. Charles Grassley, calling on President Trump to release all the secret JFK files and to reject any requests from the CIA and the FBI for continuing secrecy. These petitions, also signed by leading liberal Democrats such at Sen Pat Leahy and Rep. John Conyers, show that full JFK disclosure enjoys wide support.
Oct. 16 Politico, The JFK Document Dump Could Be a Fiasco, Philip Shenon and Larry J. Sabato, Oct. 16, 2017. Later this month, the National Archives is set to release thousands of documents about John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It’s likely to fuel conspiracy theorists for years.The federal government’s long campaign to try to choke off rampant conspiracy theories about the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy is threatening to end this month in massive confusion, if not chaos. Within the next two weeks, the National Archives is legally obligated to release the last of thousands of secret documents from government files about the assassination, most of them from the CIA, FBI and the Justice Department.
And there is every indication that the massive document dump — especially if any of it is blocked by President Donald Trump, the only person empowered under the law to stop the release of the files — will simply help fuel a new generation of conspiracy theories. Trump, no stranger to conspiracy theories, including totally unsubstantiated theories about a link between Ted Cruz’s father and JFK’s death, has not yet revealed his plans for the documents. His friend and political adviser Roger Stone, the Republican consultant who is the author of a book claiming that President Lyndon Johnson was the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination, said last week that he has been informed authoritatively that the CIA is urging Trump to delay the release of some of the JFK documents for another 25 years. “They must reflect badly on the CIA even though virtually everyone involved is long dead,” Stone said in a statement on his website.
The CIA has not confirmed or denied reports that it has appealed to Trump to block the release of some of the files on grounds that the documents might still somehow endanger national security if made public. In a cryptic statement last week, the spy agency said only that it “continues to engage in the process to determine the appropriate next steps with respect to any previously unreleased CIA information.”
As it stands now, the document release this month will be a logistical nightmare, with the public suddenly flooded with a huge online library of documents—tens of thousands in total—that will be, at first, mostly incomprehensible even to experienced students of the assassination. The National Archives, abandoning its plans to release the documents in batches over the course of several months, said this week that it will instead release everything at once—all on the same day—sometime between now and the deadline on October 26.
Future of Freedom Foundation, JFK and Regime-Change Conspiracies, Jacob G. Hornberger, Oct. 16, 2017. With the National Archives’ impending October 26 release of JFK-assassination records that the CIA has succeeded in keeping secret for more than 50 years, the mainstream media will undoubtedly obsess even more with the term “conspiracy theory,” the term that the CIA secretly came up years ago to discourage people from looking too closely at the circumstantial evidence in the Kennedy assassination.
That’s assuming, of course, that the National Archives proceeds with its plans to release those long-secret CIA records. Under the JFK Records Act, enacted in 1992, President Trump has the authority to extend the time for secrecy if the CIA makes a showing that “national security” will be threatened if the public is allowed to see its long-secret JFK-assassination records.What is a conspiracy? It’s nothing more than an agreement between two or more people to carry out an illicit or illegal act.
There’s nothing mysterious about conspiracies. They happen all the time, especially in the drug trade.If you have any doubts about this, just walk into any federal courthouse in the land and ask the District Clerk to show you the federal criminal indictments that have been issued in the last year. Just look at the first count of the indictment because it’s the one that almost always alleges a conspiracy. I’ll bet that 95 percent of federal criminal indictments allege a conspiracy. What we are talking about in the Kennedy assassination is nothing more than a regime-change operation or, if you will, a regime-change conspiracy.Interestingly, the mainstream media never refers to those regime-change operations with the terms “conspiracy” or “conspiracy theory.” For some reason, they limit that term to the Kennedy assassination. Yet, that’s precisely what all those regime-change operations were — regime-change conspiracies.It is a virtual certainty that those records that the National Archives is set to release on October 26 will help fill out the mosaic, which is why it is also a virtual certainty that the CIA will ask President Trump to extend the time for secrecy.
Center for Public Integrity, Car bomb kills crusading Panama Papers journalist in Malta, Staff report, Oct. 16, 2017. Center CEO, John Dunbar, condemns attack, demands thorough investigation. News sources today are reporting the tragic death of Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption in Malta.
Caruana Galizia, 53 (shown at right), was reportedly killed in a car bombing near her home. Local media reports indicated that in recent days she had filed a police report complaining of death threats. "Caruana Galizia was a fearless journalist and blogger who exposed numerous offshore dealings of prominent figures in Malta," said the Center's Dunbar.
She was also the mother of International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) developer and data journalist Matthew Caruana Galizia. The Center for Public Integrity spun off ICIJ earlier this year. Dunbar, CEO of the Center, condemned the attack, saying it was “not only a tragic killing of a courageous journalist but an attack on the profession as a whole. This must not go unpunished.”
Oct. 15
Review of New Biography of CIA's Master Spy James AngletonThe Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (shown above in a 1975 New York Times photo) by Jefferson Morley (St. Martin’s Press, 336 pp. $27.99).
Washington Decoded, Angleton Unrevealed, David Robarge, Oct. 15, 2017. David Robarge, the chief historian at the Central Intelligence Agency and a member of its History Staff since 1996, received his Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University. His articles and book reviews have appeared in Studies in Intelligence, Intelligence and National Security, and the Journal of Intelligence History. He is the author of the official biography of the sixth Director of Central Intelligence, John McCone As Director of Central Intelligence, 1961-1965, which was declassified in 2015. His review follows:
Readers who pick up The Ghost, hoping finally to have a comprehensive and objective treatment of James Angleton, the Agency’s long-time, shadowy, and controversial chief of counterintelligence, will be sorely disappointed. What they will find is an erratically organized account of most of the key events in Angleton’s life, along with an agglomeration of often badly sourced suppositions, inferences, allegations, and innuendoes frequently cast in hyperbolic or categorical language.
The Ghost displays the most prominent shortcomings of journalistic history: reportage substitutes for cohesive narrative, with vignettes and atmospherics stitched together with insufficient discernment among sources. One of Morley’s more dubious ones — an Angleton anonymous blog post with no citations, from which he pulls an outlandish quote — inadvertently provides an insight into what his ulterior motive in writing The Ghost appears to be: “This is not about who James Angleton was so much as what James Angleton had to be” (emphasis in the original).
Oct. 12
TrineDay Books, Program Details Announced For NOLA & Lee": Lee Harvey Oswald's Birthday Party Oct. 18 In New Orleans, Kris Millegan, Oct. 12, 2017.TrineDay Books, publishers of many vital books about President Kennedy's Assassination and such otherwise under-reported angles as the life and colleagues of New Orleans native Lee Harvey Oswald, has announced additional details of its annual Oswald conference, held this year on Oct. 18.
Among the various locations in New Orleans for the events: Press conference and rally at Lafayette Square, "Ground Zero" downtown tour of key locales, author event featuring Edward T. Haslam (author of Dr. Mary's Monkey and Judyth Vary Baker (author of memoir Me & Lee and forthcoming Kennedy & Oswald, all published by TrineDay) at Barnes & Noble, and "Birthday Party" at Le Bon Temps Roule. Produced by TrineDay Books. Details from 2016 event, with more 2017 details and registration here. Bus tour of New Orleans led by Judyth Vary Baker.
Judge John Tunheim at CAPA JFK Forum at National Press Club, Noel St. John Photo[/caption]
KFGO (Minneapolis), Judge who chaired JFK assassination review board says 'it's time to release everything,' Jim Monk, Oct. 12, 2017. A federal judge from Minnesota says it's time for the government to release the remainder of its records connected to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The National Archives is scheduled to unveil about 3,000 never-before-seen documents before Oct. 26.
In 1992, Congress mandated the documents' release in 25 years unless President Trump orders that they remain sealed. Chief U.S. District Judge John Tunheim was chairman of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. In an interview with KFGO News, Tunhem said that he hopes the records can finally be seen by everyone. “I think it’s time to release everything” Tunheim said. “We didn’t really protect that much. We never protected an entire document, except for those that we didn’t think that were relevant at all. It might have been some kind of intelligence gathering method that was still being used that they didn’t want the public to know about.”
“Part of the problem through the years is that so much information was protected, which led to so many gaps in the story” according to Tunheim. “Gaps are often filled by plausible explanations – and a lot of plausible explanations pointed to conspiracies." Tunheim says Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he assassinated Kennedy, but he says at least one conspiracy may deserve closer scrutiny.
“Among all the conspiracy theories, if there’s any that deserve closer examination over time, it’s the idea that organized crime may have played some role, but having said that, there is very little evidence that’s direct and points that way.” Tunheim says he thinks the Trump Administration “likely will allow all the releases to occur unless there’s some type of appeal from the CIA or the FBI concerning certain records.”
About 30,000 additional records "not considered relevant" to the assassination could also be released. Tunheim says it's unlikely that any big surprises will be found, but he says materials considered irrelevant in the past may be seen in a different light today.
Oct. 6
WhoWhatWhy, Navy Doctor: Bullet Found in JFK’s Limousine, and Never Reported, Milicent Cranor, Oct. 6, 2017. This is the story of a bullet — a spent, misshapen, but otherwise intact, bullet — that a Navy doctor said was found late at night, on the floor, in the back of John Kennedy’s limousine. No one seems to want to acknowledge it.
Years later, when reviewing a memoir he wrote in 1963, the doctor thought about that bullet, and tried to find some mention of it in the Warren Commission Hearings. To his dismay, he found nothing. In 2000, he wrote to President Gerald Ford (shown at right) to ask him about it. After all, Ford had been on the Warren Commission. But Ford said he knew nothing about it either. In 2001, two Navy historians interviewed the doctor, who gave them a highly detailed account of the events of November 22, 1963, some of which he witnessed personally. And he mentioned the bullet.
Recently, Dr. Randy Robertson, right, a board member of the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) came upon the doctor's papers at a Navy website. This was an exciting discovery. To understand the significance of this discovery, readers need to know that — according to the official record — only one whole bullet was recovered, the “magic bullet” found on Governor John Connally’s stretcher. Here, Robertson describes in an email to WhoWhatWhy how he came upon this apparently suppressed evidence.
Oct. 5
Salon, Republicans and Democrats agree: Trump should release JFK records, Matthew Rozsa, Oct. 5, 2017. There seems to be one major issue that is rallying considerable bipartisan support on Capitol Hill — namely, having President Donald Trump allow the release of the remaining government records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Trump will have until later this month to make this decision, due to the impending 25th anniversary of the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.
A bipartisan Senate resolution is being sponsored by Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a Republican, and a Democratic counterpart who also used to chair that committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, according to Roll Call. "Transparency in government is critical not only to ensuring accountability; it’s also essential to understanding our nation’s history.
Salon, Roger Stone calls on Trump to release JFK assassination files, Matthew Rozsa, Oct. 5, 2017. The Trump political adviser shares his odd reason why JFK assassination documents should be publicly available. Roger Stone (shown in a file photo), the famous political adviser to Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, wants the public release of the remaining secret government records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
"[The] last release of JFK assassination-related documents [included] a memo from Jay Hoover to the head of the FBI in Dallas instructing him to bring George Bush of the CIA [up] on activities of the anti-Castro Cubans in the Dallas area," Stone told Salon. "Also clued in a memo from Hoover to LBJ informing him that the Russian KGB had conducted their own investigation into the Kennedy assassination and had concluded LBJ was the ringleader in the plot to kill Kennedy," Stone claimed, implicating Kennedy's successor in his murder. "There is no telling what is in the unreleased documents, but at this point, I think the public has a right to know," he insisted.
The effort to publicize these government records has bipartisan support in both the Senate (Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and former chairman Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont) and House of Representatives (Republican Rep. Walter B. Jones of North Carolina and Democratic Rep. Louise M. Slaughter of New York). What Stone brings to the table, however, is a set of particularly controversial views on the Kennedy assassination itself.
In his book "The Making of the President 2016" (which I discussed in an interview with Stone), he repeatedly claimed that the father of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rafael Cruz, lied about his past as a Cuban immigrant.
After summarizing accounts by blogger Wayne Madsen and the National Enquirer, which claimed that Rafael Cruz may have been connected to Lee Harvey Oswald, Stone argued that one Cuban man photographed with Oswald looked like the elder Cruz. "The identity of the Cruz look-alike has never been established," Stone told Salon. "In May, I went on record saying that I had spoken with a source who identified the mystery man as Rafael Cruz." Stone also added that he did not start or plant the Cruz story.
Oct. 4
Roll Call, Lawmakers Push Trump to Release JFK Assassination Files, Niels Lesniewski, Oct. 4, 2017. Bipartisan group introduce resolutions ahead of October deadline Senior lawmakers are calling on President Donald Trump to allow the release of remaining government records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Resolutions introduced in the House and Senate would call on the president to allow release of documents held by the National Archives and Records Administration, and for the Archives to work to meet a statutory deadline that arrives later in October. The deadline occurs because it will be the 25th anniversary of the signing of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.
The leaders of the Senate resolution are Judiciary Chairman Charles E. Grassley of Iowa (left) and Democratic Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, who is a former chairman of the committee. “The assassination of President Kennedy was one of the most shocking and tragic events in our nation’s history,” Leahy said in a statement. “Americans have the right to know what our government knows. Transparency is crucial for our country to fully reckon with this national tragedy, and that is the purpose of these resolutions.” Grassley expressed a similar sentiment in his statement.
Oct. 3Broken windows show exterior Las Vegas shooter Stephen Mandalay's suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Hotel
Washington Post, Investigators find arsenal fit for a commando team in retiree’s hotel room, Lynh Bui, Mark Berman and Matt Zapotosky, Oct. 3, 2017. Hospitals remained full in Las Vegas with hundreds injured, some in critical condition, while authorities tried to grasp what caused a 64-year-old retiree, Stephen Peacock (shown in a 2002 photo) to turn a concert into a killing field, leaving at least 59 people dead and hundreds injured.
New York Post, Jimmy Kimmel tearfully rips into politicians in wake of Vegas shoooting, Lisa de Moraes, Oct. 3, 2017. Jimmy Kimmel excoriated politicians who sent love to the families of Las Vegas shooting victims, but who won’t pass legislation to curb mass shootings in this country.
Oct. 2.
Washington Post, Gunman was a high-stakes gambler known for keeping to himself, William Wan, Sandhya Somashekhar, Aaron C. Davis and Barbara Liston, Oct. 2, 2017. Stunned family members said Stephen Paddock was quiet and rarely fired guns but often gambled in tens of thousands of dollars. “My brother is not like you and me," Eric Paddock said. “He sends me a text that says he won $250,000 at the casino.”
Before he opened fire late Sunday, killing at least 58 people at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, gunman Stephen Paddock was living out his retirement as a high-stakes gambler in a quiet town outside Las Vegas.ress refuses to act,” he said. “I am more than frustrated, I am furious.”
Washington Post, At least 58 dead, more than 500 injured in Las Vegas shooting, Derek Hawkins, Travis M. Andrews, Brian Murphy and Mark Berman, Oct. 2, 2017. Gunman in a high-rise hotel on the Strip opened fire during a country music festival. In the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, the sniper-style gunfire rained down from the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino on Sunday evening, police said.
The gunman, identified as Stephen Paddock, 64, is believed to be a “lone wolf” and was killed after authorities confronted him on the 32nd floor of the hotel, police said. The carnage surpassed the death toll of 49 people slain when a gunman in Orlando, who later said he was inspired by the Islamic State, opened fire inside a crowded nightclub in June 2016.
September
Sept. 28
JFK Countercoup, List of JFK Assassination Records Missing from the Archives, Bill Kelly, Sept. 28, 2017. What is missing from the extant history is more significant than what is in the documentary record. As researcher Malcolm Blunt has said, "It's amazing we have anything left. It's sickening, just sickening, and a disgrace, an absolute disgrace. The ARRB should have pressured these people into doing a proper search."
At the CAPA Press Conference at the National Press Club in March former ARRB chairman Judge John Tunheim (shown at right) asked me to send him a list of missing JFK assassination records that should be in the JFK Collection at Archives II and open to the public. This is my list, so far. Send me along any serious additions that I may have missed.
“She was shot in the head,” says author Nina Burleigh, who wrote about artist and socialite Pinchot Meyer in the 1999 biography A Very Private Woman. “Passersby heard screams and a witness looked over the wall and saw a man standing near her body. The police came and shortly arrested a black male [Ray Crump Jr.] soaking wet who said he fell into the Potomac while fishing. … No gun was ever found.”
Disclosures this summer about President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination are prompting a blistering dispute on whether new "scientific evidence" proves that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK as a lone gunman — or whether the claim against Oswald is part of an ongoing media cover-up of the truth.
Sept. 22
Alternet, Two Top Republicans to Call for Full JFK Disclosure, Jefferson Morley (shown at left), Sept. 22, 2017. "The American people are sick and tired of not being given the truth." Two senior Capitol Hill Republicans plan to introduce a congressional resolution calling for full disclosure of U.S. government records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa, shown below left) will introduce their JFK resolution before the end of the month, according to Jones.
“I want to make sure that the information that is owed the American people is made available,” the veteran North Carolina conservative (shown at right) said in an exclusive interview with AlterNet. “The American people are sick and tired of not being given the truth. “
The JFK Records Act of 1992 mandated full disclosure of all government records related to the assassination within 25 years. Some four million pages of records were released in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Another 100,000 pages of assassination-related material from a dozen government agencies must be made public by the statutory deadline of Oct. 26, 2017.
“We going to take a very positive approach and thank the agencies that have the information and are making it public,” Jones said. “At the same time we want to put some pressure on the agencies to release all the information they have.”
The CIA declined to say if it plans to seek postponement of the release of the Agency’s remaining JFK records.
The unreleased records include CIA files on two senior officers involved in assassinations and four Watergate burglars, as well as the secret congressional testimony of numerous JFK witnesses.
“I hope they will not request any postponement,” Jones said. “We’re talking about something that happened 54 years ago.”
While JFK scholars and journalists have called on Trump to "give us the full story of the JFK assassination," Jones and Grassley are the first elected officials to lend their clout to the cause. You can access the JFK records at the National Archives. At the Black Vault, a superior interface makes the new documents easy to search. The most complete online source for JFK files and information is found at the Mary Ferrell Foundation.
Sept. 19
Global Research, CIA Files on Lee Harvey Oswald, Set to be Released in October, Has ‘Gone Missing,’ Jack Burns, Sept. 19, 2017. Volume 5 of the CIA's Lee Harvey Oswald 7-volume collection, may never be turned over, even though the law requires it to take place by October 26th of this year. Countless concerned individuals are still searching for answers surrounding the mysterious death of the 35th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. The official narrative, that a lone former Marine named Harvey Oswald assassinated him, is widely disputed.
All available documents from all government entities are required by the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 to be released on October 26th of 2017. But if history repeats itself, the Central Intelligence Agency may not release an entire volume of documents on Oswald, known as “volume 5.”
So far, 2017 has been a year of anticipation for JFK conspiracy theorists as they await the release of all files surrounding the assassination of one of the country’s most beloved presidents. One group, known as the Citizens Against Political Assassinations, is chomping at the bits to get to volume 5 and others. They believe the official government narrative is full of holes and needs to be investigated.
Many of its members are lawyers, and as TFTP has reported, have desired to clear Oswald’s name of any wrongdoing if possible.
But it is attorney Lawrence Schnapf, Chair of the Environmental Law Section of the New York Bar Association, whose comments concerning the current president and his relationship with the Deep State (implied but not referred to as such) have the media ablaze with talk of yet another political assassination.
Schnapf (shown at right) is the co-chair of the CAPA legal committee. After a brief discussion of why JFK’s assassination is relevant today, Schnapf compared the early 1960s with 2017. He said the Warren Commission was the “original fake news” organization whose conclusions later became the official government narrative. Although the commission refused to pursue “exculpatory” information, which is now hidden behind “government secrecy,” he says he hopes will come out this year, in compliance with the JFK Assassination Records Act.
Turning attention again to the case of JFK, the group plans to use the shell casings found on the scene and 21st-century ballistics analyses to conclusively determine whether or not Oswald actually killed JFK.
He said they’re first going to conduct a mock trial in November, and later an official legal proceeding called a “Court of Inquiry,” an official court proceeding to definitely prove “Lee Oswald was not the shooter…that’s what we hope to prove.”
Future of Freedom Foundation, Did the CIA Assassinate Letelier and Moffitt? Jacob G. Hornberger, Sept. 19, 2017. Ever since the assassination of former Chilean official Orlando Letelier in 1976, the official position, promoted by both the mainstream press and the Washington establishment, was that former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who the U.S. helped install into power, ordered the hit on Letelier.
Yet, as I pointed out in my 3-part article “The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt,” which was published in the January, February, and March 2017 issues of FFF’s monthly journal, Future of Freedom, that position is problematic.
While the TV critics have been agog with praise and wonder over the series’s cinematic mastery, depth of research (some 80 interviews of participants on all sides) historical sweep and emotional punch, some veterans and longtime students of the war are already taking critical aim at the series’s fuzzy treatment of the war’s central question: Why did we get involved in the first place? Who thought that was a good idea?
Burns strives to give everyone’s strongly held, divergent views equal weight, but before long, he’s waist deep in a historical big muddy, wandering among competing theories that obscure the root cause of a war that killed an estimated minimum of 429,000 U.S. and allied soldiers and 533,000 communist troops and civilians between 1954 and 1975. Many estimates soar far above those. Millions more were wounded.
“Many veterans fear that this new documentary will misrepresent what really happened and why, substituting [the] ‘many truths’ which Burns says he will present,” Chuck Searcy, an Army Intelligence veteran of the war, said in an email to friends this week from Vietnam, where he has spent the past several years helping to rid the countryside of buried U.S. munitions that are still killing people. “It may permit us Americans, once again, to evade the harsh reckoning that is long overdue, and allow us to remain in denial about what we did in Viet Nam, and why.”
At an early screening of the film’s highlights in Washington, D.C.this spring, Burns said that, “for us, the war begins in 1945,” not 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson dispatched the first U.S. ground combat unit to South Vietnam. Good start. But in episode one, he stakes the proper context for the starting point in France’s mid-19th century conquest and colonization of territories that would eventually become Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. For the next 80 years France plundered the region for its rubber, tin and other resources, impoverishing its workers while creating a servile class of French-speaking native bureaucrats to carry out its orders, all largely financed by the opium trade. By the early 20th century, Vietnamese patriots began organizing a resistance. One of them was Ho Chi Minh.
Sept. 16
Washington Post, The brutal deaths of anti-corruption activists in India, Vidhi Doshi, Sept. 16, 2017 (print edition). At least 60 right-to-information advocates have been killed since 2005. Bhupendra Vira slumped in his chair. The 62-year-old had known that his anti-corruption work was dangerous. That is why he kept evidence neatly stacked in folders under his bed. That is why he had asked police for protection.
According to data collected by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Vira’s killing was one of 60 similar cases in India since 2005, when the Right to Information Act was introduced. The legislation is similar to the United States’ Freedom of Information Act and allows citizens to request the release of information from government officials. But in India, those who invoke the law risk provoking violent retribution.
Washington Post, China used to harvest organs from prisoners. Under pressure, that practice is finally ending, Simon Denyer, Sept. 16, 2017 (print edition). A 10-year campaign has created a system that relies on voluntary donors. China’s organ-transplant system was once a cause of international scorn and outrage, as doctors harvested organs from prisoners condemned to death by criminal courts and transplanted them into patients who often paid dearly for the privilege.
After years of denials, China now acknowledges that history and has declared that the practice no longer occurs — largely thanks to the perseverance of a health official who, with the quiet backing of an American transplant surgeon, turned the system around over the span of a decade.
That official, Huang Jiefu, built a register of voluntary donors, overcoming both entrenched interests that profited from the old ways and a traditional Chinese aversion to dismemberment after death. In true modern Chinese fashion, donors can sign up through a link and app available through the ubiquitous Alipay online payment system. More than 230,000 people have done so, and a computerized database matches donors with compatible potential recipients, alerting doctors by text message as soon as organs become available. Leading transplant experts outside China, including once-severe critics, have slowly been won over.
Sept. 15
Future of Freedom Foundation, Libertarian Analysis: Why No Indictment for Conspiring to Murder Castro? Jacob G. Hornberger (shown below, left), Sept. 15, 2017. During the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s, Congress and the American people learned that the CIA, in partnership with the Mafia, conspired to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro (shown at left in a file photo).
Ever since then, the U.S. mainstream media has poked fun at the various ways the CIA and the Mafia intended to kill Castro — e.g., via an exploding cigar or an infected scuba suit. In the process, however, the media has failed to ask a deadly serious question: Why weren’t the CIA and the Mafia ever indicted for conspiring to assassinate Castro?
Under U.S. law, assassination is considered murder. People can be convicted of conspiracy to murder even though they don’t actually commit the murder. The CIA and the Mafia justified their attempts to assassinate Castro by saying that he was a communist and, therefore, a threat to “national security.” But if we closely examine the Constitution, we find that the power to assassinate communists or other people who threaten “national security” is not among the enumerated powers that are delegated to the federal government, including the CIA and its partners.
So, why weren’t the CIA and the Mafia ever indicted for conspiring to murder Fidel Castro? The answer is simple: The CIA is much too powerful. That’s what makes it and its partners immune from criminal liability for murdering and conspiring to murder Fidel Castro or anyone else.
Stephen Pollak, who served during the Lyndon Johnson administration from 1965 to 1969, highlighted one of the most notable achievements of the Civil Rights Division: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Unlike the present, the president and leaders of both parties in Congress worked together, he said. “It’s beyond disheartening to contrast this history with the voting wars of the day,” Pollak said. “Prior unity of purpose has collapsed.”
Sept. 12
New York Times, South Korea Plans ‘Decapitation Unit’ to Try to Scare North’s Leaders, Choe Sang-Hun, Sept. 12, 2017. The last time South Korea is known to have plotted to assassinate the North Korean leadership, nothing went as planned. In the late 1960s, after North Korean commandoes tried to ransack the presidential palace in Seoul, South Korea secretly trained misfits plucked from prison or off the streets to sneak into North Korea and slit the throat of its leader, Kim Il-sung. When the mission was aborted, the men mutinied.
Now, as Mr. Kim’s grandson, Kim Jong-un, accelerates his nuclear missile program, South Korea is again targeting the North’s leadership. A day after North Korea conducted its sixth — and by far most powerful — nuclear test this month, the South Korean defense minister, Song Young-moo, told lawmakers in Seoul that a special forces brigade defense officials described as a “decapitation unit” would be established by the end of the year.
Defense officials said the unit could conduct cross-border raids with retooled helicopters and transport planes that could penetrate North Korea at night.
Rarely does a government announce a strategy to assassinate a head of state, but South Korea wants to keep the North on edge and nervous about the consequences of further developing its nuclear arsenal.
WhoWhatWhy, The Murder of John Kennedy’s Mistress, Part 1, Peter Janney, Sept. 12, 2017. On October 12, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, a Washington socialite (shown with President Kennedy at the White House), went for her usual jog along the Potomac River in a fairly deserted section of Washington DC and, for no apparent reason, she was shot twice at close range. She was neither raped nor robbed.
A witness, who heard screaming and shots ran to an embankment overlooking the scene, arrived in time to see a black man standing over Meyer’s body. He said the man stared at the woman for a bit, then put a dark object in his pocket, presumably a gun, and calmly walked away. The witness, Henry Wiggins Jr., saw the gunman from a distance of 128.6 feet, and described him as a “negro” who was 5 feet 8 to 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighing about 185 pounds.
Sept. 10 JFK Facts.org, Top 4 revelations from the new JFK files, Jefferson Morley (shown in a file photo), Sept. 10, 2017. The release of long-secret JFK assassination files by the National Archives has drawn the attention of news organizations nationwide. Four revelations stand out so far.
1) WhoWhatWhy reported on documents showing that Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas at the time of JFK’s assassination, was a CIA asset in the 1950s. His brother, Charles Cabell, was a high-ranking CIA official until 1962.
2) Ian Shapira of the Washington Post plumbed the new records to recount the secret interrogation of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB intelligence officer who defected to the United States in 1964. Nosenko was detained without charges for four years in what would now be called a CIA black site.
3) Writing for Politico, professor Larry Sabato and journalist Philip Shenon reported that one new CIA file showed that in the mid-1970s, one of Angleton’s top lieutenants came to doubt the Warren Commission’s finding that JFK was killed by Oswald, alone and unaided. Sabato and Shenon argue that the JFK investigation was “botched” and the possibility of a Cuban government involvement was ignored.
4) On AlterNet, I quoted extensively from the same records to show that the JFK investigation was not so much botched as “controlled’ by top CIA officials, including Angleton. The CIA made at least four false statements to investigators. The effect of these statements was to conceal what top CIA officers, including Angleton, knew of Oswald while JFK was still alive.
Collectively, the new JFK files pour more cold water on the “KGB did it” conspiracy theory, while encouraging questions about the “Castro done it’ theory. Mostly, the new files illuminate how the CIA resisted investigation of Oswald after JFK was killed, and why the public, and CIA officials themselves, came to reject the official theory of a lone gunman.
Officials of the National Archives have told AlterNet they will release thousands of pages of additional secret JFK records before October 26.
Sept. 7
A prominent structural engineering expert who has been studying the technical mysteries about the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 during the 9/11 attacks delivered on Sept. 6 a free webinar on his preliminary findings contradicting official versions of how the building collapsed.
Updated column: Critics of official U.S. government investigations have questioned how the three World Trade Center (WTC) buildings collapsed even though they were steel-framed high-rises that supposedly could resist both fire and a jetliner crash.
Among the three towers was WTC 7, which was not hit by an airplane and fell at nearly free-fall speeds more than seven hours after the other two buildings. A widely viewed video shows the 47-story building collapsing in just over seven seconds and in symmetrical fashion.
Dr. Leroy Hulsey (shown at right), chairman of the department of engineering and mines at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, presented his team's findings so far during a lecture on Sept. 6 at the university that was live-streamed and available for interested members of the public. Other details are here;
Hulsey, shown in a graphic about his lecture, also announced his preliminary written report. The full report of his team's two-year study is expected later this fall, followed by a six-week public comment period. The final report is scheduled for release in early 2018.
(Editor's Note: Although the 9/11 attacks are typically reported as terrorism they were also acts of political assassination under either official or alternative accounts because the goal of the killing was to achieve political goals.)
Sept. 6
University of Alaska at Fairbanks, Free Webinar on 9/11: Presentation to examine 9/11 Building 7 collapse, Dr. Leroy Hulsey, 4 p.m. (Alaska Daylight Savings Time, four hours ahead of EDT), Sept. 6, 2017. The University of Alaska at Fairbanks will host a public presentation on an ongoing study into the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 6, in Schaible Auditorium in Fairbanks. Dr. Leroy Hulsey, chairman of the university's department of engineering and mines, is leading the study. Shown above, he will present the findings outlined in his team’s September 2017 progress report, which will be released the same day.
August
Aug, 31
JFK Facts, Missing from the new JFK files: a batch of CIA records on Lee Harvey Oswald, Aug. 31, 2017. All of the U.S. government’s files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are supposed to be released by October 26. But one batch of the CIA records on suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, has gone missing. (Oswald is shown at center with sunglasses in a photo from his stay in the former Soviet Union, where the ex-Marine worked at a factory before returning to the United States under mysterious circumstances that have intrigued investigators for decades.)
The records were part of 7-volume file on Oswald, held by the agency’s Office of Security (OS), which is responsible for protecting CIA property and vetting agency personnel. Declassified CIA records show that volume 5 of the file records existed in 1978. The contents of the missing file are not known.
The disappearance of the records, discovered by JFK researcher Malcolm Blunt, is significant because the Office of Security was the first component of the CIA to open a file on Oswald, an ex-Marine who (reportedly) defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959.
Aug. 29
Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), JFK Assassination Records: Shell Games, Malcolm Blunt (shown below at left), Aug. 29, 2017. Both the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations gained access to the CIA Office of Security files of Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1993, despite a directive from CIA Director Robert Gates seeking an all-encompassing search of ALL CIA components for ANY material/records relevant to the assassination of President Kennedy, the Oswald "OS" files remained hidden.
This huge search by CIA did not surface Oswald’s security files and the Assassination Records Review Board remained uninformed about their existence. In response to official requests from the US Government and despite specific directives from CIA Directors Gates and [George] Tenet, which were acted upon by HRG Chief John Pereira in 1993 and J. Barry Harrelson in 1997, the Oswald Security ["OS"] files seem to have been turned inside out and outside in.
This beggars the question; for what possible reason? The intact files were previously given to both the [Senate] SSCIA and the HSCA, so why did the CIA “not find them” until a direct, specific request from the ARRB [Assassination Records Review Board] in 1997?
And then, why turn them over minus volume 5? How were the files missed during the Gates search of 1993 and the Tenet search of 1997? The two DCI orders were to search ALL CIA components.
Dr. Cyril H. Wecht Letter to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ("P-G") Editor about its editorial printed below on the life and legacy of Dick Gregory, Aug. 26, 2017. CAPA Chairman Cyril Wecht, shown at right in a file photo taken in his Pittsburgh lab, is a consultant, medical professor, attorney, prolific author and leader of numerous professional societies. Dr. Wecht's letter to the editor is reprinted below:
I was delighted to read the editorial (His pointed humor: Dick Gregory’s biting comedy was serious at core) regarding Dick Gregory. Several years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Gregory and participating with him on some programs dealing with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Indeed, he was a very serious advocate and outspoken supporter of matters pertaining to civil rights and social justice. His great talent as a comedian enabled him to educate his audiences and stimulate their active interest in various important sociopolitical issues.
Regrettably, your statement "On the darker side Mr. Gregory was a sucker for conspiracy theories from the Kennedy assassination to....." was quite insulting, dismissive, and invalid as a matter of accurate historical reflection.
Every national poll conducted since the JFK assassination on November 23, 1963, has indicated that a significant majority of Americans (ranging from 65 to as high as 82%) do not accept the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report ("WCR," Fall, 1964), namely, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman and nobody else had any involvement with JFK's brutal murder. Despite all the efforts of the major news media establishment to support the WCR, and rebuff or simply ignore, all the forensic scientific and other physical investigative evidence to the contrary, two thirds to three fourths of US citizens have continued to reject that absurd, forensic scientifically invalid conclusion.
Pray tell, do all these people live "on the darker side"? Is the rejection of the WCR some kind of personal "idiosyncrasy" shared by millions of people?
Some day, the P-G may deign to write an obituary about me. Obviously, you will state whatever you wish. I have only one small request. Please refer to me as having been a long time, loud-mouthed leader of the idiosyncratic dark-sided population that believes the WCR is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated by our government.
Very truly yours,
Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D.
Aug. 25 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, His pointed humor: Dick Gregory’s biting comedy was serious at core, Editorial Board, Aug. 25, 2017. In the parlance of the 1960s, it would be safe to say that the comedian and activist Dick Gregory was “out there.” Known for his biting comedy, activism and penchant for conspiracy theories in recent decades, Mr. Gregory died Saturday at age 84.
Mr. Gregory (shown in a file photo) rose to fame as a comedian whose stage act owed more to astute observations about being black in America than it did to expounding on the foibles of the human condition, the territory of most successful comics. That’s not to say Mr. Gregory wasn’t funny. He was a very funny man whose humor bit down hard on whatever subject caught his fancy, but race in America fascinated him more than anything else.
Mr. Gregory’s humor was rooted in a political sensibility that boldly questioned the Establishment. He was part of the comedy revolution that emerged in the late 1950s and included such rebels as Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. He came of age at a time when being a comedian included the possibility of being arrested.
For his part, Mr. Gregory was arrested dozens of times over the years, usually supporting civil rights and equal rights for women and denouncing the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons.
Though he was later eclipsed by younger comedians such as Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, Mr. Gregory held on to a devoted following. He was especially revered by comedy aficionados on both coasts and his fellow comedians who appreciated the way he told stories. The civil rights movement had given Mr. Gregory the kind of exposure and goodwill that paid dividends for decades.
At the height of his fame and notoriety, Mr. Gregory ran for mayor of Chicago and for president of the United States on top of the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. He got a lot of write-in votes in both cases and was one of the first entertainers to demonstrate the power of celebrity in the political realm. While his runs for political office were obvious stunts, Mr. Gregory was serious about the issues.
Mr. Gregory was also obsessed with health. He incorporated regular fasting into his regimen along with running and other exercises. He wanted America to face the fact that it had a problem with obesity and deal with it. In fact, he stopped performing in nightclubs in the 1970s because smoking and drinking were allowed — putting his values above earning potential.
On the darker side, Mr. Gregory was a sucker for conspiracy theories from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11. It was an idiosyncrasy that often colored his humor, but didn’t dominate it. Mr. Gregory was an American original who never lost his love of comedy or politics. He was always striving to be the kind of comedian all Americans could laugh with, regardless of their background. He succeeded masterfully.
CAPA announces discounted hotel rate in Houston for Oswald mock trial in November, Aug. 25, 2017. CAPA has arranged a $179 per night discounted hotel rate from Nov. 15 though 17, 2017 for the planned Lee Harvey Oswald Mock Trial. The rate is being offered by the Houston Marriott Medical Center/Museum District at 6580 Fannin Street, about six miles from the mock trial venue at the South Texas College of Law-Houston. The rate does not include taxes. Hotel details are here.
Regarding the event, the two-day mock trial State of Texas v. Lee Harvey Oswald will be held on November 16th and 17th at the South Texas College of Law-Houston
Building on what has been learned from the Innocence Project and the 2009 National Academy of Sciences report on forensic evidence, the CAPA mock trial will apply 21st Century techniques to examine the physical evidence used by the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to identify Lee Harvey Oswald as the alleged sole assassin of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
The HSCA concluded that a shot from the grassy knoll by an unknown person missed Kennedy. Oswald is shown in a New Orleans police mug shot taken in August, 1963 during a street disturbance and separately below in a file photo. More details are here: CAPA, Save The Date: CAPA Mock Trial On Oswald Nov. 16-17 In Houston.
Aug. 24 Consortium News, A Distant Echo on Race and Police, James DiEugenio (shown below at left), Aug. 24, 2017. “Detroit” is a new movie that reminds Americans that the issues of racism and police brutality are nothing new, blights on the nation that have never been properly addressed.
The new film Detroit by director Katherine Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal is about an event that took place in 1967. But with what has happened in America over the past couple of years, it could not be more timely, particularly the fatal police shootings of male African-Americans, such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Alton Sterling in Ba
The chaos led President Johnson to appoint the Kerner Commission to investigate the underlying causes of the violence. The commission famously concluded, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
The Algiers Motel incident – the focus of the new movie – represented something of a microcosm of those divisions and how they sometimes had deadly consequences. The incident gained notoriety at the time mostly due to the work of author John Hersey, who is best known for his reporting on eyewitness accounts of the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
Regarding the Detroit riot, Hersey investigated the Algiers Motel case, how and why three black youths were killed. Hersey published The Algiers Motel Incident in late 1968, deliberately releasing the book before all of the legal proceedings surrounding the incident were concluded.
He felt the sooner the public was aware of what happened there, the better America could understand and deal with the killings, which were committed, as the legal phrase puts it, “under the color of authority.” Or, as the author phrased it, “the law taking the law into its own hands.” (Hersey, p. 31)
When the occupation of the Algiers Motel was finally over, three African-American youths had been killed: 17-year-old Carl Cooper, 18-year-old Fred Temple, and 19-year-old Aubrey Pollard. No sniper weapons of any kind were recovered. As presented in the film, the youths had been playing around with a starter’s pistol.
More than 50 years after the president's assassination, more than 3,000 documents remain classified "top secret," locked away in the National Archives. By law, all documents related to the investigation must be unsealed and public by October. Recently, several new documents were released, but the final, still secret batch remains a mystery.
FOX23's Justin Gray asked Shenon why government officials might want these old documents classified. Shenon said there are many theories. "I think it may show just much more bungling there had been by the government before the assassination, and how Kennedy's life should have been saved," Shenon said. "Many people who might arguably be involved in what might be thought of as a cover up are still quite prominent in America."
Others say the assassination is more than just a 20th century mystery to be debated by history buffs. "Why in 2017 should people care about this" said Andrew Kreig at the Justice Integrity Project. "Because it's the Rosetta Stone to current affairs."
The files, Kreig said, offer a look into how the FBI, CIA and other agencies investigate present-day, high-profile cases, which is why seeing those documents remains important. "Whatever one's view is, go to the evidence," Kreig said.
Aug. 19
The Root, Comedian and Civil Rights Activist Dick Gregory Dead at 84, Monée Fields-White, Aug. 19, 2017. Comedian Dick Gregory — who attacked racism through a biting and satirical style of comedy, and was equally well-known for his civil rights activism and advocacy of an austere health regimen — died Saturday, Aug. 19 at the age of 84.
Born Oct. 12, 1932, in St. Louis, Gregory (shown in a file photo) grew up in an impoverished community in that city. He helped to support his family from an early age. In high school he excelled in track and field, earning a scholarship to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He set school records in the 1/2-mile and 1-mile races. His college career was interrupted when the U.S. Army drafted him in 1954.
Gregory began to venture into comedy while in the Army, performing various routines in military shows. After briefly returning to Southern Illinois after being discharged in 1956, he moved to Chicago to join the national comedy circuit, without finishing his degree. He performed mostly in small, primarily black nightclubs while working at the U.S. Postal Service during the day. It was at one of those nightclubs that he met Lillian, the woman who became his wife in 1959. She and Gregory would have 10 children.
His big break came in 1961, when a one-night show at the Chicago Playboy Club turned into a two-month engagement. Time magazine profiled him, and he landed an appearance on The Jack Paar Show. Gregory was a new phenomenon: a black comedian performing for white audiences. He was also part of a new generation of black comedians, including Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby and Godfrey Cambridge, who shunned the stereotypical comedic minstrel show. In his routines, Gregory tackled issues of the day — especially racism and civil rights — head on.
During this time, Gregory became very active in the civil rights movement. He spoke before the voter-registration drive known as Freedom Day on Oct. 7, 1963, and made appearances at a number of other rallies, marches and benefits. In 1963 he was jailed in Birmingham, Ala. He was also an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.
In 1964 Gregory released his autobiography Nigger, about his experiences with America's color line, starting in boyhood; it has since sold more than 7 million copies. In response to his mother's objection over the incendiary title, he wrote in the foreword, "Whenever you hear the word 'nigger,' you'll know they're advertising my book."
Gregory's political activism led him to run, unsuccessfully, for mayor of Chicago in 1966 and for the presidency as a write-in candidate of the Freedom and Peace Party in 1968. Throughout his life, Gregory remained outspoken on many issues, including world hunger, capital punishment, women's rights (he marched for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1978), health care and drug abuse.
In 2005, at a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, he called the U.S. "the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet. As we talk now, America is 5 percent of the world's population and consumes 96 percent of the world's hard drugs." As a protester, Gregory never stopped putting himself on the front lines: In 2004, at the age of 73, he was arrested while protesting against genocide outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C.
In the 1970s, after moving to Massachusetts, Gregory became very interested in vegetarianism, nutrition and overall fitness, eventually advocating a diet of raw fruits and vegetables (this from a man who once weighed 350 pounds, drank heavily and smoked several packs of cigarettes a day). He was particularly opposed to the typical soul food diet, attributing to it much of African Americans' disproportionate health challenges.
Aug. 15 JFK Facts.org, How Shenon and Sabato came to Fake News in JFK’s Murder, Jefferson Morley (shown in a file photo), Aug. 15, 2017. After more than fifty years and zero quantum of proof since the JFK assassination, Philip Shenon and Larry J. Sabato insist on the out-worn hypothesis “Castro sorta done it” while reporting how the CIA came to doubt the official story. From a batch of documents recently released on line by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), they have cherry-picked an unauthored 1975-CIA memo that specifically:
“Noted the failure of the CIA, FBI and the Warren Commission to interview a key witness in Mexico City — Silvia Duran, the Mexican woman who worked in the Cuban consulate and was reported to have had the affair with Oswald.”
“Offered a detailed theory [about] how Oswald (…) may have been inspired to assassinate the president if, as seemed probable, he read an article on Monday, September 9, in the local newspaper, that suggested Castro was targeted for murder by the United States.”
Aug. 14 Cox Media Washington, DC Bureau via KIRO-TV, Thousands of secret documents on JFK assassination could be made public, Justin Gray, Aug. 14, 2017. Thousands of top secret documents that could hold never-before-revealed details about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are scheduled to be made public this fall.
But some intelligence agencies are pushing to keep the secret files classified. President Trump will make the final decision about whether to declassify the documents. If you were alive on Nov. 22,1963, you likely remember where you were.
Even if you were born in the decades after, you've still seen the images and heard about what happened on that tragic day. Now, nearly 55 years later, more than 3,000 documents from the investigation remain locked up inside the national archives.
“Do you think there could be things in this evidence that dispute the official Warren account?” Gray asked.
“Oh yes,” said Andrew Kreig, with the Justice Integrity Project [and also CAPA]. By law, all the documents related to the investigation must be unsealed and made public by October.
Just weeks ago, thousands of pages of new documents were released, but it’s unknown what's in the final, still secret, batch.
JFK Facts, 4 CIA lies: New JFK files show how assassination investigation was controlled, not ‘botched,’ Jefferson Morley, Aug. 14, 2017. The JFK story is back in the news. Under a law passed by Congress in 1992, all of the government’s JFK files had to be released within 25 years, by 2017. The July 24 release was the first in a series of document dumps that National Archives says will take place before October 24, the statutory deadline for full disclosure.
Politico claims the first batch of new files show “How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK’s Murder.” In the article, reporter Philip Shenon and professor Larry Sabato revive the theory that Fidel Castro might have been behind the crime.
The “Castro done it” theory, it is worth noting, was first floated within hours of JFK’s murder — by CIA propaganda assets. The Cuban Student Directorate, a Miami-based organization funded by the agency, published a broadsheet less than 48 hours after JFK’s death, declaring that Oswald and Castro were the “presumed assassins.” The group was funded under a covert program with the code name AMSPELL. A declassified CIA memo shows the group was receiving $51,000 a month (the equivalent of $350,000 today) from the agency at the time of its conspiracy mongering.
The “botched” investigation of the Warren Commission failed to pick up on the possible Oswald-Castro connection in 1964, Shenon and Sabato say. Only in 1975, they claim, did CIA officials realize that “no one had properly followed up on clues about an especially mysterious chapter in Oswald’s life — a six-day, apparently self-financed trip to Mexico City.” As result of these lapses, they say, Oswald’s ties to Cuban intelligence were never properly investigated.
This is a charitable reading of the new files, as WhoWhatWhy has noted. A more thorough reading of the new records tells a different story: The JFK investigation was not “botched” or “bungled” — it was controlled by two top CIA officials. The new records, available on the National Archives website and searchable in more accessible form at BlackVault.com, document how the CIA misled JFK investigators on four key issues:
1. The agency’s conspiracy in November 1963 to assassinate Fidel Castro. 2. The date CIA personnel first opened a file on Lee Harvey Oswald. 3. What CIA operations officers knew about Oswald’s contacts with an agency-funded anti-Castro group in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. 4. What top officials knew about Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate six weeks before the assassination.
In the article you wrote with Philip Shenon (“How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK Murder” – Politico, August 3), there is the following statement –“21st century forensic science demonstrates that Oswald was almost certainly the lone gunman in Dallas”.
Would you be so kind as to send me your information regarding this reference.
Thank you. Very truly yours, Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D. (Shown above right in a file photo in his forensics lab)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Dear Cyril,
Thank you for the note. Prof. Sabato discusses this subject at some length in his book, “The Kennedy Half-Century.”
I have not read Mr. Shenon’s book but I would imagine he addresses the issue in his book ( “A Cruel and Shocking Act” ) as well.
Kyle Kondik Managing Editor, Sabato’s Crystal Ball University of Virginia Center for Politics
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Dear Kyle,
Thank you for your prompt response to my recent inquiry.
I have checked the reference you gave me to Professor Sabato’s book.
The only “scientific” discussion I note therein deals with the acoustics analysis that the HSCA relied upon.
I would like to receive a more specific response to my question re: “21st century forensic science demonstrates that Oswald was almost certainly the lone gunman in Dallas.”
I am certain you can appreciate the fact that as a forensic scientist deeply involved and interested in the JFK assassination for more than 50 years, such an important reference has great significance to me.
I have had no hesitation or problem in relating to major WCR defender – proponents over the years. Indeed, I developed good relationships with Specter, Bugliosi, and Posner.
I am not seeking to engage in a personal dispute with Professor Sabato. However, I cannot ignore the statement made by him and Mr. Shenon in a widely disseminated article that will be given much weight by thousands of readers.
Their comment is quite specific. Accordingly, the basis for that comment must be quite specific, also. Just exactly what are the 21st century forensic scientific studies that buttress and validate the WCR’s conclusion re: Oswald as a lone gunman?
I believe this is a fair and logical question to be addressed to a high level academic entity.
I look forward to your response.
Thank you, Best Wishes, Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D.
Aug. 8 WhoWhatWhy, Politico’s Challenge to JFK Orthodoxy That Isn’t, Staff report, Aug. 8, 2017. Politico Magazine featured an article that appeared to question the official narrative of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — that he was killed by a lone-nut — but in the end only supported it. Why does mainstream media refuse to recognize any evidence to the contrary?
Those familiar with the circumstances surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are aware that the official story pronounced by the Warren Commission — the first official government investigation into Kennedy’s murder — was that lone-wolf Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year old ex-Marine with a curious past, shot the president from the 6th floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository building in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.
Although in the 1970s a second government investigation — the House Select Committee on Assassinations — concluded that the murder was the result of a probable conspiracy, the official line out of Washington, D.C., and nearly every mainstream news organization since that day in November, has been to parrot the Warren Commission. Oswald acted alone — although the idea of involvement of Castro and Russia is often hinted at.
Future of Freedom Foundation, Figuring Out the Kennedy Assassination, Part 2, Jacob G. Hornberger (shown below), Aug. 8, 2017. (Part I here.) The official story of the Kennedy assassination is that he was killed by a former U.S. Marine, lone-nut, communist assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald (shown in a passport photo below right). The big problem, however, is that the official story has never comported with much of the circumstantial evidence in the case nor with common sense, reason, and logic. That’s why no one has ever been able to come up with a credible motive for Oswald to kill Kennedy.
As I pointed out in Part 1, by the time he was assassinated Kennedy was ending the Cold War against the communist world and had announced his intention for America to live in peace, friendship, and mutual coexistence with the Soviet Union, especially Russia, Cuba, and the rest of the communist world. If Oswald had, in fact, been an genuine communist, that would have made him ecstatic. Why kill Kennedy knowing that he would be replaced by Johnson, who vehemently disagreed with JFK’s change of direction and, instead, was on the same page as the Pentagon and the CIA?
The obvious question arises: Why would a genuine communist want to joint to join an organization — the U.S. Marine Corps — that had just killed and injured millions of communists in Korea? Indeed, it wasn’t communists who hated Kennedy for what he was doing. It was instead the U.S. national-security establishment, which believed that Kennedy’s actions constituted a grave threat to national security.
There is an easy explanation — one, however, that is not consistent with the official story. In the 1950s, there was a famous television series called I Led Three Lives, which is based on a book of the same name by a man named Herbert Philbrick. The series revolved around an American man who posed as a communist but who was actually a FBI agent. The man’s job was to infiltrate communist cells that were supposedly operating here in the United States and secretly report their activities to the FBI.
It’s worth watching a couple of episodes of I Led Three Lives just to get a sense of what life was like here in the United States during the Cold War and the anti-communist crusade. You can access them on YouTube by searching for “I Led Three Lives.” The commies were supposedly everywhere — the State Department, the Army, Hollywood, the public schools, and other walks of life. The Russians were coming! They were coming to get us, take over the federal government, and turn America entirely Red.
As a PBS documentary entitled Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? pointed out, I Led Three Lives was Lee Harvey Oswald’s favorite TV Show as a teenager. Now things makes sense.
Aug. 7 Future of Freedom Foundation, Figuring Out the Kennedy Assassination, Part I, Jacob G. Hornberger (shown below), Aug. 7, 2017. (Part 2, Aug. 8, 2017.) By the time he was assassinated, Kennedy was ending the Cold War against the communist world and had announced his intention for America to live in peace, friendship, and mutual coexistence with the Soviet Union, especially Russia, Cuba, and the rest of the communist world. JFK Facts.org, The new JFK files: What Politico missed about the CIA role, Jefferson Morley (shown at right), Aug. 7, 2017. The first JFK writers to weigh in on the new JFK files are Phil Shenon and Larry Sabato, former New York Times reporter and University of Virginia professor respectively. In a story for Politico Magazine, they purport to tell the story How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK’s Murder.
The tipoff to the story’s limitations is the headline, which sounds a bit odd: how the CIA came to doubt the official story....If the CIA did not doubt the official story — that a lone gunman killed Kennedy out of “hatred for American society” — it was because the agency, on several key points, was the source of that story. The Warren Commission relied on the CIA’s information in telling the American public about Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union in October 1959, his return in June 1962, and his curious visit to Mexico City in October 1963.
As Shenon and Sabato note, perhaps too casually, senior CIA officials lied to the Warren Commission on each and everyone of these points. Any reasonable person would say that the initial lies call in to question the sincerity of the later doubts. In fact Oswald had been monitored closely by the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff from 1959 to 1963.
The new JFK files do not, in my view, support Shenon and Sabato’s “Castro Done It” theory, which predictably points the figure of culpability at the Cuban government in Havana. Rather these files, in their totality, tell a more disturbing story, which points to culpability in the U.S. government in Washington, and the CIA in Langley.
Sputnik via Information Clearing House, JFK Killing: Lies & Russophobia, Finian Cunningham, Aug. 7, 2017. The assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963 was a seminal event in modern American history. Yet 54 years on, the official US state continues covering up the shocking truth about the killing of one of its most popular leaders.
A recent release of secret memos from the Central Intelligence Agency is a classic case of disinformation put out to further contaminate public knowledge about how and why the president was murdered in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. What the newest release of CIA documents appear to “disclose” is that the agency was involved in a “benign cover-up” by influencing the 1964 Warren Commission to conclude that Oswald acted alone in killing the president. What this amounts to is disinformation planted in the National Archives by the CIA, which upon eventual release gives the impression that a significant revelation is being unearthed. Notice how the supposed “disclosures” end up reinforcing the official narrative – namely, that the American president was killed by a lone malcontent.
Conveniently, this latest spin feeds into the current climate of Russophobia being whipped up by large sections of the US media, which blames Russia for meddling in the presidential elections last years and colluding with the campaign team for Donald Trump. In other words, the latest CIA disclosures are designed at burnishing the credibility of the official US account of how and why JFK was murdered, while also resonating with the Deep State effort to oust Trump from the White House. The trouble is the official version of JFK’s killing has already been exposed as a preposterous fraud by numerous independent researchers and writers.
Perhaps the best account on the event is provided by James W Douglass in his book, JFK and the Unspeakable. There are several others, but Douglass’ book is a compendious study. There seems little doubt that Kennedy was “taken out” by executive action, a term used by the CIA and its Deep States operatives, including the numerous hit men that triangulated the ambush on JFK’s motorcade on that fateful day in Dealey Plaza, Dallas.
Aug. 5 Kennedys and King, The Larry and Phil Show, James DiEugenio, Aug. 5, 2017. Jim DiEugenio (shown in a file photo) excoriates two articles concerning the July NARA document release which appeared in the Washington Post and Politico. As most of us know, the National Archives began a premature release of JFK assassination documents on July 25th. The legal target date had previously been late October. For whatever reason, NARA decided to begin early. As I noted in my "Open Letter to Martha Murphy and John Mathis," the first week was marked by many problems. Most of which, in my opinion, could have been avoided.
Anyone familiar with the JFK case understands that these documents are the leftover residue from the work of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Formed to declassify all the records in the JFK case, that citizens’ panel ceased operations in 1998. But they specified that, by law, certain documents could be exempted from their declassification efforts. They also stated, however, that 2017 would be the termination date for those documents.
There were many valuable documents that the ARRB declassified, dealing both with the Kennedy presidency, and Kennedy’s assassination. Concerning the former, the ARRB declassified the records of the SecDef conference of May 1963, which cinched the case that President Kennedy had assigned Robert McNamara to implement his withdrawal plan from Vietnam. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 366) Concerning the latter, the ARRB declassified the Lopez Report, which raises the most profound questions about Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico seven weeks before the assassination. Chief Counsel of the ARRB, Jeremy Gunn, conducted a long inquiry into the medical evidence in the Kennedy assassination. The highlight of this was the testimony of official photographer John Stringer. Under oath, Stringer told Gunn that he did not take the photos of Kennedy’s brain at NARA. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 164).
Unfortunately for the public, there was little fanfare attended to both the process and the discoveries of the ARRB. There were some sporadic stories, for instance, about the Vietnam withdrawal plans and Operation Northwoods, but generally speaking, the MSM did not explain the task of the ARRB, nor did it inform the public about the gold in the treasure trove of documents — over two million pages — that finally saw the light of day after over 30 years of secrecy.
Last week’s early batch of releases also featured some bracing documents. For instance, there was a document revealing the CIA status of Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell (shown at left). Another one showed that, by the seventies, Collins Radio was quite close to the CIA. Collins Radio relates to the assassination through both George De Mohrenschildt and Carl Mather. And this is only from a first glance through several thousands of pages of newly declassified documents.
Which brings us to the Larry and Phil Show. I refer here to the commentary on this NARA release by authors Larry Sabato and Phil Shenon. These two men penned two largely irrelevant books at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination: respectively, The Kennedy Half Century, and A Cruel and Shocking Act, told us very little that was new about either the Kennedy presidency or the facts of his assassination.
What is exceptional about that fact is this: Both men wrote their books over a decade past the closing down of the ARRB. Yet one would be hard pressed to show how those millions of documents, or Gunn’s extensive medical inquiry, figured into those two books, both of which, unsurprisingly, came to the conclusion that none of the documents mattered. Neither did Jeremy Gunn’s inquiry. The Warren Commission was right all along. Lee Oswald killed JFK; the Magic Bullet lived.
Aug. 4
Black Op Radio via Kennedys and King, Jim Marrs passes away (August 2) at age 73, Participants include John Armstrong, Jim DiEugenio, Robert Groden, Larry Hancock, Debra Conway, Mark DeValk, John Barbour, Lisa Pease, Oliver Stone and Malcolm Blunt, Aug. 4, 2017.
Aug. 3
Politico, How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK’s Murder, Philip Shenon and Larry J. Sabato (shown below at left), Aug. 3, 2017. Newly released documents from long-secret Kennedy assassination files raise startling questions about what top agency officials knew and when they knew it.
After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the CIA appeared eager, even desperate, to embrace the version of events being offered by the FBI, the Secret Service and other parts of the government.
The official story: that a delusional misfit and self-proclaimed Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president in Dallas with his $21 mail-order rifle and there was no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic. Certainly, the CIA’s leaders told the Warren Commission, the independent panel that investigated the murder, there was no evidence of a conspiracy that the spy agency could have foiled.
But thousands of pages of long-secret, assassination-related documents released by the National Archives last week show that, within a few years of Kennedy’s murder, some in the CIA began to worry internally that the official story was wrong — an alarm the agency never sounded publicly.
Phil Shenon is a former New York Times reporter who says he is not interested in any other aspect of the assassination of President Kennedy other than that which indicates Castro was behind the dirty deed. In his book A Cruel and Shocking Act, he tries to make the claim that Oswald met Cuban embassy officials at a private Twist Party where they encouraged him to kill JFK. There was a party at which Oswald was encouraged to kill General Walker, but Shenon isn’t interested in that. See my reviews: JFKcountercoup: A Cruel and Shocking Twist.
Sabato is associated with the University of Virginia Center for Politics and together they represent a Punch and Judy show that we will have to get used to. We will have to respond and correct each of their articles, especially as they try to promote the original cover story: the false black propaganda and disinformation campaign to promote the idea that Castro was behind the assassination of JFK.
Dr. John M. Newman, shown at left above, author of Countdown to Darkness, JFK and Vietnam, Oswald and the CIA, Where Angels Tread Lightly and more. Photo credits: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform and Skyhorse Publishing, with collage by WhoWhatWhy
WhoWhatWhy, 2017 JFK Document Release Shows Former Intelligence Analyst Got It Right, Alan Dale, Aug. 3, 2017. For decades, those investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have been eagerly anticipating the release of previously withheld documents scheduled for later this year, October 26. One major question that remains is whether President Donald Trump will use his authority to further keep these documents from the public eye.
Fifty-four years is long enough. The potential for discovery represented by the recent and upcoming release of remaining government files on the Kennedy assassination was realized this week with the startling revelation that beginning in 1956, Earle Cabell (shown at left), brother of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Charles P. Cabell and Mayor of Dallas at the time JFK was assassinated, was a CIA asset.
We are now able to review his 10/17/56 CIA Secrecy Agreement, his CIA 201 file cover sheet, his 5/13/57 CIA Personality 201 File Request, and a cover sheet indicating that the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) reviewed his 201 file. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) master listing of files scheduled for release indicates that the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) classified these records as “Not Believed Relevant” (NBR).
ARRB Director Judge John Tunheim, speaking at the National Press Club during a CAPA-sponsored event this past March, said that he now believes that many of the NBR-designated documents are indeed relevant. With the benefit of hindsight, that may have been an understatement.
The passage of many days, months, or years may be necessary for information to be placed in the correct context and understood as being significant.
The example of George Joannides (shown at right), who was brought out of retirement to act as liaison between the Agency and the HSCA, is a case in point. Joannides’ role as the CIA case officer for the DRE (Revolutionary Student Directorate), an anti-Castro group with which Lee Harvey Oswald had interacted in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, was withheld by the agency throughout the term of the HSCA which was investigating CIA connections to the group.
When asked directly if Joannides could assist the HSCA by identifying the officer who had handled the DRE during the summer of 1963, he responded by saying, “I’ll look into that.” Perhaps the CIA did not feel that revealing Joannides’ true identity to the Committee investigators was “assassination-related.”
Kennedys and King, An Open Letter to Martha Murphy and John Mathis at NARA: Re: Last Releases of the JFK Act, James DiEugenio (shown in a file photo), Aug. 2, 2017. As both of you know, when the Assassination Records and Review Board closed its doors way back in 1998, they specified that after four years of operation, there were still many documents related to the JFK assassination that had yet to be declassified. That body had been set up as a direct result of the firestorm of controversy that swept the country as a result of the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. At the end of that film, a title card appeared which said that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations were classified until the year 2039. Stone’s film raised many questions about the circumstances of President Kennedy’s assassination. The most direct one was: Did Lee Oswald shoot the president? For about ten months in 1991-1992 the country was involved in a debate about this question which encompassed all forms of media.
Finally, due to this furor, the JFK Act was passed in 1992 and the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was later established by President Clinton. After some initial delay, it got up and rolling in 1994 and lasted until 1998. In retrospect, the ARRB did not last long enough and it was also underfunded. I say this because it has become apparent that many of the documents now being released should not have been withheld in the first place. But the main point is, everyone involved in the field knew that the 2017 date for final release was coming.
The original date for final release was late October of 2017. NARA had announced previously that, for whatever reason, it would be releasing withheld documents prior to that date. And beginning on July 25th, with little advance fanfare, this is what you did. According to a previous announcement by Ms. Murphy, there was a team of four archivists and three technicians working on this project many months in advance. One would therefore have expected that you would only begin the advance release if you were ready to do so. You must have realized that there were many people interested in the subject and that these people were eager to begin going through the remainder of the documents. Why begin the process early if everything was not in place?
After one week of sorting through the initial release of last week, that is a question that hangs pregnant in the air. To put it frankly, this early release has been the equivalent of “jumping the gun.” There have been many complaints by many researchers. But to name just some of the more popular ones:
-- Some of the documents are so poorly copied they are, quite literally, illegible. -- Some of the documents are related to the MLK case, not the JFK case. -- Some of the documents are being released with a withheld notice on them. That is, they are not declassified at all. -- Some documents have not been released but should be there, since the document was already known about. -- Some of the documents still contain redactions. -- Many of the documents in the index do not have titles.
As I noted above, many people in the JFK community, and some in the media, were eagerly awaiting the final release of the ARRB documents. The creation of the ARRB, as you know, was a very unusual act of Congress. In fact, I can think of no other body quite like it. Many, many important and revealing documents were finally declassified by that citizens’ panel. These documents had a profound impact on the information that informed people now have about the career and assassination of President Kennedy. Whole books have been written on the JFK case that have been largely based on those documents. It would not be an overstatement to say that those documents changed the calculus on that crucial historical episode. In retrospect, as beneficial as the ARRB was to the information database on the JFK case, it is clear that many of the documents released during the last week should not have been withheld either from them or by them. In my opinion, that is a matter for them to explain, not you.
But concerning the six points listed above, these are all matters that were up to NARA. The assassination of President Kennedy was perhaps the single most tragic event of the second half of the 20th century. According to polls conducted by author Larry Sabato for his book The Kennedy Half Century, that event had a profound impact on the course of history. Many people interviewed for that book said that the nation has not been the same since.
This is one of the reasons that this case still haunts America. You should have been aware of this fact. In my opinion, and the opinion of many others, there should have been no redactions or no withholdings upon the July 25th release. And given that there are, there should have been no early release. That matter should have been resolved in advance. You also should have furnished a complete and thorough index to the documents prior to their release. That way there would have been no dispute about what was there and what was not. There should have been an explanation of why there are MLK documents in the JFK collection. And finally, you should have demanded from the originating agency that every document be readily legible.
Aug. 1
Future of Freedom Foundation, Will Trump Continue the CIA’s Cover-Up in the JFK Assassination? Jacob G. Hornberger (shown at right), Aug. 1, 2017. Last week, the National Archives suddenly released a batch of long-secret official records relating to the JFK assassination. This was surprising because the official release date for all the JFK-assassination records, as mandated by law, is coming this October. The still-secret records amount to tens of thousands of pages of documents, many of which are records of the CIA, the super-secret federal agency that has specialized in the art of assassination, cover-up of assassination, and regime change practically since its inception in 1947.
The gig is finally up. With one possible exception: The CIA can request President Trump to continue the secrecy on grounds of “national security.” If the president grants the request, the secrecy continues. If it doesn’t, the secrecy finally comes to an end, at least with respect to the CIA’s records that have been in the custody of the National Archives for the past 25 years.
Will the CIA seek another secrecy extension? Will the agency tell President Trump that “national security” will be threatened if the American people are permitted to see its 54-year-old records? I don’t have any doubts about it, and I’ve been saying that for several months now.
Just as I and others have been predicting for several months. Of course, there will be those who will cry “National security, Jacob!” or simply chalk it up to the CIA’s customary penchant for secrecy.
Do the still-secret records contain a videotaped confession by CIA officials stating that they orchestrated the assassination of President Kennedy to protect “national security,” just as they orchestrated regime-change operations in Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil, Congo, Chile, and elsewhere to protect “national security”? Of course not.
But the CIA knows that the still-secret records will provide further bits of circumstantial evidence that further fill in the overall mosaic of what happened. That’s why they’re going to ask Trump to continue the secrecy — to prevent assassination researchers from getting their hands on those additional pieces of circumstantial evidence.
South Africa's flag under its racist apartheid regime is shown above
Washington Post, An anti-apartheid activist died in police custody in 1971. New testimony points to murder, Kyle Swenson, Aug. 1, 2017. Ernest Matthis spied the falling body but heard no scream. It was late afternoon, October 1971. The South African prosecutor was in the middle of a witness interview, part of an ongoing insurance investigation. “I was standing some distance from the window and I saw a person fall,” Matthis recounted last week in a courtroom in Pretoria.
Below, Ahmed Timol wrestled with his last breaths. A Muslim schoolteacher and political activist, the 29-year-old had been arrested six days earlier. Above, on the Vorster Square’s 10th floor, were the offices of the South African Police’s Special Branch, the much-feared ideological shock troopers tasked with uprooting dissent — and the unit that had grabbed Timol and a friend from a checkpoint.
July
July 31
Boston Globe, What we know about the newly released JFK assassination records — and those yet to come, Nik DeCosta-Klipa, July 31, 2017. Last week, the National Archives released thousands of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, hundreds of which had never before been publicly disclosed. Those who’ve studied the assassination say the new records expand on what was known about the government’s surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as a mysterious trip he made to Mexico City two months before the assassination.
But the latest records release is also just the tip of the iceberg of what’s expected to come. “This all goes back to Oliver Stone’s movie JFK back in the early 1990s,” says Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter and author of the Kennedy assassination book A Cruel and Shocking Act.
“Whatever you think of it as a film, it created such an uproar and it got so many conspiracy theories whirling that Congress felt it was forced to act,” Shenon said.
More than 4 million pages of documents on the assassination were released in December 1992. Some agencies like the CIA and FBI withheld some documents at the time, arguing their release could endanger government spies or informants.
The newly disclosed documents are believed to amount to only about 1 percent of the remaining unreleased records, according to Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of the book The Kennedy Half-Century.
Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), AARC Board responds to Sabato and Shenon, Editorial Board, July 31, 2017. On July 25, 2017, the Washington post published an opinion piece, President Trump, give us the full story on the JFK assassination, by Larry Sabato and Phil Shenon. The following three responses to that article are contributed by AARC Board members Dr. Don Thomas, Malcolm Blunt, and Dr. Gary Aguilar.
Dr. Donald Byron Thomas (author of Hear No Evil in 2013): In an otherwise persuasively reasoned op-ed in the Washington Post arguing for unfettered release of JFK assassination documents (as required by law), Philip Shenon and Larry Sabato indulged in uninformed and unsupported overstatement by claiming that “… 21st-century forensic science demonstrates that Oswald was almost certainly the lone gunman in Dallas…”
A novice reading that statement would likely conclude that there have been recent (since 2000) scientific studies that incriminate Lee Harvey Oswald (shown on a Time Magazine cover) in the JFK murder case. But there are none. Not one. There is not even one that claims to be.
There have been excellent (and otherwise) forensic studies on the JFK evidence in recent years, but none of them inculpate anyone. In short it is a Trumpism – made up – fake news. Shenon and Sabato’s bald claim about the forensics is an alternative fact, the very sort of invention the Washington Post should be striving hard to avoid.
JFKCountercoup, The Argot of Dealey Plaza: How to define and talk about what happened at Dealey Plaza, Bill Kelly (shown in a file photo), July 31, 2017. It now should be established and accepted as a fact that the modus operandi of the assassination of President Kennedy was not that of a deranged loner, but rather that of a covert intelligence operation.
The largest CIA station in the world at the time — at the University of Miami, went by the cover of Zenith Technological Enterprises, as US Army Ranger Bradley Ayers describes in his books The War that Never Was and The Zenith Secret.
As Ayers describes it, they set it up just like the Big Con artists set up a Big Store as a fake gambling joint or broker's office. "Monday morning we met the station chief, Ted Shackley," Ayers wrote. "As we sat in his outer office, waiting a little nervously, I saw they had missed no detail in setting up the false front of Zenith Technological Enterprises." "There were phony sales and production charts on the walls and business licenses from the state and federal governments. A notice to salesman, pinned near the door, advised them of the calling hours for various departments. The crowning touch was a certificate of award from the United Givers' Fund to Zenith for outstanding participation in the annual fund drive."
As Malcolm Blunt recently noted: “Better we should look at the documents being released and work on what I’m sure to most is irrelevant minutiae. Although most of these releases are going to be absolutely meaningless to [Washington] Post and [New York] Times reporters, really we being given missing pages from an incomplete dictionary. Agency cryptonyms, pseudonyms, internal systems and management. Very valuable.”
JFKFacts.org, Beyond the smoking gun: The new JFK files fill in two holes in the assassination story, Jefferson Morley (shown in a file photo), July 31, 2017. There is no one piece of evidence in the 113,000 pages of JFK records scheduled to be released by October 26, 2017, that will change people’s minds about what happened long ago in Dallas.
But the new JFK files, if released in their entirety, will fill in the two key gaps in the JFK assassination story that have long been obscured by government misconduct, official secrecy, and lazy journalism.
Think of the JFK assassination story as an incomplete mosaic. The new files help complete the picture in two ways. The new files shed light on the CIA’s use of Lee Oswald for intelligence purposes before November 22, 1963. They also illuminate the illegal actions of government officials to conceal the CIA’s manipulation of Oswald and its plot to kill Fidel Castro in late 1963.
Once all of these files are in the public record, then — and only then — can we assess what they tell us about the conspiracy question. So I advise news reporters (and everyone else) to put aside fantasies of a “smoking gun,” and focus on what the new facts tell us.
The new files strengthen the claim —long denied by the CIA and mainstream news organizations — that the agency used accused assassin Lee Oswald (shown in a Dallas mug shot) for intelligence purposes. More of the story is coming in the testimony of Orest Pena, a New Orleans bar owner who said he saw Oswald in the company of a senior FBI agents in the summer of 1963. The Pena testimony was not included in the first batch of National Archives releases last week.
The newly-declassified financial records of the CIA front group, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, are also relevant. In his turn as a public supporter of Castro in the summer of 1963, Oswald had repeated contacts with people associated with the CRC.
Meanwhile, intelligence historian John Newman has already begun to use the new files to develop the granular knowledge of CIA covert operations and cryptonyms necessary to tell this story.
JFKFacts.org, #NewJFKfiles: In 1964 Nikita Khrushchev schooled Drew Pearson on the JFK conspiracy question, Jefferson Morley, July 31, 2017. To people interested in the new JFK releases, I can highly recommend item 3) on Bill Kelly’s Top Ten Newly Released Records: Drew Pearson’s interview with Nikita Khrushchev. In this May 1964 conversation about the assassination of JFK, Drew Pearson, one of the nation’s leading syndicated columnists, failed to dispel the conspiratorial convictions of Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union.
Khrushchev disbelieved the Warren Report and criticized American intelligence agencies, Pearson reported. Three years later, Pearson’s fellow investigative reporter Jack Anderson would break a story that shattered Washington’s confidence in the official JFK story and lent credence to Khrushchev’s view.
July 29
Earl Cabell, Dallas mayor in 1963, year of President Kennedy's assassination
The New JFK Show Blog; New JFK Assassination Research, Earle Cabell was CIA, Larry, July 29, 2017. We all know that General Charles Cabell was fired by JFK, along with Richard Bissell, and Allen Dulles, over the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, an operation that JFK had inherited from the Eisenhower administration. On November 22, 1963, the mayor of Dallas was one Earle Cabell, the brother of Charles Cabell (shown at left). Some conspiracy theorists believe this was quite convenient for those who set up JFK for the hit in Dealey Plaza. It goes much deeper than this. This newly released file proves that Earle Cabell had been CIA since 1956!
JFKCountercoup, Kelly's Top Ten Newly Released Records, Bill Kelly (shown in a file photo), July 29, 2017. The National Archives and Records Administration is releasing documents previously withheld in accordance with the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. The vast majority of the Collection (88%) has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s. The records at issue are documents previously identified as assassination records, but withheld in full or withheld in part.
This first batch of releases consists of 3,810 documents, including 441 formerly withheld-in-full documents and 3,369 documents formerly released with portions redacted. The documents originate from FBI and CIA series identified by the Assassination Records Review Board as assassination records. More releases will follow. Except for the Collins Radio file, most of these records are among the first batch previously released with redactions.
July 27 JFK Facts, In 1972, CIA chiefs ordered no more questions about accused assassin Oswald, Jefferson Morley, July 27, 2017. On April 5, 1972, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, backed by director Richard Helms, issued a blanket order: “the agency was not, under any circumstances, to make inquiries or ask any source or defector about Oswald.”
The order, found in the massive batch of JFK files released online this week, came nine years after Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas on November 22, 1963, allegedly by Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old ex-Marine. The order was issued after officials in the agency’s Soviet Bloc division asked a Russian defector about the accused assassin who lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962.
The CIA memo, classified as a state secret for the past 35 years [JFK Facts Editor's note: Paul Hoch tells me the memo was released with a name redacted in 1998] sheds light on how Angleton, a legendary spy chief known for his brilliance and paranoia, tightly controlled the JFK investigation for years after the crime. No one at the CIA was supposed to ask questions about Kennedy’s accused killer.
Angleton’s espionage exploits have inspired a small library of spy novels and several Hollywood films since his death in 1987, including Norman Mailer’s novel Harlot’s Ghost and Robert DeNiro’s CIA film The Good Shepherd.
But the true story of Angleton’s sinister role in the events leading up to JFK’s assassination–and the cover-up that followed– is only beginning to come to light. The April 1972 memo and other newly-declassified records leave little doubt that Angleton (shown at right in a file photo) was the mastermind of the CIA coverup that followed JFK’s assassination.
The memo is just one of the CIA records among the 113,000 pages of JFK records scheduled to be released by the National Archives by October 26.
Why Angleton felt so strongly that the defector, a KGB officer named Oleg Lyalin, is a complex story that I will recount in a future post. Angleton, a conspiracy theorist par excellence, has inspired many conspiracy theories himself. From my study of the declassified CIA records and extensive interviews, the new JFK files should be read with three factual points in mind.
Angleton suspected a KGB conspiracy behind Kennedy’s murder. He publicly testified to that effect at least four times. Angleton knew more about Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy was killed than anyone in the CIA or the U.S. government. Angleton’s aides, in a secret office known as the Special Investigations Group, monitored Oswald’s movements and correspondence from October 1959 through November 1963. After JFK was killed, Angleton gained control of the CIA's investigation of Oswald and did not relinquish until he was fired by in December 1974.
The CIA wanted to control questions about Lee Harvey Oswald in 1972 because Angleton had a conspiracy theory he wanted to investigate. Angleton also had lot to hide about CIA operations involving the accused assassin before JFK was killed.
Kennedys and King, Oswald’s Intelligence Connections: How Richard Schweiker clashes with Fake History, Paul Bleau, July 29, 2017. Paul Bleau offers an exhaustive review of sixty-four individuals with whom Oswald came in contact, and who had either plausible, probable, or definite intelligence links –– something that Bob Baer seems almost entirely to have missed in the “Tracking Oswald” series.
"We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence."
~~ Senator Richard Schweiker, The Village Voice, 1975
There are many statements from official sources that contradict Warren Commission findings and most history books’ description of the JFK assassination. They are on the record in the numerous reports following other governmental investigations of the JFK assassination or they were captured in interviews and writings of many of those directly involved in them, but Schweiker’s was perhaps the most damning. Not only because of what he said, but also because of who he was.
Schweiker was a well-respected Republican politician who served under President Reagan from 1981 to 1983 as Secretary of Health and Human Services. He served over 20 years as a Pennsylvania U.S. Representative (1961–1969) and U.S. Senator (1969–1981). In 1976, he had an unsuccessful run to become Vice President in Reagan’s losing presidential campaign.
Most crucial for the purposes of this essay, from 1975 to 1976, Schweiker was a member of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Which, in deference to its chair Senator Frank Church, was commonly known as the Church Committee. This famous investigative body issued fourteen reports after interviewing hundreds of witnesses and studying thousands of files from the FBI, CIA and other agencies.
Thanks to its work, this is when most Americans were first told about the infamous U.S. assassination plots against foreign leaders, which were a key component of CIA regime control or “change operations”. Targets included the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro of Cuba, the Diem brothers in Vietnam, General Schneider of Chile and President Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Ex CIA director Allen Dulles’ pact with the mob to assassinate Castro was also part of their findings. This information, which could have had an impact on the Warren Commission investigation, was kept secret by Dulles while he served on the Commission –– something CIA historians now refer to as a benign cover-up.
Under senators Gary Hart and Richard Schweiker, the Church Committee also conducted a focused investigation (Book 5) of the Kennedy assassination, concentrating on how the FBI and CIA supported the Warren Commission. Its report was very critical of these agencies:
“... developed evidence which impeaches the process by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination, and by which they provided information to the Warren Commission. This evidence indicates that the investigation of the assassination was deficient."
To say the least, Schweiker was quite vocal in his views. Consider the following instances:
In 1976 he told CBS News that the CIA and FBI lied to the Warren Commission and that the case could be solved if they followed hot new leads. He also claimed that the White House was part of the cover up.
In a BBC documentary, , he made the following blistering statement about the Warren Commission investigation: “The Warren Commission has in fact collapsed like a house of cards and I believe it was set up at the time to feed pabulum to the American people for reasons not yet known, and one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at that time.”
In this revealing documentary, he goes on to say that the highest levels of government were behind him and his committee being mislead. They were continuing the cover-up, and also that Oswald was clearly involved with pro-Castro and anti-Castro groups, which smacked of an intelligence role as a double agent, and that these relationships were not investigated.
In his Kennedys and King article, JFK and the Unforgivable, this author chronicled some thirty examples of other investigation insiders who contradict the Warren Commission’s conclusions about Oswald being a Lone Nut assassin, which is still the basis of what we can find in most of today’s history textbooks.
July 26
Black Vault, Released JFK Documents, Admin, July 26, 2017. The National Archives and Records Administration is releasing documents previously withheld in accordance with the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. The vast majority of the Collection (88%) has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s. The records at issue are documents previously identified as assassination records, but withheld in full or withheld in part.
The first release consists of 3,810 documents, including 441 formerly withheld-in-full documents and 3,369 documents formerly released with portions redacted. The Black Vault has archived them all below, and has created a much easier index to use.
The documents originated from FBI and CIA series identified by the Assassination Records Review Board as assassination records. More releases will follow. Four selected columns from the official Archives lists (maybe not all of them) are visible here, starting at “The Document Index – With Hyperlinks.”
July 25
Washington Post, President Trump, give us the full story on the JFK assassination, Larry J. Sabato and Philip Shenon, July 25, 2017. Later this year — unless President Trump intervenes — the American people will get access to the last of thousands of secret government files about a turning point in the nation’s history: the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Larry J. Sabato (shown at left) is director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century.” Philip Shenon, a former Washington correspondent for the New York Times, is the author of “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination.”
July 24
National Archives, National Archives Begins Online Release of JFK Assassination Records, Staff report, July 24, 2017. Today at 8 a.m., the National Archives released a group of documents (the first of several expected releases), along with 17 audio files, previously withheld in accordance with the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The materials released today are available online only. Access to the original paper records will occur at a future date. On July 24, 2017 at 8 a.m., the National Archives released a group of documents (the first of several expected releases), along with 17 audio files, previously withheld in accordance with the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. CAPA's leadership applauds the release of records, including release on a rolling basis to advance research instead of all at once at the statutory deadline of Oct. 26, 2017 for final release. The National Archives (NARA) announcement of the release follows below:
The materials released today are available online only. Access to the original paper records will occur at a future date.
Download the files online here. Highlights of this release include 17 audio files of interviews of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer (shown in a file photo) who defected to the United States in January 1964. Nosenko claimed to have been the officer in charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald during Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. The interviews were conducted in January, February, and July of 1964.
This set of 3,810 documents is the first to be processed for release, and includes FBI and CIA records — 441 documents previously withheld in full and 3,369 documents previously released with portions redacted. In some cases, only the previously redacted pages of documents will be released. The previously released portions of the file can be requested and viewed in person at the National Archives at College Park (these records are not online).
Background: The re-review of these documents was undertaken in accordance with the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which states: “Each assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of enactment of this Act, unless the President certifies, as required by this Act, that continued postponement is made necessary” by specific identifiable harm.
The act mandated that all assassination-related material be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and defined five categories of information that could be withheld from release. The act also established the Assassination Records Review Board to weigh agency decisions to postpone the release of records.
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 (88 percent) has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s. The records at issue are documents previously identified as assassination records but withheld in part or in full. Federal agencies have been re-reviewing their previously withheld records for release, and will appeal to the President if they determine that records require further postponement.
Online resources: • JFK Assassination Records Processing Project—background and FAQs • Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board • JFK Assassination Records FAQs • Warren Commission Report
# ## # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
CAPA (Citizens Against Political Assassinations) this spring helped prepare the research community for NARA's forthcoming release of documents this year by presenting a major forum on March 16 at the National Press Club presenting experts on the topic. The featured speaker was former Assassination Records Review Board Chairman John R. Tunheim, who had led the five-member commission appointed by Congress to supervise release of documents related to Kennedy's 1963 assassination. CAPA Chairman Cyril H. Wecht, the noted forensic pathologist, consultant, author and medical school professor, is shown at left introducing Tunheim, who is now chief U.S. District Court judge for Minnesota. (Photo courtesy of Noel St. John.) CAPA reported and filmed the forum, which details available in ARRB’s Former Chief Tunheim Keynotes CAPA March 16 National Press Club Forum Previewing Historic 2017 JFK Records Release. “CAPA seeks release of the remaining JFK records with a minimum of redactions, which can obscure vital information,” commented Wecht, a prominent expert in forensic pathology for five decades. “We shall also file Freedom of Information Act requests and similar legal actions to enforce the law and undertake public education efforts to show the importance of disclosure to new generations.”
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and many of these documents are listed from 1968. JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963
Heavy.com, Martin Luther King Jr. Files Among New JFK Documents Just Released (With List), Stephanie Dube Dwilson, July 24, 2017. Hidden among the JFK documents just released by the National Archives are a series of documents about Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The National Archives’ servers appear slammed and the documents are very large (with some compressed files being 2 GB or more), but lists of the contents for each file are quickly viewable. Here is a list of some of the MLK files that are included among the JFK files just released. Because these documents must be downloaded before they can be viewed, and the servers are running slow, it’s not yet known what these documents contain, and there may be more MLK-related documents than found in this list.
CABLE: Subject had amazing resemblance — April 10, 1968
CABLE: Has not yet ruled out possibility — April 19, 1968
FBI has positively identified accused assassin — April 19, 1968
Dispatch: Transmittal of photographs of alias Eric Starvo Galt — April 22, 1968
Dispatch: James Early Ray, AKA Eric Starvo Galt, Harvey Lowmyer, John — April 22, 1968
CABLE: FBI advises that matching OG fingerprints proves — April 23, 1968
CABLE: Three photos James Earl Ray appeared “El Diario” — April 23, 1968
MF: James Earl Ray — April 23, 1968
CABLE: All pertinent information James Earl Ray passed — April 26, 1968
Official Routing Slip: Our files on Martin Luther King Reveal — October 22, 1975
Official Routing Slip: There is no indication in the files on James Earl Ray — October 23, 1975
Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced today that Eric Starvo Galt — January 1, 1968
MFR: Unknown Subject, possibly identifiable with Eric Starvo Galt — April 19, 1968
Routing and Record sheet: RE King Assassination — May 1, 1968
MF: Investigation in of report on suspicion actions of subject originally described as resembling suspected assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — May 16, 1968
Cable: Initial details of Ray’s arrest — June 8, 1968
Cable: Tracing has produced no evidence that… — April 19, 1968
Cable: Has had to prepare two summaries — April 12, 1968
Cable: American involvement in Anti-Vietnam War — April 13, 1968 (Not known if this is related to MLK, but he spoke out against the Vietnam War about a year before he died)
Investigation of death of Martin Luther King. Junior — April 18, 1968 & April 25, 1968
Dispatch: Reports that the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King … — April 29, 1968
Report: Meeting of Dr. Martin Luther King — Sept. 28, 1964
Dispatch: Meeting of Dr. Martin Luther King — October 20, 1964
Dispatch: Publication of articles by Dr. Martin Luther King — Nov. 17, 1964
MEMO: Martin Luther King — Nov. 30, 1964
REPORT: King, Martin Luther — November 5, 1967
REPORT: Views on black militant situation in Chicago — October 5, 1967
REPORT: Views on domestic racial situation and the new politics convention — October 5, 1967
DISPATCH: Communist comments on the death of Martin Luther King/Reference to “Black Power” concept — April 10, 1968
King/Ray FOIA — January 1, 2000
JFKCountercoup, NARA New Releases, Bill Kelly, July 24, 2017. Bill Kelly, shown in a file photo, is a member of CAPA's board of directors and is the editor of JFK Countercoup. I was notified by a National Archives Media Advisory at 8 a.m this morning that they have begun to release some of the previously with held government records under the JFK Act that mandates all government records related to the assassination of President Kennedy by October 26, 2017.
Rather than release all the remaining records all at once the NARA staff has been working hard to release what they can before the sunset date, provided agencies don't request their continued postponement in an official request to the National Security Agency and President Trump's acquesence, something he is not expected to do.
The hard copy of these new records are not available at the Archives II yet and are only available on line, via a very compressed zip filing system, a computerized system that crashed after a few hours, so only the first few users could download the records before the system went down.
I only got a chance to review the spread sheet subject matter of some of the zip files and was sent one downloaded CIA file on Collins Radio that I was interested in, that I review at JFKCountercoup2.blogspot.com.
Thats just one of more than 3,000 such records, so you can see that we will be busy reading for a long time, if they get the system up and running again.
The Education Forum, National Archives release first batch of 2017 JFK documents, Anthony Thorne, July 24, 2017. The National Archives have just released the first batch of long awaited 2017 JFK documents, with more to follow. 3810 documents have been released, 441 of those were previously withheld in full, the rest present unredacted versions of previously censored documents. The first batch comes to many gigabytes of material.
JFKCountercoup, New Collins Radio Document Released, Bill Kelly, July 24, 2017. Of the thousands of new documents being released under the JFK Act, these are significant because they were with held for reasons of National Security, and are among the last to be released, as the JFK Act requires, before October 26, 2017.
As the file with the subject COLLINS RADIO dates from 1977, it was probably created for the Church Intelligence Committee, and because the Assassination Records Review Board requested all of the documents reviewed by the Church and HSCA Congressional Committees, they received many documents not related to the assassination of President Kennedy.
As Judge John Tunheim explained in his March Sunshine Week National Press Club CAPA press conference, because the ARRB was limited by law to only JFK assassination records, they labeled NBR — Not Believed Relevant — many records segregated for the Congressional committees but not related to the assassination of JFK.
The ARRB considered this file NBR even though Collins Radio supplied the radios for Air Force One and some of its employees were implicated in the assassination.
The Records Identification Form lists it as CIA - Doc. 104-10107-10191, a 21 page record that is listed as four documents but is actually nine searate documents, mainly letters and memos seeking a legal opinion on various matters.
The first few are letters from Collins and LTV, inquiring if their employees bachelor quarters at a secret Joint Australia-USA SIGNET base near Alice Springs, Australia, are taxable. Because the base is 1,000 miles from the nearest city and operates 24-7, the assigned quarters are not taxable.
On anorther subject - the CIA General Counsel looked into the legality of using profits from operation Tominerva to fund Project SPACE, a propriety of Toshield for $222,500.00.
Another legal opinion was sought regarding the acquisition of technical communications information in the Middle East by a Collins employee that "we plan to use this foreign intelligence to penetrate select communications abroad."
It was determined to be "foreign intelligence," as defined by Section 5(a)5 of Executive Order 11905 and considered under the "Silver Platter" doctrine because it was not solicited or paid for, but could not be distributed to other agencies.
In a final document TOTINGER - a European manufacturer of cipher equipment "the NSA finds defiant of analysis" was negotiating a contract with Collins to supply micro processors that would be approved by the Office of Munitions Control. TOTINGER was attached to the stable of TOARIEL.
The bottom line is these documents have nothing to do with the assassination directly, but provide details and deep background into the defense contractors connected to the assassination - D. H. Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository was one of the owners of LTV in 1963.
This is a brief, quick review and analysis of one of the thousands of records with held and released today under the JFK Act - a review process that will take many months and years of work.
Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., Pepper told attendees of a press conference he held July 20 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. His focus was what moderator Andrew Kreig called "an exceptional slice of history": the assassinations of two of the prolific author's close friends, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
The real story hasn't been told, he said. The public doesn't know it. But the immediate purpose this morning was to announce his 200-page petition to the Organization of American States (OAS) human rights body "to obtain under treaty rights a new trial for Sirhan Sirhan or the kind of evidentiary hearing that California and other U.S. authorities have denied him."
Since 2007, Pepper has been working to have RFK's alleged assassin, Sirhan Sirhan (shown in a California prison mug shot), exonerated. He has collected reams of evidence to prove that Sirhan's shots did not kill Kennedy. The lethal shot was to the back of his head, by another culprit still not brought to justice, he said.
Similarly, the JFK assassination has been proved to have been carried out by others in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald. The "Camelot" president had, in his brief tenure, antagonized a host of powerful entities because of "radical" policies like wanting to vacate U.S. troops from Vietnam, overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba without using U.S. troops, force the resignation of war-mongering CIA and Pentagon leaders, promote desegregation, prosecute Mafia leaders, and review the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and oil depletion allowance.
He said to expect many books on the subject next year, which will contain but "a small hint of what happened."
Hausfrauleaks, Sirhan Sirhan: A “Reel Bad” Arab?J. Michael Springmann, July 21, 2017. (Michael Springmann, shown in a portrait, is an author ("Visas for Al Qaeda" and this year's "Chaos In Europe"), attorney and former U.S. State Department diplomat.)
On July 20, 2017, William F. Pepper, Ed.D., J.D., spoke at the National Press Club about his previous day’s filing of a 200-page petition regarding Sirhan Sirhan. Sirhan, jailed since 1968, is the alleged killer of Robert F. Kennedy, the late New York U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate. Organized by Andrew Kreig, J.D., editor of the Justice Integrity Project [and a CAPA board member and PR committee chair], the well-attended conference enabled Dr. Pepper to discuss his long-sought evidentiary hearing on behalf of Sirhan.
As Sirhan’s lawyer for many years, Pepper conceded that the legal remedies for his client in the United States have been exhausted at both the State and federal levels. California, where Kennedy had been murdered in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen, did not assure a fair trial. Essentially, ineffective assistance of counsel got the accused wrongly convicted. Grant Cooper, his attorney, under threat of a sealed felony indictment, did almost nothing to defend Sirhan. He failed to investigate the matter, obtain the autopsy report, or examine ballistics tests. He spent most of the court proceedings arguing that Sirhan was guilty and, that because of diminished capacity, should not be given the death penalty.
Despite Andrew Kreig's extensive and most vigorous efforts, only a few members of the press turned up at the conference: an intern from the Washington Times, a representative from Al-Mayadeen TV of Beirut, along with a knowledgeable White House correspondent for an alternative news site. This appeared to validate Pepper’s view of the heavily-managed American media. And it bodes ill for what seems to be the attorney’s goal in filing with the OAS: to generate enough adverse publicity to force the United States to re-examine the questionable trial of Sirhan Sirhan. Indeed, a casual search of the Internet turns up a number of references about “conspiracies” revolving around the problematically convicted Sirhan.
July 20
Courthouse News, JFK Researchers Demand CIA Records on Themselves, Brandi Buchman, July 20, 2017. Investigators once tasked with examining the assassination of President John F. Kennedy claim in court that the CIA won’t respond to requests for records it might have on covert surveillance of them.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Washington, D.C. federal court, Dan Hardway, Edwin Lopez and G. Robert Blakey say they filed a Freedom of Information Act request in May, requesting “201 files” or “soft files” on themselves. Hardway, Lopez and Blakey also requested the CIA turn over any “p files,” or surveillance records, maintained at the Office of Security.
[Blakey, shown at left, was general counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) created by Congress to re-investigate the 1963 Kennedy assassination and the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hardway and Lopez were staff members who worked in part on especially sensitive matters related to claims involving accused JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's purported activities in Mexico.]
Specifically, the plaintiffs want records about surveillance on themselves conducted in Mexico, Cuba and the U.S., including any surveillance of interactions between them and “members or representatives of the Cuban Interest Section, or other representatives of the Cuban government,” according to the lawsuit.
In addition to records about surveillance on themselves, they also want CIA surveillance records on Gateon Fonzi. Asking for electronic, telephonic, mechanical, digital, video or any other physical observation, Hardway, Lopez and Blakey say their request is limited to files generated between 1976 and 1979. The request seeks “operational and non-operational files, records, information and materials including but not limited to counterintelligence and autonomous operations, regarding operations aimed at, targeting or related to the [HSCA],” according to the complaint, including “search slips, search instructions, routing slip and forms, memoranda, letters, telephone messages, email” and any other form of written communication about them.
Hardway (shown in a file photo), Lopez and Blakey – joined by the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Maryland that Hardway leads – claim the CIA has not responded to their May FOIA request. The plaintiffs want an inventory list describing all of the information and materials the CIA finds. They also seek a court order that any records deemed to be exempt from disclosure be preserved by the CIA until the court authorizes their destruction or release. They are represented by attorney James Lesar of Silver Spring, Md.
The CIA declined to comment on the lawsuit Thursday.
July 19
The 5th Estate (published in Jakarta and edited by Robert Finnegan), RFK assassination expert to speak at National Press Club July 19 and 20, Dr. Cyril Wecht (shown in a file photo), July 19, 2017. " I strongly endorse and support the petition that Attorney William Pepper is submitting to the Organization of American States seeking a new trial for Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted for the 1968 killing of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
As an official consultant in forensic pathology to Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles Chief Medical Examiner who performed the autopsy on Senator Kennedy, I had the opportunity to visit the shooting scene at the Ambassador Hotel and subsequently review and analyze all the relevant forensic scientific evidence and investigative findings in this matter. Based upon all the objective, indisputable physical and forensic evidence, there can be no doubt that Sirhan did not fire the bullet that caused Senator Kennedy’s death."
July 16 Justice Integrity Project, Andrew Kreig, July 16, 2017. Dr. William F. Pepper, the noted human rights lawyer, author, and attorney who has defended the convicted killers of his friends Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will speak July 19 at the National Press Club about the central responsibility of news organizations to report the news fairly and without self-censorship.
Pepper, shown with King in a 1967 photo conferring at a conference, will describe how the media have repeatedly failed to inform the public of the ongoing injustice in the Sirhan case, among others. Without a free, independent press, Pepper says, "the rule of law and an informed public cannot function" in a democratic society.
Pepper is filing a 200-page petition this week to the Organization of American States (OAS) accusing the California and U.S. governments of violating the due process rights of accused Kennedy killer Sirhan Sirhan, shown in a prison system photo after being held without parole since the killing on June 5, 1968.
Pepper is delivering a 7 p.m. lecture to the Sarah McClendon speaker society, which has been located at the club for more than a quarter of a century. The society is named after the pioneering and blunt-speaking White House correspondent from Texas, Sarah McClendon, who died in 2003.
Pepper's lecture and a book signing are open to the press and public, and is preceded by an optional no-host, Dutch-treat dinner beginning at 6:30 p.m. at the club, which is located at 529 14th St., NW near the corner of F Street in downtown Washington, DC.
Pepper is an American lawyer and English barrister. A 1960's friend of Kennedy and King, he believes that their accused killers were wrongly accused for political reasons.
July 15
New York Times, Do Spy Agencies Hold Answer to Dag Hammarskjold’s Death? U.N. Wants to Know, Alan Cowell and Rick Gladstone, July 15, 2017. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold in 1953. Mr. Hammarskjold (shown at right) and 15 others died in a plane crash in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia. After 56 years and many investigations, there is new hope that secrets lurking in Western intelligence archives could solve the biggest whodunit in United Nations history: the mysterious death of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold.
Whether the keepers of those archives will allow access remains an open question. Mr. Hammarskjold, an iconic Swedish diplomat who was the second secretary general of the world body, died with 15 others when their plane, a chartered DC-6, crashed just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, minutes from its destination: an airfield in Ndola, in what was then the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia.
The three official inquiries that immediately followed suggested pilot error was the cause, but the third of the reports, by the United Nations Commission of Investigation in 1962, said sabotage could not be ruled out. That possibility helped feed suspicions and conspiracy theories that Mr. Hammarskjold, 56 at the time of his death, had been assassinated.
Since then, independent investigators and academics have spent years collecting and scrutinizing evidence that had been dismissed or suppressed, bolstering the theory of foul play. In her 2011 book “Who Killed Hammarskjold?,” Susan Williams, a University of London scholar of African decolonization, concluded that “whatever the details, his death was almost certainly the result of a sinister intervention.”
July 13
Black Op Radio, 2017 Research Conferences, Host Len Osanic interviewed reporter, author and CAPA Director Andrew Kreig on July 14, 2017. The topic was recent and upcoming conferences featuring research on the assassinations of President John Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy. Other recent and upcoming Black Op shows, each featured for a week after launch at 6 p.m. Thursdays (Pacific Time), are:
July 28 844 Oliver Stone The Putin Interviews
July 21 843 Andrew Kreig 2017 Research Events
July 14 842 Jim DiEugenio JFK Research
July 6 841 Scott Enyart / Randy Benson RFK / "The Searchers" film
July 10
WhoWhatWhy, The FBI’s Increasingly Odd Silence on Boston Bombing, James Henry, July 10, 2017. As another mega-budget Hollywood movie about the Boston Marathon bombing nears release, the mainstream media are finally addressing the many unanswered questions concerning the mastermind of the bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. And yet — four years after the bombing and two years after Tamerlan’s younger brother Dzhokhar was sentenced to death for his role — the feds still aren’t talking.
WhoWhatWhy readers will be familiar with most of these open questions:
How was Tamerlan able to travel back and forth to the country from which he sought asylum in 2012, despite being on multiple terror watchlists? Why was he not questioned about the 2011 murder of three of his friends? Was Tamerlan working for or manipulated by the feds for some purpose? Was the FBI or some other federal agency using Tamerlan’s desire to become a US citizen as leverage?
As we highlighted in April, ABC News investigative reporter Michele McPhee published a damning exposé which documents the suspicion in Boston’s local law enforcement that the FBI is covering up its interactions with Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the bombing. McPhee’s investigation led her to conclude that there is indeed an FBI cover-up afoot.
July 6
CAPA, Save The Date: CAPA Mock Trial On Oswald Nov. 16-17 In Houston, Lawrence Schnapf, July 6, 2017. A two-day mock trial State of Texas v. Lee Harvey Oswald will be held on November 16th and 17th at the South Texas College of Law-Houston, Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA) announced today.
Building on what has been learned from the Innocence Project and the 2009 National Academy of Sciences report on forensic evidence, the CAPA mock trial will apply 21st Century techniques to examine the physical evidence used by the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to identify Lee Harvey Oswald as the alleged sole assassin of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
The HSCA concluded that a shot from the grassy knoll by an unknown person missed Kennedy. Oswald is shown in a New Orleans police mug shot taken in August, 1963 during a street disturbance and separately below in a file photo.
A senior judge from the Harris County Criminal Court will preside over the event with the jury selected from the Harris County jury pool.
Alec Baldwin (shown in a photo from a Cannes Film Festival) will be the keynote speaker for the Nov. 16th dinner following the first day of the mock trial. He will also participate in a book signing for registrants prior to dinner for his new book Nevertheless: A Memoir.
The mock trial will offer 7.5 hours of Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credits including 1.5 of CLE Ethics credits.
Seating capacity will be limited. So early registration is recommended. The event will also be streamed live for registrants who are unable to travel to Houston.
Future of Freedom Foundation, Murder with Impunity in Russia … and the U.S., Jacob G. Hornberger (shown at right), July 3, 2017. Last Friday, the Washington Post published an excellent editorial about murder and the rule of law. The editorial described how Russian prosecutors secured convictions of five men for murdering Boris Nemtsov (below right), a popular critic of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, but criticized Russian officials for failing to pursue the people who ordered the killings.
The editorial, entitled “No Justice After the Cold Blooded Murder of a Russian Opposition Leader,” suggested that the assassination may have been orchestrated by Russian officials and criticized the judge presiding over the case for his lack of “curiosity” about who ordered the killing.
Even though the Post might not realize it, its editorial, however, says much more about the United States than it says about Russia. After all, if Russian officials did in fact orchestrate Nemtsov’s assassination, I don’t think many people would be surprised. That’s what oftentimes happens in countries ruled by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes.
What should be disconcerting to the Post and every American citizen is that state-sponsored assassinations with impunity have been made a permanent feature of the U.S. government ever since the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state in the latter part of the 1940s.
Here in the United States, U.S. officials engage in state-sponsored assassinations and other felonies with the same impunity that Russian officials presumably engage in. Nothing ever happens to U.S. officials who engage in such crimes. They’re certainly not prosecuted. If victims or victims’ families sue for damages, the federal courts summarily dismiss their cases, holding that U.S. officials have the power to assassinate anyone they want, so long as it relates to “national security.”
On the Fourth of July, 2017, The Searchers — The Story of Researchers of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy — will be released worldwide on Amazon Video Direct and Vimeo On Demand.
John Kelin, author of Praise From A Future Generation, called The Searchers, “An invaluable addition to a little-known but critically important story.”
Independent film maker Randolph Benson directed and produced the documentary.
The film's poster is at left. Kennedy's image is recreated using a collage of portraits of heroic and persistent researchers.
They have persevered through the decades to reveal the facts to the public about an unspeakable murder and cover-up that still haunts the world — an provides instruction about current times to those who dare look at the hidden history.
June 23
Kennedys and King, How Max Holland Duped the Daily Beast, James DiEugenio, June 23, 2017. For many, many years now Holland has been ignoring the declassified records of the ARRB. Even when he was supposed to be reporting on those files. The fact that he still does so, even on the eve of their final disbursement, tells us all we need to know about him.
On April 28th of this year, Max Holland published an essay on the JFK case in The Daily Beast. Holland brought up a different milestone date. This one concerned the 50th anniversary of a story originally published on April 25, 1967 in the (now defunct) New Orleans States Item.
Holland’s article was called “How the KGB Duped Oliver Stone.” Holland stated that the 50-year-old article — titled “Mounting Evidence Links CIA to Plot Probe” — was a triumph for Moscow. The article describes the arrest of Clay Shaw by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison on March 1, 1967. Holland characterizes the arrest of Shaw for conspiracy in the JFK case as “outlandish and baseless.” He adds that the reasons for Shaw’s arrest had already been reviewed back in 1963 by the FBI and found wanting.
June 21
AlterNet, The Conspiracy Theorist-in-Chief Will Decide the Fate of Secret Documents on JFK's Assassination, Jefferson Morley and Rex Bradford, June 21, 2017. A version of this story first appeared in Newsweek. He’s called global warming a hoax, suggested that Barack Obama was not an American and linked autism to childhood vaccinations. And soon, President Donald Trump, America’s most powerful conspiracy theorist, will decide the fate of more than 113,000 pages of secret documents about the ultimate conspiracy theory: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
Ever since JFK was shot and killed on that fateful Friday afternoon in Dallas, theories have abounded about who really did it. The Russians? The Cubans? The CIA? During the 2016 campaign, Trump even claimed, without evidence, that the father of his Republican rival Ted Cruz might have been involved.
Now, on the year marking the 100th anniversary of Kennedy’s birth, the conspiracy theorist in the White House will have to decide whether highly anticipated secret JFK assassination files can be released in October as planned. By law, federal agencies such as the CIA and FBI may contest the release of these records, but in that case, the president would make the final call.
A new forensic investigation reveals that the files are twice as voluminous as previously estimated. Metadata analysis of the government’s JFK database reveals the coming files contain more than 113,000 pages of material, ranging from trivial to sensational. This trove will likely illuminate many of the events leading up to Kennedy’s murder in 1963 and other pivotal episodes in the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Cold War conspiracies documented in the coming records include:
Transcripts of the interrogation of a Soviet defector at a CIA black site
A report on a suspected KGB assassin in Mexico
The CIA connections of four Watergate burglars
The operational files of two CIA assassination planners
June 20 JFKcountercoup, Book Review: Antonio Veciana's 'Trained to Kill,' Bill Kelly, June 20, 2017. William Kelly is secretary of Citizens Against Political Assassinations (www.CAPA-US.org). Book under review: Trained To Kill: The Inside Story of CIA Plots Against Castro, Kennedy and Che (Skyhorse Publishing) by Antonio Veciana, with Carlos Harrison and forward by David Talbot. Longtime JFK Assassination researcher Bill Kelly and journalist Bill Hughes have published generally positive reviews of the long-awaited memoir by Antonio Veciana, the leader of the anti-Castro death squad Alpha 66 that worked with the CIA to kill the late Cuban leader to overthrow their Communist government.
[The review by Kelly is excerpted immediately below. The one by Hughes is dated June 16 below that.]
Kelly (shown in a file photo), a board member and secretary of CAPA, published his review at the research site JFKcountercoup that he edits to explore covert operations that led to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Hughes published at the Los Angeles Post-Examiner.
After decades of knowing for certain that David Atlee Phillips is the true identity of CIA spymaster "Maurice Bishop" Antonio Veciana finally comes clean and confirms this truth he had previously denied. We knew Phillips was "Maurice Bishop" — as Veciana described him to Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi and journalist Dick Russell in the 1970s — by comparing that profile to Phillips' description of himself in his autobiography Nightwatch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service, as there are over a dozen matches of specific times, places and events that certify his true identity.
These associations cannot be coincidences and serve what Sen. Richard Schweiker (R- Pa.) called the "fingerprints of intelligence." Schweiker recognized a composite sketch of "Bishop" as David Phillips, someone who had testified before his Intelligence oversight committee. Schweiker (shown in a file photo) had hired Philadelphia investigative journalist Gaeton Fonzi as an investigator for the the Frank Church Intelligence Committee subcommittee (led by Schweiker and Sen. Gary Hart), and Fonzi was subsequently hired by Richard Sprague, the first chief-council to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
Veciana told Fonzi about "Maurice Bishop," an American intelligence spymaster who recruited Veciana while he was working as a banker in Havana and then directed his anti-Castro activities for over a decade, including a number of failed plots to kill Castro (shown at right).
While these plots are interesting, including one involving a bazooka that led to the arrest of the parents of Sylvia Odio, an important and significant fact that isn't mentioned by Veciana, what he leaves out indicates that he knows more and this story is not yet fully understood.
Other missing items include the lack of photos, footnotes and an index, things I would have thought Pulitzer Prize winning co-author Carlos Harrison would have insisted on. But as with Peter Janney's Mary's Mosaic, they may be included in future editions, as this story has legs and will not die.
The hook to Veciana's story is that his intelligence case officer — Bishop/Phillips, introduced him to Lee Harvey Oswald — the accused assassin of President Kennedy in Dallas a few months before the assassination.
The fact that Oswald (shown in a passport photo) was living in New Orleans at the time is used [by critics of Veciana's memoir] in an attempt to discredit Veciana or make it a case of mistaken identity. Although Oswald's exact whereabouts at the time are unknown he was attempting to penetrate another anti-Castro group: the DRE. And despite not having a driver's license he got around pretty good.
They met on the first Saturday in September in the lobby of the Southland Center, the tallest building in Dallas, and a place that Oswald was familiar with, as he had applied for a job there, and it was the location of the Mexican consulate. Phillips (shown below at right in a file photo) was already there talking to Oswald, to whom Veciana was introduced.
But Oswald never said a word. They looked for a coffee shop, and stopped a young couple heading for the observation tower on the roof, and they said there was a diner around the corner, and Oswald left Phillips and Veciana to discuss their work. But after the assassination the girl recognized Oswald, the accused assassin, as one of the three men she encountered, and told her mother, but they never came forward out of fear. Veciana too, recognized Oswald as the man Phillips introduced him to, but didn't press the issue, never mentioning it again, until he was questioned by Fonzi.
But as with the Odio incident, it matters not at all if it was Oswald or look-a-like or an imposter, or even if Oswald was a shooter or a patsy. Either way these incidents remove the assassination from being the act of a deranged loner and clearly define it as a covert intelligence operation — one planned and conducted by an intelligence agency network.
Los Angeles Post-Examiner, Plots against Castro and the JFK case: A CIA agent’s story, Bill Hughes, June 16, 2017. Introducing Antonio Veciana’s book — Trained to Kill: The Inside Story of CIA Plots Against Castro, Kennedy and Che — I couldn’t help thinking when reading Veciana’s riveting account of his licensed-to-kill days as a CIA asset: Will our country’s bloody past now come back to haunt us as our politics continues to badly splinter the nation?
Our America, via its “Deep State” operatives, has a notorious record of removing foreign leaders, whose politics our elite insiders oppose, by any means necessary, including murder. A case in point was the CIA-orchestrated assassination in 1973, of Chile’s Socialist President, Salvador Allende. The fingerprints of then-President Richard M. Nixon and his alter-ego, Henry Kissinger, are all over that foul deed.
This brings us back to Veciana. He is a native of Cuba, who now resides in Miami, FL. He is 88 years old and in failing health. He insisted that he wrote the book because he no longer feared a Cuban-inspired assassination attempt on himself. Veciana said it was time to reveal “the truth about his double life.”
In his book, written with Carlos Harrison, Veciana (shown in a file photo) recounts his amazing transformation, beginning in 1959, from a mild manner accountant in Havana, to a paid CIA asset, a spy, a wannabe Fidel Castro assassin and a terrorist.
Like many of his fellow Cubans, Veciana opposed the dictator Fulgenico Batista, who came to power in 1952. On January 1, 1959, Batista fled Cuba for Spain. Castro and his supporters then took over.
Veciana then met a man known as “Maurice Bishop.” His real moniker was David Atlee Phillips. He would later become the CIA’s chief of Western Hemisphere operations and Veciana’s handler. For all the failed hit jobs on Castro, Bishop supplied Veciana with the “training, the money, the intelligence and the weapons.” Veciana details all of the assassination attempts in his book. Some of the capers, however, read like a “keystone cop” operation, including the one where they were going to kill Castro with a (double gasp) – “poison pen!”
When Veciana finally ran out of gas as a CIA asset, in July, 1973, Bishop retired him. He then gave him $253,000 as a “honorarium.”
A failed attempt, in Miami, on Veciana’s life followed. Eventually, both Bishop and Veciana testified, in the late '70s, before a Select House Committee investigating the JFK assassination. Bishop died in 1988.
The most shocking revelation in this memoir is the author’s claim that he met Lee Harvey Oswald, in a Dallas, Texas, hotel lobby, with Bishop, only days before JFK’s assassination, on November, 22, 1963. If true, it would give credence to Oswald final words, “I’m a patsy” and put the CIA, and Bishop/Phillips, in the center of that crime of the century.
Trained to Kill covers a lot of our country’s darkest chapters. It’s a darn good book, but without corroboration in key parts, its plausibility should be weighted carefully by the discerning reader. Click here for full review.
June 15 Fifth Estate (Published in Jakarta, with focus on Asia-Pacific issues), Deep State Killed JFK For His Cuba Policy, Peace Advocacy, Editor: Robert Finnegan, June 14, 2017. Republication with new photos of CAPA column by Andrew Kreig: "Rogue U.S. officials conspired with their powerful patrons to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963 primarily because of his opposition to a CIA-led U.S. military overthrow of Cuba's Communist government."
June 14
Justice Integrity Project, Experts: Deep State Killed JFK For His Cuba Policy, Peace Advocacy, Andrew Kreig, June 14, 2017. Rogue U.S. officials conspired with their powerful patrons to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963 primarily because of his opposition to a CIA-led U.S. military overthrow of Cuba's Communist government. That was a dominate — albeit not universal — theme by speakers at "The National Security State and JFK" conference on June 3 in a Northern Virginia community that is heavily populated by intelligence, military and other federal workers and retirees. The forum remains timely for many reasons, including reported Trump plans to renew human rights reprisals against Cuba.
As described below also, there are columns published in recent days from Trump supporters from the right and left of the political spectrum, as well as from within the intelligence community, that a supposed Deep State that targeted both Kennedy and President Nixon over their foreign policies seeks also to end Trump's presidency prematurely.
Regarding the forum:
"The legend constructed around the assassination was clearly a pretext for a Cuban invasion," military historian Douglas Horne told the audience after he retraced many covert steps by intelligence and military leaders to plan invasions of Cuba that Kennedy repeatedly rebuffed. "Although Kennedy's assassination did not trigger an invasion of Cuban it may have been intended to."
Off Guardian, The Assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy: Questions, Hints and Allegations, Edward Curtin, June 9, 2017. Edward Curtin teaches teach sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. There is a vast literature on the CIA-directed assassination of President John Kennedy. Most Americans have long rejected the Warren Commission’s findings and have accepted that there was a conspiracy. There is much less research on the assassination of JFK’s brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, and, if asked, far fewer people would say it was a conspiracy and a cover-up. They may not even know the alleged assassin’s name.
I would like to focus on the so-called “girl in the polka-dot dress,” and ask you to think along with me as we explore why she was so conspicuous that day and night, and what function she may have served. I know you will agree that it is counterintuitive for her to have behaved the way she did. Counterintuitive for the general public, that is. The best detailed day-to-day account of this mysterious girl is in the book linked to above by Fernando Faura, The Polka-Dot File, on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing (see my review here).
June 3 Justice Integrity Project, JFK Birthday Prompts Inspiration, Art, Advocacy, Snark, Andrew Kreig, June 2, 2017. The 100th birthday anniversary of President John F. Kennedy on May 29 prompted many memorials about the late president's enduring popularity, the continuing controversies over his murder, and at least one prominent display of mockery of the late president by a big newspaper.
The mass media and major cultural institutions focused heavily on JFK's achievements, agenda, family, and legacy for politics, the arts and foreign affairs. But some Kennedy supporters stressed also the uncomfortable reminder that the search for truth about his death continues. Polls show that most Americans do not believe the official accounts of his death, particularly the central claim in the 1964 Warren Report that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to kill the president by firing three shots during the president's 1963 motorcade in Dallas.
The all-day event at the Washington Dulles Airport Marriott includes as speakers film maker Oliver Stone, former Texas Republican congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, and academics / authors Jeffrey Sachs, Michael Glennon, Stephen Kinzer, Douglas Horne, Peter Janney, Jefferson Morley, and David Talbot. Jacob Hornberger, a book publisher and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation that organized the event, announced that C-SPAN will cover it.
This editor is attending that program, and also participated as an investigative historian in several of the other events noted above during the past week regarding the JFK memorial, as described below.
May May 31 Irish Echo, Release JFK Files, Dr. James J. Kelleher, May 31, 2017. The National Archives located in College Park, Maryland is preparing to release some 3100 documents that have never been seen by the public, along with the full versions of nearly forty thousand redacted documents dealing with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. However, it is expected that government agencies such as the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies will try to block the document release on national security grounds.
"What are they hiding?" is a reasonable question to ask. People need to contact their local representatives and ask for their support in getting the documents released.
Dr. James Kelleher is an associate professor of Political Science and the author of "He Was Expendable: National Security, Political and Bureaucratic Covers Ups-in the Murder of President John F. Kennedy."
May 30 JFK Facts, The History Channel series ‘JFK Declassified’ is MIA but we have the latest, Jefferson Morley, May 30, 2017. In April, The History Channel launched JFK documentary series, “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald,” hosted by decorated CIA operative Robert Baer. Episodes 1 and 2 indicated that Baer was pursuing the “Castro Done It” conspiracy theory, advocated previously by former CIA analyst Brian Latell and author Gus Russo, among others.
Dan Hardway and I talked with Baer on Fernand Amandi’s talk radio program in Miami. On the air, Baer pleaded with us to watch the whole series before passing judgment on it, a fair request, which I intended to honor. But History Channel stopped airing the series–at least in the United States – after Episodes 1 and 2. This lonely pair has been orphaned on the History Channel web site, while the entire series has been made available to viewers in Canada. So what gives? A half dozen JFK Facts readers have asked A&E and History Channel for an explanation. All of us have received spam replies.
May 29 Washington Post, JFK, the forever-young president, 100 years on, E.J. Dionne Jr., May 29, 2017 (print edition). We cannot imagine John F. Kennedy on his 100th birthday. For all of us, he will always be a man in his 40s, exuding the vigor that became one of his trademark words, pronounced in his distinctively New England way.
He was a student of history whose rhetoric gloried in the future, challenge and change. He became an icon even though he was an iconoclast. He could be coldly realistic, but he preached idealism. He honored intellectuals but mistrusted abstract thinking and ideology. He promised greater affluence but preached against complacency.
He was a fervent Cold Warrior whose most important triumphs came in the name of peace. He avoided nuclear holocaust during the Cuban missile crisis and negotiated a partial nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union. He took office with a muscular promise that the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden” in the battle for freedom. But five months before his death, he became a prophet of what would be called detente, describing peace as “the necessary, rational end of rational men.” (Photo image/button courtesy of Karl Golovin.) Ratical, New Book: "False Mystery: Essays on the JFK Assassination" by Vincent J. Salandria, May 29, 2017. Publisher's announcement by David Ratcliffe: "I am very pleased to announce a greatly expanded digital edition of the book John Kelin first created in 1999. Three months in the works, this archival treasury contains the essays by Philadelphia lawyer Vincent J. Salandria from 1964 into 2016 presenting his evolving understanding of the assassination of President Kennedy.
Salandria began by authoring the first critical analysis of the contradictions between the Warren Report and the 26 volumes of Hearings and Exhibits, showing in extensive detail how the conclusions did not match the evidence the government published, the publisher wrote, saying further "Salandria went on to study the crux of the matter: the why of the assassination."
"After more than a half century," Salandria himself wrote in 2016, "the historical truth of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been finally established beyond rational dispute. The Kennedy assassination is a false mystery. It was conceived by the conspirators to be a false mystery which was designed to cause interminable debate. The purpose of the protracted debate was to obscure what was quite clearly and plainly a coup de’état. Simply stated, President Kennedy was assassinated by our U.S. national security state in order to abort his efforts to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion." C-SPAN, Steven Rothstein on JFK Centennial, May 29, 2017, C-Span host Steve Scully, May 29, 2017. John F. Kennedy Library Foundation Director Steven Rothstein talked about the centennial of former President John F. Kennedy’s birth and his impact on contemporary politics. May 25 Kennedy 100th Birthday Reflections PaulCraigRoberts.org, JFK at 100, Paul Craig Roberts, May 25, 2017. The conservative scholar Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, shown in a file photo, has been assistant Treasury secretary during the Reagan Administration, associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, and a professor or fellow at several prominent universities. This Memorial Day, Monday, May 29, 2017, is the 100th birthday of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States. JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963, as he approached the end of his third year in office. Researchers who spent years studying the evidence have concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy between the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service. (See, for example, JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass.)
Kennedy entered office as a cold warrior, but he learned from his interaction with the CIA and Joint Chiefs that the military/security complex had an agenda that was self-interested and a danger to humanity. He began working to defuse tensions with the Soviet Union. His rejections of plans to invade Cuba, of the Northwoods project, of a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and his intention to withdraw from Vietnam after his reelection, together with some of his speeches signaling a new approach to foreign policy in the nuclear age, convinced the military/security complex that he was a threat to their interests.
Cold War conservatives regarded him as naive about the Soviet Threat and a liability to US national security. These were the reasons for his assassination. These views were set in stone when Kennedy announced on June 10, 1963, negotiations with the Soviets toward a nuclear test ban treaty and a halt to US atmospheric nuclear tests.
Lance deHaven-Smith in his book, Conspiracy Theory in America, shows that the CIA introduced “conspiracy theory” into the political lexicon as a technique to discredit skepticism of the Warren Commission’s coverup report. He provides the CIA document that describes how the agency used its media friends to control the explanation.
May 24 Dallas Morning News, Dallas' darkest day: a Visual chronolog of the JFK assassination, Michael Hogue, May 24, 2017. Eyewitness accounts. May 20 Politico, What Could a Mysterious U.S. Spy Know About the JFK Assassination? Philip Shenon, May 20, 2017. John F. Kennedy buffs are awaiting the release of documents about June Cobb, a little-known CIA operative working in Cuba and Mexico around the time of the president’s assassination. She may have been one of the bravest and best-placed American spies in the history of the Cold War, but few people outside the CIA know the mysterious story of June Cobb (shown in a 1962 Parade Magzine photo).
The existing information in the spy agency’s declassified files depicts Cobb as an American Mata Hari — an adventure-loving, death-defying globetrotter who moved to Cuba to work for Fidel Castro, the country’s newly installed strongman, then found herself recruited to spy for the CIA after growing disenchanted with Castro’s revolution. The era’s rampant sexism is obvious in her job evaluation reports: Cobb’s CIA handlers wrote down speculation about her sex life and her failed romance in the 1950s with an opium farmer in the jungles of South America.
Historians of the Cold War — and anyone with an interest in JFK’s 1963 assassination and the possibility of Cuban involvement — are on the verge of learning much more about the extraordinary, often bizarre, sometimes tragic life of the American spy who was born Viola June Cobb, the full name that appeared on her birth certificate back home in Ponca City, Oklahoma, in 1927. The National Archives has recently acknowledged that it is preparing to release a 221-page file of long-secret CIA documents about Cobb that — for reasons the Archives says it cannot yet divulge — are somehow linked to JFK’s murder.
The Cobb file is among the most tantalizing of an estimated 3,600 assassination-related documents scheduled to be made public by late October under the 25-year deadline established by the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. Under the 1992 law, the full library of long-secret files will be released automatically by the National Archives later this year unless President Donald Trump blocks their release on national security grounds. The White House has not signaled what Trump, who for years has promoted mostly baseless conspiracy theories, including about JFK’s assassination, will do.
CAPA Editor's Note: This article's publication prompted a vigorous dispute in JFK assassination research circles. Some commentators said the story was important. Others harshly disputed the author Shenon's approach as cherry-picking research to spin what they regarded as as his discredited theory that Castro and his team sought to work with Americans, possibly including Oswald, to murder JFK.
May 15 JFK Facts.org, Documentary tells the James Files story (again), Jeff Morley, May 15, 2017. James Files is a convicted criminal who claims he shot JFK. The documentary, I Killed JFK, promises to tell his story “for the first time.” In fact, Files’ story has been told many times, most recently on the Chicago stage. One big problem: there’s not much evidence to corroborate it and many reasons to doubt it.
Film announcement: "I Killed JFK: Premiere in Select Cinemas on Wednesday, May 31, 2017. Barry Katz Entertainment in association with KAOS Connect and Screenvision Media have teamed to release a one-night only, special documentary event, focused on the world's greatest unsolved murder case entitled I Killed JFK. The film features two interviews with the only living person to have ever confessed to killing President John F. Kennedy from the now infamous "Grassy Knoll" in Dallas, Texas. This extraordinary night also features never before seen recently found footage, and in-depth testimony of 20 different respected experts and historians for two screenings on Wednesday, May 31st in select theaters across the country."
May 13 CAPA Paul Kuntzler in the News: Washington Post, This 75 year-old has been a gay rights activist for decades. Now, he’s back on the Mall fighting Trump, Perry Stein, May 12, 2017. Decades before rainbow flags were common adornments on D.C. homes — 16 years before the pride flag was even invented — Paul Kuntzler walked into a Columbia Heights apartment in March 1962. Together, they formed the Mattachine Society of Washington, the city’s first gay and lesbian advocacy organization. Since that meeting, Kuntzler, 75, and these early activists have attended countless city meeting and protests, fighting for gay rights and racial equality.
At a time when the Donald Trump presidency has ushered in a new era of activism — bringing many first-time protesters to the Mall — Kuntzler (shown in a photo from the Georgetown Dish) is still out there. He wants others out there too, but he also urges a new generation of activists to pay attention to their local politics. If they can build coalitions locally, he says, they will have a stronger voice on the national stage.
He has remained involved in activism and D.C. politics for 40 years, regularly attending city meetings and protests in support of liberal causes while volunteering for political campaigns in the District and Virginia.
Kuntzler, a widower, lives in a Southwest Waterfront apartment surrounded by a worn-out bicycle — his main mode of transportation — and relics of his past. There’s a framed proclamation hanging on his wall that then-Mayor Marion Barry signed, declaring April 9, 1981, as Paul Kuntzler Day in the District.
Also hanging in his bedroom is documentation of Kuntzler’s most unconventional interest: a copy of the $200,000, two-page New York Times ad he purchased in 2007, which asserted that Lyndon B. Johnson (shown in a photo) killed President John F. Kennedy in an “incredibly complex and brilliantly planned conspiracy” involving the FBI, in part, because Johnson “possessed an overpowering ambition to be president.” Kuntzler remembers every date with precision, his memory serving as a chronicle of D.C. history.
May 5 Facebook, JFK. Searching for the Truth, Lawrence Schnapf, May 5, 2017. Lawrence Schnapf, a prominent environmental attorney in New York State, co-chairs the legal committee of Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA). I am pleased to announce that the Honorable Jay Karahan agreed to preside over the mock trial "State of Texas vs Lee Harvey Oswald" that will be held on Nov. 16/17th at the South Texas College of Law-Houston. Judge Karahan is the presiding judge of the Harris County Criminal Court 8. He has presided over 500 jury and court trials and has managed the disposition of over 70,000 cases since his investiture on January 1, 2003. Previously, he served as both a state and federal prosecutor where he tried to jury verdict over 100 serious felony cases. May 4 JFK Lancer, Crime Scene Investigator, Author, Educator Sherry Fiester Dies, Staff report, May 4, 2017. Author, lecturer, educator and former police crime scene investigator Sherry P. Fiester died May 3 after an illness, her family announced.
JFK Lancer Productions & Publications President Debra Conway, Fiester's sister and colleague at the Texas company named for President John F. Kennedy's Secret Service name, announced the passing on the organization's Facebook site and to friends:
"My beautiful sister Sherry passed away last night. I've put a message on JFK Lancer's Facebook so that her online friends in our community can comment on what is in their hearts. I ask you to please share it, if you wish, so the word can get out. Her daughter is writing an obituary that will be available in a few days."
In 2012, JFK Lancer published Fiester's much-praised study, Enemy of the Truth: Myths, Forensics and the Kennedy Assassination.
May 3 C-SPAN, John F. Kennedy Centennial with historians Douglas Brinkley, Stephen Smith and David Ferriero, C-SPAN host Susan Swain, May 3, 2017. To mark the centennial of President John F. Kennedy’s birth, the National Archives hosted a conversation with his nephew, Stephen Kennedy Smith, and presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who are the co-editors of the book JFK: A Vision for America. Archivist of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration David Ferriero and C-SPAN host helped the guests reflect on the 35th president’s life and legacy, his administration’s “New Frontier” policies, and his conception of the American identity. President John F. Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917. May 2 Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The final cache of secret JFK records set for release this year, James Eli Shiffer, May 2, 2017. Documents that show what the government knows about John F. Kennedy's 1963 trip to Dallas have been kept secret for more than 50 years. Now, these records are among the remaining sealed documents about the JFK assassination set for release in coming months.
(Judge John Tunheim at CAPA JFK Forum at National Press Club, Noel St. John Photo.)
Weeks before he murdered President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald (sic, emphasis added) traveled to Mexico City and visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in search of a visa. Documents that show what the government knows about that 1963 trip have been kept secret for more than 50 years. Now, these records are among the remaining sealed documents about the JFK assassination set for release in coming months.
Unless President Donald Trump intervenes to stop them, the National Archives will make available tens of thousands of pages of previously unseen records on or before Oct. 26. That’s 25 years to the day President George H.W. Bush signed the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which created a five-member board that reviewed and released millions of pages of records before it disbanded in 1998.
One of the main advocates for disclosing the files is the chairman of the panel, John Tunheim, the chief federal district judge for Minnesota.
Editor's Note: The Justice Integrity Project disagrees with some of the editorial assumptions in the article, such as its unattributed conclusion that Oswald killed Kennedy, but reprints the column as relevant to understanding of the current status of the inquiry in terms of media coverage.
May 1 Future of Freedom Foundation, Call the Assassination Records Review Board Back into Existence, Jacob G. Hornberger (shown in a file photo), May 1, 2017. As some of us have been predicting, the CIA appears to be gearing up to continue its cover-up in the JFK assassination, specifically regarding the tens of thousands of long-secret CIA records relating to the Kennedy assassination that the National Archives is set to release this coming October. An article in Politico last week entitled “Will Trump Release the Missing JFK Files?” by Philip Shenon quoted CIA spokesperson Heather Fritz Horniak as saying: “CIA continues to review the remaining CIA documents in the collection to determine the appropriate next steps with respect to any previously-unreleased CIA information.”
We are talking here about records that are more than 50 years old. There is no possibility that the release of any of those records will cause the United States to fall into the ocean or will cause the federal government to fall into the hands of the communists.
There is, however, one distinct possibility: that the release of those long-secret records will further incriminate the CIA in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which is the reason why it is almost a certainty that the CIA will request that those half-a-century old records continue to be kept secret from the American people.
It’s time for Congress to reassert itself in the matter and call the Assassination Records Review Board back into existence. Otherwise, there is a distinct possibility that the CIA’s will succeed with a continuation of its cover-up.
April April 27 National Geographic, The Nazi Who Infiltrated National Geographic, Nina Strochlic, April 27, 2017. Douglas Chandler's 1937 feature on Berlin for National Geographic magazine painted a citizenry content under Nazi rule. He later collaborated with the Nazis, working as a radio propagandist.
The magazine was looking for a story “picturing the life of the people, their amusements or hobbies, something of the café life, recreational interests, the business side, recent developments in architecture, how traffic is handled …”
The resulting article — 47 pages of dramatic images showing swastika-draped buildings and reverential descriptions of a city under Nazi rule — is among the most embarrassing in National Geographic’s history. The proposed title was swapped for “Changing Berlin,” but it failed to depict a country seized by totalitarianism and religious persecution. Instead, photos show Hitler’s birthday parade and a bunch of happy Berliners.
JFKcountercoup, JFK Declassified: Fallback to the Original Phase One Cover Story, William Kelly (CAPA Board member), April 27, 2017. The much-ballyhooed History channel six-part “documentary," JFK Declassified, is a slick but unconvincing piece of propaganda, a classic case of disinformation that mixes some truth with total falsehoods to promote the original Phase One cover-story for the Dealey Plaza Operation: that the Cuban Castro Communists were behind it.
The guys who put together this program, 21-year CIA veteran Bob Baer (shown in file photo) and former LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) lieutenant Adam Bercovici, a US military intelligence officer who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, can and should be able to determine the truth. But Baer isn’t interested in determining the truth, and Bercovici is no Columbo. He worked for a police department that refuses to investigate and identify the true assassin(s) of RFK. So you can put this program in the same junk pile as the original cover story promoted by the DRE, Brian Latell, Phil Shenon, and others.
It is a very distinct psychological warfare operation promoted mainly by those with close ties to the CIA, and most of whom, as Dan Hardway points out, can be traced directly to one David Atlee Phillips, a CIA propaganda specialist and Oswald associate. While they promote the idea that they are presenting new information and the files are declassified, I haven’t seen anything new after the first installment, and can tell you that none of what they have fielded so far is from recently declassified documents.
Some of what they say is true, however, and can take the real investigation into the total truth onto another level such as the fact that Oswald used intelligence tradecraft.
But first let’s dismiss the total falsehoods that are continuously repeated, beginning with the idea that one sniper alone, Lee Harvey Oswald, executed the President by himself.
Just as [the late anti-Communist espionage author] John Barron does when he discusses “disinformation,” Baer only applies the term to the Soviets, when in fact the CIA and US military are more proficient in the use of disinformation and black propaganda and, as Dan Hardway notes in his review of Antonio Veciana’s new book, Trained To Kill, former US Army and CIA officer Paul Linebarger wrote the book on such propaganda and disinformation and taught covert operational procedures and intelligence tradecraft to David A. Phillips, E. Howard Hunt and Edward Lansdale.
The Kennedy Motorcade In Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 (Historical photo via Associated Press)
Politico, Will Trump Release the Missing JFK Files? Philip Shenon, April 27, 2017. Unless the president intervenes, we’ll soon know more secrets about the Kennedy assassination. The nation’s conspiracy-theorist-in-chief is facing a momentous decision. Will President Donald Trump allow the public to see a trove of thousands of long-secret government files about the event that, more than any other in modern American history, has fueled conspiracy theories – the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy?
The answer must come within months. And, according to a new timeline offered by the National Archives, it could come within weeks. Martha W. Murphy, the Archives official who oversees the records, said in an interview last month that a team of researchers with high-level security clearances is at work to prepare the JFK files for release and hopes to begin unsealing them in batches much earlier than October – possibly as early as summer.
Beyond releasing the 3,600 never-before-seen JFK files, the Archives is reviewing another 35,000 assassination-related documents, previously released in part, so they can be unsealed in full. Short of an order from the president, Murphy said, the Archives is committed to making everything public this year: “There’s very little decision-making for us.” April 26 Justice Integrity Project, Time Magazine, History Channel Ramp Up Oswald-JFK Fake News, Andrew Kreig, April 26, 2017. Many independent experts on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy dispute the key claims in a new Time Magazine feature story published on April 25 in coordination with History channel's launch that evening of a six-part series"JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald." In advance of renewed public attention for JFK's 100th birthday on May 29, the factual disputes underlying the first series segment, entitled Former CIA Operative Argues Lee Harvey Oswald's Cuba Connections Went Deep, illustrate the credibility gap for the series, Time Magazine, and their in-house experts.
The featured expert is the reality show's host Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who purports to act as an independent expert. But his conclusions parroting the 1964 Warren Commission report serve to obscure questions about the agency's multiple roles in the JFK death and investigation.
In contrast to "reality" hosts like Baer who earn big bucks with scripted fantasy, scholarly and eye-witness dissenters to official accounts are virtually ignored by the media unless they sound like wackos whose words confuse the public. There exist some people still living who knew Oswald as a friend, fellow U.S. Marine or other companion — and who doubt his intention or ability to kill Kennedy.
April 25 Time Magazine, Former CIA Operative Argues Lee Harvey Oswald's Cuba Connections Went Deep, Olivia B. Waxman, April 25, 2017. After Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy shortly after noon on Nov. 22, 1963, things moved quickly. About an hour later, Oswald fatally shot Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Thirty minutes after that, police found Oswald and arrested him. Two days later, on Nov. 24, Jack Ruby shot Oswald (shown in a 1964 Time cover photo just as the Warren Commission report was released). And just a day after the assassination, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had already expressed his preliminary finding that Oswald had acted alone. The full Warren Commission report would later back up that finding — but more than a half-century later, polls have found that most Americans are not convinced of that fact.
That's why former CIA operative Bob Baer launched an investigation into the declassified government files on the case. On his six-part series "JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald" — debuting Tuesday night on the History channel — Baer attempts to demystify the link between Oswald and Cuban and Soviet operatives. It's no secret that, for example, Oswald went to a meeting at the Soviet embassy in Mexico eight weeks before he assassinated JFK, or that he tried to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959.
But Baer pursues those leads, and further investigates Oswald's connections to the Cuban dissident group Alpha 66, which had been infiltrated by Cuban intelligence officials who were reporting their activities back to Fidel Castro's government. His conclusion is that, while Oswald acted alone when he fired the bullets that killed the President, his connections to Cuban and Soviet officials were deeper than is often assumed.
Ahead of the debut of his series, Baer spoke to Time about why Oswald could have wanted to work with the Soviets and Cubans.
Justice Integrity Project, Rebuttal To Time Magazine and History Channel Series "JFK Declassified," Andrew Kreig, April 25, 2017. (Andrew Kreig is a CAPA board member, journalist and author.)
The disputes illustrate the credibility gap of such media as Time and History channel, and their heavily promoted cadres of former CIA and other operatives popularized as experts while scholarly and eye-witness dissenters are virtually ignored.
However, the melange of opinion, news and public relations techniques applied to the Kennedy death are nothing, except perhaps to gullible readers and viewers.
JFK Countercoup, The Moscow KGB and Mexico City CIA Records on the Assassination of President Kennedy, William Kelly, April 25, 2017. In his CAPA Sunshine Week talk at the National Press Club in March, Judge John Tunheim, the former chairman of the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB), called attention to the Russian KGB files on Oswald that he saw in Minsk and read in part, but was unable to obtain copies of for the JFK Collection at the National Archives (NARA).
Tunheim also said that the Review Board was pressed by almost every agency of government to keep the records relating to Oswald in Mexico City withheld because of the special relationship the US government had with the government of Mexico. As Tunheim noted, the situation has changed considerably since the ARRB went out of business, the Cold War is over, and President Trump’s relationship with Russia might allow for the public release of Oswald’s extensive KGB file of his time in the Soviet Union.
resident John F. Kennedy with Secret Service Director James Rowley in 1963
JFKcountercoup, The Significance of the Still-Secret Secret Service 'Threat Sheets,' William Kelly, April 24, 2017. In his March Sunshine Week presentation at the National Press Club, Federal Judge John Tunheim called attention to the "Secret Service Threat Sheets for 1963" that the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) requested but the Secret Service wanted to keep secret. The former ARRB chairman said: “Actually, the Secret Service was probably the most difficult agency. They were the only one that tried to reclassify material after we took office to keep the information away from us. And it wasn’t information that was all that important.” [caption id="attachment_1222" align="alignleft" width="127"] Judge John Tunheim at CAPA JFK Forum at National Press Club, Noel St. John Photo[/caption]
“They fought us on the Threat Sheets,” said Tunheim (shown in a photo by Noel St. John), “and they would be important since the President was assassinated that fall, so the Threat Sheets would be relevant, but they fought us on threat. And I’m not sure as to what actually happened there, because it was after we left office.”
It was quite common for the various agencies seeking to keep records secret to continue to withhold them until after the Review Board was out of business, even though they were required to sign off on a sworn statement agreeing to continue to turn over assassination records to the National Archives after the Review Board had ceased to exist.
Indeed, the Threat Sheets for 1963 would be important, and they most certainly are relevant to the assassination, should be in the JFK Collection at the National Archives and if still secret they should be released in October.
The Threat Sheets should give us some more information on John Martin as well as the suspects in threats made against the president in Chicago and Tampa in the weeks leading up to the assassination that Blaine was made aware of. When former Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden, who investigated the Chicago threats, called attention to the fact that the Secret Service had intentionally destroyed the Tampa Advance Reports, Blaine noted in his book that he wrote the Tampa Advance Reports and still had copy in a box under his bed. With that the NARA contacted Blaine and obtained the reports, copies of which were intentionally destroyed by the Secret Service to keep them from the ARRB and the JFK Collection.
On my request to the National Archives as to the current status of the Secret Service “Threat Sheets” referred to by Judge Tunheim, I received the following reply from Martha Murphy (NARA's JFK documents expert): "We were able to verify that we have summaries of USSS records, commonly referred to as "threat sheets,", in our protected collection. These 400+ pages have been referred to USSS for review. These pages will be released no later than the October deadline unless the USSS files an appeal and the President upholds that appeal."
Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), Transcript: Nate Jones of the National Security Archive, March 16, 2017, published April 24, 2017. At CAPA's Sunshine Week Conference, Nate Jones (shown in a file photo) described the current state of President Kennedy's assassination records disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and otherwise. The top of his remarks is excerpted below, with the full transcript available via the JFKcountercoup site edited by CAPA board member William Kelly.
Nate Jones: Thanks a lot, thanks for putting this on. It's great to be here today, my name is Nate Jones from the National Security Archive and despite the official sounding name, the National Security Archive is a non-profit that files thousands of FOIA and mandatory declassification review requests each year, and we fight to get previously classified information declassified and published.
That said, I am not an expert on JFK assassination, the main reason is because the field is already crowded with experts, you here. So generally the National Security Archive focuses other matters, but I'm happy to talk today about perhaps fighting for access to records, not least of which because the JFK records collection act was one of, if not the strongest, laws ever passed for disclosing records. I have a few points that I'll go through and hit, and anything else we can talk about it in questions. So, what is needed today, or what we talked about earlier today, the JFK records collection act, is very important. The head of the government office of information service, which is in charge of bureaucrat in charge of collecting classifications government-wide. It's said on the record that government classifiers joked that they could classify a ham sandwich. The National Security Archive finally won a lawsuit for official CIA volume of Bay of Pigs history that the agency with the department justice lawyers argued to a judge and won, that its release could quote confuse the public, so it could remain secret. In this case we went to congress and congress actually passed the FOIA improvement act that, it is typically said that documents over 25 years can't use this pre-decisional exception anymore, so we won! But the executive branch didn't do it for us, just like the JFK Act, we had to go to congress, and congress had to actually pass a law, something that is rare, but these two anti-secrecy matters happened.... Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), Transcript: Adam Marshall of the Reporter's Committee for the Freedom of the Press, March 16, 2017, published April 24, 2017. At CAPA's Sunshine Week conference, Marshall provided a how-to presentation on how to obtain documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The top of his remarks is excerpted below, with the full transcript available via the JFKcountercoup site edited by CAPA board member William Kelly.
Adam Marshall (shown in a photo by Noel St. John): Good afternoon, my name is Adam Marshall, I'm an attorney at the Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press. Among other things, I participate in federal FOIA litigation and state public records litigation. That's about all I do. For those of you that are unaware that the Reporter's Committee is a non-profit based here, in Washington D.C., we primarily assist reporters and news organizations and all kinds of legal issues regarding the collection and dissemination of the news. My part in our organization's responsibilities is, like I said, is getting reported information from the government.
So I thought what I would tell you about, a little bit, because it is Sunshine Week, is the state of FOIA, which I'm sure you all already know, and also to talk a little bit about the recent amendments to FOIA that were brought in the 2016 updates. Then, finally to look forward a little bit in terms of what needs to be fixed with FOIA, so that we can get access to even more records....
April 20 Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), A Professional Conspirator: Questions About Antonio Veciana and His Book 'Trained To Kill,' Dan Hardway, April 20, 2017. Dan Hardway, a practicing attorney, was an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) who focused heavily on Mexican and Cuban-related leads in the JFK assassinaton). It appears to me that Antonio Veciana has, once again, been less than forthcoming in connection with the Kennedy assassination. I will try to explain why but, first, I want to note that in 1978 I believed Veciana’s story based entirely on [Former HSCA investigator] Gaeton Fonzi’s representation of the story and his work confirming many of the details.
My crediting his story about Phillips and Oswald was based on the credibility of the rest of his story as established by Gaeton. I heard Veciana speak in Bethesda [at an AARC 2014 conference on the 50th anniversary of the Warren Report] and also got to spend some time with him and Eddy Lopez outside of the conference.
I still found Veciana to be essentially credible. So, I picked up the book with great anticipation to learn more about what he knows. I was disappointed....I was impressed in many places in the book with the wealth of recalled and reported detail that Veciana provides about his activities. This experience of that openness made Chapter 7 even more of a disappointment to me. The story of Phillips and Oswald meeting in Dallas has almost no detail. The only detail provided is from the story that Wynne Johnson recently came forward with. There is more detail in that reportage than there is in Veciana’s own recollections.
April 19
PaulCraigRoberts.org, The Oklahoma City Bombing After 22 Years, Paul Craig Roberts (shown in a file photo), April 19, 2017. Today, April 19, 2017, is the 22nd anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. The bombing of the federal Murrah office building was blamed by federal authorities on a bomb made from fertilizer inside a truck parked in front of the building by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.
There are many anomalies associated with the official explanation, including mysterious deaths of some, including a police officer, who understood that the actual facts did not accord with the explanation. Investigators who report the actual facts are branded “conspiracy theorists” and dismissed. This has been the Deep State’s way of controlling explanations since the 1940s.
Americans never noticed that the Murrah building blew up from the inside out, not from the outside in. However, Air Force General Benton K. Partin, the US Air Force’s top explosive expert, did notice.
He prepared a detailed report containing “conclusive proof that the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was not caused solely by the truck bomb. Evidence shows that the massive destruction was primarily the result of four demolition charges placed at critical structural points at the third floor level.” Here is a copy of General Partin’s letter accompanying the report he sent to US Senator Trent Lott.
Hear no evil: Mitch & Bonnie Lewandowski Photo via Flickr
WhoWhatWhy, JFK Assassination: Low Quality of Disinformation, Milicent Cranor, April 19, 2017. The quality of disinformation on the Kennedy assassination has never been very high. Much of it is pseudoscience, slick enough to fool the general public, but nothing that ever holds up under scrutiny. Earlier this week, I saw what I think is a specimen of it in an obituary in the Dallas Morning News of a woman who witnessed the assassination. At the time, she was one of their reporters: Mary Woodward Pillsworth. She died last Tuesday, April 11.
The disinformation was designed to neutralize what she had reported — something that contradicted the official story. As you will see below, the disinformation concerns a medical issue — but no medical personnel appear to have been involved in its design. In her story, she said she thought the shots came from the grassy knoll. She had been standing on the curb, west of the Texas Book Depository Building, in front of Abraham Zapruder, the man whose film captured the closest view of the assassination. To her right was the grassy knoll. She reported hearing an ”ear-shattering noise coming from behind us and a little to the right.” (She was one of scores of people who say shots came from that area.)
But her obituary contains this bit: “A lifelong hearing problem prevented her from determining the direction from which sounds originated.” Then I learned that she herself had tried to walk back what she initially reported. It was at a conference in 1993, Reporters Remember: November 22, 1963. After admitting what she had reported earlier, she said.
April 19
Hear no evil: Mitch & Bonnie Lewandowski Photo via Flickr
WhoWhatWhy, JFK Assassination: Low Quality of Disinformation, Milicent Cranor, April 19, 2017. The quality of disinformation on the Kennedy assassination has never been very high. Much of it is pseudoscience, slick enough to fool the general public, but nothing that ever holds up under scrutiny. Earlier this week, I saw what I think is a specimen of it in an obituary in the Dallas Morning News of a woman who witnessed the assassination. At the time, she was one of their reporters: Mary Woodward Pillsworth. She died last Tuesday, April 11.
The disinformation was designed to neutralize what she had reported — something that contradicted the official story. In her story, she said she thought the shots came from the grassy knoll. But her obituary contains this bit: “A lifelong hearing problem prevented her from determining the direction from which sounds originated.”
April 15 Hidden History Museum, Memorial for Museum Founder, Marilyn Tenenoff (Museum Executive Director), April 15, 2017. Today is the third anniversary of John Judge’s passing. We miss him deeply.
Three years ago today, we received the heartbreaking news that our beloved friend and mentor, John Judge (shown above), had passed away. John would tell us not to be heartbroken. He would say that he has embarked on a new, exciting adventure. Godspeed, John!
But even so, it is difficult for us to move into an unknown and sometimes frightening future without him.
John’s loss was especially painful for me as his friend and life partner, but thousands of people who knew and loved him were also deeply affected. When he died, I received a huge outpouring of support and expressions of grief from those who treasured him. He was a guiding light and powerful force for truth. Especially now, we are in desperate need of his profound optimism and wise counsel. How would he guide us today?
CAPA Editor's Note: This news item was shortened following its original publication.
April 13
John Surratt in his Papal Zouave uniform. (Library of Congress)
Washington Post, ‘Assassins!’: A Confederate spy was accused of helping kill Abraham Lincoln. Then he vanished, Michael E. Miller, April 13, 2017. (Published as a "Retropolis" feature by the Post on local history), On Feb. 19, 1867, the American gunboat Swatara returned to the Washington Navy Yard after a months-long trip to the Middle East. Out stepped a young man in a bizarre but filthy uniform and shackles. His name was John Harrison Surratt, and he was the most wanted man in the entire world.
Two years earlier, Surratt had been a Confederate spy. The Maryland native had conspired with John Wilkes Booth and others to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln in a desperate bid to reverse the tide of the Civil War. But the plot had failed, and on April 14, 1865, Booth instead fatally shot Lincoln inside Ford’s Theatre. Newspapers across the country featured photos of Booth and Surratt under the headline “Assassins!”
Booth was hunted down and killed in a burning barn in Virginia. Eight of his alleged co-conspirators — including Surratt’s mother, Mary — were arrested, quickly tried by a military commission and found guilty. But John Surratt was nowhere to be found. For nearly two years, he lived in hiding, wore disguises and watched as his mother and friends were hanged. Surratt traveled to half a dozen countries on three continents, and even joined the Pope’s personal army.
Surratt’s remarkable tale is a footnote in the sweeping history of the Civil War, often overshadowed by Booth’s infamous act. One hundred and fifty years ago, however, Surratt’s trial threatened to expose ties between the Confederacy and Lincoln’s assassination. Instead, it showed that the newly reunited country was ready to move on.
SpyCulture.com, CIA Open Source Records on Executive Action, Staff report, April 13, 2017. Executive Action (1973, starring Burt Reynolds, Robert Ryan and Will Geer) is perhaps the most famous conspiracy thriller about the John Kennedy assassination, with the exception of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Recently released CIA records in the CREST database show that they were keeping an eye the production and how it was being received. The articles even detail how the CIA may have threatened or tried to stop the production of the film.
Executive Action it tells a story of a private, ultra-right wing corporate conspiracy to assassinate JFK and set up Lee Harvey Oswald as a patsy. The CIA records on the movie are all newspaper articles collected via their Open Source Center. All five documents include handwritten notes in the top right corner recording that the story was about Executive Action, showing that the film was a concern for the agency.
Why were the CIA worried about Executive Action? Several of the stories emphasized how the film was driven by left-wing ideology, seeking to exonerate the communist Oswald and blame right-wingers instead. One from The Pink Sheet listed how the major stars and producers had left-wing sympathies:
Interestingly, two of the writers were subsequently sued by CIA agents – Mark Lane for his allegations that E. Howard Hunt was in Dallas on the day of the assassination (something Hunt later confessed to for unknown reasons), and Donald Freed for his book Death in Washington, which alleged that David Atlee Phillips was involved in the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier, and the JFK assassination. The CIA also monitored developments in both of these legal cases. Several of the stories highlight how the CIA were reputed to be concerned about Executive Action and were [sic] trying to interfere or even stop it from being made. One New York Times report noted that: "The producer is trying to withhold more detailed in formation about the production until shooting is completed in two or three weeks. According to his press representative, Steve Jaffe, there have been rumours of Central Intelligence Agency interest in the project, and one crew member reported a C.I.A. threat to sabotage the production…." Whether these stories are accurate is not certain, though the film was heavily criticised on its release and was quickly removed from theatres. April 4
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Riverside Memorial Church in New York City, April 4, 1967 (File photo)
Ratical, 50 Years Ago: Riverside Church and MLK’s Final Year of Experiments With Truth, David T. Ratcliffe, April 4, 2017. Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King gave a paramount speech addressing the moral bankruptcy of the Vietnam war and the untenable costs to society of rampant U.S. militarism. Entering the final year of his life, the “Beyond Vietnam” address at New York City’s Riverside Church, moved Dr. King into a profoundly deeper exploration of experiments with truth akin to those that defined Mohandas Gandhi’s life.
Knowing beforehand he was progressing further across a one-way boundary, Martin King proceeded to grow far, far beyond the romanticized and frozen-in-1963 persona of a civil rights icon. In “King and the Cross,” Jim Douglass points out how, “With that speech that drew a prophetic line between real peace and our national security state, King went beyond his own security net as a civil rights leader [and] became a national security threat.”
New York Times, When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam, David J. Garrow, April 4, 2017. David J. Garrow is the author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference” and the forthcoming “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.” Fifty years ago today — and one year to the day before his assassination — the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the most politically charged speech of his life at Riverside Church in Upper Manhattan. It was a blistering attack on the government’s conduct of the Vietnam War that, among other things, compared American tactics to those of the Nazis during World War II.
The speech drew widespread condemnation from across the political spectrum, including from this newspaper. Other civil rights leaders, who supported the war and sought to retain President Lyndon B. Johnson as a political ally, distanced themselves from Dr. King. Dr. King’s Riverside Church address exemplified how, throughout his final 18 months of life, he repeatedly rejected the sunny optimism of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech and instead mourned how that dream had “turned into a nightmare.” But the speech also highlighted how for Dr. King, civil rights was never a discrete problem in American society, and that racism went hand in hand with the fellow evils of poverty and militarism that kept the country from living up to its ideals. Beyond signaling his growing radicalism, the Riverside speech reflected Dr. King’s increasing political courage — and shows why, half a century later, he remains a pivotal figure in American history.
April 1 Boston Globe, New wave of Kennedys cresting across the country, Annie Linskey Globe, April 1, 2017. They’re trying to stage a family comeback for one of the most famous names in politics at a time when voters just rejected political elites, and as dynasties on the political left and right crumbled. March March 31 Civil Rights Legal Pioneer Coleman Dies Washington Post, William T. Coleman Jr., transportation secretary and civil rights lawyer, dies at 96, Matt Schudel, March 31, 2017. William T. Coleman Jr., who helped draft the landmark 1954 legal case in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was illegal and who later became the country’s second black Cabinet officer after President Gerald R. Ford named him transportation secretary, died March 31 at his home in Alexandria, Va. He was 96. Throughout his long career, Mr. Coleman was often at the forefront of major public events, legal battles and significant social advances. In 1948, he became the first African American to serve as a law clerk to a Supreme Court justice, and within two years he was working alongside Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund on major desegregation cases.
In the 1960s, Mr. Coleman was a staff lawyer for the Warren Commission, investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He defended young civil rights activists known as Freedom Riders and successfully argued a Supreme Court case that helped eliminate prohibitions against interracial marriage. A progressive Republican, Mr. Coleman was an adviser to every president, Republican and Democrat, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush.
March 23 Vdare, Was Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev Working for the U.S. Deep State? James Fulford, March 23, 2017. Michele McPhee, an Emmy-award nominated reporter with the ABC News investigative team, writes that he [Tsarnaev] felt ‘double crossed’ and that he turned on America for failing to keep up its side of the bargain after he worked for them.
In Maximum Harm, McPhee says that as a result the federal government played a ‘direct role in creating the monster that Tamerlan Tsarnaev became.’ She argues that they recruited Tamerlan as an operative in late 2010 and that he was the ‘perfect candidate’ because he was ‘broke, desperate for citizenship and with a new wife and a baby to take care of, he spoke fluent English, Russian and a dialect of Chechen.’
Tamerlan was not jailed for his involvement in a triple murder in 2011 because he was ‘too valuable as an asset working for the federal government on a drug case with ties to overseas terrorism.’ Tamerlan was also providing them with intelligence on the mosque he attended and its ties to Al Qaeda.
Maybe Todashev was a Chechen/Russian double agent working for Kadyrov and Putin? (His dad was a pretty high-ranking government official reporting to the mayor of Grozny who was appointed by Chechen strongman Kadyrov who was appointed by Vlad.)
Even the long Daily Mail story leaves out interesting details like Tamerlan’s Uncle Ruslan’s CIA connections. Maybe Tamerlan saw himself as a triple agent working for Putin and the CIA and the Chechen Islamist rebels?
Another issue was where Tamerlan got his money from. On Tamerlan’s death certificate the Medical Examiner listed ‘Never Worked’ as his occupation but he drove a Mercedes.
McPhee told DailyMail.com that she believed that the CIA were running Tamerlan while he was in Russia and that the FBI were in charge of him when he returned to America, citing sources she had spoken to. McPhee writes: ‘Surely to stop Tamerlan at the airport for additional screening based on his physical profile alone – he was a dark-skinned Muslim male with a long beard – or because he was leaving a terrorist hotbed would have been insensitive racial profiling.
‘But the idea that a man whose name was on two terrorist watch lists somehow managed to clear customs because government officials claimed his name was misspelled on those lists is inconceivable. Well, never attribute to malice etc.
The reporter admits she doesn’t have proof. But the whole Tsarnaev story has always been insanely screwy. To get something this messed up, it helps to have the government involved. The more outrageous the atrocity, the more likely that agents provocateur and deep state officials have embarrassing ties.
March 22 CAPA, At CAPA Forum, JFK Experts See Need, Momentum For Assassination Records Release, March 22, 2017. Federal Judge John Tunheim, former chair of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), headlined an expert faculty March 16 in the nation’s capital advocating for compliance with the JFK Assassination Records Act’s deadline of release of President Kennedy’s death records. The law, approved unanimously by Congress in 1992, mandates the release by Oct. 26 of all U.S. government records related to President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Experts at the forum at the National Press Club organized by Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA) estimated that some 3,600 documents remain secret, largely because of objections, obstruction or confusion by various agencies. Judge Tunheim, now chief federal judge for Minnesota, keynoted a news conference at the forum’s beginning by outlining the challenges his presidentially appointed commission overcame in reviewing and releasing some four million pages of assassination-related material in the 1990s. The complete conference aside from the opening welcome by CAPA’s Andrew Kreig, the event organizer, is available on a video by independent film maker Randy Benson, producer/director also “The Searchers” and a speaker at the forum. Part I (1:31:44) is here. That segment showed Forum and CAPA Chairman Dr. Cyril H. Wecht introducing the Tunheim and followed by the remarks of historian and author Dr. John M. Newman, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigant and journalist Jefferson Morley and his attorney, James H. Lesar, president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC). Dr. Wecht (shown in a file photo), a longtime coroner, medical school professor, attorney and author, then delivered a forensic tutorial on the scientific impossibility of the Warren Commission’s “single bullet theory” that blames Lee Harvey Oswald exclusively for the killing. Part II of the Benson film (here, at 1:38:340) began with “Next Steps in Fact-Finding” by speakers Lawrence Schnapf, a New York-based attorney and co-chair of the CAPA legal committee, and Lesar. Schnapf described how current events reflect the JFK assassination’s relevance today in ways, he said, are frequently missed by what he described as a timid news media reluctant to admit the long cover-up of relevant hard evidence disputing the Warren Report’s findings. He described also progress in organizing a CAPA event next Nov. 20-21 in Houston at the Southwestern School of Law entitled “The People v. Lee Oswald: A 21st Century examination of the forensic evidence in the assassination of President John Kennedy.” Lesar, the AARC president, advocated for further investigations by Congress, particularly regarding new evidence that the CIA impeded during the 1970s congressional probe. The final panel was “Open Government In 2017: Researchers’ Guide To Documents, Witnesses & Freedom of Information.” Kreig, an author, historian and journalist, moderated the session heavily focused on practical solutions to document research on topics beyond JFK research. The first panelist was Nate Jones, Director of the Freedom of Information Act Project at the National Security Archive, George Washington University and author of the new book, Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War. Jones showed the audience a long National Archives printout identifying the 3,603 documents identified as “withheld in full” pertaining to the JFK assassination, as of February 2016. The second panelist was Adam A. Marshall, the Knight Foundation Litigation Attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP). Finally, the award-winning film maker Benson, an instructor in Film & Video at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, returned the discussion squarely to JFK research. Benson described the gratifications and challenges of making The Searchers, which chronicled courageous JFK assassination researchers and witnesses. , Dr. Wecht closed the event with an overview of the session's highlights and importance before attendees convened at a special reception for speakers and CAPA members in another room at the press club. CAPA (www.capa-hq.com) organized the news conference (which attracted at least two White House reporters) and forum. The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) founded Sunshine Week to foster open government via events like this throughout the nation. March 21 Facebook, CAPA "JFK at 100 Forum: Cold Facts from Forensic Evidence" Panel, Lawrence Schnapf, March 21, 2017. As part of the two-day CAPA mock trial scheduled for the South Texas College of Law-Houston on Nov. 16-17, we will have the first time ever 3-D analysis of the striations (engraved marks) of the cartridges found on the sixth floor and the bullet fragments discovered in the limo that FBI experts said were fired from the MC rifle found in the TSBD. The HSCA found in 1978 that weapon can no longer be fired these purposes because it had deteriorated too much while it was in possession of the National Archives. So we are stuck with comparing the original FBI test shells against those found in the TSBD. But this will be first time 21st century technology will be used to analyze this evidence.
Excerpted from:
Lawrence Schnapf, Esq., a New York-based attorney and co-chair of the CAPA legal committee, Moderator and panelist. He will describe how current events reflect the JFK assassination’s relevance today. He is helping organize a CAPA event next Nov. 20-21 in Houston at the Southwestern School of Law entitled “The People v. Lee Oswald: A 21st Century examination of the forensic evidence in the assassination of President John Kennedy.”
James H. Lesar, Esq., AARC president speaks on the need for further investigations by Congress, particularly regarding new evidence that the CIA impeded during the 1970s congressional probe.
March 19 JFK Facts.org, Now an audiobook: Oswald, the CIA & Mexico City (The Lopez Report), Jefferson Morley, March 19, 2017. Thanks to Dave Giglio, you can now listen to a key JFK assassination document: the HSCA report about Lee Oswald’s visit to Mexico City. Written by Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway, staffers for the House Select Committee on Assassination, the Lopez Report (as it is commonly known) was the first serious examination of the CIA’ machinations in September and October 1963 around the man who would be accused of killing President Kennedy six weeks later.
Lopez and Hardway’s probe showed the Warren Commission was largely ignorant and wholly clueless about Oswald’s visit to the Mexican capital. Their report became the foundation for subsequent works by journalist Anthony Summers, historian John Newman, and independent scholar Bill Simpich, which deepened and clarified the story that the Warren Commission missed.
They demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that Oswald’s visit was of deep interest to top CIA officials, belying the official story that Oswald was an unknown figure of only “routine” interest. They also showed that when questioned about Oswald, James Angleton, David Phillips, Ann Goodpasture, and Ann Egerter, among others, lied under oath.
March 18 JFKFacts, Judge Tunheim: I saw Oswald’s KGB file and it was five feet tall, Jefferson Morley, March 18, 2017. The Soviet intelligence service has a massive file on accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald that has never been public, said federal judge John Tunheim, former chairman of a government declassification panel. Tunheim said he reviewed the file in Moscow in 1994 on behalf of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which declassified millions of pages of JFK documents in the 1990s. “The KGB file stood five feet tall when you stacked all the boxes up,” Tunheim told a Washington press conference on Thursday.
Tunheim (shown in an official photo) said he was allowed to look at the records, which were in Russian. He was told that they related to the Soviet security services’ daily surveillance of Oswald, a former Marine who lived in the Soviet Union from October 1959 to May 1962. “We came very close to getting it released,” Tunheim said. “But I didn’t get any help from the State Department, and, in the end, the KGB chose not to let it go.” Tunheim was the keynote speaker at a conference organized by Citizens Against Political Assassinations.
JFK conspiracy theories involving the KGB have never been substantiated and are considered by historians to be among the less plausible scenarios behind the murder of the liberal president in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
March 11 National Security Archive (at George Washington University), Three out of Five Federal Agencies Flout New FOIA Law, Staff report, March 11, 2017. Only 38 of 99 Agencies Have Updated Their FOIA Rules; Out-of-Date Rules Rob Requesters of Appeal Rights.
Three out of five of all federal agencies are flouting the new law that improved the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and required them to update their FOIA regulations, according to the new National Security Archive FOIA Audit released today to celebrate Sunshine Week. The National Security Archive Audit found that only 38 out of 99 federal agencies have updated their FOIA regulations in compliance with the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 that was passed with bipartisan, bicameral support. The new law required agencies to update their FOIA regulations within 180 days of passage – that was June 30 so December 27, 2016 was the deadline.
March 8 Justice Integrity Project, Top Experts To Assess JFK Murder Records, Revelations March 16 In DC, Andrew Kreig, March 8, 2017. Federal judge John Tunheim, former chair of the congressionally appointed Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), will speak March 16 at a unique Sunshine Week press conference organized by CAPA to focus on this year's deadline for disclosure of secret records about President Kennedy's 1963 assassination. Tunheim, currently chief U.S. District Judge in Minnesota, is shown in an official photo.
The JFK Records Act, approved unanimously by Congress in 1992, mandates the release by Oct. 26 of all U.S. government records related to the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Under Judge Tunheim’s leadership, the ARRB reviewed and released some four million pages of assassination-related material in the 1990s.
The judge will address the problem of secrecy in a democracy at the news conference, which begins a high-level forum on the topic in Washington, DC.
In a 2013 Boston Globe column, he and former ARRB deputy chair Thomas E. Samoluk wrote that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deceived House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigators by not disclosing the role of deceased CIA officer George Joannides in the events of 1963.
"It really was an example of treachery,” Judge Tunheim said in an interview. “If [the CIA] fooled us on that, they may have fooled us on other things."
After the press conference leading experts in history, intelligence, law and science will discuss the relevance of the still-withheld records to the JFK assassination story and to current issues, including the credibility of officials and media outlets, as measured by polls.
Justice Integrity Project, Speakers Announced For March 16 Forum On Secret JFK Records Due For Release, Andrew Kreig, March 8, 2017. To mark the 100th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s birth this spring, leaders in the JFK research community are convening at the National Press Club during “Sunshine Week” March 16.
Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, the noted forensic pathologist, medical school professor, author and CAPA chairman (shown at right), will open the news conference. Also, he will deliver a medical/scientific tutorial showing media attendees why that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald could not have killed the president acting alone.
Justice Integrity Project, JFK Experts Seek Compliance With Records Release Deadline, Andrew Kreig, March 8, 2017. Leading former government officials and other JFK experts are among those who have called for full release by the National Archives of still-classified records regarding the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. February Feb. 28
William Liebenow with John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign. Both skippered PT boats during World War II.
New York Times, William Liebenow, 97, Dies; PT Boat Skipper Rescued Kennedy, Daniel E. Slotnik, Feb. 28, 2017. Under the cover of darkness on Aug. 7, 1943, Lt. William Liebenow skippered his patrol torpedo boat into enemy waters in the South Pacific. His mission was to rescue the sailors of PT-109 who had survived for days on inhospitable islands after a Japanese destroyer had rammed their boat, splitting it in two and killing two crewmen.
Among the 11 crew members who survived the sinking of PT-109 was a bunkmate of the lieutenant’s, the boat’s 26-year-old skipper, John F. Kennedy. Tales of Kennedy’s heroism in the aftermath of the attack became a part of his legacy, chronicled in books like Robert J. Donovan’s “PT-109: John F. Kennedy in World War II” (1961) and a film adaptation, “PT 109” (1963), which starred Cliff Robertson as Kennedy.
Mr. Liebenow, who was awarded the Bronze and Silver Stars for his wartime exploits, died on Friday at his home in Mount Airy, N.C. He was 97. His daughter, Susan Liebenow, said the cause was complications of pneumonia.
Feb. 26 Common Dreams, The FBI's New FOIA Policy Is a Big Step Backward, Fiona Morgan, Feb. 26, 2017. The FBI is planning to take a big step backward for government transparency. As of March 1, the Bureau will no longer accept Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests via email. Anyone seeking public records from the FBI will have to use a new online portal — or send requests via fax or snail mail.
Online FOIA portals may seem like a good idea in theory, but government agencies make them difficult to use — with way too many burdensome requirements. The Freedom of Information Act gives us a legal right to request public records, which allow journalists and watchdogs to hold the government accountable. FOIA requests uncovered harmful covert operations like COINTELPRO — an FBI program designed to dismantle civil rights groups, among others — and also exposed government surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists.
MuckRock, which helps journalists and others access public records, raised the alarm when the terms of service of the new FBI portal came to light. These include arbitrary restrictions that aren’t consistent with the law:
Requests can’t be longer than 3,000 characters. Individuals aren’t eligible for the reduced fees available to media outlets, meaning that freelance journalists and others will have to pay extra when filing requests. Memos, emails and other internal communications appear to be off-limits to requesters — a restriction that undermines government transparency.
While these terms of service might be improved going forward, the FBI has shown that it can and will arbitrarily change them without public comment. MuckRock founder Michael Morisy told us he’s concerned about what this step backward signals for government transparency. “The FBI is a hugely important agency, and if the FBI gets away with it, we worry that a lot of other agencies will follow suit.”
Feb. 23
American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), ASNE releases 'budget' for Sunshine Week 2017, Staff report, Feb. 23, 2017. [Notes: 'Budget' is a term among news editors denoting events expected to become news stories. JIP Editor Andrew Kreig is a member of ASNE and is organizing a Sunshine Week event March 16 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The keynoter will be the congressionally appointed former Assassinations Record Review Board Chairman John R. Tunheim (shown in an official photo), now chief federal judge in Minnesota. He and other speakers will discuss the historic scheduled release in October by the National Archives of the final 3,600 secret documents about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. More details of the forum will be published here soon.]
Federal data is disappearing from websites. Concerns are growing about whistleblower protections. The public is faced with inconsistent access to information like police dashcam video. Attacks on the First Amendment continue.
This year, more than ever, ASNE and multiple media partners will use Sunshine Week, March 12-18, to hold government officials accountable for their transparency, or secrecy, around public records. For 12 years, our Sunshine Week coverage has championed the public's right to information and revealed threats to those rights. This year, we will extend that week of focus to coverage throughout 2017.
ASNE is partnering with The Associated Press, Associated Press Media Editors, Gannett, McClatchy, The Dallas Morning News and the Minneapolis Star Tribune on coverage available to all during Sunshine Week and thereafter.
Feb. 20 [caption id="attachment_1112" align="aligncenter" width="213"] How Killers Launched Their Attack (Daily Mail graphic)[/caption] Artist's portrayal of fatal airport poisoning in Malaysia of North Korean leader's half-brother (Graphic by Daily Mail) Fox News, Video showing apparent poisoning of Kim Jong Un's half-brother surfaces, Wire and staff reports, Feb. 20, 2017. The first video footage showing the apparent poisoning of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un's half-brother emerged Monday, showing a woman rush up to the man from behind, before holding something over his mouth.
The security camera footage, obtained by a Japanese TV network, was often grainy and blurred. It also appeared to show a second women approaching Kim Jong Nam from a different direction before the attack at an airport in Malaysia. This image provided by Star TV on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2017, of closed circuit television footage from Monday, Feb. 13, 2017, shows a woman, left, at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang, Malaysia, who police say was arrested Wednesday in connection with the death of Kim Jong Nam, the half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (Star TV via AP).
After the first woman held something over the man's mouth for a few seconds, both women turned and calmly walked off in different directions.
Feb. 16 WhoWhatWhy, Dr. Cyril Wecht on JFK’s Murder: A “Coup d’état in America,” WhoWhatWhy Staff, Feb. 16, 2017 (Video). Acclaimed forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht spoke recently about the Kennedy assassination. He laid out his case for doubting the official explanation — and asserted that this horrific event was nothing less than the overthrow of the government. (Images by WhoWhatWhy staff). Dr. Wecht is the author or co-author of more than 50 books, and is a world-renowned expert on causes of death.
Woman sought for questioning in suspected political assassination of North Korea's Kim Jong-nam in Malaysia
News.com (Australia), Mystery woman suspected of killing Kim Jong-nam captured on CCTV, Victoria Craw with wires, Feb. 16, 2017. A woman who was arrested over the death of Kim Jong-un’s brother reportedly said she was asked to spray him as part of a “prank.” The woman carrying a Vietnamese passport was arrested overnight following the death of Kim Jong-nam in Malaysia. Malaysian police confirmed Doan Thi Huon, 28, was arrested after being positively identified from CCTV footage and that she was alone at the time of the arrest.
According to a reporter from Hong Kong’s Oriental Daily newspaper, the woman told police she was urged on to carry out the prank by four men. She then said the men ordered her to spray the liquid on Kim Jong-nam while her companion covered his face with a cloth.
But she claims she could not later find the men or her companion and returned to the airport on Wednesday, where she was arrested, Fairfax reported. Malaysian police are yet to comment on the report. The woman’s arrest comes as North Korea objected to an autopsy being performed on the body of the slain man.
Police said they are looking for a “few” foreign suspects in addition to the Vietnamese woman already being questioned. The half-brother to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un died after reportedly being targeted with a chemical spray in the airport at Selangor, near Kuala Lumpur.
Details about the killing remain unclear but South Korea’s spy agency said it was believed to be a North Korean operation due to Kim Jong-un’s “paranoia” about his brother. Malaysian investigators are scouring surveillance video for clues as to what happened in the extraordinary death that comes after a purge of many top-level officials in South Korea, including Kim Jong-un’s uncle, Jang Song Thaek, who was killed in 2013.
Feb. 11 Washington Decoded, Looking for Faust in Texas, John McAdams Feb. 11, 2017. Book review: "Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber Baron Culture of Texas" by Joan Mellen (Bloomsbury. 359 pp. $37).
The “Faustian bargains” in the title of Mellen’s latest book are the pacts she believes three Texans implicitly made with Lyndon Johnson to serve Johnson’s corrupt purposes in return for his sponsorship and patronage. But unlike Goethe’s Faust, there was no redemption at the end for any of them.
Feb. 6 Assassination Archives and Record Center (AARC), Publication Spotlight: Essential New Works by Dr. John M. Newman, Alan Dale, Feb. 6, 2017. Important new works by Dr. John Newman: Where Angels Tread Lightly; Countdown To Darkness: The Assassination of President Kennedy, Volume II; and JFK and Vietnam, Second Edition.
The first in a series of volumes on the JFK assassination, Where Angels Tread Lightly: The Assassination of President Kennedy, is a unique scholarly examination of historical episodes that go back to WWII, the Office of Strategic Services, and the early evolution of the CIA — up to and beyond Castro’s assumption of power in Cuba in 1959. This book is a groundbreaking investigation of America’s failure in Cuba that uncovers the CIA’s role in Castro’s rise to power and their ensuing efforts to destroy him. This work retraces the paths taken by many of the key players who became entangled in the CIA’s plots to overthrow Castro and the development of the myth that Castro was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy. With rigorous scholarship and the brilliant insight of a trained textual records interpreter and document forensic specialist, Dr. John M. Newman sheds new light on the multiple identities played by individual CIA officers. Where Angels Tread Lightly deciphers the people and operations that belong to a large number of CIA cryptonyms and pseudonyms that have remained, until now, unsolved.
The second volume in a series on the assassination of President Kennedy, “Countdown to Darkness,” describes events during a dangerous quickening of the Cold War. The book’s first chapter contains new revelations about how Oswald was a witting false defector to the USSR in a CIA plan to surface a KGB mole in the CIA. The race for a long-range delivery system for nuclear weapons came to its final, unexpected, and unstable conclusion — the “missile gap” favored the United States, not the Soviet Union. The European colonial empires were collapsing in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, spawning Cold War hot spots, where Moscow and Washington rushed in to fill the void. The inevitable consequence of Castro’s revolution played itself out as communism established itself — armed to the teeth by the Soviet Bloc by early 1961 — a few miles from the American underbelly. This book reveals how deeply the Eisenhower Administration was in denial about the entrenched Castro police state, the complete penetration of all anti-Castro groups by Cuban intelligence, and the convulsive spectacle of the exiled Cuban leaders.
The publication and suppression of JFK and Vietnam was a watershed event in 20th Century American history. The book revealed, for the first time, how President Kennedy’s opposition to sending U.S. combat forces to Vietnam led those favoring intervention to concoct a false story of battlefield success to prevent a complete withdrawal from Vietnam. The book detailed the intense struggle that erupted in the administration over the president’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam in the fall of 1963.
JFK and Vietnam exposed how President Johnson ordered key changes be made to a National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM 273) two days after the assassination, opening the door to the direct use of conventional American military forces in Vietnam. In 1992, JFK and Vietnam received high praise from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. It was favorably reviewed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in the New York Times Book Review. Elsewhere the book caused a media firestorm with proponents of conflicting views making absolute declarations in opposition to Dr. Newman’s basic thesis: Kennedy was opposed to U.S. intervention in Vietnam and was withdrawing the U.S. advisors at the time of his assassination in November 1963.
The National Security Agency attempted, unsuccessfully, to block the publication of JFK and Vietnam. Shortly after publication, the publisher, Warner Books, suppressed the book. Six months later, the Galbraith family intervened with Time Warner Inc., and the copyrights were yielded back to the author. JFK and Vietnam, second edition (2017), represents the continuation of Dr. John M. Newman’s research, progress in his understanding and perceptions, and describes the fascinating sequence of events that unfolded following publication in 1992, including the consequential relationship that was formed between Dr. Newman and former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara following the book’s debut. That relationship led McNamara, after 25 years of silence, to publish his memoir on the Vietnam War, In Retrospect. In its original form, JFK and Vietnam was a landmark work that illuminated the false calculations, mistakes, manipulations, deceptions and intrigue which led to the Vietnam War. A quarter century later, JFK and Vietnam, second edition, expands upon and adds to what so powerfully defined its original impact. Praise
Endorsements for "JFK and Vietnam
“This commanding essay in critical history is the most authoritative account anywhere of President Kennedy’s Vietnam policy–and it is fascinating reading as well.” — Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Special Assistant to President Kennedy
“A brilliant, meticulously researched and fascinating account of the decision-making which led to America’s long agony in Vietnam. Mr. Newman has added to our history–and hopefully our modesty–as we approach the decisions of the future.” — William E. Colby, former director, Central Intelligence Agency
“This great book brought to light the dark mystery of John F. Kennedy’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam. Celebrated on first publication, JFK and Vietnam has been confirmed by many new sources, witnesses, papers and tapes. This new edition is a triumph of history over evasion.” — James K. Galbraith, The University of Texas at Austin.
January Jan. 29 New York Post, Manhattan DA’s office probing death of reporter with possible JFK ties, Susan Edelman, Jan. 29, 2017. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office is looking into the mysterious death 51 years ago of newspaper writer and “What’s My Line?” star Dorothy Kilgallen, who was investigating the JFK assassination, the Post has learned. The stunning development comes after a new book, The Reporter who Knew Too Much, suggests Kilgallen was murdered to shut down her relentless pursuit of a Mafia don linked to JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald.
Joan Vollero, a spokeswoman for DA Cyrus Vance Jr., confirmed that a staffer has read the book, and reviewed a letter from author Mark Shaw citing new leads, medical evidence, and witnesses overlooked when Kilgallen, 52, died suddenly on Nov. 8, 1965 at the peak of her career.
“I’m hopeful DA investigators will probe any records available and interview witnesses still alive today who can shed light on what happened to this remarkable woman,” Shaw told The Post, which featured his findings last month.
Kilgallen, who wrote a widely syndicated column for the New York Journal-American, was the only reporter ever to interview Jack Ruby, who shot Oswald, and published Ruby’s closed-door testimony to the Warren Commission before its official release. Her enemies ranged from Frank Sinatra to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The morning after Kilgallen appeared on the hit TV game show, she was found dead in her Manhattan apartment, naked under a robe and still in make-up. The Medical Examiner ruled it an accidental mix of booze and sleeping pills.
But Shaw contends Kilgallen was drugged. He cites a powdery residue on a glass by the bed, and records obtained from the National Archives showing two additional barbiturates in her system. “There was no evidence that Kilgallen was a drug abuser,” Shaw said Saturday. “Despite the odd death scene and heavy doses, there was no investigation.”
Former ME toxicologist Dr. Stephen Goldner told Shaw the Mafia controlled the Brooklyn ME’s office, which inexplicably conducted the Kilgallen autopsy even though her death occurred in Manhattan.
Weeks before her death, Shaw learned, Kilgallen bought a gun for self-protection and planned a second trip to New Orleans to investigate Mafia don Carlos Marcello. “If the wrong people knew what I know about the JFK assassination, it would cost me my life,” she confided to hairdresser Charles Simpson, one of several witnesses who gave videotaped interviews unearthed by Shaw.
Jan. 27 JFKFacts.org, Secret JFK document #3: the DRE/AMSPELL file, Jefferson Morley (shown in photo), Jan. 27, 2017. Among the 1,100 secret CIA documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is an 86-page file of the anti-Castro group, Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE). The group, commonly known as the Cuban Student Directorate, had a curious double role in the JFK assassination story – a role that the CIA chose to conceal from both the Warren Commission in 1964 and the House Selection Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s.
The deception was not minor: CIA-funded DRE was the first organization to call public attention to accused assassin Lee Oswald–before JFK was killed. What the CIA hid from JFK investigators was its secret financial relationship with the front group used to publicize Oswald’s pro-Castro activities. The DRE was an instrument of the CIA. Known inside the agency by the code name AMSPELL, the group’s leaders met regularly in 1963 with George Joannides, the chief of psychological warfare operations in Miami. According to other CIA records, Joannides gave the group $51,000 a month in 1963, the equivalent of $150,000 today.
Courthouse News via AARC, Center Seeks CIA Documents on Plots to Kill Hitler, Castro, Eva Fedderly, Jan. 27, 2017. A research foundation dedicated to unearthing information about political assassinations sued the Central Intelligence Agency for not providing documents related to plots to assassinate Adolph Hitler and Fidel Castro. The Assassination Archives and Research Center is a privately funded, Maryland-based organization founded in 1984 “to provide a permanent organization which would acquire, preserve, and disseminate information on political assassinations,” according to the center’s website.
Daniel Alcorn, the center’s attorney, told Courthouse News that the case stems from a joint chiefs of staff document that the organization acquired. Alcorn said the document contained an intriguing reference to the CIA basing a plot to kill Fidel Castro in 1963 on an earlier plot to kill Adolph Hitler crafted by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. “This was new information to us when we saw it,” Alcorn said.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the creation of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II after observing the success of the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6. The center filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency on Aug. 25, 2012, seeking documents related to the plot to assassinate Hitler, and also the CIA’s review of that plot as part of its effort to try to topple Castro. “Originally the CIA told us they had no records. Then they rescinded, saying they were wrong and they do have the documents,” Alcorn said. “But then they came back again and said they don’t have records.”
Frustrated, the center sued the agency in the federal court in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 25. It contends the CIA is obligated to provide it with the documents it requested, and by not doing so, it is violating the FOIA.
Jan. 26 DC Dave, Book Review of FBI Agent's Courageous Memoir of JFK Assassination Probe Whistleblowing: 'From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle, David Martin, Jan. 26, 2017. Most people who have done any reading at all on the assassination of John F. Kennedy have heard of Joseph A. Milteer. He is the right-wing activist who was recorded on November 9, 1963, by an informant for the Miami police department predicting the JFK assassination, which would take place on November 22. Here we have the words of counsel Robert Tanenbaum of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in a transcription of that committee’s hearings, published March 9, 1977:
In substance, what Milteer says is that the President is going to be killed. He predicts the exact manner in which the President is going to be killed. He says it is going to be from an office building with a high-powered rifle that can be disassembled, and that shortly after the assassination the police are going to arrest someone to allay public concern.
Most people have likely not heard of Don Adams (No, not the late comedian and actor who played Maxwell Smart on Get Smart, but he was in a similar line of work as Smart.). Adams was the FBI agent first sent to investigate Milteer four days after the recorded assassination prediction, which had been immediately passed on to the FBI.
Then, after the assassination, he was sent to locate Milteer and to interview him. Later, Adams would be involved in other aspects of the investigation. The subtitle of his 2012 book, From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle (TrineDay), is “A report to the public from an FBI agent involved in the official JFK assassination investigation.”
The public should pay heed to it. It is a rare thing, indeed, when a government participant in a cover-up, particularly one from the FBI, breaks ranks with his colleagues and tells the world, from his own first-hand knowledge, that a cover-up has taken place.
Jan. 25 JFKFacts.org, What JFK records are most pertinent to the case? Jefferson Morley, Jan. 25, 2017. The best summary of the still-secret JFK records comes from Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation site. Read more here. The president can have a lot of influence over JFK records. Read about that here. Jan. 21 On-Target with Larry Sparano, 2017: Opening the Files, The Year We Learn the Truth about the Kennedy Assassinations? Host Larry Sparano (shown in file photo) interviews Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D. (video interview, 24:45 min.), Jan. 21, 2017. Forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht has never believed the official government “conclusions” concerning the deaths of JFK, RFK, and Dr. Martin Luther King. He is now leading an effort to make sure the U.S. government releases long-awaited records that can provide vital information regarding who and what was behind those assassinations.
See also, On-Target with Larry Sparano, New Push for Release of JFK Assassination Records (Video Interview), Host Larry Sparano interviews Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, Nov. 21, 2016. It’s been 53 years since the nation’s 35th president was gunned down in broad daylight in Dallas. And during those years a curtain of darkness has hidden information and records which could reveal the full story of what happened on that tragic day in November. Listen to Dr. Cyril Wecht (shown in his lab) explain how he and others hope to pierce a government-imposed black-out on the murder of John F. Kennedy – and why finding the truth still matters, more than five decades later.
Jan. 20 Independent, Pablo Larraín’s 'Jackie': She is a big part of the reason why a half century on we are still talking about JFK and why films are still being made about him, Youssef El-Gingihy, Jan. 20, 2017. 'Jackie', starring Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy, has a timely release on the day of Trump's inauguration and with 2017 being the centenary of JFK's birth and the release of the rest of the assassination files, it couldn't be more topical. The timing of Pablo Larraín’s Jackie is propitious. Not only was the film released on the same day as the Trump inauguration – an ominous portent for the incoming President – but it is shaping up to be a Kennedy year. 2017 is the centenary of JFK’s birth and October marks the date for the release of the remaining assassination files although the tantalizing possibility of a smoking gun appears to be slim to none. Jan. 19 New York Review of Books, Was Snowden a Russian Agent?Charlie Savage, Jan. 19, 2017 (Feb. 9, 2017 print issue).
How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft by Edward Jay Epstein Knopf, 350 pp., $27.95
Snowden, a film directed by Oliver Stone
One evening in the fall of 2015, the writer Edward Jay Epstein arranged to have dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side with the director Oliver Stone. At the time, Stone was completing Snowden, an admiring biopic about the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden, who disclosed a vast trove of classified documents about National Security Agency surveillance programs to journalists in June 2013 and had since been living as a fugitive in Russia. Epstein was working on a book about the same topic, which has now been published under the title How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft.
Epstein and Stone had a history of rivalry when it came to interpreting another important historical event: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Early in his career, Epstein wrote three books about that topic. The first, Inquest (1966), poked holes in the rigor of the Warren Commission’s official investigation. The second, Counterplot (1969), brought a skeptical eye to the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who pursued the theory that the Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated the president’s murder. And the third, Legend (1978), pointed readers to the conclusion that Oswald’s image as a mixed-up loner with half-baked Marxist ideas was an operational cover story — a “legend” — and that he had been a Soviet intelligence agent. (After the Soviet Union collapsed, the opening of the KGB’s archives did not corroborate the theory that Oswald had actually been a trained intelligence agent.)
Stone waded into those same murky waters with his 1991 movie JFK, which used a fictionalized version of Garrison’s investigation as a means to explore the theory that a right-wing conspiracy, spanning the CIA and the military-industrial complex, had been responsible for Kennedy’s death.
Now, years later, the two men once again found themselves eying each other as they circled the Snowden saga.....It would be eye-glazing to compile a comprehensive list of Epstein’s doubtful “facts,” but one more is worth scrutinizing because Epstein hangs such heavy weight on it: the allegation that Snowden brought files with him to Russia, despite his denials.
Jan. 15 JFKCountercoup, Honor MLK by Releasing the Records on his Assassination, William Kelly, Jan. 15, 2017. We honor MLK on Martin Luther King Day — Monday, January 16 — by taking a day off from work and making it a day of public service — volunteering to do an unpleasant task that will make for a better world.
But this year, 2017, is special because of the expected release of the remaining sealed government records on the assassination of President Kennedy. Among those records are the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that also investigated the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. — documents that remain sealed.
Jan. 14 WhoWhatWhy, Ruminations on the Greatest Mystery Never Solved, WhoWhatWhy Team, Jan. 14, 2017. Getting to the Truth Is Really Difficult: JFK Assassination Research Challenges. More than 50 years after the assassination of JFK, questions of who, what, and why remain unresolved. Despite valiant efforts by a dedicated research community, the obstacles remain formidable. At a recent JFK research conference in Dallas, Russ Baker addressed some of these challenges and how to move forward.“There is a tremendous debt owed to this amazing bunch of people who do this stuff selflessly their whole lives … This may be the greatest revelation out of the whole thing if nothing else, the fundamental goodness, decency, and tenacity” of truth-seeking investigators in the U.S. and around the world, Baker said.Jan. 13
Michigan-born reporter Serena Shim, 29, died in mysterious circumstances in Turkey in 2014
Middle East Eye, From war zones to museum: The legacy of Serena Shim, Mark Mondalek (shown in a file photo below), Jan. 13, 2017. Artifacts from the celebrated career of journalist and foreign correspondent Serena Shim were recently put on display at the Arab American National Museum (AANM), a Smithsonian Institution affiliate, in Dearborn, Michigan. Shim, who was originally from Detroit, spent her professional career overseas, broadcasting from such places as Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Ukraine.
She was most well-known for her fearless reporting on the presence of the Islamic State (IS) group and al-Qaeda-affiliated militants operating freely along the Turkey-Syria border. “The Arab American National Museum is thrilled to accept the artifacts donated by the family of Serena Shim into our permanent collection, and to display them with other recent donations,” said Elyssa Bisoski, AANM’s curator of collections. “The museum tells the story of Arab Americans, starting with the earliest immigrants, and Serena’s exhibit helps bring that story into the modern day.”
The glass-covered exhibit at AANM -- the first and only museum in the United States devoted to Arab American history and culture -- features various press ID cards that belonged to the late Lebanese-American reporter, along with her passport, driving permit and tablet. “She is being commemorated back where she was born and raised, for the work that she did abroad,” said Shim’s mother, Judith Poe. “To see her in a museum today speaks volumes about all that she was able to accomplish in her life.”
Shim died in October 2014 while covering a siege by IS militants on the Syrian-Kurdish border city of Kobani for Iran’s PressTV, after a car crash in southeastern Turkey. She was 29 years old. Shim grew up in the Detroit suburbs of Dearborn and Livonia. After high school, she moved to Lebanon, settling near south Beirut in her father’s hometown of Bourj el-Barajneh.
She was in Syria when the peaceful uprising began in 2011, and later went undercover inside Turkey to confront the state’s complicity in the conflict. She found herself in uncharted territory as a correspondent just six days into her new assignment after discovering that the Turkish National Intelligence Organisation (MIT) was actively inquiring about her location.
Shim’s employer advised her to go public immediately and disclose the entire disconcerting affair during a live telecast. Evoking her past reports as evidence, she ruminated on what the MIT’s interest in her might have been, citing her firsthand reportage on IS and al-Qaeda-affiliated militant groups crossing freely into Syria from the Turkish side of the Bab al-Hawa border via “World Food Organisation trucks” and other non-governmental organisation covers.
Two days later, the rental car that Shim was riding in was involved in a car crash in Turkey’s Sanliurfa province. Her family found the circumstances of the accident suspicious and alleged foul play by Turkish authorities. She died allegedly of heart failure a half-hour after arriving at the hospital.
WhoWhatWhy,The Death of a Journalist Who Knew Too Much, Jeff Schechtman, Jan. 13, 2017. Was Dorothy Kilgallen Murdered? What Was She About to Learn? Dorothy Kilgallen was ahead of her time as she straddled gossip, politics and real journalism. When she got too deep into the JFK assassination, she was found dead. Jan. 10 JFK Facts.org, Secret JFK document #2: James Angleton’s testimony, Jefferson Morley, Jan. 10, 2017. On January 22, 1976. retired CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton testified in secret session with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, otherwise known as the Church Committee. Forty-two years later, the 74 page transcript of Angleton’s testimony is still a state secret, according to the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s comprehensive listing of still-classified JFK material. Angleton’s testimony, scheduled to be released in October of this year, could not be more important to JFK assassination scholarship Jan. 5 JFKFacts.org, Literary (CIA) agents at work, Jefferson Morley, Jan. 5, 2017. In Literary Agents: Rethinking the legacy of writers who worked with the CIA, Patrick Iber of the New Republic delves into the role of the CIA in the culture Cold War. He doesn’t specifically mention the role of Cord Meyer and James Angleton but they were probably the two CIA officials most responsible for CIA cultural funding between 1954 and 1967, Iber captures what was most problematic about the CIA’s role, something I will touch on in my forthcoming Angleton biography.
“In 1966, The New York Times confirmed suspicions that the CIA was pumping money into “civil society” organizations: unions, international organizations of students and women, groups of artists and intellectuals. The agency had produced the popular cartoon version of George Orwell’s anticommunist classic Animal Farm in 1954. It flew the Boston Symphony Orchestra on a European tour in 1952, to counter prejudices of the United States as uncultured and unsophisticated. It promoted the work of abstract expression."
The struggle for academic patronage and the strained conditions of nearly all media properties have led to fewer jobs and fewer venues for substantial writing; the possibility of leading a public-facing life of the mind now seems vanishingly small, which only heightens nostalgia for the golden age of the 1950s. Yet the shadow of the CIA lurks behind the achievements of that time. The free play of ideas—the very thing that was supposed to distinguish the United States from the Soviet Union in the first place—turned out to be, at least in part, a carefully constructed illusion. What if the prominence of midcentury intellectuals, the sense that they were engaged in important political and artistic projects, is inseparable from the fact that they were useful to America’s Cold War empire?
Through such relationships, the CIA wielded undue influence on the literary landscape. Whitney makes a compelling case, for instance, that the CIA reinforced the literary prestige of white men in American letters. If other nations believed that race relations in America were poor, the agency feared, it would damage our ability to lead the “free” world. So the CIA sponsored African American voices only if their critique of U.S. society wasn’t too sweeping. And even writers it did support, like Richard Wright, found that the CIA was spying on them at the same time. “I lift my hand to fight communism,” Wright wrote, “and I find that the hand of the Western world is sticking knives into my back.” Ex-Communist Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, attended some CCF events; he was the only black writer featured in The Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series until the 1980s.
The evidence that investigative journalists like Whitney and [Frances] Saunders have amassed should leave no doubt that the so-called “free market of ideas,” which the CIA claimed to be protecting, was distorted and undermined by the agency’s own activities. The CIA’s cultural apparatus gave intellectuals a way to advance professionally, as long as they rejected radicalism and embraced the necessity of U.S. power in the Cold War. The CIA did not create those opinions, but it amplified them and helped give its warriors the sense of being engaged in a world-historic struggle.
Readers Guide To JFK Assassination: Books, Videos, Archives. A so-far 30-part compilation of major books, videos, documents, websites, interpretative columns, and other archives from all major points of view relevant to President John F. Kennedy's death on Nov. 22, 1963.
Readers Guide To RFK Assassination: Books, Videos, Archives. For researchers, reporters and concerned citizens, this guide presents key books, videos, documents, websites and other archives most relevant to 1968 Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy's murder on June 6, 1968.
Charlie Weissinger, tosses away the paneling from one of the desks in his father's demolished law office in Rolling Fork, Miss., Saturday, March 25, 2023. Emergency officials in Mississippi say several people have been killed by tornadoes that tore through the state on Friday night, destroying buildings and knocking out power as severe weather produced hail the size of golf balls moved through several southern states. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
Associated Press, Biden declares emergency as crews dig through storm wreckage, Leah Willingham, March 26, 2023. President Joe Biden early Sunday issued an emergency declaration for Mississippi, making federal funding available to Carroll, Humphreys, Monroe and Sharkey counties, the areas hardest hit Friday night by a deadly tornado that ripped through the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest regions of the U.S.
At least 25 people were killed and dozens of others were injured in Mississippi as the massive storm ripped through several towns on its hour-long path. One man was killed after his trailer home flipped several times in Alabama.
Search and recovery crews on Sunday resumed the daunting task of digging through the debris of flattened and battered homes, commercial buildings and municipal offices after hundreds of people were displaced.
Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell was scheduled to visit the state on Sunday to evaluate the destruction.
FEMA Coordinating Officer John Boyle has been appointed to oversee federal recovery operations. Following Biden’s declaration, federal funding can be used for recovery efforts including temporary housing, home repairs, loans covering uninsured property losses and other individual and business programs, the White House said in a statement.
The twister flattened entire blocks, obliterated houses, ripped a steeple off a church and toppled a municipal water tower. Even with recovery just starting, the National Weather Service warned of a risk of more severe weather Sunday — including high winds, large hail and possible tornadoes — in eastern Louisiana, south central Mississippi and south central Alabama.
Based on early data, the tornado received a preliminary EF-4 rating, the National Weather Service office in Jackson said late Saturday in a tweet. An EF-4 tornado has top wind gusts between 166 mph and 200 mph (265 kph and 320 kph), according to the service. The Jackson office cautioned it was still gathering information on the tornado.
The tornado devastated a swath of the 2,000-person town of Rolling Fork, reducing homes to piles of rubble, flipping cars on their sides and toppling the town’s water tower. Other parts of the Deep South were digging out from damage caused by other suspected twisters. One man died in Morgan County, Alabama, the sheriff’s department there said in a tweet.
Broadcast and lecture audiences can count on the Project's director to deliver blunt, entertaining and cutting-edge commentary about public affairs, with practical tips for the millions of Americans caught up in unfair litigation or regulation.
Based in Washington, DC, Andrew Kreig is an accomplished fighter for the public interest. Learn from his decades of reporting, analysis and advocacy:
• Shocking tales of recent corruption, deception and cover-up by both parties in communities ranging from small towns to world capitals; and • Practical how-to tips for reformers on action that brings real-world results.
regarding alleged political assassinations or attempts. The materials are arranged in reverse chronological order and focus primarily upon news arising from the 1960s murders of President John F. Kennedy (shown in a file photo), his brother Robert Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. 
founded and edited by Professor Emeritus Marcello Ferrada de Noli, Ph.D. (shown at left), a torture victim in the 1970s and retired medical school professor based in Sweden and Italy. This month's release of documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy continued the Trump administration's chaotic process that confuses the public under a guise of compliance with a 1992 law requiring full release this year.
Mary Ferrell Foundation President Rex Bradford has described the Trump release process as a "travesty" and Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger called it a "fiasco," as we have previously reported.
WhoWhatWhy, Codebreakers and Killers: CIA Covert Ops and the JFK Assassination, Jimmy Falls, Dec. 21, 2017. To those not acquainted with the multifaceted narrative of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the idea that US intelligence was somehow involved sounds like wild speculation — an alternative reality deserving of the pejorative label “conspiracy theory.” But to those more familiar with the facts surrounding the case, and knowledgeable about the formation and history of operations of the various intelligence agencies — particularly the CIA — this doesn’t seem so far-fetched after all.
One of the more notorious CIA operations involved recruiting elements of the American mafia — no friends of Castro after he had closed down their casinos — to whack the dictator through famed mafioso and CIA liaison Johnny Roselli. These assassination attempts fell under the auspices of a top-secret assassination program, code name ZR/RIFLE, which was hidden in a strange place — inside the confines of a CIA signals intelligence section called “Staff D.” From what we can tell, Staff D was a kind of liason to the National Security Agency (NSA), which was in the business of breaking codes. Staff D’s goal was to provide the NSA with code books to decrypt foreign signals — by hook or crook. And the man in charge of this section was a notorious CIA figure — William “Bill” Harvey.
JFKFacts.org, From the JFK files, a spymaster’s dictum on national security, Jefferson Morley (biographer, shown at left, in the recently published book The Ghost of the late CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James J. Angleton, shown at right), Dec. 19, 2017. From the new JFK files comes the long-suppressed testimony of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton. Among other things, he spoke on the nature of the national security state: “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the Government has to comply with all of the overt orders of the Government.”The transcript of Angleton’s closed-door testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities in September 1975, was released for the first time 42 years later, on December 15, 2017.
The versions released today were processed by agencies and, in accordance with the President’s guidance, are being posted expeditiously in order to make the documents available to the public, even before the 2018 deadline established by the President on October 26, 2017. This is the last release planned by the National Archives for this year.
Future of Freedom Foundation, Opinion: The Mainstream Media’s Deference to Authority in the JFK Assassination, Jacob G. Hornberger (shown at right), Dec. 5, 2017.
According to an interview of Benson (Editor's note: shown in a photo by Noel St. John at a National Press Club lecture ignored by the mainstream media), his work “has appeared on the Bravo Network and Canal Plus-France, and his film Man and Dog received several awards, including a Gold Medal from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Student Academy Awards.” According to its home page, The Searchers is the 2017 Winner of the Orson Wells Award at the Tiburon International Film Festival, a 2017 Official Selection by the International Freethought Film Festival, and a 2017 Official Selection of the Let’s All Be Free Film Festival.
One, how the researchers are ordinary, regular, down-to-earth people who came to the realization that there was something fundamentally wrong with the official narrative in the JFK assassination and who decided to devote much of their lives to seeking the truth about the assassination.
In March 1967, Allen and Scott published a sensational item in their column. The then-secret records of the Warren Commission, held by the National Archives, contained a State Department cable about suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald dated October 11, 1963.
At 10:30 that morning Jada Conforto (shown at right), the burlesque queen headlining Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, was hurtling across Dallas in her bronze Cadillac convertible, in such a panic to leave town that she struck a pedestrian at an intersection less than a mile from Love Field, where JFK’s plane had earlier touched down.
Black Op Radio (shown #862), Topic: The Houston Trial in retrospect, Guests: Larry Schnapf and Jim DiEugenio, Nov. 23, 2017 (52:53 mins.). A discussion of the CAPA trial strategies in Houston Nov. 16 & 17, 2017. Also, Views of the Trial outcome: Pro and Con what can we learn. Play Jim DiEugenio (1:58:13 hrs.).
Immediately upon JFK’s death, a team of Secret Service agents, following orders from new President Lyndon Johnson, forced their way out of Parkland Hospital, where the president had died. Brandishing guns and screaming profanities, they made it clear to Dallas Medical Examiner Earl Rose that they had absolutely no intention of complying with Texas law, which required that Rose conduct an autopsy.
WhoWhatWhy, What Could Have Been — JFK in His Own Words, Milicent Cranor, Nov. 22, 2017. On the anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, let’s not forget the man who was lost that day and think about how much he could have changed the world. It is a big year for those interested in the mysteries that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on this day in 1963 still poses. WhoWhatWhy has been a leader on this subject and our team of experts will spend this day — as it has so many others — scouring the newly released documents for interesting information.
Online FOIA portals may seem like a good idea in theory, but government agencies make them difficult to use — with way too many burdensome requirements. The Freedom of Information Act gives us a legal right to request public records, which allow journalists and watchdogs to hold the government accountable. FOIA requests uncovered harmful covert operations like COINTELPRO — an FBI program designed to dismantle civil rights groups, among others — and also exposed government surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists.
laid out his case for doubting the official explanation — and asserted that this horrific event was nothing less than the overthrow of the government. (Images by WhoWhatWhy staff). Dr. Wecht is the author or co-author of more than 50 books, and is a world-renowned expert on causes of death. 
Washington Decoded, 
Lightly; Countdown To Darkness: The Assassination of President Kennedy, Volume II; and JFK and Vietnam, Second Edition.
The second volume in a series on the assassination of President Kennedy, “Countdown to Darkness,” describes events during a dangerous quickening of the Cold War. The book’s first chapter contains new revelations about how Oswald was a witting false defector to the USSR in a CIA plan to surface a KGB mole in the CIA. The race for a long-range delivery system for nuclear weapons came to its final, unexpected, and unstable conclusion — the “missile gap” favored the United States, not the Soviet Union. The European colonial empires were collapsing in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, spawning Cold War hot spots, where Moscow and Washington rushed in to fill the void. The inevitable consequence of Castro’s revolution played itself out as communism established itself — armed to the teeth by the Soviet Bloc by early 1961 — a few miles from the American underbelly. This book reveals how deeply the Eisenhower Administration was in denial about the entrenched Castro police state, the complete penetration of all anti-Castro groups by Cuban intelligence, and the convulsive spectacle of the exiled Cuban leaders.
made to a National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM 273) two days after the assassination, opening the door to the direct use of conventional American military forces in Vietnam. In 1992, JFK and Vietnam received high praise from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. It was favorably reviewed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in the New York Times Book Review. Elsewhere the book caused a media firestorm with proponents of conflicting views making absolute declarations in opposition to Dr. Newman’s basic thesis: Kennedy was opposed to U.S. intervention in Vietnam and was withdrawing the U.S. advisors at the time of his assassination in November 1963.
Joan Vollero, a spokeswoman for DA Cyrus Vance Jr., confirmed that a staffer has read the book, and reviewed a letter from author Mark Shaw citing new leads, medical evidence, and witnesses overlooked when Kilgallen, 52, died suddenly on Nov. 8, 1965 at the peak of her career.
1,100 secret CIA documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is an 86-page file of the anti-Castro group, Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE). The group, commonly known as the Cuban Student Directorate, had a curious double role in the JFK assassination story – a role that the CIA chose to conceal from both the Warren Commission in 1964 and the House Selection Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s.
department predicting the JFK assassination, which would take place on November 22. Here we have the words of counsel Robert Tanenbaum of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in a transcription of that committee’s hearings, published March 9, 1977:
Most people have likely not heard of Don Adams (No, not the late comedian and actor who played Maxwell Smart on Get Smart, but he was in a similar line of work as Smart.). Adams was the FBI agent first sent to investigate Milteer four days after the recorded assassination prediction, which had been immediately passed on to the FBI.
Jan. 21, 2017. Forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht has never believed the official government “conclusions” concerning the deaths of JFK, RFK, and Dr. Martin Luther King. He is now leading an effort to make sure the U.S. government releases long-awaited records that can provide vital information regarding who and what was behind those assassinations.
been 53 years since the nation’s 35th president was gunned down in broad daylight in Dallas. And during those years a curtain of darkness has hidden information and records which could reveal the full story of what happened on that tragic day in November. Listen to Dr. Cyril Wecht (shown in his lab) explain how he and others hope to pierce a government-imposed black-out on the murder of John F. Kennedy – and why finding the truth still matters, more than five decades later.
She was most well-known for her fearless reporting on the presence of the Islamic State (IS) group and al-Qaeda-affiliated militants operating freely along the Turkey-Syria border. “The Arab American National Museum is thrilled to accept the artifacts donated by the family of Serena Shim into our permanent collection, and to display them with other recent donations,” said Elyssa Bisoski, AANM’s curator of collections. “The museum tells the story of Arab Americans, starting with the earliest immigrants, and Serena’s exhibit helps bring that story into the modern day.”
The struggle for academic patronage and the strained conditions of nearly all media properties have led to fewer jobs and fewer venues for substantial writing; the possibility of leading a public-facing life of the mind now seems vanishingly small, which only heightens nostalgia for the golden age of the 1950s. Yet the shadow of the CIA lurks behind the achievements of that time. The free play of ideas—the very thing that was supposed to distinguish the United States from the Soviet Union in the first place—turned out to be, at least in part, a carefully constructed illusion. What if the prominence of midcentury intellectuals, the sense that they were engaged in important political and artistic projects, is inseparable from the fact that they were useful to America’s Cold War empire?
Washington Post, 
Associated Press via Politico, 
Washington Post, 
Palmer Report, 
New York Times, 
Meidas Touch Network, Insurrectionist GETS HIT with DEVASTATING News she DESERVES, Michael Popok
Washington Post, 
New York Times, 
Washington Post, 
New York Times, 
Washington Post, 
New York Times, 
Associated Press,
FEMA Coordinating Officer John Boyle has been appointed to oversee federal recovery operations. Following Biden’s declaration, federal funding can be used for recovery efforts including temporary housing, home repairs, loans covering uninsured property losses and other individual and business programs, the White House said in a statement.
Washington Post, 
