If Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, why are the Kennedy files still classified?
Five decades after President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot and long after official inquiries ended, thousands of pages of investigative documents remain withheld from public view. The contents of these files are partially known – and intriguing – and conspiracy buffs are not the only ones seeking to open them for a closer look.
Some serious researchers believe the off-limits files could shed valuable new light on nagging mysteries of the assassination – including what U.S. intelligence agencies knew about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before Nov. 22, 1963.
It turns out that several hundred of the still-classified pages concern a deceased CIA agent, George Joannides, whose activities just before the assassination and, fascinatingly, during a government investigation years later, have tantalized researchers for years.
“This is not about conspiracy, this is about transparency,” said Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and author embroiled in a decade-long lawsuit against the CIA, seeking release of the closed documents. “I think the CIA should obey the law. I don’t think most people think that’s a crazy idea.”
Morley’s effort has been joined by others, including G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel for a House investigation into the JFK assassination in the 1970s. But so far, the Joannides files and thousands more pages primarily from the CIA remain off-limits at a National Archives center in College Park, Md.
Others say the continued sealing of 50-year-old documents raises needless questions in the public’s mind and encourages conspiracy theories.
“There is no question that in various ways the CIA obfuscated, but it may be they were covering up operations that were justifiable, benign CIA operations that had absolutely nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination,” said Anthony Summers, a British author who has written extensively about the JFK case.
“But after 50 years, there is no reason that I can think of why such operations should still be concealed,” Summers said. “By withholding Joannides material, the agency continues to encourage the public to believe they’re covering up something more sinister.”
Even the New York Times noticed it!
And where is Kennedy’s brain?
Speaking of “this is not about conspiracy” there’s this. The LAX shooters name is Cia-n-cia. Paul Ciancia. Hmmm…. Two weeks ago the LAX airport held a drill wherein an armed individual stormed into a passanger terminal with an AK-47 and began killing people. Hmmm…… You can’t make this crap up folks.
The CIA will be happy to release all pages pertaining to George Joannides.
But look, folks, properly redacting the files is tedious work, and they’ve gone through cases of permanent black marking pens, and they still need crates more.
Which they would happily procure, except the sequester really put a kibosh on their ability to obtain the needed quantities of permanent black ink marking pens.
If this budget item gets fixed, they’ve promised to work round the clock to get these documents released in a fashion such that all you can see is a black sheet of paper with lots of lines drawn all over it.
Now are you happy? You damn liberal busybodies?
Oswald acted alone. He wasn’t in the employ of the CIA, the FBI, the Chamber of Commerce, the Mob, Fidel Castro or the man on the fucking moon.
There is more than enough real government and corporate perfidy in this country to keep us all plenty busy for the rest of lives, why the need to pound this bullshit into the ground?
Btw – JFK was as much an elite as it’s possible to be. I always love the deep, dark conspiracies where JFK was on the verge of leading us into a socialist utopia and that’s why the CIA, the FBI, the Chamber of Commerce, the Mob, Fidel Castro or the man on the fucking moon had him killed. Christ, have any of you ever actually examined the man’s record in the Senate and White House? He was to the right of Nixon in his anti-communism. He gave us Vietnam. He dragged his heels on Civil Rights. He passed the largest tax cut in history. Gee, no wonder the elites had to off him – because…..well….umm…..you know….I’m sure there’s something.
Camelot is a fairytale for adults who never grew up.
“…He was to the right of Nixon in his anti-communism…”
Really? Two words come to mind. “Alger” and “Hiss”. And of course the secret pumpkin, carved out by Chambers Whittaker about 15 minutes before Nixon got there, to reveal the “secret microfilm” Whittaker used to incriminate Hiss.
https://files.nyu.edu/th15/public/lowsoviet.html
excerpt – “…Chambers’ story reads more like a crude frame-up than real espionage, but, in those credulous days of the Cold War, it carried the day.
Chambers also led House committee investigators to a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm, where they pulled three rolls and two strips of 35-millimeter film from a hollowed-out pumpkin in which he had put them a few hours earlier. The film contained photographs of miscellaneous government documents, which Chambers also said Hiss had given him for espionage.[17]
Representative Nixon testified secretly that the “Pumpkin Papers” were worthless, were not classified even as confidential, and had been widely distributed; but he nonetheless found them useful in persuading a grand jury to indict Hiss instead of Chambers.[18] For the press and newsreel cameras, Nixon announced, “I am holding in my hand a microfilm of the most confidential, highly secret State Department documents” conclusively establishing “one of the most serious, if not the most serious series of treasonable activities which has been launched against the Government in the history of America.”[19] The next day, with Nixon’s charge on the front pages of major newspapers, the grand jury indicted Hiss. “I played it in the press like a master,” Nixon boasted 25 years later. “We won the Hiss case in the papers…. I leaked out the [Pumpkin] papers…. I had Hiss convicted before he ever got to the grand jury.”[20]
Hiss was indicted for perjury for testifying to the grand jury on December 15, 1948, that he had not given copies of State Department documents to Chambers in 1938, or ever. The statute of limitations barred a prosecution for espionage allegedly committed more than three years previously, so Hiss was accused of lying in asserting his innocence of the ancient crime.
There were two trials, the first ending in a hung jury, the second in conviction. Hiss was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, the maximum term for perjury. Two weeks later, Senator Joseph McCarthy launched his eponymous era with a speech invoking Alger Hiss as representative of a State Department still “thoroughly infested with Communists.”[21] Republicans adopted “Twenty Years of Treason” as their campaign slogan…”
Kennedy was a staunch anti-communist, but I don’t recall him launching a communist prosecution like that in Congress.
And of course there was the December 1972 heavy bombing of Hanoi, ordered by Nixon, which had even Kissinger wondering ‘WTF’.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nixon-announces-start-of-christmas-bombing-of-north-vietnam
“…Others have suggested that the attacks had little impact, beyond the additional death and destruction they caused. Even the chief U.S. negotiator, Henry Kissinger, was reported to have said, ‘We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.’…”
I’m really not sure Kennedy would have been to the right of Nixon in that particular piece of anti-communist policy.
How many millions lost their lives in Vietnam for no other reason than JFK’s desire to look tough against communism? Don’t get me wrong, pumpkins are important, but the 1 – 2 million people who died as a result of JFK’s dirty little war carry slightly more weight.
Slightly.