You may think the November 22, 1963, assassination of President Kennedy is ancient history, but as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of the president, there are still government administrators who actively oppose the idea of the full truth being known today.
To high level officials, some government records on the assassination are still a matter of national security, and many thousands of historical records are so sensitive that they won’t allow you to read them nearly a half-century after Kennedy was killed.681
Researcher William Kelly notes that “we know that records have been intentionally destroyed, some gone totally missing and others are being wrongfully withheld, without any enforcement or oversight of the law.”682
Now I ask you, ISN’T THAT OUTRAGEOUS?
The National Archives and Records Administration[NARA] estimates that one percent of the records still remain classified, which would mean there are still an estimated 50,000 still-secret records.683
And, as investigative researcher Russ Baker points out, the loopholes are right there for them to continue hiding them for as long as they like:
Release of the remaining documents, under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, can be postponed until October 26, 2017. Not so bad, you say? Actually, the Act further states that even in 2017, the president may decide to drag this on further, by withholding records indefinitely.684
Author Jefferson Morley knows this sad state of affairs better than most, as a result of years of litigation with the CIA to try to get a judge to force them to release specific records that it’s known the CIA has in their possession.
Morley filed a lawsuit against the CIA, demanding the release of records pertaining to CIA Officer George Joannides. Joannides was called out of his CIA retirement in the 1970s and served as the CIA’s liaison with the Congressional investigation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.685
Neither Joannides—nor the CIA—informed Congress that Joannides had been the CIA case officer for a major Cuban exile group, the DRE, that Lee Harvey Oswald had been involved with. That just goes to show you the disdain that they have sometimes for our Democratic processes. Can you freaking believe that? This guy was directly involved with Oswald’s intelligence actions, and they don’t even bother to mention that to Congress!
So Jefferson Morley—who has a long and distinguished career as an investigative reporter—knew that the CIA had records on Joannides and sued the CIA to get those records released. To make a long story short, he’s still suing them. In October of 2006, a federal judge upheld the CIA’s right to block disclosure of records about Joannides’ operational activities in August of 1963.686 Morley is still suing them and that’s a lawsuit that every one of us should follow.687 You can keep track of that lawsuit at his website, JFKFacts.org:jfkfacts.org/assassination/morley-v-cia-waiting-for-judgment-day/#more-4190.
So at least Morley is battling it out with the white shirts in Washington, I’ll say that for him! We’ll see if he gets them to release the records. I don’t know about you, but I’m not holdin’ my breath on that one!
William Kelly summed up the whole situation beautifully:
In 1962, on the twentieth anniversary of the Voice of America, President Kennedy said, ‘We seek a free flow of information. . . . We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.’
Today, the American government is afraid of its people, afraid to enforce its own laws and afraid to allow its citizens to know the complete truth about the assassination of President Kennedy.688
Man, you got that one right . . .
675 William E. Kelly, “Playing Politics with History—The Still Secret JFK Assassination Records 20 Years After the JFK Act,” October 24, 2012: jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/10/playing-politics-with-history-still.html
676 Ventura & Russell, American Conspiracies, 25.
677 Elizabeth Woodworth, “JFK, MLK, RFK, 50 Years of Suppressed History: New Evidence on Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy,” April 5, 2013, Global Research: globalresearch.ca/50-years-of-suppressed-history-new-evidence-on-the-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy-martin-luther-king-and-robert-f-kennedy/5329847
678 Ibid.
679 Ibid.
680 Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination, “The MSM and RFK Jr.: Only 45 years Late this Time,” February 3, 2013: ctka.net/2013/The_MSM_and_RFKJr.html
681 Kelly, “Playing Politics with History—The Still Secret JFK Assassination Records 20 Years After the JFK Act”.
682 Ibid.
683 Ibid
684 Russ Baker, “Is The Government Holding Back Crucial Documents?,” May 30, 2012: whowhatwhy.com/2012/05/30/is-the-government-holding-back-crucial-documents/
685 John Simkin. “Jefferson Morley: Biography,” Spartacus Educational: spartacus.schoolnet. co.uk/JFKjeffersonmorley.htm
686 Ibid.
687 Jefferson Morley, “Oswald’s handler? What Morley v. CIA clarified,” April 15, 2013: jfkfacts.org/assassination/morley-v-cia-waiting-for-judgment-day/#more-4190
688 Kelly, “Playing Politics with History—The Still Secret JFK Assassination Records 20 Years After the JFK Act.”
Conclusion
I’ve proved some very important points in this book:
• The official government version of the JFK assassination was—and still is—more full of holes than Swiss cheese;
• President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy;
• The CIA and the FBI lied to us;
• There was a huge government cover-up;
• Lee Harvey Oswald was operational with U.S. Intelligence.
The U.S. Secret Service basically kidnapped the President’s body from Texas authorities—even though Texas had full legal jurisdiction. That was the same Secret Service agency that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had been attempting to wrestle out of the control of the Treasury Department and get placed under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice so that he could be in direct control of his brother’s security protection.689 Robert Kennedy clearly had some suspicions in that regard; he even investigated whether the Secret Service had been “bought off” for the assassination and why they had failed to protect the President.690
The autopsy of the President’s body was kept under the strict control of high-ranking military officers—two Navy Admirals and one Army General—none of whom had medical credentials but were “running the show” nonetheless.691 The results of that autopsy directly contradicted the evidence of wounds from frontal gunshots that had been clearly documented by the doctors in Dallas.692
The best sense we can get of the real reason for the gigantic cover-up comes straight from the national security reasons that President Johnson gave when he twisted the arms of key national leaders like Chief Justice Earl Warren and Senator Richard Russell, who were at first unwilling to serve on the Warren Commission: “this is a question that has a good many more ramifications than on the surface and we’ve got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.”693
That was the larger drama at work and it was point-blank and dangerous:
Johnson knew that he was being hustled into war with Cuba by forces within his own government. The Warren Commission would become his way of heading off this military showdown, which he realized could lead to nuclear war.694
President Johnson even saw fit to document some of the components of that cover-up, probably for the purpose of protecting himself. After speaking to Acting Attorney General Ramsey Clark about how the details of the cover-up were proceeding, Johnson even made it a point to “memorialize” that conversation in document form, in which he quoted C
lark:
On the other matter, I [Ramsey Clark] think we have the three pathologists and the photographer signed up now on the autopsy review and their conclusion is that the autopsy photos and x-rays conclusively support the autopsy report rendered by them to the Warren Commission . . .695
The plain fact of the matter is that the United States of America never admits it when we’ve done something wrong; never admits that we’ve made the wrong decision. But think about that. We know that decisions are made by people, and people do make wrong decisions. The fact that we won’t ever admit it—that we were duped or wrong or did the wrong thing—is really very childish behavior, grade-school stuff. We have to get over that or we’re not going to survive, and I believe that with all my heart. We need to come to grips. History is not history when it’s fabricated. And it also isn’t history just because the winners write it, as the old cliché goes. Because we all know that the people who write it don’t always report the truth.
But there’s even more at stake here than all that. As I mentioned in the Introduction, we don’t even seem to actually be in control of our own Democracy anymore. We elect a President who promised to get us out of a war, and he can’t do it! So who’s running things? Who is really steering the ship of this Republic? If it’s not the President, Congress, or the Judiciary branch, then who?
Has the military-corporate complex already taken over this country? I’m dead serious! I think that’s a serious question that really needs to be asked at this point. I love this country; I’ve served this country and I’ve risked my life and dedicated many years of public service for this country.
But it’s not the country I grew up in. It’s no longer the “Land of the Free.” It’s not “Of The People, By The People, and For The People.” Something happened. It’s now the home of the rich and the privileged. It’s a country that goes to war when war is clearly avoidable. It’s a nation that has taken away rights from the citizens it was sworn to protect and instead makes life more livable for the corporations and for the wealthiest one percent of its citizens. What kind of Republic does that?
America is a nation that is now virtually in a perpetual state of war around the globe. Think about that for a moment. That’s what we have become.
It wasn’t always that way. In the 1960s, it seemed we were clearly headed in precisely the opposite direction. We were on course to be the hope of the world.
It may shock you to hear this, but as shocking as it is, a lot of people agree with it, and it may surprise you to learn that PBS’s Charlie Rose is among them.696 So listen up!
There’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in Literacy, 27th in Math, 22nd in Science, 49th in Life Expectancy, 178th in Infant Mortality, 3rd in Median Household Income, 4th in Labor Force, and 4th in Exports. We lead the world in only 3 categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and Defense Spending—where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.697
What happened? Why have we fallen back so far compared to the world leader that America used to truly be? Maybe the evidence tells us.
Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex went unheeded. As we’ve recently witnessed in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. military now seems to be on a completely “different page” than the elected leaders who supposedly shape U.S. foreign policy. It’s not clear at what exact point the U.S. military came to dominate foreign policy, but in my opinion, they now do. Here’s my Exhibit A: President Barack Obama was elected on a platform clearly mandating a quick withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. Rather than being able to actually meet that pledge after being elected, as he no doubt personally wished, he was instead somehow forced to expand military actions, stalling the Iraq withdrawal for years, going “all-in” in the War in Afghanistan and escalating a covert—but very real—war in Pakistan as well.698
Were these conflicts avoidable, at least to such a large and destructive extent? You bet they were.
So why did we “rush in where angels fear to tread”699 in direct violation of what was promised? Is it because Obama is a bad person?
I don’t think so. I actually think that Barack Obama is a pretty decent human being who would keep us out of wars if he was able to. But that’s exactly my point! He wasn’t “able” to.
Which leads us right back to that all-important question: Who the hell is actually running this country? Because it obviously isn’t the President any more, as evidenced above.
It isn’t the Judiciary branch of government.
And it sure as heck isn’t Congress—at this point, I don’t think they can even manage to figure out how to follow, let alone lead.
Our civil liberties are disappearing, too: teenagers are being hauled in by the police for ridiculous “crimes” like posting a rap video on social media.700 And then the cops who arrested and jailed the poor kid have the nerve to defend making the arrest even though they openly admit that there was no real substance to the so-called “terror threat.”701 Whatever happened to our rights? And under the insidiously-named Patriot Act, Americans who get arrested are not even technically entitled to legal representation because they are being accused of “terrorism.”
And the fact that it’s illegal doesn’t seem to stop them from continuing it—or from lying about the fact that they do it! Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who risked his life to let us know about the “massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building,” and that “The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America,” also had this to say:
The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. . . . The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone . . . I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president if I had a personal email . . . I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things. I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.702
It’s extremely noteworthy that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter came out and told the press that it was good that those secrets on the extent of NSA spying on U.S. citizens were revealed to the public! But was that story covered on your nightly news broadcast? No way! And when a former President of the United States says that “America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time” then that should be a real eye-catcher.703 I implore you to read that article: thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/16043-jimmy-carter-defends-snowden-says-u-s-has-no-functioning-democracy. If mainstream media doesn’t cover a story that significant then, once again, we should be asking ourselves an important question: Why not?
So let’s remember the wise words of Benjamin Franklin. After leaving the secret deliberations of America’s Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was asked by anxious citizens outside the proceedings, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” And without hesitation, Franklin responded:
A republic, if you can keep it.704
I’d like to say something else about the “War on Terror.” I think it’s really a war on ourselves; please allow me to explain what I mean by that.
After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union evolved into the world’s two great superpowers; each holding one side of a “nuclear balance of terror,” a protracted struggle for decades known historically as the Cold War.
The United States eventually defeated the Soviets; not with guns but with money. We outspent them militarily and the Soviets simply couldn’t keep up; in trying to keep up, their economy crumbled. So I will concede that, up until that time in history, it was at least logically arguable that a huge defense budget may ha
ve made some sense. The key phrase there is not “defense budget”; the important part of that statement is “up to that point.”
After that point in history, there was no real rationale or justification for spending more on weapons than almost the entire rest of the world combined, especially when our leaders were telling our people at home that there was no money for education, no money for jobs programs, no money for the elderly, and no money for much of anything except their lavish Washington parties and an unlimited defense budget.
After the Soviet threat receded, people anywhere close to my political persuasion started thinking, "Hey, great! We’re the world’s only superpower. Now, finally, there’ll be some serious money for programs that actually help people here at home.” But the high levels of military spending continued. In the meantime, in other areas in which we had been world leaders, we experienced sharp declines compared to other countries.
The problem at that point in our history was “defense” from whom? We no longer had a Superpower enemy. So who were they protecting us from?
Then quite conveniently, along came the War on Terror. It was so convenient, in fact, that it brings to mind the expression that if it hadn’t come along, it would have had to be invented. And some people think it may have been invented. Some think it was largely a manufactured conflict that was created to provide us with an invisible enemy that required insane amounts of spending and sacrifice to keep us safe. I can’t prove that. I don’t really want to believe that. I’m just saying we should be thinking about that—it’s a question we should be asking. Because—as Benjamin Franklin also wrote:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.705
Which leads us to what we have now—perpetual war. We spend more every year on weapons of death than almost the whole rest of the world combined—and then the politicians whine that there just isn’t any money left for social programs.
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