National Archives releases thousands of JFK assassination records

Afraid of who? Wouldn't any power players involved in a conspiracy be dead or pushing 100 at this point?

 

That's not the point. The CIA, in keeping with human as well as organizational nature, will avoid any embarrassing information about itself from here to eternity.

 

I mean, that's easy to say, but there's plenty of examples of organizations admitting the wrongdoing of prior iterations. We've got generation after generation of agents going in and out, dozens of directors, a complete re-org placing the agency under the control of ODNI, 11 presidents, countless cabinet-level officials with clearance who would have loved to be whistle blowers, the list goes on.

The idea that all of these people--including many born after the assassination--would universally agree to conceal the truth (to say nothing of killing to protect it) on something that wouldn't even be close to the worst thing a component of the US gov has done. It just strains credulity.

 

So if I wanted to read one book on the JFK assassination and theories, what would everyone suggest?

 

If you want to buy the "national security" mantra that the CIA continues to hide behind no matter how many years pass and how many people grow old and die, have at it.

 

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass.

 

I would prefer they remove the redactions from the remaining ~3000 docs. My point is I really doubt that there's anything in those redactions that prove CIA involvement in the assassination.

 

I agree. I doubt seriously that the CIA has kept any "We did it" documents on file.

 

I don't know if these things are completely mutually exclusive though. The fact that our government has been so secretive about it all makes me more likely to believe there was some really bad stuff going on. If the CIA was involved or even knew about it ahead of time and did nothing, I could see a legitimate concern that revealing certain details could seriously undermine and call into question all sorts of things all the way to the present. That doesn't mean it should not be made public, but if the theories about the CIA are true, it would lend more credence to me that there is very sensitive information involved.

 

The basic problem involved in the JFK assassination is that there has never been a real investigation, which would have shown Oswald as a lone assassin to be the sick joke that it is. The Warren Commission started with a foregone conclusion and simply ignored any evidence to the contrary, the fact being that based on the evidence Oswald would never have been convicted in a trial. (Naturally he had to be rubbed out asap.) All the “investigating” was done for the WC by Hoover’s corrupt FBI, which ignored or destroyed evidence as necessary (including a note that Oswald wrote to the FBI in Dallas that was flushed down an FBI toilet after the assassination). Even the WC’s Gerald Ford was caught altering evidence, changing the location of the back wound in a document to try to make it fit the ridiculous single-bullet theory. Then in the 1970s came the House Select Committee on Assassinations, another sham investigation that was all set to rubber-stamp the WC report till it was belatedly confronted with acoustical evidence (a police recording) of a shot from the Grassy Knoll. With its time and money run out, the HSCA lamely concluded there was “probably a conspiracy” in the assassination. Even then the HSCA flat-out lied in its final report, saying that none of the medical personnel at the Bethesda autopsy agreed with the Parkland Hospital personnel regarding an exit wound in the back of JFK’s head. Documents later came to light showing that some two dozen Bethesda personnel testified to such a wound. (The chief counsel for the HSCA said that he didn’t know who wrote that part of the HSCA report.) The lying HSCA report was the last word until Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK,” which aroused such interest in the case that it resulted in passage of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, calling for release of all JFK-related documents, which of course has not fully occurred to this day. In sum, the handling of the JFK assassination remains to this day a national disgrace.

 

Was Sinatra able to account for his whereabouts at 12:30 on Nov. 22 in 1963?

 

If Sinatra did kill JFK, you can be sure he did it his way

 

Now we know why the CIA wanted to keep the documents secret: they were hiding a listening station in Mexico that allowed them to eavesdrop on conversations at the Russian embassy, like the one where Lee Harvey called and asked about the status of the visa he applied for. The call eavesdropping center was operated jointly with the office of the Mexican president, but was unknown to Mexico's security services and law enforcement. Apparently it is still in use, since the article refers to it in the present tense.

Newly released JFK documents point to what the CIA was hiding

More about the scramble to get information on Oswald after the shooting:

 

All this controversy and debate over the release of assassination-related documents, and the continual reference to "conspiracy theories" (citing no theory in particular), is a huge distraction from the actual evidence of a conspiracy. Perhaps the most compelling evidence (though you would never know it by the media's continued silence on the subject for 60 years) is a large exit wound in the back of JFK's head (IOW a shot from the front). This wound is well documented including in the Warren Commission's own published exhibits. In this case, of course, the WC simply ignored its own exhibits, as our intrepid "watch dog" media doggedly continues to do while making cracks about "conspiracy theories." (And as I noted earlier, the HSCA deliberately lied in its final report about what Bethesda medical personnel testified that they saw.) As I said earlier, the handling of the JFK assassination remains to this day a national disgrace.

 

There is no evidence that the wound to the back of JFK's head was an exit wound. The nature of the wound (and the reaction of JFK's head in the Zapruder film) has been clearly demonstrated by gel models of a head and torso being struck by an identical bullet fired from an identical rifle from the same distance and angle. The high-velocity bullet imparts energy to the head, vaporizes contents of the brain as it passes through, and some of those contents will explode backward through the opening just created as the easiest pathway out of the skull. (The gel model does not show as much of the backwards explosion of matter from the skull because the gel does not have a liquid component, while the human brain is 73% water. Water is subject to vaporization when exposed to energy. Had they put a bag of water or blood mixed with gel inside the gel head, you would have seen the blowback more clearly.) The head has an initial move forward, and then the muscles of the neck reflexively tighten and the head is thrown back as a natural counter-reaction. When someone hits you on the back of your head, your head moves forward, and then moves back. It's all simple physics.

Case closed.

 

BS. An entry wound is small, an exit wound is large. I think most hunters probably know this. The government can do all the "gel models" it wants to get some desired or claimed result. Do you think the government would conduct or sanction a demonstration that proves a conspiracy? Sure. Do you think it would design some demonstration that "proves" Oswald did it? You can take that to the bank.

 

BTW witnesses on the scene heard at least one shot and smelled gunpowder in the Grassy Knoll area. Some think it was just a diversion. Which still proves a conspiracy.

 

Not sure I trust the CIA. But I trust Stephen King implicitly. He has a robust imagination and researched this endlessly for his novel 11/22/63. His conclusion: Oswald did it.

 

Thanks, I downloaded this and started it this weekend. Should be interesting.

 

Based on what? He's not the only person who has written an "Oswald did it" book. And it's all based on nonsense like the physically impossible single-bullet theory concocted out of desperation by the WC's Arlen Specter to explain just three shots (the gospel number, it's all Oswald could have fired in the given time with his crap rifle).