Thursday, June 16, 2016


From Alternet:

The following is from the final chapter in the new ebook CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files by former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley.

So who killed President Kennedy?

The CIA’s last assassination-related files might help us answer that question. These files constitute a significant body of material — more than 1,100 files containing up to 50,000 pages of material. As we have seen, these are the files of senior officers implicated in the JFK assassination story. My hunch is that this trove of long-secret intelligence files — if declassified in its entirety — will support the notion that the president was ambushed by enemies within his own government...

The qualifier is important — if declassified in its entirety — because it raises a tougher question: Can online civil society force top CIA officials to make public information they obviously would prefer to keep a secret?

That is the fundamental question raised — but not answered — by this book. “Who killed JFK?” is a fascinating and significant question, but I have to admit it can sound like so much banter in a Baby Boomer bar room. The JFK story has no particular urgency in millennial America. I’m talking about a single homicide that happened before most of you were born. But the CIA’s last JFK files raise a contemporary political issue that couldn’t be more timely and relevant for the millennial generation: the role of extreme secrecy in a democratic society...

This veil of secrecy descended on the day Kennedy died, as senior agency officials concealed their ongoing conspiracies to kill Cuban president Fidel Castro and their pre-assassination knowledge of suspected JFK assassin Lee Oswald. 

This veil of secrecy impeded the investigations of the assassination by the Warren Commission in 1964, by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in 1967–1989, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975–1976, by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976–'79, and by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1994–'98. In every investigation relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA concealed information relevant to the JFK story that should have been made public.

In 2016, this veil of secrecy continues to conceal 1,100 files concerning the likes of CIA officials Bill Harvey, Howard Hunt, David Phillips, David Morales, Ann Goodpasture, and George Joannides, as well as the surveillance operations that picked up on Lee Harvey Oswald as he made his way from Moscow to Minsk to Fort Worth to New Orleans to Mexico City to Dallas...

The only check on those senior CIA officials who wish to continue the JFK assassination cover-up in 2016 is online civil society. Online civil society consists of citizens of the United States (and the world) who are empowered by the Internet to find and share information. Thanks to the World Wide Web, all people everywhere now have access to the historical record of JFK’s assassination (via websites like MaryFerrell.org, JFKLancer.com and JFKFacts.org) and to powerful communications channels (like Facebook and Twitter)...

Rob's comment:
See also my review of Gerald Posner's book on the JFK assassination and an excerpt from David Talbot's book: What Really Happened in Dallas.

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