President Joh F. Kennedy (left rear), Jackie Kennedy and Texas Governor John B. Connolly riding in the Presidential limousine November 22, 1963, on the route through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

In a remarkable television broadcast on December 15, 2022, Tucker Carlson made an explosive charge. He pointed out that, contrary to law, the White House was refusing to release thousands of pages of documents about the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Carlson said that these documents proved CIA involvement in the assassination and that someone within the government who had looked at these documents made a direct statement to this effect.

Here is what Carlson said: “Not long after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on camera in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, a lot of Americans started to have some questions about the Kennedy assassination. It was, you’d have to admit, a pretty extraordinary sequence of events. A lone gunman murders the president of the United States. And then, less than 48 hours later, that lone gunman is himself murdered by another lone gunman.

What are the odds of that? It’s one thing if you get struck by lightning – rare but possible. But if every member of your family also gets struck by lightning, all on different days, you might begin to suspect these are not entirely natural events. But oh, replied the U.S. government, they are. This bizarre chain of killings was all entirely natural.

So less than a year after the JFK assassination, the Johnson White House released something called the Warren Commission Report. And the report concluded that while their motives remained unclear, both Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby had acted alone. No one helped them. There was no conspiracy of any kind. Case closed. Time to move on.

And many Americans did move on. At the time, they had no idea how shoddy and corrupt the Warren Commission was. It would be nearly 50 years before the CIA admitted under duress that in fact, it had withheld information from investigators about its relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald.

But even then, at the time, before that was known, the government’s explanation didn’t seem entirely plausible. And some people started asking obvious questions about it. It was at that point, as Americans started to doubt the official story, that the term ‘conspiracy theory’ entered our lexicon. As Professor Lance DeHaven-Smith points out in his book on the subject, ‘The term conspiracy theory did not exist as a phrase in everyday American conversation before 1964. In 1964, the year the Warren Commission issued its report, the New York Times published five stories in which ”conspiracy theory” appeared.’

Now, today, of course, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ appears in pretty much every New York Times story about American politics. It’s wielded, now as then, as a weapon against anyone who asks questions the government doesn’t feel like answering. But despite 60 years of name-calling, those questions have not disappeared. In fact, they have multiplied with time.

And here’s one of them. In April of 1964, a psychiatrist called Louis Joylon West visited Jack Ruby in his isolation cell in a Dallas jail. According to West’s written assessment, he found that Jack Ruby was ‘technically insane’ and in need of immediate psychiatric hospitalization. Those are conclusions that puzzlingly no one who had spoken to Jack Ruby previously had reached. Ruby had seemed perfectly sane to the people who knew him. Louis Jolyon West pronounced him crazy.

But what West did not say was that he was working for the CIA at the time. Louis Jolyon West was a contract psychiatrist for the spy agency. He was also an expert on mind control and a prominent player in the now infamous MKUltra program in which the CIA gave powerful psychiatric drugs to Americans without their knowledge.

So of all the psychiatrists in the world, what in the world was this guy doing in Jack Ruby’s prison cell? The media did not seem interested in finding out. In fact, the New York Times, in an extensive 1999 obituary of West, never mentioned the fact that he had worked for the CIA, much less his time in Jack Ruby’s cell, which seems relevant. So you can see why non-crazy people would wonder about what really happened. And of course, many have wondered.

In 1976, long forgotten, the House of Representatives impaneled a special committee to reinvestigate the JFK assassination. Their bipartisan conclusion? Jack Kennedy was almost certainly murdered as the result of a conspiracy. But the question is a conspiracy by whom? Well, the obvious suspect would be the CIA. Why else would the agency withhold critical evidence from investigators? Is there a benign explanation for that, for maintaining this level of secrecy for this many years? Not that we’re aware of. And it is illegal.

In 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. That act mandated full disclosure of all documents by 2017, 54 years after JFK was killed. The last administration promised to comply fully with that law. But under intense pressure from CIA Director Mike Pompeo, withheld, in the end, thousands of pages of CIA documents.

The Biden administration did exactly the same thing. That would be thousands of pages of documents after nearly 60 years, after the death of every single person involved. But we still can’t see them. Clearly, it’s not to protect any person. They’re all dead. It’s to protect an institution. But why?

Well, today we decided to find out. We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, ‘Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President?’ And here’s the reply we received verbatim. Quote, ‘The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.’

It’s hard to imagine a more jarring response than that. Again, this is not a ‘conspiracy theorist’ that we spoke to. Not even close. This is someone with direct knowledge of the information that once again is being withheld from the American public. And the answer we received was unequivocal. Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president. Now, some people will not be surprised to hear that they suspected it all along. But no matter how you feel about it or what you thought about the Kennedy assassination, pause to consider what this means.

It means that within the US government, there are forces wholly beyond democratic control. These forces are more powerful than the elected officials that supposedly oversee them. These forces can affect election outcomes. They can even hide their complicity in the murder of an American president. In other words, they can do pretty much anything they want. They constitute a government within a government mocking, by their very existence, the idea of democracy. As cynical as we have become after 30 years of watching government officials ignore the voters who employ them, we were shocked to learn this. It’s not acceptable.” See this.

After this broadcast, Robert Kennedy, Jr, JFK’s nephew, tweeted:

The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.

If the CIA was involved, the obvious next question is why? Why did they want JFK eliminated? The best answer has been provided by Professor Jim Douglass in his book JFK and the Unspeakable. In brief, JFK didn’t trust the CIA and planned to dismantle it. For that reason, the CIA got rid of him before he could do it.

I interviewed Douglass over a decade ago, and here are some of the things he told me:

“Now, Jim, you were close to Thomas Merton, influenced by Thomas Merton, and part of this title comes from Merton. Would you explain that to us?

DOUGLASS: Yes, Lew. Thomas Merton wrote a book called Raids on the Unspeakable, a series of essays. He talked about the unspeakable as a kind of power and a kind of reality that went almost beyond the power of speech. It was suggested for him by the nuclear arms race, by the Vietnam War, and by the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm and Martin and RFK. It was a kind of evil where we don’t want to go. That might be one way of coming up with what he meant by the unspeakable.

ROCKWELL: Well, Jim Douglass, thank goodness you have gone where maybe others have feared to go. And all the people that I’ve talked to – and I’ve read, myself, a good amount of Kennedy revisionism, but I was extremely impressed by all you’ve done. And the people I’ve talked to who are the real experts tell me this is the best book and the most important book ever written on the Kennedy assassination. So not only do you go over why, clearly, this was a conspiracy, it just wasn’t a typical lone nut who appears from time to time in American history and is of great use to the power elite, but you show us why he was killed, why this is so important, and why we should all be concerned about it, not simply a historical event we can forget about, but why it continues to have impact on the nature of American society, of the wars that the government fights, what’s happening in terms of the police state here at home, and why it affects every person here today listening to this show.

DOUGLASS: Yes, I really appreciate your emphasizing the whys, because all I hoped to do was to tell the story of the why. I, of course, included the plot, but the only reason I did that was to fill in the picture. My point is not, and I did not write an analysis of the Kennedy assassination. It was to tell the story of JFK, and of all of us, for that matter. It was representing everyone in this country and, because of the nature of the conflict, in some sense, everybody in the world. We’re talking about weapons that could destroy the world. And that story, and of his turning – I use that word advisedly. It comes from the Hebrew Scriptures – his turning away from that kind of destructive power, towards peace, that’s the ‘why’ of his assassination.

ROCKWELL: You know, we hear, for example, about his speech where he said he was going to undo the CIA as an organization. Was that part of it, I mean, in terms of what the CIA did then, what it does today, what the Pentagon does, the Military-Industrial Complex?

DOUGLASS: He underwent a break with the CIA relatively early in his administration at the Bay of Pigs because he understood – he was not a stupid man. He was a very shrewd person. (Laughing) And he understood that he was being manipulated and set up at the Bay of Pigs so that he would have to call in the U.S. troops to win against Castro, and the CIA lied to him to set him up, they lied about the conditions of the uprisings that they told him were going to occur in Cuba and all this kind of thing. And the whole Bay of Pigs invasion had been organized during the Eisenhower administration. But when Kennedy realized afterwards the extent to which he had been lied and set up, he said, I want to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind. And he very deliberately did take steps to impair the CIA from doing that in the future. He fired the man in charge, Allen Dulles, who had been the cold warrior up to that point, and fired his main subordinates who had set him up in the Bay of Pigs. And then, of course, after his assassination, who does Lyndon Johnson, his successor, appoint for the so-called Warren Commission as the major influence within it, but Allen Dulles. He should have been considered, rightly, as the main suspect in the assassination rather than appointed to investigate it. That’s the fox investigating the murder in the hen house.

ROCKWELL: Can you look at the Kennedy assassination as a coup d’etat?

DOUGLASS: Yes. But it’s a very subtle coup d’etat in that the propaganda is so enormous and the transition is done so fluidly into an administration under Lyndon Johnson, that is reversing all of Kennedy’s main decisions. That happens with so little disruption. I mean, Kennedy’s main advisors don’t all surrender and say this is a coup d’etat or anything like that. Everybody sort of surrenders. This is Cold War thinking. This is the mission to the Powers That Be, if you want to put it in biblical terms. And so, although it is, in fact, a coup d’etat in terms of the power – and the way Kennedy was moving, he had become so isolated, and even his closest – well, most of his closest advisers were so subordinate to the Powers That Be that it was not seen as anything like that.

ROCKWELL: Did Robert Kennedy see it as a murder by the Powers That Be, and is that why he himself was murdered?

DOUGLASS: Yes, he did. But he could not, as one individual – even though he was attorney general of the United States, he could not see a way to do anything in the extreme isolation that he and his brother together had been before the assassination. But now it was Robert Kennedy alone. He, on the very day of the assassination, within an hour, he was suspecting – well, within minutes – (Laughing) – he was suspecting it was the CIA. And he actually confronted people in the CIA that afternoon, asking them about their role in the assassination. But this was all kept very much under the visibility of anyone. And he did not come out with that view. He said to his friends that he would wait until he became president himself. That was a very tragic and fatal decision. He needed to speak up long before that. And, of course, he was never given that opportunity. And he was assassinated 15 minutes after he took the turn by winning the California primary toward becoming president of the United States.”

Isn’t it time the cover-up ended? Let’s do everything we can to release the missing documents and then get rid of the evil, war-mongering CIA. But let’s not stop there. Let’s get rid of the NSA, the FBI and the other agencies that are terrorizing and spying on the American people.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State.

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