35th President of the United States John F. Kennedy.
Why are records of the murder of an American President still held under lock and key 59 years after the fact?
The term “Conspiracy Theorist” originated with the CIA concerning the murder of President John F. Kennedy and anybody who believed something other than what the government was purporting as true.
Many Americans, especially older, would like to know more of the who, what, how of the events of that fateful day long ago.
For 59 years the US government has held a treasure trove of secret documents that could possibly explain what really happened on November 22, 1963, concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has continually pushed to keep those documents secret, and they still are.
On December 15, 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released an additional 13,173 documents supposedly containing new information about the assassination in accordance with the JFK Act of 1992. Section 5 of that Act permits “postponement for an identifiable harm to military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations where the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
Just last October various agencies appealed to the Joe Biden administration to postpone release of those documents. Apparently, events that occurred almost 60 years ago could cause harm today, that is according to them.
So, when the over 13,000 records were released this week much was regurgitated old information. In fact, over 4,000 documents were redacted! Additionally, over 4,000 JFK assassination records continue to remain under court seal or for grand jury secrecy. Interestingly, some of these documents “cannot be released independently by NARA, the agencies, or the President.” What are they hiding?
Among those government agencies requesting that the JFK records continue—almost 60 years later—to be kept secret and withheld from the public are: NARA, CIA, Department of Defense, Department of State, Federal Bureau of investigation.
New York Law School Adjunct Professor Larry Schnapf, with Citizens Against Political Assassinations,
was interviewed by Fox News talk show host Tucker Carlson this week. Schnapf is one who has been pressing for release of the documents. He reviewed the just released documents and said that the documents released were “very disappointing, frustrating and infuriating because essentially what we got was old wine packaged in new bottles.”
Schnapf stated that the records released had basically already been released with perhaps some “less redactions”. He said the documents released were a “big nothing burger.”
CIA Involvement Not New Evidence
The documents again show the CIA had direct involvement of the CIA in the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. CIA involvement has been a documented fact since at least 2013, when CIA historian David Robarge, revealed that 1963 CIA Director John McCone first participated in the CIA coverup of information about their covert operations in Miami and New Orleans involving potential assassins and information to the Warren Commission. Robarge said then that McCone, “was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” at the spy agency…”
Robarge’s report was initially stamped “SECRET/NOFORN,” meaning it was “not to be shared outside the agency or with foreign governments…” The report was “originally published as an article in the CIA’s classified internal magazine, Studies in Intelligence, in September 2013, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.” It’s still not listed on the CIA website.
A still classified 2005 biography of the CIA chief written by Robarge was the source of the article. In 2012, the book was quietly declassified and is on the website of The George Washington University’s National Security Archive.
The CIA determined that after 50 years of pubic wondering they would declassify the report “to highlight misconceptions about the CIA’s connection to JFK’s assassination.” They hoped to debunk the popular notion that the agency was behind the murder of an American President. Unfortunately for them, ‘too little too late’ is the mantra as more Americans today believe the CIA had an even larger role in the assassination than ever. A December 12, 2022 poll revealed that 31% of Americans fully believe the CIA was directly involved in the assassination almost 60 years later.
Robarge’s article says that McCone, worked under the proposition that “Oswald had acted alone and that there was no foreign conspiracy involving Cuba or the Soviet Union, [and] directed the agency to provide only “passive, reactive and selective” assistance to the Warren Commission.” Thus CIA Director McCone was at the forefront of directing misinformation to the Warren Commission and covering up the agency’s involvement with the assassination events.
House Oversight Committee Opportunity to Reveal
Congressman James Comer (R-Ky.) will serve as the next chairman of the House Oversight Committee when Congress reconvenes in 2023. Schnapf said “Comer will be in a unique position to call in for public testimony the CIA, the FBI, the trustees of the RFK family trust that is holding public records back, and NBC, who has assassination records they have refused to release to the Assassinations Review Board.”
The Washington Post stated:
Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post staff writer and the vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation — which sued the Biden administration in October over the delay of the release — said his group was particularly interested in looking at a batch of “30 to 40 significant documents with redactions” that had been released previously, and comparing them to what would be released Thursday afternoon. Morley said he was not encouraged by Thursday’s release and felt the CIA was not acting in “good faith” to release all available information. Morley cited a 15-page document from 1961 — two years before the assassination — from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Kennedy titled “Memo to President CIA Reorganization.” As of Thursday, it remained partially redacted. “What the CIA has hidden,” Morley said, is whether the CIA had “operational interest in Oswald” at the time of the assassination.
On December 5, 2022, US District Court Judge John H. Tunheim, sent a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to release the balance of the JFK documents in full. Tunheim was Chair of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARB) from 1994-98. The ARB was established Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, this was a law that Joe Biden voted for when it passed Congress unanimously.
Excerpts from Judge John H. Tunheim letter:
It is now nearly 60 years since that fateful day in Dallas. You have the non-delegable power to decide to release the remaining redacted information. Please exercise your authority to bring transparency and finality to this ordeal and order the release of all remaining redacted information in the assassination records. Mr. President, as we near the sixtieth anniversary, it is long past time to come clean and be able to tell Americans that nothing is being hidden from them and that they have access to the federal government’s entire record of the JFK assassination. You would be doing a great service to providing full transparency and telling the truth about this event which even today remains mired in controversy and conspiracy beliefs.
…the Review Board believed that most agencies acted in good faith. But there is one example when the Central Intelligence Agency deliberately misled us in a very material way. We had the file on George Joannides, a CIA officer who was deceased. We were told that Joannides was simply the liaison for the CIA with the House Select Committee on Assassinations and nothing more. We returned the file to the agency. It turned out that this claim was a shadow of the truth. Joannides had earlier overseen the training in Miami of anti-Castro Cubans in advance of the Bay of Pigs, which most certainly was possibly relevant to the assassination. The Board would have released the file in full had it not been misled. The House Committee was also misled in a similar manner by the Agency. The Joannides file absolutely needs to be released in full.
CIA Miami Psychological Warfare Operations Chief George Joannides, worked as an undercover agent for the CIA while based in Miami and New Orleans in 1963. Declassified CIA records show that George Joannides obstructed two official JFK investigations by not disclosing what he knew about contacts between his Cuban agents and Oswald. Most records of his activities in the summer of 1963 are still classified.
The Constantine Report revealed that,
“In 1978, Joannides served as CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which re-investigated the JFK assassination, but he did not disclose the obvious conflict of interest to the HSCA in regard to his role in the events of 1963.”
“If I’d known his [Joannides’] role in 1963, I would have put Joannides under oath — he would have been a witness, not a facilitator,” [Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey], now a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, told The New York Times. “How do we know what he didn’t give us?”
The Mary Ferrell Foundation sued the Biden administration to release the JFK documents, stating, “the CIA is withholding most of the records at issue.”
Former Chief of the CIA under Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, has refused to come forward and be interviewed concerning the CIA involvement in the murder of JFK or to speak to the issue. All other former CIA chiefs have also refused to be interviewed on the topic including former President George H.W. Bush.
Robert F. Kennedy said “the CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which [our] democracy has never recovered.”
Assassinations take place in a Republic to change directions of the country. You can see major changes in the direction of the US immediately following the murder of JFK in US involvement in Vietnam, and the rapidity which Communist forces started showing up on college campuses among other visible changes.
Michael Reed is Publisher of The Standard newspaper, print and online. TheStandardSC video media channel is being censored by dominant social media groups like YouTube. YouTube, owed by Alphabet (Google), removed and destroyed all of our video work without permission or remuneration. That has stopped all potential donations from our many supporters on that venue. If you want to continue to see independent thought and reports please “like”, comment, share with a friend, and donate to support The Standard on this page to assure the continued availability of news that is ignored too often by the dominant media.
RSS - Posts