UPCOMING EVENT: Wednesday, February 5 at noon. FFF is hosting a get-together in downtown Boston after the oral arguments in Ian Freeman’s appeal, where we will discuss the oral arguments. I will be there. Trillium Brewing Fort Point, 50 Thomson Pl, Boston, MA 02210; (857) 449-0083; https://trilliumbrewing.com. Reminder: The Court of Appeals is located at One Courthouse Way in Boston. The oral arguments are scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on the 7th floor of the courthouse. Trillium Brewing is about one block away. See here for more details.
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Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order “ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy [and] Reverend Martin Luther King.” In signing the order, Trump declared, “That’s a big one. A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades. And everything will be revealed.”
Trump’s executive order hit the wire services and was reported widely by the mainstream press. The order also created a big buzz across the Internet.
Will those long-secret JFK assassination-related records really be finally released to the public?
Color me … skeptical, extremely skeptical.
Why I am skeptical? Because I don’t believe for a moment that the CIA is going to permit Trump to release those records.
Let’s not forget: The CIA has been fighting fiercely for more than 60 years to keep its assassination-related records secret. They fought fiercely to keep them secret during the Warren Commission hearings in 1964, during the House Select Committee on Assassinations hearings in the 1970s, during the term of the Assassination Records Review Boq4 in the 1990s, during Trump’s first term as president, and during Biden’s term as president. They fought a several-years legal battle against former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley to keep their George Joannides records secret. Indeed, they are still fighting to keep their long-secret JFK assassination-related records secret in a pending lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in California.
So, given the ferocity that the CIA has displayed in keeping its assassination-related records secret for more than six decades, what are the chances that the CIA will buckle and permit Trump to get away with disclosing these records to the American people? I say the chances of that happening are slim or nil. I think it’s much more likely that the CIA will make Trump an offer he can’t refuse and that Trump will end up releasing “some” or “many” or “most” — but not “all” of the records, which would, of course, enable the CIA to continue keeping the incriminating records secret.
Now, granted, I could be proven wrong. Trump might really follow through this time. And I would be very happy to be proven wrong. We’ll see.
Consider the following headlines in the mainstream press:
“Trump Says He’ll OK Release of Final Batch of JFK Assassination Files” (Voice of America)
“JFK Assassination: Trump to Allow Release of Classified Documents” (CBS News)
“Trump to allow release of thousands of JFK files by National Archives” (USA Today)
“Trump Says He Will Release Final Set of Documents on Kennedy Assassination” (New York Times)
“Trump Says He’ll Allow the Release of Classified JFK Assassination Files” (Politico)
You ask: Why I am simply repeating yesterday’s headlines? Because they aren’t yesterday’s headlines. They are headlines from October 2017. Yes, 2017! That’s what Trump declared the last time he was president — the same thing that he declared yesterday. And the same declaration received the same headlines and the same buzz both times.
There is something else to consider. In his executive order yesterday, Trump didn’t actually order a release of those long-secret records. Instead, his executive order directed his Director of National Intelligence to put together a plan within 15 days for the full release of documents about the JFK assassination.
A plan? Why does Trump need a “plan” for releasing those records? It seems to me that all that’s needed is an order. Here’s my proposed draft of two orders for Trump to use:
“I hereby order the National Archives to immediately release, fully and completely, without any redactions or omissions, all records, documents, and files relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”—Signed, Donald Trump, President.
“I hereby order the CIA to immediately release, fully and completely, without any redactions or omissions, all records, documents, and files relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including, but not limited to, all records, documents, and files pertaining to former CIA official George E. Joannides. I also order the CIA not to destroy any such records, documents, and files. If any such records, documents, and files have already been destroyed, I order the CIA to disclose such destruction.—Signed, Donald Trump, President.
Like I say, I hope I am proven wrong and that Trump really does follow through this time with full disclosure of those long-secret records. If he does, here is what I predict those records will reveal, in part:
1. There will be no smoking gun — i.e., no confession that the CIA orchestrated the assassination of President Kennedy, no audiotape in which Lyndon Johnson admitted his participation in the assassination, or any other similar thing. From the very beginning, it has been standard policy of the CIA to never put anything in writing relating to its state-sponsored assassinations. That policy would be even more emphasized in a state-sponsored assassination of a U.S. official, especially a president.
2. Instead, I predict that there will be bits of information that further fill out the mosaic that the JFK assassination was a regime-change operation on the part of the national-security establishment. People sometimes say, “I wonder if we’ll ever know who really assassinated President Kennedy.” Those are people who don’t want to know. That’s because we already know who assassinated President Kennedy. As I have detailed in my books The Kennedy Autopsy and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, once it was established beyond a reasonable doubt that the military and the CIA conducted a fraudulent autopsy on the president’s body on the very night of the assassination and produced a fraudulent, altered copy of the famous Zapruder film on the very weekend of the assassination, it was “case closed” on who orchestrated the assassination. That’s because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy and a fraudulent film. Both of them necessarily equal criminal culpability in the assassination itself.
So what are they still hiding? Small bits of information that they know further fill out the overall mosaic of criminal culpability. Given its longtime bias in favor of the official lone-nut narrative of the assassination, the mainstream press most likely will not be able to recognize the significance of these bits of information. But the CIA and the military know full well that assassination researchers, who include very brilliant analysts, will be able to recognize them as further pieces of the assassination puzzle. My hunch is that some of these bits of information will relate to Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico City, much of which is still shrouded in mystery more than 60 years later.
3. Here is my biggest prediction if those long-secret records are, in fact, released: The United States will not fall into the ocean, Cuba will not invade the United States, and the Reds will not end up taking control over the United States. For more than 60 years, the CIA has steadfastly maintained that releasing those JFK-assassination-related records would threaten or endanger “national security,” whatever that ludicrous term means. That, of course, has always been sheer nonsense. Nonetheless, presidents, Congress, and commissions have bought into this nonsense. The release of those long-secret JFK assassination released records would prove that the “national-security” rationale for keeping those records secret for more than 60 long years has always been nonsense.
