Most of the mainstream media continues telling their readers not to expect any “smoking guns” in the JFK records that are supposed to be released tomorrow.
That’s assuming, of course, that President Trump doesn’t change his mind at the last minute and grant the CIA’s request for continued secrecy. I stand by the prediction I made earlier this week. I think Trump will strike a last-minute deal with the CIA, perhaps one in which the CIA promises to bring its power and influence to bear on Congress to cease and desist about Russia. My hunch is that the deal will be announced in a fundraising speech that Trump is delivering today, not coincidentally, in Dallas.
There are several fascinating aspects to this controversy.
First of all is the mainstream media’s new-found discovery that the records are set to be released tomorrow. For the past year, some of us have been harping on the impending deadline and suggesting that the CIA would beseech Trump to keep its long-secret records secret, perhaps for another 25 years.
The entire time, the mainstream media has largely remained silent about the matter … until just recently when the issue exploded into the public arena. Just Google “JFK Records” and you’ll see what I mean.
Most of the media articles, op-eds, and editorials fail to question a central issue: The fact that the CIA wants its 50-year-old records to continue to be kept secret. That should be big news, especially given that the reason the JFK Records Act was enacted in the first place was because of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, which posited that the CIA orchestrated the assassination of the president as part of its many Cold War national-security regime-change operations. At the end of JFK, there was a blurb about the fact that the U.S. national security establishment was continuing to keep its assassination records secret from the American people. This secrecy created such an uproar among the American populace that Congress was effectively forced to act. That’s what produced the JFK Records Act, which the national-security establishment vehemently opposed.
The Act required the CIA, Pentagon, FBI, Secret Service, and other federal agencies to release their assassination records. (Unfortunately, for some reason, the Secret Service intentionally and knowingly destroyed many of its records after the Act was enacted and despite the fact that the Act expressly prohibited the destruction of such records.) During the term of the Assassination Records Review Board, the CIA requested the Board to keep many of its records secret, which the ARRB denied. When the CIA appealed the ARRB’s decisions to President Clinton on grounds of “national security,” the president denied its requests and the records were released.
Nothing happened to the country when the records were released. The United States didn’t fall into the ocean. The communists did not take control over the federal government.
The ARRB, whose job it was to force the CIA and other agencies to comply, went out of existence in the late 1990s. However, someone had slipped a provision into the Act that enabled the CIA and other agencies to keep selected records secret for another 25 years. That 25-year period expires tomorrow … unless Trump decides to extend it today (which I still predict he will).
So, here’s the picture: Stone’s movie accused the CIA of orchestrating the assassination. It implied that the CIA is keeping its records secret to prevent people from discovering the truth about Kennedy’s assassination, just as the CIA and the Pentagon had kept secret other regime-change operations in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Cuba, and Chile around that period of time. The CIA continued to keep its records secret until October 2017. And now it wants Trump to keep them secret even longer, arguing that “national security” will be threatened if the American people (and assassination researchers) are permitted to see them.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the CIA’s “national security” claim looks a bit suspicious, especially since nothing happened to the United States when the CIA’s claims of “national security” were denied with respect to records that were released in the 1990s. What the mainstream media is steadfastly refusing to do is assert the obvious: The CIA wants to keep its records secret because the records are incriminatory. If it has nothing to hide, why hide it?
The media keeps emphasizing that the remaining records will contain no “smoking guns.” That turns on what they mean by “smoking gun.” As I pointed out in yesterday’s article, “Circumstantial Evidence in the JFK Assassination,” by “smoking gun,” they mean things like a videotaped confession or even just a signed memorandum setting forth the steps to carry out the assassination.
But as I indicated in my article, long ago the CIA made it clear that covert assassinations were never to be put into writing.
Practically from its inception in 1947, the CIA began specializing in the art of assassination. In 1953, it was even compiling a top-secret manual on assassinations. The manual not only featured different ways to assassinate people but, equally important, ways to prevent people from discovering that the CIA was responsible for the assassination.
So, here you have an organization that is specializing in assassinations and in ways to keep its role in the assassination secret. It stands to reason that such an organization, over the years, would necessarily develop highly sophisticated ways to prevent people from discovering its role in secret state-sponsored assassinations.
As I wrote yesterday, the mainstream media continues to focus on direct evidence in the JFK assassination, ignoring the importance of circumstantial evidence. I pointed out, for example, that Navy official Saundra Spencer’s sworn testimony established that the official autopsy photographs of JFK are fakes. Before the ARRB in the 1990s, the public didn’t know about what Spencer had to say. It was all secret before then. We have Oliver Stone to thank for the revelation of her testimony.
I’d call Spencer’s testimony a “smoking gun” because it exposed the fraudulent nature of the JFK autopsy. (See my ebook The Kennedy Autopsy). The mainstream media would not call Spencer’s revelations a “smoking gun” because they are circumstantial evidence, not direct evidence.
Another example of a “smoking gun” that was discovered as a result of the ARRB’s efforts in the 1990s: the two separate brain examinations as part of the JFK autopsy.
You might ask, “Two? Why two brain exams?” Autopsies normally have one brain exam.
Well, that’s where it gets interesting. In the first brain examination, Kennedy’s brain was “sectioned” or sliced up, like a loaf of bread. That’s standard operating procedure when there is a gunshot to the brain. Sectioning enables the pathologists to determine the trajectory of the bullet.
In the second brain examination, which took place after the first brain exam, the brain was still intact, albeit damaged. It had not been sectioned or sliced like a loaf of bread.
How is that possible? Well, it’s not possible. Once the brain was sectioned, it could not be put back together. To any critical mind, that leaves but one conclusion: the second brain was a different brain, which would not have been difficult to secure since the Bethesda navy medical center, where the autopsy was performed, included a teaching hospital. Extra brains and other organs are readily available for teaching medical students.
Here’s another interesting aspect of the two brain exams. In the 1990s, when the ARRB showed the official photographer, a man named John Stringer, who worked and taught for the Navy, the official photograph of JFK’s brain, he denied that that was the brain he photographed at the first brain examination. He testified that the brain he photographed had been sectioned. That means but one thing: The photograph of the brain in the official records has to be fake, just like the autopsy photographs that were shown to Saundra Spencer.
We have Oliver Stone to thank for that revelation as well. Without the JFK Records Act, we would never have discovered the bogus nature of the autopsy photographs and of JFK’s brain.
Interestingly enough, the mainstream media, did report on this piece of circumstantial evidence. Well, at least the Washington Post did. Here are two articles about the matter:
Archive Photos Not of JFK’s Brain, Concludes Aides to Review Board by George Lardner Jr.
Newly Released JFK Documents Raise Questions About Medical Evidence by Deb Riechmann
Nonetheless, most of the mainstream media would undoubtedly argue that the two brain exams aren’t “smoking guns” because they constitute circumstantial evidence, not direct evidence.
But for those of us who place a high value on circumstantial evidence, the two separate brain exams, including one that wasn’t JFK’s brain, was a big “smoking gun” that was revealed in the 1990s. For us, it’s not surprising at all why the CIA and the rest of the U.S. national-security establishment had kept that secret from November 1963 to the 1990s and, in fact, wanted to keep it secret forever.
Why would the U.S. national security establishment conduct a fraudulent autopsy? Why would the Secret Service use the threat of deadly force at Parkland Hospital to prevent the Dallas County Medical Examiner from conducting an autopsy, as Texas law required? Why was Lyndon Johnson patiently waiting on the tarmac at Love Field for JFK’s body to be delivered to his plane? Why was it important to Johnson and the rest of the U.S. national security establishment that the U.S. military conduct the autopsy? Why was everyone who participated in the autopsy required to sign secrecy oaths regarding what they had seen about the autopsy?
Will the JFK records still remaining to be released contain more of these types of what the media would call “non-smoking guns”? Well, back in the 1990s there had to be a reason why the CIA wanted these particular records kept secret for another 25 years. Indeed, there has to be a reason why the CIA wants to keep them secret still. And no, it has nothing to do with the nebulous and meaningless term “national security.”