On Thursday, December 15, the National Archives and Records Administration released a tranche of 13,173 documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Historians and scholars of the assassination have just begun to churn through the massive data dump of documents—along with conspiracy theorists convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald had co-conspirators that day.
Don't expect any big surprises, though. If there had been a smoking gun, we would know it by now. Sooner or later, massive conspiracies are almost always exposed by whistleblowers and insiders who can't keep their mouths shut.
The assassination of JFK is by far the most analyzed murder in history. It's produced thousands of books, articles, essays, commentaries, editorials, films, and documentaries, none of which have revealed enough evidence that could convince a grand jury to put anyone on trial other than the lone assassin fingered by the Warren Commission in their exhaustive report: Lee Harvey Oswald.
In fact, of the several hundred docs I have scanned, most are related to Oswald and his various activities and travels—along with his personality profile—before the assassination.
Of the documents' delayed release, Robert Kennedy Jr. once asked, "What are they hiding?"
The answer, I strongly suspect, is activities of the CIA and other U.S. government agencies and actors in foreign countries that could embarrass the federal government and compromise the relationship the current administration has with these nations.
As revealed in the 1975 Church Committee report on Foreign and Military Intelligence and many documents since, for decades, the CIA was directly involved in overthrowing foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Indonesia's President Sukarno, and Chile's President Salvador Allende and General Rene Schneider.
Let's not forget that the CIA attempted to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro so many times that Fidel famously said, "If surviving assassinations were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal." And the CIA did assassinate Castro's revolutionary co-conspirator, Che Guevara, in Bolivia in 1967. The CIA was also involved in rigging elections in Latin American counties to favor dictators and politicians friendlier to American business interests.
Then there's the CIA's Project MK-ULTRA, also exposed by the Church Committee, showing that since the 1950s, the agency had engaged in mind-control experiments involving LSD and other mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting people—including U.S. citizens protected by the Constitution—with an aim toward developing drugs and procedures that could be used in interrogations.
As well, there is the Kennedy-era document called Operation Northwoods, officially titled "Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba." It included numerous false flag operations as a pretext to killing Castro and overturning his Communist regime, such as staging a phony attack on the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, employing a fake Russian MIG aircraft to buzz a real U.S. civilian airliner, hijacking planes, faking an attack on a U.S. ship to make it look like Cubans did it, and developing "a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington" that would harass U.S. citizens, all to be blamed on Castro.
The Church Committee also uncovered Operation SHAMROCK, which involved the National Security Agency (NSA) obtaining information and intelligence from the major telecommunications companies about both foreigners and U.S. citizens, and a "mail covers" program by the CIA and FBI that involved opening and photographing hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail—without a search warrant or notification of the mail senders or receivers. (An early revelation on the latest JFK documents is that the government intercepted mail to and from the actress and activist Jane Fonda, possibly part of this program.)
"If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country," the Church Committee warned, "the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know."
If there are any big revelations to come in this latest document release, it is going to involve such questionable actions on the part of the government, and not that it was involved in the assassination of its own President.
Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, and the author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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