A first look at the new JFK assassination Documents

[seemslikeadream]

A FIRST LOOK AT THE NEW JFK ASSASSINATION DOCUMENTS
JFK, files
Photo credit: National Archives, blinry / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and JFK Library
Rex Bradford is the president and archivist of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit entity that has collected millions of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other major events.

Just last week the National Archives released another batch of such documents. By law, all the records related to the assassination have to be released later this year, unless President Donald Trump blocks their publication.

With this new release, 88% of the National Archives store of Kennedy assassination material is now available to the public. This consists of 3,369 documents, some previously released with portions redacted and 441 formerly withheld-in-full documents. Most of these documents originate from the FBI and CIA.

Bradford talks with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about what these records reveal. He says the documents that have been examined so far do not point to a consistent and verifiable counter-narrative to the official story that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone-wolf assassin. But they do provide a valuable, behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of American foreign policy in the 1950s and 60s.


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Full Text Transcript:

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Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to radio WhoWhatWhy I’m Jeff Schechtman. Not since JFK have we had a president so at odds with the intelligence community and with what so many call the deep state. For many, this has reanimated discussions of the JFK assassination and once again brought to the surface all the unanswered questions that have haunted us for the past 54 years.
Just last week, the National Archives released a significant number of previously unseen records related to the JFK assassination. The story of the release received little coverage and the content of the documents even less.
Our guest today, Rex Bradford perhaps more than any other American understands those documents. Rex Bradford has become the self-appointed electronic archivist of the assassination of JFK. He began scanning relevant documents and making them available all the way back in 1999. He founded History Matters to make them freely available. He’s also written several essays and given talks at conferences, particularly on the Oswald-Mexico trip. He is now president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center. He is the consultant and analyst archivist for the Mary Ferrell Foundation and he’s undertaken even larger scale document archive projects.
It is my pleasure to welcome Rex Bradford to the program. Rex, thanks so much for joining us.
Rex Bradford: Hi Jeff, thanks for your kind words.
Jeff Schechtman: How did you get involved in all of this archival research, particularly as it relates to JFK?
Rex Bradford: My advice to people is: “Watch out for your hobbies, because they can get away from you.” I am a late comer compared to many people actually. I never saw the JFK movie when it came out in 1992 and then saw it I think about six years later on television, and I was intrigued enough that I went off and bought a book. I’m an avid reader and then I bought another book and another book and so down I guess the same rabbit hole that many people before me had.
I decided to go to one of the conferences that they were still holding in Dallas at that time. In fact still are. That’s when, this is now 1999 and the documentary releases, that had come out in large part because of the JFK movie and the furor after it, were coming out of the archives and people were passing around photo copies of some of the more amazing finds in them.
I’m a computer programmer by training and so my first question was: have you guys heard of scanners and the internet? Not too many people had. That sort of got me intrigued. I met Jim Lesar, who runs the Assassination Archives and Research Center in DC, shortly after that. We got together and started scanning some of the records and making CD-Rom’s available and then that quickly turned into internet ventures of putting them online.
Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about the way these documents were originally archived and how it was setup that there were certain specific release dates for this material?
Rex Bradford: Sure, well, I mean, most of the documents, well a large number anyway, come from the various investigations. The Warren Commission conducted the first major federal investigation of the Kennedy Assassination but there were several others. The biggest of which was, late 1970s, House Select Committee on Assassinations which did a full re-investigation and their Church Committee and others. A lot of the files basically are from those investigations. They tended to do their work, write up their report and then seal the documents.
That is not strictly true, the Warren Commission actually published the now famous 26 volumes of evidence but they still put files away that were not released to the public at the time. Then in the wake of the Oliver Stone movie and the passage of the JFK Records Act that mandated not only that all those files be processed for potential public release and most were but not all. But, several agencies of government, particularly the CIA and the FBI and others, were tasked with going through their records to identify relevant holdings that they had that weren’t in the hands of the investigations per se. Literally, you’re talking like five million pages, roughly, which is an amazing amount of material for a crime supposedly committed by a lone guy with a gun in a building, but there you are.
Jeff Schechtman: Going back to the original, even the Warren Commission documents and the Select Committee documents. How was the determination made, as best as we can tell today, as to what was public and what would be held back?
Rex Bradford: Originally, the Warren Commission, to take an example, published a 900-and-something page report and then were intending to do just that. But, then there was discussion within the Commission and a decision made to not only publish the report but to back it up with an impressive array of evidence behind it. The so-called 26 volumes, which is about half or actually more than half transcripts of interviews they conducted and the rest documents and other kinds of evidence. This is really what opened the Pandora’s box. Allen Dulles, who was on the Commission, said no one will read this stuff. What happened was, a small number of people actually did read the entire 26 volumes and what they found was all kind of stories that contradicted the 900-page report. That is what really got the ball rolling in the mid 60s of people questioning the Warren Commission’s findings.
In the case of the House Committee, they published 12 volumes of reports but then sealed all the rest of their records, hundreds of thousands of pages of interviews and files. None of that was made public until the passage of the JFK Records Act in the 90s.
Jeff Schechtman: These documents that were released last week, talk a little bit about what they represent?
Rex Bradford: Sure, so what happened is, in the wake of the 1992 JFK Records Act, a review board was put together to basically collect the documents from the files of the investigations as well as directly from other agencies like CIA and FBI, in particular and process them for release. The understanding was that some of them, particularly intelligence agency files would have information too sensitive to release. This review board from basically 1994 until 1998 went through these files and also conducted searches themselves and tried not to investigate the case per se but investigate the location of files. They made determinations of what things to make public, what things to keep withheld, and what to publish in redacted form with an agent name blacked out or that sort of thing. In many cases, larger pieces blacked out.
Originally, the CIA and FBI both pushed back on that Commission. The way the law was written any disagreement between the board itself and agencies would basically go to Presidential review. President Clinton at that time sided with the review board and the agencies backed down and cooperated. Although, there was an incident where the Secret Service destroyed files before the review board was able to get their hands on them.
Jeff Schechtman: Which really begs the larger question, what do we know or what information do we have with respect to any files and/or documents that have been destroyed over the years?
Rex Bradford: Well, it’s hard to know. There are known cases of that. The review board itself in their report wrote about the destruction of the Secret Service documents for instance. There’s another case in the 70s where the House Committee determined that Army Intelligence had destroyed a file on Oswald that they held.
In other cases, it’s just inferred. For instance, I took it upon myself, a few years back, to look into Church Committee records. This was the Senate investigation into intelligence agency abuses in the mid-70s post-Watergate, which took a brief look at the Kennedy Assassination as well. Specifically, to what extent the intelligence agencies supported or hindered the Warren Commission’s work.
What I discovered is that simply going through two of the Church Committee’s public volumes, which directly related to this matter, one on the Kennedy Assassination itself and the other on the CIA’s plots to kill foreign leaders and just looking at all of the footnotes and collecting the references to all of the transcripts of interviews on which the reports were based, which they identified by who was interviewed on what date and discovered that even though over 100 transcripts of the Church Committee had been released, more than 40 that were literally footnoted in these reports were not. Long story short, I discovered that the Review Board had tread this path before me and discovered that dozens and dozens of interviews were simply missing from the Church Committee’s files when the Review Board went to go collect them.
There’s other indications like that and many more. In some cases there may very well be innocent explanations, it’s a large volume of material and things go missing. But, the pattern of what’s missing is itself interesting. The more these documents come out, the more you sort of see what should be there that isn’t. That’s another aspect of all of this.
Jeff Schechtman: And what is that pattern tell us from what you’ve looked at, what does it lead you to when you look at what specifically is missing?
Rex Bradford: It’s a broad topic. A couple of things in particular that jump out is that, one topic, which we could fill up a whole long conversation with and hopefully won’t, is the subject of Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City seven weeks before the assassination. That is a huge black hole of information and there are clearly withheld records on that that are part of this set that’s going to be released and is being released and indications of missing records there as well.
Another case and a completely different area, I don’t know if this qualifies as missing records so much, but there is an amazing story of the President’s personal physician who was the only medically trained person present both at Dallas when they were trying to save his life at Parkland Hospital and at the autopsy later that night. Without getting into details there’s been an ongoing controversy of why the descriptions of President Kennedy’s wounds differ so markedly between those locations. The one person medically trained to answer that question was a guy named Admiral Burkley, who was the President’s personal physician, rode in the motorcade, etc., etc. and he was never interviewed by the Warren Commission.
In the files of the House Committee in the 1990s what was discovered, not released originally, was a letter that his lawyer wrote to the House Committee saying that his client, Admiral Burkley, had a story to tell the House Committee. The gist of which others besides Oswald must have participated. About a week after that letter was delivered, the House leadership team that was leading the investigation was removed from the case and new leadership put in. Basically, Burkley, for another year, wasn’t interviewed and then finally got a pro forma phone call on other matters and that was that.
The Review Board actually tried to obtain the files of his lawyer, Burkley now being deceased in the 90’s. They initially got permission from the family and then the permission was later withdrawn so they never received the lawyer’s files to see if they could learn more about it.
Jeff Schechtman: And these documents that were released last week?
Rex Bradford: Sure, the Review Board released, it’s hard to get an exact number, but something over 90% of the documents that they went through, well over 90%. But a significant number remain. There’s by the National Archives accounting, roughly 3600 documents that were still withheld in full as of a week ago. As well as a much larger universe of documents that have blacked out areas in them. By the law, the reason this is coming up all at this time is the 1992 law had a sunset clause, which said that after 25 years all the material, even withheld in the 90s, would be released. That is what this is all about because the 25 year anniversary is this October.
What the National Archives did last week is, before the October deadline, do a partial release of what they have. Out of the 3600 documents withheld in full, they released a little over 400 of those, a little over 10% and they also released some documents, a few 1000 in full, that had redaction’s in them and there is many, many, more of those to go. This is on the order of 10% to 15% of what is supposed to come by this October.
They come from different agencies, primarily CIA and FBI, although also from the House Committee’s files and some other places. They range in a variety of areas. They’re not all even documents, some are actually tape recordings, audio. For instance, without getting into details, there was a Soviet defector named Yuri Nosenko, who’s part of this story. He was imprisoned by the CIA, in the 1960s, for three years and the interview tapes of at least some of the interviews that they conducted with him while he was held captive are part of this release for instance.
There are also things like financial documents related to the financing of Cuban exile groups. Because, many people believed that the assassination is fundamentally tied into Kennedy foreign policy, specifically, the so-called secret war against Castro as well as potentially the Vietnam War. The Review Board cast a wide sloth of documents related to Kennedy foreign policy, particularly around Cuba and Vietnam. Many of those were released in the 1990s. A few bombshells actually in the sort of larger foreign policy and the administration policy sphere not perhaps directly related to the assassination. Some of those were withheld at the time because of things like agent names and stuff like that.
There is a large number of financial documents related to the funding of Cuban exile groups in here. This is true of the assassination records at large. There’s much there for people who are trying to figure out who killed Kennedy in there, but there’s also a large amount of material that helps fill out our knowledge of what was going on in the 1960s and the Kennedy administration, particularly some of the senior aspects of intelligence work.
Jeff Schechtman: Are there any things that are particularly surprising or that have been surprising to you out of this last release of documents last week?
Rex Bradford: This particular release I’m sorry to say I have not been reading too much of it. It’s been a busy week and this weekend is actually when I was intending to start going through it some. I’ve cherry picked and looked at a few things. In general, I would say I’m a person who, I’m not sure of the right word for it, but I’m not expecting bombshells in any of these new releases now or in October. I could easily be wrong on that.
Certainly there is many things from what came out in the 90s that I think qualifies as that. In some cherry picking I’ve done, what I’ve seen in many of these things, certainly, in many of the ones that are released that were formerly redacted is things that you might expect. There are agent codes and agent names and things like that.
Things like these financial records of Cuban exile groups, which are fairly voluminous. I’m not expert enough to even interpret those well. I expect they will be of great interest to some people that are into that in particular.
The Nosenko tapes, a lot of it is in Russian. I’d be very interested if someone comes along and makes English language transcripts available of those. I expect they will be quite interesting to listen to. In part because there is an ongoing controversy as to the so-called bona fides of Nosenko whether the story he came over from Russia with saying we had nothing to do with him and didn’t know anything about him is true or not.
I think it is too early to tell. I think this is stuff that’s at the detailed enough level that it will take a bit of time before we really learn what’s in them because, there’s a lot of detail.
Jeff Schechtman: While there may be no bombshells in this material, do you get the sense that they will shed some light on areas that have been previously explored?
Rex Bradford: They certainly will, for instance, I’ve already come across new cryptonyms. The CIA records are full of buzz words, so-called cryptonyms, and CIA records are much more readable if you understand what those cryptonyms mean. They’re names of people, names of agents, names of agencies, names of projects and in fact at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, we have an ongoing project to use in the public record to decode them and have several hundred that are either well established or reasonably inferred from documents. I think that this treasure trove will help unlock sort of more readability in those records.
There may be some very interesting stuff about Oswald. I don’t believe, although I haven’t really gone through enough to check, whether this set has it. Give you an example of a record, which I can’t imagine why is still withheld, unless, either government idiocy or there is something interesting in it. That is the testimony, to the House Select Committee, of a guy named Orest Pena. He ran a bar in New Orleans. It’s well known that he told the investigators that Oswald was an FBI informant and palled around with Federal Agents including in his bar. His testimony to the House Committee, even though they summarized it, it’s withheld in full to this day.
I’m curious to read that for instance. Again, it’s too early to tell, there may very well be highly interesting things in these, I really don’t know at this point.
Jeff Schechtman: How are all of these materials released, what is the method by which they have been kept and how have they been released to the public when these various release times like last week come about?
Rex Bradford: This one is a brand new thing for the Archive. These documents were released in PDF form online. That’s new to them. One of the problems with access to this voluminous record is that the way it works normally is the paper originals are stored at the National Archives in Maryland, at National Archives II facility in College Park.
I’ve taken several trips there to review and liberate documents from there. Although, it’s back breaking and time consuming because you have to use a high speed photocopier a page at a time or bring your own flatbed scanner a page at a time or photograph them with a camera, which doesn’t come out so good and that’s back breaking work.
I was very fortunate to meet Jim Lesar of the AARC that I mentioned early on. Because over 80% of the documents we have online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation come from the files of the AARC through the Freedom of Information Act lawsuits where the AARC was given paper copies of them so that we could pull the staples out and run them through sheet fed scanner, which you can’t do at the National Archives, which speeds up the process by a huge amount.
Several thousand pages of what we have has been done by back breaking trips to the Archives but it’s a problem. I’m very glad to see that the National Archives is putting these things online. Well, they put them in a form that’s not super accessible. You can download zip files and they have individual PDFs and you can read them so that’s fine but there’s no mechanism for searching them for instance.
My intent and I have not gotten to it yet, it has only been a few days, is to take these PDFs and integrate them as part of the Mary Ferrell searchable collection so they’re more accessible than they are in the current form for people doing research.
Jeff Schechtman: Come October when the balance of these documents have been released and there are no more, are we convinced that, that really will be it, that, that really will be all of the documents?
Rex Bradford: I view this whole process as peeling layers of the onion. One thing that the National Archives hasn’t highlighted too much is that they’re actually not making all of them public. They are reserving exceptions for IRS records, which there’s a fair number, so some of Jack Ruby’s tax returns for instance will remain sealed and some others. Ruth Payne, a woman who housed Marina Oswald in Dallas, I think her tax returns were part of what was in this collection but will also be sealed. Oswald’s tax returns themselves were released in the 90s by Marina Oswald so they’re not private even though I think they are part of this collection because they were never officially released.
Another one of great interest but will remain withheld for different reasons is William Manchester’s interview with Robert Kennedy in 1965, which was donated under a deed of gift, which seals it for, I don’t know how long, another 50 or 75 years or something. The National Archives is respecting that. There’s certainly a handful of things, mostly IRS records that will remain released.
Then you get to the question what is the universe of these things? I’ll give you one example, a colleague of mine named Jeff Morley who runs JFKFacts.org stumbled several years ago on the story of a guy named George Joannides who was the House Committee’s liaison, he worked for the CIA. He was presented to the House Select committee as the archivist who would help them process requests for CIA records when they’re doing their work.
It was not until Jeff Morley’s work more than a decade after the House Committee was done that they found out that George Joannides was in fact somebody who was in charge of the DRE Cuban exile group in the 1960s at the time of the assassination. When House Committee staffers, including a guy named Robert Blakey, who ran the committee heard about this, they were flabbergasted. Because, it’s the fox guarding the hen house, here is somebody who was in charge of Cuban exile groups that had had dealings with Oswald and he’s presented as just a guy who’s going to help you with records requests. This happened unfortunately so late in the Review Board’s lifetime in the 1990s, that they basically never got Joannides records to find out more about what he was up to. The name had been unknown before really. Morley has had an ongoing lawsuit with the CIA. They have claimed that his reports from the 17-month period in question when he was the head of that group are just missing or never created, which is not plausible so they’re missing. Again, there is an ongoing legal battle so those records are not part of this because the Review Board wasn’t aware of it and didn’t collect them from the CIA.
The battle for transparency sort of writ large in America in respect to this particular affair it sort of goes on, the JFK Records Act and these documents was a huge significant part of that. It’s really part of a larger story of people trying to get relevant material out of their own government.
Jeff Schechtman: It’s also so interesting that with millions and millions and millions of pages of documents in all of this that there are still so many questions to this day?
Rex Bradford: I mean, it is amazing. There are certainly people who take the position oh cripe, you’ve five million pages and you still can’t put together a counter narrative, it’s Oswald, get over it. I don’t take that position. I think that:
A. You have to understand that, I don’t know how to describe without someone who is sort of familiar with all these documents, sort of what they’re all about. Take the Warren Commission, for example. My personal view of the Warren Commission is that these guys were basically whistling in the dark. The CIA and FBI who they’re relying upon for all their documents were sort of leading them down the garden path of the pre-ordained conclusion. The Commission itself was more than happy to do that. I think actually in the documents of the 1990s we learned a lot about why. Johnson’s selection of Earl Warren to head the Commission was a stroke of genius. Warren was highly respected among a wide swath of America, particularly liberal groups, who might otherwise be not too keen on believing a Dulles Commission for instance.
The big question why would Earl Warren lie come up? One answer to that came out in the 1990s, Lyndon Johnson taped many of the phone calls he had in office. Those came out as part of the 1990s releases. There was a fascinating one, among many, that he had with Richard Russell, his old Senate mentor, Johnson’s old mentor in the Senate, who he also appointed to the Commission. On the day that he appointed him to the Warren Commission, which Russell vehemently did not want to serve on, Johnson told him in this tape recording the story of how he got a reluctant Warren to serve.
Warren had said he was head of the Supreme Court, he was not appropriate, it was not appropriate for him to sit on the President’s Commission and he apparently turned down. Robert Kennedy went over to talk to him, that’s a whole other story.
Johnson tells the story to Richard Russell, well, I brought him down here, he told me no twice in the oval office and then I pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City. I told him now I want you to serve on this Commission. He basically gave him the 40 million Americans will die story. That there were swirling allegations of Oswald being in league with Castro and Khrushchev. That’s a whole subject in its own right. I believe ultimately it’s false but it was a big deal in government that week at the highest levels. Warren, if you listen to this story and read other things, it becomes highly plausible that Warren was led to believe that he needed to lead this Commission and they needed to find Oswald guilty and tamp down any speculation that this was a Communist plot in order to save us from World War III. Johnson was literally talking about World War III in these phone calls.
Jeff Schechtman: If people are interested in doing their own research and reading and looking at some of these documents, Rex, what’s the best way for the laymen to do that today?
Rex Bradford: Well, there’s many avenues, I will certainly plug the foundation I run. The Mary Ferrell website at maryferrell.org, m a r y f e r r e l l.Org is certainly the premier online home for primary source documents. There’s certainly many other avenues, there’s a lot of stuff on the internet, there’s many good books for people that like to read paper or electronic books as well. The documents though, really there’s only a couple of places, there’s these few websites, primarily the Mary Ferrell Foundation and then there’s the paper copies at the National Archives themselves.
It’s not for the faint of heart. This is a story, which is now over 50 years old that has become so layered that I guess the good news is there is so much information online that it is easier to get started than it might have been 30 years ago.
Just learning the history of the assassination aftermath alone is just a vast, vast topic, which is sort of important to understanding what went down.
Jeff Schechtman: Do you think you’ll ever get to the point where you’ll have seen all of this and/or listened to all of this?
Rex Bradford: I don’t think anyone person can do 5 million pages. Maybe if you’re a speed reader I guess. There’re certainly many of us that sort of feel like we’ve seen enough that we kind of get it although many people get it in a different way than other people. I don’t know what to say about that.
One thing, I find them interesting in a different respect. There’s the whole who killed Kennedy part. I think there’s two other respects in which I find this document collection fascinating.
One, which I touched upon briefly, is just the window into foreign policy in the Kennedy administration. It was the height of the cold war, the war against Castro was a huge undertaking, there were other crises particularly Vietnam brewing at the time. These documents are a treasure trove for learning the details of that stuff. There’s taped phone calls and will not get transcripts of the same secret meetings that you might in a more modern administration now. There’s just a lot for historians of that period.
I guess the second thing I would say is that I guess I would be one of the people who says that yes Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy and yes there was coverup. But, I think coverup is one of these sort of broad overly used words that sort of bring up the image of a bunch of people conspiring in a room together to bury the truth about something. I think what I’ve learned from all of this is that’s not how the mechanism worked at all. There were all kinds of honest people involved in the investigation of these things that had limited roles and didn’t have any sense of the big picture. The field guys and the FBI and that sort of thing. At the higher levels I think you learn about how people who are in positions of authority can, I don’t know what to say, avoid the truth rather than have to actively cover it up.
I don’t know how to summarize it, but the mechanism by which our country has failed to come to an understanding of the Kennedy assassination, that mechanism itself can be learned from these records and it’s highly revealing.
Jeff Schechtman: Rex Bradford, thanks so much for spending time with us here on radio WhoWhatWhy.
Rex Bradford: Great, happy to do it. Thank you.

Jeff

Schechtman


Thank you.

Thank you for listening and joining us on radio WhoWhatWhy. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on Itunes. You can also support this podcast by going to WhoWhatWhy.org/donate.https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/08/04/first ... documents/

[elfismiles]

JFK Assassination Records - 2017 Additional Documents Release
https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/2017-release

Dallas Mayor During JFK Assassination Was CIA Asset
WhoWhatWhy Staff/Aug 2, 2017
https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/08/02/dalla ... cia-asset/

How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK’s Murder
Newly released documents from long-secret Kennedy assassination files raise startling questions about what top agency officials knew and when they knew it.
By PHILIP SHENON and LARRY J. SABATO, August 03, 2017
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... les-215449

The Newly Released JFK Files Lend Credence to a Few Major Conspiracy Theories
Last week, over 3,800 CIA and FBI documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released to the public. To put the release in context, we spoke with John Newman, a leading historian of the conspiracy.
Jack Denton, Aug 2, 2017
https://psmag.com/news/jfk-files-conspiracy-theories

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Has Trump Cut a Deal with the CIA and FBI to Keep Concealing Key JFK Assassination Documents?
Plans for full disclosure by October 26 deadline are "in flux," says National Archives.
By Jefferson Morley / AlterNet
October 16, 2017, 10:14 AM

Photo Credit: Financial Post

An unknown number of U.S government records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 54 years ago may remain secret after the legal deadline of October 26, the National Archives said Monday.

"While we continue to plan for an online release by the deadline, it is unclear what will be part of the release,” the Archive’s communications staff said in a statement to AlterNet. “Things are in flux.”

The Archive’s statement is the first official acknowledgement that President Trump is considering—or has approved—formal requests from the Central Intelligence Agency and other federal agencies to keep long-secret JFK files out of public view.

Earlier this month, a group of senior congress members challenged the continuing secrecy around the government’s JFK records, some of which are more than 50 years old.

Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), introduced House and Senate resolutions calling on Trump to order the release of all the government's JFK files. The resolution urges the president to "reject any claims for the continued postponement" of the records.

The non-binding resolutions, offered by two conservative Republicans, were also endorsed by four veteran liberal Democrats: Sen. Pat Leahy, and Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), Marcy Kaptur (Ohio) and Louise Slaughter (N.Y.).

“I am proud to cosponsor Chairman Grassley’s resolutions calling on the Trump administration to publicly disclose all government records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—as required by a 1992 law authored by my good friend, the late Sen. [John] Glenn,” Leahy said in a statement. “The assassination of President Kennedy was one of the most shocking and tragic events in our nation’s history. Americans have the right to know what our government knows."

Federal judge John Tunheim, who chaired a civilian board that oversaw the release of four million pages of JFK records in the 1990s, told a Minnesota radio station last week," it’s time to release everything."

With the Archives' plans “in flux,” that time might not yet have come.

Law and Loophole

The JFK Records Act, approved unanimously by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in October 1992, requires all government records related to the assassination be made public within 25 years. But one provision of the law exempts from mandatory disclosure any JFK records for which the president certifies that

continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations;
and the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

So if the Archives staff is uncertain which JFK documents will be released later this month, the agencies have advised the president that release of specific documents would cause “identifiable harm" to U.S. interests that outweigh any interest in public disclosure.

As Politico's Bryan Bender has explained, the last of the JFK records "may embarass the CIA."

What Are They Hiding?

Researchers for the Mary Farrell Foundation, which has the largest online repository of JFK assassination records, scraped the National Archives database of JFK records earlier this year. Our keyword analysis, published in Newsweek, yielded new insight into what the government is stlll concealing, including:

Approximately 700 pages of secret material from the files of two high-ranking CIA officers, William K. Harvey and David Phillips, who ran assassination operations in the 1960s. Both men were open in their contempt for JFK's Cuba policy.
The records of two undercover officers, Howard Hunt and David Morales, both of whom later made statements to family members that seemed to implicate themselves (and CIA personnel) in the murder of the liberal president in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
A transcript of the closed-door testimony of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton to Senate investigators in September 1975. As I document in my forthcoming biography of Angleton, his staff monitored the movements of accused assassin Lee Oswald from November 1959 through November 1963.

Oswald denied shooting Kennedy; 24 hours later, he was killed in police custody.

The assassination of President Kennedy, one of the most shocking and enigmatic events in American history, remains the subject of continuing popular fascination. The story has generated countless conspiracy theories, most of them easily disproved, while a handful remain quite plausible.

What Have We Learned?

The Archives statment to AlterNet did not identify which agencies are seeking to keep JFK records under wrap or which documents will remain secret.

“In regards to any possible postponement requests, because agency appeals are not public, we cannot share that information,” the Archives statement said.

On Monday, a CIA spokesperson deflected questions about the postponement of the CIA's JFK records with the same boilerplate statement issued two weeks ago: "CIA continues to engage in the process to determine the appropriate next steps with respect to the any previously unreleased CIA information."

In July, the National Archives released the first batch of longest-held JFK files, which generated a bumper crop of revelations about the CIA’s role in the JFK story, published in AlterNet, WhoWhatWhy, the Washington Post, and Politico.

As I wrote on AlterNet, four revelations collectively pour cold water on the “KGB did it” conspiracy theory, while raising questions about the “Castro done it" theory. Mostly, the new files illuminated how the CIA resisted investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald and his Cuban connections after JFK was killed.

What Happens Next?

If Trump and White House counsel Donald McGahn have agreed to requests from the CIA and other federal agencies to keep some JFK records secret, they will have to explain why,

The JFK Records Act requires the government to publish “an unclassified written description of the reason for such postponement” in the Federal Register, the daily newspaper of the U.S. government.

The CIA spokesperson did not answer a question about whether the CIA would comply with this provision of the law.

[seemslikeadream]

Trump Bashes ‘Fake News Media,’ Says He’ll Release JFK Assassination Files

By ESME CRIBB Published OCTOBER 21, 2017 10:29 AM
President Donald Trump on Saturday complained about the “Fake News Media” and said he would allow the release of files related to former President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Trump complained that the “MSM barely covered” Senate passage of his budget plan or the stock market’s “all time high” last week.

“I hope the Fake News Media keeps talking about Wacky Congresswoman Wilson in that she, as a representative, is killing the Democrat Party!” Trump tweeted, referring to Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL).

And, Trump tweeted, “Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.”

The federal government is required, under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, to release in full documents related to Kennedy’s assassination in Nov. 1963 by next Thursday unless Trump intervenes.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/t ... tion-files

[MacCruiskeen]

And, Trump tweeted, “Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.

Sounds like he's been invited to watch a certain short film.

"Any questions?"

[seemslikeadream]

Today's the day

Will trump release the files?

I'm thinking he will.....great biggly diversion

[stillrobertpaulsen]

And, Trump tweeted, “Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.

Sounds like he's been invited to watch a certain short film.

"Any questions?"

You are correct, sir!

Trump delays release of hundreds of remaining JFK assassination documents, bowing to national security concerns

[seemslikeadream]

he even went to Dallas yesterday

just another day another lie from trump


2,800 page diversion



Did you know there are walruses in the Gulf of Mexico?

It's true...ask Rex

In Dallas, Trump collects $4 million amid taunts of 'liar liar' and 'Go home Cheeto'
A president at war with much of his own party spent nearly four hours in Dallas on Wednesday. Adoring fans cheered him at Love Field, and 200 well-heeled donors rubbed elbows with him downtown.
But if Donald Trump was hoping for a respite from the venomous atmosphere in Washington, his day trip to Dallas offered little. Catcalls from hundreds of protesters filtered into the swank fund-raiser. "Go home, Cheeto!" they yelled, holding signs that read "Liar liar" and "shame."

I hear no one told the clown president that "THEY" decided months ago that the docs were not going to be released today

[Grizzly]

geez, you guys act as if ANY of these fucks, tell the truth. They don't, they ALL lie. Besides, poppy is still alive...

[seemslikeadream]

JFK ASSASSINATION TRIGGERED MORE THAN KENNEDY’S DEATH

JFK, Donald Trump, Deep State

The Cold War Deep State was unified. Now power is fragmenting. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0), JFK Library and US Government.
Author and journalist David Talbot has spent years examining and writing about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and its connection to broader US politics. In his conversation with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman, he makes the case that the cynicism from decades of lies about JFK, Martin Luther King, Watergate, and many more seminal events in recent US history is to blame in part for the divisions and the distrust of government we are witnessing today.

In addition to the government, Talbot holds the mainstream media accountable for its refusal to see what’s under its nose. The net result is, according to Talbot, a mixed bag. On the one hand, he claims, the “deep state” is coming apart. The destruction that is washing over so many institutions, both public and private, has impacted the security state as well. The bad news is that while cracks allow light to shine in, it leaves no one in charge.

And both nature and authoritarianism abhor a vacuum.

Talbot talks specifically about what he’s going to be looking for in the thousands of pages of JFK documents, if and when they are all released, and where he thinks the threads may take us. He even thinks that, in a time when the president shooting someone on Fifth Avenue might only be a two-day story, when all the facts are out, people will care about who killed Kennedy and its broader implications for politics today.

David Talbot is the author of The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of the American Secret Government. HarperCollins Publishers, 2015; The Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love (Free Press, 2012); Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Free Press 2008); Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America (Pulp History) (Simon & Schuster, 2010)


https://www.whowhatwhy.org/files/Talbot_mx_10_26.mp3

Click HERE to Download Mp3

Full Text Transcript:

As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to resource constraints, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like, and we hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman. Today marks the release from the National Archives of the final tranche of documents related to the JFK assassination 54 years ago next month. Hundreds of thousands of pages will make their way into the public’s hands. This event marks not only the effort to answer questions about the assassination itself but equally about America then and now.
When fake news out of the White House is a daily occurrence, when alternative facts is a real thing, do we still even care about getting to the truth? And if we can get closer to it, as my guest, esteemed author and journalist David Talbott, has repeatedly tried to do, what will it tell us about America’s security apparatus and deep state then, and what relationship might it have to the same components of the military-security complex today?
David Talbot is an author, journalist, and media executive. He’s the founder and former CEO of Salon. He is the author most recently of The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. He’s been an editor for Mother Jones, the San Francisco Examiner, and written for Time, the San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone, among others. It is my pleasure to welcome David Talbot to Radio WhoWhatWhy.

David, thanks so much for joining us.
David Talbot: Good to be here. Thank you, Jeff.

Jeff Schechtman: One of the things that I’ve been thinking a lot about with respect to the release of these documents and whatever they show and whatever comes out over the next few days and weeks and months is the context and how the public, how America will look at this today as opposed to the way it might have looked at it 10 years ago or even 8 years ago. Talk a little about that.
David Talbot: Well, in many ways the government’s failure and refusal to come clean about the Kennedy assassination, among other major traumas to this country, has resulted in this great cynicism, public cynicism about authority in this country and has led to the rise of Donald Trump and the whole notion that you can’t believe establishment media outlets and official voices, authoritative voices. So the New York Times and the Washington Post and the cable news networks love to trash Trump and his fake news, campaign, and the Russians and all that, but they really have failed to look at their own culpability in all this and why there has been such an erosion of public confidence over the last few decades in official sources of information.
Jeff Schechtman: And in that sense, can we look back to the cover-up surrounding the assassination, and Vietnam to a certain extent as well, as kind of the original sin that led us to where we are today?
David Talbot: Well, of course. The assassinations of not just President Kennedy but also Martin Luther King, of Malcolm X, of Bobby Kennedy that never were really fully investigated to the public’s satisfaction. All the lies and the deception that went into the Vietnam War, and we’re seeing, of course, that brought back to life to Ken Burns’ recent series on PBS. Watergate, I don’t think we were ever told the full story there. 9/11, same thing. The widows of the victims of 9/11 have been pursuing, as you know, a lawsuit for many years now that finally may get to the courts because of their suspicions that the Saudi government was in some way connected to the hijackers, and our government agencies that are charged with protecting us mysteriously were absent that day.
So, look, there’s many, many, I think, dark areas of American power, and the American people instinctively know this. They instinctively have come to feel that they’re being lied to. Unfortunately now we have one of the biggest liars in chief in the White House, who’s exploiting this skepticism to his own advantage. But as I say, I think the liberal media and the government is largely responsible for this really unfortunate state of affairs today and the cynicism that we see.
But there’s good reason now to celebrate the release of these papers that many people have been fighting, these government documents related to the Kennedy presidency, have been fighting literally for decades to get released. And it’s just, I think, one more strange twist in our current situation in this country where Trump is playing, it seems, something of a heroic role, not bending to the CIA, and agreeing to go along with the law that required the final release of these documents today.
Jeff Schechtman: What do you think caused Trump and/or others around him to go along with this?
David Talbot: Well, look, Trump, it’s no secret it is, I think, has been in collision in many ways with the power centers in this country, with his own Republican Party, with the CIA, with the FBI, with these agencies that have been investigating him for collusion with Russia and so on. He feels he’s at war with his own government to some extent, and I think the deep state that I studied, Jeff, and I wrote about in my book The Devil’s Chessboard, which was largely the post-war period, the Cold War period, that deep state was a much more unified entity than we see today. I think power in this country now is fragmenting because of all the pressures and all the tensions that have been building up in our society, and I don’t think you can talk about a one deep state at this point, the hidden power in America. I think it’s very fragmented. Things are coming apart in this country every day.
And so in a sense that’s good because as Leonard Cohen once sang, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” So there is, I think, now stuff seeping out because Washington is at war with itself. There’s leaks, there’s people going public you never thought would, there’s open warfare between agencies, between the White House and much of the rest of the government. Steve Bannon is out there trying to remake the Republican Party and destroy the Republican establishment. So you have a kind of chaotic free-for-all in the world of power now that’s fascinating to watch, a little terrifying in some ways because you don’t know what we’re going to end up with. Could it be even worse? But in the meantime you have these kind of flukes that are happening like the release of the Kennedy papers, and Donald Trump gets credit for that.
Partly because I think it’s whoever Trump listened to last, and I think he’s been listening to Roger Stone, who’s been a longtime advisor, and Roger Stone happens to believe that there was a conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination, and he’s written a book about this putting the blame on President Johnson. I think he’s not all together correct in his analysis, but at least he’s there I guess, it seems like, inside the Trump circle pushing and convincing Trump to do the right thing, which he did today.
Jeff Schechtman: As all of this kind of creative destruction is going on within the body politic, the kind that we’re seeing in so many other aspects of our society, what impact is it having as you see it on journalism, and what’s the plus and minus of that destruction as it relates to journalism today?
David Talbot: Well, you know, I have to say, as I look at mainstream journalism at The New York Times, The Washington Post, the cable news operations, I do so with great dismay. They have their obsessions, their fixations, Russia of course being one of them, blaming Russia for everything that’s gone awry in our political system, which I think is absurd. And it also sort of plays to some of the worst impulses in our national security state. If you turn on your Rachel Maddow, you turn on MSNBC or CNN every night, you see this parade of spooks and spies, of military figures, of people who work for military think tanks, ex-national security officials in the Obama and Clinton administrations. I mean, it’s all national security all the time, and that’s … We’re getting that perspective on Trump.
Well, that’s partly valid, but those of us who were hoping for some kind of coup or some kind of strongman response to Trump to correct him, that hope is in vain, and we clearly saw this last week when General Kelly got up in front of the nation at the press conference and was terrifying. He lied to the American people. He celebrated a kind of a military elite, saying that unless you were a part of this 1% military elite you don’t get to criticize official policy, basically, and was kind of… gave a pretty frightening authoritarian performance. And as I blogged in my Facebook page, that … And you see that press conference last week of General Kelly, this square-jawed guy who the New York Times and all the liberal media were celebrating just weeks before as some kind of check and balance on Trump, and now suddenly you see what the face of American authoritarianism is like.
So be careful what you wish for. We are in this chaotic situation. Trump and the white nationalists, the Steve Bannon faction or whatever you call that, a very now emboldened military, U.S. military doing whatever it wants. Trump is basically surrounded by a junta at this point, the three generals, Kelly, McMaster, and Mattis. And we’re now finding that U.S. troops are popping up and dying in places that most Americans never knew even existed, like Niger in Africa. Where are we going to be next?
So I think in many ways American power has been completely let off the leash. We’re all over the planet at this point fighting, getting involved in battles and wars, and the deep state, sort of the grown-ups you would think would be sort of correcting Trump, I don’t think that’s happening. I think the deep state itself is very fragmented. And some good things are happening as a result. As I say, this fragmentation maybe we’re getting more leaks and more information about how power really works and about our own history, like the Kennedy assassination, which American people have been kept in the dark about for over a half a century, but by and large I find the developments lately in Washington pretty alarming.
Jeff Schechtman: And how does that relate in your view to developments that we see around the world, some that are similar in kind? And again, the same kind of fragmentation?
David Talbot: Well, I think the rest of the world is standing gobsmacked, jaw agape looking what’s happening in this country. And of course it’s starting to have an impact, I think, on our allies in Europe, and I think the vote recently in Austria for this young right-wing nationalist, anti-immigrant guy, is in some ways spillover from the U.S.
Certainly Bannon has that global perspective. He thinks that what the revolution that he’s trying to bring about in this country has a global kind of definition, and I think that was partly what they were trying to do with Russia, link up with sort of nationalist impulses there and declare war on Muslim … Basically religious crusade against Islam all around the world, which I also think is a frightening prospect. I mean, how do you declare war on the religion of over a billion people?
So, you know, I think the ideology that we’re seeing now in ascendance not just in this country but in Europe, perhaps in Russia as well, is frightening. And it’s an us-versus-them kind of militant ideology, and I think the generals who are around Trump seem to subscribe to it unfortunately, or at least to some extent, so I’m not sure who really the grown-ups are now in Washington. You have establishment Republicans like Sen. Flake and others bailing out of the Republican Party, and they’re getting great accolades for doing that in a principled way, but then who’s left? Why aren’t they standing and fighting? I don’t get that. So, kind of crazy and kind of alarming.
Jeff Schechtman: It also begs the question of who’s in charge, because along with this crack-up is the sense that nobody is really in charge.
David Talbot: Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, as I say, the media has played a positive role in some ways, exposing some of the things that Trump has been doing every day under the surface: destroying our regulatory apparatus; destroying environmental protections; destroying our healthcare system and now with the tax system … I mean the tax proposals, pushing what will lead to even a further gaping gap between the rich and the poor in this country. We’re quickly being turned into a third-world nation, and he’s doing it all under the guise of populism. The guy’s a master showman, you have to give him that. Under the guise of populism he’s screwing the working people of this country, he’s screwing the poor, and he still has a very strong base among the disenfranchised white working class.
So that’s very unfortunate, and the Democrats have kind of contributed to that by not putting forth strong populist candidates of their own but rather corporate centrist Democrats who aren’t connecting with the voters for obvious reasons. They feel sold out by those people, and they were sold out by the Clinton and Obama administrations in many ways.
So what we really need to do at this point is instead of just sitting and watching horrified as Steve Bannon revitalizes and radicalizes his party is to rejuvenate the Democratic Party. We have to, instead of just responding to Trump’s daily tweets — which he wants us to do, of course, and get all caught up in that meshugas — we have to really do the hard lifting and the hard work of reorganizing the Democratic Party along lines that connect it once again with the strong vision of economic and social justice to a majority of American people. And we need to do that with candidates who are brave and visionary, and I really think unless we do that this country is just going deeper and deeper into the hole it’s in now.
Jeff Schechtman: And that’s really the other part of this. The Democratic Party doesn’t seem to be on a path to do that, and arguably may not even be capable of doing that. And given that, what is the end point of all this? Where does it lead us? What do things look like five years from now? People talk about, “Oh, we’ll get back to normal.” Well that normal seems to be gone forever.
David Talbot: It certainly does. I would never have predicted how extreme and dire a predicament this country is now in. Most of us, I think, were sort of lulled to sleep by the Obama years thinking that the country’s sort of on the right path even though Obama seemed kind of powerless to do many of the things he wanted to do. And so it’s only going to get worse in the sense that you have a President who’s a crude … yet popular in many parts of this country. I know the poll numbers they keep citing show how low the numbers are. But on the other hand, he does have a solid, solid base. I’m not sure what the Democratic Party base is nationally at this point. It’s a lot of different groups out there. They’re all very angry and fearful, but they really haven’t coalesced, I think, yet into a movement that can take back this country.
And to do that you need, as I say, number one, a vision of what we stand for that’s in opposition, not just in opposition to Trump but what we stand for in a positive way that can take the country forward. And I think one of those things, Jeff, it’s not just talking about economic justice and the social issues that the Democratic Party is known for and deserves credit for, but we need to have a vision now about America’s place in the world where we’re not permanently at war, where we’re not this kind of flailing imperial power that just can’t stop getting involved in one country after the next. That’s what my books really go deeply into, this security state, the security apparatus built around this growing militarized economy, and this militarized bureaucracy in Washington that has really taken over our democracy.
And this began with World War II, and it just ballooned after that. President Eisenhower warned young President Kennedy coming into office and the rest of the nation about the military-industrial complex. I think that military-industrial complex, as I document in my book, took out President Kennedy once he opposed them and tried to limit their power. And ever since then no President has been courageous or brave enough to take on this growing power in our country of militarism and imperialism. It really has, I think, subverted and destroyed our democracy to the point where we can’t even think of a national leader. Not even Bernie Sanders in his campaign, which was so thrilling in many ways, but not even he made America’s ballooning defense budget, military budget, and militarism and all these overseas engagements, he didn’t make that a primary part of his campaign. I think the last person to do that was probably Bobby Kennedy when he challenged the Vietnam War and the rise of militarism in this country when he ran for President in 1968, and he too was assassinated.
So this is a very powerful force. I call it sort of the … It’s the power of death and greed, really, that has taken hold of this country. Martin Luther King warned us about it when he said any country that year after year spends more money on killing people and its military budget than on educating its people and other social needs is in danger of spiritual death. And I think in many ways that’s what we’re experiencing now, a country that’s run by a crude lunatic who seems to have no humane values surrounded by square-jawed generals who want to keep us permanently at war. That is a country in spiritual death.
Jeff Schechtman: Do you think that there’s anything that’s going to come out in these JFK papers that will be kind of wake-up call to some of this?
David Talbot: Yes, I do. And you … you have all these The New York Times stories coming out saying, “Well, experts say there’ll be nothing in this.” The experts they keep citing are people like Max Holland, who’s a historian whose scholarship has been given awards and been celebrated by the CIA. These are … Or Gerald Posner who wrote a bestseller called Case Closed saying Lee Harvey Oswald did it. Case closed. Go home, folks. These are the experts the New York Times keep citing when they write about the release of the JFK documents.
Now, will there be bombshells in this? No. Because look, these documents have been kept in CIA vaults and other agencies, FBI and so on, for decades, so they have been pored over. They’ve been cleansed to great extent probably. But I do know for a fact that there are some documents that are not bombshells but certainly are pieces of the puzzle that we need to look at.
And I’ll give you an example. So one of the prime suspects in the Kennedy assassination for many years was the head of the assassination department for the CIA, a guy named William Harvey, a Kennedy hater who fell afoul of the Kennedys, and he was a chief suspect of the House Select Committee on Assassinations when they did their work on the case back in the 1970s. And by the way, Jeff, that was the last official government word on the Kennedy assassination, from that congressional committee, not the Warren Report back in 1964. And what the House Assassinations Committee found was that JFK died as a result of a conspiracy. That was their official determination. And one of the key guys they looked at was this guy William Harvey.
So Harvey as a result of sort of being pushed out by Kennedy after the Cuban Missile Crisis when he did something incredibly provocative, which was to send raiding teams into Cuba at the height of this nuclear crisis, he was about to be fired from the CIA and the CIA protected him by sending him to Rome, where he became the Rome station chief in 1963, in summer of ’63. Well, I learned from doing my own research for The Devil’s Chessboard that his deputy there, a very good, conscientious CIA official named Mark Wyatt, saw Harvey on a plane to Dallas not long before the assassination, and he was surprised that he would be flying from Rome to Dallas of all places. And he said, “Why you going there?” And he said, “Just to look around.” Very evasive.
I believe that Harvey played—as do other people, not just his own deputy, Mark Wyatt, but a number of investigators for Congress and others—that he did play a key role in the assassination, perhaps recruiting the actual snipers who shot and killed the President. And so I, through an attorney who actually worked for the House Assassinations Committee, a man named Dan Hardway, filed a lawsuit [inaudible 00:23:41] Freedom of Information Act demanding the travel records, which the CIA has, of Bill Harvey. Did he indeed go back from Rome to the U.S. at any point shortly before the assassination? I found indeed that he did make a request, official request within the CIA, to fly to the U.S. from Rome.
Now, there’s more records that they’ve withheld. They’ve refused to reveal, to divulge, the rest of these travel records related to Bill Harvey, the top assassination official for the CIA at that time. Why aren’t they releasing his travel records? If there’s nothing there that is incriminating, or if there is something incriminating, the American people have the right to know where Bill Harvey was in the weeks and months before Dallas, November 22nd, 1963. So there are documents within the CIA vaults that should be coming out, and if they’re not in this document release today—I’m going to have people looking over it who are very knowledgeable to see if there’s anything more—then we need to keep pushing the CIA and other agencies to reveal these documents.
Jeff Schechtman: How do you think all of this, assuming all of this comes out, how do you think this will play in the public consciousness? Will it make any difference?
David Talbot: I think it will. I mean, people say that’s another sort of thing meant to suppress public fervor about this is that, “Oh, it’s over 50 years old. It’s ancient history.” I just don’t think that’s true. I know certainly for my generation, and I’m 66 now, we certainly have a visceral connection to that time. We can remember what it felt on November 22nd when you were in school and you were told the President was killed, and coming home and watching television as Lee Harvey Oswald is shot in the gut by this guy who looks like a gangster, Jack Ruby—and was a gangster it turns out—on national television. We have a kind of a visceral memory of this. But even people who are younger, like my own sons who are in their 20s or other young people I talk to, they know how important JFK was on some level to this country and how he represented a new path and someone who was trying to lead the country toward a more peaceful world, and a world that was … honored diversity and other countries and their own aspirations for freedom.
And so there’s a gut sense that, “Hm, this guy was kind of a leader ahead of his time, and he was killed, and he was probably killed for a reason.” And so even young people want to know what the full story is there. Because I think it connects to their own sense that something has gone terribly wrong in our country today, and where did we go off the rails? At what point? And certainly I think we have to see November 22nd, 1963, as one of the key times that this country went off the rails.
Jeff Schechtman: And how do you see mainstream journalism covering the story of the release of this information?
David Talbot: It’s appalling. The New York Times has done, I guess, two or three stories now about the release, and each one is just as appalling as the next. They only go to historians or so-called experts who have a … who are wedded to the idea, the Warren Report conclusion, that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. They treat any other kind of skepticism about this as a fringe kind of idea. This is absurd.
As I posted in Facebook today, among the other major public figures who believe there was a high-level domestic political conspiracy to kill JFK, were the President’s own brother, Robert F. Kennedy, who was Attorney General at the time, by the way; the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy; Richard Nixon; the President of France, Charles de Gaulle; the man who created 60 Minutes, the preeminent investigative broadcasting operation, Don Hewitt, someone I interviewed, by the way, for my earlier book Brothers about the Kennedys; President Truman, who suspected the CIA probably was involved; President Eisenhower was suspicious; the Senator Gary Hart and Richard Schweiker from the Church Committee, which investigated CIA abuses in the 1970s; Theodore Sorenson, JFK’s speechwriter who created some of these beautiful speeches we know today; many other Robert Kennedy aides and John F. Kennedy aides who I personally interviewed. They all believed there was a conspiracy, and they all were whispering this among themselves but were too afraid to go public with it.
And so it’s only now through the work of historians like myself that we’re knowing that the media and the political establishments in this country all basically had a sense of what happened in Dallas and yet were too frightened, too concerned about their own careers or their own lives, to do anything about it. And the media has played a truly, I think, reprehensible role in all this, and basically I say it’s like a nanny who says, “Look, your fears are misguided. There’s no monsters under the bed. American people, go back to sleep.” Again and again that’s their role, when many people in the media like Don Hewitt, as I said the creator of the 60 Minutes program, knew basically what really happened there. He told me in an interview that he knew the CIA and the mafia were involved. And I asked him why 60 Minutes never pursued it, and he said, “Well, we could never nail down the story.” But I knew the real reason, and he did, too, that it would have ended his career if he did something like that.
So that’s still to this day, 54 years later, the fear that these people in the media have, that they’ll be painted as a conspiracy freak. And by the way, that whole term, that whole strategy of smearing people as conspiracy nuts was developed by the CIA itself. There’s a memo that was leaked, a memo from 1967 in which one of the high-level CIA officials advises officials throughout the CIA network that here’s the way to rebut the people who say the Warren Report is wrong, and he says one of the key ways of doing this is to smear these people as conspiracy nuts. So this has been used for years to silence people in the media, to make them fear for their careers, and it’s been very effective.
But my feeling is that 54 years later if you didn’t have the courage to really dig into this monumental crime yourself and get at the bottom of it and all you do is keep parroting the line that the Warren Report got it right, then you shouldn’t be a journalist.
Jeff Schechtman: David Talbot. I thank you so much for spending time with us today on Radio WhoWhatWhy.
David Talbot: It was my pleasure, Jeff. Thank you very much.
Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. Thank you for listening and joining us here on Radio WhoWhatWhy. I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman.
If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to WhoWhatWhy.org/donate.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/10/27/jfk-a ... dys-death/

[PufPuf93]

I thought I had posted a clip about the "Umbrella Man" from the NY Times?? What happened?

[seemslikeadream]

it's in the other thread
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34625

[SonicG]

Woah. He really nails it...I have to admit I had never even heard about this Harvey character...jesus fuck back down the rabbit hole...

[PufPuf93]

it's in the other thread
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34625

Oops

Good AM SLAD

[seemslikeadream]

sorry for the short reply Puf I was so busy looking at all the stuff that wasn't released

British newspaper got anonymous call 25 minutes before JFK assassination
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/wor ... 805893001/