Those who believe that Donald Trump is the true outsider he has claimed to be see each of his moves as part of a larger picture. From firing the deeply corrupted former FBI head “Slim” Jim Comey to overseeing the toppling of Hollywood’s most notorious – but, as many know, far from the most vicious – predators, Trump has taken unprecedented action against individuals and institutions left unchecked under countless administrations prior.
Now, Trump is the sole decision maker in a potentially perception-changing decision regarding the intelligence community itself. The CIA has a long history of shady dealings, and speculation about the role it may have played in the assassination of a widely-beloved American president may soon come to light. Such a document dump could rattle the psyche of the American people, many of whom have an inherent trust in government, even if that level of trust is that they could never play any role in a lethal coup. Especially when that potential coup was against a president who was far from a tyrant.
It would be a tough reality to face, should the documents confirm long-held, CIA-related conspiracies related to the Kennedy assassination. But, as Trump likely knows, public knowledge and confirmation of such ‘conspiracies’ would also help to insulate himself. Assuming these documents reveal CIA malevolence toward JFK, and the current President is even remotely aware of this, it is in his interest not to block the release of the documents. The prior assumptions would mean Trump’s awareness that if he were seen as a threat to the intelligence communities, he is not above assassination.
Again, this is if the documents will in fact confirm, in some capacity, what Oliver Stone posited in his film JFK, long criticized and dismissed as the stuff of conspiracist fantasy. In part, the plot includes this excerpt:
‘Along the way, [New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison] stumbles across evidence that a great many people had reason to want to see the president killed, and he is convinced that some of them worked in concert to frame Oswald as the killer. Among the suspects are Lyndon Baines Johnson (the next president), the CIA, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Mafia.’
By the end of the month, the film may not seem so far-fetched, after all.
As reported by Newsmax, ‘The National Archives within the next two weeks will release thousands of never-before-seen government documents related to President John F. Kennedy's assassination…’. They add that ‘more than 3,000 never-before-seen documents from the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department are set to be released, along with 30,000 that have only been partially released in the past.’
A natural reaction is to question why any set of documents would be concealed from the public eye, even if that means releasing information in a partial manner. It’s the equivalent of a lie of omission not to release information in its entirety, and the intelligence community – the CIA in particular – seems to be in a panic over this seemingly impending document dump.
The dump is part of a 1992 Congressional mandate that, while allowing 25 years of concealment, ‘all assassination documents [must] be released within 25 years, unless [the president] says that doing so would harm foreign relations, law enforcement, intelligence or military operations.’ Do the math, 1992 + 25 = 2017. The deadline for the documents’ release is October 26th, and many are predicting that the full disclosure of documents will lead to ‘chaos,' according to Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
Roger Stone, someone whose opinion is to be taken with a grain of salt, says that ‘The CIA is urging President Donald Trump to delay disclosing some of the files for another 25 years.’ Whether or not that will happen will likely depend on their, let’s say, tactics of persuasion in convincing the President to do so.
For the sake of the public interest, the documents must be released. Any yet-unconfirmed information pertaining to the assassination of any U.S. President is very much pertinent to the public interest, and necessary for the restoration of the public’s trust in government, which has been heavily eroded over the years.
The Gateway Pundit elaborates on the nature of documents that, as of now, will be released by the 26th of this month.
‘About 3,100 files are still sealed in the National Archives. Under the 1992 JFK Records Act, the Archives have until October 26 to decide which of those files to publicly disclose.
Some of the classified documents include a CIA personality study of Oswald, top-secret testimony of former CIA officers to congressional committees, transcripts of interrogations with Soviet defector and Oswald handler Yuri Nosenko, letters about the case from J. Edgar Hoover and Jackie Kennedy, the CIA file on Jack Wasserman, the attorney for New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, and the operational file of E. Howard Hunt, career spy and Watergate burglar.’
Politico Magazine adds to the nature of these files:
‘Many are known to involve a mysterious chapter in the history of the assassination—a six-day trip that JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald paid to Mexico City several weeks before the president’s murder, in which Oswald met with Cuban and Soviet spies and came under intensive surveillance by the CIA’s Mexico City station. Previously released FBI documents suggest that Oswald spoke openly in Mexico about his intention to kill Kennedy.’
It has been indicated by even those who believe that the Kennedy assassination was conducted by Lee Harvey Oswald and Oswald alone that the documents’ release shouldn’t be delayed any longer.
Gerald Posner, who concluded in his 1993 bestselling finalist for the Pulitzer for History, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, that the Warren Commission’s findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted as the lone gunman and mastermind behind the assassination were correct, wants the documents released. While he seems to believe they will only confirm the findings of his book, he sees the release of the long-classified documents as necessary to quell the public’s speculation.
“These files should have been released long ago,” says Posner. “The government does this all the time, over classified documents and then holds on to them for decades under the guise of ‘national security.’ All the secrecy just feeds people’s suspicions that the government has something to hide and adds fuel to conspiracy theories.”
According to Politico Magazine, the CIA has not confirmed nor denied that they are urging President Trump, the only man that can do so, to block the release of the documents. The question is whether or not the documents’ release could serve as harm to national security, foreign relations, law enforcement, intelligence or military operations. It’s hard to fathom how information pertaining to the JFK assassination could harm present national security. It is conceivable that, if other nations [namely the Soviet Union] were somehow involved in the operation, such revelations could be damaging to foreign relations, and even potentially military operations.
But, if foreign intervention in the successful assassination of an American president were in fact the case, the American people need to know. Still, if the documents are released, the National Archives’ decision to release them all on one day means that it will take time to wade through them all. Sound conclusions, and certainly not comprehensive ones, could not likely be made straightaway.
‘The National Archives, abandoning its plans to release the documents in batches over the course of several months, said this week that it will instead release everything at once—all on the same day—sometime between now and the deadline on October 26,’ Politico Mag reported.
Even the partial releases of past years – releases that the CIA and other intelligence agencies apparently believed were less controversial than whatever they chose not to release – have had major ramifications that seem to undermine official accounts of the assassination.
‘millions of pages of other documents about the assassination were made public in the 1990s, and they did reshape the thinking of many historians about JFK’s murder. Many of those documents revealed how much information had been withheld by the CIA and FBI over the years that demonstrated how those agencies had bungled intelligence in 1963 that, if acted on, might have prevented the assassination.’ (Politico Mag)
Whether those agencies ‘bungled’ the information purposefully, or whether inaction was truly the result of ineptitude would seem to be the subject of the still-unreleased documents. At least, that is popular speculation, and it seems to make sense on the surface.
Virtually everybody, the CIA reportedly serving as the exception, is calling for the release of these documents. If the President is the man of the people he claims to be, he will not block their release. But, as the documents themselves may further reveal, and what we already know, is that the CIA’s powers know virtually no bounds. So, the American public is likely to remain in the dark on whether the JFK assassination documents will be released, and if so what they contain, until October 26th at the earliest.
If released, rest assured that they will likely be a game-changer in how the American public views the intelligence community, for better or worse.
