A Dallas ceremony and a Washington, DC vigil and a documentary film premiere were among the events on Nov. 22 commemorating the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and protesting the official cover-up that government and the major news have maintained until present.
Proponents of that historical view convened at noon in Dealey Plaza in Dallas among others places that included the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Separately in the nation’s capital a free showing was held on Capitol Hill of the new documentary film The American Media: The Second Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The movie’s producer, director and writer John Barbour answered questions after the 2 p.m. screening at the Stewart Mott Foundation, which is located at 122 Maryland Ave., NE between the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate Hart Office Building.
Barbour (shown at left from photo from his hit “Real People),” is the only person ever to win TV Emmys for both news and entertainment, has described mainstream coverage of the assassination as “fake news.”
Shown at right below more recently, his compelling film alleges that a false narrative continues to the present in hiding the truth: that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison documented in the 1960s about how powerful American oligarchs used the CIA to kill Kennedy for what they regarded as a traitorous foreign policy that emphasized peace too much during the Cold War era.
A photo of Kennedy delivering the 1963 Commencement address at the American University is shown below at right. That speech marked Kennedy’s break with Cold War rhetoric and infuriated his enemies.
This editor and the Justice Integrity Project have been active in reporting, commenting and supporting these events because they highlight ongoing, shocking aberrations by government and the media following the president’s murder during his motorcade through Dealey Plaza. I lectured at two separate conferences in Dallas over the weekend about the media’s role in mis-reporting key events.
Judyth Vary Baker, whose memoir Me and Lee describes a 1963 friendship with accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and who is an organizer of one of the two Dallas conferences, promoted a noon vigil in Dallas on Elm Street at the site of the murder. This is a knoll outside the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald worked.
Baker along with many forensic experts and millions of Americans believes that Oswald could not possibly have killed Kennedy since, among other reasons, ballistics show that the president was killed from a wound on the front right temple (with a shot coming from the direction of the knoll and its picket fence) and not from the sixth floor of the book warehouse behind the president’s limo.
In Washington, DC, the vigil (from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.) on the North Terrace of the Kennedy Center has been organized for years by retired U.S. Customs special agent Karl Golovin, whose duties in 2001 included responding to the 9/11 clean up effort in New Jersey. He leads the vigil twice a year on the anniversary of JFK’s death and on the late president’s birthday on May 29. Golovin founded a website public education effort, An Idea Lives On, which has funded, among other things, a number of full-page newspaper ads in the Washington Times and information distribution efforts to all 535 House and Senate offices on JFK and 9/11 issues.
The vigil on Nov. 22 was announced as “The Peaceable Assembly for Truth: From JFK to 9/11.” The “assembly” language is derived from the U.S. Constitution. That focus on the Constitution and peace minimizes animosity or reprisals from those who might be offended by questions about the official accounts of such an important historic event.
News accounts and reports of the president’s killing began within a day to assert with only slight variations that the former U.S. Marine Oswald was a deranged loner with Communist sympathies who acted alone in killing the president with three shots fired from behind.
Critics of the Oswald-acted-alone theory announced by the FBI and the 1964 Warren Commission have varied alternatives. These include belief in Oswald’s innocence with the rationale that he was a patriotic undercover operative (essentially Baker’s, as articulated in her memoir Me and Lee). Other theories include more complex scenarios, such as his possible involvement as one of several shooters.
Whatever the details, public opinion polls for decades have shown that larger majorities — sometimes 80 percent of the population and nearly always well above 60 percent — does not believe the Warren Report published by a blue-ribbon commission. Privately, Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson and at least two members of the seven-member Warren Commission have raised questions about key parts of the report. All seven members of the commission are now dead.
Our project’s research (summarized in a JFK Readers Guide excerpted below) has shown that virtually all major media endorse the Warren Report. These powerful media organizations also stifle or ridicule the most logical alternatives to the lone gunman theory, while promoting wacko theories (such as that a Secret Service agent accidentally the president or that outer space aliens did the killing) as representative of critics.
Star actor Alec Baldwin has said that he was told by MSNBC not to criticize the Warren Report on air because the parent network NBC’s policy was to support the report. Baldwin made the comments on Nov. 17 at a banquet and book signing for his memoir Nevertheless in Houston organized by Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA). CAPA had organized a mock trial of Oswald, which resulted in a hung jury.
Barbour’s documentary directly attacks the nation’s media, in which he was a prominent part for many years.
Barbour, 84, a five-time Emmy winner, is also known as “The Godfather of Reality TV” for his co-producing and co-hosting NBC-TV’s No. 1 hit “Real People” credited with spawning the genre. He is shown at left in a photo from the show.
“No matter what people know about the assassination of JFK,” says Barbour, as we reported last week “they will be stunned by what they learn in this film. It is the definitive film about the assassination and the birth of fake news, which plagues us to this day. Fake news impeded New Orleans District Attorney’s Garrison’s 1960s investigation at every turn.”
Timed for the anniversary of President Kennedy’s murder on Nov. 22, Barbour shows shows how America’s major media have suppressed the truth that Garrison (shown at right) discovered about the 1963 conspiracy to kill JFK.
The 130-minute documentary subtitled “The Garrison Tapes Part II” draws on 3 ½ hours of taped interviews Garrison granted Barbour about the DA’s murder conspiracy case against New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw.
A jury acquitted Shaw (shown at left) after many prosecution witnesses died and powerful news outlets smeared Garrison for disputing the Warren Report’s claims that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to murder.
The film’s producers have said:
“This powerful, compelling movie supported by declassified CIA documents proves that New Orleans District attorney Jim Garrison solved the case when he said elements of our CIA killed JFK aided by some in the media before Dallas and protected by all afterwards. “It proves the government and media illegally sabotaged Garrison’s winnable case. It reveals how the CIA’s ‘Project Mockingbird’ infiltrated the media to create fake news for perpetual fake wars. An unforgettable film!””
Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes. For those who cannot attend the screening, the film is available to watch on supported devices by rental ($1.99) or purchase ($4.99). Renters have 30 days to start watching this video, and 48 hours to finish once started. More details here.
As other events, these two hour-long interviews were among the cutting-edge discussions of JFK and history:
- Peoples Internet Radio, John Barbour with Karl Golovin, Andrew Kreig and Brian Lloyd, interviewed by Catherine April Watters, Nov. 22, 2017.
- Crowd Source Radio, John Barbour with Brian Lloyd, interviewed by Jason Goodman, Nov. 22, 2017.
Editor’s note: This column was updated after the Nov. 22 events and reflected that they had occurred as predicted.