CAPA News & Views 2016

 Editor’s Choice: This Year’s News & Views

This archive of assassination-related news and commentary for the calendar year 2016 is a joint project between CAPA and the Justice Integrity Project. The material below consists of selected excerpts from significant news stories or commentaries regarding alleged political assassinations or attempts. The materials are arranged in reverse chronological order and focus primarily upon news arising from the 1960s murders of President John F. Kennedy (shown in a file photo), his brother Robert Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Included also are several reports regarding other alleged political murders of prominent international leaders, or attempts.

CAPA welcomes your submission of additional items or any comments (including corrections) of items listed below. It is requested that new items be submitted in the format below: Publication name, headline with hotlink to URL, author, date, and brief excerpt. Correspondence should be sent to this site’s editor, Andrew Kreig, via email. 

Click here to see, on a complimentary basis, the first issue of CAPA’s member-only newsletter, dated September 2016. (Downloading may take time, depending on your system.) 

2016

December

Dec. 31

JFKFacts.org, Trump family confidante served on the Warren Commission, Jefferson Morley, Dec. 31, 2016. JFK researcher Bill Kelly has the story on the former Warren Commission lawyer who is close to Donald Trump and well-positioned to influence the decisions the Trump administration will have to make about JFK secrecy and disclosure in the next ten months:

“Of all the surviving former Warren Commission lawyers,” Kelly wrote, “none will be more influential in the new administration than Murray Laulicht, a New Jersey attorney whose wife, Linda Kushner, is the sister of Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.”

Dec. 30

JFKCounterCoup, Warren Commission Lawyers Strike Back, William E. Kelly, Dec. 30, 2016. The story was familiar: a group of former Warren Commission lawyers meet in Washington D.C. to plot their media strategy in the face of another looming threat to their dubious legacy — the Warren Report conclusion that one man alone was responsible for the murder of President Kennedy.

As reported in the American Scholar (Summer 2016), “On a sunny day in Washington last October,” seven former Commission colleagues met to reflect, in their words, “on our investigation and the report we wrote.” The discussion of the issues has recently shifted from “Who killed Kennedy?” to “What’s in the secret and soon-to-be-released records?”, and whether the next president will release them or acquiesce to the intelligence agency requests to keep the documents secret for reasons of national security.

Actor, assassin or fall guy, Oswald’s role in what happened at Dealey Plaza is taking a back seat in the debate as the controversy over the release of the records increases in intensity.

As former Commission lawyer Howard Willens mentions in the American Scholar article, the remaining few who met in Washington included Willens, David Slawson, Stuart Pollack, Sam Stern, Murray Laulicht (shown in a file photo) and Alfred Goldberg. All are high powered lawyers except for Goldberg, a recently retired Army historian who worked out of an office in the Pentagon and was brought in to substantially re-write the investigative reports and chapter drafts to give the Warren Report a readable and believable narrative, an exercise that was only partly successful.

Willens, Slawson, Pollack, Stern and Laulicht were each responsible for drafting different aspects of the case, while Goldberg substantially re-wrote their drafts to form the basic narrative.

Dec. 28

Dallas detective Paul Bentley escorts Lee Harvey Oswald out of the Texas Theater on Nov. 24, 1963, pushing “The Fall Guy” to his day of reckoning (Jim MacCammon photo via Warren Report exhibits)

JFKcountercoup, Oswald is Dashiell Hammett’s Fall Guy, William Kelly, Dec. 28, 2016. Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco private eye Sam Spade had it all figured out. Chapter 14 of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is called “The Fall Guy.” Spade explains the need for a Fall Guy: “There’s another thing that’s got to be taken care of first. We’ve got to have a fall guy. The police have got to have a victim — somebody they can stick those murders on. The way to handle them is to toss them a victim, somebody they can hang the works on.”

“I get away with it because I never let myself forget that a day of reckoning is coming. I never forget that when the day of reckoning comes I want to be all set to march into headquarters pushing a victim in front of me, saying ‘Here, you chumps, is your criminal!’ …. He’s made to order for the part. Let’s pin the necessary evidence on him and turn him over to them.”

In fact, Detective Paul Bentley may have more to do with the assassination than Oswald, a pawn and Fall Guy….while Bentley was the Dallas police polygraph operator who should never have been at the scene of Oswald’s arrest. Even before Oswald was killed while in police custody, a close friend of Bentley, Robert D. Steel, wrote him a letter:

“Paul, Perhaps you are aware that ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] has quite a file on Oswald, which no doubt has been made available on the Washington level. If not, I am certain that this information can be obtained for you through our resident special agent in charge of the Dallas office, A. C. Sullivan, who is a wonderful agent, and whom I hope you know.”

In an interview before he died, ONI investigator Robert Steel said that he visited Bentley in Dallas, and personally wrote or read a number of 119 investigative reports on Oswald’s defection and after the assassination, none of which are among the records of the JFK Collection at the National Archives or among the still withheld records list.

So the “quite a file” Steel said ONI had on Oswald just went missing, and no one is looking for them.

Dec. 26

JFKFacts.org, What the JFK review board recommended for 2017, Jefferson Morley (shown in file photo), Dec. 26, 2016. Between 1994 and 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) reviewed and declassified millions of pages of JFK records, contributing immensely to the history of the JFK’s murder, his presidency, and the Cold War. The board’s final report also laid down the law to any government agency that wants to continue withholding JFK documents past October 26, 2017: “the JFK Act mandated that all postponed assassination records be opened to the public no later than the year 2017 (25 years from the date of enactment of the JFK Act).”

The report goes on: “Government offices could continue to postpone public release of material in assassination records after the year 2017 if “the President certifies” that (1) “continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations” and (2) “the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”

”The report stated: “Without such certification, NARA will release all postponed records or portions of records in 2017.”

Dec. 21

Sputnik, Thanks to Oliver Stone, Thousands of JFK Assassination Files To Be Released, Staff report, Dec. 21, 2016. Next year, the US government will hit its 25-year deadline to release approximately 3,000 never-before-seen documents, and 34,000 previously redacted files relating to the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. In 1991, Oliver Stone’s film JFK renewed public interest in a probable conspiracy surrounding the events leading to the November 22, 1963 assassination. The massive surge in interest lead to the passage of the 1992 JFK Records Act, which gave the government 25 years to release all documents relating to what happened in Dealey Plaza on that day.

The National Archives annex in Maryland is currently processing, scanning, and preparing for the large trove of files to be released.Many of the files are from the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and are expected to reveal what the CIA may have known about Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the shooting.

Also contained in the previously unseen files is “information about the CIA’s station in Mexico City, where Oswald showed up weeks before JFK’s death; 400 pages on E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglary conspirator who said on his deathbed that he had prior knowledge of the assassination; and testimony from the CIA’s James Angleton, who oversaw intelligence on Oswald,” Time Magazine reports.

“The records that are out there are going to fill out this picture,” Jefferson Morley, an author who has spent decades researching the JFK assassination, told the magazine. There are hopes that the files will provide information on George Joannides, a CIA officer who had been involved with an anti-Castro organization whose members fought with Oswald in New Orleans months before the assassination.

WhoWhatWhy, Berlin Truck Terror Suspect and the Curious Matter of ID Papers Left Behind; Not the First Time a Terror Suspect Apparently Left a Paper Trail — or Was Previously KnownNot the First Time a Terror Suspect Apparently Left a Paper Trail — or Was Previously Known, WhoWhatWhy Staff, Dec. 21, 2016. Today, WhoWhatWhy has seen heavy traffic coming from Google searches that point to a story we ran almost two years ago. Why the sudden interest? It took us only a moment to discover the connection: We had written about the odd phenomenon of terrorists repeatedly leaving ID papers behind at the scene. And now, with the Berlin truck attack, we see yet another such example.

We also see that, in a pattern we have previously reported on with other terror incidents, the suspect was already known to authorities — had even been in custody, but was released.

What does it all mean? That’s for you to decide. You can start by reading the original article, below.

Original story: One intriguing — if barely discussed — aspect of the Paris massacre was the quick progress authorities made in their investigation. According to CNN, this was thanks to a staggering error — by one of the two now-dead alleged perpetrators. The man, Said Kouachi, reportedly left his identification card in the abandoned getaway vehicle. It was a most curious mistake. After all, this is the same man who went to such trouble to seemingly hide his identity by wearing a mask.

Such apparent gaffes have marked other watershed violence. Consider these examples, and draw your own conclusion:

• Bundle of evidence dropped by James Earl Ray
• Wallet of Lee Harvey Oswald
• Passports belonging to Ziad Jarrah and Saeed al-Ghamdi

Dec. 19

JFKFacts.org, Attention CIA: the whole world expects full JFK disclosure, Jefferson Morley (JFKFacts.org editor, author, and adjunct professor shown in file photo), Dec. 19, 2016. Thanks to the Internet, the media is finally paying attention. Three days ago, it was Macleans, the Canadian newsweekly, which ran an article about the impending release of thousands of secret JFK records in October 2016. Today it is Time magazine, which reports: “The tortured path that began with a left turn onto Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963, will find its unlikely end point this October in College Park, Md. At a National Archives annex, the last remaining documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are being processed, scanned and readied for release.”

In 2015, it was Politico which explained “Why the last of the JFK files could embarrass CIA.” In 2013, it was Associated Press that reported, “5 decades later, me JFK probe files still sealed.” The story is out there. It is undisputed. And it has nothing to do with the stupid JFK conspiracy theories.

Thanks to the Mary Ferrell Foundation (Mark The Date), and WhoWhatWhy (Exclusive: List of Withheld JFK Assassination Documents), anybody who wants to know can see a listing of all the JFK records that are supposed to be released on or before October 26, 2017.

The JFK issue in 2017 is not conspiracy. That is to say, the issue today is not whether one long deceased young man, Lee Oswald, engaged in criminal behavior on November 22, 1963. That is an interesting question, but it is actually a secondary issue.

The more significant issue for Americans today is the well-documented but still unexplained criminal behavior of certain career government officials when responding to the murder of the liberal president.

Note to all reporters/bloggers/pundits interested in the JFK story: We are not “conspiracy theorists.” I’ve been writing about JFK for thirty five years and I don’t have a “theory.” And we are not–repeat not–looking for a “smoking gun.” Nor do we expect to find one. So when no single “smoking gun” document emerges in October 2017, please do not report that as news. It is not news. It is already a commonly accepted fact.

Dec. 19

Washington Post, Russia’s ambassador assassinated in Turkey, David Filipov and Brian Murphy, Dec. 19, 2016 (with graphic video of murder). A gunman in Turkey wearing a suit and tie opened fire Monday on Russia’s ambassador, killing the diplomat and wounding several others in an attack possibly linked to Russia’s military involvement in Syria. The gunman was killed as panicked people scattered for cover at a photo exhibit in the Turkish capital, Ankara, where the ambassador was a guest speaker.

Video posted on social media purported to show the Turkish-speaking attacker (shown in a screen shot with the victim at his feet) decrying violence in Syria, where Russia is a key backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In Moscow, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said Ambassador Andrei Karlov (shown above in a file photo) died after being hit in the back by gunfire. Earlier, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said efforts to treat Karlov were delayed as gunfire raged. Photos from the gallery showed the suspected attacker, wearing a dark suit and tie, gripping a pistol as he stood near the fallen ambassador. The gunman was later killed.

The Reuters news agency, citing security sources, said the attacker was an off-duty police officer. “We consider this to have been a terrorist attack,” Zakharova said. “Terrorism will not pass. We will fight it decisively.”

“Allah Akbar! Do not forget Aleppo!” said the gunman, according to the widely circulated video. “Do not forget Syria! Do not forget Aleppo! Do not forget Syria! As long as our lands are not safe, you will not be safe!

In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby condemned Monday’s attack. Leonid Slutsky, head of the committee on international affairs of the Russian lower house of parliament, said talks in Moscow between the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey over Syria will continue as planned. “I think that tomorrow despite this monstrous tragedy,” he said, “something constructive will nonetheless be achieved.”

Dec. 16

JFK Facts.org, The impact of JFK’s assassination endures because of the cover-up continues, Jefferson Morley, Dec. 16, 2016. Even a half century after the fact, Americans believe the murder of the 35th president was one of the four most important events in the nation’s history, according to a new Pew Survey [reported in the New York Times as What Events Most Shaped America in Your Lifetime?]. This despite the fact that more than two-thirds of all Americans were born after November 22, 1963.

Dec. 15

New York Times, What Events Most Shaped America in Your Lifetime? A Pew Survey Tries to Answer, Niraj Chokshi, Dec. 15, 2016. As divided as the American public may seem, there are still some things on which most people agree. No matter age, party or gender, Americans overwhelmingly believe that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, played a dominant role in shaping the history of the country, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center with A+E Networks’ History.

When asked to name the events in their lifetimes that had the greatest impact on the nation, 76 percent of those surveyed listed the attacks, far surpassing any other event, according to Pew, which conducted the survey of about 2,000 people, in part, to better understand the events that drive public discourse.

Sept. 11 came to mind most often, by a long-shot. President Obama’s election followed distantly, with 40 percent including it in their list. The tech revolution was next, followed closely by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and then the Vietnam War. The survey found that Americans were primarily united by their age.

While Sept. 11 dominated each generation’s list, the other entries varied by age. The so-called “silent” and “greatest” generations, identified as Americans 71 and older, were united by the import they placed on World War II. For baby boomers — adults 52 to 70 — it was the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War that unified them. Millennials and members of Generation X, the groups including those 18 to 51, were united in the importance they placed on Mr. Obama’s election.

Dec. 14

Ratical, John Judge, Leading Change: A Transformational, Quiet Servant Leader, Cynthia McKinney, Dec. 14, 2016. David Ratcliff Introduction: In June 2014, I joined the board of John Judge’s Museum of Hidden History non-profit. John (shown in a photo) was born 69 years ago today and died all too soon of complications from a stroke in April 2014. The current project focus of the Museum is the Hidden History Center located in York, Pennsylvania. In honoring John today I am pleased to announce an extended hypertext version of a case study written by former Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party Presidential Candidate Dr. Cynthia McKinney (shown below) in 2012 as part of her Ph.D. leadership studies program. As Ms. McKinney describes some of the scope explored in this remarkable paper:

I decided that because of the brilliance and the dedication of this gentleman, that in my own PhD leadership studies I would write a paper on him and the type of leadership that he demonstrates. John Judge is perhaps one of the most important unknown historians of our generation. I chose to research the story of John Judge because he startled me into not one, not two, but many, disorienting dilemmas. I became so fascinated with John that I wanted to pierce deep down inside his world. There is a piece of each one of us, including me, inside this very special man. Imagine if we could flip the switch and have a little of John inside each and every one of us.

And while I might not agree with John on every issue, I say that if we had even just a few more John Judges in this country, not only our country, but also our world, would be a vastly different and much-improved place. In this paper, I give the floor to John and the other participants [Cyril Wecht, M.D., J.D., Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D., Tamara Carter, Joe Green, Michael Nurko]. I give them the opportunity to be heard in full context.

JFFacts.org, Dealey Plaza eyewitness: ‘People were running to the grassy knoll,’ Jefferson Morley, Dec. 14, 2016. As a thirteen year old girl, Tina Towner went to Dealey Plaza with her parents on November 22, 1963 to see President Kennedy. She filmed the motorcade with a movie camera as it turned on to Elm Street. Here’s what she recorded.

Kennedys and King (formerly CTKA), Review: ‘A Coup in Camelot,’ Martin Hay, Dec. 14, 2016. Aside from Shane O’Sullian’s mostly worthwhile Killing Oswald, there has been very little of note that has even attempted to counter the MSM’s seemingly endless deluge of propaganda with reliable evidence and solid reasoning. A Coup in Camelot (Directed and produced by Stephen Goetsch; written and produced by Art Van Kampen) clearly aims to fill that void. Unfortunately, however, it falls considerably short of the mark, writes Martin Hay, as described here:

Considering the large number of films and TV specials about the assassination of President Kennedy that have appeared over the last ten or fifteen years, genuinely worthwhile documentaries on the subject are sadly few and far between. The likes of Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement and Chip Selby’s Reasonable Doubt were fine for their day but given the wealth of information and technological tools that have become available in the time since those films were produced they appear more than a little outdated now.

Sadly, the majority of well-budgeted, slickly produced documentaries of the 21st century have been created solely to push the delusory mythology of the Warren Commission. Aside from Shane O’Sullivan’s mostly worthwhile Killing Oswald, there has been very little of note that has even attempted to counter the MSM’s seemingly endless deluge of propaganda with reliable evidence and solid reasoning. A Coup in Camelot clearly aims to fill that void. Unfortunately, however, it falls considerably short of the mark because it consistently confuses theory with fact.

The film begins strongly enough with a ten-minute introduction that briefly discusses Kennedy’s intention to withdraw American troops from Vietnam then outlines the reasons for his trip to Dallas and explains how, within hours of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was fingered as the lone nut assassin.

From there A Coup in Camelot moves swiftly into one of its strongest segments, featuring respected author and researcher Vince Palamara as its main talking head. Over the years, through his diligent hard work in locating and interviewing members of the Secret Service, Palamara has made himself the go-to expert on the subject of President Kennedy’s protection ― or lack thereof ― in Dallas. I must admit that I have never been convinced the Secret Service was actively involved in the assassination. Yet Palamara’s work most certainly gives reason to at least consider the idea that JFK’s protection on November 22, 1963, was intentionally compromised.

Dec. 6

OpEdNews, Power to the People: John Lennon’s Legacy Lives On, John Whitehead, Dec. 6, 2016. It’s been 36 years since Lennon was gunned down by an assassin’s bullet on December 8, 1980, but his legacy and the lessons he imparted in his music and his activism have not diminished over the years. All of the many complaints we have about government today — surveillance, militarism, corruption, harassment, SWAT team raids, political persecution, spying, over-criminalization, etc. — were present in Lennon’s day and formed the basis of his call for social justice, peace and a populist revolution.

Little wonder, then, that the U.S. government saw him as enemy number one. Because he never refrained from speaking truth to power, Lennon became a prime example of the lengths to which the U.S. government will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.

Lennon was the subject of a four-year campaign of surveillance and harassment by the U.S. government (spearheaded by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover), an attempt by President Richard Nixon to have him “neutralized” and deported. As Adam Cohen of the New York Times points out, “The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics.”

November

Nov. 26

Justice Integrity Project, Revelations Prove JFK, RFK Murder Cover-ups, Andrew Kreig, Nov. 26, 2016. Disclosures and analysis at two research conferences last weekend in Dallas confirmed the U.S. majority popular opinion that conspirators murdered President John F. Kennedy in a 1963 plot that authorities have continued to cover up. Similar analysis shows a cover-up in the 1968 assassination of the leading Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. The combination illustrates the ongoing threat to American presidents since then of attempted assassination, which continues to threaten independent leaders and ultimately democracy itself. Editor’s Note: The opinion column above and its components are not necessarily endorsed by CAPA, and neither are other commentaries in this section.

Nov. 24

Midnight Writer News, The 4th Annual JFK Assassination Conference: Day Three in Dallas, S.T. Patrick, Nov. 24, 2016. The final day of the 4th Annual JFK Assassination Conference in Dallas came to a close with assassination witness Beverly Oliver serenading the crowd with “God Bless the USA” and a rousing, unique version of “Old Time Rock ‘N’ Roll.” Before Ms. Oliver took the stage to discuss her story and end in song, the day progressed with a group of high-level presentations that added an immense amount of knowledge to the ongoing discussions that had been permeating the Crowne Plaza Hotel for three days.

Midnight Writer News, Review: The American Media, The 2nd Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Garrison Tapes, Part Two, S.T. Patrick, Nov. 24, 2016. “Liars run for office…. Truth tellers run for their lives.” — John Barbour, The American Media – The 2nd Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Garrison Tapes, Part Two.

As the 4th Annual JFK Assassination Conference drew to a close, around 300 invitees and locals attended a special screening of John Barbour’s new documentary, The American Media – The 2nd Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Garrison Tapes, Part Two. The screening was held on Monday, November 21st at the Texas Theatre in Dallas. The Texas Theater is the historic site where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder of Officer JD Tippit (and shortly thereafter charged with the murder of President John F. Kennedy) on November 22, 1963. Attending the special screening were Crossfire author and researcher Jim Marrs, researcher Richard Bartholomew, and assassination witness Beverly Oliver. Gary Fannin, author of The Innocence of Oswald, assisted with the research on the documentary and was in attendance as well.

John Barbour wrote and directed part one of The Garrison Tapes (1992) following the success of Oliver Stone’s JFK, which focused on the story of former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. Barbour was the only personality to conduct a comprehensive video interview with Garrison after the trial of Clay Shaw in 1969. Garrison prosecuted the only case regarding the murder of Kennedy.

In The American Media, narrated and directed by Barbour and co-produced with Myra Bronstein, Garrison’s story is told once again, this time with an emphasis on the tragic double-cross of an NBC producer who deceptively, and without Barbour’s input, doctored Barbour’s interview with Garrison so that Garrison states a foolish belief that there were 30 shooters in Dealey Plaza.

Barbour was angered to tears by the smearing of Garrison and called Garrison urging him to sue NBC using the conversation with the NBC producer that Barbour had recorded. Garrison, tired and somewhat accustomed to mainstream media tactics, told Barbour that he would not sue. Instead, Garrison told Barbour that he was a fan of Barbour’s show and asked him for a couple Real People t-shirts for his family. Because of his loyalty to Garrison and his distrust of NBC’s editorial decisions, Barbour would lose his position with NBC and would soon fade from show business altogether. He did not, however, fade from the fight for Jim Garrison’s honor and the truth regarding John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Nov. 22

Books & Books (Coral Gables, FL), NYT Bestsellers To Debate JFK Assassination Nov. 22 in Florida, Staff report, Nov. 20, 2016. Roger Stone and Gerald Posner will debate JFK’s assassination in a debate moderated by the Miami Herald’s Glenn Garvin. On the 53rd anniversary of that fateful day in Dealey Plaza, South Florida will be hosting a debate on competing theories surrounding the murder.

Roger Stone, (shown at right) a veteran political operative and advisor to Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush will face investigative reporter Gerald Posner (below left). Both men have written extensively detailed books on the matter and have competing theories on the crime that rocked the world.

In The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ, Stone colorfully posits that Vice President Lyndon Banes Johnson was behind the assassination. He had a prominent role in the 2016 presidential election as an informal advisor to President-elect Donald Trump. Posner’s Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK Assassination, relentlessly defends the findings of the Warren Commission, which declared Lee Harvey Oswald acted completely alone. The debate will be moderated by veteran journalist Glenn Garvin of the Miami Herald and will be hosted at the Coral Gables Books & Books.

Nov. 21

On-Target with Larry Sparano, New Push for Release of JFK Assassination Records (Video Interview), Host Larry Sparano interviews Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, Nov. 21, 2016. It’s been 53 years since the nation’s 35th president was gunned down in broad daylight in Dallas. And during those years a curtain of darkness has hidden information and records which could reveal the full story of what happened on that tragic day in November.

Listen to Dr. Cyril Wecht (shown in lab) explain how he and others hope to pierce a government-imposed black-out on the murder of John F. Kennedy – and why finding the truth still matters, more than five decades later.

Truth and Shadows, The ultimate weapon against dissent, Craig McKee, Nov. 21, 2016. CIA memo on JFK shooting leads entire culture to mock ‘conspiracy theories’ in defense of any official story It has been called the “conspiracy theory” conspiracy. But it’s not just a theory, it’s a fact. And like more than a few conspiracies it involves the Central Intelligence Agency – specifically a campaign in the 1960s to discredit those challenging the findings of the Warren Commission in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The agency achieved this by linking challenges to the official story with “conspiracy theories.” It is known as CIA dispatch #1035-960. It was distributed in 1967 but not released to the public until 1976 following a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times.

JFKFacts.org, On JFK, Joyce Carol Oates blames the victim, Jefferson Morley, Nov. 21, 2016. In an essay for the Washington Post, prolific novelist Joyce Carol Oates opines that the real problem in the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy was not the government’s implausible and mendacious account of the crime but the confused and outraged response of the American majority that could not – and does not – believe it.

“If Kennedy’s assassination was a tragedy,” she writes in a review of Alexandra Zapruder’s book about her grandfather’s home movie of the assassination, “the aftermath of competing and vociferous conspiracy theorists was a farce, with serious consequences: the undermining of trust in the U.S. government and in authority in general that continues to this day.” As we approach the commemoration of JFK’s death on November 22, Oates’s stance is a reminder of the sources and power of denial. Rather than face the facts, Oates takes comfort in the fiction that the American people are to blame for their own suspicion and doubt.

Oates suggests that the critics of Warren Commission’s account undermined trust in government. She refrains from judging President Johnson or FBI director J. Edgar Hoover or former CIA director Allen Dulles decided within 48 hours of JFK’s death that Oswald alone had committed the crime and then ordered subordinates to reach that conclusion.

Nov. 20

National Press Club, “Smitty” talk dominates Unipressers reunion at the Club, Wesley G. Pippert, Nov. 20, 2016. Merriman “Smitty” Smith was UPI’s White House correspondent from the Franklin Roosevelt administration through Richard Nixon. During its glory days, UP (subsequently UPI) was fueled by a host of talented but underpaid and understaffed correspondents, eternally bonded by a sense of esprit de corps.

The brightest star in this constellation was Merriman Smith,, shown in a file photo. When Smitty, as he was almost universally known, died the UPI story identified him as “Merriman Smith, the dean of White House correspondents.” The next day, one UPI staffer said the lead should have identified him as, simply and elegantly, “Merriman Smith, the White House reporter.” In other words, “THE White House reporter.”

Although he died 46 years ago, by his own hand perhaps during the grief of losing his namesake son in Vietnam, Smitty still dominated a gathering of Unipressers (including this writer) and friends at the National Press Club Thursday night to recall the long-gone glory days. The event, with several panelists, including Smith’s son, Tim, was arranged by Gil Klein the club’s chair of the history and archives committee. Much of its focused on Smitty’s coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas Nov. 22, 1963, including an eyewitness account from Sid Davis, then a Westinghouse broadcaster and later NBC Washington bureau chief.

Bill Sanderson read from his forthcoming book about Smith and the assassination, Bulletins from Dallas, a detailed account of what happened when Smitty, as usual in the front seat in the motorcade’s press pool car, recognized three loud pops as coming from a gun. Smitty, who knew guns from owning several himself, grabbed the mobile phone to call the Dallas UPI bureau to say that shots had been fired at the motorcade – and a scant five minutes later, based on Smitty’s reporting, UPI sent a flash that Kennedy was wounded “perhaps seriously perhaps fatally.” Smith later won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of that day. No one who was in that pool car is still alive.

Nov. 18

MaryFerrell.org, Mark The Date: Oct. 26, 2017, Rex Bradford, Nov. 20, 2016. This is a transcript of a video/slideshow presentation by Mary Ferrell Foundation President Rex Bradford (shown in a photo from a 2013 lecture), delivered at the 2016 “November in Dallas” research conference organized by JFK Lancer Events and Productions.

The date? October 26, 2017. That’s about 11 months away. Why is this date important? Because it’s the 25th anniversary of the passage of the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992. But the significance goes beyond the normal anniversary nostalgia. Here is a section from the JFK Records Act: “Each assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of the enactment of this Act…..”

And the National Archives is busy getting ready to do just that. They have published, and we have put online at maryferrell.org, a document listing 3,571 records which to this day have remained withheld in full. There are another roughly 35,000 documents which feature redactions — like this page of “The Lopez Report.” In 11 months, all of those redactions are supposed to be lifted.

Oh but wait, I forgot to read the rest of the sentence in the JFK Records Act. “Each assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full…..yadda yadda…..unless the President certifies, as required by this act, that: (i) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and (ii) the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”

So, is this event going to be a big deal? What’s in these records? Will we get to see what’s behind the whiteout on this page from the CIA’s so-called family jewels” document, released in 2007 with much fanfare as a sign of new openness?

Personally, I have given up on the hunt for the smoking gun, but I also am very much looking forward to this release. We already have the RIF sheets — the metadata including titles, subjects, number of pages, etc. for all 3,571 fully withheld documents, so we have a sense of what to expect. This metadata, by the way, along with metadata for the full collection, is now all available and searchable at maryferrell.org, in a project called the JFK Database Explorer. The metadata cards I’ll be showing in this presentation were grabbed off these MFF pages.

Here’s a breakdown of those 3,571 documents by agency — FBI and CIA documents make up the bulk of them, but there’s a fair number of IRS records too. Why? Tax returns.

FBI: 35%
CIA: 33%
DOJ: 15%
IRS: 5%
HSCA: 5%
STATE: 3%
OTHER: 5%

Records Walkthrough

Here are metadata slides for a few of those IRS records. Tax returns for Lee Harvey Oswald — 1959, the Paines — 1962, hmm, here’s the William B. Reilly Coffee Company, where Oswald worked in New Orleans. Most of the FBI documents still with held are marked NBR — Not Believed Relevant, so many of them may not be of much interest, though I’m sure that judgment will differ from reader to reader.

But in general, and you can scan through these for yourself using the JFK Database Explorer, just from the titles and subjects it’s clear that there is much of interest in these still-withheld records. And the simple fact that these have been withheld for this long adds a bit of mystery. In some cases, like IRS records, the withholding is directly related to general government practices around documents. In other cases, it’s not at all clear why some documents are withheld. Let’s have a look at a few interesting samples…..

Nov. 17

McClendon News Service, Author Andrew Kreig: Lecture at National Press Club Nov. 17 to advocate Obama pardons for political prisoners and renewed Kennedy assassination disclosures, John Edward Hurley, Nov. 17, 2016. President Obama should pardon the nation’s leading political prisoners and whistleblowers as a lasting legacy, according to Justice Integrity Project Editor Andrew Kreig, author of many investigative stories, including this week’s President Obama, I Beg Your Post-Election Pardon, which documents political prosecution, assassination, and media issues.

Justice for those have been framed in high-profile, historic cases — which include the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy (shown in file photo) — would provide a vital civic lesson, he said as the nation wrestles with what Electoral College winner Donald Trump has called campaign for “law and order.”

The lecture organized by the McClendon News Service chaired by John Hurley at 7 p.m. is open to the public at the National Press Club. Discussion is preceded at 6:30 p.m. by an optional no-host dinner with the speaker [shown above and a member of the CAPA board of directors, among other professional and civic groups].

Washington Post, Twenty-six seconds of the JFK assassination — and a lifetime of family anguish, Joyce Carol Oates, Nov. 17, 2016. Zapruder, granddaughter of the videographer and a founder of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has written a moving and enlightening account that is part memoir; part detailed history of the film and its (inestimable) role in the nation’s understanding of the assassination; and part overview of the film as an inspiration for countless, often bizarre conspiracy theories, as well as for works of art as disparate as Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and “Underworld,” and a particularly inventive episode of “Seinfeld.”

So much history, embodied in a mere 26 seconds of footage! Not least, this film would one day be sold by the Zapruder heirs to the U.S. government for $16 million, the highest price ever paid for “an American historical artifact,” to be stored in the National Film Registry for scholars and historians to study.

Nov. 16

LewRockwell.com, “Mary’s Mosaic”: A Masterpiece of Biography and a Mesmerizing Detective Story, Douglas (Anonymous last name), Nov. 16, 2016. Mary’s Mosaic is several things at once: an insightful and sensitive biography of both Mary Meyer and her one-time husband, CIA propaganda specialist Cord Meyer; a murder mystery; a trial drama; an expose of secret knowledge and cover-ups inside the Washington D.C. Beltway during the 1950s and 1960s; and of course, a love story about the late-developing relationship between President John F. Kennedy and Mary Pinchot Meyer, whom he had first met at an Ivy League prep school dance when she was only 15 years old.

Their paths had crossed briefly once again in the Spring of 1945, at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. (Mary, her new husband Cord Meyer, and John F. Kennedy all attended the conference as journalists reporting on the events there, at the birth of the United Nations.)

One of the fascinating aspects of this well-researched book is how it traces the evolution and personal development of Mary Pinchot Meyer, Cord Meyer, and John F. Kennedy. As Cord Meyer — a scarred war hero who was once an idealist and a pacifist, and who aggressively lobbied for a united world government following World War II — became a disillusioned cynic and was subverted to the “dark side” by Allen Dulles of the CIA, his all-consuming commitment to the Cold War (and his abandonment of his former idealism) slowly killed his marriage to Mary Pinchot. Mary remained an idealist and an independent thinker, and it was this very independent and unconventional woman whose orbit finally intersected with that of President John F. Kennedy again late in 1961, about two years before his assassination.

Nov. 11

New York Post, New JFK assassination theory: Cuban double agent led plot, Joshua Rhett Miller, Nov. 11, 2016. More than 50 years after President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, new evidence uncovered in the secret diaries of a Cold War spy and assassin implicates another clandestine figure believed to be working as a double agent for Cuba, an explosive new book claims.

The never-before-revealed diaries of Douglas DeWitt Bazata, a decorated officer for the United States Office of Strategic Services — the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency — claim that his longtime close friend and fellow spy, René Alexander Dussaq, was a “primary organizer and plotter” of Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. The diaries reveal that Dussaq might even have fired the fatal “shot or shots” that killed the 35th president of the United States, according to author Robert K. Wilcox’s latest book, Target: JFK, The Spy Who Killed Kennedy?

CAPA Editor’s Note: This excerpt of this book announcement is in the spirit of news reporting and not an implied endorsement of its thesis, which differs from those espoused in vast numbers of other books.

Response to CAPA from author Robert Wilcox: “My book does not differ from thesis’s implied in the vast amount of other books. It points to Castro and Cuba as the culprits. Both were among the first suspects in the assassination. It challenges the Warren Commission, as do most books about the assassination. And as most theses do, it suggests a frontal shot from the grassy knoll or elsewhere. It also agrees with what the Zapruder film suggests and details a conspiracy as most books about the assassination do. Where it is different is that it gives new evidence of the possible genesis of the conspiracy. This is based on credible witness that has recently been uncovered and certainly deserves a hearing.”

Nov. 1

Boston Globe, GOP ‘jokes’ speak of bullets, not ballots, Renée Graham, Nov. 1, 2016. Hey, did you hear the one about Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican senator who “joked” last weekend that “nothing made me feel better” than seeing a picture of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on the cover of a firearms magazine? “I was a little bit shocked at that — it didn’t have a bullseye on it,” Burr said, getting a big laugh from a roomful of GOP volunteers. The lawmaker is shown in his official photo.

Just a few months earlier, Donald Trump, who has presided over a number of violent incidents at his raucous campaign rallies, quipped that if Clinton is elected and “gets to pick her judges — nothing you can do, folks. Although the 2nd Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

For what it’s worth — and during this campaign, so many apologies cover the ground like dead leaves — Burr eventually called his comment “inappropriate.”

Of course Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, carped that he’d been misinterpreted. After all, why would anyone believe that a man who said of a protestor, “I’d like to punch him in the face,” and longed for the “old days” when such a person would’ve been “carried out on a stretcher,” would advocate violence?

Among other sickening things, 2016 is the year when assassination became a fetid political punch line.

In 1963, hate mongers prepared for President Kennedy’s assassination by distributing the handbill above in Dallas before he was killed. The Dallas Morning News ran a similar “welcome” (below) that day.

Los Angeles Times, Review Shakespeare meets Oliver Stone in ‘The Tragedy of JFK,’ Philip Brandes, Nov. 1, 2016. Friends, readers, theatergoers, lend me your eyes; I come to praise “The Tragedy of JFK (as told by Wm. Shakespeare)” at the Skylight Theatre, not to bury it.

Daniel Henning’s adaptation of “Julius Caesar” is an audacious new production from the Blank Theatre Company, one that inventively maps Shakespeare’s historical drama to figures and events surrounding the 1963 Kennedy assassination.

Marrying director Henning’s deep knowledge of both classical theater and JFK conspiracy theories, the play transposes Shakespeare’s plot to the political intrigues of an Oliver Stone-worthy cabal at the highest levels of our government.

October

Oct. 31

A Coup in Camelot, Award-Winning JFK Assassination Documentary Available on November 4, 2016 on iTunes and Other Digital Platforms, Oct. 31, 2016. A Coup in Camelot, the award-winning documentary on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy will be available on November 4, 2016 on iTunes, Amazon Video Direct, Google Play and Vimeo OnDemand. On November 4, the DVD and Blu-ray can be purchased exclusively on the film’s website.

Narrated by Emmy award-winning actor Peter Coyote, directed/produced by Stephen Goetsch and written/produced by Art Van Kampen, A Coup in Camelot is a powerful examination of compelling new research, exclusive interviews and critical analysis by the top medical, forensic and research experts in the country.

“November 22, 2016 marks the 53rd anniversary of the assassination of the country’s 35th president,” said Stephen Goetsch, director/producer. “We are pleased to offer audiences this unbiased and impassioned addition to the historical record of this tragic event.”

Five decades later crucial questions remain about President Kennedy’s assassination. The film provides extensive evidence of botched Secret Service protocols, Zapruder film analysis with 6k digital scans, shocking medical evidence revelations, and expert Oswald analysis, to uncover the dramatic tale of A Coup In Camelot.

The following JFK assassination experts who appear in the film are available for interviews:

Douglas Horne, Assassination Records Review Board, Author
Vince Palamara, Secret Service Expert, Author
Sherry Fiester, Forensics Expert, Author
Dr. David Mantik, Radiologist
Dick Russell, Oswald Expert, Author
Barry Ernest, Oswald Expert, Author
Jerry Dealey, Historian, Author

For the film experts’ biographies, visit here. To view the trailer, visit here. For complete information, visit here.

Oct. 28

Hidden History Center, Museum Announces Website, New Location In Pennsylvania, Executive Director, Marilyn Tenenoff, Oct. 28, 2016. Here are headlines:

• The Center has moved to North George Street in York , PA.
• Our presence extends far beyond our physical location.
• Thanks to Assistant Director Dave Ratcliffe, our new information-packed website has just debuted here. Check it out!
• The Center is on the threshold of an exciting new social media outreach.
• Board member Joe Green is editing John Judge’s book, “Judge for Yourself,” and will soon re-publish it.
• I turned 70 on October 23.
• You can send me a great birthday gift by donating to support our important work at hiddenhistorycenter.org.

Mission: “The Hidden History Center is a Gateway for Truth ~ a source for facts our schools are not teaching, secrets our government is hiding, and information we are blinded from seeing by our culture. The Center is based on the vision of our founder, John Judge, whose scholarship, integrity and dedication to the Truth were unrelenting. The Center is a project of the Museum of Hidden History, a 501(c)(3) non-profit.”

Oct. 27

Secrecy News, CIA Will Place Its CREST Database Online, Steven Aftergood, The Central Intelligence Agency said this week that it will post its database of declassified CIA documents online, making them broadly accessible to all interested users. The database, known as CREST (for CIA Records Search Tool), contains more than 11 million pages of historical Agency records that have already been declassified and approved for public release.

Currently, however, CREST can only be accessed through computer terminals at the National Archives in College Park, MD. This geographic restriction on availability has been a source of frustration and bafflement to researchers ever since the digital collection was established in 2000.

But that is finally going to change. The entire contents of the CREST system will be transferred to the CIA website, said CIA spokesperson Ryan Trapani on Tuesday. “When loaded on the website they will be full-text searchable and have the same features currently available on the CREST system at NARA,” he said.

CIA was not able to provide a date for completion of the transfer, but “we are moving out on the plan to make the transition,” Mr. Trapani said. In the meantime, “The CREST database housed at NARA will remain up and running at least until the website is fully functioning,” he said.

Oct. 26

Carroll County Times-Georgian (Georgia), JFK exhibit at Ingram Library, Melanie Boyd, Oct. 26, 2016. The “Hidden History of the John F. Kennedy Assassination” exhibit opened Monday at the Ingram Library on the University of West Georgia campus. The exhibit, which will be up through Nov. 22, will include a free presentation by Lamar Waldron on Nov. 9. Waldron has written several books about JFK and his assassination. His talk will focus on evidence that the president was killed as the result of a conspiracy, a claim that has been rejected by many authorities, yet persists among many other scholars.

One of Waldron’s books on the JFK assassination, Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, is currently being developed as a feature-length motion picture that will star Leonardo DiCaprio. Waldron has also been interviewed numerous times on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, the Discovery Channel and the History Channel.

Oct. 18

JFK.Facts.org, Attacking Trump’s JFK theories, the New York Times neglects the facts, Jefferson Morley (shown below), Oct. 18, 2016. The disturbing shadow of John F. Kennedy’s assassination remains visible in American politics and journalism. Witness the appearance of Roger Stone, adviser to Donald Trump, at a symposium on Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans, which drew the attention of the New York Times (and the pro-Clinton attack group Media Matters.)

“At a time when talk of having lost the country is very much in vogue, along with deep suspicions of a powerful and secretive elite, the symposium seemed remarkably of the moment,” writes reporter Campbell Robertson. Of course, reporting on how fears of secret power are driving the discourse of the 2016 presidential election is an eminently timely and worthy subject. But reporting is what Robertson failed to do. Instead of learning the latest JFK facts, Times readers were served a birthday cake.

For the editors of the Times, rightly worried about the possibility of a Trump presidency, depicting the “conspiracy theorists” who support him as a monolithic threat is a tempting editorial choice.

It is also a journalistic mistake. In seeking to capture how Trump and his advisers appeal to a fearful nation, the Times neglected to do its job: supply new and relevant information about topic of wide public interest. Robertson reported that symposium participants expressed “general approval” for Trump’s baseless claim that Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in JFK’s assassination. It might have been worth mentioning that not a single credible JFK conspiracy author agrees. Editor’s note: Morley’s unsourced opinion on a potential Cruz connection is itself disputed by researchers who have probed deeper.

Oct. 17

New York Times, In Donald Trump, Conspiracy Fans Find a Campaign to Believe In, Campbell Robertson, Oct. 17,

2016. “What the government tells you is rarely the truth, and it’s never the complete truth,” proclaimed Roger Stone, the veteran political operative and longtime confidant of Donald J. Trump. To the approving hoots of several dozen audience members on Sunday in a conference room at the Crowne Plaza New Orleans Airport Hotel, Mr. Stone went on to contend that his candidate was no tool of the elite power brokers at the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderberg meetings — and then he asserted paternity cover-ups within the Clinton family, declared that one group supporting Hillary Clinton was a “criminal-based money-laundering operation” and promised “devastating” revelations among hacked emails yet to be released.

And, in a brief detour, he explained that Lyndon B. Johnson helped orchestrate the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The last part, while hardly the focus of Mr. Stone’s speech, was what had brought him, for the second year in a row, to the annual Lee Harvey Oswald Conference, a gathering of conspiracy amateurs and prolific authors that is timed around Oswald’s birthday (Oct. 18). The conference is dedicated to the proposition, as the conference organizer explained in his introductory remarks, that “Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy and that it was a coup d’état that happened and we lost our country.”

At a time when talk of having lost the country is very much in vogue, along with deep suspicions of a powerful and secretive elite, the symposium seemed remarkably of the moment.

The idea that political figures are at the whim of shadowy forces is a core principle of the conference. The notion that elections have always been rigged was echoed by at least one presenter: Sean Stone, the son of the director Oliver Stone, whose 1991 film “JFK” is effectively one of the conference’s founding documents. There was also extensive and generally favorable discussion of claims put forward by Mr. Trump that Senator Ted Cruz’s father had played a role in a conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination.

But the Oswald conference is not easy to classify politically. If there was any “party” loyalty, it was with Oswald (shown in a file photo at right), considered an honorable patriot manipulated and impugned by conspirators, and with Kennedy, described by one attendee as among the country’s great conservatives and by one speaker as a “kind of better-looking Bernie Sanders.”

Oct. 10

JFK Facts.org, Oct. 10, 1963: Six top CIA officers discuss Lee Harvey Oswald among themselves, Jefferson Morley, Oct. 10, 2016. Fifty three years ago today, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald came to the attention of a group of senior CIA officers in Langley, Virginia. Oswald (shown in a passport application photo) had recently visited the Cuban consulate and Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. A CIA wiretap captured a man identifying himself as “Oswald.”

The CIA officers conferred about Oswald and his actions and signed off on a cable about him. They are identified on the declassified CIA cable whose authenticity is not disputed. Why were they so interested in Oswald? One possible explanation for their interest in Oswald is that he was part of a covert operation.The CIA denies it. For reasons that have never been unexplained, these CIA officers decided not to share information about Oswald’s recent arrest or his public activism in support of a subversive pro-Castro organization with their colleagues in Mexico City. Forty two days later, Oswald allegedly shot and killed Kennedy.

The October 10 cable destroys the cover story, fed to the Warren Commission, that the CIA only had a “routine” interest in Oswald before the assassination. To the contrary, a half dozen high-ranking officers were familiar with his biography, leftist politics, foreign travels and foreign contacts six weeks before JFK was killed.

Oct. 7

Texas Theatre, Premiere Screening of “The Searchers” Scheduled for Nov. 21, Oct. 7, 2016. The first public screening of “The Searchers,” a feature documentary film by Randolph Benson, co-sponsored by JFK Lancer, will be Monday, Nov. 21 at the Texas Theatre in Dallas. Fourteen years in the making, the film uses never before seen interviews, archival footage and recently declassified documents to chronicle the past and present of these ordinary citizens and their contributions to revealing the truth about the crime of the 20th century.

Suffering ridicule, and being labeled with the intellectual scarlet letter of conspiracy theorists, these individuals have challenged the institutions of power for over 50 years. They have fought against great odds to, as they often proclaim, “take back our history!”

The film features Cyril Wecht, Robert Groden, Josiah “Tink” Thompson, Mark Lane, John Judge, Jim Marrs, Jim DiEugenio, Debra Conway, Gary Aguilar, Lisa Pease, Rex Bradford, Walt Brown, Andy Winiarczyk and John Kelin, among many others.

All profits from this special screening will go to the JFK Lancer Student Scholarship Fund. Reserve tickets here.

September

Sept. 23

Washington Post, CIA found ‘convincing evidence’ Chilean dictator was behind 1976 D.C. attack, Missy Ryan, Sept. 23, 2016. The CIA concluded that former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (shown in a portrait at left) personally ordered the 1976 murder of a top dissident, according to newly released government documents that show U.S. confidence about a key ally’s responsibility for a shocking attack in Washington.

The latest revelations about the Cold War-era case come on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Orlando Letelier, a leading opponent of the Pinochet regime and onetime Chilean foreign minister, and his think-tank colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in a car bomb on D.C.’s Embassy Row. he CIA assessment released Friday is part of a suite of documents presented in 1987 to President Ronald Reagan by his national security adviser, Frank Carlucci, regarding U.S. government policy on Chile.

In the document, the CIA states that “a review of our files on the Letelier assassination has provided what we regard as convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder.”

Wikipedia bio: Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte (1915 – 2006) was a Chilean politician who was President of Chile between 1973 and 1990 and Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army from 1973 to 1998. He was also president of the Government Junta of Chile between 1973 and 1981. His rule of Chile has been described as a dictatorship. Pinochet assumed power in Chile following a United States-backed coup d’état on 11 September 1973 that overthrew the elected socialist Unidad Popular government of President Salvador Allende and ended civilian rule. Pinochet is shown in 1976 file photo with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

According to a government commission report that included testimony from more than 30,000 people, Pinochet’s government killed at least 3,197 people and tortured about 29,000. Two-thirds of the cases listed in the report happened in 1973. Pinochet was arrested under an international arrest warrant on a visit to London on 10 October 1998 in connection with numerous human rights violations. Following a legal battle he was released on grounds of ill-health, and returned to Chile on 3 March 2000. By the time of his death, about 300 criminal charges were still pending against him in Chile for numerous human rights violations during his 17-year rule, and tax evasion and embezzlement during and after his rule. He was accused of having corruptly amassed at least $28 million USD.

Sept. 21

Muckrock, Help release the FBI file on Watergate burglar (and alleged CIA asset) Frank Sturgis, Michael Best, Sept. 21, 2016. Despite numerous denials from the CIA and assertions that Frank Sturgis was never employed by the Agency, a pair of documents have surfaced that clearly contradict this and show the Justice Department was aware of it. We won’t know the full extent of the file — which is more than four times as long as the 17,000 page FBI file on Watergate — until it’s released, but there are a number of things that are certain to be in it and which have very little official documentation available to the public.

Sturgis’ career began in Cuba before Castro’s rise to power, when he was an ally to the Castro brothers in their opposition to Batista. During this period, he was a paramilitary who fought the government and made friends with a number of other Cuban paramilitaries, as well as the American government. According to Sturgis, he began making contact with the FBI and CIA in 1959. By 1961, he was opposed to Castro and became involved in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and other CIA sponsored and tolerated anti-Castro activities. According to Sturgis, his CIA control officer was Jose Joaquin Sanjenis Perdomo AKA Sam Jenis.

The Agency has continued to deny this, but it’s known that Jenis did have a relationship with the Agency. Some of the papers relating to him are still being withheld in National Archives as part of the JFK Assassination records. These activities are specifically mentioned in the lawsuit that led to uncovering the Iran-Contra scandal as the beginning point for the modern nexus between paramilitary operations, assassinations, and the trafficking of weapons and narcotics.

Sept. 16

JFKCountercoup, RFK Double Crossed at Dealey Plaza, William Kelly, Sept. 16, 2016. Lee Harvey Oswald was framed as the Patsy, Fidel Castro was set up as the Fall Guy, and RFK was double crossed and checkmated – so those who planned the Dealey Plaza operation would not be pursued and the truth about the assassination would be kept secret for over fifty years.

Sept. 8

Robert F. Kennedy flanked by union organizers Dolores Huerta, left, and Paul Schrade, right. Huerta co-founded what would become the United Farm Workers. Schrade, also a union organizer, was one of five others wounded when RFK was assassinated in 1968. Photo: Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund

Litchfield County Times and Cool Justice Report, RFK Jr. points to forensic evidence of second gunman in his father’s assassination, Andy Thibault, Sept. 8, 2016. RFK Jr. points to forensic evidence of second gunman in his father’s assassination. Buried on page 271 of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new book on the Skakel murder case in Greenwich is a quick, but telling reference to his father’s assassination. Kennedy family members rarely have spoken publicly about the assassinations of either President John Kennedy or U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy, much less criticized the official findings. The passage is noteworthy for the simple fact it is memorialized in a book. It is not just a comment in an interview.

This angle deserves serious attention, and so it wasn’t shoehorned into the column published Aug. 5 on the Greenwich murder case, RFK Jr. attacks prosecutors, cops, courts for willful misconduct as he asserts cousin Skakel’s innocence.” Following are two paragraphs from Kennedy’s book, Framed, Why Michael Skakel Spent Over A Decade In Prison For A Murder He Didn’t Commit, leading up to the clincher paragraph on the RFK assassination:

“I sympathize deeply with Dorthy Moxley [Martha’s mother]. I have seen up-close the agony of a mother’s grief over the loss of her child. my mother lost her husband to murder and two of her sons to violent, untimely deaths in the bosom of their youth. I was with her when my father died. I stood beside her 29 years later as my little brother Michael died in her arms.

“My mother told us that we needed to let go of our impulse for revenge and allow the cycle of violence to end with our family. This, she said, was the lesson of the New Testament, which swapped the savage eye-for-an-eye tribalism of the Old Testament for the ethical mandate that we turn the other cheek. But forgiveness wasn’t just ethics. It was salutary. Revenge and resentments, my mother said, are corrosive. Indulging them is like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die. By opposing the death penalty for Sirhan, we diluted these poisonous passions.

“And what if, God forbid, the object of our revenge turns out to be innocent? For several decades, my father’s close friend Paul Schrade, who took one of Sirhan’s bullets, has argued that Sirhan Sirhan did not fire the shot that killed my father. Recent forensic evidence supports him. How would we have felt now, if our family had demanded his execution?”

Sept. 3

“For one bright moment back in the late 1960s, we actually believed that we could change our country. We had identified the enemy. We saw it up close, we had its measure, and we were very hopeful that we would prevail. The enemy was hollow where we had substance. All of that substance was destroyed by an assassin’s bullet.”

– William Pepper (Page 15, The Plot to Kill King)

Truth and Shadows, Martin Luther King survived shooting, was murdered in hospital: An interview with William Pepper, Craig McKee, Sept. 3, 2016. The revelations are stunning. The media indifference is predictable. Thanks to the nearly four-decade investigation by human rights lawyer William Pepper, it is now clear once and for all that Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and that also involved the U.S. military, the Memphis Police Department, and “Dixie Mafia” crime figures in Memphis, Tennessee. These and many more incredible details of the King assassination are contained in a trilogy of volumes by Pepper culminating with his latest and final book on the subject, The Plot to Kill King. He previously wrote Orders to Kill (1995) and An Act of State (2003).

With virtually no help from the mainstream media and very little from the justice system, Pepper was able to piece together what really happened on April 4, 1968 in Memphis right down to who gave the order and supplied the money, how the patsy was chosen, and who actually pulled the trigger.

Without this information, the truth about King’s assassination would have been buried and lost to history. Witnesses would have died off, taking their secrets with them, and the official lie that King was the victim of a racist lone gunman named James Earl Ray would have remained “fact.”

Instead, we know that Ray took the fall for a murder he did not commit. We know that a member of the Memphis Police Department fired the fatal shot and that two military sniper teams that were part of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group were sent to Memphis as back-ups should the primary shooter fail. We have access to the fascinating account of how Pepper came to meet Colonel John Downie, the man in charge of the military part of the plot and Lyndon Johnson’s former Vietnam briefer. We also learn that as part of the operation, photographs were actually taken of the shooting and that Pepper came very close to getting his hands on those photographs.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media has ignored all of these revelations and continues to label Ray as King’s lone assassin. In fact, Pepper chronicles in detail how a disinformation campaign has featured the collaboration of many mainstream journalists over almost half a century. He says he suspects that those orchestrating the cover-up, which continues to this day, are no longer concerned with what he writes about the subject.

And the most stunning revelation in The Plot to Kill King – which some may question because the account is second hand – is that King was still alive when he arrived at St. Joseph’s Hospital and that he was killed by a doctor who was supposed to be trying to save his life.

“That is probably the most shocking aspect of the book, that final revelation of how this great man was taken from us,” Pepper says.

August

Aug. 30

Kennedy Library Foundation, Steven M. Rothstein Named Executive Director of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, Rachel Flor, Aug. 30, 2016. Kenneth R. Feinberg, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, today announced the selection of Steven M. Rothstein as the new Executive Director of the organization. An accomplished non-profit administrator, public servant, and entrepreneur, Rothstein led the world-renowned Perkins School for the Blind through a period of significant growth during his eleven year tenure as President of the institution.

“Steven Rothstein’s proven success leading complex and ambitious educational, human service, government and business organizations makes him uniquely suited to advance the strategic vision of the Kennedy Library Foundation,” said Feinberg. “Throughout his career, Steven has answered President Kennedy’s call to service, dedicating himself to social justice and human progress. We are fortunate that he will now lead the Foundation in inspiring the next generation to become engaged citizens and make the world a better place.”

Archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero expressed his support for the selection of Rothstein, noting that “his background and experience come at a critical time as we build on the decades of public-private partnership which the Foundation and the Library have enjoyed.”

Beginning September 6, 2016, Rothstein will oversee all operations of the Foundation, a 501(c)(3), non-profit organization that provides financial support, staffing, and creative resources for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, a federal institution governed by the National Archives and Records Administration. In this role, Rothstein will work with staff to position the Foundation at the center of an interactive world-wide dialogue on President Kennedy’s legacy and the continued significance of the ideas, policies and programs that he advanced throughout his life and presidency.

Aug. 21

Mason City (Iowa) Globe-Gazette, Expert on JFK assassination to speak in Clear Lake, John Skipper, Aug. 21, 2016. Fifty-three years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Americans still are asking questions about the president’s death and the findings of the Warren Commission. North Iowans will have the opportunity to hear firsthand how some of those questions, dilemmas and findings were addressed and how the findings from 1963 stand the test of time today.

Federal Judge John R. Tunheim, chairman of the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board (and shown in a file photo), will give a special program at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 8 at the Best Western Holiday Lodge, sponsored by the Clear Lake Chamber of Commerce. Tunheim, chairman of the review board from 1994-98, will discuss the assassination and the many evidentiary issues concerning the assassination that are still talked about today.

These include the Warren Commission, the “magic bullet” theory, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. The discussion will also address questions concerning organized crime and involvement of foreign governments. Tim Coffey, chief executive officer of the Chamber, said millions of Americans will never forget the assassination and its aftermath.

“To learn more about what really happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, is incredibly important in the history of our country,” he said. Tunheim will describe the many legal and procedural obstacles faced by the board in its efforts to open documents from government agencies. The program is free and open to the public.

Aug. 10

Washington Post, Political violence is no joke, William Kennedy Smith and Jean Kennedy Smith, Aug. 10, 2016. William Kennedy Smith and Jean Kennedy Smith are the nephew and sister of President John. F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated on June 6, 1968.

The words of public figures matter, and they reveal something about them. Bobby Kennedy knew this. Does the GOP nominee? On April 4, 1968, the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, Robert Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency in Indianapolis. Bobby conveyed the news of King’s death to a shattered, mostly black audience. He took pains to remind those whose first instinct may have been toward violence that President John F. Kennedy had also been shot and killed. Bobby went on, “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

That speech has crystallized into the single most enduring portrait of Bobby’s candidacy. Because it was extemporaneous, it conveyed directly, and with raw emotion, his own vulnerability, his aspirations for his country and a deep compassion for the suffering of others. Bobby concluded his remarks that night by urging those listening to return home and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Those words mattered. While there were riots in cities across the nation that night, Indianapolis did not burn.

Today, almost 50 years later, words still matter. They shape who we are as a people and who we wish to be as a nation. In the white-hot cauldron of a presidential campaign, it is still the words delivered extemporaneously, off the cuff, in the raw pressure of the moment that matter most. They say most directly what is in a candidate’s heart. So it was with a real sense of sadness and revulsion that we listened to Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, as he referred to the options available to “Second Amendment people,” a remark widely, and we believe correctly, interpreted as a thinly veiled reference or “joke” about the possibility of political assassination.

Aug. 9

Washington Post, Trump appears to encourage gun owners to take action if Clinton appoints anti-gun judges, Sean Sullivan and Isaac Stanley-Becker, Aug. 9, 2016. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Donald Trump told supporters at a rally in Wilmington, N.C. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, a Democrat, and MSNBC host Chris Matthews were among those responding that Trump’s comment could be interpreted as an invitation for Clinton’s assassination. Former Reagan and Bill Clinton White House advisor David Gergen said Trump’s comment was “one of the major events of the campaign” because it was a “dog whistle” message to dehumanize his opponent in a way that could lead a mentally unstable person to try to kill her.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, disagreed and said Trump must have meant for gun-owners to vote against Clinton, not kill her.

Matthews countered Giuliani by saying Trump clearly spoke about options for Second Amendment backers after a possible Clinton election to prevent her from exercising presidential powers, not options like voting available before election.

Huffington Post, Donald Trump Suggests Shooting Hillary Clinton, Her Supreme Court Picks, Or Both, S.V. Date, Aug. 9, 2016. Donald Trump on Tuesday warned his supporters that if Hillary Clinton is elected president and appoints judges to the Supreme Court, there is nothing anyone can do about it. But then he added that, given the Second Amendment, maybe there is. “If she gets to pick her judges ― nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said with a shrug at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina. “Although, the Second Amendment people. Maybe there is. I don’t know.”

“A person seeking to be the president of the United States should not suggest violence in any way,” the Clinton campaign responded.

What Trump was actually suggesting is not clear. However, Trump’s veterans affairs adviser found himself in hot water last month when he said that Clinton should be shot for treason over her use of a private email server.

Aug. 8

Former U.S. State Department Chief of Cuban Interests Section based in Havana Dr. Wayne Smith, at left in 1995, with journalist and former House investigator Gaeton Fonzi, center, and Cuban retired Gen. Fabian Escalante, former head of Cuban State Security (Fonzi Family Photo)

Mary Ferrell Foundation, And Why, By the Way, is Fidel Castro Still Alive? Gaeton Fonzi, Aug. 8, 2016. (originally written in 1996). The Inside Story of Cuban Intelligence. The General is tired and would like to relax. He has gone up against very powerful adversaries and the struggle has not been easy. Yet he has helped keep both Cuba and Fidel Castro alive and while that is no longer his direct responsibility, he finds it very difficult to put his mind at ease after almost four decades of living on the edge.

The General and I are sitting on the ocean-side terrace of the Copacabana Hotel in Havana.

If anyone has a right to be sick and tired of Castro assassination plots, it is Fabian Escalante Font, Division General of the Cuban Revolutionary Army. Escalante is the former chief of Cuba’s Counter-Intelligence.

Charged with detecting and diverting the continuing fusillade of anti-Castro plots, his covert unit went mano a mano with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency at its most venomous. Later, Escalante was made head of the Cuban State Security Department, the powerful, ubiquitous Big Brother bureau known as G2. Those key posts make Escalante the one man largely responsible for keeping Fidel Castro alive for more than three decades.

Most Americans have no idea just how deep and persistent was the U.S. government’s desire to kill Castro. The reason they have no idea is because the CIA, which orchestrated many of the plots and played a support role in most of them, had, until the mid-Seventies, consistently denied any involvement. Its directors even lied to Congress when they had to. And one, Allen Dulles, never mentioned the Castro plots to his fellow members on the Warren Commission. Then, under pressure of investigating Congressional intelligence committees, the Agency admitted only those attempts it made with the only those attempts it made with the help of Organized Crime figures in the early Sixties. Even today, that’s still as far as the CIA has gone….

Mary Ferrell Foundation, Unpublished Gaeton Fonzi Essay, Rex Bradford, Aug. 8, 2016. Rex Bradford (shown via C-SPAN during a 2013 lecture) s director of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the world’s largest private archive of materials related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In late 1995, journalist and former House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigator Gaeton Fonzi traveled to Cuba and interviewed Fabian Escalante, the former head of Cuban CounterIntelligence. The interview was part of a planned article for Esquire magazine. Escalante talked with Fonzi for hours about his role protecting Castro, and together they toured a museum devoted to artifacts of assassination plots against the Cuban leader.

The article was never published by Esquire. But, through the generosity of Fonzi’s widow Marie, the Mary Ferrell Foundation is now making it available for the first time. Also donated to the MFF are 6 cassette sides of interviews with Escalante, along with transcripts created by Gaeton Fonzi himself. Marie Fonzi wrote the following preface to the essay:

Mary Ferrell Foundation, Preface to Gaeton Fonzi’s Escalante Story, Marie Fonzi, Aug. 8, 2016. In April of 1995, Gaeton received a contract from Esquire Magazine to write an article about General Fabian Escalante, former head of Cuban State Security. Expected length was 8,000 words with a due date of October 31, 1995. In July of 1996 Gaeton, after three revisions, wrote to the Esquire editor, “Here’s the rewrite as per your suggestion. It comes pretty close to your suggested length also, in the 10-grand range. A few hundred more might come out if need be, but I think it reads pretty tight now. And I like it. So send the check. You’re getting close to violating the hourly minimum-wage law now. I was a kid when I started this. Thanks.”

Gaeton was a master at concealing his frustration with humor. And he was annoyed. In a letter to a friend dated August 1996, Gaeton complained that he was still waiting for Esquire to return his calls three weeks after that third revision. Esquire never did publish this story. It was a good story but it was a story, Gaet felt, that may have been too honest, too sympathetic to the Cuban side of the story, a story that made the CIA look like amateurs in their botched attempts to kill Castro.

Now that our Government has decided to make peace with our former enemy, I envision JFK saying, “About time.” And I hear Gaet commenting on the publication of his article with the same words.

Please read below for previous items

July

Global Research via Interpid Report, Robert F. Kennedy and the girl in the polka-dot dress: A review of Fernando Faura’s ‘The Polka-Dot File: on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing,’ Edward Curtin, July 19, 2016. There is a vast literature on the CIA-directed assassination of President John Kennedy. Most Americans have long rejected the Warren Commission’s findings and have accepted that there was a conspiracy. There is much less research on the assassination of JFK’s brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, and, if asked, far fewer people would say it was a conspiracy and a cover-up. They may not even know the alleged assassin’s name.

June

Gary Null Show, Guest Daniel “Danny” Sheehan, Gary Null, June 10, 2016. Part Four of Conversations with Remarkable Minds featuring public interest lawyer and author Daniel Sheehan, a constitutional and public interest lawyer, public speaker and educator. Over the last forty-five years he has participated in numerous legal cases of public interest, including the Pentagon Papers Case, the Watergate Break-In Case, the Silkwood Case, the Iran-Contra Scandal and others. He established the Christic Institute and the Romero Institute, two non-profit public policy centers. Sheehan published The People’s Advocate, a memoir, in 2013 through Counterpoint publishing. Series: Part One; Part Two; Part Three; and Part Four.

June 4

WhoWhatWhy, What Did the Death of Bobby Kennedy Mean? Jeff Schechtman, June 4, 2016. How might the world be today had Bobby Kennedy lived? And who was behind his death? Paul Schrade, one of his closest confidants, who was also shot that night, looks back. Schrade (with glasses) is shown with Kennedy in a file photo.

In commemoration of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination on this day nearly half a century ago, WhoWhatWhy offers a real treat to students of history. In an extensive podcast, Kennedy confidante Paul Schrade, who was also shot that fateful night, talks about his relationship to RFK and reveals insights never heard before.

The 91-year-old Schrade begins with a leisurely reminiscence on early labor and political days, of special interest to those with some background in those issues. Starting nine minutes in, he turns to the RFK assassination. After taking us through the events and the subsequent investigation, you can hear the pain and reluctance from Schrade when he talks about how Bobby might have changed the country, had he lived.

Reuters via Huffington Post, Nigeria Says It Has Recovered $9.1 Billion In Stolen Money And Assets, Staff report, June 4, 2016. President Muhammadu Buhari, elected last year largely on his vow to fight corruption, has vowed to recover “mind-boggling” sums of money stolen from the oil sector. Nigeria’s government has recovered $9.1 billion in stolen money and assets, its information and culture minister said on Saturday, as its corruption crackdown continues against the backdrop of the country’s worst economic crisis in years.

President Muhammadu Buhari, elected last year largely on his vow to fight corruption, has vowed to recover “mind-boggling” sums of money stolen from the oil sector and said public coffers were “virtually empty” when he took office last May.

June 3

AP via Greenwich Time, Letter written by JFK to purported paramour is for sale, Mark Pratt, June 3, 2016. An intimate letter written by President John F. Kennedy to a purported paramour seeking to set up a liaison is one of several Kennedy-related items being sold at auction. The four-page letter to longtime Kennedy family friend Mary Pinchot Meyer, an artist and former wife of a CIA agent (shown in a 1942 photo), is thought to have been written in October 1963, about a month before the president’s assassination.

“Why don’t you leave suburbia for once — come and see me — either here — or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th,” the letter reads. “I know it is unwise, irrational, and that you may hate it — on the other hand you may not — and I will love it. You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all of these years — you should give me a more loving answer than that. Why don’t you just say yes.”

It’s signed simply “J.”

“It’s incredible to see the president writing something so personal,” said Robert Livingston, the executive vice president of Boston-based RR Auction , which is handling the sale. “We’ve handled a lot of JFK letters here, and he was always very formal.”

June 2

Justice Integrity Project, William Pepper, Friend of MLK, RFK, Slams Murder Cover-ups, Andrew Kreig (shown in CAPA board photo), June 2, 2016. Murder of political leaders is a common problem, according to noted historian and human rights attorney William Pepper, who believes that a continuing cover-up ruins the legacy of his friends Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

“Assassinations didn’t start in the 1960s,” says Pepper, author of explosive investigations that include a new book due June 21 exposing King’s murderers in detail. “They have been part of our society for a very long time.” His explosive new book The Plot To Kill King is scheduled for release this month.

Even more remarkable than Pepper’s listing of political victims from Socrates, Julius Caesar and Jesus up to modern times, he has provided legal representation for both of his friends’ convicted killers.

Pepper believes the late James Earl Ray, King’s convicted killer, and RFK’s still-imprisoned convicted slayer Sirhan Sirhan have been patsies framed by authorities to take the blame for the real assassins hired by still-powerful entities.

Update: Gary Null Show, New Evidence On Martin Luther King Murder, Gary Null interviews Dr. William Pepper, a King family friend and author who published a new book June 21 naming the murderers, June 21, 2016. We present new evidence that demands a revision of the history behind the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. An exclusive live press conference happened today over the radio, June 21, at the studios of the Progressive Radio Network.

Pepper (shown in a 1967 photo with King) has spent decades attempting to expunge the convicted men’s guilt in their separate cases.

Pepper’s work has included his courageous and creative successes in persuading several of those allegedly complicit in King’s murder to confess at least part of their guilt. Overcoming obstacles by so-called law enforcement, Pepper has revealed, most notably so far in his 2003 book An Act of State. a chilling plot perpetrated by rogue officials, who sometimes used Mafia or military gunmen,

Setting the stage for his latest book, Pepper shared his insights May 21 in a panel discussion about American assassinations and Deep State intrigue held at the annual Left Forum at John Jay Criminal Justice College in Manhattan.

Joining the panel were best-selling author Russ Baker, speaking on President John F. Kennedy’s death, and this editor.

Baker is working on a new book about the JFK murder and cover-up.

I previewed the Justice Integrity Project’s comprehensive Readers Guide to the RFK Assassination that is being released today in preparation for the 48th anniversary of the late New York senator Robert Kennedy’s 1968 death early in the morning of June 5, 1968.

The shooting came minutes after Kennedy won that year’s California Democratic presidential primary. The victory positioned RFK as that cycle’s most likely Democratic nominee and the favorite to win the presidency. The presidency would have given him also the clout to renew an investigative into his brother’s assassination, and implement other progressive policies, including ending the Vietnam war and pursuing the kind of economic and social justice policies King had advocated.

Instead, Republican Richard Nixon won the election and two terms in office, putting the nation on a long-term authoritarian, Big Government course that continues to the present with a bipartisan consensus to engage in endless wars on grounds of national security.

University of California historian and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott advanced the Deep State concept with his pioneering 1993 book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK.

Scott’s compelling thesis and evidence, since endorsed by many others, are that the major 1960s assassinations represented a power grab by a hidden “Deep” government. The perpetrators’ ability to suppress the truth of the JFK, MLK and RFK murders showed that rogue officials could eliminate the decade’s three most important progressive leaders without accountability in courts or elsewhere.

No Lies Radio, a non-profit grassroots affiliate of the Pacifica Radio Network, documented our 110-minute panel (including Q&A moderated by Gregory Longo). This was part of six-panel series at the conference on “The Deep State” at the conference. No Lies Radio recorded all six of the panels, which are listed below with links to the speakers and now-archived radio coverage.

June 1

TrineDay, New book claims link between the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Nixon conspiracy to scuttle the Paris Peace Talks, Staff report, June 1, 2016. There is a link between the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Nixon conspiracy to scuttle the Paris Peace Talks. The startling, explosive allegation is made by Miami based author Fernando Faura in his new book, The Polka Dot File on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing – The Paris Peace Talks Connection, to be published by TrineDay, June 6, 2016.

The Polka Dot File refers to the mystery woman in the polka-dot dress who ran out of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles claiming to have shot the senator, while the alleged assassin was being pummeled and captured in the kitchen. Faura, an award winning journalist, is credited with being the only newsman to chase the mystery woman even after the police denied her existence.

“I have always been fascinated by the story of John Fahey, who spent the day leading up to Bobby Kennedy’s assassination with a mysterious woman whose group were “going to take care of Kennedy tonight.” Without the persistence and ingenuity of Fernando Faura, we wouldn’t have that story.”

“As the last remaining reporter on the scene who chased the polka-dot dress mystery, here he brings us with him, day by day, on his investigation. We’re transported back in time to the aftermath of Kennedy’s murder in June 1968, and given suppressed witness testimony and a tantalizing new lead that connects to one of the great political scandals of the Nixon presidency. A must-read for anyone interested in this case.”

– Shane O’Sullivan, producer and director of RFK Must Die ( 2007) and author of Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy (2008).

May

May 26

WhoWhatWhy, Exclusive, Previously Unpublished Interview With Mark Lane, Matt Harvey, May 26, 2016. Mark Lane, the store-front lawyer, freedom-rider, and prolific author who took the CIA to court and won, talks about a number of subjects, including his lifelong crusade to get the word out on who really killed John F. Kennedy.

Lane, shown in a file photo, was arguably the first and most prominent of a band of citizens to question the increasingly untenable tale from government-approved media that President Kennedy was murdered by a lone lunatic with a mail order bolt-action rifle. (Especially after Lee Oswald was himself gunned down in the Dallas police station.)

If we accept Orwell’s dictum that truth-telling during a time of universal deceit equals revolution, America lost a great dissident when Mark Lane succumbed to a heart attack recently. In his careful, tweedy way, Lane did as much during the 1960s as any band of New Left radicals to change the national consciousness from blind acceptance of whatever came out of the TV to the bracing distrust of government that has marked public attitudes since the 1970s.

May 19

JFKFacts.org, Hardway declaration: how CIA stonewalled our JFK investigation, Jefferson Morley (shown at right in a file photo), May 19, 2016. In a new sworn declaration filed in federal court, former JFK investigator Dan Hardway tells the story of how the CIA stonewalled him and other investigators for the House Select Committee of Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978.

Hardway’s first-person account is perhaps the clearest accounts of how the CIA obstructed Congress’s attempt to investigate JFK’s assassination in 1978 since Gaeton Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation. Hardway adds new detail to the story Fonzi told by detailing the obstructionist tactics of George Joannides that he personally experienced.

Hardway (shown in a file photo) also documents the “public benefit” of disclosures forced by my Freedom of Information Action lawsuit, Morley v. CIA, now in its 13th year. The court is now considering the issue of whether the government has to pay the legal fees of my attorney James Lesar, who prevailed over government attorney’s three times during the course of the litigation.

Hardway’s declaration highlights how Joannides prevented the HSCA from clarifying the relationship between the CIA and the Cuban Student Directorate, an agency-funded anti-Castro group whose members had contact with Lee Oswald in the summer of 1963. Hardway notes that the HSCA didn’t probe the issue in 1978 because CIA “had firmly represented to the HSCA that all ties between the DRE and the CIA had been terminated prior to1963.”

That representation was false, as the records from Joannides’ personnel file, which I obtained in the lawsuit, demonstrate. In fact, Joannides served as case office for the DRE from April 1962 to May 1964.

Hardway also highlights one of the key documents that the CIA is withholding: a job evaluation, written September 20, 1978, “not long after Mr. Joannides began his job undercover as liaison with the HSCA.” See Hardway declaration here.

photo), May 19, 2016. In a new sworn declaration filed in federal court, former JFK investigator Dan Hardway tells the story of how the CIA stonewalled him and other investigators for the House Select Committee of Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978.

Hardway’s first-person account is perhaps the clearest accounts of how the CIA obstructed Congress’s attempt to investigate JFK’s assassination in 1978 since Gaeton Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation. Hardway adds new detail to the story Fonzi told by detailing the obstructionist tactics of George Joannides that he personally experienced.

Hardway (shown in a file photo) also documents the “public benefit” of disclosures forced by my Freedom of Information Action lawsuit, Morley v. CIA, now in its 13th year. The court is now considering the issue of whether the government has to pay the legal fees of my attorney James Lesar, who prevailed over government attorney’s three times during the course of the litigation.

Hardway’s declaration highlights how Joannides prevented the HSCA from clarifying the relationship between the CIA and the Cuban Student Directorate, an agency-funded anti-Castro group whose members had contact with Lee Oswald in the summer of 1963. Hardway notes that the HSCA didn’t probe the issue in 1978 because CIA “had firmly represented to the HSCA that all ties between the DRE and the CIA had been terminated prior to1963.”

That representation was false, as the records from Joannides’ personnel file, which I obtained in the lawsuit, demonstrate. In fact, Joannides served as case office for the DRE from April 1962 to May 1964.

Hardway also highlights one of the key documents that the CIA is withholding: a job evaluation, written September 20, 1978, “not long after Mr. Joannides began his job undercover as liaison with the HSCA.” See Hardway declaration here.

May 12

New York Times, Mark Lane, Early Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theorist, Dies at 89, Keith Schneider, May 12, 2016. Mark Lane, the defense lawyer, social activist and author who concluded in a blockbuster book in the mid-1960s that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy, a thesis supported in part by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979, died on Tuesday at his home in Charlottesville, VA. He was 89. The cause was a heart attack, his friend and paralegal Sue Herndon said.

The Kennedy assassination, one of the manifest turning points of the 20th century, was the pivotal moment in Mr. Lane’s life and career. He would go on to raise the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. five years later, but it was his Kennedy inquiry that made his name. Before the president’s murder on Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. Lane was a minor figure in New York’s legal and political circles.

After the Kennedy murder, Mr. Lane (shown in a 2011 photo) devoted much of the next three decades to its investigation. Almost immediately he began the Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry, interviewed witnesses, collected evidence and delivered speeches on the assassination in the United States and in Europe, where he befriended Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, who became an early supporter of Mr. Lane’s efforts.

Mr. Lane emerged as one of the most important experts on the Kennedy assassination after President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the Warren Commission to investigate it. Mr. Lane testified before the commission in 1964 and was a legal counsel to Marguerite Oswald, the suspect’s mother.

He published the results of his inquiry in August 1966 in “Rush to Judgment,” his first book, which dominated best-seller lists for two years. With a trial lawyer’s capacity to amass facts and a storyteller’s skill in distilling them into a coherent narrative, he asserted that the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman was incomplete, reckless at times and implausible.

The book raised doubts about Oswald’s marksmanship and the expertise of police agencies, and it sought to ridicule the Warren Commission’s conclusion that one “magic bullet” could have struck and grievously injured President Kennedy and Gov. John Connally of Texas and have still emerged essentially intact.Mr. Lane’s findings were disputed aggressively by the government. Still, the financial success of “Rush to Judgment” and its conclusions prompted the development of a cottage industry of books on the assassination, written both by those who believed in a conspiracy and by those who did not. More than 2,000 such titles were eventually published.

May 11

Flagpole, Lee Harvey Oswald and Ted Cruz’s Father, Donald E. Wilkes, Jr., May 11, 2016. Donald E. Wilkes, Jr. (shown in a file photo) is a professor emeritus at the University of Georgia where he taught in the iaw school for 40 years. Recently, stunning accusations have been made against Rafael Cruz, father of recent presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz. It is alleged that in New Orleans in 1963 the elder Cruz accompanied Lee Harvey Oswald while Oswald was handing out pro-Fidel Castro “HANDS OFF CUBA!” leaflets.

A majority of the researchers who have studied Lee Harvey Oswald’s short but enigmatic life—LBJ famously described Oswald as “quite a mysterious fellow”—believe it is likely that Oswald was both a CIA operative and an FBI informant. Under this approach, Oswald really was an undercover government agent, not a leftist or a Marxist. When he did such things as hand out pro-Castro leaflets or claim membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, he was engaged in sheepdeeping, a term used in the intelligence community to refer to manipulated behavior designed to create a desired image.

It is not improbable that Rafael Cruz, a vocal, militant, activist opponent of Fidel Castro, might have been involved in the CIA’s massive secret anti-Castro activities in New Orleans. Wayne Madsen may well be right in saying that “there is strong reason to believe that Cruz was associated with [the] Central Intelligence Agency’s anti-Castro operations.” If this was the case, Cruz may very well have known that both he and Oswald were undercover American intelligence assets. If so, this would explain why, if he was the man in the photos, he did not, despite his near-fanatical anti-Castroism, loudly remonstrate with a man distributing pro-Castro literature right in front of him.

At any rate, the story of the alleged connection between Lee Harvey Oswald and Rafael Cruz as told and popularized by the National Enquirer is flawed because it rests upon three fundamental factual errors. Contrary to what the Enquirer breathlessly asserts, Cruz was not a “commie;” Oswald was not pro-communist; and Oswald did not assassinate President Kennedy.

May 7

OpEdNews, When They Killed JFK They Killed America, Paul Craig Roberts (shown in a file photo), May 7, 2016. In the JFK administration I was a White House Fellow. President Kennedy’s intention was to involve many young Americans in government in order to keep idealism alive as a counter to the material interests of lobby groups.

In my lifetime there has not been another like him. Indeed, today he would be impossible. Conservatives and Republicans did not like him, because he was thoughtful. Their favorite weapon against him was their account of his love life, which according to them involved Mafia molls and Marilyn Monroe. Unlike most presidents, Kennedy was able to break with the conventional thinking of the time. For those of you too young to have experienced John Kennedy and those of you who have forgot his greatness, do yourselves a favor and listen to this 5 minute, 23 second speech.

The CIA, the Joint Chiefs, and the Secret Service concluded that JFK was “soft on communism.” So did the Bill Buckley conservatives.

JFK was assassinated because of anti-communist hysteria in the military and security agencies. The Warren Commission was well aware of this. The coverup was necessary because America was locked into a Cold War with the Soviet Union. To put US military, CIA, and Secret Service personnel on trial for murdering the President of the United States would have shaken the confidence of the American people in their own government. Oswald had nothing whatsoever to do with JFK’s assassination. That is why Oswald was himself assassinated inside the Dallas jail before he could be questioned. The evil that resides in Washington does not only kill foreign leaders who try to do the right thing, but also its own.

May 4

The Blaze, Trump Says He Never Believed JFK-Rafael Cruz Conspiracy Theory, Only Wanted People to Read It, Oliver Darcy, May. 4, 2016 ((1:36 min. video). Donald Trump said Wednesday that he never believed Ted Cruz’s father was connected to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, just one day after floating a conspiracy theory which suggested exactly that during an interview on national television.Speaking with CNN host Wolf Blitzer, Trump repeatedly said he never thought the theory he cited held water: “Of course I don’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it. But I did say, let people read it.”

Just one day prior, Trump floated an unsubstantiated National Enquirer report on “Fox & Friends” that suggested Rafael Cruz was with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the assassination of Kennedy. “What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the shooting?” Trump asked at the time. Pressed on the subject after Cruz ended his bid for the White House, the presumptive Republican nominee insisted he never believed the theory he floated. “Of course I don’t think that,” he told Blitzer.

May 3

USA Today, Trump bizarrely links Cruz’s father to JFK assassin; Cruz goes ballistic, Donovan Slack, May 3, 2016. The feud between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz hit epic proportions Tuesday as Republican primary voters headed to the polls in Indiana. Trump was asked on Fox News to respond to remarks by the Texas senator’s father on the campaign trail. Rafael Cruz had said electing “the alternative” to his son “could be the destruction of America.”

Then he [Trump] insinuated that Cruz’s father may have played some role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. [Sic No really. He brought up a questionable National Enquirer story claiming Rafael Cruz appeared in a photo with Oswald shortly before the murder. (The Miami Herald took a critical look at the claims.)

JIP editor’s note: The USA Today writer mixes up JFK (the president) and his son, JFK Jr., as noted above in the USA Today story widely redistributed May 3. Editors presumably will correct the story at some point in the future but the error shows the utter historical cluelessness of those involved, and their willingness nonetheless to editorialize on a breaking news story.

Politico, Trump accuses Cruz’s father of helping JFK’s assassin, Nolan D. McCaskill, May 3, 2016. Donald Trump on Tuesday alleged that Ted Cruz’s father was with John F. Kennedy’s assassin shortly before he murdered the president, parroting a National Enquirer story claiming that Rafael Cruz was pictured with Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963. A Cruz campaign spokesperson told the Miami Herald, which pointed out numerous flaws in the Enquirer story, that it was “another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage.”

MSNBC, Cruz calls Trump ‘serial philanderer’ and ‘pathological liar’ in blistering attack, Staff report, May 3, 2016. Trump’s evidence? A photo, disseminated in fringe circles online and then by the National Enquirer, that conspiracy sleuths claim shows the elder Cruz near Oswald. There is zero evidence the person in question is Rafael Cruz.

Washington Post, How on earth is the media supposed to cover Trump’s wacky JFK-Cruz conspiracy theory? Callum Borchers, May 3, 2016. Callum Borchers covers the intersection of politics and media. Some journalists aren’t holding back. But hard-news reports include some written gymnastics.

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TruNews, The Cruz Conspiracy, Rick Wiles, May 3, 2016. (11:26 mins.).

Infowars, Trump Links Cruz’s Father to JFK Assassination, Kit Daniels, May 3, 2016. “That was reported, and nobody talks about it,” Trump says about mainstream media, GOP Presidential frontrunner Donald Trump seconded on May 3 the explosive allegation that Rafael Cruz, father of presidential rival Ted Cruz.

 

April

April 22

Four French Generals who tried to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle: Left to right: André Zeller, Edmond Jouhaud, Raoul Salan and Maurice Challe. Photo credit: Unknown / Wikimedia

WhoWhatWhy, Anniversary of an Attempt to Overthrow France’s Charles De Gaulle. Did CIA Help? WhoWhatWhy Team, April 22, 2016. It seems like the far-fetched plot of a Hollywood movie: Top military leaders are conspiring to bring down a western democracy. But that is exactly what happened, just days after the Bay of Pigs.

In the post-World War II era, one week stands out as truly extraordinary. Just a couple of days after the failed US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, on April 21, 1961, a group of French generals launched a coup-d’etat, with the aim of taking down President Charles de Gaulle (shown during World War II). This week marks the 55th anniversary of this profound event, little-remembered today.

The conspirators managed to control Algiers, the capital of French Algeria, but failed to achieve their secondary objective of taking Paris. Lacking popular support and having lost momentum, the coup was put down within days. Evidence suggests that Allen Dulles, the US Director of the CIA, and his numerous contacts deep within the French government, helped orchestrate the plot.

Consortium News, How CBS News Aided the JFK Cover-up, James DiEugenio, April 22, 2016. With the Warren Report on JFK’s assassination under attack in the mid-1960s, there was a chance to correct the errors and reassess the findings, but CBS News intervened to silence the critics. In the mid-1960s, amid growing skepticism about the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman findings on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, there was a struggle inside CBS News about whether to allow the critics a fair public hearing at the then-dominant news network. Some CBS producers pushed for a debate between believers and doubters and one even submitted a proposal to put the Warren Report “on trial,” according to internal CBS documents.

But CBS executives, who were staunch supporters of the Warren findings and had personal ties to some commission members, spiked those plans and instead insisted on presenting a defense of the lone-gunman theory while dismissing doubts as baseless conspiracy theories, the documents show.

March

March 14

WhoWhatWhy, The Tortured Logic Behind Sirhan Sirhan’s Parole Denial, Shane O’Sullivan, March 14, 2016. Shane O’Sullivan is an author, filmmaker and researcher at Kingston University, London.His work includes the documentary RFK Must Die (2007) and the book Who Killed Bobby? (2008). Newly Released Transcript Exposes Tragic Flaws in Parole Process.

In the newly released transcript of Sirhan Sirhan’s parole hearing on February 10, we discover why — at nearly 72 years of age — the convicted murderer of Bobby Kennedy “continues to pose an unreasonable risk of danger to society or a threat to public safety and is therefore not suitable for parole.”

Since its landmark opinion in the Lawrence case in 2008, the California Supreme Court has required the parole board to provide “some evidence” that a prisoner is “currently dangerous” when denying parole. This, and pressure to reduce prison overcrowding, has seen parole grant rates for “lifers” jump from 8 percent in 2008 to 33 percent in 2014. A Stanford Law School study in 2011 found that, of 860 murderers paroled in California since 1995, only five re-offended and none were convicted of another murder.

But, as we’ll see, the tortured logic used by one of the commissioners to compute Sirhan’s current threat level gives him little hope of freedom anytime soon. As described in my previous piece, the hearing was hotly contested. On one side, David Dahle, representing the L.A. County District Attorney’s office, called Sirhan (shown in a mug shot) a “terrorist.” On the other, Sirhan’s attorney William Pepper and shooting victim Paul Schrade called him “a political prisoner” and condemned his inhumane treatment.

Read the full transcript of Sirhan’s parole hearing here.

 

February

The Indicter, Olof Palme and Julian Assange subjected in Sweden to same hate campaign by the same political forces and with the same purpose: to defend U.S. geopolitical interests, Professor Marcello Ferrada de Noli (shown in photo), March edition (released Feb. 28, 2016). Today, the 28th of February 2016, the world is mourning the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Olof Palme, the honourable PM of Sweden. The Swedish media and a variety of early authorities and representatives of Sweden’s power and cultural elites have been during the last weeks unanimous on this: The assassination took place in the frame of a hate campaign against him, and where Olof Palme was constantly subjected to libelous personal attacks.

However, what that media and politicians who professed frank animosity against Palme’s anti-imperialist stances do not say is that it was they who promoted and/or echoed such a hate campaign. Months ago, a politician of name Jörgen Olsen and belonging of the same organization as Carl Bildt and Ulf Adelsohn wrote in Facebook, “Palme was a repulsive person.” That is the terms used by former Social Minister Göran Haglund when referring to Assange.

Martin Klepke, a reporter formerly working at the Swedish newspaper Expressen, told in 2014 that he heard colleagues at his working place in Expressen discussing in serious terms whether Olof Palme “should go voluntarily or forced out by means of military power.” That was the time when Olof Palme had in unambiguous terms denounced the bombing of Hanoi civilian population by the U.S. and criticized the occupation war in Vietnam.

Nevertheless, the Swedish police disregarded eyewitness reports from the very same evening of the murder of Palme which identified a U.S. agent at the time working for Pinochet’s infamous DINA – the secret security agency set up to assassinate opposition leaders abroad. Olof Palme was the only foreign dignitary who was listed in the death list of Operation Condor.

Feb. 26

OpEdNews, RFK Murder Cover-Up Continues After Dramatic Parole Hearing, Andrew Kreig, Feb. 26, 2016. A California parole board this month rejected a dramatic plea to release the convicted slayer of 1968 presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy, thereby continuing one of the nation’s most notorious murder cover-ups.

Feb. 25

Reader Supported News, Sirhan Denied Parole: It’s a Broken Criminal Justice System, Bill Simpich, Feb. 25, 2016. Bill Simpich, shown in a file photo, is a San Francisco attorney and prominent researcher of 1960s assassinations.

Sirhan Sirhan, the accused killer of Robert F. Kennedy, was denied parole for the 15th time on Wednesday, February 10. After 48 years in prison, he has done everything he could to change his life. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called not only for his release but for a new investigation of his father’s death. One of the men Sirhan shot, UAW organizer Paul Schrade, testified on Sirhan’s behalf at the hearing. Schrade, 91, expressed his confidence that a second gunman shot Bobby. Sparks flew when Schrade turned to Sirhan and said, “Sirhan, I forgive you.” The parole board told Schrade he had no right to speak to the prisoner.

Schrade is one of the victims of Sirhan’s bullets. Schrade has spent more than 40 years mastering the evidence in the RFK murder. Under California law, a victim can speak at the parole hearing for as much time as he or she wants. How dare these people say that Schrade cannot look into a man’s eyes and speak to him? Because the people who run the criminal justice system are powerful, well-connected, and above the law. The RFK murder was figured out a long time ago. There was a second gunman, but the California criminal justice system has no interest in looking for the killer.

The cover-up in the RFK case is well-documented. Review the evidence at sirhanbsirhan.org or at any number of competent websites. We live in a society that has lost its way. We need a mighty burst of outrage to turn things around. Sirhan has determined attorneys, but they have little power in the face of a determined law enforcement machine that is unaccountable to its citizens.

Feb. 23

Politico Europe, Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Feb. 23, 2016. They don’t hate ‘our freedoms.’ They hate that we’ve betrayed our ideals in their own countries — for oil. In part because my father was murdered by an Arab, I’ve made an effort to understand the impact of U.S. policy in the Mideast and particularly the factors that sometimes motivate bloodthirsty responses from the Islamic world against our country. As we focus on the rise of the Islamic State and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology. Instead we should examine the more complex rationales of history and oil — and how they often point the finger of blame back at our own shores.

Feb. 20

Free Thought Project, Eyewitness Comes Forward: “Sirhan Sirhan Did Not Assassinate RFK,” Andrew Emett, Feb. 20, 2016. Andrew Emett is a Los Angeles-based reporter exposing political and corporate corruption. Despite the fact that Sirhan Sirhan shot him in the head nearly 50 years ago, Paul Schrade attended the convicted assassin’s parole hearing this week to both forgive Sirhan and defend the shooter’s innocence in the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. After decades of research into the assassination and witnessing the event first-hand, Schrade continues to assert that Sirhan physically could not have fired the fatal bullet that killed Kennedy.

Less than three months after the assassination, the LAPD incinerated thousands of documents and pieces of evidence related to Kennedy’s death. Besides destroying physical evidence, including door jambs and ceiling tiles taken from the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, the LAPD also burned 2,140 police photographs related to the murder. Calling for a reinvestigation into Kennedy’s murder in December 1974, Schrade led the campaign to eventually declassify the remaining LAPD documents in 1988, after 20 years of being suppressed.

Feb. 19

WhoWhatWhy, Sirhan: A “Manchurian Candidate” in the RFK Assassination? Jeff Schechtman, Feb. 19, 2016. Parole hearing number 14 for Sirhan Sirhan may have finally launched a search for the truth behind Robert F. Kennedy’s murder. Forty-eight years ago (in 1968), the country was in the midst of another presidential campaign that came at a seminal moment in American history. Five years earlier, John F. Kennedy had been murdered, and Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April of 1968. The Vietnam War was escalating. Race riots were becoming a fact of urban life. Racial and generational politics as well as social issues were threatening to tear the country apart. Then on the night of June 5th, 1968, after John Kennedy’s brother Robert had won the all-important California Primary, America got yet another jolt: the younger Kennedy, too, had been struck down.

Flash forward to 2016. Last week, his alleged killer, Sirhan Sirhan, was up for his 14th parole hearing. Sitting in the audience was Paul Schrade, one of RFK’s closest confidantes — who was also shot during the attack; Schrade, now 91, is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is his conclusion that, assuming Sirhan was one of the shooters that night, he was not the only one. Moreover, if Sirhan fired any shots, Schrade is quite certain that the young Palestinian-American, once again being denied parole, could not have killed RFK — because it was a physical impossibility.

Feb. 16

WhoWhatWhy, The Full Story of the Sirhan Sirhan Parole Hearing, Shane O’Sullivan, Feb. 16, 2016. The near-complete media blackout means the world had to rely on one reporter’s account of the Sirhan Sirhan parole hearing. Here is the complete story of what actually transpired and matters.

“Who Killed Bobby?” book cover and author Shane O’Sullivan; Photo: Union Square Press

Feb. 11

WhoWhatWhy, Sirhan Denied Parole; RFK Friend Distraught, Russ Baker, Feb. 11, 2016.

Information Clearing House, Man Shot Alongside RFK Says Sirhan Sirhan Should Be Granted Parole, Steve Fiorina, Feb. 11, 2016. Paul Schrade, now 91 years old, was shot in the head on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles while standing alongside Kennedy. Schrade contends that Sirhan was not the only shooter that night. In an exclusive interview that aired on 10News Tuesday night, Schrade stated that Kennedy was actually killed by a second gunman.

Washington Post, Sirhan Sirhan denied parole despite a Kennedy confidant’s call for the assassin’s release, Peter Holley, Feb. 11, 2016. After decades of investigation, Paul Schrade (shown in a photo) has no doubt about the identity of the man who shot him in the head shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel: It was Sirhan Sirhan, the same gunman convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy. And yet, when Schrade came face to face with Sirhan for the first time in nearly 50 years, at a parole hearing in San Diego on Wednesday, he argued that the notorious gunman wasn’t Kennedy’s killer.

But the panel wasn’t swayed and Sirhan [shown in a 2016 photo] was denied parole for the 15th time, according to the Associated Press, which noted: Commissioners concluded after more than three hours of intense testimony at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Center that Sirhan did not show adequate remorse or understand the enormity of his crime.

Still, the AP reported, Schrade forgave his shooter during the hearing and apologized to Sirhan not doing more to win his release. “I should have been here long ago and that’s why I feel guilty for not being here to help you and to help me,” Schrade said. The fatal bullets, Schrade argued, were fired from a different shooter’s gun.

Sirhan Sirhan is shown in a photo upon his arrest in 1968

JIP Editor’s Note: Important new books and citizen efforts, including by the new Citizens Against Political Assassinations, are compiling additional evidence that Sirhan, a Christian of Palestinian descent and no strong political views, was most probably a mind-controlled patsy who took the fall for Robert Kennedy’s murder, with scant intention or remembrance of the circumstances.

Feb. 10

NBC News, Robert Kennedy Killer Sirhan Sirhan Denied Parole — Again, Corky Siemaszko, Feb. 10, 2016. The 15th time before a California parole board was not the charm Tuesday for Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin. Once again, the commissioners said no to releasing Sirhan B. Sirhan, who has spent nearly half a century behind bars for fatally shooting the Democratic senator for New York. “This crime impacted the nation, and I daresay it impacted the world,” commissioner Brian Roberts said. “It was a political assassination of a viable Democratic presidential candidate.” Kennedy, who was the younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy, was shot June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just after he’d won the state’s Democratic presidential primary. The 42-year-old candidate died the next day.

Now 71, Sirhan has maintained for years that he doesn’t remember shooting Kennedy. “If you want a confession, I can’t make it now,” Sirhan said at the hearing Wednesday. “Legally speaking, I’m not guilty of anything. … It’s not that I’m making light of it. I’m responsible for being there.”

Sirhan, a Christian-born Palestinian from Jordan outraged by RFK’s support for Israel, was caught with a gun in his hand and later convicted of the killing. He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison after California banned the death penalty. At his last parole hearing in 2011, parole commissioners said Sirhan had not shown enough remorse or understanding of the severity of his crime.

Feb. 9

WhoWhatWhy, RFK Friend to Raise Doubts About Sirhan Guilt at Parole Hearing, Shane O’Sullivan, Feb. 9, 2016. Although Shot by Sirhan, Paul Schrade Calls for His Release.

KGTV (ABC-TV San Diego affiliate) / Channel 10 News, Did second gunman kill Robert F. Kennedy? Emily Valdez, Feb. 9, 2016. A bystander Sirhan Sirhan also shot the night Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated claims the presidential candidate was actually killed by a second gunman, who remains free to this day. It was quite the celebration at The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night of June 5, 1968. More than 1,000 people were celebrating. Democratic Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy won the California primary. His brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated five years earlier by a gunman in Dallas, Texas. He was poised to be the next president.

“It was just a beautiful moment,” said Paul Schrade, 91. In 1968, Schrade (shown in a recent photo) was a union official and friend of Robert Kennedy, or Bobby, as he called him. Schrade walked with Kennedy into the kitchen that night, after Kennedy gave his victory speech to an elated, cheering crowd. Kennedy died 26 hours later. Sirhan was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Schrade knows Sirhan fired the bullet that hit him. But he is convinced there was a second gunman who shot Kennedy.

“[Sirhan] couldn’t shoot Robert Kennedy and didn’t, he was never in the position to do this,” Schrade said. Schrade said he has spent the last 40 years investigating the case. “There’s strong evidence of a second gunman,” Schrade said. He said experts re-examined evidence. “They could not match the Kennedy bullet. He got hit in the back of the neck, it was the only whole bullet, it did not match Sirhan’s gun,” Schrade said.

Feb. 4

President John F. Kennedy prepares to deliver remarks. Photo credit: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum / White House

WhoWhatWhy, Exclusive: List of Withheld JFK Assassination Documents, Russ Baker, Feb. 4, 2016. Here It Is — a Map to What We Can Still Learn. Exciting news: WhoWhatWhy has obtained the complete list of 3,603 secret documents on the Kennedy assassination still being held by the US government. (Or, to be precise, what it admits to still holding.) Now we can at least get a peek at what they have been hiding. The list was obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request by FOIA specialist Michael Ravnitzky, who alerted us. The complete list is below [On WhoWhatWhy site). You’ll note that some documents are briefly characterized by subject, while others are less clearly identified.

The government has promised to release as many documents as possible in October, 2017, the 25th anniversary of the JFK Records Act, in which Congress mandated that all efforts be made to release everything in Washington’s possession unless an overriding case can be made for withholding in the national interest. Some — perhaps most — of these documents could be released at that time. Then again, they may be further withheld. The CIA in particular is likely to argue that some are just too sensitive to be made public. Still, knowing their subject matter makes it easier to press for disclosure, and to hold the government accountable by insisting it justify any continued withholdings.

Those who wish to look at the list should be forewarned that it’s a bit like looking at hieroglyphics. Most of the names and brief references will mean something only to a very few. Among the documents that caught our eye:

• Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA “201 File.” 201 files contain personality assessments
• Records on David Morales, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, William King Harvey and others considered by top researchers prime suspects for participation in the planning and implementation of Kennedy’s murder.
• Tax returns of Michael Paine, who with his wife Ruth provided housing and more for the Oswalds — Ruth also got Lee a job in the Texas School Book Depository — from which he purportedly shot Kennedy; Michael worked for the defense contractor Bell Helicopter.

JFKFacts.org, Denied: the JFK records the government doesn’t want you to see, Jeff Morley, Feb. 4, 2016. The invaluable WhoWhatWhy has posted a spreadsheet of the 3,600-plus assassination-related records that the U.S. government has never made public. The existence of the 3,600 records was first reported in JFK Facts last May. The WhoWhatWhy document, obtained by FOIA specialist Michael Ravnitsky, advances the story by providing new details about what exactly the government does not care to share with the American people. I’ve already called attention to seven key files that the CIA is hiding.

The National Archives staff, led by Martha Murphy Wagner, says that it is now preparing to release all of these documents online by October 2017. This list identifies many more documents relevant to the question, “Who killed JFK?” and still more of historical interest. Some that jumped out at me on first reading. Take look and send me your list of the five JFK documents you think should be made public.

 

January

Justice Integrity Project, Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Enhanced By Historic Discovery, Andrew Kreig, Jan. 18, 2016. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy is forever enhanced by discovery of a 24-minute recording of his first meeting with the national media, which occurred during a 1962 speech that was the first ever by an African American at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

“Readers Guides” To JFK, MLK, RFK Assassinations (via Justice Integrity Project)

 

Readers Guide To JFK Assassination: Books, Videos, Archives. A so-far 30-part compilation of major books, videos, documents, websites, interpretative columns, and other archives from all major points of view relevant to President John F. Kennedy’s death on Nov. 22, 1963.

 

Readers Guide To The MLK Assassination: Books, Videos, Archives. Key books, videos, documents, websites and other archives most relevant to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder on April 4, 1968.

Readers Guide To RFK Assassination: Books, Videos, Archives. For researchers, reporters and concerned citizens, this guide presents key books, videos, documents, websites and other archives most relevant to 1968 Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy’s murder on June 6, 1968.