The Secret JFK Records
Preliminary Note: Watch Oliver Stone, Jefferson Morley, and James DiEugenio Testify Live Today on JFK before Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. 2 p.m. Eastern. Today, April 1. Click here.
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For more than 60 years, U.S. officials have claimed that to release their secret JFK-assassination-related records would threaten “national security.” That was their position during the Warren Commission hearings in 1964 and during the House Select Committee hearings in the 1970s. That’s what they told the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. That’s what they told President Trump during his first term in office. That’s how they got President Biden to order the continued secrecy of the records essentially into perpetuity.
It was all a lie. There was never any threat to “national security” whatsoever.
How do we know this? Because many, but certainly not all, of those long secret records have now been revealed to the public. And guess what! The United States has not fallen into the ocean and the U.S. government has not been taken over by the Reds, terrorists, Muslims, Taliban, Russia, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, or Venezuela. The federal government and the nation are still standing!
Of course, it’s true that any of those scary things could still happen if and when the rest of the long-secret records are released. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
So, why would the U.S. national-security establishment lie about so-called threats to “national-security” that would supposedly arise if those records were to be released?
Immediately after the recent initial release of records, the mainstream press declared that there were no “smoking guns,” as in the nature of an official confession to the assassination. But that’s a patently ridiculous assertion. Assassination researchers were always certain that the secrecy was not intended to hide a confession. Don’t forget, after all, that these are all records that the national-security establishment knowingly delivered to the National Archives in the 1990s, where they were then kept secret. What are the chances they would have delivered a confession to the National Archives? No chance at all. Nobody would be that dumb. And there is no doubt that the high officials who worked in the CIA were not dumb people. On the contrary, they were extremely smart people.
Moreover, it was standard practice within the national-security establishment to never put any reference to a covert state-sponsored assassination into writing. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that policy would have been especially followed in the state-sponsored assassination of a U.S. president.
So, then why fight so fiercely to keep the reco
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