Assessing New JFK Records, Alec Baldwin’s Slam Of NBC Cover-up

Mary Ferrell Foundation President Rex Bradford has described the Trump release process via the National Archives as a “travesty.” Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger, an attorney and book publisher, predicted what he called a “fiasco.” He followed up with the column The JFK Cover-Up Continues  describing the process as successful cover for criminal rogues at the CIA, with the agency’s successors probably grateful to President Trump for his role in confusing the public.

Baldwin Helps Us To Understand

Fortunately, the famed actor Alec Baldwin (shown at left on the cover of his memoir Nevertheless published last spring) helped cut through the confusion last month with a bold, civic-minded revelation of how the NBC and MSNBC continue to support the disputed Warren Commission account of the murder and to suppress alternative discussion.

There’s more on that below, along with a mini-history of how the major media have avoided reporting on evidence in the murder through the decades.

Instead, the broadcast networks, major newspapers, wire services, book publishers and academic institutions distract their audiences by using smear terms like “conspiracy theory.” They create so much needless confusion that it’s understandable that President Trump accuses such organizations of delivering “fake news” even when journalists have a sound basis for their coverage.

Today’s column first provides an opinion about the JFK case and cover-up. We then report specifics on the latest release by the National Archives, which occurred at the end of the workday on Friday, Dec. 15 (the traditional time for public relations operatives to bury news). Finally, we report the announced timetable for future JFK document releases. An appendix lists recent, relevant news stories and the 48-part “Readers Guide to the JFK Assassination.”

Personal View, Recommendation

Beginning in 2013, I kept a relatively open mind as I began in-depth study of the current implications of the Kennedy murder and its coverage.

In the process of examining many media treatments about the murder on its 50th anniversary that year, I began a list (updated here) of several hundred of the most important books, films, official reports and research libraries representing all major viewpoints. This grew to what is now the 48-part “Readers Guide to the JFK Assassination,” with hot links to each segment provided at the bottom of this column.

Following close association with lifelong experts on this topic, my view has evolved from that of a cataloger and reporter to that of a commentator. At this point, I recommend that those who want to understand the case read brief overviews of diverse sources and then focus on at least one of the best recent books.

The alternative of trying to learn via news reports of details of document disclosures and associated theories is likely to leave even the most diligent general reader lost. That’s because the field has too much information, and is filled with disinformation, time-wasters and other bias along with many genuinely sincere and effective researchers.

Like many other researchers, I recommend as a start JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (2009, 510 pages) by James W. Douglass and/or Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why by Gerald D. McKnight (2005, 478 pages).

For most people, any time spent reading coherent, well-sourced analysis — even if one might oppose the author’s major themes — is more productive than trying to keep up with intermittent “news” reports and film clips about new developments. Many of the pundits have highly dubious motives and credentials.

That said, this column reports on recent developments. I have paid close attention to them and know that many people from around the world remain fascinated by the history-changing JFK murder and its current implications..

Last Week’s Documents

Many of the 3,539 items released on Dec. 15 are proving interesting to experienced researchers, according to our initial review that closely monitors what scholars of diverse viewpoints are saying.

But the National Archives — doubtless under intense pressure from the Trump White House, CIA and FBI — released these materials in such incremental and haphazard fashion that the material is unlikely to change anyone’s pre-existing overall view about Kennedy’s assassination without further study.

And that kind of rigorous, evidence-based analysis is rarely reported in any detail by the corporate-controlled media, which remain wedded to the flawed narrative about the assassination announced by the seven-member Warren Commission in 1964. The Warren report blamed JFK’s murder during a 1963 motorcade through Dallas entirely on former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald (shown at right), acting alone.

This verdict by a part-time Warren panel without significant investigative power was despite vast inconsistencies in the official story that have since been documented by eyewitnesses, more than four million pages of previously released documents, and the oft-solid research contained in many of the more than 2,500 books on the topic of JFK and his death.

For me, the most alarming current implication of the murder is the ongoing reluctance of government, academia and the media to examine the evidence in a thorough, credible manner.

That casts further doubt on the real story regarding a host of other dubious “news” reports on current matters, domestic and foreign, right up to the present-day headlines.

Alec Baldwin Speaks Out

That’s the worrisome context to the recent revelation from Baldwin — reported here for the first time aside from a Facebook posting — about how the big-time media really works.

On Nov. 16 in Houston, Baldwin explained to the research group Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA) his first-hand experience on how NBC and MSNBC handled JFK assassination news and commentary. Baldwin spoke at a CAPA dinner and signed copies of a new humor book that he co-authored in November with Kurt Andersen, You Can’t Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump.

Baldwin is shown at right below in a photo taken during his dialog with CAPA board member Lawrence Schnapf, a New York attorney who also helped organize a two-day mock trial of Oswald as a joint project of CAPA and the South Texas College of Law, Houston.

In response to Schnapf’s question about why the mainstream media do not explore evidentiary questions surrounding the assassination, Baldwin shared his experience in 2013 when, as a once-a-week prime time talk show host at MSNBC, he tried to cablecast a JFK program on the 50th anniversary of the assassination.

Here is Baldwin’s account:

The entertainer had been a successful celebrity podcast host in New York City before MSNBC hired him early in the fall of 2013. He lined up for the JFK anniversary show a team of notable guests, including Mark Lane, the pioneering Warren Commission critic and best-selling author.

But a senior producer advised Baldwin that the NBC network’s policy was to “support” (emphasis added) the conclusions of the Warren Commission, which stated that the Oswald acted alone to kill JFK with three shots from behind during Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Not only was Baldwin’s MSNBC episode never aired (for unrelated reasons arising from a separate and seemingly trumped-up controversy) but NBC has kept the JFK program under wraps, said Baldwin, who added that he has never been able to access the material.

Everyone present for his remarks in Houston would have understood that his talents have since enabled his return to NBC as a frequently featured star on the Saturday Night Live show in another iconic role as “Donald Trump.”

But even a megastar apparently faces limits on his clout when it comes to the JFK case. Something sensitive clearly remains with evidence in the JFK case.

Baldwin concluded that the media and the government seemingly endorse the challenge that Jack Nicholson’s character posed to his prosecutor at the courtroom climax of A Few Good Men:

The American people, like the prosecutor portrayed by Tom Cruise, “can’t handle the truth.” (That scene is excerpted in a 2:39 min. video clip of Nicholson, who is shown at right.)

The American people, however, have never truly had a chance to decide whether to handle the truth. From the beginning, elites in government and the media have been making that decision behind closed doors, often via CIA-implemented propaganda techniques aimed at U.S. audiences and supposedly forbidden under the agency’s 1948 enabling legislation. More on that below.

Authoritative and important as were Baldwin’s remarks in Houston, they received virtually no news coverage aside from Schnapf’s account on his JFK Facebook site.

A ‘Real People’ Concurrence

A similar message was being delivered that same evening, on Nov. 16, by film maker, actor and former NBC star John Barbour in a lecture at the National Press Club about his new documentary The American Media: The Second Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Barbour, 84, is a five-time Emmy winner for television excellence. He is the only person to win in the categories of both news and entertainment. He is known also as “The Godfather of Reality TV” for creating and co-hosting the NBC show Real People, which was once the nation’s most popular television show as well as a critical success.

Barbour, who narrated his documentary, blames the nation’s corporate media for hiding from the public the truth about the JFK murder, as we reported here last month in TV Star John Barbour Premieres New JFK Documentary In DC With Free Screenings, Lectures.

Barbour argues that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison essentially solved the case in the late 1960s and that a co-opted, corrupt corporate media worked with the CIA and others to stymie Garrison’s investigation and follow-ups through the years. More on that below..

Although Baldwin has returned to the NBC network as a frequent star of Saturday Night Live he described in a 2014 essay in Vulture Magazine his revulsion towards the media, particularly in the context of false stories. “Now I loathe and despise the media in a way I did not think possible,” Baldwin said in his essay. “I used to engage with the media knowing that some of it would be adversarial, but now it’s superfluous at best and toxic at its worst.”

NBC, like other major media, covered the JFK murder anniversary in 2013 in several ways. Among the popular but ultimately pointless ways used by many outlets was to encourage reporters and others to reflect on their locales when they learned that JFK had been shot. That strokes egos and emotions but adds little to our understanding of who killed the president and who covered up the facts.

Another staple of “news coverage” is for outlets to present wacko ideas about JFK’s death instead of independent, well-credentialed experts of diverse viewpoints.

Instead, major outlets tend to rely on a cherry-picked sample of the same few so-called experts who can be relied upon to endorse the Warren report in essence, scoff at its critics and who are never subjected to informed challenge. These frequent commentators include University of Virginia politics professor Larry Sabato, former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, and author Gerald Posner.

In sum, the NBC network, like its media peers, has provided through the years relatively little of substance regarding the apparent cover-up of important JFK evidence, as we have reported since 2013. These media critiques included Self-Censorship In JFK TV Treatments Duplicates Corporate Print Media’s Apathy, Cowardice and Major Media Stick With Oswald ‘Lone Gunman’ JFK Theory. (These are part of our project’s  “Readers Guide,” excerpted at the bottom of this column.)

The brave work and commentaries by Barbour and Baldwin — like those of countless little-known law enforcers, doctors, military officers, witnesses and concerned citizens of no particular expertise but their patriotism—help show why the JFK document disclosure requirement this fall prompted the government to create so much confusion.

Beginning five decades ago, a Dallas legal secretary named Mary Ferrell (shown at left) began collecting newspaper clips of the murder because she did not believe the official story. That evolved into the Mary Ferrell Foundation, based in Massachusetts and led by Rex Bradford. This is the world’s largest private collection of documents, which are now electronically indexed.

In the same manner, the celebrities Baldwin and Barbour have risked their insider status and suffered major career setbacks to try to tell the rest of us how the giant news networks have shown scant interest in examining the JFK 1960s evidence.

Barbour has been fired several times from major media jobs for outspoken commentary, and has spent his life savings (he estimates $400,000) on his documentary The American Media, which is subtitled The Garrison Tapes Part II because it draws on 3 1/2 hours of exclusive interviews with the late prosecutor and judge Garrison, shown at right.

Some of these networks, such as NBC, MSNBC and ABC, have through the decades functioned as relatively minor subsidiaries of giant conglomerates that are also major defense contractors dependent on discretionary federal money that can be endangered, particularly if the news divisions irritate some of the nation’s major power brokers.

All of these major media fear adverse regulation, and not just from the Federal Communications Commission. Profit-threatening actions can potentially come also from regulation of mergers, taxes, government grant programs, potential stock filings or bankruptcies.

Perhaps most important, the media titans at the highest levels past and present are not just potential targets of regulators, but the masters of the presidents and members of Congress who appoint the regulators.

And for all the fame of longtime CBS Evening News Anchors Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Bob Schieffer at CBS, for example, none of them were even mentioned in A Passion To Win, the 2001 memoir of the CBS network’s billionaire owner Sumner Redstone, head of the parent company Viacom. At the Redstone level of business and government, these icons of the news business as Cronkite are less important than the art of the deal.

The Dec. 15 Document Disclosures

With that context and some additional history below we can address more fully this year’s document releases by the National Archives.

As the founding editor of the Justice Integrity Project and as a CAPA board member, I helped CAPA prepare for the document releases this year by inviting JFK document experts, including the former Assassination Record Review Board (ARRB) chairman John Tunheim to speak at a CAPA conference March 16 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

The purpose was to show the call by many experts, including from a number of surviving Warren Commission staff members, for remaining JFK documents by the Oct. 26 deadline that Congress and its ARRB had established in the 1990s. We reported on the impressive list of those calling for full release by the deadline in October of this year here: JFK Experts Advocate Compliance With Records Deadline.

Tunheim, now chief federal judge in Minnesota, is shown (in a photo courtesy of Noel St. John) sitting while being introduced by CAPA Chairman Cyril H. Wecht, M.D,, J.D., a noted forensic pathologist, author, medical school professor and critic of the Warren Commission.

Wecht, county coroner for the Pittsburgh region for 20 years, still performs more than 500 autopsies a year at age 86. the author or co-author of more than 40 books, he is shown (also in a photo by Noel St. John). The photo can be fairly interpreted as conveying the emotions of an expert who knows to a certitude that the Warren Commission was not correct but who (with all of his experience and accomplishments) can barely penetrate the ongoing cover-up in the media and elsewhere regarding the crime of the century, at least in the United States.

The locale of the forum was chosen as the National Press Club to coincide with the news industry’s “Sunshine Week” that urges government transparency. But serious consideration of JFK assassination seems to continue as an almost verboten topic in terms of in-depth coverage, and virtually no reporters from mainstream organizations attended, only a few from international or alternative outlets.

My organizations JIP and CAPA reported also on each of the National Archives document releases that began on July 24. Our project’s website contain the coverage updated several times per week on a home page button marked “Assassinations.” The CAPA website contains the material also in its  “News and Views” sections.

Also, I participated on the official, invitation-only White House conference call for news reporters on the evening of Oct. 26. This was for the Trump White House Communications Office to explain to the most relevant reporters the administration’s actions and to entertain our questions.

I was thus in a position to cover the chaotic process and the ill-informed questions by several of those in the mainstream media that night. In curating this news archive. I have received additional perspective from being interviewed during the summer and fall by a number of U.S. and international news organizations about the JFK documents and their current implications.

In this, I commend the Cox Media Washington Bureau especially for reaching out to include alternative viewpoints for its televised reports on JFK document releases along with commentaries from the usual establishment pundits Sabato and Shenon.

It’s a seemingly inevitable part of the news process also that a headline writer for one newspaper put my comments in a round-up of “Conspiracy Theories Old and New” even after I’d spent hours showing solid evidence on the JFK case to the reporter, including the CIA-origin of the term “conspiracy theory” to smear Warren Commission critics.

For good measure, the article’s main quotation attributed to me was actually misattributed, making me look like a plagiarist. I had  provided the quotation and its source, the conservative scholar Dr. Paul Craig Roberts. I’ll not mention the newspaper here, however, since as a longtime journalist myself I realize that unintended bias and error are all part of the process. That’s especially true for the underpaid and overworked majority of those journalists still employed to toil in that fast-downsizing and increasingly disdained field. .

My lectures at two Dallas JFK conferences in November (“November In Dallas” and “The JFK Assassination Conference” focused also on the document release process, news media coverage, and other current implications. The conferences were organized by JFK Lancer Events and Productions, led by Debra Conway, and JFK Conferences, led by Judyth Vary Baker, both of them CAPA members. CAPA President Cyril Wecht, Schnapf and other CAPA leaders spoke, learned and networked at the Texas events to advance understanding of current research.

CAPA’s site is here for news excerpts includes also relevant commentaries on assassination-related news. For instance, it excerpts WhoWhatWhy and Dallas Morning News commentaries about last week’s newly released documents.

The Big Picture On the JFK Cover-Up

For decades, large majorities of the American public have told pollsters that they do not believe the Warren Report. Sometimes, especially after the powerful 1991 Oliver Stone movie JFK portraying a CIA-led conspiracy to kill the president on behalf of big business and similar interests, nearly 80 percent of respondents say they disbelieve the report. Almost always the margins in the mid-60th percentile of those responding.

The Warren report was written by government staff, mostly by a Department of Defense team led by its talented and still-living historian Alfred Goldberg, shown below at left in a government sketch.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren (at top left) led the commission, whose members are shown at right along with two of its top staff members.

All but one of the commissioners had burdensome full-time jobs on other matters, including Warren (shown at top left). The exception was former CIA Director Allen Dulles, shown at bottom left. Kennedy had forced Dulles to resign in 1961 along with two top CIA deputies because top agency officials had lied to Kennedy in trying to inveigle him into an invasion of Cuba as part of that year’s Bay of Pigs operation.

The CIA and similar agencies are neither monolithic nor all-powerful, it’s important to note. Dulles and his older brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were essentially Wall Street lawyers for ultra-powerful oligarchs, and not merely government officials.

Furthermore, the intelligence agencies work on tightly compartmentalized basis whereby more or less typical public servants might work largely unwittingly with others engaged in sensitive missions on a need-to-know basis.

Scholar and author Dr. John Newman, himself a former Army intelligence officer who became assistant to a National Security Agency director during the 1980s, has identified about nearly a hundred identities that CIA operative David Atlee Phillips used. Phillips, a famed Cold Warrior, did so in part to confuse some of his own CIA colleagues about the nature of his work, which some claim linked him to Oswald and to anti-JFK interests. Newman is shown above left with a collage by WhoWhatWhy of his books on JFK, Vietnam, Oswald and the CIA.

It’s notable also that Phillips has been heavily implicated in various aspects of plots to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders, and refused to under pointed questioning by the House Select Committee on Assassinations regarding his potential involvement in JFK’s assassination.

A 2013 lecture about this confrontation between Congress and Phillips (Congress backed down) at a JFK researchers conference is among the most powerful lessons available anywhere for someone seeking to understand the reluctance of anyone in government to probe the JFK killing — especially after what happened to Garrison and the 1970s congressional probe.

Former committee counsel Robert Tanenbaum was a top prosecutor in New York City before his appointment to lead the JFK part of the joint JFK-MLK murder investigation probe by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He is shown above in a C-SPAN screenshot from his lecture, which is available here via C-SPAN.

Tanenbaum delivered his remarks at a 2013 conference by the Wecht Institute at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He later became a later a best-selling author and two-time mayor of Beverly Hills. By any reasonable standard, he should be one of the experts most widely quoted by the media on JFK-related matters. But his insights apparently do not match the agendas of the powers that be.

Personal History

As one more example, drawn from experience:

My late mother, Margaret Kreig, was a well-known author drawn into this world on an occasional basis as a CIA asset. I revealed that background in my 2013 book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters, which documents in a century-long history how all recent U.S. presidents between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump had covert CIA or FBI ties before they entered politics. A 53-second video here summarizes the implications for the public.

From these same kind of patriotic and career motives that often prompt leaders, my late mother Margaret Kreig dropped out of college during World War II and became a pioneering female member of the U.S. Marines. She later overcame barriers to women in the workplace to advance from free-lancing to becoming a globe-trotting journalist and best-selling author.

Her books were Green Medicine: The Search for the Plants that Heal and Black Market Medicine, which revealed that the Mafia and other gangsters were counterfeiting prescription drugs, including those intended for serious conditions. The book and her undercover work in cooperation with federal drug agents prompted a congressional invitation for her to be the star witness at a 1967 hearing on then little-known Mafia, whose existence had been revealed in 1963 by informant Joe Valachi but whose true notoriety would not arise until the 1968 Valachi Papers by Peter Maas and The Godfather movies soon afterward.

Black Market Medicine’s back jacket with her photo and bio are shown at right.

In the 1960s, she confided at the time to close family, that she occasionally worked with Col. J. Caldwell King, a former Wall Street banker who rose to become chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere operations. So I don’t need academic research to know that the CIA is both connected to Wall Street and works with undercover assets in the professions, business and politics.

King was himself eased out of office in the JFK-induced purge of those responsible for the Bay of Pigs disaster, according to the 1979 book by former State Department intelligence analyst John D. Marks. His book, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control, further states that King in 1966 became head of a CIA-front company called the Amazon Natural Drug Company, a linkage that raises still-current questions between agency funding of pharmaceutical and academic efforts.

Controlled News Agendas?

Despite the public’s skepticism about the Warren commission’s cherry-picked evidence, virtually all major U.S. media outlets have from beginning used their news and opinion columns for the propaganda role of endorsing the report to the public, not independently reporting on the evidence.

Even more important than that history, the media continue to misinform the American public by “reporting” (either directly or by implication) that little of importance is contained in the released JFK documents. The implication is that the story is no longer important. To the contrary, the cover-up remains of utmost importance as a Rosetta Stone to media performance these days, as indicated by Baldwin’s anecdote that NBC supports the Warren report despite its almost innumerable flaws.

To suppress research and dissent, the CIA organized its operatives in newsrooms and academia in the 1960s to smear critics of the Warren report as “conspiracy theorists” who should be regarded as unfit to report or teach, according to now-declassified CIA documents.

Most important was a 50-page CIA memo, known as “CIA Dispatch 1035-960,” that instructed agents to contact their media contacts and disparage those, like New Orleans District Attorney Garrison, who were criticizing the Warren Commission claim that Oswald alone killed JFK. The 1967 document is here in the original, and here in reformatted text of its summary. Minutes of CIA meeting that same year indicated fear that Garrison would win a conviction in his murder conspiracy case against New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw.

The national media launched an intense smear campaign against Garrison. NBC News hired former high-ranking Justice Department official Walter Sheridan, who had been an early recruit to the super-secret NSA in the 1950s and later worked as a top aide to Robert F. Kennedy at the Justice Department. A definitive view of the Kennedy clan’s complicated motivations then are beyond the scope of this column. But those motivations may be summarized either as simply adherence to the truth (the conventional view promoted by corporate media), or conversely as fear of exposure, death and other reprisal unless or until RFK could assume the powers of the presidency..

Garrison sought and received under broadcasting legal authority of that era a right of reply. His 27-minute outline of the case Jim Garrison Video Interview on JFK Murder Charge that NBC broadcast nationally on July 15, 1967 provides a powerful overview of the case for conspiracy. Also, Garrison repeatedly stressed the public’s right to know the evidence proving the truth about the murder of their president despite what he called name-calling and censorship of “the press-media” elites in Washington and New York City.

But a jury promptly acquitted Shaw of the main charge following more than a dozen deaths (including suicide) of potential witnesses, including the mob and CIA operative David Ferrie, shown at left.

Ferrie, a pilot, had also known Oswald as early as the 1950s (as shown by the adjoining photo of a Ferrie-led Civil Air Patrol chapter, with Oswald standing at far right)..

The CIA Created ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Smear

To this day, new generations of reporters and academics continue to use the term “conspiracy theory” to taint their colleagues or members of the public who dare to examine sensitive matters like the JFK assassination or other suspected examples of government initiatives against Constitutional government.

Operation Mockingbird

The CIA program in cooperation with 40 leading newspapers, broadcast networks, national magazines and major wire services was identified as Operation Mockingbird by investigative reporter and author Deborah Davis, who first reported on it in her suppressed 1979 unauthorized biography Katharine the Great about Katharine Graham, wife of Washington Post Publisher Philip Graham.

Shown at right, he had been of the leaders of the Mockingbird propaganda program, and Katharine Graham’s own memoir Personal History describes how she and her husband used to dine on a weekly basis with the leader of the CIA program, Frank Wisner and his wife, Polly Wisner.

The Davis  book is being republished Jan. 30 by Graymalkin Media in hardback, with an audio book option also.

Among others who have reported on the program are author, attorney, and former Department of State Foreign Service officer J. Michael Springmann, whose 2014 memoir Visas for Al Qaeda cites several sources describing the beginning of the Mockingbird program.

In a tale that is especially timely now because of the new and adulatory film The Post about the Grahams and their executive editor Ben Bradlee, it’s worth noting that Bradlee successfully pressured Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the first publisher of Katharine the Great, to destroy all copies. Only after nearly a decade of litigation was the author Davis able to bring out new editions of the suppressed book in a second edition via a small publisher, National Press.

It’s relevant also that the Graham patriarch Eugene Meyer (shown at left) was essentially a banker (a former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve and later of the World Bank), and that a significant part of the Post’s coverage on sensitive issues can be reasonably suspected of secret agendas when deemed necessary, and hidden even from the vast majority of its working journalists.

The meetings with Wisner are one example, as were the Grahams’ work through the years helping to organize and attend the secret annual Bilderberg Group meetings of fellow elites first organized in 1954 by the Rockefeller and Rothschild families.

It is this type of history and context — which can arise from the four million pages of previously declassified documents and more than 2,500 books about the JFK assassination — that is required to understand the marginal significance of such new remaining releases as those put forward on Dec.15 and others still withheld.,

There remain still living witnesses who are willing to give share their experiences and other evidence.

But there has not been an official government investigation of the JFK or Martin Luther King, Jr. murders since Congress backed away in the 1970s from demanding the kinds of answers from the CIA and FBI that Tanenbaum and his boss Richard Sprague had been seeking as counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

King is shown in a 1962 photo at the National Press Club, where he is reputed to have been the first black ever permitted to speak in the main auditorium. The club’s speaker committee chairman resigned over the invitation, helping illustrate the bias and animosities in the nation’s capital. The speech is one more indication of a black life that surely mattered, but carries a legacy of a disputed assassination investigation, much like those probes of the JFK and RFK deaths.

Tanenbaum and Sprague were replaced, and the House committee’s 1979 report under successor counsel G. Robert Blakey cited the possibility of a conspiracy in JFK’s death but ascribed it merely to the Mafia. Critics dispute that finding, including with the argument that the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities and their big business supporters are the ones with the clout to enforce the ongoing cover-up these days, not the Mafia.

Looming in the background of that is substantial evidence that Oswald had been a low-level asset of U.S. government agencies growing out of his time as a Marine working on the U-2 spy program in Japan, and that much of his supposedly suspicious activities were part of his cover of ingratiating himself as a supposed Marxist.

He was a patsy, in other words, although he undoubtedly knew plenty and had to be killed along with a number of others. There are several character witnesses to that effect still alive, but few know about them or their stories. Indeed, one of the most readily disproved major contentions of the Warren report is that Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby (shown at right killing Oswald) was not affiliated with organized crime.

Ruby, owner of a Dallas nightclub, indisputably had been affiliated with Chicago and New Orleans mobsters for many years, including New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello, who controlled Dallas as part of his turf.

What’s Next?

Looking ahead to 2018, the news industry will surely commemorate lavishly the 50th anniversaries of the deaths of RFK and MLK, and trot out a familiar crew of supposed experts to extol their legacies and confirm that the official investigations were correct. Some of us will differ about the veracity of the official findings, as we have previously reported here many times..

Regarding the Trump administration’s self-described timetable for future disclosures of JFK documents, the plan is:

• March 12: FBI, CIA and other agencies must report to the archives any material they want withheld
• March 26: National Archives makes its recommendations to the president on what material warrants further withholding
• April 26: The president’s deadline for release of all remaining records.

In sum, the JFK document release process reached another milestone on Dec. 15 that requires ongoing scrutiny by an informed, independent grassroots research community, as we seek to foster with this latest report.

Shown below are excerpts from the reports cited above from the National Archives and from selected news outlets reporting about the release coming to our attention.-–

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Readers Guide To JFK Assassination, http://www.justice-integrity.org/faq/1019-justice-integrity-project-readers-guide-to-jfk-assassination   To help researchers of President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination and its current implications, the Justice Integrity Project began publishing a Reader’s Guide in 2013, now 48 columns or lists of research resources, to coincide with the shooting’s 50th anniversary.

A publication at JIP.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

Contact author Andrew Kreig