The Future of Freedom Foundation
January 9, 2023
President Biden's recent decision to permit the CIA to continue keeping its 59-year-old records relating to the Kennedy assassination secret from the American people has brought about a public backlash that has not been seen since the enactment of the JFK Records Act in 1992. This major shift is a tremendously positive development in the JFK assassination.
You will recall that a couple of years ago, Biden used the Covid crisis as an excuse to give the CIA another extension of time for secrecy. Biden has now returned to the tried-and-true "national-security" excuse for, once again, letting the CIA get away with another secrecy extension. Apparently the idea is that if the CIA's 59-year-old secret assassination-related records are released to the public, the United States will fall into the ocean or be taken over by the Reds.
The backlash to Biden's decision has been substantial.
There is Tucker Carlson's monologue on Fox News in which he expressly stated his belief that the CIA was involved in Kennedy's assassination. Given that Carlson is the most popular commentator on Fox News, that monologue is obviously a huge breakthrough.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., is the son of Robert Kennedy, the president's brother, who himself was assassinated. Kennedy, Jr., sent out a tweet that included a link to Carlson's monologue. Kennedy's tweet stated, "The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA's murder of my uncle was a successful coup d'état from which our democracy has never email protected Carlson."
In his online show System Update, the noted political commentator Glenn Greenwald has also now weighed in on the JFK assassination. You can see his presentation here (go to 43:00). Greenwald doesn't specifically state his conviction that the CIA helped carry out the JFK assassination but there is no doubt in my mind that, based on his presentation, that is what he believes. In his presentation, he features Carlson's monologue and Robert Kennedy's tweet. He also recommends David Talbot's book The Devil's Chessboard. For a written summary of Greenwald's presentation, see here.
The libertarian Reason magazine published an article which, while refraining from taking a position on whether the assassination was, in fact, a national-security-state regime-change operation, called for the release of the CIA's long-secret assassination-related records.
Even though he is skeptical of claims that November 22, 1963, was a regime-change operation, federal judge John Tunheim is exhorting President Biden and Congress to order the release of the CIA's long-secret assassination-related records. Tunheim served as chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. The ARRB was the agency whose job it was to enforce the JFK Records Collection Act. You can see his presentation here at a press conference at the National Press Club.
Biden's decision to extend the time for secrecy also generated a large number of articles in the mainstream press criticizing his decision. A fascinating aspect of these articles is that some of them did not limit their criticism to the continued secrecy of the records. Like Carlson and Kennedy, Jr., they went one important step further and actually stated their conviction that Kennedy was felled by his enemies within the government. See this article by Jefferson Morley that recaps many of the articles in the mainstream press regarding the controversy.
In fact, Morley, who is a former investigative reporter for the Washington Post, deserves the credit for having brought much of the recent publicity to the CIA's continued cover-up. Longtime supporters of FFF will recognize Morley as the author of FFF's book CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files. He was also a speaker at our 2021 conference " The National Security State and the JFK assassination," which was, in my opinion, the best conference ever on this topic. In fact, if you haven't watched it, I highly recommend doing so.
In fact, another fantastic conference we held was in 2017, which featured Oliver Stone and many other great speakers. It was entitled " The National Security State and JFK."
There is also a federal lawsuit that has recently been brought by the Mary Farrell Foundation against the National Archives to force compliance with the JFK Records Act. Read about that lawsuit here.
The genesis of the JFK Records Act is a testament to the power of public opinion. For 30 years, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Secret Service, and other federal agencies were steadfastly keeping their assassination-related records secret. "National security," they said! Needless to say, that was a weird claim, given their official narrative that a lone nut with no ties to U.S. intelligence had killed the president.
In 1991, Oliver Stone came out with his movie JFK, which posited that the assassination was a U.S. national-security state regime-change operation, no different from regime-change operations that were carried out against other regimes, such as Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1960-present), and Chile (1970-73). At the end of the movie, Stone included a blurb informing people that federal officials were still keeping their assassination-related records secret.
Stone's blurb produced a public outcry that forced Congress to enact the JFK Records Act. That can happen again. Biden extended the CIA's secrecy deadline to June 2023, which I think was a dumb move because there is a good chance that there will be more publicity surrounding that upcoming deadline. From the CIA's standpoint, Biden would have been much better off extending the deadline for 25 years or forever.
There is no doubt that the records that the CIA continues to steadfastly keep secret have nothing to do with "national security," no matter what definition one puts on that nebulous, meaningless term. But in the final analysis, the real issue is not what's in those secret records, but rather that the CIA and the Pentagon did, in fact, orchestrate the assassination of a U.S. president, just as they orchestrated the assassination of foreign leaders who they felt posed a grave threat to "national security."
As far as I'm concerned, the CIA should never have come into existence. As I state in my most recent book on the JFK assassination, An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, which I consider the best work I've done in the 33-year history of The Future of Freedom Foundation, once the CIA's evil program known as MKULTRA came to light, the CIA should have been abolished at that point. But I am more convinced than ever that the day of reckoning is getting closer for the CIA, the day that a critical mass of Americans finally reach the conclusion that John F. Kennedy was, in fact, assassinated by the U.S. national-security establishment for his decision to move America in a direction different from that of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.