This letter was released in conjunction with the celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, January 21, 2019. It was signed by 50 people, including members of the Kennedy and King families as well as doctors, lawyers, activists, and scholars across the political spectrum (names attached.
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“I want the truth to come out. The truth needs to come out,” Rep. Walter Jones told McClatchy’s Washington Bureau in October 2017.
When it came to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jones, the ten-term Republican from North Carolina who died Sunday, was as a skeptic of the official story that one man alone killed JFK for no reason.
He was a deeply religious but not in the cynical way of many on the right. As a small-government conservative he hated unjust wars and unnecessary government secrecy. In 2004, he was the first Republican in Congress to admit the invasion of Iraq was foolish disaster promoted by lies. He apologized for voting to authorize it.
On the assassination of JFK, he did not shade his opinion.
I interviewed Jones in September 2017 about the impending release of JFK files and he was adamant. “It’s time to reveal what happened,” he told me. He backed up his words with actions, introducing House Resolution 556 calling on President Trump to release all of the files, without exception.
Jones he hoped that he thought “some government agencies” would resist full disclosure and he wanted to create public pressure to support Trump in making all the files public.
“I hope you people in the press can pick up on this and make it an issue,” he said. “That’s the only way it’ll happen.”
Alas, the press didn’t pick up on the issue and Trump caved to the CIA’s demands for continuing secrecy. More than 15,000 JFK files remain secret, most of them by the CIA and FBI.
Jones saw it coming and he tried to do something about it. He failed but we honor his effort and his memory.
Wofford, who passed January 21 at the age of 94, was a lawyer and political operative close to both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
What Wofford wrote in his 1980 memoir, Of Kennedy and Kings, underscores the importance of the recent open letter from MLK III, RFK Jr. and some 60 other luminaries calling for a reopening of the investigation of four most important assassinations of the 1960s.
Wofford wrote:
Read moreThey are a politically diverse group of Americans from Kennedy and King families, from academia, law, medicine and journalism.
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A joint letter aimed at Congress and the general public has been signed by a list of more than 50 prominent citizens, including family members of the victims, Hollywood entertainers, legal experts, scholars and journalists. The petition–which has attracted some surprising names–is certain to provoke lively debate about one of the darkest chapters in American history. You too will have a chance to add your name to this powerful statement/
Check in with me here next Monday, January 21, Martin Luther King Day. I’m proud to be joining with lots of other people in the unveiling a major petition effort signed by more than 50 prominent American citizens. The joint statement is aimed at moving Congress to investigate deeply troubling, long-buried chapters in American history. After reading the statement, you’ll be able to join this important campaign by adding your name to the petition.
I think this might be the most cogent radio interview I did about THE GHOST.
(Just because I was on Lew Rockwell’s show doesn’t mean I agree with this politics.)
George H. W. Bush, CIA director and future president
(This post was first published on the JFK Facts blog, in different form under a different headline, in March 2013)
The theory that the late President Bush was somehow complicit in JFK’s death has often been heard in the comments section of this site. Exactly how he was involved is rarely explained.
Four claims are adduced to support this theory:
In his new book, Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate and the CIA, Shane O’Sullivan lays bare a scandalously under-covered story: the role of CIA personnel in the Watergate scandal and its aftermath.
In an excerpt for the Washington Post, O’Sullivan tells an intriguing tale about Watergate burglar Rolando Martinez, the CIA operative who was pardoned by President Reagan in 1984. Antonio Veciana, the CIA operative who says he saw Lee Harvey Oswald with David Phillips two months before JFK was killed, has an interesting role in the story.
O’Sullivan’s story doesn’t directly bear on the JFK story but it does show that Veciana was a trusted agency operative through the 1970s.
A readeader asks:
Do you still believe Nosenko was a true defector, Jeff?
Have you read Tennent H. Bagley’s “Spy Wars,” or even his 35-page PDF “Ghosts of the Spy Wars”?
Yes, I did read Bagley’s Spy Wars. I also interviewed him. And yes, I do believe Nosenko was a true defector.
I think Bagley was wrong, for two reasons: lack of a plausible suspect and lack of damage to CIA operations.
Remember Angleton’s theory that Nosenko was a dispatched defector is inextricably bound up in the theory that Nosenko was dispatched to protect a mole already working inside the CIA as of January 1964. So the reader’s question is really two, was Nosenko a mole? And, if so, who was he protecting?
As I asked in THE GHOST
if there was a mole burrowed into the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Angletonians claimed, who the devil was it? And what damage did he do?
“13 days before that dark day in Dallas, Somersett elicited a chilling, police tape-recorded threat from a right-wing racist who talked of how the President would soon be shot ‘from an office building with a high-powered rifle’ and how ‘they’ll pick up somebody within hours after … just to throw the public off.’”
via A Miami police informant, a prophetic racist and fresh questions about JFK’s death | Broward Bulldog.
The political violence of the 1960s, says author Carmine Savasteno, “transformed the American landscape” and hopes for “a potential bright American future [were] dashed.” Prophetic voices for peace like JFK and Martin Luther King have been scarce ever since.
A cop runs toward the grassy knoll on November 22.
Strange but true:
At least two dozen, and perhaps as many as four dozen, of the witnesses to the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 thought at least one gunshot came from in front of the presidential motorcade, a claim rejected by the Warren Commission and most U.S. news organizations..
Richard Charnin has proposed a statistical proof of a shot from the front.
Another way to think about the matter is to review the eyewitness accounts, especially those of people with crime scene training.
From the new paperback edition of THE GHOST:
“Historians and journalists usually describe COINTELPRO as an FBI program, which is not quite the case. It was created by Hoover but functioned as a joint FBI-CIA venture, with a bureaucratic division of labor. Hoover took the lead in targeting dissident Americans inside the United States; Angleton took the lead outside the United States. In the case of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and its most famous member Lee Harvey Oswald, the FBI and the CIA would work together.
Angleton used the HUNTER program to feed the COINTELPRO beast.”
