In response to yesterday’s post, “Click here to let Obama know what you think about secret JFK files, former Texas Observer editor Ronnie Dugger writes:
“Mr. President, I was in one of the two press buses in the presidential cavalcade in Dallas then when Mr. Kennedy was murdered, covering for the Washington Post and my Texas newspaper, the Texas Observer. An hour or so before at Love Field I was a person or two behind the rope when he and Ms. Kennedy came down the ramp. They were beautiful in the midday sunlight. Beautiful.”
“Many of us, for the truth in history, lessons to be learned, the honor of our country, would be grateful, sir, if half a century later — half a century — you would take over the control of all the government’s remaining inexplicably still-hidden-from-us records on that event, specifically presidentially seizing those decisions completely away from the CIA concerning their hoarded files, and except as only you alone decide what may not yet be revealed, complete our government’s faithful execution of the 1992 Kennedy assassination records law (not to mention the people’s rights in our own history).
“Mr. Morley on the reliable JFKFacts website informs us there are more than a thousand records still lodged in the imprisoned files 50 years later. 2017, you won’t be President, and the hiders might well after that keep on concealing the truth, whatever the hell it is. Do this now for us, please, Mr. President. If you do we will all thank you. I will be coming to Washington to see these records.”
“Respectfully, Ronnie Dugger, Austin, Texas, biographer of Johnson and Reagan, other books, now writing a work on steps to be taken to avert nuclear war, concerning which I will be asking you and Ms. Power for interviews.”
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Click here to let Obama know what you think about secret JFK files
Mr. Heindenheimer, an interesting point, at the outset of your reply. Mr. Truman originated the CIA, to his later dubiety. Is the CIA answerable to the President, or is it an agency independent of the President who is choosing what persons the CIA then is ordered by the President to actively seek to kill with the CIA’s lethal drone force, or is the CIA, now being a military organization with respect to its Drone air force and perhaps in other activities, therefore checked and balanced by the Pentagon? Well, you raise a good question, one worthy, say, of a PhD thesis in university-level government. Perhaps the murder of the President is more relevant now in our situations than checks and balance theory? I would suggest, as a practical matter, that if the President asked or ordered the CIA to release all the unreleased files on the murder of JFK except what, after his and his subordinates’ examination of them, he deemed should not be released, and if necessary made that request or order public, that would obtain, would it not.
RD
“presidentially seizing those decisions completely away from the CIA ”
As if.
50 years after the coup, many are still implying that presidents can tell the CIA what to do. Mr. Dugger may be doing that here for rhetorical purposes, I can’t tell.
That “as if” is what the JFK assassination is really all about. As a nation we spend tens of billions in mediated-airwave time and classroom time teaching a model of power known as checks and balances. Does it have anything to do with the way power really operates in 2013? It is dashboard nominalism or the engine of how real power works in the capitalism of 2013. I am a high school history teacher. I’m tired of teaching dashboard. The kids need diagnostics, they need engine. And they are so interested in history if they get even a tiny taste of it.
Of course with the Core Curriculum…..
The mediation of the 50th has been 50 ships passing in the night with no mediation, no debates seeking to makes sense of competing claims. This is a recipe for divergence, and for the eventual labeling that the Corporate Media is so quick with: “Conspiracy Theory”
Ironically the corporate media are themselves responsible, because of the religious consistency with which they have refused to mediate conflicting views. Why no debates? Perhaps Oscar Wild knows: “Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar, and often quite convincing.”
You came into office claiming you wanted to run the most transparent administration in our country’s history. In that spirit I ask that you release all the remaining files related to the Kennedy assassination. Given that it is the 50th anniversary of this momentous event there can be no legitimate reason for most, if not all of the remaining files to be made public. Thank you.