Generations of professional and amateur sleuths have spent decades steeped in the details of the JFK assassination. In coming days, they’ll be able to pore through thousands more files kept classified for 54 years — unless President Donald Trump steps in.

Those who are sure that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone are eager for vindication and new jigsaw pieces to fill the void spots in the puzzle. So are those who blame the mob, Fidel Castro, the Soviets or the military-industrial complex.

Lost on neither camp is the fact that the authority to decide which secrets to keep sealed for another decade or more rests with a president known for indulging conspiracy theories.

The deadline is Oct. 26, set by Congress a quarter-century ago after Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-minded JFK movie reignited demands to open the files on John F. Kennedy’s murder in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2017/10/19/decades-secrecy-end-soon-trump-allows-release-last-jfk-assassination-records

More than 3,000 never-before-seen documents from the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department on the assassination of John F. Kennedy are scheduled be released, with many experts fearing that such a large release of secret JFK assassination documents will spur “a new generation of conspiracy theories.”

According to Roger Stone, the CIA is urging President Donald Trump to delay disclosing some of the files for another 25 years.

According to The Gateway Pundit Roger Stone and Gerald Posner, two New York Times bestselling authors who are polar opposites about who killed JFK, have joined together to urge Donald Trump to release all the remaining classified files on Kennedy’s assassination.

http://theduran.com/cia-urges-potus-trump-to-delay-release-of-3000-never-before-seen-documents-on-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy/

The federal government’s long campaign to try to choke off rampant conspiracy theories about the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy is threatening to end this month in massive confusion, if not chaos.

Within the next two weeks, the National Archives is legally obligated to release the last of thousands of secret documents from government files about the assassination, most of them from the CIA, FBI and the Justice Department.

And there is every indication that the massive document dump—especially if any of it is blocked by President Donald Trump, the only person empowered under the law to stop the release of the files—will simply help fuel a new generation of conspiracy theories.

Trump, no stranger to conspiracy theories, including totally unsubstantiated theories about a link between Ted Cruz’s father and JFK’s death, has not yet revealed his plans for the documents. His friend and political adviser Roger Stone, the Republican consultant who is the author of a book claiming that President Lyndon Johnson was the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination, said last week that he has been informed authoritatively that the CIA is urging Trump to delay the release of some of the JFK documents for another 25 years. “They must reflect badly on the CIA even though virtually everyone involved is long dead,” Stone said in a statement on his website.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/16/the-next-jfk-document-dump-could-be-a-fiasco-215716

Volume 5 of the CIA's Lee Harvey Oswald 7-volume collection, may never be turned over, even though the law requires it to take place by October 26th of this year.

All available documents from all government entities are required by the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 to be released on October 26th of 2017. But if history repeats itself, the Central Intelligence Agency may not release an entire volume of documents on Oswald, known as “volume 5.”

As Sputnik reports, the release in July of 3,810 CIA and FBI documents on the assassination by the Assassination Records Review Board threw up a number of revelations that JFK researchers have hungrily devoured and enthusiastically publicized. For instance, the mayor of Dallas at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, Earle Cabell, was a CIA asset in the 1950s, and his brother, Charles Cabell, a high-ranking CIA official until 1962.

The release in October has been highly anticipated by those seeking answers. However, thanks to a deliberate fudging or records, or a conveniently timed clerical error, an entire volume may never see the light of day.

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cia-volume-oswald-missing/

Veteran author and researcher James DiEugenio interviewed filmmaker and television personality John Barbour on Black Op Radio. John has made three films about the JFK assassination and conducted a rare series of interviews during the 1980s with Jim Garrison, Mark Lane, and witnesses to the events in Dealy Plaza.

http://ourhiddenhistory.org/entry/jfk-jim-garrison-and-the-american-media-john-barbour-interviewed-by-james-dieugenio

Rex Bradford is the president and archivist of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit entity that has collected millions of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other major events.

Just last week the National Archives released another batch of such documents. By law, all the records related to the assassination have to be released later this year, unless President Donald Trump blocks their publication.

With this new release, 88% of the National Archives store of Kennedy assassination material is now available to the public. This consists of 3,369 documents, some previously released with portions redacted and 441 formerly withheld-in-full documents. Most of these documents originate from the FBI and CIA.


https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/08/04/first-look-new-jfk-assassination-documents/

Guests: John Armstrong / Dr. Cryril Wecht / Mark de Valk /
Robert Groden / Jim DiEugenio / Larry Hancock / Debra Conway / John Barbour
Comments: Malcolm Blunt / Oliver Stone / Lisa Pease

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv4Fj_4SrVk

After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the CIA appeared eager, even desperate, to embrace the version of events being offered by the FBI, the Secret Service and other parts of the government. The official story: that a delusional misfit and self-proclaimed Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president in Dallas with his $21 mail-order rifle and there was no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic. Certainly, the CIA’s leaders told the Warren Commission, the independent panel that investigated the murder, there was no evidence of a conspiracy that the spy agency could have foiled.

But thousands of pages of long-secret, assassination-related documents released by the National Archives last week show that, within a few years of Kennedy’s murder, some in the CIA began to worry internally that the official story was wrong—an alarm the agency never sounded publicly.


Specifically, key CIA officials were concerned by the mid-1970s that the agency, the FBI, the Secret Service and the White House commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren had never followed up on important clues about Oswald’s contact with foreign agents, including diplomats and spies for the Communist governments of Cuba and the Soviet Union, who might have been aware of his plans to kill Kennedy and even encouraged the plot. (There is no credible evidence cited in the documents released so far that Cuban leader Fidel Castro or other foreign leaders had any personal role in ordering Kennedy’s murder.)

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/03/jfk-assassination-lone-gunman-cia-new-files-215449

Jim Marrs, best-known for his work researching the various theories surrounding the JFK assassination and UFOs and a guest on many talk shows, died this week at the age of 73.

According to his official Facebook page he died of a heart attack on Wednesday. He had recently been put on dialysis.

According to his online biography, Marrs was a former Fort Worth Star-Telegram staffer starting in 1968 and was a police reporter and general assignments reporter. After a stint serving in the Army in Vietnam he came back home and began writing about military and aerospace technology.

His 1989 book "Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy" was a New York Times Paperback Non-Fiction Best Seller and became a basis for the Oliver Stone film "JFK" in 1991. He served as a chief consultant for the film.

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/Jim-Marrs-JFK-conspiracy-theory-dead-at-73-11731000.php

The passage of many days, months, or years may be necessary for information to be placed in the correct context and understood as being significant. The example of George Joannides, who was brought out of retirement to act as liaison between the Agency and the HSCA, is a case in point. Joannides’ role as the CIA case officer for the DRE (Revolutionary Student Directorate), an anti-Castro group with which Lee Harvey Oswald had interacted in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, was withheld by the agency throughout the term of the HSCA which was investigating CIA connections to the group. When asked directly if Joannides could assist the HSCA by identifying the officer who had handled the DRE during the summer of 1963, he responded by saying, “I’ll look into that.” Perhaps the CIA did not feel that revealing Joannides’ true identity to the Committee investigators was “assassination-related.”

The official ARRB classification “assassination-related” was not limited to issues or evidence pertaining exclusively to the scene of the crime.

Dr. John Newman argues that real progress in solving the JFK assassination will not to come to those who await a smoking-gun revelation, but will be possible if we first have an understanding of the internal language of US government cryptonyms and pseudonyms. Only by establishing the true identities of the actors — and their locations and activities — can we hope to separate fact from fiction in this mystifying saga.

That has been his goal in a series of publications on America’s untold history over the last three decades. As a retired strategic intelligence cryptologic analyst for US Army Intelligence and the former military assistant to the director of the National Security Agency, Newman has some unique qualifications. His works on the cold war and America’s involvement in Vietnam have been recognized by many, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and former CIA Director William Colby to be among the most authoritative and significant yet published. In past publications he correctly foretold what we are now seeing in the 2017 release of JFK records.

https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/08/03/2017-jfk-document-release-shows-former-intelligence-analyst-got-right/

Here is the first major revelation from the historic release of previously withheld government records on the JFK Assassination: the mayor of Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was killed in that city was a CIA asset.

We were alerted to this salient fact by retired military intelligence officer and author John Newman, who is conducting a thorough analysis of the long-secret documents.

At the time of the assassination, Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell, brother of one-time Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Charles P. Cabell, had been a CIA asset since 1956.

It is worth noting that Kennedy dismissed CIA Director Allen Dulles in November 1961, and that Earle Cabell’s brother Charles left the CIA on January 31, 1962, after Kennedy forced him to resign. Thus, both Dulles and Charles Cabell were no longer working for the CIA on November 22, 1963, when Kennedy was killed.

Earle Cabell, who had been elected mayor of Dallas in May 1961, oversaw arrangements for Kennedy’s trip and motorcade, which took him through Dealey Plaza, a route that violated almost all standard rules for presidential safety — and where normal safeguards, such as sealing windows and placing sharpshooters, were ignored. This is of interest to researchers into the assassination, who have been collecting evidence of CIA ties to a host of individuals who figure in the events of 11/22/63 (see also WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets for more on this topic.)

https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/08/02/dallas-mayor-jfk-assassination-cia-asset/

While popular media has often portrayed Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney behind the infamous Clay Shaw trial, as having been targeted by the federal government for retribution, a look at his FBI file reveals the exact opposite - according to the documents, Garrison’s investigation was considered so toxic and aggressive that Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered no agents have any contact with him. When third parties began providing the FBI with evidence that Garrison had engaged in fraud against the government, the Bureau cautioned against investigating him, precisely because of how Garrison would inevitably frame it.

As early as February 1967, the FBI Director had ordered the Bureau’s agents to avoid all contact with Garrison and his investigators. Just days before a KGB planted story would appear in the Italian newspaper Paese Sera and redirect Garrison’s investigation to obsess over CIA connections, Hoover identified Garrison as “a person not to be contacted without prior Bureau approval.” This was the explicit result of Garrison’s already inflammatory investigation and accusations.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/aug/02/jim-garrison-fbi-jfk/

NEW: 3,810 JFK assassination documents. 441 never seen before. 3,369 now unredacted https://t.co/P9d8lqMX0F pic.twitter.com/9C2JWrAqT3— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 24, 2017

The National Archives and Records Administration is releasing documents previously withheld in accordance with the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. The vast majority of the Collection (88%) has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s. The records at issue are documents previously identified as assassination records, but withheld in full or withheld in part. Learn more

This release consists of 3,810 documents, including 441 formerly withheld-in-full documents and 3,369 documents formerly released with portions redacted. The documents originate from FBI and CIA series identified by the Assassination Records Review Board as assassination records. More releases will follow.

https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/2017-release

Jim DiEugenio is a veteran author and researcher lately focusing on JFK's foreign policy. He's the author of Reclaiming Parkland and Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, now in its second edition. He's a regular guest on Len Osanic's Black Op Radio, he writes for Robert Parry's Consortium News, and he's the principle behind one of the most active and important assassination websites, www.KennedysAndKing.com, which is constantly updated with new articles, book reviews, and important news about the assassinations of both JFK, RFK, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., among a lot of other interesting items.

http://ourhiddenhistory.org/entry/james-dieugenio-the-jfk-assassination-in-the-press-the-public-eye

Gary Mack, a Dallas broadcaster whose fascination with the Kennedy assassination led him to become a widely consulted expert on the event and, eventually, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum, which is devoted to the assassination, died on Wednesday in Arlington, Tex. He was 68.

The museum said on its website that he had died after a long illness. The Dallas Morning News reported that his wife, Karin Strohbeck, said the cause was a rare and aggressive cancer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/us/gary-mack-kennedy-assassination-expert-dies-at-68.html

From JFK to MKULTRA, here’s what the Agency didn’t want getting released to the public

In a 1978 memo urging the curbing of the newly-empowered Freedom of Information Act, the CIA compiled a list of six FOIA topics considered to be the most potentially dangerous to the Agency’s reputation.

One reason CIA felt these requests were so dangerous was “because of the FOIA requirement to release bits and pieces of information.” There is no such requirement, only exemptions that CIA chooses to take advantage of - there is nothing stopping the agency from developing briefing books specifically for the public, although the Agency generally prefers anonymously releasing information through journalists.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jun/21/cias-six-most-dangerous-foia/