what to do when the cia wants to kill you
How the CIA & FBI's handling of JFK'south murder created modern conspiracy culture
In November of this yr, QAnon supporters gathered at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, awaiting John F. Kennedy Jr.'south resurrection. Many media outlets portrayed the event as a sign of today'due south absurd political climate, but such conspiracies belong to a proud American tradition. This lineage includes the events of November 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated. The questionable handling of the events post-obit the killing contributed to a massive reject in trust in the US government—from 77 per centum in 1964 to 36 percent simply ten years subsequently. A majority of Americans are conspiracy theorists on this topic, rejecting the official story that Kennedy's killer acted solitary; today, 61 per centum of the populace believes others were involved. The only group in the country where a minority hold conspiratorial views on JFK are college-educated white people.
The federal regime maintains a strategic involvement in the bump-off: On October 22, 2021, President Biden once once again postponed the final release of the JFK assassination records. This decision continues a nigh threescore-twelvemonth-long effort past the CIA and FBI to suppress information relating to JFK's decease. Their latest success is a timely reminder of why the U.s.a. will never be rid of conspiracy theories so long as the national security state wields unchecked power.
In 1992, Congress passed the JFK Records Drove Act, which ordered all branches of government to provide whatever bump-off-related records to the National Archives for public inspection within 25 years. The move was spurred by Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK, an Oscar-winning blockbuster that portrayed the killing every bit a conspiracy by radical anticommunists in the CIA, FBI, and military. The law aimed to appease renewed controversy, stating that "most of the records…are nigh thirty years sometime, and simply in the rarest cases is at that place any legitimate demand for continued protection."
Another 30 years afterwards, roughly 88 percent of the estimated files have been released. However, 11 per centum were released with sensitive portions removed, the CIA illegally destroyed others, and at least 15,000 remain unpublished, according to the National Archives.
The status of these files seems unlikely to change. While President Trump tweeted his intent to release the remaining files days before the 25-year deadline in October 2017, he succumbed to terminal-infinitesimal pressure from the CIA and FBI and issued an executive order blessing a half dozen-month delay. In 2018, he extended the delay by iv years, citing the JFK Act's provision for withholding documents that pose an "identifiable threat" to national security. Four years later, President Biden cited the same clause to postpone the release to Dec 15, 2022, claiming the Covid-xix pandemic disrupted a "concluding" review which had ostensibly started iii years ago.
There'due south an understandable impulse to shrug. Even bump-off researchers think there'due south niggling hope for a bombshell revelation. And given a resurgence of dangerous conspiratorial beliefs nationwide—from vaccine disinformation to claims of election fraud— reopening a half-century old controversy might seem counterproductive. Respectable mainstream outlets have warned confronting a "sickness" dragging millions of Americans downward conspiratorial rabbit holes and have accused their economical competitors of harboring weapons of mass disinformation.
Just the intelligence community'south ongoing and effective opposition to public will in this case points to an underlying trouble. Historian Steven M. Gillon recently argued that the assassination's legacy shows how conspiracy theorists undermine republic: "Conspiracy advocates have peddled myths distorting Kennedy's life and death for far too long, thereby fueling cynicism about American institutions that has opened the door for Trump to lie with impunity." Later on endless revelations of government crimes and cover-ups—the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the Church building and Pike Committees, Iran-Contra, Chelsea Manning'south Transitional islamic state of afghanistan Diaries and Iraq War logs, the Snowden Athenaeum, and the Drone Papers, to proper noun the nigh publicized—it is disingenuous to place the blame for mass disaffection solely on conspiracy theorists rather than American institutions. As we now know, the government, especially the CIA and FBI, did distort Kennedy's life and death. They destroyed evidence, such as tapes of Lee Harvey Oswald from September 1963; intimidated witnesses like Silvia Duran, who was Oswald's Cuban embassy contact; and deceived federal investigators, for instance, by concealing Operation Mongoose. Not even Lyndon B. Johnson, who deputed the Warren Report in 1963, accepted its conclusion that Oswald was the lone assassinator. This effort to muddle the truth has created a national conscience, filled by conspiracy theories and insufficient of clear information.
We may never know if JFK's decease was the act of a lone shooter or a CIA coup d'état. But we practise know that the intelligence community helped manufacture this dubiousness and volition proceed to suppress information. Fifty-fifty our most powerful elected officials—including Trump and Biden—have proven unable or unwilling to claiming intelligence officials, regardless of strong public support for releasing the documents. Legislative response to ix/11 gave the intelligence community extraordinary powers such every bit rendition, torture, and mass electronic surveillance. At present, as Congress is warming up for a new domestic state of war on terror in response to the January. 6 insurrection, it'southward worth asking if the state'southward intelligence agencies really need more ability.
Source: https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2022/03/the-cia-doesnt-want-you-to-know-who-killed-jfk/
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