Here we are 61 years later, and the JFK "conspiracy theorists" are still largely right about John F. Kennedy's assassination and the media are still woefully wrong.
American lore tells us that government spooks coined the term "conspiracy theory" to malign and discredit the people who thought the Warren Commission Report on the JFK assassination was utter nonsense. Well, guess what? The conspiracy theorists were right again, and the media got duped again by the information operators with the intelligence state. So far, there's plenty more information supporting their hypotheses than not.
Hilariously, the Associated Press (AP) even sought to "fact check" the derivation of the term "conspiracy theory" and its connection to the government to describe JFK assassination skeptics. The AP reported in 2023 that the term had been used a few other times in the context of discussing former President James Garfield's shooting. The AP also reported that any claims the CIA created this phrase to demean Warren Report skeptics were "false."
What's not false, however, is that the CIA and government officials industriously exercised this demeaning term to malign and marginalize the people who knew the ballistics were wrong, the CIA connection was an under-reported story, and that there was no such thing as a "magic" bullet. Plus, mobsters were telling their tales from jail.
Besides sources and methods to hide, successful media manipulation could be an undeclared reason why the CIA wanted to keep the rest of the JFK files under wraps. I began to think about this while listening and watching report after report of mainstream media reporters claiming that "there was nothing new" in the latest thousands of pages released only the night before. How can Terry Moran of ABC News know this at this point that there were not "any bombshells," though there were thousands of documents to cull through and he'd had only a few hours to go over them, I wondered.
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Call me a conspiracy theorist if you must, but I think the CIA's confirmed connection to and surveillance of the mob and meeting between Jack Ruby and Soviet acolyte Lee Harvey Oswald in the months leading to the assassination might be considered to be a bombshell.
But no, the mainstream media reported a lack of a "smoking gun."
Let's check the MSM:
- The New York Times said that there were no major revelations or smoking gun — especially about a second gunman.
- The BBC reported that no smoking gun was found.
- The UK Independent reported that the release of 60,000 documents so far was a "nothing burger."
What the documents did reveal was intriguing, according to JFK specialist and presidential historian James Robenalt in a Live Now from Fox Digital interview.
- Code names "that will take awhile to unravel," but there's a lot of intel about the Cuban CIA assets in there. These code-named individuals were connected to the New Orleans mob (stop me if this sounds like a movie you've seen).
- There are memos on Operation Mongoose, the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Others find these other pieces of information interesting.
- There are documents and memos that seem to support what some JFK assassination sleuths believe show that Oswald was being set up to be — as Oswald himself said — "I'm just a patsy!" for the assassination.
- Ballistics information showing the one gunman theory unlikely.
- Wiretaps connecting Jack Ruby to the mob.
- Interviews with sources presaging the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. years before it happened.
"This is looking more and more like the anti-Castro group pulled the trigger," according to Robenalt. Far from being a nothing burger, he says that "there is a lot to work with, a lot to analyze" in the latest tranche of documents.
There are plentiful documents about the Cuba connection with the CIA because of Operation Mongoose, the plot to assassinate Castro by "the anti-Castro group." The CIA was angry that Kennedy left their anti-Castro Cuban assets unprotected during the Bay of Pigs. And believe it or not, some of those same anti-Castro Cuban spooks were also connected to the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, a break-in that was ultimately used to frame Richard Nixon. Yes, really.
There was previous information about a bullet found in the limo behind JFK by Paul Landis, according to Robenalt. It shows that there was a superficial wound from that bullet and adds to the theory "that this was an ambush and that there were multiple shooters" involved in the assassination. He says there wasn't enough time for Oswald, armed with a bolt action rifle, "to shoot, load and shoot again to hit [Texas Governor John] Connally, so there had to be multiple shooters."
"Once we know that, we know that there's a conspiracy, then the question is: who was involved in it? But that evidence is pretty strong that there were multiple shooters," Robenalt concludes.
This comports with what has been revealed in the latest document dump about several code-named people meeting with the mob in the summer before the assassination.
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So why has the information been hidden and redacted for so long? Robenalt believes both President Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to rush the Warren investigation to stop speculations about Oswald and the Soviets. They were concerned about triggering World War III.
"They were worried that it was going to be blamed on the Cubans; they were worried it would be blamed on the Russians, and they were not willing to risk nuclear war over all of this," he says.
Could there be a "gotcha!" memo declaring decisively that the CIA worked with the mob to end JFK's life? Probably not because there never seem to be those mic-drop, smoking gun moments in documents (unless you count the FBI text messages between the top people promising to Get Trump with an "insurance policy.") Heck, the "smoking gun" Nixon tape wasn't even a smoking gun. Yes, really.
