I've always found weird that Oswald being paid by some powerful organization is considered a fringe conspiranoia, like Elvis is still alive, when some facts (Kennedy was the POTUS, Oswald was himself killed later before he could speak) made it the default hypothesis.
You can say that it was impossible to gather enough proof, that the evidence led nowhere, but saying that it's ridiculous is... suspicious.
Reminds me of more recent events... <ducks and hides under the desk>
The White House and DOD still use handwritten routing slips at the highest levels to track memo packages, sign-offs, comments, and orders given in response.
As a nephew of someone who happened to be a very close associate of Lyndon Baines Johnson, this is my take on the whole thing. John and his brother Robert were allegedly involved in Marilyn Monroe's death, and LBJ used this "fact" to garner overwhelming support in favor of Kennedy's assassination. His true intentions however were most likely that he wanted to make sure that he [1] was not implicated in the "Billy Sol affair" and [2] could become president. Incidentally, if it were not for the fact that Hoover had been pulled into the scheme, Oswald might have gone down in history as a hero. Why? Because he was reporting the progress of the "plans on the ground" to the FBI on a regular basis. Unfortunately for him, Hoover was burying these reports, just as Oswald himself was being designated as the most convenient fall guy. In truth, I believe that he was a patriotic (if naive) "agency man" who gathered much useful intelligence for US interests, including a detailed report concerning operational matters relating to an electronics factory in Minsk, key Cuban assets, and of course details about a plan to take the president's life! It's a very sad twist of fate, but it just goes to show how cronyism can tarnish even the most prestigious institutions. As for official recognition of "the truth", that will probably never happen. It would only open a can of worms that nobody wants to deal with...
I have a good one too, but it's totally bupkiss. Nonetheless, it's a fun one.
Joe DiMaggio had JFK killed.
DiMaggio's family hails from Sicily and had a lot of mob connections in the East Bay. JFK was famously barred by Joe from attending Marilyn's funeral, due to his jealousy and implications he held that JFK was responsible in part for her death. Via mob connections and his time playing with/against Ted Williams, Joe manages to get Oswald, a Marine like Williams, to do the deed.
Just a reminder that someone claiming to be the nephew of an "associate" of a historical figure, with extraordinary claims and zero evidence, is not a very good source.
The JFK assassination is the only conspiracy theory that I actually believe has a lot of merit. After reading a few books on the (underground) politics of the era here is what I believe to a good degree of certainty happened:
* The hit was ordered by the Chicago mafia boss at the time, Sam Giancana
* CIA wasn't directly involved but caught a whiff of the plot and let it happen anyway because they were very unhappy with JFK
here is why the mafia was unhappy with JFK:
* JFKs father made his fortune as a bootlegger during the prohibition era and was very friendly with the mobsters
* the OG mobsters wanted JFK as a president because they were going to have some influence on him through his father.
* the mafia and specifically Sam Giancana helped JFK getting elected in Chicago which was kind of a flip state
after getting elected JFK was not having any of it and completely cut off the mob and actually went against them in a couple of ways
Firstly his brother Robert Kennedy was made attorney general and went after the mob hard. He made his goal to put Jimmy Hoffa behind bars. Hoffa was mobbed up and it was the main financier of the mobs building casinos by providing loans to them through the Teamsters Pension Fund.
The mafia had built many casinos in Cuba. After the revolution, Fidel Castro nationalised the casinos taking away the big cash flows from the mob. The mafia wanted JFK to invade Cuba and take down Castro so they could take control of the casinos back.
here is why CIA was against JFK:
* The bay of pigs invasion was orchestrated by the CIA by training Cuban anti-Castro dissidents that fled the country after the revolution and sending them to fight during the invasion.
* During the invasion JFK promised that he would provide air support to the troops but at the last moment he flinched leaving the ground troops helpless which doomed the operation
What I believe happened:
* Oswald was set up as a patsy for the assassination. His handler from the mob was a guy named Jack Ruby.
* Jack Ruby was a known mobster and the right hand man of Sam Giancana
* When Oswald was captured and during his transport after the initial interrogation Jack Ruby killed Oswald live on television (you can find it on youtube) so he would not blow the whistle
From my understanding the main falling out in the relationship of JFK, the CIA and the mob was when he intentionally botched the invasion to avoid an all out war. This is what lead to his assassination
They confirmed the existence of a conspiracy with the Warren Report, and the endorsement of the idea that there was a single-shooter, explained by the so-called magic bullet. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that The Most Serious People in the government signed their names to something that any 12 year old who's shot a .22 caliber rifle would know is utter, complete, and irredeemable nonsense. All the rest is window dressing. That's all you need. And, after sealing the deal, there's only one organization which could have been responsible, by sheer power (to get SCOTUS and POTUS to go along with it), and motivation (standard MIC motivation of endless war in SE Asia).
The fact that they continue to release more stuff over and over gives very legitimate credence to the notion they are hiding something.
It seems clear they don't want us to know something.
Now, it could be more or less political, or personal, or something ultimately mundane, but the conspiracy theorists can make it anything they want of it.
I suggest there might have been something really complicated wherein nobody could point the finger fully at any group, but that the CIA was doing something sketchy, funding the wrong people, Johnson new about it but only in superficial terms, someone somewhere took it too far, it got out of hand and that the truth is just too damaging to the state (and various agencies) itself so they want to keep it hidden.
Well, releasing ALL the documents would be a good start. Seeing as how it is over 50 years after the fact, when all of the principles are now dead, that should not be too much to ask.
I disagree. There are enough facts already to conclude that powerful forces have tried to obfuscate facts surrounding the assassination. What that means is unclear because that’s how muddying the waters works. But only a fool would buy the official narrative. It may be very close to the truth but there are too many unexplainable aspects to not think there is more to what happened that the average person believes. That may be different now since people trust journalists and government less. It’s clear the let Oswald get shot. And the bullet? It’s a joke.
The more interesting event to me is that the balance of evidence on MLK’s assassination shows that he was murdered in an operation coordinated between the FBI and the Memphis police and mafia.
Assuming some government agency actually did kill Kennedy, how long would they have to wait until admitting what happened would carry no consequences? I feel that it really wouldn't be that long. 100 years? Less?
Why on earth would they literally ever do that? There are always numerous procedural backdoors on how to avoid that if you play by the book (can't release from archives if it ain't archived for reason XYZ for example), and endless options if you don't.
If you as chief just take a single copy of some strong evidence and burn it, that's about it, who is gonna stop you. People on top of these power pyramids have usually more massive ego than their body can actually take so its easy to feel righteous about such acts.
Out of all the possible reasons, killing one's own president is confidently on top of the list of reasons to never ever disclose.
Not that I subscribe to any particular theory since we don't know and probably never will, but there are way too many weird coincidences and events to make the lone shooter theory anything but a fringe, unprobable one.
But given how massively CIA et al fucked up long term almost everything they took upon, this would have to be their best-executed mission by far. That doesn't mean somebody else wasn't more competent/lucky.
A story from my former soviet-enslaved country in east europe - after iron curtain fell, secret services were intensively burning all the heaps of incriminating paperwork gathered in prior decades on themselves and their collaborators, and bribes were done to get ones that evaded this. Very few remained. That's how you easily erase past, no other digital copies on distributed tapes. Now most apparatchiks are in politics or organized crime, often both.
Unfortunately some of it won't be released, particularly the note Oswald passed to Special Agent Hosty a few days before the assassination. Allegedly it was a threat to stop hassling his family but we'll never know. Hosty was ordered by his superiors to destroy it, and promptly flushed it down the toilet.
Never, as long as the CIA still exists. The institutional reputation of the agency is very low right now among large swaths of the population. Imagine what would happen if it was revealed that they had a hand in killing a sitting US president? No matter how long ago it was, their reputation and credibility (and the reputation and credibility of all the institutions and people who continue to uphold them as patriotic defenders of democracy) would be forever tainted (even beyond what it is today).
... not relevant to the JFK assassination, but it kind of shows you how they would go about researching subjects they weren't already knowledgeable in.
JFK was a proponent of interventionist foreign policy and neoliberal-ish economics just like every US president after him. The US establishment had no reason to kill him. He was one of them through and through.
Focusing on who pulled the trigger is a distraction from what the consequences were and how policy was affected.
What's important is what happened after and that should be the real focus - that's why most people have no idea who Charles J Guiteau and Leon Czolgosz are.
The JFK assassination, and other historical events, seem like they could be such great applications for the kind of AI systems we have now. It really seems as if something like ChatGPT could "read" every document related to the JFK assassination and put together the pieces for us.
I'm already convinced it was some combination of anti-Castro Cubans, Italian-American mafia, and members of the CIA that were involved in a conspiracy to kill JFK. That seems pretty clear just from reading the Wikipedia pages, but I'd love to have an AI system assemble the full story in detail. There's a lot of unanswered questions, like how far up the chain did things go. Who was involved in the cover up, and much more.
At the very least, we probably need a system that is trained on just the raw source material so that it is not biased by all the existing theories.
Say what you will about Trump (lots of bad stuff to say in that regard), but this was specifically one of his campaign promises and after years of legal / bureaucratic battles we at least have some more records
That said, I don’t understand why these types of requests take so long… this event was quite literally a life time ago. Anyone involved would long be dead or incapable of standing trial.
> Anyone involved would long be dead or incapable of standing trial.
If, for example, some documents include details of spies in Russia never uncovered, even if those folks have retired/died, their network (and its recruited descendants) might well still be operating.
One reason the CIA doesn't release information that has since become public, is because the techniques used to acquire that information are still classified.
I'm not any kind of expert, but at the end of the JFK movie (1991) it says the House Select Committee on Assassinations files are locked until 2029. I think that is the result of the Warren commission...
While Trump promised to do this, he unfortunately later agreed with the Intelligence Community to continue hiding certain information, which Biden has now done as well.
One obvious reason is that these documents can confirm spying operations that were happening and may still be continuing to today.
For example the US was tapping and transcribing all the phone calls to communist bloc embassies in Mexico in collaboration with Mexico’s presidency but unbeknownst to their law enforcement agencies.
Of course we already safely assumed they were tapping communist embassies, but the documents reveal the precise nature of the taps, what they usually did with the information they found, and to what extent the Mexican government was aware.
There must be a lot of review and consideration before deciding to reveal these details, even decades later.
Consider the prospect that those were just populist campaign lies. For gosh sakes "I'm going to release the JFK secrets" is the most tabloidy, QAnon thing one could say. I mean, it's perfect in terms of appeal to his core demo, but why on earth would he want to actually follow through? What would be the point? He can just pretend he didn't say it, and make up some other thing for the next election cycle.
My prediction: these documents may narrow some unknowns while providing zero evidence that rebuts the conventional story. Conspiracy theorists are emotionally invested in their wacko ideas, so they will continue peddling their warez.
Conspiracy theorists allow their emotions to overwhelm their rationality. It’s a self-imposed mental feebleness. Most of us, by contrast, find balance between the two.
Much of the worst we see in modern US politics are when bad actors knowingly take advantage of this emotionally driven mental feebleness. That’s how you empower extremists.
[+] [-] narag|3 years ago|reply
You can say that it was impossible to gather enough proof, that the evidence led nowhere, but saying that it's ridiculous is... suspicious.
Reminds me of more recent events... <ducks and hides under the desk>
[+] [-] pcurve|3 years ago|reply
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2022/10...
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2022/10...
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2022/10...
They played such important roles pre-computer days, and to this date still do.
1960s office environment was so different watching old footages like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zUQD1p9bXY
[+] [-] subpixel|3 years ago|reply
https://thomasmoore.info/cage-correspondence/
https://www.ebay.com/itm/224709320630
[+] [-] NDizzle|3 years ago|reply
All the good stuff is hand written, in the margins, or above/below the line.
[+] [-] Perceval|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thsbrown|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] af3d|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2-718-281-828|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|3 years ago|reply
Joe DiMaggio had JFK killed.
DiMaggio's family hails from Sicily and had a lot of mob connections in the East Bay. JFK was famously barred by Joe from attending Marilyn's funeral, due to his jealousy and implications he held that JFK was responsible in part for her death. Via mob connections and his time playing with/against Ted Williams, Joe manages to get Oswald, a Marine like Williams, to do the deed.
[+] [-] amrangaye|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcurve|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdhn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DamnInteresting|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drexlspivey|3 years ago|reply
* The hit was ordered by the Chicago mafia boss at the time, Sam Giancana
* CIA wasn't directly involved but caught a whiff of the plot and let it happen anyway because they were very unhappy with JFK
here is why the mafia was unhappy with JFK:
* JFKs father made his fortune as a bootlegger during the prohibition era and was very friendly with the mobsters
* the OG mobsters wanted JFK as a president because they were going to have some influence on him through his father.
* the mafia and specifically Sam Giancana helped JFK getting elected in Chicago which was kind of a flip state
after getting elected JFK was not having any of it and completely cut off the mob and actually went against them in a couple of ways
Firstly his brother Robert Kennedy was made attorney general and went after the mob hard. He made his goal to put Jimmy Hoffa behind bars. Hoffa was mobbed up and it was the main financier of the mobs building casinos by providing loans to them through the Teamsters Pension Fund.
The mafia had built many casinos in Cuba. After the revolution, Fidel Castro nationalised the casinos taking away the big cash flows from the mob. The mafia wanted JFK to invade Cuba and take down Castro so they could take control of the casinos back.
here is why CIA was against JFK:
* The bay of pigs invasion was orchestrated by the CIA by training Cuban anti-Castro dissidents that fled the country after the revolution and sending them to fight during the invasion.
* During the invasion JFK promised that he would provide air support to the troops but at the last moment he flinched leaving the ground troops helpless which doomed the operation
What I believe happened:
* Oswald was set up as a patsy for the assassination. His handler from the mob was a guy named Jack Ruby.
* Jack Ruby was a known mobster and the right hand man of Sam Giancana
* When Oswald was captured and during his transport after the initial interrogation Jack Ruby killed Oswald live on television (you can find it on youtube) so he would not blow the whistle
From my understanding the main falling out in the relationship of JFK, the CIA and the mob was when he intentionally botched the invasion to avoid an all out war. This is what lead to his assassination
[+] [-] ceejayoz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasmer|3 years ago|reply
It seems clear they don't want us to know something.
Now, it could be more or less political, or personal, or something ultimately mundane, but the conspiracy theorists can make it anything they want of it.
I suggest there might have been something really complicated wherein nobody could point the finger fully at any group, but that the CIA was doing something sketchy, funding the wrong people, Johnson new about it but only in superficial terms, someone somewhere took it too far, it got out of hand and that the truth is just too damaging to the state (and various agencies) itself so they want to keep it hidden.
[+] [-] starkd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2devnull|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sonotathrowaway|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beepbooptheory|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _justinfunk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdhdjdbdjdbd|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mjd|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thatguy0900|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saiya-jin|3 years ago|reply
If you as chief just take a single copy of some strong evidence and burn it, that's about it, who is gonna stop you. People on top of these power pyramids have usually more massive ego than their body can actually take so its easy to feel righteous about such acts.
Out of all the possible reasons, killing one's own president is confidently on top of the list of reasons to never ever disclose.
Not that I subscribe to any particular theory since we don't know and probably never will, but there are way too many weird coincidences and events to make the lone shooter theory anything but a fringe, unprobable one.
But given how massively CIA et al fucked up long term almost everything they took upon, this would have to be their best-executed mission by far. That doesn't mean somebody else wasn't more competent/lucky.
A story from my former soviet-enslaved country in east europe - after iron curtain fell, secret services were intensively burning all the heaps of incriminating paperwork gathered in prior decades on themselves and their collaborators, and bribes were done to get ones that evaded this. Very few remained. That's how you easily erase past, no other digital copies on distributed tapes. Now most apparatchiks are in politics or organized crime, often both.
[+] [-] Simon_O_Rourke|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StanislavPetrov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] einpoklum|3 years ago|reply
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2022/10...
... not relevant to the JFK assassination, but it kind of shows you how they would go about researching subjects they weren't already knowledgeable in.
[+] [-] keewee7|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guilhas|3 years ago|reply
Richard Belzer Discusses "Hit List," His Book on the JFK Assassination, at The National Press Club https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ETvZ0p9FiHw
Also did not knew his acting was that close to himself
[+] [-] kristopolous|3 years ago|reply
What's important is what happened after and that should be the real focus - that's why most people have no idea who Charles J Guiteau and Leon Czolgosz are.
[+] [-] markus_zhang|3 years ago|reply
http://somesecretsforyou.blogspot.com/2010/04/
[+] [-] staunch|3 years ago|reply
I'm already convinced it was some combination of anti-Castro Cubans, Italian-American mafia, and members of the CIA that were involved in a conspiracy to kill JFK. That seems pretty clear just from reading the Wikipedia pages, but I'd love to have an AI system assemble the full story in detail. There's a lot of unanswered questions, like how far up the chain did things go. Who was involved in the cover up, and much more.
At the very least, we probably need a system that is trained on just the raw source material so that it is not biased by all the existing theories.
[+] [-] _justinfunk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] victor22|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _hcuq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lettergram|3 years ago|reply
That said, I don’t understand why these types of requests take so long… this event was quite literally a life time ago. Anyone involved would long be dead or incapable of standing trial.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|3 years ago|reply
If, for example, some documents include details of spies in Russia never uncovered, even if those folks have retired/died, their network (and its recruited descendants) might well still be operating.
[+] [-] ThinkingGuy|3 years ago|reply
Source: "The Langley Files: A CIA Podcast" (Yes, the CIA has a podcast) https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-langley-files/
[+] [-] monstertank|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giarc|3 years ago|reply
It was 59 years ago. There definitely could still be people alive that were involved (I'm not implying anything).
[+] [-] knorker|3 years ago|reply
He could have declassified it all, but didn't.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/oliver-s...
[+] [-] hx833001|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_random_canuck|3 years ago|reply
For example the US was tapping and transcribing all the phone calls to communist bloc embassies in Mexico in collaboration with Mexico’s presidency but unbeknownst to their law enforcement agencies.
Of course we already safely assumed they were tapping communist embassies, but the documents reveal the precise nature of the taps, what they usually did with the information they found, and to what extent the Mexican government was aware.
There must be a lot of review and consideration before deciding to reveal these details, even decades later.
[+] [-] jasmer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markus_zhang|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dev_daftly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AuthorizedCust|3 years ago|reply
Conspiracy theorists allow their emotions to overwhelm their rationality. It’s a self-imposed mental feebleness. Most of us, by contrast, find balance between the two.
Much of the worst we see in modern US politics are when bad actors knowingly take advantage of this emotionally driven mental feebleness. That’s how you empower extremists.