Jackie Onassis believed that Lyndon B Johnson and a cabal of Texas tycoons were involved in the assassination of her husband John F Kennedy, ‘explosive’ recordings are set to reveal.

The secret tapes will show that the former first lady felt that her husband’s successor was at the heart of the plot to murder him. She became convinced that the then vice president, along with businessmen in the South, had orchestrated the Dallas shooting, with gunman Lee Harvey Oswald – long claimed to have been a lone assassin – merely part of a much larger conspiracy.

The tapes were recorded with leading historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr within months of the assassination on November 22, 1963, and had been sealed in a vault at the Kennedy Library in Boston.

The then Mrs Kennedy, who went on to marry Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, had ordered that they should not be released until 50 years after her death, with some reports suggesting she feared that her revelations might make her family targets for revenge. She died 17 years ago from cancer aged 64 and now her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, has agreed to release the recordings early.

John F. Kennedy’s closest aide was the queen of conspiracy theorists.

Evelyn Lincoln, his personal secretary, wrote down a list of suspects in her beloved boss’ assassination — and it included both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

The never-before-seen personal note, scribbled by Lincoln as she sat aboard Air Force One returning to Washington on the day of JFK’s death, lists those she thought might be behind the president’s murder.

The note, estimated to be worth $30,000, is now on the auction block.

Her note listed “Lyndon, KKK, Dixiecrats, [Teamsters boss Jimmy] Hoffa, [the] John Birch Society, Nixon, [South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh] Diem,Rightist, CIA in Cuban fiasco, Dictators [and] Communists.”

Read More in the NY Post

For the JFK-assassination conspiracy junkie who has everything: Lee Harvey Oswald’s coffin. Body not included.

A Los Angeles auction house said on Tuesday it would sell the simple pine coffin in which the suspected assassin of President John F. Kennedy was buried for almost 20 years.

Bidding will start at $1,000, but the item is expected to fetch strong interest from museums and collectors of presidential memorabilia when it goes on the block on December 16.

“There’s just a lot of interest in Kennedy and anything to do with his assassination,” said Laura Yntema, auction manager at Santa Monica, California-based Nate D. Sanders.

The coffin was unearthed in October 1981 after a legal dispute between Oswald’s widow, Marina, and his brother, Robert. Marina successfully sought an exhumation to test a conspiracy theory that a lookalike Russian agent had been buried in her husband’s place, according to the auction house…

[continues at Reuters]

“… Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty …“

Beautiful stuff without a doubt.  But is it still true? The ‘Greatest Generation’, Kennedy’s generation, the generation that suffered the deprivations of the Great Depression, fought on the front lines against fascism during WWII and pioneered the Civil Rights movement is approaching their century mark and has nearly if not quite entirely departed the national stage alltogether. How well have their Boomer and X’er heirs honored their legacy?

A Generation of Swine

Not too well at all it seems, if you’ve been monitoring the latest dustups about the deficit reduction commission. Though I wouldn’t blame you at all if you haven’t; by and large it’s been more of the same from Republican’ts. Just one long litany of proposed hatchet jobs, both to vital programs that support the working class and retirees and slash the tax load of the mega-rich. They’re currently using refusing to renew unemployment benefits and threatening to make regular Americans work an extra 5 years in order to pay for yet another handout to their wealthy patrons. Despite a roll call of high-profile economic experts and even business moguls warning against the damage that Republican policies will do to our national infrastructure, the middle class and the economy in general, the Right Wingers seem just about Hell-bent on the “Roadmap to America’s Ruin.”

Wisconsin’s own homegrown homunculus, Paul Ryan, will become House budget chief in January, which should be a profound shock to anyone with a working appreciation for morality or intelligence.  Having thoroughly shit all over himself by begging for an $800 + billion bailout for his patrons, the atavistic bankster failures AIG and JP Morgan Chase, he not only had the cojones to run interference to prevent attempts to check their excesses, but now he claims the mantles of down-home populism and economic savvy.  Oh yeah, and he’s trying to repeal the law that allows parents to insure their college-age children and keeps insurance companies from denying coverage at will.  Just one more chapter in the life of an American ‘patriot’.

Seriously, though, Paulie’s list of failures must loom large in the annals of the history of those of us born in the late ’60s through the early ’80s.  Most social historians call these folks “Generation X“. But Hunter S. Thompson, perhaps my favorite American writer of all times had a much more descriptive and apropos name for us, the “Generation of Swine“, reflecting the utter moral and intellectual pollution of a generation, raised to be Reaganauts with the crude lack of self-awareness that is pleased to call cutthroat robbery “magic of the free markets.”

More at Dystopia Diaries

Site editor’s note: This post from DJ Pangburn originally appeared on

The Kennedy assassination and the conspiracies surrounding it are imbued with such meaning for Americans because the distortion radiating in waves almost immediately following the spectacle was the aftershock of a system convulsing in its own death.

I do not use the “death” metaphor in regards to the JFK assassination lightly, for death is no light matter. Follow me through the looking glass.

Oliver Stone taught an entire generation to invoke Cicero’s Senate speech when thinking about any event and the official version of such events, through the voice of the character X (based on Fletcher Prouty) in the movie “JFK.” He taught people that the “how and the who” is all scenery for the public, and the real questions are: why?, who benefits?, and who has the power to cover it up? ”Cui bono?” The greatest thing the filmmaker ever did was to question the motives of the men to whom Americans willingly relinquish power.

And why not? The default position should not be absolute trust in our elected officials and military leaders but absolute skepticism. Why? Quite simply, power is at stake, and nothing drives men to cross into the realm of death quite like power and money – the true religion for many human beings.

But, what of JFK’s death itself: the actual moment? It is pure spectacle.

Caught on film, burnt into a strip of chemicals and duplicated for all time, it became something else as soon as the Zapruder film was made public. It outdid Hollywood at its own game and made the moment into a collective mesmerization. The frame doesn’t show who did it, and if the official story that Oswald was not the lone assassin isn’t believed, then we — as voyeurs, amateur sleuths — extend ourselves by way of imagination beyond the borders of the frame, where reality is nebulous.

The shock of Kennedy’s head being disintegrated has the appearance of a spectacular special effect. But, as with any image of death, whether painted, frozen in photographic stillness or under the magical spell of persistence of motion, a desensitization occurs. The shock of the instant dissipates — or does it?

No, the shock is transferred into something else entirely but related by virtue of the moment’s symbolism. The shock no longer has its effect in a repulsion at a life being taken, but in the death of something much larger. The sick feeling permeating the collective American stomach is the collective witnessing of nothing less than the death of democracy.

Kennedy was a complex figure, at once part of the system but apart from it.  In a sense, he’d always been an outsider owing to his Irish Catholic heritage — trying to, perhaps because of his father, infiltrate an order that was entrenched and as exclusive as a fraternity. The high class social equivalent of “separate but equal.” His loyalties were to family and country.

Neither he nor his brother Robert were willing to prostrate themselves to the traditional power structures, only use and manipulate them by turning the order’s own weapons — realpolitik and Machiavellian maneuvering — against them. RFK probably superseded his brother in sheer disgust of the established order, though he was not possessed of the same political finesse, which made him even more dangerous.

As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard noted in his book “Simulacra and Simulation”:

“The Kennedys were killed because they incarnated something: the political, political substance, whereas the new presidents are nothing but caricatures and fake film — curiously, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, all have this simian mug, the monkeys of power.”

And after? After JFK’s assassination, a slippage occurred, in which our sense of democratic reality was lost in a hall of mirrors — the illusion of democracy. We operated under the assumption that it was still functional, if it ever had been in the first place.

With Kennedy, it was as if someone materialized who would attempt to change the established order, even if the legislature and the courts were unwilling to follow. A figure that posed a perfect threat to that order because he would expose it for what it really was: an oligarchy, an aristocracy not of nobility but of money and influence.

He was Machiavelli’s Prince inverted: come not to accumulate power and decapitate the aristocracy for personal gain, but to feed the power back to the source whence it emanates — the people.

This made Kennedy supremely dangerous. It is hard to imagine how dangerous he truly was because very few people stop to think about the forces arrayed against him in the guise of other politicians, defense contractors, corporations, banks, etc.

It almost doesn’t matter who assassinated JFK–only that it happened. The assassin is, as Stone suggests, pure scenery. It is a magic show by a cadre of illusionists. Even the more meaningful questions of why, who benefits and who has the power to cover it up lose all meaning as you pass through the looking glass.

We lose ourselves in the minutiae: the static of the spectacle is now transferred into theories in which we are hopelessly lost.  And this is exactly where we are meant to be — lost in the static. The spectacle of JFK’s assassination, and our obsession with the spectacle and its surface-level detail, is simply the microcosm of our life inside what passes for American democracy now.

Did the CIA kill Kennedy? The Mafia? The Russians? The Cubans? Oswald? E. Howard Hunt? The French Connection? Defense contractors? Wall Street? It is all of them and none simultaneously. Whoever it was, the effect is the same, and this is the critical point. It is the most shocking aspect of the spectacle. It not only brought death to Kennedy, but death to everything he symbolized.

Oswald acting alone achieves the same effect as that of every possible conspiracy theory scenario: power re-established, preserved temporarily. And it is repeated with Robert Kennedy — equally unreal in its imagery.

There was an effort to resurrect the two Kennedy’s in the figure of Barack Obama, but that was false hope. If he had half the will, or posed half the threat of the Kennedy’s, the spectacle would have been repeated again.

Remember: it does not matter how it happened, or even why (we know the answer), only that it happened.

Imagine that you are JFK, freshly-elected President. You are brought into a room (it doesn’t matter where). Men in suits approach you and sit down. And you, as Kennedy, see those disturbing smiles on their faces, and no words pass between you aside from some pleasantries. Now it is time for business. There is no politics to this interaction.  One of these men lays it out in full detail: keep the house in order and all will be well. Transgress the order and, well, you can imagine the endpoint.

Now imagine this interaction repeated with the newly-elected President Obama. Now you are him. The men with similar vacant grins, but they have the spectacle of the Zapruder film as ammunition and ask you how it will be?  And you know then you will not transgress the order because you know very well the endpoint.

Here’s a quote from Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation”:

“In the end, the game of power becomes nothing but the critical obsession with power–obsession with its death, obsession with its survival, which increases as it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, we will logically be under the total hallucination of power — a haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere, expressing at once the compulsion to get rid of it (no one wants it anymore, everyone unloads it on everyone else) and the panicked nostalgia over its loss. The melancholy of societies without power: this has already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that cannot terminate its mourning.”

It is that power which benefitted from Kennedy’s death: a power terrified of seeing its raison d’être disappear.

They may have assassinated democracy through the symbol of Kennedy, but they have not terminated the will of those able to see the machinery behind the illusion.

After mostly avoiding the spotlight for decades, many of the former U.S. Secret Service agents who were assigned to protect President John F. Kennedy are now offering their accounts of the day he was assassinated, 47 years ago Monday.

After the first shot hit the president, former agent Clint Hill says, “I saw him grab at his throat and lean to his left. So I jumped and ran.” Hill is the man seen running toward the limousine in the famous film of the shooting, captured by a bystander named Abraham Zapruder. Hill jumped onto the back of the presidential car, in a desperate attempt to protect the president.

“Just before I got to the car, the third shot hit him in the head.” Hill says.”It was too late.”

First lady Jackie Kennedy had climbed onto the back hood of the car, but Hill moved her back into her seat, and attempted to shield the two of them from any further bullets, as the car sped to the hospital.
As the president’s head lay in her lap, Hill heard Mrs. Kennedy say, “Oh, Jack, what have they done to you?”…

[continues at CNN]

At the New World Order Report, Jonathan Elinoff provides a much more extensive presentation of how I introduce 9/11 in my lectures and essays. (He barely mentions 9/11 as it turns out — but he doesn’t really need to because of all the other Truth he presents that paves the way!)

My own approach to 9/11 has been not only about the reality of the dark side of human nature, but all about context — amply demonstrating that 9/11 is just one more monstrous manipulation of world events — and that OF COURSE “our leaders” would do it, because just look at how many times they’ve done it before!

But of course that means newbies coping with the SHOCK that almost all of the U.S. and World History we’ve been taught is JUST ONE BIG FAIRY-TALE. I’m convinced, though, that all that truth is about to “bust out all over.” And this compendium of facts from J. Elinoff just may be one of the Internet catalysts to help it happen.

Only problem is — no matter how much he has condensed the reports and even video clips of news broadcasts that prove it all — this thing is almost as long as a book! And it’s infested with some typos and code glitches that make it look a little bit of a mess. I would LOVE to edit it down and clean it up (especially to send to every newspaper editor I know), but that’s WAY too much time and effort.

So here it is, AS it is. Be aware: even with only a quick skim through it is still OF GREAT VALUE!

After reading the article released by Cracked.com, I decided to update and revise their work. The article gave me a chuckle because it lacked many famous and much larger conspiracy theories that became known. Their article had only listed seven. I can name 33 and I am about to release a revised list soon with 75. The article I read at Cracked can be viewed here, but don’t waste your time, all of that is in this article and more.

Most people can’t resist getting the details on the latest conspiracy theories, no matter how far-fetched they may seem.  At the same time, many people quickly denounce any conspiracy theory as untrue … and sometimes as unpatriotic or just plain ridiculous. Let’s not forget all of the thousands of conspiracies out of Wall Street like Bernie Madoff and many others to commit fraud and extortion, among many crimes of conspiracy. USA Today reports that over 75% of personal ads in the paper and on Craigslist are married couples posing as single for a one night affair. When someone knocks on your door to sell you a set of knives or phone cards, anything for that matter, do they have a profit motive?  What is conspiracy other than just a scary way of saying “alternative agenda”?  When 2 friends go to a bar and begin to plan their wingman approach on 2 girls they see at the bar, how often are they planning on lying to those girls?“  I own a small business and am in town for a short while. Oh yeah, you look beautiful.”

Conspiracy theory is a term that originally was a neutral descriptor for any claim of civil, criminal or political conspiracy.  However, it has come almost exclusively to refer to any fringe theory which explains a historical or current event as the result of a secret plot by conspirators of almost superhuman power and cunning. To conspire means “to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or to use such means to accomplish a lawful end. ”The term “conspiracy theory” is frequently used by scholars and in popular culture to identify secret military, banking, or political actions aimed at stealing power, money, or freedom, from “the people”.

To many, conspiracy theories are just human nature. Not all people in this world are honest, hard working and forthcoming about their intentions.Certainly we can all agree on this.So how did the term “conspiracy theory” get grouped in with fiction, fantasy and folklore?  Maybe that’s a conspiracy, just kidding.  Or am I? …

[continues at New World Order Report]

The Black Fridays Episode 25 — Mack White

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The Black Fridays are please to welcome Mack White from Psi-Op Radio to our show! Tonight we continue the conversation about the JFK Assassination. We are going to play the actual audio of the assassination as well as talk with Mack about where he was that day and what a recent guest on Psi-Op had to say about his role in the conspiracy.

Mack has been a guest we have wanted to talk to for a long time. He is a noted comic artist and illustrator in his professional life as well as a talk show host. He has a lot to say and we were happy to listen!

Check out Mack White’s website here and check out Psi-Op Radio too!

I’m partial to Oliver Stone’s filmmaking … and I can’t wait for his Wall Street sequel later this year.

Here’s a bit of JFK that is about the power of questioning established truth, regardless of how entrenched that “truth” might be.

I’ll let the film speak for itself and do share your favorite films or film moments:

What would Crossfire author and JFK conspiracy expert Jim Marrs say? (Answer: He’s fine with it.)

(Below is a news report, not the actual video itself.)

A month before marrying Jacqueline Bouvier, the future President was writing amorous notes to another woman.

If there was ever any doubt that John F Kennedy, the slain American President, was a hopeless romantic, if not an out-and-out rake with a foggy grasp of the commitments of marriage
, a newly revealed collection of love letters written in his own hand to a straw-haired Swedish siren will surely put it to rest.

True, the then young senator from Massachusetts first met the woman in question, Gunilla von Post, before his marriage to Jacqueline Lee Bouvier – but only one month before. It was the summer of 1953 and the pair – he 36 and she just 21 – were both on holiday on the French Riviera. They danced all night and parted with a moonlit kiss.

Most about-to-be-married men might consider such a night as a last fling of bachelorhood with no prospects for continuation, particularly if they are in public life with aspirations one day to lead their country. But Mr Kennedy did not think like most men. So he was to begin corresponding with Ms von Post, mostly in the hope of organising a clandestine reunion, a dream that was at first thwarted but finally resulted in a week-long assignation in Sweden.

The details of the affair were made public by Ms von Post herself in a book and an interview with ABC News in the US in 1997. But only now are the 11 letters written by Mr Kennedy, many filled with swooning language (and showing a blithe disregard for the most rudimentary rules of English punctuation), coming to light. More than that, they are up for sale on an online auction site based in Chicago.

[Read more at The Independent]

A new mini-series about John F. Kennedy’s presidency that is being prepared by the History channel does not yet have a cast or a premiere date. Not a frame of footage has been shot. It does, however, have prominent critics who want it brought to a halt.

The critics, including Theodore C. Sorensen, a former Kennedy adviser, say they have read the scripts for the project and that those contain errors of fact and emphasis. But like a similar controversy over a 2003 television film about Ronald Reagan, the dispute over the embryonic Kennedy series seems to say as much about the enduring place of the Kennedys as a battleground in the culture wars as it does about history itself.

The mini-series, called “The Kennedys,” is the brainchild of Joel Surnow, a creator of the Fox action show “24” and an outspoken political conservative. That raised alarms among Kennedy partisans when the History channel said in December that it would pick up the project.

Now a documentary filmmaker who makes no secret of his liberal politics is releasing an Internet video in which Kennedy scholars say the scripts offer a portrait of the president and his family that is, at best, inaccurate, and at worst, a hatchet job.

“It was political character assassination,” the filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, said of the screenplays in a telephone interview. “It was sexist titillation and pandering, and it was turning everything into a cheap soap opera of the worst kind.” Mr. Greenwald said he is hoping that his 13-minute video and an accompanying petition, at stopkennedysmears.com, will take on lives of their own on the Web. A title card at the film’s conclusion reads: “Tell the History Channel I refuse to watch right-wing character assassination masquerading as ‘history.’ ”…

[continues in the New York Times]

Image by quarkscrew via Creative Commons

The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani, so often the purveyor of eviscerating book reviews, for once truly loves something: an all-out mockery of a myriad of conspiracy theories, from 9/11 to Princess Diana, by David Aaronovich, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History:

The principle of Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one — or as the character Gil Grissom in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” succinctly puts it, if you hear hoofbeats, “think horses, not zebras.”In his lively new book, “Voodoo Histories,” the journalist David Aaronovitch uses Occam’s razor to eviscerate the many conspiracy theories that have percolated through politics and popular culture over the last century, from those that assert that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were actually a United States government plot to those that claim that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered at the direction of the royal family or British intelligence.

In most cases, Mr. Aaronovitch notes, conspiracy theorists would rather tie themselves into complicated knots and postulate all sorts of improbable secret connections than accept a simple, more obvious explanation.

Of those who claim that the Pentagon was not hit on 9/11 by a terrorist-piloted American Airlines Flight 77, Mr. Aaronovitch sarcastically observes: “But there is always the possibility, however extraordinarily remote, that DNA might have been planted to the exact specifications of the missing passengers, crew and employees, that wreckage might somehow have been placed at the scene within minutes of the crash, and that the real occupants of the missing Flight 77 might have been spirited away to some unknown place, there to be butchered or to live in the world’s weirdest witness protection program.”…

[continues in the New York Times]

Few events have captured the American imagination more than the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The American public and our greatest intellectuals have poured over the evidence over and over again. It nags at national consciousness like a wound that won’t heal because you keep picking at it.

The solution to the problem always lies on the tip of our collective tongue. Of course, a great deal of the evidence is locked up, hidden away in the vaults of the intelligence community. This article will not attempt to shed new light on the assassination.

Much of the information presented here is available elsewhere, and has been repeated ad nauseum. I wish to concentrate on the subject of the man Lee Harvey Oswald, a singularly fascinating figure in American history.

Full Article at Black Sun Gazette

Our Guest this episode, Jim Marrs

We take a break from the recent onslaught of occult-related episodes, and delve head-first into the world of conspiracy theory with legendary author Jim Marrs. Jim is the author of the New York Times bestseller Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, Above Top Secret, The Sisterhood of the Rose and many more.

This week, we discuss: Did the Nazis ever really go away, Who killed JFK, was Lee Harvey Oswald a Patsy or the lone gunman, and much more.

Joining Ken is SittingNow veteran Jacob ‘JW’ Williams, a man plauged with questions about the Kennedy assassination. One such question, “was Kennedy’s door open?”, is now available for your digestion:

Jacob’s eagle-eye spotted this…

Enjoy!

About Jim Marrs:

Jim Marrs was born in Fort Worth. After graduating from University of North Texas he joined the United States Army. On his release in 1968 he joined the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He served as police reporter and general assignments reporter covering stories locally, in Europe and the Middle East. After a leave of absence to serve with a Fourth Army intelligence unit during the Vietnam War, he became military and aerospace writer for the newspaper and an investigative reporter. Marrs began to take an interest in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. After interviewing several members of the Dallas Police Department he became convinced him that the Warren Commission was a cover-up. Marrs continued to investigate the case and interviewed several important witnesses as well as city and county officials.

In 1976 Marrs began teaching a course about the assassination for the University of Texas at Arlington. He left the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1980 and worked as a freelance journalist while continuing to investigate the death of Kennedy. Marrs eventually became convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald had been set up by the government and in 1989 he published Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Published to critical acclaim and reached the New York Times Paperback Non-Fiction Best Seller list in mid-February 1992. It also became a basis for the Oliver Stone film JFK and he served as a chief consultant for both the film’s screenplay and production.

Since 1980, Mr. Marrs has been a freelance writer, author and public relations consultant. He also published a rural weekly newspaper along with a monthly tourism tabloid, a cable television show and several videos. Beginning in 1992, Mr. Marrs spent three years researching and completing a non-fiction book on a top-secret government program involving the psychic phenomenon known as remote viewing only to have it mysteriously canceled as it was going to press in the summer of 1995. Within two months, the story of military-developed remote viewing broke nationally in the Washington Post after the CIA held a press conference revealing the program but putting their own spin on psychic studies. Psi Spies is now available from JimMarrs.com.

In May, 1997, Marrs’ in-depth investigation of UFOs, Alien Agenda, was published by HarperCollins. Marrs has been a featured speaker at a number of national conferences including the Annual International UFO Congress and the Annual Gulf Breeze UFO Conference. Publisher’s Weekly described the book as “the most entertaining and complete overview of flying saucers and their crew in years.” The paperback edition was released in mid-1998 and has since become the best-selling UFO book ever in the United States. Beginning in 2000, he began teaching a course on UFOs at the University of Texas at Arlington.

In early 2000, HarperCollins published Rule by Secrecy, which traced the hidden history that connects modern secret societies to the Ancient Mysteries. In 2003, his book The War on Freedom probed the conspiracies of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath.

Other books by Jim Marrs includes Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies (2004), Terror Conspiracy, The: Provocation, Deception and 9/11 (2006) and Rise of the Fourth Reich (2008)

The endless tangle of questions about bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and has obsessively fascinated, if not entirely blinded, two generations of self-styled assassination investigators, probably never will be satisfactorily resolved. Each new release of documents from the various bureaucracies involved in the nearly half century old investigation may only deepen the apparent contradictions.

Within this morass of facts. however, there is a central actor, Lee Harvey Oswald. His rifle, which fired the fatal bullet into the president, was found in the sniper’s nest at the Texas Book Depository. So was his palm print. He had also bought the ammunition. His cartridge cases were found near the body of a murdered policeman on the route of his flight.

In light of such evidence, the issue that ought to have concerned Americans was not Oswald’s technical guilt but whether he was involved with others in the assassination. Oswald was not a “loner” in the conventional sense. Ever since he was handed a pamphlet about the Rosenberg prosecution at the age of 15, he was a joiner, seeking affiliations with groups at home and abroad. When he was only 16, he wrote the Socialist Party, “I am a Marxist and have been studying Socialist Principles for well over five years,” and he requested information about joining their “Youth League.” He subsequently made membership inquiries to such organizations as the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party, The Gus Hall-Benjamin Davis Defense Committee, The Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the Communist Party, USA– correspondence that brought him under surveillance by the FBI.

[Read more at The Huffington Post]

Kennedy conspiracy theorists appear to have one less bullet in their arsenal. Hany Farid, a computer science professor and expert in digital forensics at Dartmouth College, spent two months evaluating a photograph of John F. Kennedy shooter Lee Harvey Oswald.

“You can’t really authenticate a photo in all honesty,” Farid said of the image, which shows Oswald holding a Marxist newspaper and a rifle. “But I can say pretty definitively that the things that people thought made the photo a fake, well, those people are wrong. And it doesn’t make them stupid. I was wrong too. But that photo is not the proof they think it is.”

It’s long been the contention of conspiracy theorists that photos of Oswald were doctored as part of an elaborate cover-up after the President’s Nov. 22, 1963, assassination.

Farid said over the years, he’s received dozens and dozens of requests to analyze the photo. What helped him decide to take on the project was a recent study he worked on looking at how the human brain processes images.

Read More: Union Leader

According to the book by Steven M. Gillon The Kennedy Assassination — 24 Hours After via huffpo:

It was standard practice for the plane to take off as soon as the commander-in-chief was onboard. Even after McHugh had ordered the pilot to take off, however, “nothing happened.” According to the newly declassified transcript, Mrs. Kennedy was becoming desperate to leave. “Mrs. Kennedy was getting very warm, she had blood all over her hat, her coat…his brains were sticking on her hat. It was dreadful,” McHugh said. She pleaded with him to get the plane off the ground. “Please, let’s leave,” she said. McHugh jumped up and used the phone near the rear compartment to call Captain James Swindal. “Let’s leave,” he said. Swindal responded: “I can’t do it. I have orders to wait.” Not wanting to make a scene in front of Mrs. Kennedy, McHugh rushed to the front of the plane. “Swindal, what on earth is going on?” The pilot told him that “the President wants to remain in this area.”

McHugh, like most members of the Kennedy entourage, did not know that Johnson was onboard. They believed that the new president was on his own plane flying back to Washington. If LBJ was on the plane, McHugh wanted to see for himself. Since he had not seen Johnson in the aisle — and at 6′4″ Johnson would be tough to miss — McHugh assumed that he must then be in the bedroom. When he checked there Johnson was nowhere to be seen. The only place on the plane he had not inspected was the bathroom in the presidential bedroom.

What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking. “I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed,” McHugh recalled. He claimed that LBJ was crying, “They’re going to get us all. It’s a plot. It’s a plot. It’s going to get us all.’” According to the General, Johnson “was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing.”

I soon discovered that McHugh had told a similar story when he spoke by phone with Mark Flanagan, an investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Ironically, McHugh gave the interview to the HSCA a week before he sat down with the Kennedy Library in May 1978. “McHugh had encountered difficulty in locating Johnson but finally discovered him alone,” Flanagan wrote in his summary to the Committee. Quoting McHugh, the investigator noted that the General found Johnson “hiding in the toilet in the bedroom compartment and muttering, ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy, they’re after all of us.’”

Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior.

For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.

The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his earlier role.

That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about C.I.A. activities. The agency’s deception was first reported in 2001 by Jefferson Morley, who has doggedly pursued the files ever since, represented by James H. Lesar, a Washington lawyer specializing in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits…

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The first half of our JFK assassination special features lively discussion about the basic elements of the assassination, as well as an examination of some of the more obvious problems with the official record.

In the second half of our JFK assassination specia we talk about different theories surrounding the identity of the assassin/assassins, as well as possible motives behind the President’s murder.