The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was originally passed in 1946, then modified in 1966 to prevent its misuse to hide information rather than doing its originally intended function of making knowledge of government activities available to the public. It was further amended a number of times, notably in the post-Watergate period of 1974; in 1982 when Reagan limited its application in the interests of national security; in1995-99 when Clinton opened up much information on what the government had been doing during the Cold War and most things of historic interest from at least twenty-five years earlier. In 2009 and 2010 Obama permitted retroactive classification of documents requested under FOIA, and briefly exempted the SEC from some disclosure in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007. Despite these modifications, the law and the departments organized to handle information requests under FOIA have remained as established in 1974. It has been a useful tool for those few remaining journalists who keep trying to expose the truth about government activities which the government would prefer that the public not be aware of.
Such efforts are often resisted by government agencies but in the past year or two, there have been striking revelations which together led to an important conclusion regarding the designated time frame for the release of potentially embarrassing information. All governments lie about their activities, or at least embellish them to improve their image, but since the US has been the world’s only superpower after 1991, its activities and misdeeds have greater worldwide consequences.
As an American citizen with a tendency to be hypercritical about almost everything, I believe it preferable to have a critical eye focused on one’s own activities and those of one’s tribe, despite the negative impact it may have on one’s economic prospects, than to blame all of the world’s ills on “the other”.
In the 1960’s the US was rocked by a series of major political assassinations which the country has never fully recovered from. Within the years 1963 to 1968, President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King were assassinated. All of them were moving the country toward a broader-based democracy and in every case that trajectory was derailed by their deaths. Each killing was followed by the growth and dissemination of a fairy tale explaining the event to keep the public from growing dangerously restive. These tales were remarkably successful except in the case of MLK, where the fury of the black population could not be so easily constrained.
In 2024 a number of reports, interviews and videos on internet finally put the mysteries to rest. Remarkably, several were documentaries made in the late 1990’s based on, or featuring, death-bed confessions by participants in these events. How it happened that such reports were made nearly three decades after the events, without making headlines in the news, remains almost as big a mystery as how the basic facts of the assassinations were concealed in the first place. That the documentaries made in the late 90’s only came to wide distribution last year adds another layer of mystery. In all four cases the evidence that has emerged indicates that there was some level of collusion within elements of government.
Now, let’s turn to some of the specific revelations that have found wide exposure in the past year. An interview with Chauncey Holt made a few days before his death in 1997 had him describing his career working for both the Mafia and for the CIA when their activities overlapped. He was on assignment in Dallas at the time of the JFK assassination, his role being essentially logistical in terms of supplying weapons and fabricating fake Secret Service I.D. badges for participants in the plot. He mentions his bosses in the Mafia as well as his contacts at the CIA. Holt was an interesting man with a strange combination of skill sets ranging from weapons expert to circus acrobat. His long interview on YouTube is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z5MgCG4COY
While Chauncey Holt admitted to being involved in the JFK assassination, he said he did none of the actual shooting. Shortly after seeing that filmed report, I found a video of an interview with another participant, James Files, who admitted to being the person who fired the fatal shot. He was not the primary shooter but was stationed on the grassy knoll ahead of the motorcade in case the first shooter failed to kill the president, and so it was that he fired the one shot that completed the mission. His story seems credible enough, certainly ten times more so than the Warren Commission Report, although that’s a very low bar. Could this documentary have been created by AI? The assassination was in 1963 and the confession about thirty-four years later. The wonders of Artificial Intelligence are far more recent. Was he just seeking fame before he died? I doubt it but see for yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp1E31tnTUU
The assassination of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965 as he was preparing to give a speech to a crowd of about 400 people seemed to be a more straightforward story of a clash between rival religious sects. Malcolm had a falling out with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, the year before and had joined a more orthodox Sunni Muslim congregation. The Black Muslims were angry. Malcolm was shot as many as 16 times, with his autopsy revealing 21 wounds, some from a shotgun fired by Thomas Hagen, a thug from NJ. Hagen was shot in the leg by security guards and escaped from the angry crowd. He was apparently never arrested for the crime. Three members of Nation Of Islam were arrested, tried and convicted for the murder. The media published reports of the crime that varied in many details, reflecting a degree of confusion as well a strong antipathy for the groups involved. One of the three men convicted of the killing, Mujahid Abdul Halim, subsequently confessed but said that the other two men convicted were not involved. In 2021, after serving many years in prison, the two men were exonerated by a judge who said the prosecution had withheld evidence at their trials. In 2024, surviving members of Malcolm X’s family decided to sue the FBI, the CIA and the NYPD for $100 million, alleging their complicity in the crime. I have no further information of the outcome of their case.
By the time that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on 05 June 1967 the American public was demoralized by the spate of killings and the changes set in motion by them. It seems to have leaped at the chance to believe that Sirhan Sirhan, a crazed Pakistani Muslim, was the sole killer. Evidence of the killing was quickly destroyed by the LA police and there was little official follow-up. Robert Kennedy Jr. was a thirteen year-old boy at the time of his father’s murder and unsurprisingly has spent a lot of time and effort doing what the FBI and the LA Police failed to do, i.e. finding out who the real killer was, although not necessarily who paid him. Spoiler alert: Sirhan was not Kennedy’s killer, despite being in the room and firing a number of shots, one of which critically wounded a member of the Kennedy entourage. RFK was shot from behind at close range by a security guard who left the country shortly after the killing. He was named by Kennedy Jr. in his interesting report, a summary of which you can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_assassination_conspiracy_theories
When killed, RFK was campaigning in California to become the Democratic candidate for president to replace President Lyndon Johnson, who would step down rather than face a primary challenge. The assassination of Kennedy threw the party into disarray which contributed to Richard Nixon becoming president in the elections of 1968.
James Earl Ray was blamed, charged and convicted of the killing of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. Given that the 40 year-old was both a racist and a fugitive from prison and was seen at the site of the crime, he was a convenient scapegoat, allowing the more important protagonists to escape scrutiny. A more plausible and detailed description of the crime has emerged which exonerates the long deceased Ray. He continued to insist til the day he died, in prison in 1998, that he was set up to take the rap and did not do the killing, except for the time when he took a guilty plea to escape the death penalty
See the long wikipedia description, which includes most of the alternate theories and rebuttals, including confessions of involvement by other locals, and accusations by the King family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
Besides the revelations regarding assassinations of the 1960’s, 2024 saw two attempts to assassinate former and future president Donald Trump. In the first instance, at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks managed to wound Trump on his right ear, kill one bystander and seriously wound two others before being shot to death by the Secret Service. The Director of the Secret Service was removed after what was called the biggest failure of the SS since the Reagan shooting in 1980. Was the failure a matter of negligence or was it planned? Maybe we’ll know in thirty years.
Two months later, another would-be assassin was found in a hedge on the perimeter of the Trump Golf Course in West Palm Beach before he could fire any shots. This one, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, a disenchanted former Trump enthusiast, had some shady associates from Ukraine to Latin America helping him to acquire heavy weapons. Routh fled and escaped by car when shot at by the Secret Service agent who spotted him but was later apprehended. He has been charged with attempted murder and terrorism and is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Had either of these two would-be assassins been successful and gotten away, we can assume that based on the history of the assassinations of the 60’s, confessions would start appearing around 2050 and information regarding all the people involved in any way would be released by 2084. These recent attempts may have simply been the gestures of crackpot loners with no government involvement. But what of the larger crimes the government has obviously had a hand in, from the color revolutions to all the coups d’etat around the world, or the deals with Israel to coordinate, supply and defend the on-going genocide? We’ve seen the results but how much was each member of Congress paid to support the massacre? Will the sordid planning details ever be revealed? And if so, when? We won’t know about them. Perhaps our grandchildren will but they won’t care.
Yes, coverups are not exclusively about assassinations. Another story that reemerged in the past year was about the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 for which Timothy McVeigh was executed. Rather than me trying to summarize the story, you can get a fuller version from Jeremy Kuzmarov with this link.
I’ll end this little essay on the long wait for concealed information to reach the public with a word of appreciation for Oliver Stone. In 1991 he made a film, JFK, a bio-pic with an all-star cast, which challenged the findings of the Warren Report. It received eight Oscar nominations, winning two of them, but it also drew criticism from the major media, ever ready to defend establishment orthodoxy, for fomenting conspiracy theories. Thirty years later, Stone made a documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which provided solid evidence for many of the events which seemed to be based on rational conjecture in the earlier film. If you haven't seen it yet, you should.
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