John F. Kennedy remains the most highly rated former president when Gallup asks Americans whether, in retrospect, they approve or disapprove of the job each did as president. Ninety percent of U.S. adults now approve of the job Kennedy did, 21 percentage points higher than second-place Ronald Reagan’s rating.
Read the rest of the article here. (Gallup)
On June 22, 1962, an intelligence official drafted a memo summarizing a letter intercepted between Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother. The memo was made public long ago. But for 60 years, the name of the letter opener was kept secret.
Now it can finally be told: According to an unredacted copy of the memo released recently by the government, the official who intercepted Oswald’s mail for the CIA in the months before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated was named Reuben Efron.
Read the rest of the article here. (Yahoo! News)
In January 1967, the CIA sent a memo (marked “SECRET,” “RESTRICTED,” and “DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED”) to its army of media “assets” secretly embedded in virtually every area of U.S. communications. This army of covert operatives (exposed as “Operation Mockingbird” in a historic 1977 Rolling Stone article by Carl Bernstein) extended all the way up to world famous columnists, bureau chiefs, managing editors, newspaper publishers and CEOs of major radio and television broadcasting networks.
What did the CIA’s secret memo instruct its media assets to do? Entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” the memo provided guidance for countering “conspiracy theorists” who challenged the Warren Report’s false conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy. It recommended the strategy of smearing critics of the Warren Report by describing them as being financially motivated; or having “anti-American, far-left or communist sympathies,” or being hasty, inaccurate or ego-driven in their research.
Sound familiar? Although five decades old, the tactics recommended by the memo seem chillingly current, a virtual operating manual for how the present-day CIA tries to smear and discredit anyone who dares to question official government propaganda.
Read the rest of the article here. (CovertAction Magazine)
President Joe Biden is keeping thousands of JFK assassination secret as part of a “Transparency Plan,” drawing fire from historians, researchers as well as his Democratic primary opponent—a nephew of the president murdered nearly 60 years ago today.
“It’s very disturbing,” Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., told The Messenger in an interview. “They’re pouring the concrete on 60-year-old secrets so that they’re permanently interred. Why?”
Read the rest of the article here. (The Messenger News)
On Friday night, President Joe Biden released an executive order that more or less said that the JFK Records Collection Act is no longer in effect.
Usually the White House delays such an announcement to a Friday night in order to avoid maximum publicity such a decree would get on a Monday morning news cycle. Since there was little publicity about the order, it appears that the administration succeeded in its attempt to keep the fallout about the order minimal.
What this announcement does is essentially stymie the original JFK Records Collection Act. That 1992 law said that after October 2017, every last document concerning the JFK case would be released without redactions. The only person who could prevent that from happening was the president. Yet after that termination date, first President Trump and then President Biden, delayed the process a total of at least four times. And now, with this June 30th order, Biden has pretty much stopped the declassification process before it is completed—and in two ways. First, there are still thousands of documents yet to be released in unredacted form. Secondly, according to our reporter on the subject, Gary Majewski, the last two releases contained no new documents.
Apparently, Biden has succumbed to the demands of the executive intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and its so called Transparency Plan. (Chad Nagle explains that here) Biden’s order also turns over ultimate disposition of the remaining JFK files to the National Declassification Center, by following the Transparency Plan:
The Transparency Plans will ensure that the public will have access to the maximum amount of information while continuing to protect against identifiable harms to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, and the conduct of foreign relations under the standards of the Act.
It is hard to comprehend how someone as experienced as Joe Biden could agree to these excuses that the CIA, and FBI always use in order to keep relevant information hidden. President Kennedy was killed almost 60 years ago under the most suspect circumstances. What secret operations from more than a half century ago could outweigh the need for total disclosure of that murder?
We urge our readers to protest this attempt to place a muzzle on the JFK Records Collection Act. Please contact either the House Oversight Committee or The White House to make your objection known.
House Oversight Committee
2157 Rayburn House Office Bldg.
Washington. DC 20515
Phone: 202-225-5074; Fax: 202-225-3974
Chair: James Comer; Ranking Member: Jamie Raskin
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N. W.
Washington DC 20500
Phone: 202-456-1111; Email : president@whitehouse.gov
(This is a breaking story, and we will have more about it from attorney Mark Adamczyk and Andrew Iler.)
Biden and his DOJ have put an axe through sections 6 and section 9(1)(d) of the Act, which will effectively kill the JFK Assassination Records Act of 1992 and all of the work accomplished by Oliver Stone to get the Act passed in the first place.
Here is a news story on this topic.
Download the memorandum issued by the White House here. (PDF)
Daniel Ellsberg, a US government analyst who became one of the most famous whistleblowers in world politics when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US government knowledge of the futility of the Vietnam war, has died. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family on Friday.
Read the rest of the article here. (The Guardian)