The White House have released thousands of new documents regarding the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy two years into his Presidency in 1963. The shooting of JFK has been a festering hive for conspiracy theories over the last five decades, because the conclusion that the Warren Commission came to seemed a little bit too convenient, plus the trajectory of the bullet didn’t line up with what they said, leading to the “magic bullet” theory.
US President Donald Trump had originally planned to release all of the files on the JFK assassination to the public, but now that they’ve been release, the full dossier has only be partially declassified and we still don’t have the whole story.
Trump has blamed “potentially irreversible harm” to national security that would come as a result of revealing the full files for not releasing all of it. A US law was passed literally 25 years ago that mandated the release of all of these files, and we still don’t have all of them today.
Experts aren’t buying Trump’s lame duck excuse
Jefferson Morley, a historian specialising in the CIA and the head editor of the website JFKFacts.org, has said that the CIA scrambling to postpone the release of these documents shows that the Kennedy assassination is still a “very live and sensitive issue” in the United States government. Morley also said that Trump’s excuse that documents from over 50 years ago could have any impact whatsoever on national security today fails to “pass the test of common sense.” Morley also suggested that the CIA is hoping to avoid an “embarrassing” revelation where it’ll turn out they could’ve easily prevented the assassination.
The almost 3,000 files have shed more light on the government’s response to the assassination, rather than the assassination itself. But still, there’s some interesting stuff if you dig in there. For example, Soviet officials were apparently scared of an “irresponsible” US Army general launching a missile attack in the blind rage following the assassination.
Plus, the FBI did tell the police in Dallas about a threat of murder to Lee Harvey Oswald, since he became the most hated man in America after killing Kennedy.
Trump wants ‘great transparency’ on the JFK assassination
President Trump called for the release and declassification of these documents to make America trust its government again (even though that ship sailed a long, long time ago).
In the past, Trump has promoted JFK assassination conspiracy theories himself, and now he is hoping for “great transparency” about the whole thing, so that people can finally get answers, as they’ve spent the past few decades speculating about what really happened and beginning to doubt their government and stop trusting them.
In a tweet recently, Trump promised that all of the information about the shooting and the surrounding background information will be “carefully released,” pledging to “get just about everything to public!” However, the Washington Post have warned that Trump is “bowing” to the CIA’s wishes, which they are saying is “a reminder of how the Presidency changes people.” This “just about everything” business is a backtrack on what Trump had said just one day prior, where he pledged to release the full files on the assassination.
Before becoming President, Trump was desperate to know what really happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963, but now he’s getting coy about releasing it, even though he could easily sign an executive order (which we know he likes to do) to release everything and bring the CIA to its knees. Many of the conspiracy theories revolve around how the CIA may have orchestrated the JFK assassination to avoid the Marilyn Monroe sex scandal from going public.
