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Finally, after 54 years in the waiting, the world has more top secret files on one of the blackest days of democracy, the murder of a sitting president of the US, one whose tenure held so much hope for many.
President John Kennedy was no ordinary leader. He had vision, intelligence, courage and a willingness to shake up the establishment, even to the core. He was up against J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, who had denied persistently that organised crime even existed in the US.
He was up against the Mafia, against the CIA that dragged the Whitehouse into the Bay of Pigs fiasco, against the banks that were amassing staggering powers, against the oil industry clinging tenaciously to their unjust tax exemptions. He was up against the military that wanted to engage big time in Vietnam. He was up against them all.
Some of the most fundamental principles of law were disregarded in the investigation; innocent until proved guilty in a trial judged by one’s peers; the right to a defence, to cross examine witnesses, to have access to the prosecution’s files; the non-interference in the appointment of the decision makers; the avoidance of conflicts of interest; the principle that justice must also appear to be done; the independence and transparency of forensic teams carrying out the autopsy on the slain president.
These are but a few of the cardinal rules that were blatantly broken in the aftermath of the assassination, thereby nullifying any credible outcome of the investigation. Of course the obvious question is, why were all these standard operating procedures ignored in the first place?
No one was ever charged with the assassination. The only arrested man, Lee Harvey Oswald, shouted out to the media in the few seconds he had a chance to, that he was a fall guy, and was in turn killed within two days of the assassination. No defence in his name was ever made, no witnesses heard in open court, no forensic testimony cross examined, no footage officially released to the public.
Instead, in a Hamlet-like tragedy, we had the successor to the murdered head of State appoint a commission to investigate the murder of his predecessor.
Why should an ad hoc commission have ever been appointed by him in the first place, to usurp the power of the official judicial organs? Why was Oswald’s family never permitted to appoint an attorney to defend his name and reputation, and examine the evidence? Why was the memorandum of its own investigator, Attorney Wesley Liebeler ignored by the commission?
Liebeler had pointed out to his Warren Commission that FBI marksmen had failed to replicate Oswald’s alleged rapid fire, and that FBI expert Frazier had testified before the commission that shots fired by FBI agents with the assassination weapon were “a few inches high and to the right of the target… because of a defect in the scope” of the rifle allegedly used by Oswald.
Liebeler tells the commission that “to the extent that it leaves testimony suggesting that the shots might not have been so easy, out of the discussion, thereby giving only a part of the story, is simply dishonest”.
Evidence cited in Jeremy Bojczuk’s book A Brief Guide to the JFK Assassination, furthermore quotes a marine’s report that by the time he left the Marines, Oswald “was a rather poor shot”.
Even without the recent release of secret files, there was so much evidence of something gone horribly wrong
The President’s autopsy was not carried out by an independent, forensic entity, but by the military. Why? Evidence listed in The Kennedy Autopsy, by Jacob Hornberger indicates that the President’s head wounds were tampered with before the autopsy took place.
It was only years later that the world finally saw the unedited footage that has come to be known as the Zapruder film, which clearly shows Kennedy being shot fatally from the front, not the back from the school book depository. The outrage it caused eventually gave rise to a reopening of the investigation by Congress. This important point has been forgotten.
In 1979, a congressional inquiry carried out by the House Select Committee on Assassinations found serious flaws in the Warren Commission Report, concluding that the murder was indeed most likely the result of a conspiracy ‒ Congress’s words, not conspiracy theorists’. Yet somehow today it is still the Warren Commission Report, discredited as it was by Congress that is quoted in the assassination saga. Why?
Add to that the fact that the brother of Chicago Mafia kingpin Sam Giancana confirmed in a biography that his own brother was involved in the assassination. Add to that Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald, was known in the underworld to be a Giancana henchman, running one of his casinos.
The newly released files include a top-secret deposition by CIA director Richard Helms, who was asked in 1976: “Is there any information involved with the assassination of President Kennedy which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent…” The deposition cuts off.
The newly released document was tampered with and does not show his reply. Investigators had argued that Oswald had received pay cheques from the CIA, hence the question put before Helms. It was not conspiracy theorists, but a federal judge and the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, who openly accused the CIA of deceit and deception.
Suspicions were later reinforced by a recorded death-bed confession to his son in 2007 of a CIA officer, Howard Hunt, one of the masterminds of the Watergate break in, that there were men in the agency, oil men and persons from the underworld who were involved in the assassination.
Add to that the fact that the President’s own body guards in the secret service were ordered by their superior officer to stand down and walk away from the President’s limousine where they were posted to stand on the bumper as human shields and watch the crowds. Why? We have clear footage of this.
Add to that the declaration of President Lyndon Johnson’s own mistress, Madeleine Brown, who stated on camera for posterity that the night before the assassination, several high-ranking officials within the government, and Dallas tycoons, met at his house (Johnson was from Texas) and after the meeting Johnson told her that “those SOBs will never embarrass me again”.
Roger Stone’s Book The Man who killed Kennedy, makes a case that it was President Johnson, whom Attorney General Robert Kennedy was going to indict for complicity to murder of an agricultural officer whistle-blower, who actually masterminded the assassination. We all know what happened to Bobby Kennedy in 1968.
How is it, one may ask, that even without the recent release of secret files, there was so much evidence of something gone horribly wrong, of much more than a silenced lone gunman who killed the head of State? Why has it remained shrouded in secrecy all these years?
Why do we denigrate investigators as some wacko conspiracy nuts, when the House Committee on Assassinations itself concluded that there was most probably a conspiracy to kill the President?
Could it be that such a conspiracy to murder may well have amounted to a coup d’etat, an overthrow of a government by violent, surreptitious and criminal means, followed by a gargantuan cover up, to maintain the status quo and an extremely powerful elite, setting the US on a very different path than that intended by its democratically elected leader in 1963?
Dr Ragonesi is a lawyer and researcher in international affairs.