This may be the year!
This may be the year, at long last, when we find out who killed President John F. Kennedy. In the name of national security, the federal government has withheld thousands of documents from public view since 1963.
It’s been a long time coming. In 1992, on the heels of Oliver Stone’s conspiratorial blockbuster JFK, Congress passed the JFK Records Act, which mandated that all documents related to the fateful Dallas shooting be made public 25 years later.
That meant 2017. But then-President Trump kicked the can four years down the road on the advice of then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Some 15,000 documents must be released by Oct. 26 – unless President Biden holds the release up once again.
This decades-long shroud of national-security secrecy has provided fertile ground for conspiracy theories. Even the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that JFK “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” although the committee was unable to identify the other gunman or the full extent of the conspiracy.
The three main conspiracy contenders have been the CIA, the Mafia and the Soviet Union. The latter gets a boost from a new book by James Woolsey, President Clinton’s CIA director from 1993-95.
Operation Dragon: Inside The Kremlin’s Secret War on America is based on claims by Woolsey’s collaborator, former Romanian intelligence chief Ion Mihai Pracepa. From the small excerpt I was able to find, it seems the pair are proposing that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev personally ordered KGB asset Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK. “Operation Dragon” was a disinformation campaign aimed at blaming the conspiracy on others – like the CIA and the Mafia.
Is Woolsey’s book the truth about a secret Soviet disinformation campaign, or is it part of a CIA disinformation campaign to divert attention from its own sinister role? When can you believe people who make a living lying about what they do?
Either way, Woolsey’s book coming out ahead of what could be the final JFK records release raises a question that more and more people are grappling with: In a digital-media age marked by hyper-partisanship, how do you separate the truth from fake news?
For the journalist, sources are everything. Can we find credible sources with firsthand information? Will these sources go on the record, putting their names and reputations out for public scrutiny? Will they testify under oath, facing a penalty of perjury?
If we can find several credible sources that point us in the same direction, we are approaching the facts. Corroboration, convergence of narrative and documentation give us a higher probability that we’re finding the truth.
Maybe we’ll find the truth this year.
#conspiracystudies