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Release of JFK records delayed again, with Biden citing
Covid-19 and national security
23 Oct, 2021 13:31
minutes before his assassination in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963 © Wikipedia
Is it just me or was John Connolly's door not shut?
President Joe Biden has ordered the remaining files on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination to remain hidden until next December, citing the coronavirus pandemic. He’s not the first president to delay releasing the files.
In a memo on Friday, Biden wrote that the remaining files concerning the assassination “shall be withheld from full public disclosure” until December 15 next year, nearly 60 years after Kennedy was shot dead as his motorcade rolled through Dallas, Texas.
Biden’s memo states that due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the National Archivist have been prevented from checking in with every agency affected by the files, and can’t determine whether releasing the unredacted documents would impact national security.
Therefore, Biden wrote, “temporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations.”
Some information already deemed appropriate will be released this December, while the remainder will stay secret until at least next December.
Although Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for Kennedy’s murder, he never stood trial as he was shot dead two days later by Jack Ruby. As a result, Kennedy’s murder has spawned countless conspiracy theories, and a majority of Americans still believe that sinister forces were behind the assassination.
Sinister forces like Deep State working through American intelligence. Apparently, they still are.
These theories have persisted for decades, and in 1992, Congress ruled that all records surrounding the shocking murder “should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.” However, multiple administrations since have stalled on this disclosure.
Former President Donald Trump promised via tweet in 2017 to allow the “long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.” Despite Trump’s promise, a pledge that many thought he’d follow through on due to his status as a political ‘outsider’ in Washington, only a selection of material was released, and some of this material remained redacted.
Whenever the Biden administration releases the rest of these documents, they will at least be easier for the general public to view. At present, the 250,000 or so records released so far are viewable only at NARA’s location in College Park, Maryland. Biden’s memo orders NARA to digitize these files and make them available online.
Washington Post's ‘conspiracy theory’ quiz declares existence of
‘deep state’ fake news, contradicting its own reporting
8 Oct, 2021 15:49
If you believe in a “Deep State” embedded in the US government, then you’re falling down the conspiracy “rabbit hole,” the Washington Post claims. Yet the Post believes this theory too. It just doesn’t call it a ‘Deep State’.
Nine in 10 Americans believe at least one conspiracy theory, researchers found earlier this summer. Yet conspiracy theories run the gamut from ‘Bigfoot exists’ to ‘the Holocaust never happened’, and the Washington Post published a quiz this week to remind its readers which ones to believe and which to discard. The answers tell a story in themselves.
In a series of multiple-choice questions, the statement “There is a ‘deep state’ embedded in the government that operates in secret and without oversight” is marked as false.
“For much of the past four years, Republicans have speculated that a ‘deep state’ was working to undermine President Donald Trump,” the Post explained, adding: “While the FBI and CIA do conduct covert operations, there’s little evidence for a separate Deep State.”
Yet this is untrue, according to the Washington Post’s own reporting. The Post revealed in 2013 that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence maintains a “black budget” of $52.6 billion mapping “a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny,” which spends these funds on spy operations and occasionally lethal action abroad. The public didn’t know that the NSA spied on Americans’ communications for a long time, until the Post published Edward Snowden’s leaks that same year, and the Post was instrumental in drawing attention to the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program.
Even before Snowden’s revelations, the Post in 2010 described the US national security and intelligence apparatus as “a hidden world, growing beyond control.” This leviathan, the paper described, is “hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight,” while “no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it, or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”
Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who first reported Snowden’s leaks, described the Post’s about-turn on the existence of the Deep State as an example of “how the Trump era corrupted almost every mainstream institution in the US, especially media corporations.”
The CIA’s experiments with mind-control and psychological torture, which were carried out on Americans during multiple presidential administrations, are not the stuff of conspiracy theory. These experiments took place between 1953 and 1973, with some information on the program, known as MKUltra, only declassified in 2001. Another question in the Washington Post’s quiz even highlights this CIA program as an example of a conspiracy that actually took place.
The term ‘Deep State’ has been used in recent years to describe the bureaucrats and intelligence agency operatives who worked to frustrate and stymie former President Donald Trump’s agenda. When invoked by Republicans and Trump supporters, the term is ridiculed as a conspiracy theory, but those involved openly admit to working against the former president from behind the scenes.
General Mark Milley, commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went behind Trump’s back to assure his Chinese counterpart that he and the national security establishment wouldn’t let Trump do anything “rogue” after his election loss last year. Milley admitted to consorting with Beijing, and with Democrat politicians, in a recent book by Washington Post reporters Robert Costa and Bob Woodward.
Time Magazine lionized the “well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to ensure that Trump lost his re-election bid. In the words of the magazine, “they were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”
New Yorker author David Rohde, who has written a book on the Deep State and the conspiracies surrounding it, told Vox last year that the Deep State exists, and can be described as “a permanent government or an institutional government” made up of “incredibly large and powerful organizations like the FBI and the CIA and the NSA.” Whether by the FBI’s ‘Russiagate’ investigation – which was predicated on several lies – or unnamed ‘intelligence sources’ planting false stories in the media to hamper Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, this “permanent government” did work against Trump before and during his four years in office.
Curiously, the Washington Post’s quiz now describes the claim that “Donald Trump colluded with Russians to steal the presidency in 2016” as false, after four years of articles pushing the notion that there was, in fact, “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The difference between conspiracy theory and conspiracy fact, it seems, largely depends on who’s in office.
It's not the people who run US democracy, Ron Paul tells RT
2 Nov, 2021 22:44
A new poll showing other countries unimpressed with American democracy and healthcare is not a surprise, as the US has turned corporatist and has too much democracy but too little freedom, former congressman Ron Paul tells RT.
A new Pew Research poll of 16 advanced economies showed widespread belief that the US healthcare system is below average or downright bad, while only 17% thought American democracy was a good model for other nations.
“We deserve a lot of that criticism,” Paul told RT on Tuesday. He blamed the results on “corporatism,” which he says is the underlying philosophy of the government as currently practiced in the US.
The retired physician who represented Texas in Congress for decades added that “it’s not the people voting, it’s really the corporations that run things,” from healthcare to schools and the military-industrial complex.
We’re a long way off from what people think is democracy.
No, we’re a long way off from freedom.
Democracy is fine when electing officials, Paul explained, but when it gets to the majority dictating to the rest how to live, what to believe, even how to practice medicine, it becomes a problem. What the US has now is a combination of big business and big government running things, he added.
“A good republic, a good system, wouldn’t have us spending trillions and trillions of dollars, taking advantage of the fact that we have the reserve currency of the world and people still trust us to take care of the dollar. But that’s ending, and that’s why I think people are starting to say ‘Can we really trust the Americans?’” Paul said, adding that the US is headed for a “major” financial and banking crisis as a result.
He also believes the entire US pandemic response was “essentially wrong,” from the initial lockdowns to mandates and government interference in how doctors practice medicine – which Paul contrasted with the way things were back when he was a practicing physician.
The Pew poll, made public on Monday, showed that 16 developed nations ranked the US highly on technology, entertainment and education. However, a median of 48% thought American healthcare was below average and 18% considered it the worst. Meanwhile, only 17% thought the US political system set an example worth following, while 57% said it used to, but not in recent years. American democracy ranked the highest in Italy at 32%, and the lowest in New Zealand, where only 8% of respondents said it was a good example.
Americans were far more critical of their own political system, with only 19% telling Pew it was a good example, while 72% said it used to be, but no longer.
When did the transition occur? Probably when the military-industrial complex began to take over during Eisenhower's presidency. The US has been largely controlled by Deep State ever since.
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