The CIA Killed JFK - So Of Course It Opposes Long-Promised Records Releases

jacobin  |   his isn’t the only major revelation that has come out of President Joe Biden’s December declassification. One is a secret 1977 memo unearthed by Morley and other researchers that was written by an employee of the foreign intelligence branch of the CIA’s Miami station, showing that far from assuming that Oswald acted alone or that the KGB was involved, officers there considered anti-communist Cuban exiles prime suspects.

According to the memo, when Kennedy was still alive, station chief Theodore G. Shackley ordered scrutiny of the movements and plans of “known dangerous Cuban exile activists” while the president was traveling the country, to get wind of and halt any “conspiracies” in that community to “exploit or interfere with the president’s movement.” After Kennedy’s death, the memo states, Shackley and other top station officials ordered agents to gather information about Cuban exiles who may have been involved in the assassination.

Sure enough, the decades that followed have seen serious circumstantial evidence of anti-Castro exile involvement come to light. One anti-Castro militant, Antonio Veciana, admitted that he had been introduced to Oswald in Dallas by his CIA handler, a man whom he later identified as David Atlee Phillips, head of the agency’s anti-Cuban operations. In late 2021, the son of anti-Castro fighter and CIA contractor Ricardo “Monkey” Morales revealed that his father had told him that he had trained Oswald as a sniper at a secret CIA training camp for an invasion of Cuba, and that he had been ordered by his CIA handler to go to Dallas for a “clean-up” mission two days before Kennedy was shot.

Another document from the December tranche found by researchers is a 1976 CIA memo attesting to the agency’s heavy involvement in the Warren Commission’s investigation. According to the memo, thirty-nine CIA personnel were involved, including “nine of whom were involved daily.” As Morley pointed out at the time, several of those listed in the memo are known to have misled the Warren Commission about the CIA’s interest in and knowledge of Oswald.

It’s further evidence of what even the agency’s own in-house historian in 2013 charitably called a “benign cover-up” by the CIA in its dealings with the commission, aimed at pushing it in the direction of what it considered the “best truth” — that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, for his own, inexplicable motives.

It builds on previous disclosures that show that the CIA had a keen and extensive interest in Oswald before the assassination that went right up to the agency’s senior officials.

Fortress DC Shown To Be As Useful As The Patriot Act, Patriot Missiles And The Political Class

slate |  It turns out that Fortress D.C.—the capital city’s permanent, ever-expanding post-9/11 security-scape—is a myth. It’s a myth that residents have put up with because, in some ways, we want it to be true. It made us feel safer and it made us feel important, if only by proxy. (We also put up with it because we couldn’t say no.) And it gave some higher purpose to getting yelled at for unknowingly walking too close to a building or leaving your Swiss Army knife on your keychain when you walk through a metal detector. The scrutiny was frequently more intense for people of color.

Naïvely, I thought they were taking little things so seriously to demonstrate how gravely and ruthlessly they would dismantle a big thing. (After all, Fortress D.C. hasn’t had a problem being ruthless in the name of security in the fairly recent past.) But Wednesday’s insurrectionist siege revealed that there never was any higher purpose to us getting yelled at or detoured. It wasn’t an indication of any higher seriousness at all. It was instead the limits of the security’s reach.

When Fortress D.C. was tested, it failed: An angry mob marched to the Capitol, broke in, and stayed for hours. Unrushed, they sat in the House speaker’s office with their feet up. Unbothered, they walked out with a senator’s computer. I can barely believe these things happened, and not even in my wildest imagination would I have considered them possible before Wednesday. Fortress D.C. failed from a combination of factors that I’m sure will be investigated and enumerated, and people will resign and be fired if they haven’t already. It turns out that yelling at bike commuters, stray tourists, and kids sledding did not prove a successful deterrent to a mob invasion that was announced ahead of time. Whatever the security plan was, it wasn’t sufficient to secure the building, deter the crowd, or prevent tragic and senseless deaths, including that of one of the Capitol Police officers whose superiors failed to adequately prepare for a clearly hostile crowd. Fortress D.C. was so sure of itself it preemptively rejected offers to help. It took local police to get things back under control, and by that point the building and the myth of the building’s inviolability were completely wrecked.

The response will be to double down on more of the same. “Non-scalable” fences will cut off the U.S. Capitol for at least the next 30 days. There will inevitably be more bollards and more metal detectors. More street closures. More intrusions on daily life. More of the things that proved so easily surpassable when there was an effort to pass them. Fortress D.C. didn’t work, and as a consequence, it will get larger. Everyone will lose more public space, more access, and more mobility. And for what?

 

How Was The Security Of The Capitol Building Restored So Quickly After The "Breach"?

From an operational security perspective, consider that any one of the people who "invaded" the capital building yesterday could have been a foreign agent. They would have had the greatest opportunity to plant listening devices, radiological,chemical or biological weapons.
 
It would have been a great time to just scatter some ricin on the carpets or upholstery. While I was watching one of the big three networks yesterday doing live coverage I heard one of the reporters state that it would take a long time to sweep the building to make sure it was secure before they could let congress back in and that the earliest would be sometime the next day before they could resume.
 
Yet just 2 hours after the protesters were kicked out, the Senate was back in session. 

Now from an IT security perspective alone, it would take at least 24 hours to do a basic tempest security sweep of every single computer, printer, ethernet port, electrical outlet, telephone, etc., not including taking these devices apart and doing a visual inspection to ensure nothing untoward had been plugged in or surreptitiously added to the device.

No security officer would EVER allow congress to get back in session that quickly - not if the breach was real.