CommentsPOLITICAL SECURITY-Seasoned conspiracy buffs refrained from getting their hopes up too high after President Trump’s announcement that he wouldn’t prevent the scheduled release of thousands of files pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by the National Archives. They were right to do so; hundreds of files ended up being held back which won’t be released until well into 2018, if at all.
Despite Trump’s assurances of eventual transparency, the probability of those files being released in full at that time is approximately zero. If they were going to be released, they would have been released as scheduled. The U.S. intelligence community has had a quarter of a century to prepare for the release of those documents, yet they’re still being withheld at the request of the FBI and the CIA for further review on the grounds of “national security” concerns. Like that’s a thing. Like after fifty years documents pertaining to a president’s assassination could expose vulnerabilities in America’s nuclear arsenal or espionage operations or something.
Documents from half a century ago aren’t being withheld/redacted because of “national security”, they’re being withheld/redacted because of political security. Someone powerful did something appalling that is either directly or indirectly referenced in those documents, and the CIA and FBI don’t want mainstream Americans to know that they live in a country where such things can happen.
It’s one thing to have a very small fringe percentage of the population digging for truth who can be dismissed as conspiracy nuts; it’s quite another to have viral stories trending online telling the American mainstream that everything they’ve been taught about their country is a lie.
The biggest revelation from the JFK files is not in the files themselves, but in the fact that the FBI and the CIA still desperately need to keep secrets about something that happened 54 years ago. What we’ve seen in the files released thus far has been pretty tame in comparison.
Some are documents pertaining to CIA infiltration of the media which we already knew about, some are odd-sounding but justifiable comments from J Edgar Hoover about how important it is to “convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin”, and some are about police having been warned in advance of a plot to kill Oswald. These pale in comparison to the importance of the fact that an event which happened half a century ago is still being aggressively shrouded in secrecy by intelligence agencies.
Maybe this is as simple as poppa Bush having done something evil and then living way longer than expected, so they’re holding off so as not to embarrass him while he’s alive. Maybe it’s something vastly more sinister. Either way, Americans can clearly see from the withholding of the JFK files that they live in a nation with a second, secret government they never get to know much about, and the reason for that secrecy has nothing to do with national security. There are powerful people who decide what you get to know about your country, and their reasons for giving or withholding information has nothing to do with keeping you safe or promoting your wellbeing.
Meanwhile two-thirds of Americans would struggle to cover a crisis that costs a mere $1,000, while living shorter lives despite paying more than anyone else for a broken healthcare system, as the ecosystem quickly approaches a point of no return and taxpayer-funded bombs rain down upon countries few Americans could even find on a map. In short, there is a secret government that is unanswerable to democratic influence, and it is doing a terrible, terrible job. This needs to change.
Keep watching these bastards. Watch their behavior and ignore what they say. Watch what they withhold from you and ignore their stated reasons for doing so. Watch who they bomb, where the money’s going, and how poor the majority of Americans remain. Ignore their stories and watch their actions. They’ll tell you everything you need to know, despite their best efforts.
Like I said, ignore their words and watch their actions.
(Caitlin Johnstone is a journalist and poet. This piece first appeared in Medium.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
