Latest news with #JFKFacts
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Boebert appears to confuse Oliver Stone with Roger Stone during JFK records hearing
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) appeared to confuse Oliver Stone, an American filmmaker and a witness before House lawmakers on Tuesday, with political strategist Roger Stone during a hearing on the release of new documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 'You wrote a book accusing LBJ of being involved in the killing of President Kennedy. Do these most recent releases confirm or negate your initial charge?' Boebert asked. 'No, I didn't,' Oliver Stone said. 'If you look closely at the film, there's no — it accuses the President Johnson of part, being part of, complicit in a cover-up of the case, but not in the assassination itself, which I don't know.' Jefferson Morley, editor of the JFK Facts blog and another witness before the House task force, stepped in to suggest that Boebert had mistaken the witness. 'I think you're confusing Mr. Oliver Stone with Mr. Roger Stone. It's Roger Stone who implicated LBJ in the assassination of the president. It's not my friend Oliver Stone,' Morley corrected the Colorado Republican. 'I may have misinterpreted that and I apologize for that. But there seems to be some alluding of, like you said, incompetence or some sort of involvement there on the back end,' Boebert responded. 'Sorry, I'm going to move on.' Roger Stone, a longtime political operative and Trump ally, authored the 2013 book 'The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.' Oliver Stone, a director, worked on the controversial 1991 political thriller 'JFK,' which stoked conspiracy questions surrounding Kennedy's death. Oliver Stone was speaking on Tuesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, in an inaugural hearing related to the so-called JFK files that comes a few weeks after the National Archives last month released more than 2,000 files related to the Kennedy assassination. The move followed an executive order from President Trump. Experts have said the latest release does not contradict the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in the assassination. But multiple witnesses on Tuesday raised questions about the investigations and long-held conclusions about the case. 'I ask the committee to reopen what the Warren Commission failed miserably to complete. I ask you … to reinvestigate the assassination of this President Kennedy from the scene of the crime to the courtroom,' Oliver Stone told lawmakers in his opening statement, contending that the CIA's 'muddy footprints are all over this case.' Task force Chair Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said in a release announcing the hearing that lawmakers 'will get to the bottom of this mystery.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
01-04-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Boebert appears to confuse Oliver Stone with Roger Stone during JFK records hearing
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) appeared to confuse Oliver Stone, an American filmmaker and a witness before House lawmakers on Tuesday, with political strategist Roger Stone during a hearing on the release of new documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. 'You wrote a book accusing LBJ of being involved in the killing of President Kennedy. Do these most recent releases confirm or negate your initial charge?' Boebert asked. 'No, I didn't,' Oliver Stone said. 'If you look closely at the film, there's no – it accuses the President Johnson of part, being part of, complicit in a cover-up of the case, but not in the assassination itself, which I don't know.' Jefferson Morley, editor of the JFK Facts blog and another witness before the House task force, stepped in to suggest that Boebert had mistaken the witness. 'I think you're confusing Mr. Oliver Stone with Mr. Roger Stone. It's Roger Stone who implicated LBJ in the assassination of the president. It's not my friend Oliver Stone,' Morley corrected the Colorado Republican. 'I may have misinterpreted that and I apologize for that. But there seems to be some alluding of, like you said, incompetence or some sort of involvement there on the back end,' Boebert responded. 'Sorry, I'm going to move on.' Roger Stone, a longtime political operative and Trump ally, authored the 2013 book 'The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.' Oliver Stone, a director, worked on the controversial 1991 political thriller 'JFK,' which stoked conspiracy questions surrounding Kennedy's death. Oliver Stone was speaking on Tuesday before the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, in an inaugural hearing related to the so-called 'JFK files' that comes a few weeks after the National Archives last month released more than 2,000 files related to the Kennedy assassination. The move followed an executive order from President Trump. Experts have said the latest release does not contradict the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in the assassination. But multiple witnesses on Tuesday raised questions about the investigations and long-held conclusions about the case. 'I ask the committee to reopen what the Warren Commission failed miserably to complete. I ask you … to reinvestigate the assassination of this President Kennedy from the scene of the crime to the courtroom,' Oliver Stone told lawmakers in his opening statement, contending that the CIA's 'muddy footprints are all over this case.' Task force Chair Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said in a release announcing the hearing that lawmakers 'will get to the bottom of this mystery.'
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The release of a 1961 plan to break up the CIA revives an old conspiracy theory about who killed JFK
A key adviser warned President John F. Kennedy after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 that the agency behind it, the CIA, had grown too powerful. He proposed giving the State Department control of 'all clandestine activities' and breaking up the CIA. The page of Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s memo outlining the proposal was among the newly public material in documents related to Kennedy's assassination released this week by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. So, too was Schlesinger's statement that 47% of the political officers in U.S. embassies were controlled by the CIA. Some readers of the previously withheld material in Schlesinger's 15-page memo view it as evidence of both mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA and a reason the CIA at least would not make Kennedy's security a high priority ahead of his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. That gave fresh attention Thursday to a decades-old theory about who killed JFK — that the CIA had a hand in it. Some Kennedy scholars, historians and writers said they haven't yet seen anything in the 63,000 pages of material released under an order from President Donald Trump that undercuts the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old Marine and onetime defector to the Soviet Union, was a lone gunman. But they also say they understand why doubters gravitate toward the theory. 'You have this young, charismatic president with so much potential for the future, and on the other side of the scale, you have this 24-year-old waif, Oswald, and it doesn't balance. You want to put something weightier on the Oswald side,' said Gerald Posner, whose book, 'Case Closed,' details the evidence that Oswald was a lone gunman. The first 'big event' in the US to spawn conspiracy theories But Jefferson Morley said the newly released material is important to 'the JFK case.' Morely is vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, and editor of the JFK Facts blog, and he rejects the conclusion that Oswald was 'a lone nut." Morley said that even with the release of 63,000 pages this week, there is still more unreleased material, including 2,400 files that the FBI said it discovered after Trump issued his order in January and material held by the Kennedy family. Kennedy was killed on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper's perch on the sixth floor. Two days later Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast live on television. 'It was the first big event that led to a series of events involving conspiracy theories that have left Americans believing, almost permanently, that their government lies to them so often they shouldn't pay close attention,' said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of 'The Kennedy Half-Century" The Bay of Pigs fiasco prompts an aide's memo Morley said Schlesinger's memo provides the 'origin story' of mutual mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA. Kennedy had inherited the Bay of Pigs plan from his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, and had been in office less than three months when the operation launched in April 1961 as a covert invasion to topple Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Schlesinger's memo was dated June 30, 1961, a little more than two months later. Schlesinger told Kennedy that covert all operations should be cleared with the U.S. State Department instead of allowing the CIA to largely present proposed operations almost as accomplished tasks. He also said in some places, such as Austria and Chile, far more than half the embassies' political officers were CIA-controlled. Ronald Neumann, former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Algeria and Bahrain, said most American diplomats now are 'non-CIA,' and in most places, ambassadors do not automatically defer to the CIA. 'CIA station chiefs also have an important function for ambassadors, because the station chief is usually the senior intelligence officer at a post," Neumann said, adding that ambassadors see a CIA station chiefs as providing valuable information. But he noted: 'If you get into the areas where we were involved in covert operations in supporting wars, you're going to have a different picture. You're going to have a picture which will differ from a normal embassy and normal operations.' A proposal to break up the CIA that didn't come to fruition Schlesinger's memo ends with a previously redacted page that spells out a proposal to give control of covert activities to the State Department and to split the CIA into two agencies reporting to separate undersecretaries of state. Morley sees it as a response to Kennedy's anger over the Bay of Pigs and something Kennedy was seriously contemplating. The plan never came to fruition. Sabato said that Kennedy simply 'needed the CIA' in the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies like Cuba, and a huge reorganization would have hindered intelligence operations. He also said the president and his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wanted to oust Castro before JFK ran for reelection in 1964. 'Let's remember that a good percentage of the covert operations were aimed at Fidel Castro in Cuba,' Sabato said. Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University who is writing a book about JFK's presidency, discounts the idea of tensions between the president and the CIA lasting until Kennedy's death. For one thing, he said, the president used covert operations 'avidly.' 'I find that the more details we get on that period, the more it appears likely that the Kennedy brothers were in control of the intelligence community,' Naftali said. 'You can you can see his imprint. You can see that there is a system by which he is directing the intelligence community. It's not always direct, but he's directing it.' ___ Associated Press writer David Collins in Hartford Connecticut, contributed to this report.
The Independent
20-03-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
The release of a 1961 plan to break up the CIA revives an old conspiracy theory about who killed JFK
A key adviser warned President John F. Kennedy after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 that the agency behind it, the CIA, had grown too powerful. He proposed giving the State Department control of 'all clandestine activities' and breaking up the CIA. The page of Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s memo outlining the proposal was among the newly public material in documents related to Kennedy's assassination released this week by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. So, too was Schlesinger's statement that 47% of the political officers in U.S. embassies were controlled by the CIA. Some readers of the previously withheld material in Schlesinger's 15-page memo view it as evidence of both mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA and a reason the CIA at least would not make Kennedy's security a high priority ahead of his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. That gave fresh attention Thursday to a decades-old theory about who killed JFK — that the CIA had a hand in it. Some Kennedy scholars, historians and writers said they haven't yet seen anything in the 63,000 pages of material released under an order from President Donald Trump that undercuts the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old Marine and onetime defector to the Soviet Union, was a lone gunman. But they also say they understand why doubters gravitate toward the theory. 'You have this young, charismatic president with so much potential for the future, and on the other side of the scale, you have this 24-year-old waif, Oswald, and it doesn't balance. You want to put something weightier on the Oswald side,' said Gerald Posner, whose book, 'Case Closed,' details the evidence that Oswald was a lone gunman. The first 'big event' in the US to spawn conspiracy theories But Jefferson Morley said the newly released material is important to 'the JFK case.' Morely is vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, and editor of the JFK Facts blog, and he rejects the conclusion that Oswald was 'a lone nut." Morley said that even with the release of 63,000 pages this week, there is still more unreleased material, including 2,400 files that the FBI said it discovered after Trump issued his order in January and material held by the Kennedy family. Kennedy was killed on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper's perch on the sixth floor. Two days later Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast live on television. 'It was the first big event that led to a series of events involving conspiracy theories that have left Americans believing, almost permanently, that their government lies to them so often they shouldn't pay close attention,' said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of 'The Kennedy Half-Century" The Bay of Pigs fiasco prompts an aide's memo Morley said Schlesinger's memo provides the 'origin story' of mutual mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA. Kennedy had inherited the Bay of Pigs plan from his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, and had been in office less than three months when the operation launched in April 1961 as a covert invasion to topple Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Schlesinger's memo was dated June 30, 1961, a little more than two months later. Schlesinger told Kennedy that covert all operations should be cleared with the U.S. State Department instead of allowing the CIA to largely present proposed operations almost as accomplished tasks. He also said in some places, such as Austria and Chile, far more than half the embassies' political officers were CIA-controlled. Ronald Neumann, former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Algeria and Bahrain, said most American diplomats now are 'non-CIA,' and in most places, ambassadors do not automatically defer to the CIA. 'CIA station chiefs also have an important function for ambassadors, because the station chief is usually the senior intelligence officer at a post," Neumann said, adding that ambassadors see a CIA station chiefs as providing valuable information. But he noted: 'If you get into the areas where we were involved in covert operations in supporting wars, you're going to have a different picture. You're going to have a picture which will differ from a normal embassy and normal operations.' A proposal to break up the CIA that didn't come to fruition Schlesinger's memo ends with a previously redacted page that spells out a proposal to give control of covert activities to the State Department and to split the CIA into two agencies reporting to separate undersecretaries of state. Morley sees it as a response to Kennedy's anger over the Bay of Pigs and something Kennedy was seriously contemplating. The plan never came to fruition. Sabato said that Kennedy simply 'needed the CIA' in the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies like Cuba, and a huge reorganization would have hindered intelligence operations. He also said the president and his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wanted to oust Castro before JFK ran for reelection in 1964. 'Let's remember that a good percentage of the covert operations were aimed at Fidel Castro in Cuba,' Sabato said. Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University who is writing a book about JFK's presidency, discounts the idea of tensions between the president and the CIA lasting until Kennedy's death. For one thing, he said, the president used covert operations 'avidly.' 'I find that the more details we get on that period, the more it appears likely that the Kennedy brothers were in control of the intelligence community,' Naftali said. 'You can you can see his imprint. You can see that there is a system by which he is directing the intelligence community. It's not always direct, but he's directing it.' ___
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Four key takeaways from newly released JFK files
More than 2,000 newly released documents related to the investigation into President John F Kennedy's assassination are notable not just for what they contain - but for what is omitted. As many experts expected, this latest release by the Trump administration does not answer all lingering questions about one of the turning points in American history - the 1963 slaying of Kennedy in Dallas. Nor do they fundamentally shift the understanding of what happened that day. There is no 'smoking gun'. But this latest batch does include documents that are now mostly or fully unredacted - original material is included instead of blacked-out or replaced by blank space. The release also includes a number of details likely to interest historians and JFK case watchers. A US government investigation concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a drifter and former US Marine who at one point defected to the then-Soviet Union before returning to the US, acted alone when he shot at Kennedy's motorcade from a nearby building. However, most Americans tend to disagree - over decades, polls have consistently shown that a majority doubt the official story. JFK experts scour newly unsealed assassination files The case still prompts questions, along with wild conspiracy theories, more than 60 years later - and the latest release is unlikely to change that. Here are some key takeaways. Several experts praised the release as a step forward for transparency. US authorities previously released hundreds of thousands of documents, but despite years of promises, many have been held back or partially redacted, with officials citing national security concerns. That means many of the documents have been released before - but that more complete versions are now visible. In a number of cases, names and addresses of CIA agents, which were previously blacked out, are now public. Due to the sheer volume of the release, experts are still combing through the documents, but no real earth-shattering stories have been uncovered. Still, Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and editor of the JFK Facts blog, calls the latest release "the most exciting news around JFK records since the 1990s". "Several very important documents have come into public view," he said. Morley said that among them are documents further outlining the CIA's surveillance of Oswald, the extent of which has only become clear in the last few years. "He's a subject of deep interest to the CIA" long before the assassination, Morley said. A number of the documents shed light on intelligence-gathering techniques of the time - giving a window into Cold War operations. The unredacted portions of one document detailed the use of fluoroscopic scanning - the use of X-rays to provide real-time images showing inside an object. The technique was developed to detect hidden microphones possibly used to bug Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) offices. The memo is also notable for one of the names in it - James McCord, who would later gain infamy as one of the men who burgled the Watergate complex. The break-in kicked off the unravelling of the scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon. In a newly revealed portion of another document, the CIA describes a system to secretly tag and identify public phone boxes that are tapped, using a paint only visible under ultraviolent light. David Barrett, a Villanova University professor and expert on the CIA and presidential power, said the agency is traditionally opposed to the release of any operational or budget details. "It's a very good thing for the government to release these documents even if there still may be some redactions," he said. Another unredacted memo is a more complete version of a note written by Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger. Critical of the CIA and its role in shaping foreign policy, the newly published parts reveal that the agency had a huge presence in US embassies, even in allied countries such as France. Schlesinger warned Kennedy about the agency's influence on American foreign policy. While the document is not directly related to the assassination, it does give historians another piece of information about the rocky relationship between the president and intelligence agencies. Some well-known online accounts claimed that the recent documents reveal new details about long-alleged plots against Kennedy - even though some of the supposed revelations have been public for years. They includes several viral posts about Gary Underhill - a World War Two military intelligence agent. Mr Underhill reportedly claimed that a cabal of CIA agents was behind the assassination, a theory openly published in Ramparts, a left-wing magazine, in 1967. Mr Underhill's death in 1964 was ruled a suicide, but the magazine cast doubt on that as well. Photos of a seven-page memo regarding Mr Underhill went viral Tuesday - but the bulk of it is not new. His story has long been discussed online and the CIA memo mentioning it was first released in 2017. Just a few sentences on one page of the memo were newly unredacted in the latest release. And crucially the theory is based on a second-hand account published after Mr Underhill's death and includes no hard evidence. However, the story was just one of a number of unsubstantiated theories circulating following the release of the files. A 1992 law required all of the documents related to the assassination to be released within 25 years - but that law also included national security exceptions. The push for greater transparency has led to more releases over time - both President Trump in his first term and President Biden, as recently as 2023, released batches of documents. Ahead of the new release, President Trump said that he asked his staff "not to redact anything" from them. That doesn't appear to be entirely the case - the new documents still have some redactions. However, experts were largely in agreement that the latest release was a step forward for transparency. JFK Files journalist Morley said there are further documents in the National Archives yet to be released, and others held by the CIA and FBI which have not yet been accounted for. Even though there could be more releases to come - as well as promised drops about the killings of Robert F Kennedy Sr and Martin Luther King Jr - the questions around the JFK assassination will almost certainly continue. "Whenever there is an assassination there will be debates and to come degree there will be conspiracy theories," said Barrett, the Villanova historian. "That's not going to change because of these or any other documents." JFK experts scour newly unsealed assassination files Trump orders plan for release of JFK and MLK assassination files JFK assassination: Questions that won't go away
