You're Only as Sick as Your Secrets
Why the Hearing on the JFK Assassination Files are important
“Secrecy is the enemy of democracy; it’s the enemy of the republican form of government and a misinformed or an uninformed public cannot make good decisions, and a compliant press helps cushion the public from that fact. And this process leads to a loss of belief in both the government and the media.”
James DiEugenio The Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets hearing April 2025
LIVE: Hearing on JFK assassination files
Why is it important that we get to the truth about the assassination of a president 62 years ago on November 22nd, 1963? It was a tragedy at the time and still haunts modern America today. We still have no agreement on the facts. Many Americans know only the fairytale that it was a lone crazed gunman who took JFK’s life and that the Warren Commission solved the crime. End of story. That period of American history saw the assassinations of many leaders, like RFK and MLK. It was a particularly violent time confused over the upheavals in American society — the place of women, sexual norms, pop and teen culture, the fight for civil liberties, the role of America in the world as a superpower. I believe there was also an upheaval in how wars would be fought post WWII, when we stopped declaring our wars in Congress.
We should have had complete transparency in 2017 when all documents should have been declassified as established by the independent Assassination Records Review Board. Trump failed to address this in his first presidency, and Biden also failed to disclose all the facts. In fact, it is a bipartisan failure of disclosure by both Democrats and Republicans since 1963. On March 18th Trump’s executive order #14176 fixed this problem. The E.O. declassified some 80,000 pages including the RFK and MLK documents which were in the National Archives.
The speakers at this Federal Secrets hearing sited well-known statistics. When JFK took office 75% of the public believed in what the government said: but by the 1990s only 19% of the public believed in their government. A Pew Research center article goes into further detail about Americans deep mistrust of government. Public Trust in Government: 1958-2024 | Pew Research Center
Reading history is the key to expanding our understanding of current political issues. It is important because lack of historical knowledge leads to public mistrust and more importantly leads to a disengaged citizenry.
Do we have an unelected government inside our government, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. described as a “State within a State”? Do they pull strings and make decisions without the public’s consent or even the consent of our elected leaders? If we follow the pattern of facts, past events demonstrate we do have a government within our government.
This most recent congressional hearing, The Taskforce on Declassification of Federal Secrets, in April 2025 is another piece in the puzzle. Those who testified have all meticulously read and researched the JFK assassination and the history of that era. They include:
Jefferson Morely, a researcher and expert on the assassination of JFK, and editor of JFK Facts
Oliver Stone, a director and documentarian on the assassination of JFK and a Vietnam War veteran
James DiEugenio, a researcher and author and expert on the assassination of JFK
John Davisson, a senior counsel for Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is a data privacy organization
They reviewed the most recent unredacted documents of the JFK files. They found more evidence that our American president was killed by our own government. Essentially it was a coup d’etat.
Among the pile of evidence is a memo written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who was special assistant to President Kennedy. It was a report requested by JFK to reorganize the CIA because JFK thought the CIA had lied to him about the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, a failed military landing on the Cuban coast by the USA. As the chief executive Kennedy was the commander-in-chief of the military. He should have decided when and how the military was used. It should not be up to unelected bureaucrats of the administrative state, like the CIA or Pentagon, to make these determinations. They serve the president who serves us the people.
After JFK was assassinated, the CIA then censored this document. We have only now seen what was censored. One piece of evidence is that at the time 47% of the State Department were CIA agents. Schlesinger gave the example of the more than 100 CIA agents working in the US embassy in Paris and its connection to an attempt to unseat Charles de Gaulle, President of France. In essence they were controlling another executive agency, the State Department, and not complying with presidential orders, keeping him in the dark.
In1963, a month after Kennedy was killed, ex-president Harry S. Truman and the president who created the CIA wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post called Limit CIA Rule to Intelligence.
“We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”
What are the next steps in this discovery process? Jefferson Morely asked the congressional task force to do the following:
Provide the task force with the records related to the CIA agent George Joannides, which would provide more information on Lee Harvey Oswald’s connection to the CIA.
Ask the CIA to make a public statement in order to answer the question of why the following 3 men all lied to JFK investigators.
James Jesus Angleton, former chief counterintelligence officer at CIA 1954 to 1975
Richard Helms, former Director of the CIA 1966 to 1973
George Joannides, former CIA agent at the CIA station in Miami 1963
The chairwoman of this hearing was Congresswoman Luna, a Republican representative from Florida. In her opening statement she explained that this is for “the soul of our Republic” It may sound dramatic, but it’s true. As unpartisan as this issue should be, during the hearing’s question time, we had a display of incompetence or worse yet, attempts to get “tough” sound bites during a congressional hearing for TV—conflict for conflict’s sake.
Representative Boebert (Rep. Colorado) didn’t even know who was in front of her. Along with other Democrats on the committee, she was grandstanding instead of dealing with the subject at hand. Rep. Boebert made a fool of herself as she quoted Roger Stone who blamed LBJ for the assassinations, not realizing she had Oliver Stone before her discussing the JFK plot.
Representative Crockett (Dem. Texas) made the discussion all about her and not the topic at hand, which was information for the American people about JFK, RFK and MLK. As she pointed out, she’s a lawyer so she knows about chain of custody. The event happened in Dallas in what is now the district she represents. Rep. Crockett wasted time diverting attention to the Signal information leak story and DOGE. She completely misunderstands the importance to all Americans both Democrat and Republican of the revelation of truths about our slain leaders.
The American constitution gives the people the democratic vote. The government has legitimacy because the people vote representatives into service. They are public officials that serve us, the private citizens, hence their need to be transparent and truthful.
For years government officials have used national security as an excuse to hide their actions, discussions, and spending. They have confused public service with secretive authoritarian government. We can no longer outsource our thinking about our Republic to the “experts” in Washington DC.