The US has released thousands of classified documents about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (File)
Washington:
US authorities on Wednesday released thousands of pages of classified documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a case that continues to spark conspiracy theories despite the official conclusion that he was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.
CIA and FBI files show that American investigators spread their net wide and deep to find out if Oswald was conspiring with others in the November 22, 1963 murder that shocked the world.
Documents show that they have pursued countless tracks, from Soviet intelligence to African communist groups and the Italian mafia.
The papers also show extensive US efforts to spy on and influence Fidel Castro’s communist government in Cuba, where Oswald had contacts and whom Kennedy had attempted to overthrow.
The 1,491 files, many of which are lengthy reports, were posted to the JFK Assassination Records page of the National Archives, which already has tens of thousands of listings related to Kennedy’s death and the investigation that followed.
The Kennedy assassination has long sparked numerous conspiracy theories that do not accept the official verdict that Oswald was working alone when he shot Kennedy as the young president rolled through the streets of Dallas, Texas in a convertible limousine.
Some believe that Oswald, a communist sympathizer, was ordered to him by Cuba or the Soviet Union.
Others believe that anti-Cuba activists, possibly with support from US intelligence or the FBI, had Kennedy assassinated.
And others believe that his political rivals could have been behind the murder.
‘Sinister Conspiracies’
Four years ago, then-President Donald Trump was legally required by a 1992 law to disclose the information withheld by US intelligence on the subject.
The law requires that all government documents about the murder be made public “in order to fully inform the public.”
Trump declassified more than 53,000 documents into seven tranches, bringing the proportion of the entire murder record available to the public to 88 percent, according to the National Archives.
But Trump left thousands more behind for national security reasons.
This year, President Joe Biden pledged to respect the law, but he too came under fire in October when the White House delayed more releases.
Biden said at the time the delay was necessary “to protect against identifiable damage to military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement or foreign relations conduct.”
The White House is now under pressure to complete reviews of the documents before the end of 2022.
Philip Shenon, an expert on the Kennedy Murder File, wrote Wednesday in an article Politico published that there are likely documents that will never be released for security reasons.
“As long as the government keeps some documents hidden, it will only further promote the idea that sinister conspiracies about Kennedy’s death have a factual basis,” he said.
“Today, QAnon, which the FBI considers a domestic terrorism threat, has embraced JFK conspiracy theories,” Shenon added, referring to the US conspiracy movement that has crept into the mainstream in recent years.
Shenon estimates that 15,000 murder-related documents remain secret, most of them from the CIA and FBI.
Interview with Jackie Kennedy is missing
Jefferson Morley, who maintains a website about the murder, JFKFacts.org, and who spent years in court to release documents, said the latest release still contains important data.
Importantly, he said, historian William Manchester’s interviews with Kennedy’s wife Jackie Kennedy and brother Robert Kennedy (RFK) remain limited.
“Neither Jackie nor RFK believed in the official theory that Kennedy was killed by one man alone for no reason,” Morley wrote on Twitter.
“They said JFK was privately assassinated by his domestic enemies. That’s what’s on these tires and why they’re so sensitive.”
(This story was not edited by DailyExpertNews staff and was generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)
