Déjà Vu on JFK at the Washington Post

The Washington Post is giving me a déjà vu feeling about the JFK assassination. After publishing an extraordinary article detailing how recently revealed records of the CIA disclose that it has been lying continuously about the George Joannides matter for more than 60 years, the Post has now followed up with an editorial emphasizing how important it is for government institutions to begin telling the truth so that we can renew our trust in government. Otherwise, the Post suggests, people will continue to have paranoid delusions that give rise to conspiracy theories.

What?

It has just been revealed that the CIA has lied about a critically important aspect of the Kennedy assassination. Oh well, ho hum. We all know that the CIA lies. Golly, if only the CIA would start telling the truth. Then we no longer would have all these silly conspiracy theories. The 5-Ingredient Cookb... Kelly, Benjamin Best Price: $3.72 Buy New $8.57 (as of 12:06 UTC - Details)

Why the seemingly blasé attitude toward the CIA’s lies regarding Joannides? My hunch is that it’s because long ago the Post subscribed to the lone-nut theory of the assassination — a theory to which it has obviously remained wedded regardless of the overwhelming circumstantial evidence of guilt on the part of the national-security establishment, including the evidence establishing the fraudulent autopsy that the military conducted on JFK’s body on the very evening of the assassination. As the Post writes in its editorial, “When Oswald killed Kennedy…”

That’s got to explain the lack of interest in following up on why the CIA has lied about Joannides for so long. In other words, the Post could have written an editorial calling on the CIA to come clean — to explain why it has lied about Joannides for so long. Okay, sure, the CIA officials who began the lying in 1963 are all dead. But somehow the instruction to continue the lying about Joannides was transmitted from CIA generation to CIA generation. How did that happen? Why did it happen? Who are the people in the CIA today who received that instruction? What was told to them?

The Post could be leading the way in demanding answers from the CIA. Rather than simply exhorting the CIA to tell the truth in the future, it could be calling on Congresswoman Luna to subpoena CIA officials to explain under oath the reasons for the lies surrounding Joannides. Isn’t that the moral and ethical duty of the press?

My opinion is that the basic problem is that by steadfastly hewing to the official lone-nut theory of the assassination, the Post, as well as much of the other mainstream press, simply cannot bring itself to think the unthinkable — that the lone-nut theory of the assassination is simply wrong — that the assassination was, in fact, a regime-change operation orchestrated and carried about by the U.S. national-security establishment. After all, what the Post cannot deny is that the 60 years of CIA’s lies about Joannides is a puzzle piece that fits perfectly within the overall mosaic of a national-security state regime-change operation.

The reason that the CIA’s attitude seems like déjà vu all over again for me is that we saw this same phenomenon take place back in the 1990s. On November 8, 1998, the Post published a story about how the Assassination Records Review Board had determined that there had been two brain exams as part of the JFK autopsy. You can read the story here.

What was that significant? Well, one reason is that the military pathologists claimed that there was only one brain exam, which meant that they were doing exactly what those CIA officials have been doing. They were intentionally, knowingly, and deliberately lying! Another reason is that the second brain exam necessarily Iinvolved a brain that belonged to someone other than Kennedy. Isn’t that something worth investigating? The Post article states “The central contention of the report is that brain photographs in the Kennedy records are not of Kennedy’s brain and show much less damage than Kennedy sustained when he was shot in Dallas and brought to Parkland Hospital there on Nov. 22, 1963…. ‘I am 90 to 95 percent certain that the photographs in the Archives are not of President Kennedy’s brain,’ [Douglas] Horne, a former naval officer, said in an interview.” The Death of the West:... Patrick J. Buchanan Best Price: $2.12 Buy New $12.46 (as of 06:40 UTC - Details)

Now, wouldn’t you think that that would be enough for a mainstream paper to send an investigative reporter to get to the bottom of all this? After all, an allegation that the military is lying about something that is quite important — the fraudulent autopsy of a president — is a fairly serious accusation. Isn’t that worth checking out? Isn’t that the job of an independent press?

Apparently not because the Post, as far as I know, did not launch any investigation into the matters that it itself detailed in that 1998 article, just as it is showing no proclivity toward doing insofar as the Joannides lies are concerned. After publishing that article in 1998, they apparently just dropped the matter, just as they are apparently now ready to drop the Joannides matter.

Moreover, don’t forget: Someone had slipped a provision into the JFK Records Act that prohibited the Assassination Records Review Board in from reinvestigating any aspect of the assassination. Surely, the Post knew that. So, given that the ARRB was prohibited from getting to the bottom of the two brain exams and the rest of the fraudulent autopsy, shouldn’t that have motivated the mainstream press, which was not operating under such a prohibition, to undertake such an investigation. Obviously not.

When the Post talks about the distrust of government among the American people, it conveniently avoids another critically important point — that the American people have an equal distrust in the mainstream press. I wonder why.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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