Assassinations News Stories

Excerpts of Key Assassinations News Stories in Major Media

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Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Later this year - unless President Trump intervenes - the American people will get access to the last of thousands of secret government files about a turning point in the nation’s history: the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The National Archives this week released several hundred of the documents, which come from CIA and FBI files. JFK researchers are scrambling to see whether they contain any new clues about the president’s murder. But many more documents remain under seal, awaiting release by this October, the 25-year deadline set by the 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. The law gives only one person - the president - the ability to stop the release from happening. He can act only if he certifies in writing that the documents would somehow endanger national security. About 3,150 ... documents remain totally under seal, along with tens of thousands of pages that have been only partially unsealed because intelligence and law-enforcement agencies opposed their release in the 1990s. Those are the documents that Trump could try to keep secret. And sadly, he appears to be under pressure to do so. Congressional and other government officials have warned us in confidence in recent weeks that at least two federal agencies will make formal appeals to the White House to block the release of some of the files. Which agencies? Which files? The officials would not say. Trump ... has a chance to show that he is committed to resolving some of the biggest conspiracy theories in American politics. We hope he welcomes the opportunity.

Note: The above was written by Larry J. Sabato, author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” and Philip Shenon, author of “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination.” For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and assassinations from reliable major media sources.

[The CIA] has since 1945 succeeded in deposing or killing a string of leaders, but was forced to cut back after a Senate investigation in the 1970s. Some of the most notorious of the CIAs operations to kill world leaders were those targeting the late Cuban president, Fidel Castro. Attempts ranged from snipers to imaginative plots worthy of spy movie fantasies. But although the CIA attempts proved fruitless in the case of Castro, the US intelligence agency has ... succeeded in deposing or killing a string of leaders elsewhere around the world either directly or, more often, using sympathetic local military, locally hired criminals or pliant dissidents. On Friday, [North Korea accused] the CIA and South Koreas intelligence service of being behind an alleged recent assassination attempt on its leader Kim Jong-un. Such a claim cannot be dismissed as totally outlandish given the long list of US involvement in coups and assassinations worldwide. The agency was forced to cut back on such killings after ... then president Gerald Ford signed in 1976 an executive order stating: No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire in, political assassination. In spite of this, the US never totally abandoned the strategy, simply changing the terminology from assassination to targeted killings. A leaked document obtained by WikiLeaks and released earlier this year showed the CIA in October 2014 looking at hacking into car control systems, [potentially allowing] an agent to stage a car crash.

Note: Strong evidence suggests that courageous journalist Michael Hastings was killed when his car controls were hacked causing him to crash head on into a tree. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on verified or suspected assassinations from reliable major media sources.

WikiLeaks has alleged that the CIA looked into vehicle interference methods that could potentially enable it to assassinate people without detection. According to the whistle-blowing organisation, the CIA explored the tactic in October 2014. It hasn’t included any more details about the alleged practice. WikiLeaks included the claim in its release announcing ‘Vault 7’, a huge batch of documents, which Julian Assange claims to account for the CIA’s “entire hacking capacity”. “As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks,” reads a passage in the release. “The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.” The CIA has also been accused of using malware and hacking tools to turn TVs into covert microphones and remotely break into smartphones. The latter, according to WikiLeaks, allowed it to bypass encryption on a number of popular messaging apps, including WhatsApp. WikiLeaks describes Vault 7 as “the largest intelligence publication in history” and says that the initial batch of 8,761 files is just the first in a series of releases.

Note: See the wikileaks webpage summarizing this most important leak. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

Much has been made of Bobby Kennedy’s impossible burden following the assassination of his brother. A review of [documents released as recently as a few months ago] by the Globe, fortified by the work of historians and new interviews with former Kennedy aides, paints a picture of a brother responding to the assassination with equal parts crippling grief and growing suspicions. In the five years between his brother’s murder and his own assassination in 1968, Bobby Kennedy voiced public support for the findings of the Warren Commission, namely that a pathetic, attention-seeking gunman had alone been responsible for the murder of President Kennedy. Privately, though, Bobby was dismissive of the commission, seeing it ... as a public relations tool. After hearing the news out of Dallas, it’s clear that he quickly focused his attention on three areas of suspicion: Cuba, the Mafia, and the CIA. Crucially, Bobby had become his brother’s point man in managing all three of those highly fraught portfolios. And by the time the president was gunned down, Bobby understood better than anyone how all three had become hopelessly interwoven, and how much all three bore his own imprint. For while John Kennedy was the one gunned down, Bobby had reason to believe he may have been the ultimate target. Walking the grounds of Hickory Hill just an hour after receiving confirmation of his brother’s death, Bobby confided in an aide something truly unsettling. That aide, Edwin Guthman, would later recount it in his book “We Band of Brothers.” “I thought they would get one of us,” Bobby said, adding, “I thought it would be me.”

Note: In 2006, BBC reported that CIA operatives were directly involved in Robert Kennedy's assassination, and that Sirhan Sirhan may have been a programmed Manchurian Candidate. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing assassinations news articles from reliable major media sources.

There's no more valuable resource for an informed citizenry than the folks doing god's work at the National Security Archive at the George Washington University. Their most recent revelations concern the Rockefeller Commission, which was formed by the Ford Administration as a reaction to the New York Times stories in 1975 that broke the news of the CIA's misdeeds, up to and including covert assassinations. And, lo and behold, you'll never guess who was leading the [cover up]: "The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into standard accounts of the events of this period. Among the abuses that led directly to President Ford creating the Rockefeller Commission were charges the CIA had compiled dossiers on American citizens and infiltrated political groups that opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam. The Rockefeller panelists entered a blanket finding that the files and lists of citizen dissenters were "improper." The White House edit changed this conclusion.

Note: Read about the CIA's involvement in the 1953 death of military scientist Frank Olson. The Rockefeller Commission report was one of the first official sources to publicly reveal CIA and DOD mind control experiments. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

David Talbot despises Allen Dulles. As director of the CIA, Talbot declares, Dulles exemplified the “frightening amorality that prevailed at the pinnacle of American power” at the height of the Cold War. As a lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell in the 1930s, Dulles protected and promoted Nazi-controlled cartels. He used his influence in the Office of Strategic Services and the CIA to shield former Nazis from prosecution for war crimes in the ’40s and ’50s. Dulles organized the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, [and was] willing to manipulate and undercut American presidents. In “The Devil’s Chessboard,” David Talbot, the founder and former editor in chief of Salon and former senior editor at Mother Jones, examines Dulles’ career and adds several more “achievements” to his dark resume. Talbot’s indictment is long. He suggests that had President Franklin D. Roosevelt lived, Dulles might well have faced criminal charges for hiding the U.S. assets of German corporations and destroying incriminating evidence. By 1963, Talbot insists, a clear consensus had emerged among corporate leaders “and within America’s deep state” that Kennedy was a threat to national security and had to be removed. Dulles, they concluded, “was the only man with the stature, connections, and decisive will to make something of this enormity happen." [Dulles] then lobbied Lyndon Johnson to appoint him to the Warren Commission, where he saw to it that Lee Harvey Oswald would take the fall as the “lone gunman.”

Note: Read another good article on Talbot's book revealing evidence in the JFK killing. And isn't it interesting that no other major media seemed to find this book worth a review, even though Talbot is well known as the founder of the website Salon.

General Augusto Pinochet directly ordered the 1976 assassination of a Chilean diplomat who was killed in a car bomb in Washington DC, according top secret US intelligence documents declassified by the Obama administration. The documents ... also show that the former dictator was so concerned with covering up his role in the murder that he planned to assassinate his own head of intelligence, General Manuel Contreras. Orlando Letelier, a former defence and foreign minister under President Salvador Allende, was tortured and incarcerated after Pinochet’s 1973 coup. He later fled to the US and worked at the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington DC. Letelier, who had once been Chile’s ambassador to the US, was murdered on 21 September 1976 by a car bomb planted under the driver’s seat of his vehicle just a mile from the White House. Ronni Moffitt, an American colleague, was also killed in the blast. Letelier’s son, Senator Juan Pablo Letelier, confirmed to the Guardian that he had received copies of the newly released documents, which ... include papers from the CIA. Speculation that the CIA was aware of the plot to kill Letelier is based on previously declassified records showing that Manuel Contreras was paid by the CIA before the bombing and was in regular contact with top officials at the spy agency. Contreras, who died in August, always denied responsibility and blamed the CIA for the bombing.

Note: Members of Pinochet's brutal regime were strongly supported by Washington until very recently. George H.W. Bush was head of the CIA when the assassination described above was carried out. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about intelligence agency corruption.

"I have a dream today." Those are the words that still echo to this day. But that dream was deferred by a gunshot in Memphis. The date was April 4th 1968. Reverend Charles Sherrod ... knew Martin Luther King Junior as more than a civil rights leader. "I got to know him as a person," said Sherrod. And he says he knows to this very day there's more to his murder. On that day in April at the Lorraine Motel, several people pointed to where the deadly gunshot came from. Reverend Jesse Jackson was one of them. "We were telling the police, you guys are coming this way but the bullet came from that way. Don't come here. Go there," said Jackson. The investigation led to the arrest of ... James Earl Ray. Ray maintained until his death that he took the blame but a man by the name of Raul actually killed King. So who did it? "The government," said Sherrod. Reverend Sherrod says King was getting more radical with his approach to civil rights and people wanted him quieted. "So what happens when he comes to Memphis? There was a breakdown, an intentional breakdown," said Sherrod. Shelby County Criminal Prosecutor John Campbell and a team of investigators spent four years re-examining evidence from the King murder. "We know that J. Edgar Hoover was doing all types of illegal things to Dr. King. We also know that Bobby Kennedy approved ... illegal wire taps. It's not a stretch to say if they were doing that they were certainly capable of killing him," said Campbell.

Note: Watch clips of this news report and a CNN program on a conspiracy surrounding the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. Then watch an excellent six-minute video clip of a Canadian news program giving an excellent overview of the 1999 civil trial in Memphis which found the U.S. government guilty in the assassination.

Forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot down. The alleged assassin [was] a small time criminal on the run. Some of Dr. King's closest aides believe the full story has yet to be told. From his first days in the civil rights movement, Dr. King lived under the shadow of death - his house bombed in the Montgomery bus boycott, followers killed in Birmingham and Selma. He was stabbed once in Harlem at a book signing. Dr. King's electrifying speech at the March on Washington in August of 1963 had made him the ... the FBI's nightmare, according to the official paper trail. They called him in one of the FBI memos released later "the most dangerous Negro." Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrow ... discovered thousands of these memos while writing his book, "The FBI and Martin Luther King." The memos show an FBI obsessed. Director J. Edgar Hoover sent Attorney General Robert Kennedy [the] warning [that] communists were pulling Dr. King's puppet strings. Fellow minister Ralph Abernathy discovered an FBI bug while speaking at an Alabama church. Hoover ... called Reverend King "the most notorious liar in the country" in a rare 1964 press conference. When Dr. King won the Nobel Prize, the FBI mailed an anonymous package to Dr. King's office [containing sexually explicit recordings along] with an ominous note. There was nothing nervous about him that last day in Memphis. "I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man," King said. He probably never even heard the shot.

Note: Watch clips of this news report and a CNN program on a conspiracy surrounding the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. Then watch an excellent six-minute video clip of a Canadian news program giving an excellent overview of the 1999 civil trial in Memphis which found the U.S. government guilty in the assassination.

The CIA is acknowledging for the first time the extent of its deep involvement in Chile, where it dealt with coup-plotters, false propagandists and assassins. The agency [released] a declassified report required by the U.S. Congress. Despite the disclosures, the CIA report admits to no abuses or cover-up by CIA agents. But it chronicles clandestine contacts authorized by then-U.S. President Richard Nixon and other top U.S. officials which it said would violate standards now upheld by the agency. Among the disclosures: The CIA had prior knowledge of the plot that overthrew Allende three years later. The CIA supported a kidnapping attempt of Chile's army chief in October 1970, as part of a plot to prevent the congressional confirmation of Allende as president. The kidnapping attempt failed, and Gen. Rene Schneider was shot and killed. The CIA later paid $35,000 to the kidnappers in what it termed "humanitarian" assistance. The CIA made a one-time payment to secret police head Gen. Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, the head of the military regime's feared secret police. He was sentenced in 1993 for killing Chilean socialist leader Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976. Contreras has said the CIA was behind the assassination. The report also describes efforts to influence news media in Chile against Allende and to continue anti-leftist propaganda efforts by successor Pinochet, "including support for news media committed to creating a positive image for the military Junta" now accused of an array of abuses during his 17-year rule, including more than 3,000 killings.

Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency operations news articles from reliable major media sources.

From 1960 to 1965, the CIA brainstormed at least eight plots to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro. According to a report prepared in 1967 and declassified 36 years later, the CIA thought of using cigars, contaminated air, poisoned pills, fungus and a poison-filled syringe to take out the Communist leader. One plot, which sought only to damage Castro's image, suggested placing thallium salt in his shoes, in the hope that his beard would fall out. But one idea stood out above the rest: the plan to kill Castro with a booby-trapped seashell. You see, the dictator was a fan of skin diving, so intelligence agents plotted to place an especially spectacular shell in a reef Castro was known to frequent. The hope was that the shell would be so beautiful that Castro would pick it up and, by doing so, trigger an explosive. Desmond Fitzgerald, the CIA's head of Cuban operations, went as far as to buy two books on Caribbean mollusks. But the elaborate scheme was deemed impractical.

Note: For more on assassinations as a tool of government policy, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

James Tague was standing in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza when the shots were fired on Nov. 22, 1963. A bullet presumably meant for Kennedy instead struck a curb near where Tague was standing and sent debris flying into his face. Tague’s daughter, Suanna Holloway, said her father died at his home 70 miles north of Dallas on Friday following a brief illness. He was 77. Tague’s experience at Dealey Plaza ultimately led Warren Commission investigators to conclude that one of the three shots missed and that one of the rounds went through both JFK and Texas Gov. John Connally. JFK researcher Debra Conway said the commission was initially going to settle with two shots hitting the president and one hitting the governor. But because Mr. Tague was near the missed shot and was wounded … they had to account for the missed shot,” said Conway, president of JFK Lancer, a historical research group. “Jim is a very important witness.” Critics of the Warren Commission have long questioned the so-called “magic bullet theory,” arguing that the bullet could not have traversed multiple layers and angles. Through the years, Tague’s own curiosity transformed him from eyewitness to JFK assassination researcher. He befriended other JFK assassination buffs, visited the National Archives to inspect evidence and amassed a huge collection of Kennedy-related books. Tague also authored two books, including last year’s LBJ and the Kennedy Killing in which he alleges a cover-up plot. “Personally, I’m urging young people to keep the truth alive,” he told Yahoo News.

Note: For more on the JFK assassination, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

[Thirteen] days before that dark day in Dallas, [police informant Willie Augustus] Somersett elicited a chilling, police tape-recorded threat from a right-wing racist who talked of how the President would soon be shot “from an office building with a high-powered rifle” and how “they’ll pick up somebody within hours after…just to throw the public off.” Extremist Joseph A. Milteer, of Quitman, Ga., made the threat against Kennedy in the kitchen of Somersett’s small apartment in downtown Miami. In the late 1970s, the House Assassinations Committee had experts analyze a photograph taken in Dealey Plaza moments before the first shot of an unidentified motorcade spectator “who bears a strong resemblance” to Milteer. The experts, however, concluded the man was not Milteer, who died in 1974. But now, a retired FBI agent who says that within hours of the assassination he was assigned to locate Milteer has [said] the man in the photograph is indeed Milteer. “I stood next to the man. I interviewed him and spent hours with him,” said Don Adams, who spent 20 years with the FBI before working as a police chief in Ohio. “There is no question in my mind. As soon as I saw that picture I almost fell off of my feet.” Congressional investigators never contacted Adams. Adams, now 82, says he saw the Dealey Plaza photograph for the first time a decade after his 1982 retirement from the FBI. The photograph renewed his interest in the case and ultimately led him to write the book, From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle. His insider’s account raises disturbing questions about the FBI’s investigation of Kennedy’s death.

Note: To watch a five-minute video of 20-year FBI agent Don Adams stating he has no doubt there was a major cover-up of the JFK assassination, click here. For more excellent, revealing videos on the assassination, click here and here. For more on the JFK assassination, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

On December 4th it [was exactly] 44 years since a select unit of 14 Chicago Police officers, on special assignment to Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, executed a pre-dawn raid on a west side apartment that left Illinois Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark dead, several other young Panthers wounded, and the seven raid survivors arrested on bogus attempted murder charges. The physical evidence soon exposed the claims of a "shootout" that were made by Hanrahan and his men to be blatant lies, and that the murderous reality was that the police fired nearly 100 shots while the Panthers fired but one. But those lies were only the first layer of a massive cover-up that was dismantled and exposed over the next eight years -- a cover-up designed to suppress the central role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its COINTELPRO program in the assassination. The first documentation [of the operation and its cover-up] surfaced in March of 1971 when the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a small FBI office in Media Pennsylvania and expropriated over 1000 FBI documents. These documents exposed the FBI's super-secret and profoundly illegal COINTELPRO program and its focus in the 1960s on the black liberation movement and its leaders. Citing the assassinated Malcolm X as an example, Hoover directed all of the Bureau's Offices to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize" African American organizations and leaders.

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency activity, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Despite the Cold War rhetoric of his campaign, JFK's greatest ambition as president was to break the militaristic ideology that has dominated our country since World War II. He told his close friend Ben Bradlee that he wanted the epitaph "He kept the peace," and said to another friend, William Walton, "I am almost a 'peace at any price' president." Hugh Sidey, a journalist and friend, wrote that the governing aspect of JFK's leadership was "a total revulsion" of war. Nevertheless, as James W. Douglass argues in his book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, JFK's presidency would be a continuous struggle with his own military and intelligence agencies, which engaged in incessant schemes to trap him into escalating the Cold War into a hot one. His first major confrontation with the Pentagon, the Bay of Pigs catastrophe, came only three months into his presidency and would set the course for the next 1,000 days. From the start, JFK recoiled at the caper's stench, as CIA Director Allen Dulles has acknowledged, demanding assurances from CIA and Pentagon brass that there was no chance of failure and that there would be no need for U.S. military involvement. Dulles and the generals knowingly lied and gave him those guarantees. When the invasion failed, JFK refused to order airstrikes against Castro. JFK was realizing that the CIA posed a monumental threat to American democracy. As the brigade faltered, he told Arthur Schlesinger that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."

Note: For more on the powerful social forces that assassinated JFK, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The Central Intelligence Agency is getting a very bad press in dispatches from Vietnam to American newspapers and in articles originating in Washington. The agency is precluded from [giving] information to the press, under a seal of confidence, that challenges or refutes the critics ... because to do so would require some disclosure of its activities. Every President since the C.I.A. was created has protected this secrecy. This Presidential policy has not, however, always restrained other executive units from going confidentially to the press with attacks on C.I.A. operations. The peak of the practice has recently been reached in Vietnam and in Washington. This is revealed almost every day now in dispatches from reporters ... with excellent reputations for reliability. One reporter in this category is Richard Starnes, [who] related that, "according to a high United States source here, twice the C.I.A. flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge ... [and] in one instance frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought from Washington because the agency disagreed with it." Among the views attributed to United States officials on the scene, including one described as a "very high American official ... are the following: The C.I.A.'s growth was "likened to a malignancy" which the "very high official was not sure even the White House could control ... any longer." "If the United States ever experiences [an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government] it will come from the C.I.A. and not the Pentagon." The agency "represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.

Note: The NY Times requires payment to view the above article in full. You can find it available free of charge on this webpage. Note the date of this article, just weeks before JFK was assassinated. Watch an excellent documentary titled "The Killing of a President," which presents huge amounts of evidence, including eye-witness testimony, which shows that JFK could not have been killed by Oswald. You can find an abundance of reliable resources on the JFK assassination in our information center on this topic.

The fifty years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy have done little to quell the public's interest or skepticism about who killed the president. In 1978 ... the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations found that in addition to Oswald, there likely was a second gunman who fired at the president's motorcade. The commission concluded that the gunmen were part of a "conspiracy," without determining exactly who was behind it, opening the door to five decades and a cottage industry of theories. According to a 2003 ABC News Poll, 70 percent of Americans believe Kennedy's death was "the result of a plot, not the act of a lone killer." Fifty-one percent believe Oswald did not act alone, and 7 percent believe Oswald was not involved at all in the assassination. In the years since Kennedy's death more than 2,000 books have been written about the assassination, many of which espouse one or more conspiracy theories. In nearly every theory that involves American conspirators, be they wealthy industrialists or tough-as-nails mafiosi, one group is routinely represented – the CIA. One theory suggests that Oswald was a CIA operative and agents tampered with his FBI file before and after the investigation to make it appear he was a communist and lone wolf. [Another theory claims President Lyndon] Johnson was aided in the plot by another man who would become president, George H.W. Bush, a burgeoning CIA official who happened to be in Dallas on the day of the assassination.

Note: On the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination see our powerful JFK assassination information center and the best videos and news articles on the topic. For an astonishing History Channel Video in which the attorney for Lyndon Johnson states he has no doubt Johnson was involved in the assassination, click here.

It has long been known that the Warren Commission ... was flawed in ways that led to generations of conspiracy theories about what happened on Nov. 22, 1963. A [new] book from former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon digs into exactly what the commission got wrong, both by intentional concealment, or, in Shenon's view, extensive attempts by both the CIA and FBI to withhold just how much they knew about Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. "Much of the truth about the Kennedy assassination has still not been told, [and] much of the evidence about the president's murder was covered up or destroyed - shredded, incinerated, or erased - before it could reach the commission," Shenon writes in the prologue to A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, which draws its title from the first sentence of the commission's report. Shenon tells the story of how Navy pathologist James Humes threw his blood-stained notes from Kennedy's autopsy into the fire after he transcribed a fresh copy of the report. He said that he wanted to keep the documents from falling into the hands of "ghouls," and gave a similar rationale for ordering that the sheets that covered Kennedy's head wounds in Dallas be laundered during the autopsy. The commission's investigators never even saw the photos and X-rays from the autopsy. Shenon also points to the CIA as having taken great steps to cover up their knowledge of Oswald's visit to Mexico City before the assassination.

Note: As the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination approaches see our powerful JFK assassination information center and the best videos and news articles on the topic. For more on political assassinations, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Five decades after President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot and long after official inquiries ended, thousands of pages of investigative documents remain withheld from public view. The contents of these files are partially known — and intriguing — and conspiracy buffs are not the only ones seeking to open them for a closer look. Some serious researchers believe the off-limits files could shed valuable new light on nagging mysteries of the assassination — including what U.S. intelligence agencies knew about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before Nov. 22, 1963. It turns out that several hundred of the still-classified pages concern a deceased CIA agent, George Joannides, whose activities just before the assassination and, fascinatingly, during a government investigation years later, have tantalized researchers for years. "This is not about conspiracy, this is about transparency," said Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and author embroiled in a decade-long lawsuit against the CIA, seeking release of the closed documents. "I think the CIA should obey the law. I don't think most people think that's a crazy idea." But so far, the Joannides files and thousands more pages primarily from the CIA remain off-limits at a National Archives center in College Park, Md. Anthony Summers, a British author whose sequel to his JFK book Not In Your Lifetime will be released this year, [said] "By withholding Joannides material, the agency continues to encourage the public to believe they're covering up something more sinister."

Note: For more on the strange secrecy around Joannides and his checkered past, see the New York Times article summarized here. For more on political assassinations, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The murder of President Kennedy was a seminal event for me and for millions of Americans. It changed the course of history. It was a crushing blow to our country and to millions of people around the world. Today, ... profound doubts persist about how President Kennedy was killed and why. My film "JFK" was a metaphor for all those doubts, suspicions and unanswered questions. Now an extraordinary new book offers the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance. That book is James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. In his beautifully written and exhaustively researched treatment, Douglass lays out the "motive" for Kennedy's assassination. Simply, he traces a process of steady conversion by Kennedy from his origins as a traditional Cold Warrior to his determination to pull the world back from the edge of destruction. Many of these steps are well known, such as Kennedy's disillusionment with the CIA after the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion, and his refusal to follow the reckless recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. But many of his steps remain unfamiliar: Kennedy's back-channel dialogue with Khrushchev and their shared pursuit of common ground; his secret opening to dialogue with Fidel Castro (ongoing the very week of his assassination); and his determination to pull out of Vietnam after his probable re-election in 1964. All of these steps caused him to be regarded as a virtual traitor by elements of the military-intelligence community. These were the forces that planned and carried out his assassination.

Note: For more on this important book, click here. For an excellent collection of the best information, videos, books, and essays on the John F. Kennedy assassination, click here.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.