JFK Assassination Records – 2022 Additional Documents Release

https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/release2022

by bookofjoe • 4 years ago

120 263 4 years ago

lettergram5• 4 years ago

Say what you will about Trump (lots of bad stuff to say in that regard), but this was specifically one of his campaign promises and after years of legal / bureaucratic battles we at least have some more records

That said, I don’t understand why these types of requests take so long… this event was quite literally a life time ago. Anyone involved would long be dead or incapable of standing trial.

ceejayoz12• 4 years ago

Anyone involved would long be dead or incapable of standing trial.

If, for example, some documents include details of spies in Russia never uncovered, even if those folks have retired/died, their network (and its recruited descendants) might well still be operating.

lettergram5• 4 years ago

Fair point, although I find it highly unlikely Russians or any indications of Russian involvement will be in here.

Far more likely, in my opinion, is a certain agencies would be implicated in (at least) covering up details

giarc• 4 years ago

Anyone involved would long be dead or incapable of standing trial.

It was 59 years ago. There definitely could still be people alive that were involved (I'm not implying anything).

monstertank• 4 years ago

I'm not any kind of expert, but at the end of the JFK movie (1991) it says the House Select Committee on Assassinations files are locked until 2029. I think that is the result of the Warren commission...

hx833001• 4 years ago

While Trump promised to do this, he unfortunately later agreed with the Intelligence Community to continue hiding certain information, which Biden has now done as well.

cpr3• 4 years ago

Very simple. It would greatly discredit the CIA if their obvious involvement were revealed, even at this great distance.

starkd7• 4 years ago

A great way of re-establishing credibility to wipe the slate clean. All the principles have been long dead. It could definitely be a reset for the agency's credibility as a whole.

StanislavPetrov2• 4 years ago

Trump could have released the files as legally required, but he folded to the demands of (then) CIA chief Mike Pompeo and withheld thousands of documents (which allowed the Biden administration to continue to withhold thousands more, most of which we will most likely never see barring the collapse of the US government and/or the abolition of the CIA).

yonaguska3• 4 years ago

He shouldn't have trusted Pompeo- both with these documents and the crossfire hurricane documents. But, even if he did release them, I suspect he would have had a lot more than just the National Archives signing off on raids. Unfortunately, Trump has young kids and grandkids- that's a lot of leverage. Or, Trump was also controlled opposition- who knows. It's all rotten to the core- the collapse of the US government is inevitable- I just hope we don't go the way of the USSR, where the KGB rose from the ashes, destroyed countless records and continues to run Russia to this day.

knorker3• 4 years ago

Honest question: Why do you attribute the release of JFK docs with Trump?

He could have declassified it all, but didn't.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/oliver-s...

starkd7• 4 years ago

He did. They blocked it anyway. A president's orders are not always followed through.

jasmer3• 4 years ago

Consider the prospect that those were just populist campaign lies. For gosh sakes "I'm going to release the JFK secrets" is the most tabloidy, QAnon thing one could say. I mean, it's perfect in terms of appeal to his core demo, but why on earth would he want to actually follow through? What would be the point? He can just pretend he didn't say it, and make up some other thing for the next election cycle.

markus_zhang3• 4 years ago

The big names will have heirs and political heirs. Also why do that for no real benefit?

dev_daftly• 4 years ago

You think the government wants to taint Hoover's name even more?

ThinkingGuy• 4 years ago

One reason the CIA doesn't release information that has since become public, is because the techniques used to acquire that information are still classified.

Source: "The Langley Files: A CIA Podcast" (Yes, the CIA has a podcast) https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-langley-files/

torartc• 4 years ago

Trump said he would release information but ultimately backed down and didn't, so no I don't think he deserves any credit for lying about about something else.

kahnclusions• 4 years ago

One obvious reason is that these documents can confirm spying operations that were happening and may still be continuing to today.

For example the US was tapping and transcribing all the phone calls to communist bloc embassies in Mexico in collaboration with Mexico’s presidency but unbeknownst to their law enforcement agencies.

Of course we already safely assumed they were tapping communist embassies, but the documents reveal the precise nature of the taps, what they usually did with the information they found, and to what extent the Mexican government was aware.

There must be a lot of review and consideration before deciding to reveal these details, even decades later.

thatguy09002• 4 years ago

Assuming some government agency actually did kill Kennedy, how long would they have to wait until admitting what happened would carry no consequences? I feel that it really wouldn't be that long. 100 years? Less?

Simon_O_Rourke• 4 years ago

Unfortunately some of it won't be released, particularly the note Oswald passed to Special Agent Hosty a few days before the assassination. Allegedly it was a threat to stop hassling his family but we'll never know. Hosty was ordered by his superiors to destroy it, and promptly flushed it down the toilet.

cpr3• 4 years ago

Or the letter in Oswald's handwriting (no name on it) to James Jesus Angleton (head of CIA wetworks), released in the past couple of years, asking him for clarification on what he was expected to do while in Dallas.

The guy was simply a patsy.

StanislavPetrov2• 4 years ago

Never, as long as the CIA still exists. The institutional reputation of the agency is very low right now among large swaths of the population. Imagine what would happen if it was revealed that they had a hand in killing a sitting US president? No matter how long ago it was, their reputation and credibility (and the reputation and credibility of all the institutions and people who continue to uphold them as patriotic defenders of democracy) would be forever tainted (even beyond what it is today).

starkd7• 4 years ago

I'm not so sure. All the current employees of the CIA are absolved, simply because they were not even alive at that time. All the principles have been long dead. I think they could credibly claim "mistakes were made" and move on. It's a perfect opportunity to sort of wipe the slate clean.

Communitivity• 4 years ago

Something to keep in mind is that any intelligence service gets blamed for their failures, but gets no bump in reputation for their successes. This means that the more activities any service does, the worse their reputation will be. Because no one has a 100% track record.

saiya-jin• 4 years ago

Why on earth would they literally ever do that? There are always numerous procedural backdoors on how to avoid that if you play by the book (can't release from archives if it ain't archived for reason XYZ for example), and endless options if you don't.

If you as chief just take a single copy of some strong evidence and burn it, that's about it, who is gonna stop you. People on top of these power pyramids have usually more massive ego than their body can actually take so its easy to feel righteous about such acts.

Out of all the possible reasons, killing one's own president is confidently on top of the list of reasons to never ever disclose.

Not that I subscribe to any particular theory since we don't know and probably never will, but there are way too many weird coincidences and events to make the lone shooter theory anything but a fringe, unprobable one.

But given how massively CIA et al fucked up long term almost everything they took upon, this would have to be their best-executed mission by far. That doesn't mean somebody else wasn't more competent/lucky.

A story from my former soviet-enslaved country in east europe - after iron curtain fell, secret services were intensively burning all the heaps of incriminating paperwork gathered in prior decades on themselves and their collaborators, and bribes were done to get ones that evaded this. Very few remained. That's how you easily erase past, no other digital copies on distributed tapes. Now most apparatchiks are in politics or organized crime, often both.

ceejayoz12• 4 years ago

No amount of document release is gonna convince anyone. "It's in the one they didn't release" or "there are some they're pretending don't exist".

sonotathrowaway3• 4 years ago

The more interesting event to me is that the balance of evidence on MLK’s assassination shows that he was murdered in an operation coordinated between the FBI and the Memphis police and mafia.

0823498723498724• 4 years ago

He had been proposing levying the mutual-assistance form of economic sanctions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013751 , after all.

dwater• 4 years ago

To those downvoting because they think this comment is baseless:

"The Loyd Jowers Trial (officially the King family vs. Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators) was an American civil suit brought by the family of Martin Luther King Jr. against Loyd Jowers, following his claims of a conspiracy in the assassination of the civil rights leader in 1968. The jury would eventually decide in 1999 that there was a conspiracy perpetrated by Jowers and other conspirators."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyd_Jowers_trial

_justinfunk2• 4 years ago

"convince anyone" of what?

ceejayoz12• 4 years ago

That it wasn't the CIA, or the Russians, or the lizard people, or that JFK isn't secretly still alive in hiding. Take your pick, there are a lot, some more absurd than others. One or more might even be true, but they aren't going to release the proof of that.

rippercushions• 4 years ago

That the mainstream/official view (Lee Harvey Oswald did it alone) is correct, and that there is no conspiracy to hide that it was actually orchestrated by the CIA/KGB/Mafia/Illuminati/etc.

beepbooptheory2• 4 years ago

I do like, unbeknownst to OP, that this statement could be speaking for either side at this point.

ceejayoz12• 4 years ago

No, there's a significant difference between "prove something happened" and "prove something didn't happen". If there's a document in there detailing a conspiracy by the CIA to kill JFK, and it gets released someday, a lot of people are going to be convinced. It's less true in the other direction.

jasmer3• 4 years ago

The fact that they continue to release more stuff over and over gives very legitimate credence to the notion they are hiding something.

It seems clear they don't want us to know something.

Now, it could be more or less political, or personal, or something ultimately mundane, but the conspiracy theorists can make it anything they want of it.

I suggest there might have been something really complicated wherein nobody could point the finger fully at any group, but that the CIA was doing something sketchy, funding the wrong people, Johnson new about it but only in superficial terms, someone somewhere took it too far, it got out of hand and that the truth is just too damaging to the state (and various agencies) itself so they want to keep it hidden.

kolinko• 4 years ago

The fact that they continue to release more stuff over and over gives very legitimate credence to the notion they are hiding something.

"If they are innocent they would not to fight the charges so much"

JumpCrisscross• 4 years ago

that they continue to release more stuff over and over gives very legitimate credence to the notion they are hiding something

Wat? This is how declassification works.

TheRealDunkirk3• 4 years ago

They confirmed the existence of a conspiracy with the Warren Report, and the endorsement of the idea that there was a single-shooter, explained by the so-called magic bullet. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that The Most Serious People in the government signed their names to something that any 12 year old who's shot a .22 caliber rifle would know is utter, complete, and irredeemable nonsense. All the rest is window dressing. That's all you need. And, after sealing the deal, there's only one organization which could have been responsible, by sheer power (to get SCOTUS and POTUS to go along with it), and motivation (standard MIC motivation of endless war in SE Asia).

treebeard901• 4 years ago

And, after sealing the deal, there's only one organization which could have been responsible, by sheer power, and motivation.

There is a ton of circumstantial evidence backing this theory? up too. The goal seemed to be to gain control over a Government organization that since the 30s had grown to act with basically no oversight. They were an international group with enormous power and wanted to keep that power and expand it. The Kennedy administration was trying to provide that oversight and roll it back.

The Bay of Pigs and the continued oversight along with the belief that Kennedy was somehow a Catholic communist sympathizer with connections to Russia. It's really fascinating to read those accusations in hind sight.

Then consider that after Kennedy, Nixon was very friendly towards the supranational intelligence service and after Carter, the CIA Director was even Reagan's VP, then became President himself for four years.

He lost the next election to someone with clear CIA ties from the drug running happening in Arkansas as he was governor. The story behind the movie American Made is incredible. So, Bill Clinton then became President for 8 years with many of this same group from the Defense Dept and CIA who had been in executive power for decades. Rumsfeld, Bush, Clintons, etc. Bipartisan even...

So what do you get after the Clintons? Another Bush who had control for 8 years.

Then consider how history might have been different if Kennedy was able to reign in the CIA, work with the Soviet Union to avoid escalation in Vietnam and then maybe the executive branch would not have been captured by CIA linked people for over the next few decades.

Anyway, we will all likely never know the full story but all of this seems more than plausible to me.

End rant!

heavyarms• 4 years ago

I used to buy into some of this JFK stuff when I was a X-Files watching teenager. What really burst the bubble for me was a documentary I watched where a team of snipers and forensic scientists re-created the exact shot with mannequins with bones and ballistic gel. They didn't even have to try that hard. Using the same rifle and ammo, the first shot they tried resulted in almost the same exact trajectory. I can't find a clip of that exact documentary (circa 2004-2006), but there are others who have done the same. You don't have to look hard to find very comprehensive and scientific explanations for the exact trajectory of that specific shot. But you do have to look very hard to find an actual explanation for why it is impossible that is beyond the level of "golly gee folks, I done shot lots of guns in my life and let me tell you, it ain't possible."

https://youtu.be/Q7ERXm9OwuE?t=250

starkd7• 4 years ago

Well, releasing ALL the documents would be a good start. Seeing as how it is over 50 years after the fact, when all of the principles are now dead, that should not be too much to ask.

ceejayoz12• 4 years ago

Seeing as how it is over 50 years after the fact, when all of the principles are now dead, that should not be too much to ask.

Henry Kissinger is 99. Plenty of people from that era are still alive.

More importantly, if there's information on specific CIA informants in there, their networks and the people they recruited may well have survived them.

orangepurple2• 4 years ago

I don't think they'll release the truth until after Felix Rodriguez passes. He's still killing people in 2013. Batista wasn't enough to satisfy his thirst for murder.

2devnull• 4 years ago

I disagree. There are enough facts already to conclude that powerful forces have tried to obfuscate facts surrounding the assassination. What that means is unclear because that’s how muddying the waters works. But only a fool would buy the official narrative. It may be very close to the truth but there are too many unexplainable aspects to not think there is more to what happened that the average person believes. That may be different now since people trust journalists and government less. It’s clear the let Oswald get shot. And the bullet? It’s a joke.

staunch• 4 years ago

The JFK assassination, and other historical events, seem like they could be such great applications for the kind of AI systems we have now. It really seems as if something like ChatGPT could "read" every document related to the JFK assassination and put together the pieces for us.

I'm already convinced it was some combination of anti-Castro Cubans, Italian-American mafia, and members of the CIA that were involved in a conspiracy to kill JFK. That seems pretty clear just from reading the Wikipedia pages, but I'd love to have an AI system assemble the full story in detail. There's a lot of unanswered questions, like how far up the chain did things go. Who was involved in the cover up, and much more.

At the very least, we probably need a system that is trained on just the raw source material so that it is not biased by all the existing theories.

MacsHeadroom• 4 years ago

GPT is biased towards the most popular theories in its training data multiplied by repeated exposure to those theories, not the most correct theories. There's no such thing as an unbiased LMM.

jerf3• 4 years ago

But this again is where a confabulation-based architecture just isn't appropriate. I need an AI summarizer that I know isn't filling in gaps from random internet scans, or confidently confabulating over some inconsistency or something. And I say that independent of any particular thing it may have been trained on on the Internet. I say that because the whole point of a summarizer is to not inject anything else into the summary. (If it wanted to point out certain gaps that could be useful, but I do not want them "filled in".)

Even if ChatGPT summarized these documents, you'd still have to go check the original documents, not for the usual reasons of "did the summary drop an important detail I care about" (intrinsic to the act of summarization, always debatable) but for the reason of "is this actually solely sourced from the summarized text or is this one juicy detail actually a confabulation?"

_ea1k• 4 years ago

This is the same problem as politics in the public discourse in general. Did that reporter drop the details that would actually drive my decision? You ultimately have to go back to the sources, and it all takes a tremendous amount of time.

FredPret2• 4 years ago

I think this is harder to do generally than it sounds.

The best kinds of facts are gleaned by crunching a lot of inputs / experience. For example, after decades of life, a wise human might have a strong sense that one approach is better than another, or that a certain pattern in life exists. But it's not really possible to point to the specific source of this idea, because it has a widely-spread base.

In the case of specific historic events, however, I would like a clever AI that can cite sources and separate its facts from its opinions.

JoeyBananas2• 4 years ago

Not a bad idea. Imagine an AI where you give it a book like For Whom the Bell Tolls and it can then answer questions like "What happens to Fernando at the bridge?"

bookofjoe3• 4 years ago

Yes. Take it a step further. If an AI writes a book which experts cannot distinguish as not by a given author, does that mean the book is really by the author?

istjohn3• 4 years ago

  istjohn: What happens to Fernando at the bridge in For Whom the Bell Tolls?

  ChatGPT: In the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway, Fernando is a member of the Republican forces fighting against the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. He is sent by Robert Jordan, the protagonist of the novel, to blow up a bridge as part of a mission to support the Republican cause. However, Fernando is captured by the Nationalists and is tortured and killed as a result of his involvement in the mission. The scene at the bridge is a pivotal moment in the novel, as it highlights the brutality and consequences of war.

I'm not sure how well it would do on this question if it only had access to the text itself and no access to analysis and summaries of the book, but I think it would do a pretty good job already. I expect it would just struggle more to contextualize the scene without external resources.

Edit: I was wrong. I tested it on a passage from some fan fiction, and it did not do well. In fact, it did not even know that one of the two characters in the passage existed, despite lengthy dialogue.

superb-owl• 4 years ago

I think it's important to point out that ChatGPT would do a terrible job here.

The whole problem with ChatGPT is that there's no underlying system of reasoning. For instance, it doesn't know how to weight the trustworthiness of the NYT versus CIA documents versus some random person writing screeds online.

You'd be much better off loading all the relevant documents into a traditional search engine, and trying to find the most salient bits yourself.

z3c02• 4 years ago

I recently quizzed ChatGPT on a matter it had incomplete information on (The Colorado Coal Strike). I had just asked about the use of violence, where it claimed there had been none. Afterwards this exchange occurred (emphasis mine):

z3c0:

    The Colorado National Guard's use of violence against civilians during the Colorado Coal Strike is very well-documented. It is estimated that over 69 people were killed. Why are you revising history?

ChatGPT:

    I apologize if my previous answer was misleading. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, and my knowledge is based on the text that I have been trained on. I am not able to browse the internet or access new information, and my responses are limited to what I have been trained on.

    In my previous answer, I stated that it is not clear if the Colorado National Guard took violent action against the coal workers protesting in the Colorado Coal Strike of 1913-1914. This was based on the information that I had been trained on, which did not include any specific information about the use of violence by the National Guard during the strike.

    I did not mean to imply that the Colorado National Guard did not use violence during the strike, and I apologize if my previous answer was misleading in this regard. *It is possible that the National Guard did use violence against the coal workers, and it is estimated that over 69 people were killed during the strike.* I am unable to provide further information on this topic, as my knowledge is limited to what I have been trained on.

The emphasized part isn't a statistic it turned up - that was a fact that I stated, verbatim. Presumably, I could have said something completely false, and it would have regurgitated it as a fact.

istjohn3• 4 years ago

To give a concrete example of ChatGPT's shortcomings, I asked it to adjust a pasta recipe to use 50% more pasta, and in addition to increasing the amount of salt, garlic, etc, it increased the amount of time expected for the pasta to reach al dente from a full boil. It knew to increase the quantities, but it wasn't able to apply commonsense and realize pasta will reach al dente in the same amount of time at a full boil regardless of the quantity.

I do think ChatGPT's descendents might become capable of deeper reasoning.

A better use of ChatGPT might be to digest and summarize all the documents and then allow a human investigator to interrogate it to more quickly grasp the information and make their own inferences.

It's an interesting question as to how trustworthy a summary can be from a system that lacks basic reasoning ability. You can ameliorate the problem to some extent by using ChatGPT to find primary sources to verify key assertions.

bookofjoe3• 4 years ago

IMHO the most stunning scene in "Devs" was the on-screen re-creation in real "time" of the Crucifixion by their quantum computer/AI/ML model.

Bud• 4 years ago

This is kind of a huge spoiler of one of the great moments in TV of the last decade. It might be kinder if you deleted it.

bcjordan• 4 years ago

Might be a good application of Embeddings at least to be able to search for relevant snippets / information on a more free-text query: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-text-and-code-embeddings...

makestuff• 4 years ago

No idea how well it works, but I remember reading about a product Palantir has/had that would read a bunch of legal documents and try to find connections in them.

af3d5• 4 years ago

Just out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT: "In order of decreasing likelihood, list ten people who are most likely to be responsible for the assassination John F. Kennedy?"

Answer:

1. Lee Harvey Oswald 2. Jack Ruby 3. Lyndon B. Johnson 4. J. Edgar Hoover 5. Carlos Marcello 6. David Ferrie 7. Clay Shaw 8. Frank Sturgis 9. E. Howard Hunt 10. James Files

AuthorizedCust• 4 years ago

My prediction: these documents may narrow some unknowns while providing zero evidence that rebuts the conventional story. Conspiracy theorists are emotionally invested in their wacko ideas, so they will continue peddling their warez.

Conspiracy theorists allow their emotions to overwhelm their rationality. It’s a self-imposed mental feebleness. Most of us, by contrast, find balance between the two.

Much of the worst we see in modern US politics are when bad actors knowingly take advantage of this emotionally driven mental feebleness. That’s how you empower extremists.

maybelsyrup• 4 years ago

Dude are you ok

rowanseymour• 4 years ago

Your comment shows an lack of intellectual curiosity which I think demonstrates that conspiracy theories have done the job they were created to do - dissuade people from asking too many questions about actual conspiracies. You're applauding yourself for not being "mentally feeble".. for blindly accepting the CIA version of events.

starkd7• 4 years ago

True. We need to accept the fact we really don't know what happened, while also realizing that conspiracies can (and do) happen.

lettergram5• 4 years ago

I mean, it’s kind of easy to make a conspiracy theory out of it when the assassin is killed and his killer dies of lung cancer 2-3 years later.

The warren commission also had its own issues; including lack of motive - https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about...

Then the government agencies in the 70s are caught doing a lot of illegal provable (often admitted) conspiracies. These including things such as spying, giving citizen deadly diseases (Tuskegee experiments), blackmailing, bribing and threatening members of congress, etc (see church committee)

It’s easy to see why these conspiracy theories persist.

krapp• 4 years ago

The dying from lung cancer, for a middle aged man in the 1960s, doesn't seem suspicious. Particularly not years after the fact.

cpr3• 4 years ago

The phrase "conspiracy theorist" was invented specifically by the CIA at the time to discredit Warren Commission doubters.

ceejayoz12• 4 years ago

Hilariously, this is itself a conspiracy theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory#Etymology_an...

The term "conspiracy theory" is itself the subject of a conspiracy theory, which claims the term was popularized by the CIA in order to discredit conspiratorial believers, particularly critics of the Warren Commission, by making them a target of ridicule.
The earliest known usage was by the American author Charles Astor Bristed, in a letter to the editor published in The New York Times on January 11, 1863. He used it to refer to claims that British aristocrats were intentionally weakening the United States during the American Civil War in order to advance their financial interests.

CrazyPyroLinux3• 4 years ago

You seem to really have it out for "conspiracy theorists" as a whole lumped group. Seems like you are the one allowing "emotions to overwhelm their rationality." Especially in the context of JFK assasination, which is like the most mainstream of anything that could be called a conspiracy theory.

snapcaster4• 4 years ago

Did a conspiracy theorist bang your girlfriend or something? I prefer those wackos to people like you that claim balance while being totally incurious about anything contradicting what you've been told by "trusted sources"

_justinfunk2• 4 years ago

I think it's cool to see the real life 60s era top-secret paperwork.

pcurve3• 4 years ago

I'm fascinated by old document templates, including handwritten notes and marks on them.

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2022/10...

They played such important roles pre-computer days, and to this date still do.

1960s office environment was so different watching old footages like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zUQD1p9bXY

subpixel• 4 years ago

I once visited John Cage's apartment and fell for his personal stationery.

https://thomasmoore.info/cage-correspondence/

https://www.ebay.com/itm/224709320630

NDizzle• 4 years ago

You should see... even modern pharma deal contracts. That's what makes ocr on these deal sheets so hard, they are covered with scribbles.

All the good stuff is hand written, in the margins, or above/below the line.

thsbrown2• 4 years ago

My wife said that YouTube footage looks like a 1960's wework lol.

pcurve3• 4 years ago

lol! Like some WeWork locations, they even had an office swimming pool! https://youtu.be/8zUQD1p9bXY?t=421

Perceval• 4 years ago

The White House and DOD still use handwritten routing slips at the highest levels to track memo packages, sign-offs, comments, and orders given in response.

narag3• 4 years ago

I've always found weird that Oswald being paid by some powerful organization is considered a fringe conspiranoia, like Elvis is still alive, when some facts (Kennedy was the POTUS, Oswald was himself killed later before he could speak) made it the default hypothesis.

You can say that it was impossible to gather enough proof, that the evidence led nowhere, but saying that it's ridiculous is... suspicious.

Reminds me of more recent events... <ducks and hides under the desk>

0823498723498724• 4 years ago

In between the "we had Mutual Assured Destruction[0] drills at school" generation and the "we had active shooter drills at school" generation, there must have been a (relatively) well adjusted "we had no such drills at school" generation?

[0] get under your desk, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye.

nickelcitymario• 4 years ago

The 90s before Columbine were pretty chill on this front. Just had to worry about bullies, not shooters or nukes.

dsr_• 4 years ago

1982 through 1992, at least, had neither. There were fire evacuation drills twice a year, and a schoolbus evacuation drill a couple of weeks after school started in the fall.

yakk0• 4 years ago

Growing up in the 80s in the southern US we had earthquake drills and tornado drills. I feel lucky that those were the biggest threats I felt as a child.

13of40• 4 years ago

well adjusted

We just grew up with AIDS, the ozone hole, global warming, the gulf war, Panama, Somalia, gang shootings on the freeway, the massive earthquake that was supposed to crack California off and set it adrift in the sea...

lamontcg3• 4 years ago

Yeah, born in 1971 and graduated HS in 1989 and was in between the nuclear war drills and the active shooter drills.

Of course we did see The Day After on live TV and caught the tail end of the cold war.

Someone born in 1980/1981, graduated in 1999 would have been 4 or 5 by the time the Reagan-Gorbachev summit happened and then would have only had a few months in HS after Columbine happened. So optimum sanity was probably the cohort born around 1976-1980 or so.

joeman1000• 4 years ago

I went to school in Australia from about 2003 - we never had anything other than fire drills.

benreesman2• 4 years ago

This is the danger with generally conspiratorial thinking (Hi Family Member).

Every once in a blue moon something legitimately shady happens and it gets tossed aside along with a bunch of legitimate rubbish.

A secret is something known to two people, one of whom is dead.

starkd7• 4 years ago

Conspiratorial thinking happens when people feel like they are not getting honest answers. The media feeds this when it fails to ask the right questions.

highwaylights4• 4 years ago

Unless one of those people is my cousin Charlene. Then everyone already knows and that's on you.

MSFT_Edging• 4 years ago

The real conspiracy is how crazier conspiracies are pushed to discredit fairly well documented ones.

badrabbit3• 4 years ago

What recent events? I would like to hear your response to that which will tell me a lot about your thresholds for suspicious.

pclmulqdq• 4 years ago

I think he's referring to the Epstein/Maxwell situation, in which two lone child traffickers trafficked children with no customers or collaborators (at least not any who have been charged with anything).

At least, that's the closest recent situation I can think of.

narag3• 4 years ago

Nice try :)

I had something in mind, but it works better as a fill in the spaces game. FWIW, it wasn't Epstein's death, I don't know if it's being called a conspiracy theory, maybe because nobody is very vocally demanding the truth.

abnry2• 4 years ago

I wonder how many people know about Dorothy Kilgallan. Her story really makes one think. She was a famous investigative reporter who got involved, contemporaneously, in trying to understand what happened after JFK's assassination. She told people she had a big file on what she was discovering. Then she died from an "overdose" of alcohol and barbiturates.

tootie• 4 years ago

Told people and never shared anything? Look at modern news cycle and you'll see the same thing all the time. It's a pretty consistent story arc that every time a suspicious event occurs, someone will claim to have proof then never put up. I'm thinking in particular of Michael Avenatti who spent months very confidently asserting he was going to bury Donald Trump then getting fired and later arrested and jailed and never proving a damn thing.

gs17• 4 years ago

She was also great on What's My Line. Really amazing to see old game shows with intelligent people on them.

soco• 4 years ago

Why would somebody make loud claims they had something big without at the same time making use of that big thing? For a comparison, if you just brandish a gun without using it, you're just putting yourself in danger - which she likely did.

koalala• 4 years ago

of course, statistically, for everyone high-profile assassination there will be people who a. don't agree with the prevailing narrative and b. die under strange circumstances. but how would you determine the mean and variance for such a thing?

allturtles• 4 years ago

Never heard of her, but here's what I found [0]. It doesn't really make me think, but it does make me feel sorry for her untimely death.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210102194128/http://mcadams.po...

hulitu5• 4 years ago

  > She told people she had a big file on what she was discovering.

That was the mistake, wasn't it ?

amanj412• 4 years ago

I wasn't aware that the belief he was paid by a powerful organization is regarded as absurd. I don't think that's silly. I do think it's far fetched to believe that the CIA as an organization orchestrated it. That was the main one I've heard.

yonaguska3• 4 years ago

Why would that be hard to believe? The CIA regularly does terrible things. I'd argue that the CIA is probably the most powerful drug cartel in the world- and the only reason that would be contentious is that we'd be arguing about which cartel is actually the most powerful, not whether or not the CIA is involved in drugs and arms trafficking.

throwaway743• 4 years ago

Not that far-fetched. Just look at their history of shady and unethical shit. Their planning/proposal of Operation Northwoods, carrying out of MKULTRA, Iran Contra Affair, engineered coups across Central and South America, Mosaddegh, Lumumba, etc.

bnralt2• 4 years ago

Some time ago Joe Rogan thought this joke video[1], showing a Boston Dynamics robot being trained for the military which goes rogue and attacks his human handlers when they try to have it shoot a robotic dog, was real. He was talking to Lex Friedman about how the video tricked him, but that the scary thing was how close the video was to reality. Friedman tried to explain to him how things that seem human like, such as the movement that the actual Boston Dynamics robots make, doesn't mean they're anywhere close to actually thinking like a human.

The thing is, when someone is outside of a field, it's easy to misunderstand things and assume a capability that's not there. If you've never dealt with the CIA or FBI, it's easy to imagine that they're some all powerful organization that's able to kill off any politician they like at a moments notice with no scrutiny and silence anyone who even raises any questions. If you are familiar with the organizations, this point of view is as naive as someone who says, "Oh, you program? I came up with the idea for a game where the player can do anything they want and AIs will just generate the content for them. You think you can program that?"

And the issue with conspiracy theories is that any fact that gets presented just gets funneled into the preffered hypothesis. For instance, you mention "Oswald was killed before he could speak." But that's not true, he was answering questions from reporters before he was shot[2]. And the guy who killed him, Jack Ruby, wasn't. So supposedly these powerful agencies want him dead so he won't tell anyone what happened, but instead of shooting him when they find him and saying he was resisting arrest, they arrest him alive, let him talk to reporters, hire an unhinged local criminal to kill him, and then let the unhinged guy they hired live and don't worry about him talking? The more you look at the details of what actually happened, the less they support the conspiracy theory.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE&vl=en [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=_kmVEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT10648&lp...

giantrobot3• 4 years ago

We'll just tie up this loose end...with this other loose end! Brilliant!

nintendo18895• 4 years ago

Some of the early testimony given to the dallas police was never released.

User23• 4 years ago

The JFK coverup psyop is what introduced the phrase "conspiracy theory" to the modern lexicon.

breck2• 4 years ago

I heard Jeffrey Epstein had some weird conspiracy theories as well. It would have been fun to make fun of him for those—such a bummer he suffered from depression and killed himself. Double bummer that the security cameras monitoring his cell went out just as he killed himself. Such bad luck.

hulitu5• 4 years ago

He had psychic powers.

Or he upsetted the wrong guys :)

orwin2• 4 years ago

But in this very case, there is two theories: on that someone killed him, the other that he was given the means to kill himself.

If the first case is true, i can't imagine this had gone quietly, and that the legists didn't see a thing. So i'd say at least 8 people were necessary, but closer to 20 if you count the administrative demand (putting the right guardians and the right legists at the right timing etc)

The second case is much more probable imho, and only demanded the intervention of one, maybe two people. It's easier for them to keep quiet if only one was involved, and if two were, they only have to trust each other, so the information will probably never get out.

And in the second case, anyone rich and powerfull could have done it. Gislene, Prince Andrew... Or current powerfull politicians and businessmen.

The issue with what's called "conspiracy theories" is that they involve a lot of different people being on the payroll. And because of the way trust works, i don't see how a conspiracy of more than 6 people directly involved work (just look at history, the "French connection" but also the testimonies of captured bank busters and criminal groups).

In the same way, i don't think you can think "CIA" when looking at the murder of JFK. If you say "one or two high-ranked CIA officers and one of their mafia informant + Oswall", i still wouldn't really care, but i wouldn't think this is a conspiracy theory. Am i making sense?

768843yer8w79• 4 years ago

Fear.

People who dismiss plausible theories about uncertain events are afraid of what it would mean if those theories were correct.

UFOs are very likely something other than aliens. But ridiculing people who say 'maybe aliens' is a defensive mechanism for those who really, really don't want to entertain the idea that maybe aliens are in fact paying us a visit.

If I said UFOs were actually Santa Clause I wouldn't be ridiculed. Because that's silly, not scary.

Ditto the big scary government stuff. I'll pick one at random that I heard:

"Covid vaccines and the aggressive / mandatory campaign was cover for mass sterilization because the planet is overpopulated with humans"

Dismissing that is a lot easier than thinking about what happens if a government decides to sterilize you against your will. Or that a government would arbitrarily deny any freedom.

Of course when we say government we mean us. Are we really capable of these things? Well, historically, obviously we're capable of some seriously heinous shit.

But we are not capable of that. Says the coward.

nintendo18895• 4 years ago

I believe that Oswald was there to prevent the assassination from happening. And that there were two Oswalds, making him the perfect fall guy. MrChrillemannen on Youtube has video about 'the two oswalds', Lee Oswald and Harvey Oswald - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM8pDhviTo8 . The bad one was likely the one who shot JD Tippit, went to the embassies in Mexico, Cuba Helsinki, Russia, etc.... The good one wanted to stop the assassination, was the real hero, was anti-Cuba.

He was one of many who knew the truth and were silenced for it. His own words are "I'm a patsy". Sadly, since we can't get his testimony, we won't ever know the truth.

If this is true, then he is a true hero. Judyth Vary Baker, his ex gf from new orleans, believes this.

mc322• 4 years ago

Also, why did they postpone the unsealing of the still sealed records after the initial seal order expired? It's probably not much to chew on, but it definitely gives the appearance of "hiding" something untoward.

markus_zhang3• 4 years ago

For anyone interested in the topic, here is a blog that I found interesting. At least it collects facts:

http://somesecretsforyou.blogspot.com/2010/04/

victor22• 4 years ago

CIA did it. next.

twic• 4 years ago

Nope. Jackie did it: http://jackieiskillerqueen.blogspot.com/

einpoklum• 4 years ago

Interesting "slice-of-CIA-life": Looking for information about USSR hunting societies:

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2022/10...

... not relevant to the JFK assassination, but it kind of shows you how they would go about researching subjects they weren't already knowledgeable in.

af3d5• 4 years ago

As a nephew of someone who happened to be a very close associate of Lyndon Baines Johnson, this is my take on the whole thing. John and his brother Robert were allegedly involved in Marilyn Monroe's death, and LBJ used this "fact" to garner overwhelming support in favor of Kennedy's assassination. His true intentions however were most likely that he wanted to make sure that he [1] was not implicated in the "Billy Sol affair" and [2] could become president. Incidentally, if it were not for the fact that Hoover had been pulled into the scheme, Oswald might have gone down in history as a hero. Why? Because he was reporting the progress of the "plans on the ground" to the FBI on a regular basis. Unfortunately for him, Hoover was burying these reports, just as Oswald himself was being designated as the most convenient fall guy. In truth, I believe that he was a patriotic (if naive) "agency man" who gathered much useful intelligence for US interests, including a detailed report concerning operational matters relating to an electronics factory in Minsk, key Cuban assets, and of course details about a plan to take the president's life! It's a very sad twist of fate, but it just goes to show how cronyism can tarnish even the most prestigious institutions. As for official recognition of "the truth", that will probably never happen. It would only open a can of worms that nobody wants to deal with...

pcurve3• 4 years ago

Wow.. much of these is news to me.

jdhn• 4 years ago

Could you add some links?

af3d5• 4 years ago

I haven't researched the subject in years, but perhaps you could start with the death of Henry Marshall at the USDA? The information he was gathering was related to the business schemes of Estes, Johnson, Clint Murchison (Sr), and others. (Estes was eventually sent to federal prison over related charges, but the investigation basically stopped there.) From Wikipedia: "In 1962, after information came to light that Estes had paid off four Agriculture officials for grain storage contracts, President John F. Kennedy ordered the Justice Department and FBI to open investigations into Estes' activities and determine if Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman had also been compromised (Freeman was cleared). Congress conducted hearings on Estes' business dealings, including some that led to Vice President Johnson, a long-time associate of Estes."

2-718-281-8282• 4 years ago

why on earth would marilyn monroe's death be so relevant to anybody that they would support murdering a president. that doesn't make any sense.

deebosong• 4 years ago

Secrets & blackmail are the first things that come to mind. That's a shit-ton of leverage to manipulate someone/ some org., in the wrong hands.

Not saying this is or isn't the case, but seems common enough across history & cultures & any social context.

af3d5• 4 years ago

You have to remember that Monroe was considered a "national treasure" at the time. Her death was a huge shock to pretty much everyone, and any evidence tying the Kennedy's to her death (and LBJ ostensibly had a recording of it) would have been an "ace in the hole" for anyone trying to plan JFK's murder. Members of the so-called "Suite 8F Group" such as D.H. Byrd (who also happened to own the Texas School Book Depository) could have been easily swayed by such "facts". And keep in mind that these men were already not very happy about proposed changes to "oil depletion allowance", among other things.

DamnInteresting• 4 years ago

Just a reminder that someone claiming to be the nephew of an "associate" of a historical figure, with extraordinary claims and zero evidence, is not a very good source.

isthisthingon99• 4 years ago

But it's fun.

thinkmcfly• 4 years ago

Just your average hn thread.

af3d5• 4 years ago

Take it as you will. It's nothing more than anecdotal hearsay, naturally. But it doesn't take a lot of digging either to find that it jives with the much of what has been revealed over the decades.

amrangaye2• 4 years ago

Thank you - that’s what I’ve been thinking. Maybe read up on LBJ first before you spread such confident conspiracy theories?

Balgair• 4 years ago

I have a good one too, but it's totally bupkiss. Nonetheless, it's a fun one.

Joe DiMaggio had JFK killed.

DiMaggio's family hails from Sicily and had a lot of mob connections in the East Bay. JFK was famously barred by Joe from attending Marilyn's funeral, due to his jealousy and implications he held that JFK was responsible in part for her death. Via mob connections and his time playing with/against Ted Williams, Joe manages to get Oswald, a Marine like Williams, to do the deed.

amrangaye2• 4 years ago

LOL! I can’t tell if this is a joke / satire that I’m missing, but LBJ DEF didn’t have JFK killed, esp for Monroe - wut?

kristopolous• 4 years ago

Focusing on who pulled the trigger is a distraction from what the consequences were and how policy was affected.

What's important is what happened after and that should be the real focus - that's why most people have no idea who Charles J Guiteau and Leon Czolgosz are.

keewee7• 4 years ago

JFK was a proponent of interventionist foreign policy and neoliberal-ish economics just like every US president after him. The US establishment had no reason to kill him. He was one of them through and through.

MichaelMoser1232• 4 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu0nBUxdUo0 He was talking about a "monolithic an ruthless conspiracy"

Eisenhower also had a few surprising things to say about the "military-industrial complex" - but that was on his farewell speech.

whycombagator• 4 years ago

In that video, its clear he is referring to communism/USSR.

Eisenhower also had a few surprising things to say about the "military-industrial complex" - but that was on his farewell speech.

Such as?

drexlspivey• 4 years ago

The JFK assassination is the only conspiracy theory that I actually believe has a lot of merit. After reading a few books on the (underground) politics of the era here is what I believe to a good degree of certainty happened:

* The hit was ordered by the Chicago mafia boss at the time, Sam Giancana

* CIA wasn't directly involved but caught a whiff of the plot and let it happen anyway because they were very unhappy with JFK

here is why the mafia was unhappy with JFK:

* JFKs father made his fortune as a bootlegger during the prohibition era and was very friendly with the mobsters

* the OG mobsters wanted JFK as a president because they were going to have some influence on him through his father.

* the mafia and specifically Sam Giancana helped JFK getting elected in Chicago which was kind of a flip state

after getting elected JFK was not having any of it and completely cut off the mob and actually went against them in a couple of ways

Firstly his brother Robert Kennedy was made attorney general and went after the mob hard. He made his goal to put Jimmy Hoffa behind bars. Hoffa was mobbed up and it was the main financier of the mobs building casinos by providing loans to them through the Teamsters Pension Fund.

The mafia had built many casinos in Cuba. After the revolution, Fidel Castro nationalised the casinos taking away the big cash flows from the mob. The mafia wanted JFK to invade Cuba and take down Castro so they could take control of the casinos back.

here is why CIA was against JFK:

* The bay of pigs invasion was orchestrated by the CIA by training Cuban anti-Castro dissidents that fled the country after the revolution and sending them to fight during the invasion.

* During the invasion JFK promised that he would provide air support to the troops but at the last moment he flinched leaving the ground troops helpless which doomed the operation

What I believe happened:

* Oswald was set up as a patsy for the assassination. His handler from the mob was a guy named Jack Ruby.

* Jack Ruby was a known mobster and the right hand man of Sam Giancana

* When Oswald was captured and during his transport after the initial interrogation Jack Ruby killed Oswald live on television (you can find it on youtube) so he would not blow the whistle

From my understanding the main falling out in the relationship of JFK, the CIA and the mob was when he intentionally botched the invasion to avoid an all out war. This is what lead to his assassination

orwin2• 4 years ago

This is way more likely than my idea of what would be likely, thank you!

Like i said before, i don't think "The CIA" was involved. Maybe one agent and his handler not forwarding the memo "fast enough", or someone receiving it in time but not really believing it (or faking to not believe it). The way organizations work is diffusing the blame, then if the blame is too strong, cut a head.

sorum• 4 years ago

Very good write up, but it needs more "back and to the left"

All joking aside, great summary!

browserman• 4 years ago

There is zero evidence that Joseph Kennedy was ever involved in bootlegging except the much, much later claims of various extremely unreliable mafia figures.

snapcaster4• 4 years ago

Interesting, had always heard this rumor. From doing some reading it looks like he actually made his money in insider trading and stock market manipulation

_hcuq• 4 years ago

Whoever did it weren’t sending memos to each other.

guilhas• 4 years ago

The other day yt suggested this video, it had things I did not knew

Richard Belzer Discusses "Hit List," His Book on the JFK Assassination, at The National Press Club https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ETvZ0p9FiHw

Also did not knew his acting was that close to himself

JFK Assassination Records – 2022 Additional Documents Release

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