Give Us Just a Little More Time!
Doesn’t this 11th hour delaying tactic tell us everything we really need to know about the JFK assassination?
This release date was established decades ago. It’s a joke that someone needs ‘just a little more time’ when they’ve already had 25 years not to mention all the years before that. Here’s the punchline: Lee Harvey Oswald was doing uncover work for multiple organizations in the US federal government, including Hoover’s FBI, the ATF and G2, as a contractor for Guy Bannister’s private agency. The Mexico City trip featured in the current set of records touches on one or more of those gigs.
Whether Oswald killed JFK or not (I don’t think he did), on his own or assisted (I think he was the designated fall guy), none of the groups he did off-the-record work for in the past want to be seen as having any ties to him at all ever.
You know what they always say about surveillance and erosion of our personal privacy — if you haven’t done anything wrong, what do you have to be worried about? Well, the thing is, like me, and possibly you — the FBI, ATF and G2 (Army Intelligence) and all their buddies do many things wrong and quite frequently. Stuff they do that is ‘extra-legal’ or ‘extra-constitutional’ isn’t some exception to operating norms. It is part of the norm.
As you are reading this, employees of the US government, direct contractors for the US government, as well groups and networks receiving substantial support from the US government are doing something wrong. They’re doing something explicitly illegal. Or they’re funding something with illegal drug money. Or they’re supposed to report publicly about something and they’re not. They’re doing plenty of legal things too. Sometimes, but not always, doing things legally is the default option. But a lot of the time, legal ways don’t work, or they take too long. So representatives of the US government (and the Russian government, and the Chinese government, and the British government and every government that can afford to) use illegal methods as part of standard operating procedures.
There are no boundaries when you go illegal. Illegal includes everything from lying to killing, big lies and lots of people if needed. I think we all know this at some level. We try to imagine that other governments are worse with their illegal stuff than ours, or that we have more noble motives.
What we need to understand now more than ever is not the details supposedly revealed in redacted documents — it doesn’t matter who Lee Harvey Oswald sat next to on his bus ride to Mexico City and what he ate for a snack on the way — what matters is that public documents, public behaviors, and public narratives woven by controlled media are only part of the overall dynamic that drives events. Part of the reason the spectacle is so confusing is that we are trying to make sense of it with important missing characters and plot lines — the stuff that isn’t talked about, usually.
I saw a frame-by-frame analysis of the Zapruder film in 1967 when Warren Commission critiques were just getting warmed up. I read more and thought about it and realized that our government, any government, will always have to prioritize suppression over investigation, because of what Cannot Be Known. In the case of JFK’s assassination, there is still in 2017, to some powerful players in the US government network, much that Cannot Be Known. The stock answer is, “We’re protecting US security interests, which means protecting You, so STFU.” They are protecting their own ass, protecting the public from the truthful range of activities and operations undertaken every day of the week and twice on Sunday by individuals acting under the banner of the United States government.
We don’t know exactly what these powerful players are still holding back. It might be just that they interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald once, or it might be that their guys shot the President, or that they had nothing to do with it but were part of covering up evidence — we can’t know any of that. No one can know for sure if Lee Harvey Oswald even pulled a trigger that day or not. I have an informed opinion and that has to be enough for me.
It is. I don’t need certainty about the details. In fact, the most important truths aren’t in the details — they’re in the larger picture of how governments behave. The US government can support unreported/off-the-records/”illegal” operations at a scale maybe unprecedented in human history because of its (current level of) wealth in a time of high global connectivity. But any student of history will tell you there is nothing unique about the difference between the story for public consumption and how things really get done in the USA today.
I think that means citizens tend to be enablers. From the citizens of Athens and Rome to the citizens of New York and LA. In return for some apparent stability for the pursuit of happiness, we agree to pretend not to know about what governments really do and what they could even do to Me, but probably won’t if I don’t stick my neck out too far.
