Recently the House Oversight and Government Reform committee's task force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held a hearing on the JFK files. It included the deeply weird claim by one member of the panel, testifying that the man arrested for the murder of President John F. Kennedy “might have fired a gun” that day in Dallas, but was absolutely “not the intellectual author” of the murder.
After plenty of thinking, I must admit: I have no idea what that means either.
I am not alone. JFK anti-conspiracy nation was appalled.
“My expectations were low going in and it was still worse than I expected,” said Gerald Posner in an interview. Posner is the author of “Case Closed,” the bestselling book on the assassination. The one that lays out the-beyond-convincing case that Lee Harvey Oswald, arrested 80 minutes after the assassination — after murdering a Dallas police officer — is irrefutably much more than just “the intellectual author” of the assassination.
He is the lone shooter of the president, proven by the evidence, melded with a solid understanding of his biography, confirmed by multiple investigations as well as by decades of hard work by individual researchers unimpressed by tales of invisible additional shooters; or of somehow popular explanations such as that either of two Secret Service agents in the motorcade shot JFK. (Really. This scenario is huge on social media.)
The reason the Oswald-is-guilty case was not made at the hearing is because no one present was interested in making it. Nobody at the witness table and nobody among their questioners, members of the subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who announced before the hearing that she had decided that multiple shooters were involved, and that a news film taken moments after the shooting had been hidden from the country by NBC.
It had not, and was barely referenced in the hearing. Several leading anti-conspiracy critics said they approached the subcommittee in advance of the hearing seeking a seat at that table of testifiers, but were ignored.
“We are not angry, but we are disappointed,” said Fred Litwin, author, podcaster and constant updater of his essential website, which debunks claim after ridiculous claim from JFK conspiracists. “Congresswoman Luna does not seem to have a firm grasp of the case, and I worry that she could end up being fooled by theories which are ridiculous.”
One solution: Invite to testify next time experts with a broader range of views. And not just on who the killer is, but on what arcane documents mean and do not mean. Luna announced late last week she would in fact host another hearing on JFK issues.
Posner, Litwin, W. Tracey Parnell and other leading anti-JFK-conspiracy critics were left to provide fast and informative reactions after the made-for-TV event. The non-revelations piled up: The CIA reading Oswald’s mail — actually only one letter, from Oswald’s mother, asking him to write to her ...
