No Transparency, No Accountability
JFK: No Transparency, No Accountability
It was 60 years ago yesterday that the Warren Commission delivered its final report on the JFK assassination to President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Chief Justice Earl Warren delivers the 888-page document to LBJ. The guy in the bow tie staring off in the distance is Allen Dulles, the CIA director JFK fired.
JFK’s murder on Nov. 22, 1963 marked the moment when Americans’ trust in “the system” first began to erode — when the heady post-WWII sense that life would keep getting better and better took its first major blow.
“The unresolved major event is largely a modern phenomenon that coincides with the collapse of America's constitutional government and the decline of its culture,” wrote the veteran Washington journalist Sam Smith more than a decade ago.
“Beginning with the Kennedy assassination, the number of inadequately explained major events has been mounting steadily, and with them a steady decline in the trust between the people and their government.”
Here’s the thing: You can believe the official story as put out by the Warren Commission — JFK was done in by a “lone nut” named Lee Harvey Oswald — and still find cause for outrage.
In 1992, Congress passed and President George H.W. Bush signed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.
The law mandated that absent specific presidential action, all records in the JFK Collection at the National Archives would be released no more than 25 years after the law’s enactment.
Thus there was a hard deadline of Oct. 26, 2017.
A few days beforehand, President Donald Trump promised full disclosure — kinda, sorta…
The deadline of the 26th came and went. The next day…
In the end, we got far, far less than that. Trump authorized the disclosure of 19,045 documents. But more than 15,000 still had portions redacted.
“Trump said that all the JFK files will be released, but the truth is that thousands of JFK files are still secret,” former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley told his old paper. “The CIA wants to keep this secret forever. It’s a very clear statement of intent.”
For over 20 years, Morley has fought the CIA for release of documents related to JFK’s murder — not to prove any pet theories about what “really” happened but because he believes you and I as American citizens deserve to know the whole truth, whatever it might be.
As badly as Trump caved to the deep state, President Joe Biden did worse: In 2023, “the CIA gained control of the historical record,” Morley wrote last year, again in the Post.
Late on a Friday night in June, Biden issued an executive order essentially nullifying the 1992 law. He signed off on an Orwellian-named “Transparency Plan” authored by the CIA.
At this time, the National Archives and Records administration says more than 3,000 assassination-related records remain redacted.
“As a result,” Morley writes, “the most important Kennedy files might never be seen, leaving unanswered the question of the exact nature of the agency’s interest in Lee Harvey Oswald.
“Was the CIA merely incompetent in dealing with the itinerant Marxist Marine, or did it use him for some still-classified purpose? Or is there another explanation for its unwillingness to share all it knows? The clandestine service is no longer under any obligation to answer such questions.”
We know Oswald was on the CIA’s radar as early as 1959. But why? We know the CIA station in Miami believed Oswald didn’t act alone. But who was the possible accomplice — or accomplices?
Maybe the answers are benign — but then why would the CIA wish to keep them secret?
Beyond Oswald, there are other essential documents the CIA is keeping under wraps.
Files remain redacted about Operation Northwoods — a false-flag scheme cooked up by the Pentagon to stage violent crimes around the country and blame them on Cuba. (JFK put the kibosh on those plans.)
Likewise, the agency can continue to suppress critical information about JFK’s plans to reorganize the CIA.
The plans were laid out in a June 1961 memo by Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, after the failure of the Bay of Pigs.
In the portions that are public, we learn of Schlesinger’s warning to the president that “the contemporary CIA possesses many of the characteristics of a state within a state.”
The memo runs to 15 pages. To this day, a section from pages 8-10 remains secret. Page 9 might be “the most important blank page remaining in the JFK files,” Morley writes on his Substack site.
What does the CIA not want us to know — 63 years after this memo was written?
What in the world does the CIA not want you to know after all this time?
Where’s the transparency? Where’s the accountability?
Again, you don’t have to believe any “conspiracy theories” about JFK to be appalled. You don’t have to believe Allen Dulles — the CIA director fired by JFK — engineered the assassination because he and his cronies feared that the president wanted to wind down the Cold War with the Soviet Union, ending the gravy train for the military-industrial complex.
No, the available facts alone are a devastating indictment of the system.
It is not a system worth preserving and it is not a system worth fighting for.
Epstein: No Conspiracy Theories, Just Outrage
You can draw a through line from JFK’s assassination to the death in custody of the financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Here too, you don’t have to believe any “conspiracy theories” surrounding Epstein. You don’t have to believe he was murdered in a federal lockup in New York. You don’t have to believe he was an Israeli spy, luring the rich and powerful to compromise themselves with underage girls.
You don’t have to believe any of it — and you can still find reason for outrage.
Consider the available facts in early August 2019: Epstein was potentially a witness to monstrous crimes by other people in high places. And he was already a known suicide risk.
After Epstein’s initial suicide attempt, Attorney General William Barr had one job — to make sure Epstein stayed alive.
The day after the news broke that Epstein was dead, I wrote that Barr should resign in disgrace. But he did not.
➢ And it wasn’t until 2022 that I learned about all the weirdness surrounding Barr’s father Donald, who was an officer in the OSS (the CIA’s predecessor)… and how Donald Barr hired a manifestly unqualified 21-year-old named Jeffrey Epstein to teach math at the prestigious Dalton School in New York. But again, none of that matters for our purposes today.
Meanwhile, Epstein is dead, “but the power structure that enabled him endures,” wrote the investigative journalist Vicky Ward in 2022.
It was Ward who published the first major profile of Epstein in 2003, for Vanity Fair. As we’ve recounted in the past, Ward’s piece cast doubt on how he acquired his wealth: Literally no one she interviewed believed Epstein could support his lavish lifestyle simply by managing the money of billionaires and taking a commission.
But there was a crucial section that was cut from Ward’s story after Epstein paid a call on Vanity Fair’s legendary editor Graydon Carter — the part about two young women, sisters, who went on the record to claim Epstein assaulted them. At the time, one of them was underage.
To this day, Ward is “haunted” about the three-year gap between the time that part of her story was spiked in 2003… and the time the feds first started looking into Epstein in 2006.
In 2022, Epstein’s enabler Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years on charges she recruited and trafficked four teenage girls for Epstein.
And that’s it. Case closed. Literally no one else in financial, political or media circles is facing criminal charges in what was surely a massive ring of abuse whose victims numbered in the hundreds.
As Ward wrote archly at her Substack site, “Trafficking requires another person’s involvement: the person to whom the minor is trafficked.
“The wealthy gaggle of men who hung around Epstein — some even after he was a known sex offender — have just flitted back to their lives, no questions (as far as we know) asked by prosecutors.
“Just this weekend, I learned from someone whose anonymity I promised to protect that the same web continues apace. I am told that, during the Cannes Film Festival this year [2022], $10,000 in cash was exchanged in order for 20 models (of unknown ages) to be bussed from Milan to the French Riviera… It was this web that held up Epstein’s entire sex-trafficking enterprise.”
And what of the videos? “During my reporting on this case, I heard time and time again that Epstein recorded the powerful people who came into his orbit… What happened to that video footage remains one of the biggest questions of this case: Where is it?”
Look, you can believe Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. You can believe he came about his immense wealth through legitimate means.
But with no transparency and no accountability, the available facts alone are a devastating indictment of the system.
It is not a system worth preserving and it is not a system worth fighting for.
COVID: The Betrayal
Seven months after Epstein’s death came the swiftest and most extreme power grab Americans have ever experienced, apart from the Japanese-Americans herded into concentration camps in the 1940s.
I won’t recount the still-breathtaking events surrounding the advent of COVID lockdowns in March of 2020 — the sudden end to freedom of association, freedom of movement, freedom of commerce, freedom of worship — I did that last year.
Nor will I belabor the betrayal behind the COVID jabs. Suffice to say the claims that they would prevent infection and prevent transmission were already proven false by the time the Biden administration tried to impose its mandates in the fall of 2021.
Everything since — the injuries, the evidence that accumulated boosters weaken your immune system after only a few weeks — is superfluous for our purposes today.
“How screwed up is the U.S. right now?” wrote the independent journalist Matt Taibbi last year.
“The nation’s top medical official for years worked in public and private to stifle investigation of our worst health crisis, which increasingly looks like an unparalleled man-made catastrophe. He’s going to skate on it, because upper-class America is now so deep into mass mental illness that it’s more likely to make a sex symbol of corruption than punish it.
They unironically bought Anthony Fauci votive candles…
“We were propagandized to reject natural immunity, ignore obvious massive age-specific risk discrepancies and believe the health of the collective depended on mass acceptance of a vaccine that people like Fauci knew early on did not stop transmission or infection.
“The public was told anyway that the unvaccinated were killing Grandma and predictable rage and calls for brutal counter-measures, including jail, ensued.
“This was true factory-produced out-group hatred of the type found in every modern authoritarian movement, and journalists blew off the obvious warning signs and even participated themselves because Tony Fauci knew how to pull an aw, shucks face in split-screen with Alisyn Camerota.”
As I mentioned last year, even the mainstream is acknowledging that lockdowns were “a failure.”
But Fauci sailed off into the sunset of retirement, and Deborah Birx became a biotech CEO.
Meanwhile, you and I continue to live with the inflationary consequences of the lockdowns — consequences that Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell promised throughout 2021 would be “transitory.” For his manifest failure, Powell was rewarded in 2022 with a second term.
Across the board, no transparency and no accountability. The available facts are a devastating indictment of the system.
It is not a system worth preserving and it is not a system worth fighting for.
What’s Worth “Fighting for,” Anyway?
When I say “fighting for,” I’m not using a figure of speech.
“A majority of American adults would not be willing to serve in the military were the U.S. to enter into a major war,” according to Newsweek.
The poll is almost a year old, but presumably the numbers have changed little: “A poll by the research institute Echelon Insights of 1,029 likely voters, conducted between Oct. 23–26, found that 72% of those asked would not be willing to volunteer to serve in the armed forces were America to enter a major conflict, compared with 21% who would. The remainder were unsure. The poll was conducted after Hamas led an unprecedented militant attack on Israel on Oct. 7.”
As we mentioned on occasion last year, the military is coming up short in its recruitment goals. Young people aren’t interested. Veterans are discouraging their kids and grandkids from enlisting — and for many years that’s been the most reliable source of new recruits.
Conservative media latched onto the explanation that the Pentagon under Biden went “woke” with its social media outreach. And maybe there’s something to that.
But it’s more likely that Americans of all generations recognize “the collapse of America's constitutional government and the decline of its culture” that Sam Smith mentioned above — and the accumulation of “inadequately explained major events.”
Maybe they can’t articulate it in terms of JFK or Epstein — but they feel it on a subconscious level. And perhaps they can articulate it in terms of the lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. How many disillusioned vets of the Bush-Obama “forever wars” are telling their teenagers to learn a trade instead of following in their bootsteps?
Or maybe they can articulate it in terms of the COVID betrayal. Speaking of which, get this…
Meanwhile, soldiers who were forced to leave the service for refusing the jab got letters last year telling them they “may request a correction of their military records” — and that “individuals who desire to apply to return to service should contact their local Army, U.S. Army Reserve (USAR) or Army National Guard (ARNG) recruiter for more information.”
Yeah, good luck with that…
Promises, Promises
On the campaign trail this summer, Donald Trump promised to release “all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy” if he’s elected to another term.
He said that in a stump speech. Unfortunately no one in the media has seen fit to follow up with questions about why he didn’t do it when he previously held the office, as the law required.
Nor has a reporter asked him about the conversation he had with Judge Andrew Napolitano shortly before leaving office in 2021. As Napolitano recounts it…
I said, “You promised you would release the records of the JFK assassination.”
He said to me, “Judge, if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn't have released it either.”
And I said, “Who's they? And what did they show you?”
And then he said, “Judge, someday when we're on the phone” — and then he raised his voice — “and there aren't 15 people listening to the phone call” — back to a normal voice — “I'll tell you.”
You’d think that in light of the attempts on his own life this year, Trump has become determined to achieve full disclosure. Then again… maybe he’s even more intimidated now?
One thing is for certain: It was Mike Pompeo, CIA director in 2017, who prevailed upon Trump to withhold full release. Trump has routinely said Pompeo will get another top spot in his next administration.
As for Epstein, Trump makes no promises — not even a hollow one. As he told a Fox interviewer this summer, “You don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because there’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”
Meanwhile, the record is indisputable: Lockdown occurred on his watch and with his assent. He owns it.
I originally penned many of these thoughts to coincide with the 60th anniversary of JFK’s murder last year. It was the day before Thanksgiving.
I concluded thus…
I imagine in the next 24 hours we’ll be hearing politicians and media figures telling us to be thankful we live in — a free country?
Well, they probably won’t be mentioning it in the same breath as JFK.
But then, that’s just a vivid reminder to be thankful for what matters most — family, home, neighborhood, community. The things that are nearest and dearest. The things that are faraway from Washington, D.C., and other power centers — where they’re indifferent to you at best and hostile at worst.
That’s what’s worth preserving. And worth fighting for.
P.S. Today’s edition is coming your way early because much of the Paradigm team is gathered at the Four Seasons Baltimore for the “America’s Next Move” summit featuring James Altucher.
Everything that’s in James’ wheelhouse — AI, crypto, small caps — will be up for discussion. Several of James’ trusted analysts, including Ray Blanco and Zach Scheidt, will speak as well. Two panel discussions are on the agenda: One will take on “the next Magnificent 7” and another is devoted to the election’s impact on digital assets.
Emily will be taking copious notes and she’ll share highlights with you in tomorrow’s edition.
P.P.S. Meanwhile, the dockworker strike is underway – more than three months after we first alerted you to the possibility. Only this morning are consumers of corporate media becoming aware…
The reaction in the stock market is muted. The major index futures are little changed; the S&P 500 is set to open down maybe a tenth of a percent.
Precious metals are rebounding from their Friday-Monday drubbing: Gold is back above $2,650 and silver has recovered the $31 level.
Crude continues to act as if everything in the Middle East is hunky-dory, down over 50 cents to $67.64.
Again, come back tomorrow for all things Altucher from our “America’s Next Move” summit, underway as you read this – a host of new ideas in AI, crypto and small caps for the rest of 2024 and into 2025. Catch you then…
