The White House announced a few days ago that it will postpone the release of the remaining confidential documents related to the assassination of former US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
It is true that in 2018, former President Donald Trump allowed the publication of thousands of classified files related to the assassination, but he withheld others for reasons of national security.
President Joe Biden confirmed in a statement that the remaining files “will remain completely blocked” until December 15 of next year, nearly 60 years after Kennedy’s assassination. Biden also said the delay was “essential to protect against harm to military defence, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations” and that it “outweighs the public interest in prompt disclosure” of the documents. Even though US law requires the disclosure of all government records related to the assassination “to enable the public to obtain complete information.”
In fact, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is considered one of the most mysterious cases in the history of modern American politics.
The assassination of the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America among his guards in his presidential motorcade by a former US Navy soldier, next to his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, in front of cameras and television in 1963, shocked the entire world. All the events that followed, too, were unprecedented.
Everyone watched the death of the most powerful man in the world at that time, and then the world was surprised again by the assassination of the only suspect in the incident in front of the cameras as well, in the midst of a crowd of security men at the hands of another killer who died of cancer before his retrial, so that the assassination remains a puzzle and inspiring many conspiracy theories. More importantly, what is happening today in procrastination in the disclosure of some documents confirms that this mystery is becoming increasingly ambiguous in a way that confirms the conspiracy theory that has long been put forward regarding the involvement of American intelligence in the assassination.
One of the most important supporters of this theory is the famous American journalist David Talbot, who accused the former Director of Intelligence Alan Dulles of being responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy in his famous book. The book was published in 2015 under the title” The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.”
Talbot asserted that the clash occurred between Kennedy on one side and the Central Intelligence Agency “CIA” on the other hand when Kennedy delivered his important speech in the Senate in 1957. Kennedy assured the audience that the Soviet Union is not the only enemy of the United States and the freedom of the world. There is another enemy represented in the Western colonial or imperialist powers, which, according to him, “crushed the legitimate aspirations of peoples throughout the third world.”
The speech was enough to set the stage for the conflict between Kennedy and the CIA. President Kennedy crossed red lines and challenged Eisenhower’s comprehensive global vision and Republican and Democratic institutions. Talbot asserts that after the speech, there was a trend within the network of interests, money, intelligence, and weapons that Dallas had established that Kennedy had become a “threat to American national security” and that getting rid of him was only a matter of time.
Talbot relied in his book on many sources and documents related to the accident and the people associated with it. Many reliable documents were used, such as government documents, sources from the American and European intelligence, correspondence and memoranda of Dallas’ wife and mistress, Mary Bancroft, who described him as a predatory shark, and private conversations with the families of several high-ranking CIA personnel.
Although it has been nearly 60 years since Kennedy’s assassination, it seems that the disclosure of all the documents related to this event will already shed light on many of the conspiracies that were and are still being hatched against the countries of the Middle East.
Dr Marwa El-Shinawy is an Assistant Professor at International American University for Specialized Studies(IAUS).
