The CIA's JFK Assassination Records

Circumstantial Evidence in the JFK Assassination

by Jacob G. Hornberger

October 24, 2017 

Having recently discovered this Thursday’s legal deadline for the National Archives’s mandated release of JFK assassination records that the CIA, FBI, and other agencies have succeeded in keeping secret for more than 50 years, the mainstream media is repeatedly emphasizing that the records will contain no “smoking guns.” 

Well, duh! As I stated in my article yesterday, “I Predict Trump Will Continue the CIA’s JFK Assassination Cover-Up,” ever since the CIA began specializing in assassinations, one of its principal rules has been never to put any reference to a covert state-sponsored assassination into writing. Given such, it’s no big revelation that the records that are set to be released — assuming that President Trump doesn’t grant the CIA’s request to keep them secret — will not contain a videotaped confession, a memorandum detailing how the assassination was to be carried out and covered up, or any other such “smoking gun” type of evidence. 

However, it is a virtual certainty that the tens of thousands of records will contain bits of circumstantial evidence that further fill in the mosaic that the assassination of President Kennedy was one of the CIA’s regime-change operations, no different in principle from those carried out in the 1950s-1970s in such countries as Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Cuba, and Chile. 

The problem is that mainstream reporters and commentators, generally speaking, have no understanding of or appreciation for the importance and relevance of circumstantial evidence. To them, all that matters is direct evidence, such as a videotaped confession or a signed memorandum showing how the assassination was carried out. 

What is circumstantial evidence? The definition provided by Wikipedia is as good as any other: 

Circumstantial evidence is evidence that relies on an inference to connect it to a conclusion of fact — like a fingerprint at the scene of a crime. By contrast, direct evidence supports the truth of an assertion directly — i.e., without need for any additional evidence or inference. 

It is worth noting that courts consider circumstantial evidence to be of equal value to direct evidence. 

When the mainstream media refers to the term of Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, they always repeat the same mantra — that the ARRB found no “smoking guns.” They are, again, referring to direct evidence and not circumstantial evidence. 

An example of circumstantial evidence was the testimony of Saundra Spencer, who was the petty officer in charge of the White House Laboratory at the Naval Photographic Center in Washington, D.C. As such, she worked closely with the Kennedy White House, including on highly classified matters. 

It would be virtually impossible to find a more credible witness than Saundra Spencer. I think that everyone, including the Pentagon and the CIA, would attest to her integrity and veracity. 

Spencer gave sworn testimony before the ARRB. The mainstream media has never devoted any attention to her testimony. Why? Because her testimony did not constitute direct evidence. That is, since she didn’t testify that she saw who shot the president or some other type of direct “smoking gun” testimony, the mainstream media has ignored what she told the ARRB. 

Spencer testified under oath that on the weekend of the assassination, she was asked to develop JFK autopsy photographs, on a highly classified basis. 

The ARRB asked Spencer to identify the official autopsy photographs in the record. She examined the photographs and told the ARRB, in direct and unequivocal terms, that those were not the autopsy photographs she developed. The ones she developed showed a big exit-sized hole in the back of the president’s head. The official autopsy photographs in the record show the back of JFK’s head to be intact. 

Spencer’s sworn testimony before the ARRB leads to but one conclusion: The official autopsy photographs in the JFK assassination are fakes.

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Jesse and Ron Pound Warhawks

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J. Q. Adams on foreign policy

On July 4, 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams delivered an historic address on U.S. foreign policy. After reading the full text of the Declaration of Independence, he continued (a portion of his talk follows):

In the progress of 40 years since the acknowledgment of our independence, we have gone through many modifications of internal government, and through all the vicissitudes of peace and war, with other mighty nations. But never, never for a moment have the great principles, consecrated by the Declaration of this day, been renounced or abandoned.

And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the older world, the first observers of mutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to inquire, what has America done for the benefit of mankind?

Let our answer be this–America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, equal justice, and equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama, the European World, will be contests between inveterate power, and emerging right.

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

-- ‘She Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy’, The American Conservative