5 decades later, JFK files still sealed
Press TV – August 18, 2013
US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas. Five decades after his death, thousands of pages of official documents over the case remain withheld from public view.
The contents of these files are only partially known and thousands of documents relating to the case remain confidential. What secrets do these documents hold? Why are they still off-limits to researchers?
Documents pertaining to Kennedy’s assassination are set to be released by 2017. But why then and why not sooner? This as researchers demand transparency urging the classified files be made public on eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination.
The Associated Press reports that researchers demand the CIA to declassify documents detailing what the government knew about Kennedy’s accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, before the assassination.
Several hundred of the still-classified pages, according to the AP, concern a CIA operative “George Joannides, whose activities just before the assassination and, fascinatingly, during a government investigation years later, have tantalized researchers for years.”
Joannides left the CIA in 1979 and died in March 1990.
Researchers believe Joannides played a key role in the case both before and after the assassination. Some critics believe that Joannides was involved in a conspiracy to link Oswald with the government of Fidel Castro.
The AP reports that “Joannides was the CIA case officer assigned to an anti-Castro group called the Student Revolutionary Directorate, which had an altercation in the streets of New Orleans with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro organization that counted Oswald as a member. After the fight, it was discovered that Oswald was passing out pamphlets that contained the address of a known anti-Castro operation, leading many to believe that Oswald was part of a CIA effort to sabotage the pro-Castro group from the inside.”
It was only after Joannides’ death that it came to light that he was in contact with the Directorate (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil of DRE) in 1963, the same year that JFK was assassinated. The CIA has so far refused to release files concerning the activities of Joannides in 1963 fueling suspicions that it might be covering up some secrets about the assassination. The agency was paying the anti-Castro group.
Author Anthony Summers states “By withholding Joannides material, the agency continues to encourage the public to believe they’re covering up something more sinister.”
The Warren Commission, assigned by President Johnson in 1963, concluded in 1964 that Oswald acted alone and was not part of a conspiracy. But an investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) which was established in 1976 to probe the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, concluded that Kennedy was very likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.
Most Americans believe Oswald conspired with others to kill JFK. In November of 1963 some 52% of Americans thought others were involved in the assassination. The percentage was 50% in 1966, 81% in 1976, 74% in 1983, 77% in 1992, 75% in 2001 and 75% in 2003. A 2004 Fox News poll found that 66% of Americans thought there had been a conspiracy while 74% thought there had been a cover-up in the case.
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An Essay on Paul Offit’s Bad Faith
Lies are Unbekoming | July 14, 2026
In June and October 1998, Paul Offit sat on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and voted twice in favor of Wyeth-Lederle’s RotaShield rotavirus vaccine: on June 25 to recommend it for routine childhood use, and on October 22 to add it to the federal Vaccines for Children Program.¹ Offit’s own rotavirus vaccine, developed at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in partnership with Merck, was under development at the time. On October 22, 1999, exactly a year after his second vote, ACIP rescinded the RotaShield recommendation after CDC identified an elevated rate of intussusception in vaccinated infants. Intussusception is a bowel condition in which one segment of intestine telescopes into another and cuts off its own blood supply; without emergency intervention, it kills. The surveillance data at the point of withdrawal included hospitalizations and infant deaths. Offit abstained from the withdrawal vote.² Seven years later, Merck’s RotaTeq, which Offit co-invented, received ACIP recommendation for the same schedule slot. The patent sale netted him at least six million dollars by his own account, with other public estimates running higher.³
In June 2000, the United States House Committee on Government Reform published Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making. The report named Offit specifically. It concluded that “conflict of interest rules employed by the FDA and the CDC have been weak, enforcement has been lax, and committee members with substantial ties to pharmaceutical companies have been given waivers to participate in committee proceedings.”⁴
In March 2015, Basic Books published Offit’s Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine. The book accuses religious parents of moral failure. It calls for the elimination of religious exemption from vaccination law. It endorses criminal prosecution of parents who withhold pharmaceutical products from their children on religious grounds, including, under the Oregon sentencing guidelines Offit presents as a model, terms of up to twenty-five years in prison.⁵ … continue
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