Who thinks the JFK assassination still matters?

The CIA, that's who.

Today's New York Times details Agency stonewalling over 295 documents relating to George Joannides, an agent working with anti-Castro Cubans out of JM/WAVE, their Miami station. Groups under Joannides' direction "publicly clashed with" Lee Harvey Oswald. These clashes were some of the most significant ways that Oswald's personal politics--in other words, his entire motive--were presented to the public.

"The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets," writes Scott Shane. "But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance."

If things happened the way the Warren Report says they did--if it was one crazy person acting alone with a mail-order rifle--that's where the trail ends, and nothing in CIA's files can change that fact. But CIA has acted guilty from the start, misleading investigations and covering stuff up--and this is in the face of almost total support from the mainstream media. The New York Times is not digging at this story now, any more than it did in 1964. Yet CIA's gameplan has remained the same: stonewall until the information is a curious historical fact. The question is why?

It is completely understandable that CIA would control the flow of information to the Warren Commission, to protect ongoing operations and/or cover its ass in the wake of a huge failure. But this rationale weakens for Mr. Joannides' behavior as CIA liason to the Congressional investigation in 1976-78; and still further for its resistance to the Assassination Records Review Board in the 90s. It's completely ludicrous today.

These documents are nearly 50 years old. Joannides is dead, Castro nearly so. The only reasonable conclusion is that CIA has something to hide regarding the assassination, and it relates to JM/WAVE, Oswald, and anti-Castro Cubans. I don't know what it has to hide, but it has to be damaging enough to justify an organization-wide commitment over 50 years, in the face of sustained public interest and intermittent Congressional pressure. That's the story here, not what scraps of redacted paper eventually emerge.

The Times article trots out a few lone nut theorists--Gerald Posner and Max Holland--who predictably declare there's no "there" there. But CIA's behavior has already answered this question. We already know that when the documents eventually do come out, The New York Times will study them carefully, looking for Allen Dulles' handwritten scrawl, "Get Oswald to shoot Kennedy." Not finding it, the lone nut theory will be "proven" once again, and the rest of us will be treated to some more cognitive dissonance.

CIA has shown itself to be liars on this topic, so sensible people should stop listening to what they say. What they do is much more instructive, and that points a big, fat finger squarely at Langley--for what I don't know, but the enormous amount of other evidence makes that less important. Five decades of imperial government and a lapdog press means that the details will be obscured, but the larger picture is resolving, and it doesn't show Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. Those of us who've known that for decades thank the CIA for helping get the word out.

ADDITION 10/22: Peter Dale Scott on the same NYT article.