from the ready-fire-aim dept
Let me start this off with a brief confession: while I’m not particularly into conspiracy theories in general, the JFK assassination is an outlier for me. I’ve been fascinated with JFK since I was a child and I don’t believe the official version of the story is the entire story, at a minimum. That throat clearing isn’t the main topic of this post, but it will inform you as to why any new information that comes out about the topic is of great interest to me.
So, while I’m no fan of the current administration, I did sit up and take notice when Trump released additional government files about the assassination in his first term, and again recently when the administration announced the release of the rest of the documents it has on the matter. I’m also completely unsurprised that the main reaction to what has been reviewed in the new files thus far has been mostly “meh.” I have not seen anything that remotely looks like a counterfactual to the official story in these documents and I didn’t expect to. There wasn’t going to be some secret document in there entitled, “Here’s how we killed him and who was involved.”
But I also didn’t expect to learn that the administration released the documents in such a disorganized and careless manner that they essentially doxxed a bunch of people who are very much still alive today.
And in typical Trump fashion, the release has been chaotic and slipshod. The files aren’t organized, summarized, or labeled in a way that makes sense. It’s just raw PDFs with a long numeric string uploaded onto a website. Click the PDF and see what you get. And, according to one lawyer going through them, they include the sensitive personal information of living people.
“The Trump Administration dox’d countless people who served on the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations back in 1977-79 by releasing their SSNs in full,” Mark Zaid, an attorney who works on National Security issues, said on Bluesky. “Some of these people are alive. I know them. This was totally unnecessary & contributed nothing to understanding 11/22/63.”
What is darkly funny about all of this is that the only reason Trump didn’t release these very files the first time around was, according to the man himself, so that the government could go through the documents to redact anything that pertained to current security concerns or corporeal human beings. Five years later, upon release, we learn that said review either wasn’t done at all, was done exceptionally poorly, or that this sensitive and personal information of living human beings was done purposefully.
Given the disorderly manner in which this release occurred, I would guess the last of those was not the actual intention. Never assume malice where incompetance is an equal or better explanation, as the saying goes. But with this adminstration, one fueled by grievance and revenge, you never can tell, I guess.
To be clear, more government transparency is a good thing, even if it has to come with several decades worth of baggage. But just like the supposed aim to reduce government spending, there is the orderly and intelligent way to approach it all, or the Trump way. The latter is done so incompetently so as to cause collateral damage. That’s the problem.
Filed Under: donald trump, doxxing, jfk, jfk assassination, social security numbers
