ForteCash

Upon his inauguration as president, JFK continued to support the plans to attack Cuba with the force of exiled Cubans?a project that Nixon had nurtured, supported and managed for the Eisenhower White House. However, JFK decided to withhold U.S. air support in order to maintain an arm's length separation from the Cuban invasion.

The Bay of Pigs became a fiasco. JFK accepted the blame, and he immediately ordered a thorough-going reorganization of the CIA. A few months later, Allen Dulles, who had been a free-wheeling manufacturer of coups d'états while serving as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), ?retired' after a formal conversation with JFK. JFK promptly named a new director, and John McCone, who had been the director of the Atomic Energy Commission, soon took Dulles's place as DCI.

JFK's reorientation of the CIA did not stop there. Recognizing that the agency's mission to wage a covert Cold War was dangerously counterproductive, JFK ordered the CIA to make nuclear non-proliferation its top priority. Eventually, JFK would successfully negotiate the Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khruschev in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis?by far the most significant strategic confrontation of the entire Cold War.

While rogue elements in the U.S. intelligence community have long been suspected of meddling in his assassination and those of his brother and Martin Luther King, Jr., Shane O'Sullivan's identification of three CIA agents in the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the assassination of RFK suggests strongly that the case should be reopened. The third agent in the Ambassador Hotel, George Joannides, now appears to have been engaged in a sabotage mission during the HSCA investigation of JFK's assassination.
The assassination of JFK would seem to be an eternal mystery that has long since passed into the realm of myth; however, that is not the case for today; technology has provided a wealth of new tools with which to examine evidence in criminal cases?even cold cases over forty years old.

While O'Sullivan is calling for a re-opening of the case of RFK, it is only reasonable to re-open JFK's case, as well.

In 1968, I was in my final year at the University of North Carolina. From my meeting with a close associate of RFK, I worked as a college and university organizer in his presidential campaign. At the time of his assassination, RFK was the leading candidate for the presidency?far ahead of his nearest rival in the polls and definitely on track to win the November election.

Seeing the BBC broadcast of videotape evidence of three unassigned CIA agents in the Ambassador Hotel Ballroom at the time of RFK's assassination shocked me. The federal government, Congress and the criminal justice system of the United States failed to protect the president of the United States and its leading presidential candidates. Worse. They have failed to tell the truth to the American people.

Today, on the anniversary of one of the most tragic dates in American history?I propose that the cases of RFK and JFK should be re-opened in either the 110th or the 111th Congress.

We must follow the evidence exhaustively and relentlessly, leaving no stone unturned and no document unexamined regardless of its current status: Sensitive; Secret, Top Secret or Above Top Secret. To do any less would be to become complicit in the lies and cover-ups that have denied the American people of the truth.

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