Show HN: AssassinationFiles.net – JFK Declassified Document Search | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: AssassinationFiles.net – JFK Declassified Document Search

assassinationfiles.net

122 pointsjiscariot80 comments

Best thing anyone interested in this to read is Rethinking Camelot by Noam Chomsky. Full text is online.[1]

Without giving too much away, it's not about the assassination. It's about JFK's actual record, which calls into question the whole enterprise of liberal hero-worship and destroys the basis upon which most CIA conspiracy theories are premised. There is no motive for the CIA to assassinate JFK. Vietnam was his war, he was a fanatical supporter of terrorism, and brought us closer to nuclear war than any other president.

[1] https://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/htdocs/chomsky/r...

Hello Abalone have you seen The Smoking Gun, the film based on Mortal Error (book)?

Each time the JFK assassination comes up, reading the comments gives me the feeling that HN is pro lone gunman theory.

That strikes me as odd given the amount of circumstancial evidences pointing in the conspiracy direction.

Also the lone gunman who kills single handily the president of the most powerful nation in the world:

- would not admit it (why not if he is a crazy guy killing for political reasons?) - and is killed right after by a mafia linked guy

This guy is executed right after being questioned by the police and denying any role in the assassination and pretending he’s a patsy. And it’s not a conspiracy?

There is a lot of weird circumstances, but given the available evidence I still think the lone gunman theory is the most plausible.

You say "the lone gunman who kills single handily the president of the most powerful nation in the world" - it is like an act of such magnitude must have a bigger and deeper explanation than just a half-crazy guy with a gun and unclear motives.

But if you have a clear line of sight it is not harder to kill the president of the most powerful nation in the nation of the world, than it is to kill any other random person on the street. And you don't really need a better motive to it either. And it is not weird to deny a crime when apprehended. Certainly the Ruby assassination was weird and unfortunate, but how does it actually point to a conspiracy? It seems rather random.

Hi, there is simply no way Oswald killed JFK. And the Ruby assassination of LHO was not random at all. The fiction made up by George HW Bush and co (CIA) was necessary to cover-up the extent of the coup that had just taken place. There is so much credible evidence. You must also ask yourself: why, after all these years, is a substantial quantity of government info still secret? So secret that 'swamp drainer' Trump won't declassify it? Have you read Carl Oglesby's book "The Yankee and Cowboy War"? Incredible page-turner! https://archive.org/details/OglesbyCarlTheYankeeAndCowboyWar . And finally I don't vouch for everything in the following film, only that he encourages you to look up the facts for yourself. https://youtu.be/U1Qt6a-vaNM p.s. I was in grade school when the USA had its coup, and I remember very clearly how it was presented to the public back then.

I won't get into the other stuff, but:

> You must also ask yourself: why, after all these years, is a substantial quantity of government info still secret? So secret that 'swamp drainer' Trump won't declassify it?

1) Because he's not a swamp drainer, he's a swamp monster.

2) He didn't declassify these documents, time did.

3) Because the vast majority of intelligence data is secret (for a substantial amount of time), regardless of motive.

4) Because it implicates George HW Bush and/or other people still alive in the conspiracy.

5) The fact that the Warren Commission Report was a fabrication would be clear to everyone.

6) Some other illegal government action would be exposed, like the Bay of Pigs, or the Gulf of Tonkin 'attack', the 'Lusitania is not carrying arms for England', and/or other government lies.

7) < you get the idea >

---- I find the small-minded among us (who down-vote when they do not like what is said) should really re-read HN Rules. Thank you.

I suspect the downvote is from a politician who is vested in having the "LHO killed JFK" inaccurate meme continue to proliferate. Fess up! ;-)

It's always good to use Occam's razor, but it works both ways.

Even a cursory glance of the single bullet theory doesn't pass a sniff test. (a single bullet that bounces around the bodies of two different people, and comes out in pristine condition.)

Regarding how Jack Ruby points to a conspiracy. Mr. Ruby said it himself. [0]

If you'd like to challenge your theories and add to your known evidence, I'd recommend the documentary series "The men who killed Kennedy". It was done by the History Channel back when the History channel was focused on history and is full of first hand accounts from people involved at the time.

I believe parts 7,8,9 are not allowed to be sold anymore due to a lawsuit filed by LBJ's estate, but they are still available on youtube.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we2eucWXqjg

I feel like if these files revealed anything groundbreaking it'd be all over the news by now.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, as this is a legitimate point.

Still might be interesting to history buffs

like the paradise papers?

You don't even have to go back that far, there still aren't any answers for Mandalay Bay. The media has a short attention span.

I had searched for "Luther" because I had heard there was information about Martin Luther King in this release. I found this paper in which a Panamanian sailor swears his belief that an Alabama-based motor company was going to attempt to hire him to assassinate MLK. He did not go forward to Alabama to find out any details about the job because they wouldn't pay his requested $75 travel fees.

Probably just a kook. But you can't make this stuff up.

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-101...

You can make this stuff up. People have been doing it for a long time, some even professionally.

I feel like if these files revealed anything groundbreaking they wouldn't have existed. If there was anything that needed to be covered up, it wouldn't have been done on the books, classified or not.

>I feel like if these files revealed anything groundbreaking they wouldn't have existed. If there was anything that needed to be covered up, it wouldn't have been done on the books, classified or not.

Of course. This was nothing more than a completely absurd bit of theater put on to throw meat to His tinfoil hat wearing, Alex Jones watching base of supporters.

People leave a lot of accidental breadcrumbs.

Consider that even what people believe to be carefully anonymized data sets can be reverse-engineered down to a scarily specific group of people, if not all the way down to the specific person individually. [0] [1]

Aside from the fact that some people have a conveniently weak definition of "anonymous", this is part of why it's worrisome to have so many people collecting and reselling browsing data and other types of user analytics, despite their repeated assertions of anonymity.

It's perfectly plausible to believe that with the right shuffle of declassified data, substantial new information will become apparent.

[0] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization

Generally yes, but there are occasional cases where information is preserved. There's a really interesting podcast about one instance:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/mau-mau/

Nixon's effective admission to knowledge of the Watergate scandal and cover-up was recorded on tape. And this is someone who probably knew of/ordered/did himself the erasure of 18½ minutes of tape, the contents of which are still unknown today.

Even if you believe that such first-order evidence didn't exist, bureaucracies generate massive amounts of second-order evidence that's hard to erase. For example, if you believe that the conspiracy selected Oswald as a fall guy, you have to ask how; and the simplest way of doing that would be to send someone down to the records archive and search for a good one... which would be noted as someone accessing the records [1].

This is the problem with conspiracy theories: to explain the lack of evidence, they have to expand the conspiracy to be able to erase that evidence, which generates more evidence that needs to be erased.

[1] I don't know if such accesses were logged back then, but I'd be surprised if they weren't.

I'd imagine the opsec would be much tighter for a presidential assasination/coup than Watergate.

The punishment for the former would be execution, the latter resulted in a simple resignation.

Exactly.

Speaking of 18-minute-gaps: https://www.forensicmag.com/article/2011/02/cracking-waterga...

These guys say 'nothing particularly special' was in the gap: https://nypost.com/2014/08/03/after-40-years-john-dean-re-ex...

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes

Black Op: If you heard even a hint of it, it ain’t black. Anyone who tells you about a black op is a liar. Does Stratfor do black ops? You’ll never know.

From "Stratfor Glossary of Useful, Baffling and Strange Intelligence Terms"

https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/The_Stratfor_Glossary_of_Usefu...

That source is amazing, fascinating to see a glimpse of the culture there. I especially liked "Green Carder", "Center-of-Gravity", and "Hoover's Dress".

It feels like reading the glossary of a well-written novel. Except it is (probably) all true.

> Duplicitous little bastards.... Israeli Intelligence

Is this legit?

You'll never know.

"Si non e vero, e ben trovato", as they used to say in Abyssinia.

About Israelis, I love the kilowatt/megawatt passage.

I think you overestimate two factors: (1) government competence in censoring data; (2) everyone else's desire/willingness/capability in going through this stuff in depth.

Thanks for this. I was able to find a relative who I suspected would have been an associate of Jack Ruby. I wanted to search for him before, but without OCR, it would have been a needle in a haystack.

While it wasn't anything significant to others, it was a neat bit of family history for me.

In case anybody was interested, my relative wasn't investigated because of a link to Jack Ruby after all, but he was mentioned by other informants.

That is awesome - thanks much for sharing!

Really great work!

Two questions:

What sort OCR stack did you use?

Is there a way to see the text inside the search results? I'm only seeing the PDFs themselves and would love to do some full text searches of my own!

Thanks much for the feedback!

Imagemagick -> tesseract -> solr/lucene

I am a neophyte when it comes to this stuff, so I'm sure someone with more experience could get better results from tweaking IM/tess. Some of the IM convert stuff was extremely memory intensive on larger documents and AWS was starting to get really expensive. Later on I added PDFbox to split the PDFs pre IM and run a page at a time vs. the entire document.

SOLR has a highlighting feature that I never really got working right. That would have showed some context to the search terms in the results.

Is it possible to download these? Would love to play with some Dynamic Topic Modeling stuff using them to see changes over time!

Yes, please open source this data! Making it easily searched is a great public service but technical people can do even more with the text data.

The 11/03 release is still finishing up OCR'ing, so perhaps once that is loaded, I can post to github. That should be over the next couple of days. Thanks everyone for the feedback as well--I don't have a big interest in JFK or anything, but needed a good project.

Very interesting!

Some random searches brought me to this: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-101...

It seems to be a summary on a special agent operating in the 60s and gives some interesting glimpses into his life/tasks.

If you search for NSA you can get some articles on how the agency operated before the internet madness. Very interesting to say the least.

https://assassinationfiles.net/script/search.php?searchterms...

Small misspelling: "Relavance" as a column header, which should be "Relevance." Otherwise, wonderful job.

Thanks very much netule! I updated it.

Easy Xss to spread fake news:

https://assassinationfiles.net/script/search.php?searchterms...

Perhaps you could've chosen something more safe for work?

whoops wrong xss, fixed it to something more sfw

I searched for a random keyword and found this file: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-101...

1 July 1947

Enclosed herewith are translations from the official gestapo files of a list of persons connected with the work of the Third International in China. These files are in possession of Turin, NY and he is combing through them extracting this type of information which will be forwarded to you as it is obtained.

I guess it's not super surprising that US intelligence was interested in the results of Gestapo intelligence on communists in other countries, but it does make me incredibly, incredibly uncomfortable.

Some of the Gestapo notes identify various people as "US citizen, Jew," "German citizen, Jewess," etc.

(On the technical side - is the OCR'd text available, or only searchable?)

The US has a long history of employing former Nazi and fascist officials post WW2.

There were projects to capture/recruit scientists, intelligence agents and propaganda experts.

The Nazis before and during WWII were fastidious about documentating the backgrounds, political affiliations, and connections of pretty much everyone they could, but especially their perceived foes. They were assisted in this by tabulating equipment provided by IBM. So they probably had more complete records of this sort of thing than anyone else at the time.

Replace a few words and you have the present day situation.

Sure, but don't we think they'll be ... colored by Nazi ideology? Was the US really happy to think that anyone who the Nazis think is a communist and a threat to the Reich is someone that they should also consider a communist and a threat to the republic? Barely two years after sending half a million soldiers to die because this country was too evil that we needed to pay any cost to defeat them? After discovering the Holocaust, which we didn't know about when we made that decision and only learned about as we found the piles of dead bodies? We're not only interested in their intelligence, we trust the Gestapo's judgment?

I mean, I guess at some level I always knew the answer was yes, but this is pretty blatant.

I don't see any evidence of unconditional trust of the Gestapo's judgement. As an intelligent analyst, you would be pretty stupid to ignore information just because its contents might be unreliable. Reliability and utility are two distinct axes (even if not entirely orthogonal).

The image quality is too poor for me to spend the time to figure out what all the text and annotation is saying. It looks like it's something like a summary of major leaders of the Chinese branch of the Comintern with supporting documentation, but I'm not entirely certain.

The US recruited actual members of the Nazi party[1], so a few files is not much in comparison.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

I've had a lot of fun doing just that over the course of this project. Little random stuff like a report on a "professional strip-teaser" named Candy Barr and her film "Smart-Alec" is the stuff that stuck with me.

A few people have asked about the text, so once the 11/03 release is complete in the next couple of days, I should be able to upload it to github. I'm sure that someone who is really familiar with image manipulation/cleanup could produce a better text index.

Thanks for making these publicly accessible; that's great work. A couple of thoughts:

1. Change the name. Assassination Files is sensationalistic, which always feels manipulative to me and raises my doubts about the author's intentions. These days, with so much trolling and propaganda, I assume that anyone who adopts sensationalistic practices doesn't understand and/or respect the issues of integrity on the Internet and is not to be taken too seriously.

2. I'm not sure many others feel this way, but I need a reason to believe the website contains a correct, complete, and fully searchable record of the released documents. I don't know if the author has an axe to grind, and perhaps omits or fails to properly OCR or index certain documents, or if there are errors due to the unknown error rate - and not knowing the site's producer, I have no idea if that error rate is high or low. If someone with expertise, such as a professor in that field, could vouch for it, that would help - but perhaps that's outside the scope.

Thank you!

> Assassination Files is sensationalistic

when talking about actual files pertaining to an actual assassination (noone debates asssasination I dont think here)? what should they be called instead?

'the recently released information possibly tangentially related to the events leading to the transition of the 35th and 36th us presidency'?

Or they want people to go to their site. Not everything sensationalist is automatically bad.

Thanks for the feedback. To be honest, I just thought it would be a fun project. Perhaps I should indicate that somewhere in the about page to make it more clear. Someone else had recommended making the index files public, which might help with some of your concerns.

I went back and forth about the title, but my girlfriend gave the OK, so I went with it. :)

> To be honest, I just thought it would be a fun project.

You are generous to give the world the benefit of your project, and for free. I wrote the feedback because that's what Ask HN is for, but overall IMHO it's awesome that you did it.

Definitely, it's better to listen to your S.O.'s feedback than to strangers on HN - most of us can't even get a date.

Fun project! The title is descriptive. Your girlfriend is right ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com