The best kinds of conspiracy theories are the ones that cannot be proven or disproven easily. The CIA stonewalling the public over releasing their files covering the John F. Kennedy assassination -Lee Harvey Oswald materials is such an instance:
After losing an appeals court decision in Mr. Morley’s lawsuit, the C.I.A. released material last year confirming Mr. Joannides’s deep involvement with the anti-Castro Cubans who confronted Oswald. But the agency is withholding 295 specific documents from the 1960s and ’70s, while refusing to confirm or deny the existence of many others, saying their release would cause “extremely grave damage” to national security.
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C.I.A. secrecy has been hotly debated this year, with agency officials protesting the Obama administration’s decision to release legal opinions describing brutal interrogation methods. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, came under attack from Republicans after she accused the C.I.A. of misleading Congress about waterboarding, adding, “They mislead us all the time.”
On the Kennedy assassination, the deceptions began in 1964 with the Warren Commission. The C.I.A. concealed its unsuccessful schemes to kill Fidel Castro and its ties to the anti-Castro D.R.E., the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, or Cuban Student Directorate, which received $50,000 a month in C.I.A. support during 1963.
In August 1963, Oswald visited a New Orleans shop owned by a D.R.E. official, feigning sympathy with the group’s goal of overthrowing Castro. A few days later, D.R.E. members found Oswald handing out pro-Castro pamphlets and got into a brawl with him. Later that month, Oswald debated the anti-Castro Cubans on a local radio station.
In the years since Oswald was named as the assassin, speculation about who might have been behind him has never ended, with various theories focusing on Castro, the mob, rogue government agents or myriad combinations of the abov
[Click to continue reading C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery – NYTimes.com]
I doubt the CIA was instrumental in the JFK assassination, but their behavior does seem to indicate they are embarrassed by some action they did. In a democracy, the people should have a right to know, trumping the wishes of officials, but obviously the US is not really a democracy.