Conspiracy via meta-evidence.

The most damning evidence of extensive conspiracy by elements of the state in the assassination of President Kennedy might be called “meta-evidence”. That meta-evidence is exactly that, nearly sixty years later, relevant documents are still kept classified and thus secret from the public.

Who and what are protected by this continued secrecy? Most people who were adults in 1963 are simply dead now; the rest are in their eighties or older! US agents then within foreign nations are all retired if not dead, and the Soviet state disintegrated more than twenty years ago. The intelligence technologies then employed are those of more than half a century ago.

Twenty years ago, I would have agreed that perhaps a legitimate reason existed for keeping some things secret. Ten years ago, I might have agreed that the illegitimate reason could be found in procedural inertia. Moreover, I would have somewhat doubted that discovering a conspiracy would be of much remaining practical significance.

But still more time has passed, and a President reneged on a promise to declassify the remaining documents.

We must infer that most or all who are protected are not persons merely then somehow entangled in the business of killing a President, but persons whose current positions are in institutions carried forward into the present, which institution would be regarded as losing legitimacy in the face of the evidence.