I watched JFK this past weekend because I’ve been reading about it for a long time, off and on. I think the reason the investigation continues is not because people can’t move on from JFK’s death - it is more about the government itself, not just one man.

People need to know whether their government was right or wrong in its analysis. If it is wrong, was that due to carelessness? Was that carelessness simply sloppy investigation, or did they unwittingly overlook evidence because they wanted to have an answer? Or was the report deliberately falsified? If so, was it because the government wanted to placate the public, or because there was a deliberate intentional coverup? What was being covered up? Could the deliberate falsification be due to the government knowing its investigation was careless and wanting to seem competent despite some evidence simply being lost? Or was it a deliberate falsification to cover up a true conspiracy? Who was involved in the conspiracy, and how far did it go?

Although “Mr. X” in Oliver Stone’s movie JFK says the important question is not who or how, but why, I disagree with this. The American public has moved on from Vietnam, Cuba, etc. Although “why” would be nice to know, it doesn’t have any bearing on modern politics. That’s all history now. But knowing who did it would let the public trust its government, or find fault with it and change it. The continued importance of the JFK assassination investigation is not even about the killing itself: the reason we need to know who killed Kennedy is because we need to know if the Warren Report, a government-generated document, was true or false. That information is why thousands of people spend hours upon hours researching this.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we will ever know the truth. Virtually all of the records are already available; the remainder will be opened over the next 10 years. (Yes, there’s a line in that link about some records possibly remaining sealed forever, I did see that.) But really…we already know pretty much everything there is to know. If there is a massive conspiracy and coverup, we will never know that…what would anybody who is still holding onto the secrets want to divulge them for at this point? It’s a painful part of American history, and we can talk about it till the sun goes supernova, but I just don’t think what really happened will ever be revealed.

Wow. I wanted to access the late Tammad Rimilia’s page to look up some information, and this is what I got:

Government Access Denied, for your own good.

Government networks are vigorously monitored; you could get in trouble for spending your time here while on the job. There is nothing work-related on this page.

You may wish to return in an unofficial capacity from your personally-owned machine at home.

I’ve never seen such a thing before. I had completely forgotten that I’m coming from a .mil domain when I’m at work. At first I thought it was a local block, but then I realized that it was from his site itself! Now I feel all naughty…and I really wasn’t looking for anything bad!

Yes, it’s true. The Secret Service is aware of LiveJournal. At least, they’re aware of anniesj, who documents her experience here. This whole thing made it onto Metafilter (while I was on vacation), and it’s getting talked about all over LJ, of course. And as kalessin (also known as perigee) points out in the MeFi thread, this has been going on for a long time. Our mutual friend Dan Burford (frequently known as Gilmore) was visited by the Secret Service back in 1996 for his Exploding Heads website, which is still around (sort of) thanks to Archive.org. (There’s another summary of Gil’s incident here.) Gilmore’s infraction was making graphic animations of various politicians’ heads exploding. I also have a newspaper clipping from the Washington Post floating around the house somewhere (you can see it above the number 30 here) that discusses Gil’s experience with the Secret Service.