By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
CAIRNS News has aired a number of theories around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy but not until now the testimony of a jailed criminal who says he fired the single shot from the infamous “grassy knoll” that killed the president.
James E. Files’ confession was recorded during the 1990s and released with little to no fanfare last year as a film by the YouTube channel Documentary Central aka DocCentral. For whatever reasons, probably the sheer volume of material on YouTube and the ability of YouTube algorithms to funnel or censor preferences, we have only just been made aware of this documentary.
Files first made his confession 1992 to Houston private investigator, the late Joe West, while serving his 50-year sentence for the 1991 attempted murders of two police officers. Files was released on parole in 2016.
Wikipedia cites the LA prosecutor Vincent Bufliosi as saying that of “those who believe in such a conspiracy very few believe Files’s claims warrant serious attention”. “However, conspiracy author Jerome Kroth described Files as “surprisingly credible” and said his story “is the most believable and persuasive” about the assassination.
Meanwhile, the stupid Associated Press claimed last year that newly released documents related to Kennedy’s assassination “gave curious readers more details Wednesday into Cold War-era covert U.S. operations in other nations but didn’t initially lend credence to long-circulating conspiracy theories about who killed JFK.”
“An initial Associated Press review of more than 63,000 pages of records released this week shows that some were not directly related to the assassination but rather dealt with covert CIA operations, particularly in Cuba. And nothing in the first documents examined undercut the conclusion that Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.”
AP’s article quotes at length Philip Shenon, who wrote a 2013 book about the assassination. “I haven’t seen any big blockbusters that rewrite the essential history of the assassination, but it is very early.” It it clear that “very early” is an excuse to put aside the most relevant information.
We note that AP said its “initial review” of 63,000 pages did not undercut the lone-gunman story. And that’s where they leave it. Is the AP doing a further review? We don’t know, but here we see an example of mainstream media weaseling its way around information that could leave huge amounts of egg on their faces.
Meanwhile the Files’ confession aligns with the assassination theory that the CIA co-opted members of the Mob to do the killling. Files named organized crime figures Charles Nicoletti, Johnny Roselli, and Sam Giancana, as being intimately involved in the crime of the century.
The only apparent gap in Files’ testimony is the role of nightclub owner Jacob Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby, who handed a planning map and ID badges to one of Files’ colleagues in the operation. Who Ruby represented is not stated, although the Jewish arm of the mob and the Israeli Mossad might be a good starting place.
Files named his CIA handler as David Atlee Phillips, a CIA officer of 25 years and a recipient of the Career Intelligence Medal, who rose to become the CIA’s chief of operations for the Western Hemisphere. Phillips is a true picture of CIA evil.
Files’ says his “surprise helper” was none other than the infamous self-proclaimed patsy, the late Lee Harvey Oswald. who is still named in Wikipedia as “a U.S. Marine veteran who assassinated John F. Kennedy”. Organised history does not die easily. “All the way through I had Lee Harvey Oswald with me,” Files told his interviewer.
Files’ incredibly detailed testimony has the ring of truth about it. Either that or he’s a brilliant liar. A photo of Files taken by Oswald shows him to be probably in his late teens or early 20s in 1963. He had received military training.
Files says he knew Phillips and Oswald from a previous operation in which they ran semi-automatic, 45-calibre sub-machine guns to Clinton Alabama, where he was introduced to Oswald by Phillips, who said Oswald could be trusted and that he was his controller.
Oswald, of course, learned with his life that while he could be trusted, those above him could not, and he was sacrificed for convenience’s sake by the pistol weilding “Jack Ruby”.
Another one of Files’ accomplices was Johnny Roselli, who was involved in the CIA’s Cuban operations from Florida. Files was taken by Roselli to a meeting at Fort Worth with Ruby, who was apparently not trusted by Roselli, who asked Files to cover him in the room where they met.
Ruby, however, was clearly involved in the operation. He handed Roselli an envelope containing what looked like law-enforcement-style ID wallets with badges and a map of the president’s motorcade route through Dealey Plaza.
Earlier Rosetti had told Files that the CIA wanted to abort the operation, and when they returned to Dallas, Charles Nicoletti, took over the operation and took Files to Dealey Plaza to surveil the location.
Nicoletti said Rosetti did not want to go against CIA orders and was flown in specifically to abort the operation. Nicoletti, however, said it was “still on” and the only person who could abort the mission as far as he was concerned was the mob No. 2 man Sam Giancano, who operated under Tony Accardo, the Chicago mob boss.
Nicoletti asked Files to be the back-up shooter, and Files agreed, saying he would be honoured to do whatever he was asked. He said he previously thought he would be simply supporting the operation in weapons transport and so on.
The video features the Zapruder film and news reports on the day of the assassination that we have seen and heart many times. Files describes in detail his preparation to take the shot with a scope, which brought his target very close.
2025 was also the year that a US House of Congress Oversight Committee held hearings, one of which included Douglas Horne (Ex-Govt Employee Tells Congress JFK X-Rays ‘Actually Reveal A Total Of 3 Headshots,’ Records Missing) a former member of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) for the final three years of its four-year lifespan from August of 1995 through September of 1998.
Horne was hired as a senior analyst on the military records team and was promoted early in 1997 to head the military records team, serving as chief analyst for military records until the ARRB shutdown on September 30th, 1998.
During his time on the staff, in addition to securing the declassification and public release of military records related to Cuba and Vietnam policy, he worked extensively in the medical evidence arena and to serve as the review board’s point man on issues related to the Zaprruder film of Kennedy’s assassination.
“Although the review board was not empowered to reinvestigate the assassination or generate conclusions or findings of fact, the board did choose to attempt to clarify the record of certain aspects of the assassination by taking the depositions of 10 persons who participated in or who were present at the autopsy on President John F. Kennedy and by later taking one additional joint deposition of five of the Dallas treating physicians,” Horne told the committee.
“I served as the principal research assistant to the review board’s general counsel, Jeremy Gun, in preparing for and conducting our 10 depositions of the participants and witnesses to JFK’s autopsy, and was present at all 10 of those depositions.
“The sworn testimony of our 10 deponents, as well as numerous written interview reports of additional unsworn medical witnesses, were all deposited in the National Archives in the JFK records collection without comment or endorsement.”
In subsequent years, Horne wrote a five-volume memoir about his own personal conclusions regarding the medical evidence and explained the substantial ways in which the work of the ARRB staff “significantly enhanced the totality of the medical evidence and our understanding of how President Kennedy was killed”.
“Some outstanding questions were resolved, but many other questions were raised by the information we gathered – questions that remain unresolved today. And this is the heart of my oral testimony here.”
Horne says many Americans remain troubled today by the many conflicts within the JFK medical evidence and what they might mean. “And they remain unsatisfied with the official conclusions offered up by both the Warren Commission in 1964 and the HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations) Forensic Pathology Panel in 1979.” he said.
Horne has concluded that there are ample reasons for the disquiet of so many of the American people, such as the eight different sets of photographs known with confidence to have been taken during the autopsy on JFK that are not in the official collection today and never have been.
He says some autopsy photos in the official collection at the National Archives are in gross disagreement with the head and neck wounds universally observed on November 22nd, 1963 by the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital, which they recorded in precise detail in their treatment notes that day and in their subsequent 1964 testimony.
Other issues cited by Horne include:
- At least two and possibly three JFK skull X-rays exposed at Bethesda Naval Hospital are missing today and have never been in the official collection. Optical densitometry reveals that all three surviving skull X-rays are not originals but rather are altered copy films.
- Two highly qualified and respected MDs who were granted repeated access by the Kennedy family to the autopsy photographs and X-rays in the deed of gift collection at the archives agree that the extent JFK skull X-rays reveal unambiguous and clear evidence of two head shot fired from in front of the president.
- Contrary to the findings of the Warren Commission and the HSCA, the JFK skull X-rays actually reveal a total of three head shot, one from behind and two from the front.
- The so-called Harper fragment of skull bone, a crucial item of evidence signed for by the president’s military physician and photographed and X-rayed by the FBI, has been missing since late in 1963.
- Many bullet fragments known to have been removed from President Kennedy’s body at Bethesda Naval Hospital were never placed into the official record and are missing today.
- The remains of President Kennedy’s brain following its examination were placed in a stainless steel container in 1963, but the brain is missing today. As many people know already, that stainless steel container and an original signed autopsy report were among materials transferred from the Secret Service to Senator Robert F. Kennedy in April of 1965. Those materials and others were not among the materials returned to the US government by RFK on October 31st, 1966 via a deed of gift to the National Archives.
- The Kennedy family attorney Burke Marshall, told the HSCA that Robert F. Kennedy had made those materials permanently inaccessible without providing details. The 14 brain photographs in the National Archives today cannot be and are not photographs of John F. Kennedy’s brain.
- The chain of custody of President Kennedy’s body prior to the start of the autopsy shortly after 8.00 PM on November 22nd, 1963 clearly appears to have been broken, casting even more doubt upon the reliability of the official autopsy report.
- And finally, Navy pathologists arrived at four sets of differing conclusions about President Kennedy’s wounds and how he died within the two weeks after his death. The official autopsy report that is now in the National Archives represents only the fourth and final set of conclusions.
- This fact perhaps more than any of the others above is patently unacceptable in the nation that prides itself as the world’s greatest democracy.
