
Show HN: AssassinationFiles.net – JFK Declassified Document Search - jiscariot
https://assassinationfiles.net/index.html
======
abalone
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...](https://zcomm.org/wp-
content/uploads/zbooks/htdocs/chomsky/rc/rc-contents.html)

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

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srge
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?

~~~
olavk
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.

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GeorgeTirebiter
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](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](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.

~~~
croon
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.

~~~
GeorgeTirebiter
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! ;-)

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nvr219
I feel like if these files revealed anything groundbreaking it'd be all over
the news by now.

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jasonkostempski
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.

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Iv
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...](https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/The_Stratfor_Glossary_of_Useful_Baffling_and_Strange_Intelligence_Terms.pdf)

~~~
King-Aaron
> Duplicitous little bastards.... Israeli Intelligence

Is this legit?

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
"Si non e vero, e ben trovato", as they used to say in Abyssinia.

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smudgymcscmudge
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.

~~~
jiscariot
That is awesome - thanks much for sharing!

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bpchaps
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!

~~~
jiscariot
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.

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

~~~
peacethroughx
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.

~~~
jiscariot
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.

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koyote
Very interesting!

Some random searches brought me to this:
[https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-101...](https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-10182-10059a.pdf)

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

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snowpanda
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...](https://assassinationfiles.net/script/search.php?searchterms=nsa)

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

~~~
jiscariot
Thanks very much netule! I updated it.

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asdfj921sa
Easy Xss to spread fake news:

[https://assassinationfiles.net/script/search.php?searchterms...](https://assassinationfiles.net/script/search.php?searchterms=CIA%3C/span%3E%3Cbr%3ECIA%20KILLED%20JFK%3Cbr%3ETotal%20Results:%201%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E)

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

~~~
asdfj921sa
whoops wrong xss, fixed it to something more sfw

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geofft
I searched for a random keyword and found this file:
[https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-101...](https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-10173-10133.pdf)

 _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?)

~~~
ams6110
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.

~~~
geofft
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.

~~~
jcranmer
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.

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forapurpose
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!

~~~
jiscariot
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. :)

~~~
forapurpose
> 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.

