Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone is to testify on latest JFK assassination files

Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone, whose 1991 sinema JFK portrayed President John F Kennedy’s assassination as the work of a government conspiracy, is set to testify to US Congress today regarding thousands of newly released documents surrounding the killing. 

Also invited are Jefferson Morley and James DiEugenio, who both have written books arguing for conspiracies behind the assassination of JFK. 

Experts say the files that Donald Trump ordered to be released did not reveal any new information that weakened the conclusion that a lone gunman killed Kennedy. 

Many documents were previously released but contained newly removed redactions, including Social Security numbers.

The first hearing of the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets comes five decades after the Warren Commission investigation concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old former Marine, acted alone in fatally shooting Kennedy as his motorcade finished a parade route in downtown Dallas on 22 November 1963.

Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who chairs the task force, said last month that she wants to work with writers and researchers to help solve “one of the biggest cold case files in US history.”  

Stone’s JFK was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, and won two. It grossed more than $200 million but was also dogged by questions about its factuality.

The last formal congressional investigation of Kennedy’s assassination ended in 1978, when a House committee issued a report concluding that the Soviet Union, Cuba, organized crime, the CIA and the FBI weren’t involved, but Kennedy “probably was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”

In 1976, a Senate committee said it had not uncovered enough evidence “to justify a conclusion that there was a conspiracy.”

The Warren Commission, appointed by Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, concluded that Oswald fired on Kennedy’s motorcade from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

Police arrested Oswald within 90 minutes, and two days later, Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast on live television.