The article can be found here.
What follows is COPA director John Judge’s response to the piece.
Beginning in 1964, newsman and Midlothian (TX)Mirror editor Penn Jones, Jr. and early critic of the Warren Commission’s conclusion of a lone gunman, began a vigil and a Moment on Silence on the Grassy Knoll to commemorate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and to remind the public that the case was still unsolved, that the evidence led to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that the government and press were still covering up the reality of that political murder.
I stood with Penn Jones for almost all of the years that followed, sometimes with only a handful of people present. The crowds swelled after the release of Oliver Stone’s film, JFK to hundreds, and on the 40th anniversary there were 5,000 people in Dealey Plaza. Penn fell ill with Altzheimer’s and when he was unable to carry on the tradition, he asked me to keep the Moment of Silence alive, which I have done each year, as a legally permitted event.
In 1994 I co-founded the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) which sponsors the Moment of Silence and holds an annual conference in a hotel near the site, bringing the best new forensic, medical, and documenatry evidence and research into the murders of JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X, among others. Our organization was formed to push for implementation of the JFK Assassination Recores Act, which to date has released over 6.5 million classified pages about JFK’s administration and death, rewriting the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs and the assassination itself.
We were on the Grassy Knoll again this year, along with some unpermitted events, but we are not mentioned in your reportage as the initiator of the event and this tradition. The Dallas Morning News and other press are welcome to cover our conferences. Your reporters should not be surprised that there is a substantial public presence at the site of Kennedy’s assassination each year, since in the mind of the majority of Americans, the case has yet to be resolved and the damage done to the country reverberates into the current policies and crises that we face.
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