The Central Intelligence Agency implicated itself in the 1963 murder of President Kennedy and its ongoing cover-up, according to experts who have spoken out recently.

Former congressional investigator Robert Tanenbaum, right, said he and his boss quit the last official probe of JFK’s murder in 1978 because Congress was too frightened of the CIA’s power to permit a probe of the agency’s suspicious actions.

Those actions included, he said, implicating Lee Harvey Oswald in a fictitious Communist plot against JFK. The CIA apparently concocted evidence in October 1963 that an Oswald imposter plotted with Soviet and Cuban embassy personnel in Mexico City to kill the president later in the year.

Why?

Tanenbaum, a former top prosecutor in New York City and now a best-selling crime novelist, described why he and his boss, noted Philadelphia trial lawyer Richard Sprague, resigned from the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in disgust at the cover-up of the nation’s most important murder of modern times.

Tanenbaum, shown above right, spoke eloquently on the topic during a recent conference about the assassination I that attended at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

C-SPAN cablecast his talk beginning Nov. 29 on what is now must-see TV for anyone who cares about modern public affairs or true-crime at the highest level of drama.

Today’s column – the ninth in our “JFK Murder Readers Guide” series – treats topics that should be part of any credible discussion of blame for Kennedy’s murder 50 years ago.

I am not trying to assert detailed, final conclusions. Evidence of murder complicity by members of an organization does not mean guilt at the top, of course. Similarly, those engaged in cover-up are not necessarily the perpetrators of a crime.

Those vital details are addressed in many official reports and some 2,000 books on the JFK murder, including more than a hundred in 2013 alone. Much work remains, most importantly regarding the serious implications for the Obama administration and today’s public that I chronicle in my new book, Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters.

Instead of conclusions, I urge here only that readers who want seriously to consider the Warren Commission’s findings get familiar with the eight topics below. The headlines are in bold if you have time to read only the headlines and not the explanatory material.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media and top government leaders typically duck each of these issues. They are thus able to remain almost entirely unified behind the Warren Commission’s findings, as evident in coverage of the murder’s 50th anniversary this fall.

The general public seems to understand the self-censorship in the coverage. Polling has shown for many years that most Americans doubt the findings of the seven-member Warren Commission.

Chaired by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, the commission sought to reassure the public that guilt fell only on Oswald, whom they portrayed as a mentally unbalanced, pro-Marxist killer acting alone. The script followed the Justice Department’s advice to the White House immediately after the killing, as indicated here, as well as the State Department’s “Propaganda Notes” on Sept. 24, 1964 that provided secret guidance to insiders on how to mock critics of the Warren Commission.

The most trusted names in news continue now to stick to simple name-calling against critics, as evident in previous segments in this series and the overwhelming bulk of recent news coverage of the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder.