Monday, December 19, 2022

What are they still hiding?

Under the JFK records act, all documents related to the assassination were supposed to be released by 2017. But then-President Donald Trump delayed the full publication of all records and ultimately left it in the hands of Biden, who in 2021 delayed full release until Thursday, only to do so again.

[...]

Biden’s administration released more than 13,000 records of President John F. Kennedy's assassination Thursday, but it fell short of fully complying with the spirit of a 30-year-old law demanding transparency by now.

With Thursday's action, about 98% of all documents related to the 1963 killing have now been released and just 3% of the records remain redacted in whole or in part.

[...]

“We’re 59 years after President John Kennedy was killed and there’s just no justification for this,” said Judge John H. Tunheim, who from 1994-98 chaired the Assassination Records Review Board that was established Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which Biden voted for when it passed Congress unanimously.

Among the documents that remain largely hidden: 44 related to a shadowy CIA agent, George Joannides, and a covert Cuba-related program he ran that came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald less than four months before Kennedy was shot, according to calculations made by JFK researchers with the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the nation’s largest nonprofit repository of the assassination records, which sued the administration to make all the documents public. The foundation says the CIA is withholding most of the records at issue.

  NBC
Of course they are. It's the CIA.
"We’re talking about over 87,000 documents originally included in the JFK Act collection," the agency said. "And as of today, CIA has completely disclosed more than 84,000 of those to the public without any redactions. That amounts to about more than 95% of those documents, released in full."
So, not all.  (There are lawsuits ongoing to get everything released. Don't hold your breath.)
[T]hose records that remain secret are expected to be the most interesting to researchers, involving government contacts with Oswald.

[...]

As Oswald interacted with DRE and became known as an activist who supported President Castro, the Pentagon was formulating a plan called Operation Northwoods to stage a false flag attack in the United States to blame on Cuba and justify a military confrontation to make up for the aborted Bay of Pigs fiasco two years before.

The foundation seeks those Operation Northwoods records in its lawsuit, as well as records concerning CIA plans to assassinate Castro and a June 30, 1961, memo from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to JFK to reorganize the agency after Bay of Pigs.

Jefferson Morley, a JFK expert and vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, said a spot check of the Thursday files showed that the memo was still "largely redacted."

"If the CIA can't bring itself to release a document written two years before the assassination — a memo that is obviously critical of the CIA — you have to question their good faith in whether they are complying with the law," he said.

[...]

[The CIA] appointed Joannides as an agency liaison to investigators, which impeded the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation, its general counsel, G. Robert Blakey, told Miami New Times in 2001. Tunheim agreed.

“They said his files shouldn’t be released because it didn’t relate to anything related to the assassination because he wasn’t involved. That clearly wasn’t true at all,” Tunheim said. “His information is highly relevant, and if we had it at the time, we would have released it. And the fact they haven’t released it leads people to think they have something to hide. It just suggests there’s something to hide.”

[...]

“Calling for further delays and redactions for six decades-old documents around the most important of issues in American history — the murder of a president inside our borders — doesn’t just raise additional suspicions, it borders on tacit admission by the agency that something's very rotten at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia[,” Amandi told NBC News.]
You think?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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