The Full Release of the JFK Files Could Only Harm the Dead
On Thursday, the National Archives released what they say are the last documents in their possession related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This was trumpeted as the final fulfillment of the president's order to come clean. Except, as we all have come to know over several decades, that doesn't mean we know everything or that we have all the information the U.S. government has about the assassination. From the Guardian:
All of the remaining JFK files were originally supposed to have been released in October 2021. Biden postponed that planned release, citing delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and announced they would be instead disclosed in two batches: one on 15 December 2021, and another by 15 December 2022, after undergoing an intensive one-year review. With Thursday’s release, 95% of the documents in the CIA’s JFK assassination records collection will have been released in their entirety, a CIA spokesperson said in a statement, and no documents will remain redacted or withheld in full after an “intensive one-year review” of all previously unreleased information.
“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.
This latest review will presumably encompass the 515 documents that were fully withheld from release and the nearly 2,500 documents that were partially withheld. The fine hand of the CIA is still at work. From the Washington Post:
Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post staff writer and the vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation — which sued the Biden administration in October over the delay of the release — said his group was particularly interested in looking at a batch of “30 to 40 significant documents with redactions” that had been released previously, and comparing them to what would be released Thursday afternoon. Morley said he was not encouraged by Thursday’s release and felt the CIA was not acting in “good faith” to release all available information. Morley cited a 15-page document from 1961 — two years before the assassination — from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Kennedy titled “Memo to President CIA Reorganization.” As of Thursday, it remained partially redacted. “What the CIA has hidden,” Morley said, is whether the CIA had “operational interest in Oswald” at the time of the assassination.
I'm with the judge. There is no conceivable reason for the CIA to withhold any documents or to redact much of anything, for that matter. Anyone whose career might suffer from the revelations is likely long dead. And if there is proof that Oswald was the subject of the agency's "operational interest," what difference does it make? A majority of the American people have consistently rejected the Warren Commission's findings almost since they were released, and we've all made peace with that belief and gone on with our lives. Seeing it on paper isn't going to matter anymore.
From: Esquire US
