The government of Joe Biden published this Thursday another batch of secret government files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy59 years after his death and more than five years after the law originally required the documents to be publicly disclosed.
The tranche of documents, (13,173)was recently published by the National Archives and Records Administration of the USA after the president Joe Biden issued a memorandum.
“The profound national tragedy of the assassination of president kennedy continues to resonate in American history and in the memory of so many Americans who were alive on that terrible day; meanwhile, the need to protect records about the assassination has weakened over time,” Biden wrote in the memo.
“Therefore, it is critical to ensure that the government of the USA maximize transparency by disclosing all information in the records related to the murder, except where the strongest possible reasons advise otherwise.”
Kennedy’s assassination, and the subsequent withholding of government documents related to his death, generated Conspiracy theories for almost six decades, particularly around the gunslinger Lee Harvey Oswald. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone when he killed the president on November 22, 1963, and that there was no conspiracy.
A large part of the documents released Thursday belonged to the INC. Several focused on Oswald’s movements, his contacts, and even if it really was his signature on an application for Cuban visa. Other documents focus on requests from the Warren Commission.
One document, dated June 22, 1962, notes that Oswald was mentioned in a recent article in the Washington Post as a deserter to the Soviet Unionindicating that Oswald was on the CIA’s radar for more than a year before Kennedy was assassinated.
“A former Marine sergeant from Fort WorthTexas, who defected to the USSR three years ago, recently left Moscow together with his young son and his wife born in Russia bound for the United States,” the document says.
A December 1963 document described how CIA officials in the Mexico City They “intercepted a phone call” that Oswald made in October from that city to the Soviet embassy there “using his own name” and speaking “broken Russian.”
Oswald, according to the document, had visited the embassy before and claimed that someone promised “to send a telegram from him to Washington.” On the call, Oswald asked if there was “anything new.”
The 23-page document goes on to say: “Our Mexico City station often produces information like this about US citizens contacting Soviet-bloc embassies in Mexico City. Often the information we get is extremely incriminating.”
Another document, dated September 1964 and marked secret, described US officials discussing Oswald and his assassination. The official, Felix Dmitreevich Karasevsaid he believed it was impossible for the gunman, Jack Rubywould have killed Oswald “without the help of some US officials,” according to the document.
The official, in helsinkihe went on to write: “We tried to discredit this impression, but Karasev stood by his views.”
With Thursday’s release, 95 percent of the documents in the collection of records from the murder of jfk The CIA documents will have been released in their entirety, a CIA spokesperson said in a statement, and no documents will remain redacted or retained in their entirety after “an intensive one-year review.” of all the unpublished information.
“We have made great progress in our review of the CIA’s collection of records. We are talking about more than 87,000 documents originally included in the collection of the JFK Lawthe spokesman said, speaking on condition of anonymity before the release of the documents.
The CIA spokesman justified the continuation of redaction of some documents, saying they contain information detailing CIA intelligence sources and methods, some dating to the late 1990s, provided to help provide context on CIA methods and terminology.
“The CIA believes that all of its information known to be directly related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 has already been released,” the spokesperson said.
On initial review, the documents that were released appeared to contain no explosive new evidence of the decades-long murder and the devastating consequences that followed.
Rather, many of the documents seemed to summarize stories that referenced the murder that shocked the world, or showed how officials responded to news questions (“warning that their scoop may, in fact, be old news”). At least one document recalled how a low-level government employee mistakenly believed that the Oswald documents had been altered.
Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all assassination records were required to have been publicly released within 25 years, or by October 2017, but postponements were allowed in cases where the national security concerns outweighed public interest in disclosure.
President donald trump in 2017 he announced that he planned to publicly release the remaining JFK files, only to delay the release of some of the files for national security reasons, setting a new deadline of October 26, 2021. In 2018, Trump ended up authorizing the release of 19,045 documents, about three quarters of which still contained some redactions.
Originally, all the remaining JFK files were supposed to have been released last October. Biden postponed that planned release, citing delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, announcing that they would instead be released in two batches: one on December 15, 2021, and another on December 15, 2022, after undergoing a “ intensive 1-year review”.
“The temporary continuing postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or foreign relations conduct that is of such severity that it outweighs the public interest in prompt disclosure,” Biden said last October.
The decision angered JFK investigators, who accused the Biden administration of using the pandemic as an excuse for the government to obstruct the public yet again, noting that nearly 60 years had passed since Kennedy was assassinated.
“It’s strange. It’s been almost 60 years since my uncle’s death,” he said. robert kennedy jr. a NBCNews in October. “What are they hiding?”
The CIA spokesman on Thursday rejected claims that the agency is withholding information related to Oswald.
“The CIA believes that all material information known to be directly related to Oswald has been released. The few remaining newsrooms protect the names of CIA employees, sources, locations and CIA commerce,” the spokesperson said. “Similarly, we are not aware of any documents known to be directly related to Oswald that have not yet been part of the Collection.”
Jefferson Morley, former editor of the Washington Post and vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, who sued the Biden administration in October over the delayed release, said his group was particularly interested in looking at a batch of “30 to 40 important documents with redactions” that had been released previously and comparing them to what would be released on Thursday. in the 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 “CIA President Reorganization Memorandum.” Until Thursday, it remained partially redacted. “What the CIA has withheld,” Morley said, is whether the CIA had “an operational interest in Oswald” at the time of the assassination.
In a memo Thursday, Biden said that until May 1, 2023, the National Archives and relevant agencies will “jointly review any remaining redactions in the records.” After that review process, “any information withheld from public release that is not proposed by agencies for continued deferral” will be released by June 30, 2023.
(c) 2022, The Washington Post
Keep reading:
Strange “slow crash” in Texas: the moment a fighter plane crashes and its pilot ejects from the cockpit
Russia’s once fearsome elite brigade was utterly destroyed in Ukraine
Living and dying in Tijuana, the “fentanyl capital” of Mexico
Source-www.infobae.com