Latest news with #AssassinationRecordsCollectionActof1992
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Oliver Stone calls on Congress to reopen JFK assassination investigation
Filmmaker Oliver Stone on Tuesday called for Congress to reopen the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Stone is testifying before a House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets hearing on the release of recently declassified records of the investigation into the Kennedy assassination. Stone took aim at the Central Intelligence Agency, calling it a tax-funded agency that "arrogantly believes it is outside our laws" and that "nothing of importance has been revealed by the CIA in all these years." He asked, "Can we return to a world where our government can level with us," and tell the truth? Stone's 1991 film "JFK" focused on the work of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who conducted an independent investigation of the assassination, resulting in his failed prosecution of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, who Garrison alleged was involved in a CIA conspiracy to kill the president. The film was a commercial and critical success, grossing $205 million and winning two Academy Awards. The film is credited with popularizing conspiracy theories of FBI and CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination. The film was credited by the Assassination Records Review Board as being at least partially responsible for the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. Stone testified before Congress in support of the bill. The act mandated the release of all documents related to the assassination by 2017, though that timeline was delayed several times. The film's release also coincided with an increased degree of public skepticism in the Warren Commission's findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of Kennedy. Gallup polling has consistently shown that a majority of Americans has consistently believed more than one person was responsible for the assassination. The number believing the official conclusion of a lone gunman saw a sharp decline in the 1970s and 1980s, reaching an all-time low of 10% in 1992. Stone has long been active in politics, largely supporting Democratic candidates and has been a vocal supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He has been the subject of criticism for statements that have been perceived as supportive of Russian President Vladimir Putin. he took aim at the cia calling it a tax funded agency that "arrogantly believes it is outside our laws" and that "nothing of importance has been revealed by the cia in all these years". He asked "can we return to a world where our government can level with us" and tell us the truth. Oliver Stone calls on Congress to reopen JFK assassination investigation originally appeared on
Atlantic
22-03-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
What the JFK File Dump Actually Revealed
In 1962, the CIA had a driver's license made for one of its officers, James P. O'Connell. It gave him an alias: James Paul Olds. We know this because the document containing the information was released to the public in 2017—part of an effort to declassify information related to John F. Kennedy's assassination. But now, thanks to an executive order from President Donald Trump calling for the release of all the classified information pertaining to the incident, we know a bit more. It was, specifically, a California driver's license. This is an irrelevant detail in an irrelevant document. As far as anyone knows, O'Connell had nothing to do with the assassination; the inclusion of his story was probably just a by-product of an overly broad records request. But there it was on Tuesday evening, when the National Archives and Record Administration uploaded to its website about 63,400 pages of 'JFK Assassination Records.' Given Trump's order, the release of all this information sounded dramatic, but much of what has been revealed is about as interesting as that driver's-license detail. Many of these documents were already public with minor redactions, and many of them have almost nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination and never did. This is why the Assassination Records Review Board, which processed them in the 1990s, labeled so many of them 'Not Believed Relevant.' Hundreds of thousands of such documents have been released since the '90s, including thousands released during Trump's first term and the Biden administration. (This is thanks to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which was passed in response to overwhelming public interest in the case after the release of the Oliver Stone movie JFK.) But one of Trump's 2024 campaign promises was to release all the rest; he said that it was 'time for the American people to know the TRUTH!' His health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—John Kennedy's nephew—has been animated about the issue and framed the secrecy around the last files as evidence to support his conspiratorial view of history. There are still some documents that the Archives could not make public, because they are subject to IRS privacy laws or because they come from sealed grand-jury proceedings. These may come out eventually, but they will likely follow the same drip, drip, drip as all the rest. It seems possible that the public's curiosity will never be fully satisfied, at least in my lifetime. A new batch will always come out, but there will always be something left. I'm one of the people who cares a lot about the Kennedy assassination. I'm currently finishing a book about the case. On principle, and out of selfish personal interest, I agree that the government should make all of the documents public if it can. Of course I scanned this new batch to see whether there was anything exciting. There wasn't, but some of it was kind of funny. In many cases, the removed redactions reveal proper nouns that a reader could have easily inferred before or that seem totally inconsequential. For instance, there is a 1974 memo about the Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt's history with the CIA. A previously released version of the document mentions that the Office of Finance had asked a CIA station whether Hunt had received payments from it while he was living in Madrid. We did not know which station had been asked. Now we know it was the Madrid station. (Wow!) A 1977 document about the New York Times reporter Tad Szulc includes a rumor about Szulc being a Communist; in previous versions of the document, this information was 'apparently from a [REDACTED] source.' With the redaction removed, we now know that it was 'apparently from a British source.' Some of it was less funny. The files also contain the unredacted personal information—including Social Security numbers—of dozens of people, seemingly published accidentally, though the National Archives site now suggests this was an inevitable result of the transparency effort. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged the problem to The New York Times on Thursday, saying, 'At the request of the White House, the National Archives and the Social Security Administration immediately put together an action plan to proactively help individuals whose personal information was released in the files.' The National Archives did not respond to my request for comment. In my scan, I came across the late-'70s personnel files of dozens of staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, all of which contained Social Security numbers. A good number of those people are likely still alive. The document dump contains the Social Security number of a journalist who was active in the anti-war movement during the '60s. There are, by my count, 19 documents about his personal life and employment history; none of the documents about him appears to have the faintest relevance to the assassination. Bizarrely, the new release also contains an unredacted arrest record for a Dealey Plaza witness who testified in front of the Warren Commission in 1964. This record—for the alleged theft of a car in 1970—has nothing whatsoever to do with the assassination of President Kennedy. Yet it is reproduced in full and it includes the man's Social Security number and a full set of his fingerprints. From the February 1964 issue: A eulogy for John F. Kennedy Relatively few of the documents even mention Kennedy. I saw only one addressed to him: a June 30, 1961, memo from his special assistant, confidant, and eventual biographer, Arthur Schlesinger about the growing power of the CIA. Most of it has been public since 2018, but the version released on Tuesday removed a final redaction about the agency's extensive use of State Department jobs as cover for its agents. Schlesinger informed Kennedy that about 1,500 CIA agents abroad had State-provided cover stories at the time—too many, in his opinion; he wrote that 'the effect is to further the CIA encroachment on the traditional functions of State.' The Paris embassy had 128 CIA people in it at the time, he added as an example. 'CIA occupies the top floor of the Paris Embassy, a fact well known locally; and on the night of the Generals' revolt in Algeria, passersby noted with amusement that the top floor was ablaze with lights.' Again, this is at best 'kind of interesting' and at most trivia. It doesn't meaningfully affect the historical understanding of President Kennedy's tense relationship with the CIA, which is very well documented elsewhere. After decades of releases, it may be that these are the only kinds of secrets the Archives still hold about the Kennedy assassination—tiny bits of color on things that are already well understood and boring details about people whose connections to the event are minimal if they even exist. But there's no way to know until we see everything … if we see everything, if we ever can. Even then, when the count of secret things ticks down to zero, how will we know that was really, really all? We won't, of course. We never will.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Latest batch of JFK assassination documents show Kennedy's distrust of the CIA
The newly released tranche of documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy includes a memo that for decades helped fuel speculation that the CIA was somehow involved in the killing of the president. Known as the Schlesinger Memo, the 15-page document, dated June 10, 1961, was written by JFK's aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It warned Kennedy that the CIA was encroaching on his ability to direct foreign policy. The memo's existence was not a secret, and it was made public earlier, but with large chunks of text blacked out for security reasons. The entire unredacted memo was one of the thousands of now-declassified documents that the National Archives and Records Administration released Tuesday on orders from President Donald Trump. As of Wednesday afternoon, about 69,000 of the 80,000 documents that Trump promised to release have been posted online. And if anybody was expecting to find proof in the memo that the CIA conspired with JFK's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to kill Kennedy, they will not find it. The information the government had blacked out had to do with CIA staffing, including the specific number of CIA operatives stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Paris and how they 'sought to monopolize contact with certain French political personalities," as well as the number of CIA sources in countries like Austria and Chile. Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter who runs the 'JFK Facts' blog and has been pressing the government for decades to release the records, was undeterred. 'There's a sensational story here that people need to know," Morley said in an MSNBC interview. "This is not a nothing-burger, as people will tell you. There is an amazingly interesting and pregnant story in these JFK files.' The memo and other documents are more evidence that Kennedy deeply mistrusted the CIA, which had Oswald under surveillance long before Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, Morley said. 'We got a memo yesterday about Kennedy's plans to reorganize the CIA, and a lot of that memo had been redacted before,' Morley said. 'We now understand why Kennedy mistrusted the CIA and a mistrust, to be sure, that was returned by CIA officers who did not like his liberal policies.' Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all the documents related to the assassination were supposed to have been released by 2017, when Trump was president the first time. Trump released some documents then, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the remaining files. It was not until December 2022 that President Joe Biden released more than 13,000 records after the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the country's largest nonprofit repository of JFK assassination records, sued the administration to make all of them public. Morley, who is affiliated with the foundation, said that in all the documents 'we see a new window into the CIA's pre-assassination surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald.' The late James Jesus Angleton, one of the founding members of the CIA, had put Oswald under surveillance starting in November 1959 and was 'monitoring his politics, his personal life, his foreign travels, his contacts,' Morley said. Angleton had a 180-page file 'on Oswald on his desk a week before Kennedy went to Dallas' in November 1963, Morley said, citing government documents that had been released earlier. 'So what this story raises is the question: Was the CIA incredibly, atrociously, incompetent when it comes to Lee Harvey Oswald, or was Angleton actually running an operation involving Oswald?' Morley said. 'We don't have the answer to that question because there's still some relevant records to come out. For example, one file of another CIA officer who was involved in the pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald is still kept secret. This is a great first start.' This article was originally published on
NBC News
19-03-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Latest batch of JFK assassination documents show Kennedy's distrust of the CIA
The newly released tranche of documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy includes a memo that for decades helped fuel speculation that the CIA was somehow involved in the killing of the president. Known as the Schlesinger Memo, the 15-page document, dated June 10, 1961, was written by JFK's aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It warned Kennedy that the CIA was encroaching on his ability to direct foreign policy. The memo's existence was not a secret, and it was made public earlier, but with large chunks of text blacked out for security reasons. The entire unredacted memo was one of the thousands of now-declassified documents that the National Archives and Records Administration released Tuesday on orders from President Donald Trump. As of Wednesday afternoon, about 69,000 of the 80,000 documents that Trump promised to release have been posted online. And if anybody was expecting to find proof in the memo that the CIA conspired with JFK's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to kill Kennedy, they will not find it. The information the government had blacked out had to do with CIA staffing, including the specific number of CIA operatives stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Paris and how they 'sought to monopolize contact with certain French political personalities," as well as the number of CIA sources in countries like Austria and Chile. Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter who runs the ' JFK Facts' blog and has been pressing the government for decades to release the records, was undeterred. 'There's a sensational story here that people need to know," Morley said in an MSNBC interview. "This is not a nothing-burger, as people will tell you. There is an amazingly interesting and pregnant story in these JFK files.' The memo and other documents are more evidence that Kennedy deeply mistrusted the CIA, which had Oswald under surveillance long before Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, Morley said. 'We got a memo yesterday about Kennedy's plans to reorganize the CIA, and a lot of that memo had been redacted before,' Morley said. 'We now understand why Kennedy mistrusted the CIA and a mistrust, to be sure, that was returned by CIA officers who did not like his liberal policies.' Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all the documents related to the assassination were supposed to have been released by 2017, when Trump was president the first time. Trump released some documents then, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the remaining files. It was not until December 2022 that President Joe Biden released more than 13,000 records after the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the country's largest nonprofit repository of JFK assassination records, sued the administration to make all of them public. Morley, who is affiliated with the foundation, said that in all the documents 'we see a new window into the CIA's pre-assassination surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald.' The late James Jesus Angleton, one of the founding members of the CIA, had put Oswald under surveillance starting in November 1959 and was 'monitoring his politics, his personal life, his foreign travels, his contacts,' Morley said. Angleton had a 180-page file 'on Oswald on his desk a week before Kennedy went to Dallas' in November 1963, Morley said, citing government documents that had been released earlier. 'So what this story raises is the question: Was the CIA incredibly, atrociously, incompetent when it comes to Lee Harvey Oswald, or was Angleton actually running an operation involving Oswald?' Morley said. 'We don't have the answer to that question because there's still some relevant records to come out. For example, one file of another CIA officer who was involved in the pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald is still kept secret. This is a great first start.'
NBC News
18-03-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Government releases latest batch of JFK assassination documents
More than 60 years after President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, the federal government began releasing what could be the final trove of documents delving into the assassination that shocked the nation and spawned countless conspiracy theories. The Justice Department's National Security Division on Tuesday started unveiling the long-awaited files a day after President Donald Trump announced that 80,000 pages related to the fatal Nov. 22, 1963, shooting were about to be released. 'You got a lot of reading,' Trump said while visiting the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 'I don't believe we're going to redact anything.' Trump was cagey about what would be in those files, but historians contend that there are around 4,700 documents that haven't yet been released. "The origins of the 80,000 pages of material are unknown," Jefferson Morley, an expert on the JFK assassination and the CIA, wrote on his JFK Facts blog. DOJ lawyers worked all night to review hundreds of pages of classified documents before they were released, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News. It remains to be seen whether this document drop will finally put to rest the widespread public skepticism of the government's official explanation of who killed Kennedy — a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald who fired the fatal shots from the Texas Schoolbook Depository. 'People have so many doubts,' presidential historian Michael Beschloss said. 'There are so many theories that are conflicting. It's very hard for me to imagine that there will be one piece of evidence that will make everyone agree on what happened here. What most people do agree is that the killing of John Kennedy changed history, and mainly in a bad way.' When Trump was campaigning last year and trying to win the endorsement of JFK's nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he renewed his promise to release the files. Hours after snagging RFK Jr.'s endorsement in August, Trump vowed that if elected, he would establish a commission on assassination attempts in honor of RFK Jr., who is now the Trump administration's secretary of Health and Human Services. Shortly after he began his second term, Trump signed an executive order mandating the release of all records related to President Kennedy's assassination, as well as the 1968 assassinations of RFK Jr.'s father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all the documents related to the assassination were supposed to be released by 2017, when Trump was president the first time. Trump released some JFK-related documents then, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the remaining files. It wasn't until December 2022 that President Joe Biden released more than 13,000 records after the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the nation's largest nonprofit repository of the JFK assassination records, sued the administration to make all the documents public. But Biden only released about 98% of all the documents related to the killing that remained in the National Archives, which controls the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. 'It's high time that the government got its act together and obeyed the spirit and the letter of the law,' Morley, who is also the vice president of the nonpartisan Mary Ferrell Foundation, said at the time. 'This is about our history and our right to know it,' said Morley. The 4,700 or so records that were kept under wraps were believed to have included more information on accused Oswald's sojourn in Mexico City before the JFK assassination. Among those documents were 44 related to then-CIA agent George Joannides and a covert Cuba-related program he ran that came into contact with Oswald less than four months before Kennedy was shot, according to calculations made by JFK researchers with the Mary Ferrell Foundation. In a memorandum explaining why some documents were not being released, Biden noted that the records act 'permits the continued postponement of disclosure of information ... only when postponement remains necessary to protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.' Prominent historians didn't buy that explanation. 'We're 59 years after President John Kennedy was killed and there's just no justification for this,' Judge John Tunheim, who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board from 1994 to 1998, said when Biden released the records.
