The final cache of secret JFK
records set for release this year
By James Eli Shiffer Star Tribune
MAY 2, 2017
[BILL KELLY WILL ANNOTATE THIS ARTICLE AT ANDREW'S REQUST]
Chief U.S. District Judge John
Tunheim of Minnesota, who led an effort to release JFK records, expects some
insights, but no big revelations.
Weeks before he murdered President
John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald traveled to Mexico City and
visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in search of a visa.
[DEAR JAMES, THANK YOU FOR TAKING AN INTEREST IN THIS SUBJECT, BUT THERE ARE SOME MISTAKES THAT NEED CORRECTING, BEGINNING WITH THE FACT THAT LEE HARVEY OSWALD DIDN'T MURDER PRESIDENT KENNEDY, WAS NOT ON THE SIXTH FLOOR AT THE TIME OF THE SHOOTING, WAS WHAT HE CLAIMED TO BE A PATSY, AND THE PROPER JOURNALIST WOULD REFER TO HIM AS THE 'ACCUSED ASSASSIN.' THE SIXTH FLOOR SNIPER WHO WORE A WHITE SHIRT (OSWALD WORE BROWN) AND HAD A BALD SPOT WILL SOMEDAY BE POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED AND OSWALD WILL BE EXONERATED.]
[DEAR JAMES, THANK YOU FOR TAKING AN INTEREST IN THIS SUBJECT, BUT THERE ARE SOME MISTAKES THAT NEED CORRECTING, BEGINNING WITH THE FACT THAT LEE HARVEY OSWALD DIDN'T MURDER PRESIDENT KENNEDY, WAS NOT ON THE SIXTH FLOOR AT THE TIME OF THE SHOOTING, WAS WHAT HE CLAIMED TO BE A PATSY, AND THE PROPER JOURNALIST WOULD REFER TO HIM AS THE 'ACCUSED ASSASSIN.' THE SIXTH FLOOR SNIPER WHO WORE A WHITE SHIRT (OSWALD WORE BROWN) AND HAD A BALD SPOT WILL SOMEDAY BE POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED AND OSWALD WILL BE EXONERATED.]
Documents that show what the
government knows about that 1963 trip have been kept secret for more than 50
years. Now, these records are among the remaining sealed documents about
the JFK assassination set for release in coming months.
[NOT ALL OF THE MEXICO AND RUSSIAN DOCUMENTS ARE IN THE COLLECTION - AND THEY ARE BEING WITHHELD BY THE GOVERNMENTS OF MEXICO AND RUSSIA - SEE THE TRANSCRIPT OF JUDGE TUNHEIM'S CAPA REMARKS FOR DETAILS.]
[NOT ALL OF THE MEXICO AND RUSSIAN DOCUMENTS ARE IN THE COLLECTION - AND THEY ARE BEING WITHHELD BY THE GOVERNMENTS OF MEXICO AND RUSSIA - SEE THE TRANSCRIPT OF JUDGE TUNHEIM'S CAPA REMARKS FOR DETAILS.]
Unless President Donald Trump
intervenes to stop them, the National Archives will make available tens of
thousands of pages of previously unseen records on or before Oct. 26. That’s 25
years to the day President George H.W. Bush signed the John F. Kennedy Assassination
Records Collection Act, which created a five-member board that reviewed
and released millions of pages of records before it disbanded in 1998.
[TRUMP CAN ONLY INTERVENE TO STOP THE RELEASE IF AGENCIES PETITION HIM TO CONTINUE TO WITHHOLD THEM, OTHERWISE THEY AUTOMATICALLY WITH BE RELEASED.]
[TRUMP CAN ONLY INTERVENE TO STOP THE RELEASE IF AGENCIES PETITION HIM TO CONTINUE TO WITHHOLD THEM, OTHERWISE THEY AUTOMATICALLY WITH BE RELEASED.]
One of the main advocates for
disclosing the files is the chairman of the panel, John Tunheim, the chief
federal district judge for Minnesota.
Those expecting revelations about
the “grassy knoll” or mobster ties to Oswald are likely to be disappointed.
[THERE WILL BE BOMBSHELL INFORMATION AS SUCH BOMBS HAVE ALREADY BEEN RELEASED, BUT THEY PROBABLY WON'T BE ABOUT LEE HARVEY OSWALD - THE PATSY WHO HAD LITTLE TO DO WITH THE ACTUAL OPERATION OTHER THAN PROVIDE A RABBIT FOR INVESTIGATORS TO CHASE. OZZIE RABBIT.]
Questions are likely to remain about
Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico City in the weeks before the assassination.
The Kennedy assassination set off
intense and enduring conspiracy theories, spawning countless books, articles
and even Oliver Stone’s motion picture “JFK,” which Tunheim said drove
Congress to pass the JFK records act to set the record straight.
Even Trump has taken part. During
the campaign, he pointed several times to an article in the National
Enquirer that linked Oswald to the father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a former GOP
rival.
The story was based on a photo that
claimed to show Cruz’s father, Rafael, passing out pro-Cuba leaflets with
Oswald. Cruz and his father have always said the man is someone else.
Tunheim said the government’s
secrecy surrounding the records of the assassination damaged the public’s
confidence in the Warren Commission, whose conclusion that Oswald acted
alone was tainted by obstruction from the CIA.
The controversy over the Warren
Commission “kind of sent us down a path of losing trust in government,” Tunheim
said. “The release of information could have moderated that, and they wouldn’t
do it.”
Through the mid-1990s, the panel led
by Tunheim exercised its extraordinary powers to collect and examine the vast
quantities of records held by the FBI, CIA, State Department and many other
agencies and private sources. It turned over about 5 million pages to the National
Archives. About 11 percent remain partly secret. About 1 percent — or 3,600
files — have been completely withheld, after agencies argued they still could
affect national security.
Some secrets will remain
“Details about our cooperation with
the Mexican government, details about how we gathered intelligence that was
still being used, the location of CIA stations, some of those things were
protected and would be in these releases,” Tunheim said.
The documents are still likely to
feed the seemingly insatiable appetite of JFK scholars and assassination buffs.
In September and October 1963,
Oswald went to Mexico City and tried unsuccessfully to obtain visas to enter
Cuba or the Soviet Union. The CIA learned of Oswald’s activities, but the House
Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that communications failures
within the CIA prevented word of the Mexico City trip from reaching the FBI,
which was also tracking Oswald.
Tunheim noted that the CIA
investigation of the assassination was taken over after two weeks by James
Angleton, who left no papers on it when he was forced out of the agency in the
1970s. “That whole Mexico City part of the story is still very strange,”
Tunheim said.
[LOOKING FORWARD TO JEFF MORLEY'S BIO OF ANGLETON COMING SOON]
“I think Oswald was the only shooter
that day. Whether he had discussions with anyone in advance, that was relevant
to the assassination, that could have been the basis for a conspiracy, I don’t
know if we’ll ever know that for sure,” he said. “That’s fair game for
researchers to try to figure out.”
Tunheim said he also hoped to see
the release of the personnel file of George Joannides, which the CIA has
fought in court to keep secret for years. Joannides was the liaison between the
CIA and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s, and the JFK
records panel agreed in the 1990s to keep the file secret.
“It turned out no one knew, it
wasn’t disclosed to us, no one knew until a good reporter figured it out a
decade later that [Joannides] was in charge of the Miami station that would
have interacted with anti-Castro Cubans before the Bay of Pigs,” Tunheim said.
Had the CIA disclosed that information, the panel would have moved to release
the file, he said.
JFKcountercoup: Judge John Tunheim - CAPA Sunshine Week at NPC
JFKCountercoup2: Judge Tunheim on the Moscow and Mexico City Assassination Records
JFKcountercoup: Judge John Tunheim - CAPA Sunshine Week at NPC
JFKCountercoup2: Judge Tunheim on the Moscow and Mexico City Assassination Records
In March, Tunheim gave the keynote
speech before a meeting of the Citizens Against Political Assassinations,
a group that has argued for the release of all records. Its chairman, forensic
pathologist Cyril Wecht, does not believe the Warren Commission’s
conclusion, and believes that the release of the final JFK records will offer
insight into what he describes as a “coup d’état in America.”
“Why would all of these documents
have been withheld, if there isn’t anything of any consequence?” Wecht said.
The White House has not said whether
Trump plans to release the documents.
[AS STATED, TRUMP CANNOT PLAN TO RELEASE THE DOCUMENTS, HE CAN ONLY WITHHOLD THEM AN ONLY DO THAT IF THE AGENCIES REQUEST THEY CONTINUE TO BE WITHHELD.]
[AS STATED, TRUMP CANNOT PLAN TO RELEASE THE DOCUMENTS, HE CAN ONLY WITHHOLD THEM AN ONLY DO THAT IF THE AGENCIES REQUEST THEY CONTINUE TO BE WITHHELD.]
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