27 October 2017

JFK, fifty years on

Yahoo has an article by Adam Kelsey and Jack Date of Good Morning America about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

The National Archives released nearly three thousand previously classified or redacted records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Thursday, but will withhold some of the records due to national security concerns, according to a memo from President Donald Trump.
The documents related to the investigation into Kennedy's murder, consisting of files from the CIA, the FBI, the Defense and State departments, and other agencies, were scheduled to be released 25 years after the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The law called for the records to be made available based on the approval of the then-President.
The newly released documents illustrated the broad swath of the probe that included memos about Communist sympathizers, anti-Fidel Castro activities, and US intelligence assets offering information on Cuba. Still others discussed investigative leads about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s travels, including a trip to Mexico before the assassination, which has long generated speculation about who he may have met with.
One memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover details information from a source within the USSR on the Soviet reaction to Kennedy's death. The source says the news was met with "great shock and consternation and church bells were tolled in the memory of President Kennedy". The Soviets were shocked by the development, and preferred Kennedy as the head of the American government. The Soviet Communist Party believed the assassination was an "ultraright" act and in effect a "coup". The source also said the Soviets immediately began instructing their agents to gather information on the new president, Lyndon Johnson.
Another Hoover memo, dictated on 24 November 1963 just hours after Jack Ruby shot Oswald, says the FBI had sent an agent to the hospital hoping for a confession from Oswald before he died. After not getting that confession, the memo illustrates Hoover's urgent desire to have "something issued so that we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin."
A document memorializing information obtained by the CIA said that "circumstances already developed here point to possibility that Oswald may have been Castro’s agent. Mexicans are also keenly aware of the possibility." A note in the margin makes clear that the source of that information is unknown, and the information "varies" from at least one other account.
It is important to remember many of the documents contain raw intelligence information that is uncorroborated, but will surely fuel further speculation about the plot. It is also worth noting that the total collection contains more than five million records, and any single document should be examined in that context.
Trump issued a memo to the heads of executive departments certifying declassification on Thursday, but also noted that some expressed reservations and therefore ordered that Federal agencies be given 180 days to re-review whether certain documents related to national security require continued redaction or withholding.
"Executive departments and agencies have proposed to me that certain information should continue to be redacted because of national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns," reads the memo from Trump. "I have no choice today but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation's security. To further address these concerns, I am also ordering agencies to re-review each and every one of those redactions over the next 180 days."
The three thousand records that were released were posted on the National Archives' website, with more expected to be made public following the review.
Trump said on Twitter Friday that the files are being "carefully released", but his hope to get "just about everything to the public."
The vast majority of records related to the assassination, roughly ninety percent, have been available since the late 1990s, with an additional ten percent of the documents released, with redactions, since then.
Rico says he remembers it like it was yesterday...

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