JFK files offer a treasure trove of answers
TRUMP FOLDS UNDER PRESSURE OF INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES, GRUDGINGLY GIVES THEM UNTIL APRIL 26 TO REVIEW PENDING PAPERS
Trump bows to pressure from CIA and FBI by withholding thousands of additional papers |
US President Donald Trump ordered the long-awaited release on Thursday of more than 2,800 documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but bowed to pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) by withholding thousands of additional papers pending six more months of review.
While incomplete, the documents represented a treasure trove for investigators, historians and conspiracy theorists who have spent half a century searching for clues to what really happened in Dallas on that fateful day in 1963. They included tantalising talk of mobsters and Cubans and spies, Kremlin suspicions that President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the killing, and fear among authorities that the public would not accept the official version of events.
Paging through the documents online on Thursday night was a little like exploring a box of random papers found in an attic. There were fuzzy images of CIA surveillance photos from the early 1960s; a log from December 1963 of visitors coming and going from Johnson’s ranch in Texas; and a report that Lee Harvey Oswald obtained ammunition from a right-wing militia group.
The message
Some of the documents convey some of the drama and chaos of the days immediately after the murder of the president. Among them is a memo apparently dictated by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, on November 24, 1963, shortly after Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as he was being moved from police headquarters to a local jail.
“There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead,” the memo begins laconically, before reciting the day’s events. Trump, who has indulged in his own wild speculation about the sensational killing, had expressed eagerness to finally open the last of the government files, only to run into a last-minute campaign by intelligence agencies to redact certain documents. Grudgingly, he gave the agencies until April 26 to go through the remaining papers again and make their case.
“I am ordering today that the veil finally be lifted,” Trump said in a memo to the agencies. Given their objections, he said, “I have no choice, today, but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation’s security.”
But he ordered the agencies to “be extremely circumspect,” noting that the rationale for secrecy has only “grown weaker with the passage of time.”
For conspiracy theorists, the Kennedy assassination has provided much fodder and produced an endless string of books, reports, lectures, articles, websites, documentaries and bigscreen Hollywood movies.
Every government authority that has examined the investigation of his death concluded that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, but that has never satisfied the doubters, and polls have consistently shown that most Americans still believe that someone other than Oswald was involved.
Of the 2,891 documents released, just 53 had never been disclosed by the archives. The documents will not end the debate or speculation — and a few may add to the questions.
In a 1975 deposition, for example, Richard Helms, the former CIA director, was asked: “Is there any information involved with the assassination of President Kennedy which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent or an agen...”
The document ends there, and Helms’ answer is missing.