The Present State Of The Critical Community

[Don Jeffries]

Robert,

I appreciate your post and do find it encouraging.

I also still await Josiah Thompson's answers to the simple questions I asked him earlier. I know I'm not Jim Fetzer, and this is not about film alteration, but it would be nice if he'd participate. I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd value his input.

Edited April 27, 2009 by Don Jeffries

[Robert Howard]

While there seems to be a lull on this thread at the moment, I thought some Forum members would find it enlightening to see the reaction of the intelligence agencies, primarily the CIA and FBI, to the mandate that was given to the Assassination Records Review Board to implement a more timely declassification process, compared to the snail-like pace that had hitherto been the norm, while the time period in question is over a decade ago, there are still interesting elements to what was verbalized during this situation.....

Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) To fight the culture of secrecy, Congress established an independent Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) with extraordinary power—it had access to every record of every federal agency and the power to order release of documents over the objections of the agencies; only the president had the power to overrule the review board. Public access to the Kennedy assassination records thus has much stronger protection than the FOIA provides for other government documents.

Under the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, the entire process of identifying relevant documents, depositing them at the National Archives, and processing them for release was to be completed in 300 days. But the culture of secrecy delayed implementation of the new law. President Bush failed to appoint the review board members before leaving office. Although Congress had required their appointment before the end of January 1993, the Clinton administration delayed making nominations for almost a full year. The Senate confirmation hearings caused further delays, so the board was not sworn in until April 1994, eighteen months after passage of the act—and eight months after the date Congress had set as the deadline.

No federal agency met the congressional deadline for reviewing documents and conveying them to the National Archives, with the exception of the National Archives itself. Congress and the White House failed to appropriate funds for the review board for another seven months. No documents could be reviewed by the board staff until office space could be found with secure vaults for classified documents—vaults approved by the CIA. And the staff of twenty-five could not go to work until members had received security clearances from the FBI. Although Congress gave the ARRB the unprecedented power to release classified documents, something courts cannot do under the FOIA, the FBI and CIA argued strenuously against release. According to Anna K. Nelson, a historian at George Washington University who served on the review board, both the FBI and the CIA contended that the information they had gathered thirty years ago was as sensitive as information gathered three days ago. Both claimed that all their sources had to be protected, whether they were alive or dead, high-level spies or citizens volunteering information. Both agencies, Nelson writes, "expected the board to accept without question the rather generic explanations they offered" for withholding documents. Board members were "appalled at the agencies' seemingly irrational obsession" with protecting sources. 6

The CIA, Nelson writes, told the board that releasing its information about the Kennedy assassination would have dire consequences: "governments would fall, allies would be lost, and cooperation with other intelligence organizations would come to an end." Despite board members' protests, agency officials argued that "the accidental release of one word or phrase will not only kill countless people but also send the country to its knees." CIA and FBI officials required a line-by-line review of each of their documents. Almost four million pages were included in the collection when it was finally completed in 1998. 7

6. Anna Kasten Nelson, "The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board," in Theoharis, Culture of Secrecy, 221, 223.

7. Ibid., 224, 229; Tim Weiner, "A Blast at Secrecy in Kennedy Killing," New York Times, September 29, 1998. The review board had five members: John R. Tunheim, a federal district judge in Minnesota, who served as chair; Henry F. Graff, Columbia University historian; Kermit L. Hall, professor of history and law at Ohio State University; William L. Joyce, archivist at Princeton University; and Anna Kasten Nelson.

Source

pages 102-103 from Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files by Jon Wiener Publication: Berkeley, Calif. University of California Press, 1999.

After all these years, and the back to square one dichotomy that was a hallmark of the Bush Administration regarding the de-classification process, it seems that the ARRB experienced a taste of what it is like to take on the National Security State.

Ironically, Anna Kasten Nelson, a former member of the ARRB authored a piece entitled

The Evolution of the National Security State: Ubiquitous and Unending.

See

http://www1.american.edu/cas/hist/faculty/nelson.htm

Edited May 4, 2009 by Robert Howard

[William Kelly]

“A Culture of Secrecy – The Government Versus the People’s Right to Know,” Anthology edited by Athan G. Theoharis (University Press of Kansas, 1998), with contribution by Matthew M. Aid, Jon Wiener, Anna Kasten Nielson, et al.

Chapter 10

The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. By Anna Kasten Nelson.

“I’ve never seen any information released that ever did anyone any good.” – Agency representative, ARRB briefing.

Anna Kasten Nelson:

“The John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Collection Act of 1992 marked an important milestone in the ongoing conflict between the public’s need to know and the culture of secrecy that evolved during the fifty years of the cold war. The act was designed to strip away theories that implicated federal agencies in a conspiracy to murder the young president. Its unintended consequence has been to crack open the door to the inner sanctums of the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies.”

[bK: As Doug Horne notes in his response to this statement, the act was designed not to strip away theories but to release records and let the people decide for themselves what to believe.]

“…The Warren Commission Report concluded that President Kennedy had been killed by bullets fired by only one assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. Three shots had been fired; one hit the president but did not kill him, one went astray, and the third killed Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally of Texas, who shared the president’s limousine as it slowly moved through downtown Dallas. The commission further concluded that, while Oswald was influenced by Marxist ideology and was sympathetic to Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba, his decision to kill the president came from internal demons, not an external conspiracy…”

[bK: Of course it was the first shot that hit the president but did not kill him and reputedly went on to wound Connally, and not the third shot, that killed Kennedy].

“The most thorough and direct study of President Kennedy’s assassination was conducted in 1978-79 by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which examined all three of the assassinations that had rocked the country during the 1960s – those of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy…the HSCA questioned the ‘single-bullet theory,’ the conclusion that a single bullet killed the president and wounded Governor Connally…”

[bK: The HSCA investigated the JFK and MLK cases, but not RFK. The MLK HSCA investigation files remain sealed; ostensibly until Oliver Stone makes a movie about that assassination.]

“…How do five individuals deliberately chosen for their unfamiliarity with Kennedy assassination documents, arguments and theories, carry out their legal mandate?…”

[bK:The Review Board was to be composed of five individuals who had no prior experience working FOR the government, not deliberately chosen for their unfamiliarity with the JFK documents. They were supposed to be familiar with the documents as historians and librarians and scholars.]

“…On one memorable occasion, a board member asked an agency official why his agency always withheld a particular piece of information that appeared to be completely harmless. The official thought for a few minutes before replying that he could not remember the reason, but since the information had never been released he was sure there was a good reason.”