Staff Reports
The Biden administration released over 13,000 records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but it fell short of fulfilling the law's 30-year requirement for transparency.
Almost all of the documents related to the assassination of Kennedy have been released. About 3% of them remain redacted. The National Archives, which manages the records, said that 98% of them had been released.
The documents released show that accused gunman Lee Harvey Oswald spent time in Mexico City. However, about 4,300 of them remain redacted. According to the agency, there's no justification for keeping these records secret to protect intelligence gathering or national security.
John Tunheim, who served as the chairman of the review board that reviewed the records related to the assassination of Kennedy, said that there's no justification for keeping these details secret. He noted that it's 59 years since the president was killed.
Among the documents that remain censored are those related to George Joannides, a CIA agent who was involved in a covert program that involved Cuba. According to calculations by the researchers at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, this program came into contact with Oswald around four months before Kennedy was killed. The foundation, which sued the government to make the records public, claims that the CIA is intentionally withholding many of these documents.
The foundation's lawsuit claims that many of the documents related to George Joannides were never placed in the National Archives' Kennedy collection.
The records act was established to ensure that the public can access all of the details related to the assassination of Kennedy. However, after Donald Trump became the president, the full release of these documents was delayed.
Although Trump and Biden authorized the release of some information, the most significant files that remain secret are those related to government contact with Oswald.
In a memorandum, Biden explained how the records act allowed the government to delay the release of certain information to protect the interests of the US and its allies. However, he noted that this can be done only if it's necessary to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of certain information.
During the 1990s, Tunheim said he didn't believe that the arguments made by the CIA about the need to keep certain information secret. He wrote a letter to Biden, urging him to follow the law and release the documents related to the assassination of Kennedy. One of the documents that remained censored showed that in the months before the president was killed, a CIA operative was in contact with Oswald in New Orleans.
As Oswald became more prominent, the Pentagon started working on Operation Northwoods, which involved carrying out a false flag attack to blame Cuba for the Bay of Pigs incident. The operation was designed to justify a military confrontation in response to make up for the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
According to Jefferson Morley, a Kennedy expert, a spot check of the documents revealed that a memo about Operation Northwoods was still heavily redacted.
According to Tunheim, there's probably no smoking gun in the documents that suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the gunman who killed Kennedy on November 22, 1963. A majority of Americans now believe that Oswald was not a lone wolf gunman. A poll conducted by the Mary Ferrell Foundation and the Gallup organization last week revealed that most people believe this.
The results of the poll showed that 71% of voters support releasing all of the documents related to the assassination of Kennedy.
