ASSASSINATION ARCHIVES

AND RESEARCH CENTER

Statement in Response to White House Announcement-

Statement in Response to White House Announcement-

“In a midnight Friday night announcement the White House has delivered the bad news that President Biden will be maintaining secrecy indefinitely on some JFK assassination related records.  This is unwelcome news for transparency advocates and concerned citizens of the country.  In 1992 the JFK Records Act was passed unanimously by Congress with the promise that all assassination related records would be released no later than October 2017, 25 years after enactment.  This promise has not been kept and in fact has been broken with this midnight announcement.  By far the best course of action for the government is to make full release of JFK assassination records to restore some public trust.  That opportunity is lost for now.”


Daniel S. Alcorn
President, Assassination Archives and Research Center

30 June, 2023

 

30 June, 2023: Memorandum on Certifications Regarding Disclosure of Information in Certain Records Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies

SUBJECT:      Certifications Regarding Disclosure of
Information in Certain Records Related to the
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

Section 1.  Policy.  In the three decades since the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (44 U.S.C. 2107 note) (the “Act”) was enacted, the United States Government has undertaken a comprehensive review of its records and has strived to make available to the public thousands of classified documents that provide a fuller understanding of the tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  As I have reiterated throughout my Presidency, I fully support the Act’s aim to maximize transparency by disclosing all information in records concerning the assassination, except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.  Executive departments and agencies (agencies) have worked meticulously over thousands of hours of review to ensure that the American people have access to every single word that is appropriate for release under the standards of the Act.  With my final certification made in this memorandum -– the last required under the Act -– and definitive plans for future disclosures, my Administration is fulfilling the promise of transparency to the American people.

Sec. 2.  Background.  (a)  The Act permits the continued postponement of public disclosure of information in records concerning President Kennedy’s assassination only when postponement remains necessary to protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.  Agencies have applied this statutory standard when proposing the continued postponement of public disclosure of specific information, and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has reviewed each of these redactions to determine whether NARA agrees that these redactions continue to meet the statutory standard.  In the Presidential Memorandum of December 15, 2022 (Certifications Regarding Disclosure of Information in Certain Records Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy) (December 2022 Memorandum), I certified the temporary continued postponement of public disclosure of redacted information in a small number of records covered by the Act.  At the time, the Acting Archivist of the United States (Acting Archivist) advised that a limited number of records that were the subject of agency proposals for temporary continued postponement warranted further review to ensure that information from these records is disclosed to the maximum extent possible, consistent with the standards of the Act.  In the December 2022 Memorandum, consistent with that advice, I directed agencies to continue to work with NARA to review these records to determine if additional information proposed for redaction could be disclosed.

(b)  On May 1, 2023, the Acting Archivist informed me that the review process was complete and recommended that I postpone the public release of certain redacted information in the records certified for temporary postponement of public release in the December 2022 Memorandum.

Sec. 3.  Certification.  In light of the recommendation for continued postponement of public release of information in the records identified in section 2(b) of this memorandum under the statutory standard, I hereby certify, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act, that continued postponement of public disclosure of that information is necessary to protect against identifiable harms to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, and the conduct of foreign relations that are of such gravity that they outweigh the public interest in disclosure.  All information within these records that has been proposed for continued postponement under section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act shall accordingly be withheld from public disclosure.  Future release of the information in these records shall occur in a manner consistent with the Transparency Plans described in section 5 of this memorandum.

Sec. 4.  Release.  Any information currently withheld from public disclosure under section 4 of the December 2022 Memorandum that is not subject to the certification in section 3 of this memorandum shall be released to the public by June 30, 2023.

Sec. 5.  Transparency Plans.  As part of their review, each agency prepared a plan for the eventual release of information (Transparency Plan) to ensure that information would continue to be disclosed over time as the identified harm associated with release of the information dissipates.  Each Transparency Plan details the event-based or circumstance-based conditions that will trigger the public disclosure of currently postponed information by the National Declassification Center (NDC) at NARA.  These Transparency Plans were reviewed by NARA, and the Acting Archivist previously advised me that use of the Transparency Plans by the NDC will ensure appropriate continued release of information covered by the Act.  In the December 2022 Memorandum, I directed that the Transparency Plans submitted by agencies be used by the NDC to conduct future reviews of any information that has been postponed from public disclosure.  On May 1, 2023, the Acting Archivist recommended continued use of agencies’ Transparency Plans to release information covered by the Act.  Therefore, I direct the NDC to continue to use the Transparency Plans to conduct future reviews of any information covered by the Act that has been postponed from public disclosure.  The Transparency Plans will ensure that the public will have access to the maximum amount of information while continuing to protect against identifiable harms to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, and the conduct of foreign relations under the standards of the Act.

Sec. 6.  Publication.  The Archivist of the United States is hereby authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.

                               JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

8 June, 2023 UPDATE: JFK Records Lawsuit

Courtesy of Bill Simpich and the Mary Ferrell Foundation:

On October 19, 2022, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a non-profit archive with the internet’s largest collection of searchable JFK records, filed a lawsuit against President Biden and the National Archives for failing to implement the 1992 JFK Records Act. These failures have resulted in confusion, gaps in the records, over-classification, and outright denial of thousands of assassination-related files, five years after the law’s deadline for full disclosure.

On April 10, 2023, the MFF filed an amended complaint. The amended complaint highlights the Biden “Transparency Plans” and emphasizes that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) should not be the main avenue for the release of additional assassination records. The JFK Records Act states at Section 2(a)(5) that the Act is “necessary” because FOIA “prevented the timely public disclosure” of JFK records.” Similarly, Section 2(a)(6) states that the Act is necessary because other procedures to declassify “national security information” has prevented the timely public disclosure of JFK records. The National Archives should be enforcing the JFK Records Act by forwarding well-founded public requests for additional records to the agencies that have them in their possession.

As of 8 June, 2023, a motion for injunctive relief has been filed.

Plaintiff asks the court to stay the enforcement of President Biden’s Transparency Plans –  arguing that these plans would lock up some of the unreleased documents for decades to come.
Plaintiff asks the court to declare that NARA is the successor in function to ARRB, and that it has a duty to supplement the assassination records. (This was stated in a regulation issued by NARA in 2000 – now the agency is trying to say that the reg, “doesn’t say what it says.”)
Plaintiff asks the court to enforce the memorandum of understanding signed by the CIA, NARA and ARRB in 1998 to obtain additional assassination records from the CIA.

It is requested that NARA be required to enforce the JFK Act when seeking records from agencies, rather than referring researchers to use FOIA – described in the Act as an ineffective way to obtain assassination records.

As things stand – and things could change – the July 13 hearing in SF will address both the motion for relief and DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case.
Download the motion brief by clicking here: mffvbiden-motionforinjunctionetcfiled

 *     *     *     *     *

Bill Simpich serves on the Board of the AARC. He is a Civil Rights attorney, author of ground-breaking articles focusing on the hidden intricacies of the CIA, and a leading and insightful analyst of the intelligence files associated with Lee Harvey Oswald’s enigmatic episode in Mexico City seven weeks prior to President Kennedy’s assassination. Between August 2010 and January 2015 Bill produced 12 articles on the JFK case which became the backstory to his invaluable work, STATE SECRET: WIRETAPPING IN MEXICO CITY, DOUBLE AGENTS, AND THE FRAMING OF LEE OSWALD. 

Read The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend by clicking HERE.

 

 

 

 

 

Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers, Is Dead at 92

Deeply disturbed by the accounting of American deceit in Vietnam, he approached The New York Times. The disclosures that followed rocked the nation.

A black-and-white photo of Daniel Ellsberg and his wife, Patricia, amid a crowd near the Courthouse in Boston in 1971.

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, surrenders at the U.S. Courthouse in Boston on June 28, 1971, accompanied by his wife at the time, Patricia.Credit…Donald F. Holway/The New York Times

By Robert D. McFadden

Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who experienced a sobbing antiwar epiphany on a bathroom floor and in 1971 disclosed the secret history of American lies and deceit in Vietnam that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, died on Friday at his home in Kensington, Calif. He was 92.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife and children said in a statement.

In March, Mr. Ellsberg, in an email message to “Dear friends and supporters,” announced that he had recently been told he had inoperable pancreatic cancer, and said that his doctors had given him an estimate of three to six months to live.

The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 pages of damning revelations about deceptions by successive presidents who exceeded their authority, bypassed Congress and misled the American people — plunged a nation that was already wounded and divided by the war deeper into angry controversy.

It led to illegal countermeasures by the White House to discredit Mr. Ellsberg, halt leaks of government information and attack perceived political enemies, forming a constellation of crimes known as the Watergate scandal that led to the disgrace and resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

And it set up a First Amendment confrontation between the Nixon administration and The New York Times, whose publication of the papers was denounced by the government as an act of espionage that jeopardized national security. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the freedom of the press.

A black and white portrait of Daniel Ellsberg in a dark suit and tie.
Mr. Ellsberg in 1971, after the release of the Pentagon Papers.Credit…Associated Press

Mr. Ellsberg was charged with espionage, conspiracy and other crimes and tried in federal court in Los Angeles. But on the eve of jury deliberations, the judge threw out the case, citing government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, a break-in at the office of Mr. Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist and an offer by President Nixon to appoint the judge himself as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“The demystification and de-sanctification of the president has begun,” Mr. Ellsberg said after being released. “It’s like the defrocking of the Wizard of Oz.”

The story of Daniel Ellsberg in many ways mirrored the American experience in Vietnam, which began in the 1950s as a struggle to contain communism in Indochina and ended in 1973 with humiliating defeat in a corrosive war that killed more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians.

He was a brilliant young man from Michigan who had known tragedy at 15, when his mother and sister were killed in a car crash after his father fell asleep at the wheel, and who had rallied to march through prep school, Harvard and the University of Cambridge in England with high honors and lofty, disciplined ambitions.

He joined the Marines in 1954, swept through officer candidate school and extended his enlistment to ship out with his battalion to the Middle East for the Suez crisis in 1956. He saw no action, but mustered out as a first lieutenant with firm ideas about military solutions to international problems.

He earned a doctorate at Harvard, joined the RAND Corporation and began studying game theory as applied to crisis situations and nuclear warfare. In the 1960s, he conferred on Washington’s responses to the Cuban missile crisis and North Vietnamese attacks on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.

By 1964, Mr. Ellsberg was an adviser to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. As American involvement in Vietnam deepened, he went to Saigon in 1965 to evaluate civilian pacification programs. He joined Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, the counterinsurgency expert, and for 18 months accompanied combat patrols into the jungles and villages.

What he saw began his transformation. It went beyond the failure to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese. It was a mounting toll of civilian deaths, tortured prisoners and burned villages, a litany of brutality entered in military field reports as “clear and hold operations.”

“I saw it was all very hard on those people,” he told the syndicated columnist Mary McGrory. “But I told myself that living under communism would be harder, and World War III, which I thought we were preventing, would be worse.”

To Mr. McNamara, Mr. Ellsberg forecast a dismal prospect of continued death and destruction, ending perhaps in an American withdrawal and victory for North Vietnam. His reports went nowhere. But Mr. McNamara summoned him in 1967, with 35 others, to compile a history of the Vietnam conflict.

His contribution to the study was relatively modest. But he was deeply disturbed by its sweeping conclusions: that successive presidents had widened the war while concealing the facts from Congress and the American people. In 1968, Mr. Ellsberg returned to RAND, but began quietly acting on his changing views, composing war policy statements for Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential race and attending antiwar conferences.

CONTINUE READING AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

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