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Expert Talks JFK Files

By VIC BRADSHAW Daily News-Record

HARRISONBURG — John M. Newman said Tuesday morning that he spent too much time talking to reporters in recent days to dive deeply into the recently released documents related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, with international television crews at his home and calls from print journalists around the globe.


But he’s had a chance to study between 400 and 500 of what he thinks are the key pages out of the thousands made available to the public Thursday night, and he’s intrigued by what he’s found and hasn’t found.
“Having been around this case since the early 1990s, I know pretty much how to hit the high-value stuff,” said Newman, a James Madison University adjunct professor of political science and author of four books on JFK, his assassination, and Lee Harvey Oswald, whom history tells us was the assassin. “There were 50 that were never before released at all. I’ve been through those.”


The thing that’s captivated him most so far is the re-release of an April 1972 memo handwritten by a then-CIA agent.


In the document, which lists “Harvey Lee Oswald” as the subject, the agent writes that then-CIA Director Richard Helms indicated that “the agency was NOT, under any circumstances, to make inquiries or ask questions of any source or defector about Oswald.”
What’s important about the memo is that the third page says Oswald was a source for the CIA, providing information about the Soviets. “That contradicts a 50-year lie that [CIA officials] never talked to him,” Newman said of Oswald. “The people involved — those the memo was to and from and the people who were shown the document — were all involved in counterintelligence.”


That’s significant enough as it is. But Newman’s curiosity is piqued because he has a copy of the three pages released in the early 1990s. The version released Thursday had only two pages, and it was given a different document number than the initial release.


“I was amazed,” the retired U.S. Army intelligence officer said, “to see one piece disappear and not be released with the other two pieces it belongs with. Obviously, that was an attempt to disconnect it from [the previously released] document.”


Newman’s Theory


Newman, a Harrisonburg resident, will provide more of his impressions at 7 p.m. Thursday when he presents “KGB-CIA Spy Wars: Oswald’s intelligence files and the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division.” The event is scheduled for the Highlands Room at JMU’s Festival Conference and Student Center and is free and open to the public.


“Everybody was lying,” he said of the Soviet and American intelligence agencies. “Oswald was at the center of the chessboard.”


Newman already has published two of the five-book series he’s writing on the Kennedy assassination: “Where Angels Tread Lightly” and “Countdown to Darkness.” The presentation essentially will be the fifth chapter of Volume 3, which he’s working on now.


A consultant to director Oliver Stone for his 1991 film “JFK,” Newman said he isn’t focused on who shot Kennedy or how many shooters there were.


He personally thinks there probably was more than one shooter, but isn’t convinced of it, and he questions whether Oswald could have shot the president as he rode through Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963, and escaped the Texas School Book Depository so quickly as to encounter a Dallas police officer moments after the shooting.


His focus is on who is behind the slaying. Did the shooter or shooters act alone, or were they emissaries of some organization?


Based on his research, Newman has developed a hypothesis that President Lyndon Johnson used “a very complicated psychological warfare operation” to get Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren to head the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.


The commission determined that both Oswald and Jack Ruby, who shot and killed Oswald two days after JFK’s slaying, acted alone. Conspiracy theorists have long doubted the panel’s findings.


Newman said he thinks Johnson “browbeat” Warren to head the commission and stay away from conspiracy theories by telling the chief justice that identifying the KGB or Cuban leaders as masterminds of the plot to kill Kennedy would prompt a nuclear holocaust that would leave 40 million Americans dead. Documents with false information, Newman claims, were put in Oswald’s file to persuade Warren that Oswald did the communists’ bidding, though neither the Soviets nor Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro had anything to do with it.


“Warren thinks it’s the truth,” Newman said. “He had to tamp down what he thought was the truth to save lives.”
As evidence of the duplicity, the professor notes that tapes made in the Oval Office include Johnson boasting about what he’d done to Warren Commission member Sen. Richard Russell and Warren relaying a similar version of the exchange on public television in the 1970s.

More To Come


The documents didn’t provide the trove of information historians and researchers expected as Thursday approached. Legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush on Oct. 26, 1992, called for all assassination records to be released no more than 25 years from that date. But last-minute appeals by the FBI and CIA prompted President Donald Trump to withhold some documents for six months. Newman said only about 6,000 pages were released, about 12 percent of the total expected.


Newman called the development “very disappointing” and said he’s “angry” with both agencies for waiting 25 years to request redactions in the documents. April 26 is the new expected release date.


“There’s no reason anybody in the government now would be withholding documents. That would be bad for democracy,” he said. “A law was passed. It needs to be complied with. If not, this sore will fester.


“It’s critical to get the documents out there and let people make up their own minds.”

Visit Dr. Newman’s website HERE.

http://www.dnronline.com/news/harrisonburg/expert-talks-jfk-files/article_540dc6ee-beaa-11e7-8b60-37b63092031a.html

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: 2017, CIA, JFK, JFK ACT, JFK files, John M. Newman, JOHN NEWMAN, Kennedy assassination. John F. Kennedy, Oswald

Rep. Walter Jones to offer resolution calling for full JFK disclosure

September 22, 2017| jeffmorley

Two senior Capitol Hill Republicans plan to introduce a congressional resolution calling for full disclosure of all U.S. government’s records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Ia.) will introduce their JFK resolution before the end of the month, according to Jones.

Walter Jones, Republican of North Carolina

“I want to make sure that the information that is owed the American people is made available,” the veteran North Carolina conservative said in an exclusive interview with AlterNet.  “The American people are sick and tired of not being given the truth. “

The JFK Records Act of 1992 mandated full disclosure of all government records related to the assassination within 25 years. Some four million pages of records were released in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Another 100,000 pages of assassination-related material from a dozen government agencies must be made public by public by the statutory deadline of October 26, 2017.

Under the law, the CIA, FBI and other government agencies can postpone release of still-secret JFK records after October 26–but only with the written permission of the president.

“We going to take a very positive approach and thank the agencies that have the information and are making it public,” Jones said. “At the same time we want to put some pressure on the agencies to release all the information they have.”

CIA Hedges

The CIA declined to say if it plans to seek postponement of the release of the Agency’s remaining JFK records.

CIA HQ

CIA headquarters, Langley, Va.

“CIA continues to engage in the process to determine the appropriate next steps with respect to any previously-unreleased CIA information,” said spokesperson Nicole de Haay in a written statement released Thursday.

The unreleased records include CIA files on two senior officers involved in assassinations and four Watergate burglars, as well as the secret congressional testimony of numerous JFK witnesses.

“I hope they will not request any postponement,” Jones said in the telephone interview. “We’re talking about something that happened fifty four years ago.”

While JFK scholars and journalists have called on Trump to “give us the full story of the JFK assassination,” Jones and Grassley are the first elected officials to lend their clout to the cause.

Jones stressed that the JFK Records Act was approved by a vote of 435-0 in October 1992.

“The first President Bush signed this law and everybody in Congress, Republican and Democrat, voted for it,” Jones said.

Jones said he and Grassley plan to thank Bush and enlist the support of all the members of the House and Senate who voted for the JFK Records Act in 1992, including House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)

CONTINUE READING AT JFK FACTS

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: 2017, Charles Grassley, CIA, JFK ACT, Kennedy assassination, October 26, REp. Walter Jones

President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection: Toward Final Disclosure of Withheld Records in October 2017

May 26, 2017 (IN10709)
|R. Eric Petersen, Specialist in American National Government

Congress enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Records Act), as amended, to bring together all materials related to the November 22, 1963, assassination of the 35th President that were created or held by a government office, and to house those records in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Today, NARA reports that there are 268,116 records comprising more than five million pages of paper documents in the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. Of those, NARA states that “approximately 88% of the records … are open in full.” Another 11% are available in part with sensitive portions removed. Approximately 1% of documents identified as assassination-related, numbering between 3,000 and 3,600 records according to some media reports, remains withheld in full.

The JFK Records Act, 44 U.S.C. 2107 Note, set a deadline of 25 years from its enactment for each assassination record to be publicly disclosed, subject to some limitations. The deadline falls on October 26, 2017, and has raised some interest about the potential extent of disclosure of redacted portions of records that are partially available, and those that are withheld in full. No legislation related to the JFK Records Act has been introduced in the 115th Congress.

The October 26 deadline marks the end of the final, statutorily mandated assessment of assassination records, and might mark the conclusion of a long process of records preservation and assessment for the suitability of their release that began in the days and weeks following President Kennedy’s death. The JFK Records Act prohibited the destruction or alteration of assassination records, and required each government office, including Congress, various investigatory commissions and panels, executive branch entities, independent agencies, courts, and involved state or local law enforcement agencies, to identify and organize its assassination records, determine which were officially disclosed or publicly available in a complete, unredacted form, and which were covered by the Act’s standards for postponement of public disclosure. Officially disclosed records were to be made available immediately in 1992, following enactment of the JFK Records Act.

Postponed records were to be submitted to the Assassinations Records Review Board, an independent agency established by the JFK Records Act. The Review Board was to be composed of impartial private citizens with national professional reputations in their fields appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. The Review Board’s responsibilities were to determine whether a record constituted an assassination record and whether an assassination record or particular information in a record qualified for postponement of disclosure.

Grounds for postponement include:

  • Threats to military or intelligence operations or the foreign relations of the United States.
  • Undisclosed intelligence sources or methods.
  • Potential identification of intelligence agents whose identities require protection.
  • Identification of a living person who provided confidential information who would be at risk of harm.
  • Unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.
  • Compromising confidentiality requiring protection between a government agent and a cooperating individual or a foreign government.
  • Public disclosure of a security or protective procedure currently utilized by the Secret Service or other government agency responsible for protecting government officials.

The Review Board concluded its duties on September 30, 1998, and transferred its records to NARA. In its final report, the Review Board stated that it had reviewed and voted to release more than 27,000 previously redacted assassination records, and worked with various agencies to publicly release more than 33,000 of their previously restricted assassination records. All remaining postponed records have been subject to periodic review by the agency originating a postponed record and NARA. When a record is determined to qualify for continued postponement, an unclassified written description of the reason must be provided and published in the Federal Register.

In anticipation of the October 26, 2017, deadline, NARA in 2014 established a team of archivists and technicians to evaluate materials subject to postponed disclosure and to process those materials for public release, along with an explanation of their activities. NARA reports that it has “identified a small number of records, or portions of records” related to grand jury or personal tax return information, and some records subject to a deed of gift that restricts their disclosure, that will not be released in October. As of March 2017, NARA states that it has not been informed of any agency appealing the planned release of its documents, but their understanding is “that agencies are still reviewing the documents subject to release.”

Under the JFK Records Act, postponed agency assassination records are scheduled to be released on October 26, 2017, unless the President certifies before then that continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations, and that the harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure. There is no publicly available, authoritative source describing the contents of redacted and withheld records, but NARA states their assumption “that much of what will be released will be tangential to the assassination events.”

DOWNLOAD a PDF of this article HERE.

RELATED: FREEING THE JFK FILES

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: 2017, JFK ACT, JFK ASSASSINATION, JFK ASSASSINATION FILES, JFK records, NARA, OCT 26

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