The US Government has today released long classified documents about the JFK assassination
The world looks different when you sit behind the Resolute desk.
At the request of the CIA, FBI and others in the national security community, President Donald Trump made a last-minute decision to delay the release of thousands of pages of classified documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination.
The president allowed the National Archives to publish about 2800 records that the agencies did not object to making public. But about 300 additional records - the ones historians were most interested in seeing - will stay secret for now.
Federal agencies have known since 1992 that the midnight deadline was coming up. It was created by Congress, in a law signed by George H.W. Bush, after Oliver Stone's JFK movie in 1991 suggested a broad conspiracy to kill the president that included the CIA, the FBI and the military.
But they were sending requests to the White House to withhold documents as late as midday Thursday. Trump acquiesced under the pressure.
Even as he holds back some of the juiciest stuff, the president wants credit from his base for releasing the documents. "I am ordering today that the veil finally be lifted," Trump said in a statement. "At the same time, executive departments and agencies have proposed to me that certain information should continue to be redacted because of national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns. I have no choice - today - but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation's security."
JFK Files are being carefully released. In the end there will be great transparency. It is my hope to get just about everything to public!
Trump is probably the most conspiracy-minded president in US history. At the very least, he is the most likely to buy into far-fetched conspiracy theories since Richard Nixon. He catapulted to stardom on the right by falsely claiming that Barack Obama is from Kenya - not Hawaii. He's wrongly claimed that his predecessor didn't attend Columbia University. He insisted that Obama personally bribed New York's attorney general to investigate Trump University. He accused Obama of "bugging" Trump Tower after taking office.
He said there's something "very fishy" about Vince Foster's suicide. He suggested that Antonin Scalia may have been a victim of foul play after the Supreme Court justice died in his sleep. He said the IRS audits him because he's a Christian. He's peddled the dangerous falsehood that vaccines are connected to autism. He has never backed off his assertion that he watched TV footage of thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey on 9/11 after the collapse of the World Trade Center.
He suggested before the final primaries in 2016 that Ted Cruz's Cuban-born father, Rafael, was somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination and knew Lee Harvey Oswald. After the Texas senator refused to endorse him at the Republican National Convention, he revived the silly claim again last summer.
Against that backdrop, no one can deny that the president's impulse is to get all these files out. His longtime adviser and friend Roger Stone wrote a book alleging that Lyndon Johnson had Kennedy killed, and he's been lobbying the president to open all the files.
Trump has already shown that he wants to make public anything that might back up his conspiracy theories or reflect poorly on what his supporters derisively call "the deep state." Remember, after losing the popular vote last November by 2.9 million votes, the president began insisting that 3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally. When every expert called that claim preposterous, Trump didn't back down. Instead, he created a taxpayer-funded commission to look into it.
But the president was reminded again on Thursday that it's really hard to tell national security officials "no" when they're warning you of potential dangers to the country and its intelligence apparatus if certain information goes out.
Part of a file, dated November 24, 1963, quoting FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as he talks about the death of Lee Harvey Oswald. Photo / AP
For example, CIA officials say that they pushed to withhold documents to protect their assets, the identities of current and former officers, intelligence-gathering methods and sensitive partnerships that remain in effect today. "Every single one of the approximately 18,000 remaining CIA records in the collection will ultimately be released, with no document withheld in full," the agency said in a statement, adding that the redacted information in the 18,000 pages represents less than 1 per cent of all CIA information in the Kennedy collection.
To varying degrees, every president finds himself persuaded by these kinds of arguments - no matter how spurious. The best example of this came in 2014 when Barack Obama's White House aggressively worked behind the scenes to limit how much the public got to see of a Senate Intelligence Committee report documenting the CIA's brutal interrogations of terrorism suspects. The effort to conceal the findings of the investigation was completely at odds with the spirit that animated Obama's 2008 campaign. (He also never closed Gitmo.)
In the national security realm, Trump has already backed away from several commitments he made during the campaign. He escalated in Afghanistan after promising withdrawal. He explicitly endorsed NATO's Article V after initially refusing to. He didn't pull out of the Iranian nuclear deal, instead settling for a middle-ground compromise pushed by his advisers. The list goes on.
The presidency has a way of warping a person's perspective. George W. Bush said no more nation building during the 2000 campaign. After invading Afghanistan and Iraq, he did more of it than anyone since Harry Truman unveiled the Marshall Plan.
This is a tale as old as the presidency. A generation of presidents never tried to remove J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director because they worried what dirt he might have on them.
Trump's decision to acquiesce to the CIA will only add to the cloud of public suspicion that hangs over the official story line - even 54 years later - that Oswald acted alone.
Secrecy corrodes public trust in government. The government's refusal to be fully transparent and forthright has contributed to a climate in which few citizens trust institutions. The feds have long had an over-classification problem, erring on the side of marking files secret that really don't need to be. It has become even worse since the 9/11 attacks.
Many Americans do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Photo / AP
A poll conducted last week by SurveyMonkey for FiveThirtyEight found that only 33 per cent of Americans believe that one man was responsible for the Kennedy assassination, while 61 per cent think that others were involved in a conspiracy.
"In pretty much every demographic, most respondents believed that Oswald didn't act alone," Harry Enten notes. "A majority of men, women, white people, people of colour, registered voters, non-registered voters, old people, young people, Democrats, Republicans and so on all believe that more than one person was involved in Kennedy's assassination. This is one of the few questions in this polarized age on which you can even find agreement among Hillary Clinton voters (59 per cent believe in a conspiracy) and Trump voters (61 per cent). . . . African-Americans (76 per cent) and Hispanics (72 per cent) are far more likely than whites (56 per cent) to believe that Oswald didn't act alone. The government, of course, has a history of lying to the black community, which may be why African-Americans are more likely to think the government isn't telling the whole story about Kennedy's death and other major news stories."
What exactly is still being withheld? "Some of the material that assassination experts had been most eager to review was not included in the documents released Thursday," The Post's Ian Shapira, Steve Hendrix and Carol D. Leonnig report. "The missing records include a 338-page file on J. Walton Moore, the head of the CIA office in Dallas at the time of the killing, and an 18-page dossier on Gordon McClendon, a Dallas businessman who conferred with Ruby just before he shot Oswald. Several files on notorious anti-Castro Cuban exiles were apparently withheld, including those focusing on Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch, who had been accused of a 1976 airline bombing that killed 73 people . . .
"Researchers had hoped the release would shed new light on Oswald's movements and contacts in the months before he shot Kennedy. Historians were particularly eager for new details of Oswald's six-day trip to Mexico City, where he met with Cubans and Soviets two months before the assassination. None of those documents appeared to be in the batch released Thursday. Nor were there revelations on Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, both of whom were longtime CIA operatives of interest to assassination theorists."
What might the CIA be afraid of? "Since the Warren Commission concluded its investigation, historians and journalists have written extensively about how the CIA deliberately concealed information about Oswald's interactions with Cubans or Soviets in Mexico City before the killing," per Ian, Steve and Carol. "Philip Shenon, author of a 2013 book on the Warren Commission, interviewed one of the commission's chief investigators, David Slawson, for Politico two years ago and showed him documents that had been declassified in the 1990s but that Slawson had never seen. Slawson's conclusion: The CIA tampered with surveillance evidence of Oswald in Mexico City that would have revealed the agency knew of Oswald's threat well before the assassination . . .
"Even the CIA publicly acknowledged in 2014 that John McCone, its director at the time of the assassination, participated in a 'benign cover-up,' according to a paper by agency historian David Robarge. His article said McCone was 'complicit in keeping incendiary and diversionary issues off the commission's agenda.' The agency historian wrote that McCone purposely did not tell the commission about CIA-Mafia plots to kill (Fidel) Castro, some of which had been planned at the Mexico City station. 'Without this information,' Shenon concluded in a 2015 Politico story, 'the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots.'"
The White House insists that Trump remains committed to disclosure. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president has directed the agencies "to minimise redactions without delay," and that redactions will only be made on the remaining documents "in the rarest of circumstances."
But many Kennedy experts are dismayed about what they see as the president caving. They worry the final batch will still be heavily redacted and think the odds are high that the new six-month deadline will slip. University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato, for example, wrote a 2013 book on the assassination:
Sabato tweeted: "54 yrs since #JFK assassination, 25 yrs since mandated release TODAY, and we'll have to wait another 6 months to MAYBE see the good stuff."
