Thousands of unedited government JFK assassination files released

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Its mostly because declassifying documents takes a lot of time, time that the people who have to review the documents do not have, and these reviews usually are at the bottom of the priority list.
 
There are documents that will never see the light of day, some will still have parts redacted, and I'm not confident that this new document release will reveal anything of historical value as far as the actual assassination is concerned. The American people have pushed for this. The U.S. government knows this. About 70% of the public does not believe the government's published version of the events.
 
TsrJoe said:
1963 and there's still material deemed sensitive ???
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Two things that the government *hates* to declassify:
1) Nuclear weapon technology
2) Human intelligence assets/techniques/operations.

I doubt there's much in #1, but probably a lot of #2, even if it's just informants in the mob or details about efforts to infiltrate the commies/details about commie infiltration. Even if there is absolutely nothing really new or "explosive" here, Oswald *was* a commie who palled around with commies and went to the USSR; undoubtedly there was a lot of research on him and his dumbassery. And even if *that* research turned up nothing of any real interest, *how* they went about it and *who* they might have used would be classified and not somethign the CIA or FBI would like to give up. Because they might need to do it again. And maybe they *are* still doing it to this day. The methods used to investigate Oswald might be at use this very moment, for example.
 
In an ideal country/world, the process would be reversed, and any government document would be automatically released at the latest after say three years of its creation unless it was actively decided by a competent authority that it still needed to be kept from the global public for another three years. Taxpayers have an innate right to see how their money is spent, and as the saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
 
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In the U.S., methods and procedures used by the various parts of what is referred to as 'the intelligence community' cannot be disclosed since our enemies would use this knowledge. Also, individuals who cooperated with such agencies, especially if foreign, would have their identities protected by nondisclosure, since our enemies might target them. During the Second World War, the British T-Force did a lot of work that remains secret. Avoiding "embarrassing" disclosures takes precedence.
 
I note that your argument is not in contradiction with the approach I outlined above, since the three year period would not be subject to only a limited number of reviews/renewals, but various and sundry reasons for secrecy become obsolete over time. For example, once people die, enemies can no longer target them.
 
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In the book T-Force by Sean Longden, the author promises a "now it can be told" narrative. That does not happen. For example, the reader is told of the discovery of an important new explosive in formerly German occupied territory. It is rushed to England. What this explosive was called and who made it is not revealed. The author instead takes the "tell all, reveal nothing" approach. If anyone is interested, get the first printing, first state with the V-2 rocket on the dust jacket.
 
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Thanks for the warning. Also, as someone who only learned English as a third language, it never fails to amuse me that the UK has an Official Secrets Act, which I first became aware of with respect to the HOTOL engine concept - makes you wonder about all the unofficial secrets the Brits might have...
 
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The background of the Official Secrets Act is pretty ludicrous though, passed in 1911 after a wave of spy mania cooked up by William Le Queux and Erskine Childers fiction novels.

Until it was revised in 1989 the Act made it a criminal offence to disclose any official information without lawful authority.
 
Reminds me of Oliver Stone's JFK, where Costner's character Jim Garrison mentioned that he asked his son to wait for the documents to be de-classified after he is long gone from this world .....
 
The movie JFK provided the evidence required to dismiss the U.S. government's version of the assassination. It reminded the American people of the omissions of The Warren Commission Report.
 
Yeeeeah... as if Oliver Stoned (the aptly named) knew better in fiction and 30 years after the facts, than the Warren Commission itself...

Why on earth is it so hard to admit that Oswald was a loner and a loony yet a loony that had USMC training and thus knew how to use a sniper riffle ?
That JFK security at Dealey Plaza that day was a sick joke ?
That over the next twenty years half a dozen high profile murders (or atempts) happened, same loony loners profiles, and yet no such conspiracy B.S ? RFK, MLK, Wallace, Jerry Ford twice in two weeks, and Reagan ? and all the Sirhan, Earl Rey, Bremer, Fromme, Hinckley were all similar to Oswald - lost souls, loony loners ?
Disgruntled men and women with almost free access to lethal weaponry - that was not going to end well...
 
Archibald said:
Yeeeeah... as if Oliver Stoned (the aptly named) knew better in fiction and 30 years after the facts, than the Warren Commission itself...

Why on earth is it so hard to admit that Oswald was a loner and a loony yet a loony that had USMC training and thus knew how to use a sniper riffle ?
That JFK security at Dealey Plaza that day was a sick joke ?
That over the next twenty years half a dozen high profile murders (or atempts) happened, same loony loners profiles, and yet no such conspiracy B.S ? RFK, MLK, Wallace, Jerry Ford twice in two weeks, and Reagan ? and all the Sirhan, Earl Rey, Bremer, Fromme, Hinckley were all similar to Oswald - lost souls, loony loners ?
Disgruntled men and women with almost free access to lethal weaponry - that was not going to end well...
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Did you actually see JFK? All of your questions are answered in the movie. Before Oliver Stone, an attorney named Mark Lane raised many questions in his book, Rush to Judgment - published in 1966.
 
I read Jim Garrisons's book "On the trial of the assassins" right after I saw JFK. I would say the movie pretty much covered all the main points from the book given the limited duration of the movie ....
 
I wonder how much this’ll cost as believe declassifying that much stuff in a short amount of time is going to cost in manpower?
 
Flyaway said:
how much this’ll cost
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That would depend on how thoroughly the material would be vetted. Mar-a-Lago levels of thoroughness insist on a separate table for sensitive documents, and, err... Not much else? General cleanliness?
 
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They were talking to a historian on a podcast I was listening to late last year who has studied the JFK assassination and he doesn’t believe there was any conspiracy, but he said he would like to see these kind of documents released after so long, and also blamed things like Oliver Stone’s film for feeding the fire in more recent times on reigniting the conspiracy beliefs.
 
But what's the point of accepting the plain mundane when contemplating conspiracy provides so much more of an endorphin experience.
 
It's not just a question of excessive paperwork or incompetence that there are still files to be released: I remember reading a while ago that some of the Kennedy files, initially to be sealed until 2019, were to be kept in the dark a little longer because some of the people refered to, or some close relatives, were still alive and could be impacted by the information therein...

Anyway, as Paul said, the link with the forum is tedious — although the film JFK implies that Kennedy's pledge to have all troops back home before Christmas 1965 was not to the taste of the military industry. I try hard not to have a conspirationist approach to the whole thing, but it's a fact that companies such as Bell, for instance, made a fortune with the war in Vietnam, and had everything to lose if the war ended too soon. The fact that Bell was Texan (just like Lyndon Johnson) is also worthy of note — his taking over as president meant no end to the war and a lot of military contracts secured.
 
In my opinion, this decision has several far-reaching political objectives:

-Satisfy the anti-vaccine Kennedy who collaborated during the election campaign.

-Opening the way to frozen research on the Wuhan virus and the World Health Organization.

-Unbalance the Woke movement by honoring the memory of Martin Luther.

-Make it clear that the new government, made up of people outside the political class, does not owe anything to the system.

-A veiled threat to the cover-ups of information.

-Increase confidence in the new government of the impoverished social classes silenced by the establishment.
 
The intelligence community has to protect any assets it has developed, otherwise, people would be less inclined to cooperate. Kennedy issued National Security Action Memorandum #263. It called for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam by 1965.
 
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President Trump was going to release the documents in his first term, but was convinced by the FBI and CIA that the information contained within might damage national security. The President is now going to release the remaining documents. From the White House site:

"Sec. 2. Declassification and Disclosure. (a) Within 15 days of the date of this order, the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General shall, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and the Counsel to the President, present a plan to the President for the full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."
 
There’s lots of stuff around already known programs that still hasn’t been declassified. But because most of that is ‘unsexy’ technical stuff no one makes a big fuss for it to be declassified, instead relying on a handful of interested historians and researches to try and get it released.
 
Arjen said:
That would depend on how thoroughly the material would be vetted. Mar-a-Lago levels of thoroughness insist on a separate table for sensitive documents, and, err... Not much else? General cleanliness?
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Far more secure at Mar-a-Lago (which had Secret Service there and the National Archives okay'd) than the back of Biden's garage in crumpled boxes.....
 
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