Episode 53 Help us Please, Mr. President! Published Sep 01, 2021
Episode 53 is a special episode that goes on a small, but very important and time sensitive wander. Many of you who follow this story are aware that the President John F. Kennedy Assassinaton Records Collection Act of 1992 also known as the the “JFK Act” was passed in 1992 and mandated that all assassination records, that had been withheld by the government, be released by the deadline date that was set forth in the JFK Act itself. That deadline gave the government a delay of up to twenty-five years to assess sensitive materials, and determine how long such materials should be kept from the general public…with the notion that such holdback could only be accomplished under the strict guidelines contained within the JFK Act itself, and presumably on the rarest of occasions. The scheduled twenty-five year deadline came upon us in 1997 during the Trump administration and the greatly anticipated final release was met with a thud…as the Trump administration extended the release date for a large bolus of documents. While this was disappointing to all who anticipated seeing all remaning documents, it has become known that there are other problems too. The level of rigor to maintain and make avaiable this collection of documents needs more attention as well, and the lack of full compliance with the retrieval and cataloging of documents is again creating a new wave of skepticism about what is being released. How do we know that everything that should have been gathered and accounted for and classified as an assassination record is within the current catalog of documents? The goverment had twenty-five years more to do this right, and get that part of it right. In fairness, much has been done. But the question is whether it was done with enough rigor, and some very trained eyes, think the answer to that question may be “NO”. Those truly trained eyes in the research community are seeing signs of this and while those conditions are not easily discernable by the casual observer, they are clear to the professionals in the research community who follow this topic vigorously. A deadline was agreed to in 1992. Congress set that deadline. It has been moved once now by President Trump. There has been no credible fact revealed that would rationally allow that deadline to be moved again, yet actions are underway by many federal agencies to petition the President and the government to do just that, and to compel the Assassination Records Review Board to continue to whithold from public view many critical documents related to the assassiantion. This is not an issue divided along conspiracy versus non-conspiracy lines. It’s almost sixty years now after the assassination. Virtually everyone involved who was old enough to hold a material place in the decisions and actions that surrounded the assassination are deceased. It’s become a matter of history now and getting that history straight and helping our government restore some of the credibility it lost at that moment by not telling the whole truth about what happened…. and more specifically what they knew about what happened. The transparency now matters to those of us that are living and love our country and want our government to be the recipient of the full support and confidence of the American people, and indeed all the people of the world. That’s why transparency on this topic matters and still has relevance.
On September 26th, the Archivist is set to report to the President of the United States on the state of the records in the collecdtion and to communicate any request from federal agencies to further withhold any records under the JFK Act.
On October 26th, the extension to the original twenty-five year deadline, the extension granted by President Trump, which came as a surprise to many…that extension will expire. President Biden will surely be faced with pressures to again extend the deadline for releasing the records. For whatever reason (or reasons) that are being privately communicated to the executive office, regardless, we should all understand that this matter was settled twenty-five years ago and a law was passed then. It should be adhered to. There can be no facts and circumstances so great that the passage of that stated time has made greater (in term of its influence on natonal security or other matters) the risks around disclosure of these documents. If such extraordinary circumstances now exist, then they should be debated in Congress and a new law passed…But we all intuitively know that the passage of this extra time….and this passage of time which amounts to (almost) sixty years now from that day on November 22nd, 1963, this passage of time is now long enough….no matter how painful the remaning truths might be as we receive the last and most sensitive of the materials and truths that are due the public.
See the letter below from a group of esteemed lawyers and othe signatories written to President Biden on this topic and delivered recently to him: