Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
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10policies. I believe the procedure just outlined could be applied much more widely. A statute could declare that all government records more than thirty years old would become public unless the originating agency showed specific cause for continued non-disclosure. A Board or Commission appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate could have authority to review all such materials and to question or appeal the non-disclosure. This approximates practice in the United Kingdom.In conclusion, I repeat a warning against expecting any legislation to create consensus and thereby "contribute to the trust of the people in their government." Inventors of conspiracy theories will always be more ingenious than assemblers of evidence. The immediate result of releasing records will be, moreover, to provide grist for the theorists' mills. Even if everything were released tomorrow, it would take at least a decade for researchers to sort the newly released materials. In the meantime, conspiracy builders would be picking out those bits and pices of evidence that suited them. In the long run, release of documents will get us closer to truth; but, as Keynes observed, that long run probably stretches beyond any of our lifetimes.
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TESTIMONY OF JAMES H. LESARPRESIDENTASSASSINATION ARCHIVES AND RESEARCH CENTERONS.J. RES. 282"THE ASSASSINATION MATERIALS DISCLOSURE ACT OF 1992"BEFORETHE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRSOF THE UNITED STATES SENATEMay 12, 1992
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2Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee:I am honored to have this opportunity to testify before you on the legislation to require the government to release its records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I appear on behalf of the Assassination Archives and Research Center ("the AARC"), of which I am President. The AARC is a private, non-profit organization which collects, preserves and disseminates information and materials on political assassinations. The AARC is funded by membership dues and donations from the public. I am an attorney specializing in Freedom of Information Act litigation, and have litigated well over 100 such lawsuits. Over the past twenty years I have represented nearly all of the major authors and researchers who have litigated their Freedom of Information Act requests for records pertaining to the assassination of President Kennedy. To date, I have handled over fifty such lawsuits.I have carefully studied the proposed legislation. I have also read the letter which you received from the Department of Justice. I have heard that the Administration may seek to achieve its goals, particularly that of using more restrictive standards for release of Executive Branch records, by issuing an executive order rather than awaiting action by Congress. In my mind the only thing worse than seeing the Justice Department's wishes granted in legislation would be to see them set forth in a stand-alone executive order which goes unchallenged by Congress. Legislation is needed to bring each branch of government which holds records
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3on to the same playing field, and to create a process which isaccountable, independent and credible. Incorporating the JusticeDepartment's restrictive standards in an executive order wouldduplicate the devastating damage to the ideal of full disclosurewhich occurred when the Reagan Administration successfullysabotaged the 1974 amendments to Exemption 1 by drasticallyaltering the standards for classifying information in the interestsof national security.The difficulty which researchers have had gaining access toKennedy assassination materials amply demonstrates the need toalter the standards employed by the FOIA and the current executiveorder on national security classification. If you support releaseof the Kennedy assassination records, you cannot favor the JusticeDepartment's recipe of simply mixing one part political will tothree parts of existing standards and stir. You must substantiallyliberalize the existing standards and make it stick.A few illustrations from my practice will show theinadequacies of the FOIA and the enormous frustration which accruesto those who attempt to use it to obtain information about theKennedy assassination. These examples reveal a pattern of delay,costly litigation, and untrue representations by the government.Cases brought in the 1980's also show that massive withholding ofinformation, with little significant information being released.Case 1: In 1969 Harold Weisberg, a leading Warren Commissioncritic, made a simple request to the FBI. He wanted to see theresults of the spectrographic tests which had been conducted on
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4bullet(s), bullet fragments and items of evidence allegedly struckby bullets during the assassination of President Kennedy. Deniedaccess by the FBI and the Attorney General, in 1970 he broughtsuit. A four-year legal battle ensued. First, the district court,relying on the Justice Department's representation that it was notin the national interest to release the results of these scientifictests, denied his request. A court of Appeals panel reversed, butthe dissenting judge wrote a scathing opinion in which he referredto FOIA requesters as "rummaging writers" and characterizedWeisberg as "some party off the street." Stating that the FOIA"forfend(ed) against" Weisberg's proposed further inquiry into theKennedy assassination, he concluded his dissent with a Latin phrasein capital letters, "REQUIESCAT IN PACE." "Rest in Peace." Butthe case did not rest in peace. The Justice Department sought arehearing before the full court, which was granted. On rehearingen banc, the full court ruled that the files of the FBI were exemptfrom the FOIA's disclosure requirements. That case set a precedentso bad that when Congress first amended the FOIA in 1974, itspecifically overturned the Weisberg case, requiring that the FBIand other law enforcement agencies demonstrate that allegedlyexempt records fall within one or more of six enumerated harms.In 1975, when the new amendments took effect, Weisberg againbrought suit on his request for the spectrographic analyses, thistime adding a request for neutron activation testing on the sameevidentiary items. This new phase of the battle lasted eight yearsand involved three trips to the Court of Appeals. Ultimately,
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Weisberg obtained important records on these scientific tests, including records that the FBI had first said did not exist, then claimed were missing or destroyed. Other records were never located or were meaningless. From the date of the first request, the legal battles lasted fourteen years.Case 2: In 1980 another requester asked the CIA to release all of the records it had made available to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The CIA refused and the requester brought suit. In court the CIA stated that there were approximately 300,000 pages of records responsive to the request. I spent the first three years of this lawsuit litigating four threshold issues raised by the Government. Had my client lost any one of these four threshold issues, the CIA would not have had to release a single page from its 300,000 page collection.By 1984 the CIA had begun to release a trickle of documents. Although the CIA told the court that it had assigned seven people to work on the request, it processed the documents at an incredibly slow pace. When it became evident that it would take the CIA several decades to process all of the documents, the requester had no choice but to drastically limit the scope of his request. Thus, he entered into a stipulation which restricted his request to some of the subjects discussed in the report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations and its supporting volumes. Although the CIA's job of reviewing documents was reduced by more than one-half, it took several more years for it to complete processing of the remaining documents. Moreover, the CIA continued to withhold
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13-000006virtually everything. Only a few thousand pages were released, and most of them consisted of newspaper clippings, records that previously had been released, or documents that were heavily redacted.Case 3: In 1976, Dr. Paul Hoch requested two batches of CIA documents which had remained to be processed after the CIA had made its initial releases of Kennedy assassination documents. Many of the records responsive to this request related to the 1966-1969 investigation and trial of Clay Shaw by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who charged that Shaw, David Ferrie and others had plotted to kill the President. The CIA repeatedly told Hoch that his request was being processed and that if he would only be patient the documents would be released in "a few months," "in six to eight weeks," "in the near future." Indeed, Hoch received such assurances on no less than 11 different occasions over a six-year period. After having been strung-out for six years, Hoch retained counsel and filed suit. After the suit was filed, evidence was developed which indicated that all the CIA had done over the previous six years was to number the documents. It had numbered several documents one month, a few more another month, a couple more the next month. Then, in one month, it engaged in a veritable orgy of numeration, numbering, as I recall, nearly a hundred documents that month.A few months after Hoch filed his complaint in district court, the CIA produced 808 pages. It also continued to withhold a considerable volume of materials, mostly on grounds of national
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7security or because disclosure allegedly would identify intelligence sources and methods. The district court upheld all of the CIA's exemption claims save one. This one was an 11-page memorandum which the CIA swore must be withheld in its entirety under Exemption 5's deliberative process privilege. The judge ordered this anonymous, undated memorandum disclosed. Then things got really interesting. The CIA moved the judge to reconsider his order on this memorandum, asserting that it had claimed, albeit obscurely, that this document was also withheld in its entirety under Exemptions 1 and 3 in order to protect national security and intelligence sources and methods. But before the court could act on the motion for reconsideration, the CIA rushed to court with a new revelation: the eleven-page memo, which dealt with the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, matters exposed by the Church Committee in 1975, had been released nearly in full almost a decade earlier, by the CIA itself.Case 4: In 1969, Harold Weisberg made a request for FBI records on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. J. Edgar Hoover himself ordered that no response be made to this request. In 1975, when the amended FOIA became effective, Weisberg submitted a new request for King assassination records. He specifically included a request for crime scene photographs. After he filed suit, the FBI claimed that it did not have any crime scene photographs. This statement was false. Ultimately, the FBI released more than 150 crime scene photographs to Weisberg.During the same case, Weisberg picked up indications that an
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8FBI supervisor named Long had kept a tickler on the King assassination. A tickler is a file containing extra copies of documents kept at hand so it can be immediately retrieved. The FBI first denied that such a tickler file had been kept. Then it claimed that it could not locate it. After a long period of resistance, the Justice Department finally located the Long tickler exactly where Weisberg had suggested they look for it. When finally located, most of the file had been gutted.Weisberg's suit for the King assassination documents lasted 15 years. He obtained approximately 60,000 pages. If the same suit were filed today, I believe that he would get about one-fourth of what he obtained in the late 1970's and early 1980's.These stories that I have related are unusual only because the requesters actually went to court to fight the CIA and FBI. Most requesters cannot afford the time or the money of litigating their FOIA requests against these agencies. You might be tempted to conclude from the absence of litigation that the FOIA is working just fine. The opposite is true. The FOIA has been severely damaged by the 1984 amendments eliminating access to CIA operational files and by the 1986 amendments to Exemption 7, which applies to law enforcement records, as well as by a string of decisions in the Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia which have greatly expanded the amount of material which can be withheld from the public.Let me add that while it is important to have obtained the public pledges from CIA Director Gates and FBI Director Sessions
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9which you heard today, if you support release of the records, you must also ensure that you have the support of other agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Treasury Department, the State Department, and such divisions as the Secret Service and the National Security Agency.I wish to caution that while I think that this legislation will result in greatly enriching our fund of knowledge about the Kennedy assassination and the official investigations of it, at least if modified along the lines I suggest in the attachment to this statement, I do not believe that there is likely to be any "smoking gun," which will "solve the case." Rather, this legislation must be defended on the ground that the American people have a right to the fullest possible disclosure so they can make of it what they will. It will take much time to read, analyze, and understand the information released. Whether it will lead to the resolution of any controversies which beset this subject remains to be seen, but it is a course which cannot be avoided. The American people want to know the details of their history, however painful and puzzling it may be, and that is their right.The proposed legislation has both strengths and weaknesses. I am attaching to this statement a detailed discussion of the joint resolution which includes a number of recommendations for changes. To briefly summarize, the major provisions of the bill include: a definition of "assassination materials," the composition of the Review Board, and the standards for the postponement of the release of information. The standards for postponement are critical
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10because they determine the amount of material which may be withheld.Before discussing the limitations on the term "assassination material" as related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I note that this section excludes records on the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The House Select Committee on Assassinations ("HSCA") conducted an extensive investigation on Dr. King's assassination and concluded that his murder probably involved a conspiracy. Public belief that Dr. King was killed as a result of a conspiracy and that this crime remains unsolved is widespread. The alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, denies that he shot Dr. King. Unless the importance of historical issues is to be determined by whether a movie has been made about them, there is no justification for excluding the King assassination records from this legislation.The assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy is equally the subject of profound controversy. Recently, a group of distinguished citizens have submitted a lengthy petition to the Los Angeles County Grand Jury to investigate evidence that the Los Angeles Police Department engaged in "willful and corrupt misconduct" in its investigation of Senator Kennedy's assassination. In support of these charges, the group submitted more than 800 pages of exhibits, mainly derived from the Los Angeles Police Department's own files, which document its charges that L.A.P.D. destroyed crucial items of evidence, ignored material evidentiary leads, cannot account for important missing evidence,
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11engaged in a cover-up of its failures, and failed to conduct a thorough investigation of the crime. The records of federal agencies and congressional committees relevant to Senator Kennedy's assassination should also be included in this legislation.The term "assassination material" is broadly defined, but it falls short of ensuring that scholars will have all of the documents which they need in order to properly study the subject. It should include policy documents which provide the context of decisions in the Kennedy Administration which may shed light on the assassination. It should include, as it presently does, all documents obtained or created by any previous official investigation. It should include materials on those persons who have figured in previous official investigations: state, Federal or local. Because no one can predict in advance where new avenues of study may lead, or what they may produce, the definition should be flexible enough to provide scholars with those materials reasonable calculated to shed light on the assassination or its investigations. Finally, it should also include information records on agency operations and functions which may be relevant to the study of the assassination.The current provision defining assassination materials contains an exemption for "personnel matters or other administrative affairs of a congressional committee, the Warren Commission, or any entity within the Executive Branch of Government." I strongly oppose this exclusion. The Warren Commission records on this subject have been publicly available
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12through the National Archives for many years and should not now be made secret. The work of prior commissions and committees is a perfectly legitimate subject, but it has been the subject of some secrecy which has impeded the public's right to know. In particular, the staff of the House Assassinations Committee, with the exception of its General Counsel and Staff Director, G. Robert Blakey, pledged an oath of secrecy about their work. Blakey has published a commercial book about the committee's work, and is quite public and outspoken about it. Because of the secrecy oath, others who are quite knowledgeable about the Committee's work have been silenced. The public has been denied their views and their information. In this regard, I would urge the insertion of an additional provision in this legislation which would rescind any secrecy oaths taken by the staffs of any previous congressional or executive branch commission or committee.This provision would also be used to prohibit release of information regarding a very troubling incident in which the House Select Committee discovered that its most sensitive files on the Kennedy assassination had been rifled by a CIA liaison officer assigned to assist the committee. According to published accounts in the Washington Post, this officer, Regis T. Blahut, surreptitiously entered the safe reserved for physical evidence of President Kennedy's assassination, including autopsy photos, X-rays, and other articles, including the so-called "magic bullet" that wounded both Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally. According to the Post, Blahut was given several polygraph
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13-0000013examinations. He was asked whether he did it, and according to onesource, he flunked that. He was asked whether anyone had orderedhim to do it, and he is said to have flunked that question too.Materials regarding incidents of this kind should be fullyavailable to the public.A second problem with this legislation is that is proposes toexclude from the Review Board anyone who has had "previousinvolvement with the investigation or inquiry relating to theassassination of President John F. Kennedy." I believe this is toobroad and should be limited to involvement in prior "official"investigations. Having a panel of Kennedy assassination agnosticsmight have some idealistic allure, but the public is unlikely tobe persuaded that the government intends to disclose all pertinentmaterials if the panel does not include experienced andknowledgeable Kennedy researchers.A third and critically important area that needs refinementis the standards for postponement of disclosure. Particularlysignificant is the need to narrow the definition of the term"intelligence source" and the term "intelligence method."Virtually all information an intelligence agency document can bewithheld under these terms. "Intelligence source" must be definedto make clear that it does not include dead sources who have beenthe subject of widespread publicity that is tantamount to officialacknowledgement, and sources who are willing to have theiridentities disclosed, and sources who cannot reasonably be expectedto suffer death or serious bodily harm if their identities are
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13-0000014disclosed. Similar restrictions must be put on the term "confidential source." With respect to intelligence methods, it must be made clear that this term does not include outmoded methods, methods which are known to the public or methods which may be commonly deduced. Nor should it include methods that are known to other hostile intelligence services.New legislation is needed. Half measures will not do. If this legislation does succeed in substantially clearing the air, it does not convince the public that nothing of critical importance to our understanding has been withheld but for the very best of reasons, then public cynicism about government will continue to increase.I ask that additional comments be placed in the record.
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# ANALYSIS AND COMMENTSon S. J. Res. 282Sec. 3. Definitions(2) "Assassination material" is broadly defined but still may fall far short of the documents which scholars need in order to properly study the Kennedy assassination. In essence, the present definition limits "assassination materials" to those records which have figured in previous inquiries by Congressional committees or Executive Branch agencies or commissions. Since these entities may not have asked for all of the relevant records, and may in fact not have asked for records on some relevant subject areas, the definition of "assassination material" needs further refinement. It should be modified to indicate that "assassination material" includes any material which any member of the Assassination Materials Review Board ("AMRB") or any individual seeking release under the Freedom of Information Act ("the FOJA"), can plausibly contend may shed light on the assassination or any of its investigations.The definition also contains two explicit exclusions. The first of these excludes material to the extent that it pertains "to personnel matters or other administrative affairs of a congressional committee, the Warren Commission, or any entity within the Executive Branch of the Government."