[104-10337-10014.pdf — page 37]
# CHAPTER 5: THE STANDARDS FOR REVIEW: REVIEW BOARD "COMMON LAW"Office, and ultimately the Department of State spent a substantial amount of time resolving the issues that arose in the appeal process, and for those important records that were at issue, the Review Board considered its time well-spent. The Review Board similarly dealt with other key records and spent as much time as was necessary to deliberate and decide upon those records.The postponement-by-postponement review at each early Review Board meeting proved to be a slow and careful process. The postponement-by-postponement review proved to be a necessary educational process for the Board members. The Board members were a group of five citizens who were selected not for their familiarity with the subject of the assassination, but for their professional competence in history and law. Thus, through reviewing individual documents at its early meetings, the Board essentially educated itself about the assassination.While the Review Board did need time to educate itself and to develop its policies, the Board's pace eventually increased. In an effort to streamline its work, the Review Board consulted with federal agencies such as the CIA and FBI to work out an approach for review of records that would allow the Review Board to make informed decisions, but not require agencies to spend hundreds of hours locating evidence for and providing briefings on each postponement within an assassination record.The first step to developing a reasonable approach was for the Review Board to formulate general rules for sustaining and denying postponements. The Review Board's "guidance" to its staff and the agencies became a body of rules—a Review Board "common law." Once the Review Board notified an agency of its approach on a particular type of postponement, the agency learned to present only those facts that the Review Board would need to make a decision. For example, with regard to FBI informants, the Review Board notified the FBI of what it considered to be the relevant factors in its decisionmaking. In other words, it defined for the Bureau what it considered to be "clear and convincing" evidence. Then, the Review Board worked with the FBI to create a one-page form titled an "Informant Postponement Evidence Form" that the FBI could use to provide evidence on an informant. (See illustration.) The form allowed the FBI to simply fill in the answers to a series of questions about the informant in question, which in turn allowed the Review Board to focus on those facts that it deemed to be dispositive in a particular document. This approach had the added benefit of providing consistency to the Review Board's decisionmaking.A large number of records that the JFK Act defined as "assassination records" proved to be of very low public interest. The JFK Act required the Review Board to process all records that were "made available" to the Warren Commission and the Congressional Committees that investigated the assassination, whether or not the records were used by the Commission or the committees. Many of these records, while interesting from a historian's perspective, are not closely related to the assassination. For those documents that were of little or no public interest, the Review Board modified its standards in the two ways described below.A. "NBR" Guidelines: Records that Review Board judged were "not believed relevant" to the assassination. For those records that truly had no apparent relevance to the assassination, the Review Board designated the records "not believed relevant" (NBR). The "NBR" Guidelines allowed the Review Board to remove irrelevant records from further consideration. Records that the Review Board designated "NBR" were virtually the only groups of records that the Review Board agreed to postpone in full. Thus, the Review Board was always extremely reluctant to designate records "NBR" and rarely did so.B. Segregated Collection Guidelines. For those records that were not immediately relevant, but shed at least some light on issues that the congressional committees that investigated the assassination explored as potentially relevant to the assassination, the Review Board created the "Segregated Collection Guidelines." The segregated collections records, although marginally relevant, were not appropriate for "NBR" designation, as the "NBR" Guidelines would have resulted in withholding records in full. Instead, the Board passed the "Segregated Collection" Guidelines, which ensured that the Review Board staff would review every page of the