Fred Litwin
Feb 9, 20234 min
Updated: Feb 10, 2023
I posted yesterday a video of Jeremy Gunn, Executive Director of the ARRB, delivering a speech in 2013 at the University of New England. In addition to his criticisms of Oliver Stone, Jim Garrison, and Fletcher Prouty, he also commented on the unreleased redactions in assassination records.
Here is an excerpt from a transcript: (42:00)
Jeremy Gunn: There were people whose names in the record had very little to do with the assassination itself. Sometimes we'd have records, such as a presidential briefing, where topics from the entire gamut of what the President is briefed on, are included in the record, but only one paragraph is on the assassination. We also had records where there's some things were rather unimportant. And what we did was to say that the postponement of the release of these records will continue until the year 2017, which I thought, well, that's going to be a long time from now. That's after we're all dead. Now it's coming up. I was asked when I was interviewed, last week, will I be very interested in seeing these last records and what they show about the Kennedy assassination? So, now we'll finally get it in 2017. I said, I've already seen those records. There isn't anything in there that I can identify. So, in some ways, the story of what is available in federal government records is for all practical purposes, revealed. There are some records that we've learned about subsequently, parts of the story that we didn't know, that there are still efforts to try to release them. I'm not expecting that there will be anything that will help answer the question of what really happened in Dealey Plaza, so, I'm expecting that we will continue to learn additional things in the future, but I am not expecting any major revelations in terms of what I saw. Don't wait until 2017 to learn the truth, it's not going to be there.
Gunn says that "there isn't anything in there that I can identify."
Here is a relevant quote from Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History (pages 2,844 - 2,845)
Most important to the suspicious and cynical, however, Judge Tunheim [Chairman of the ARRB] said that either he or another member of the Review Board has personally examined all of the redacted material, and there was “nothing in any of the documents that was central to the assassination. There’s no smoking gun, and no substantive information was protected and not released by way of redaction.” What they did protect and redact, he said, were such things as the names of intelligence agents, “who proved to us that there could be some harm to them by the release of their name,” methods of intelligence gathering back then that are still used today and not generally known, matters pertaining to presidential security, “and a very few cases involving personal privacy.” (Telephone interview of Judge John Tunheim by author on December 10, 1999)
Here is an excerpt from a transcript: (14:20)
Tunheim: I've been encouraging the full release of everything that is remaining redacted in these files. This would be an important move for transparency and finality to the ordeal. And the information, what we redacted I've largely seen, it doesn't contain bombshells of any kind, but it is important to be able to tell the American people that everything has been released.
Right now, NARA is in the process of digitizing the JFK collection. This is important work - only a small fraction of HSCA documents are online. In fact, I'll be going to the College Park branch of NARA in April to retrieve some additional HSCA records.
The truth is that we won't learn much about the assassination from the remaining redactions. We will learn more when all of the remaining, and currently public, documents are put online. I don't mean that the truth of the assassination will come out - but that we will learn more about the investigations.
Additional documents will be put online by the end of June. I can predict what will happen. More documents will be put online with fewer redactions. There will be no major new revelations. There might still be some documents that contain redactions, and the Joannides personnel file might still be withheld. The griping will continue.
Don't miss the Viewer's Guide to JFK: Destiny Betrayed and JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.
Over the past several months, I have shown in multiple blog posts how Oliver Stone's documentary series, JFK Revisited and JFK: Destiny Betrayed, misleads viewers. In fact, despite months of work, there are still many more misleading segments that need to be addressed. It's no wonder that the fact checkers of Netflix nixed the airing of the films.
There is a choice between four hours of tendentious nonsense (JFK: Destiny Betrayed) and two hours (JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass). As a handy guide for viewers, here are all those posts in order of their appearance in JFK: Destiny Betrayed and JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, preceded by some general critiques.
The Viewer's Guide has now been updated to include the sources from my new book, Oliver Stone's Film-Flam: The Demagogue of Dealey Plaza.