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Release of the JFK Redactions Will Tell Us Little

Writer's picture: Fred LitwinFred Litwin

President Trump's executive order to release JFK assassination documents has driven the press and the conspiracy world into a frenzy. The sad fact is that they are all setting themselves up for a massive disappointment. There just isn't that much to release!


Before I explain further, please re-read the following article:


Robert Reynolds, the undisputed expert on the JFK assassination records, writes on Trump's executive order.


And please check out Robert's website, and his interview for my podcast.


His article's two main points are as follows:


First, the remaining redactions were the result of a thorough process based on strict criteria. You can actually view the transparency plans of the various agencies on the Mary Ferrell website.


Second, there isn't that much material that is redacted, and the redactions themselves aren't that important. Reynolds notes that "more than 99 percent of the ARC records are open in full."

Now wait a minute! What about all those “secret documents” withheld from the public, which have appeared again and again in news reports and on internet blogs? For the nth time: there aren’t any. Except for whole page redactions (now limited to only about 60 records), redactions hold back only words and phrases, names, places, and numbers.
For those who bother to go through the mind-numbing effort of looking at all the documents still redacted, the tiny volume of text redacted in these, and its general lack of relevance to the JFK assassination, will be starkly clear.

It's a routing sheet of an article about the JFK assassination and the Secret Service. The only redaction in this document is the name of the person who wrote it. Will anybody really care when that name gets released?


The redaction in this document refers to the job that Mr. Fulton held at the U. S. Consulate in Helsinki.



You can do this yourself and go through all of the documents in the transparency plan.


And, of course, there are many documents with the social security number of a living person. Here is one such record:

There are well over 100 HSCA Payroll records with redacted social security numbers.




So once the currently-redacted files are released we will learn almost nothing about the assassination itself. We may learn a bit more about CIA operations in Mexico City and we will learn more about the Cold War and the war against Fidel Castro.


Judge John Tunheim has repeatedly told the public that there are no smoking guns in the remaining redactions. Here is a quote from the Boston Globe:

But the release of those records, which were supposed to all have been made public by 2017, should go a long way to removing doubts in the minds of many people, said John R. Tunheim, a Minnesota federal judge who chaired the federal Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s that Congress created to help find and release all the Kennedy files.
“I don’t think it’ll end it completely because Americans, and indeed citizens around the world, love to dig into conspiracies,” Tunheim told the Globe. “But I think it will eliminate a major reason in people’s minds why they still have doubts about what the Warren Commission concluded or what the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded. It’ll remove, for a lot of people, that last lingering doubt.”

The only withheld in full documents (about 515 in total) are IRS documents and some grand jury testimony. This material is exempt from disclosure by the JFK Records Act. There are some interviews by William Manchester of Robert Kennedy and some personal letters of Jackie Kennedy.


Will Trump's executive order release these documents? He'll probably need an act of Congress to make the IRS documents public, but I have no reason to oppose the release of this material. Will it add to our understanding of the assassination. Absolutely not.


I welcome the release of these papers.


There are also the notes of Walter Sheridan:

The RFK and Sheridan documents would be very interesting. But they won't tell us much about the JFK assassination.


There also might be records of the Ramsey Panel which may not be in the ARC and which could add some insights on the evaluation of the acoustics evidence by the HSCA.


So of course I want this material to be released.


And when any this material is released there will be the feeding frenzy in the media. Once again, all sorts of previously-released documents will be discussed as if they are new.


Here is an excerpt from my book, I was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak: (pages 203 - 204 in the Kindle edition)


One CIA memo, written the day after the assassination, reported that the Cambridge News in the UK had received an anonymous phone call 25 minutes before the assassination saying that they should call the American Embassy for some big news. Here’s the headline in Newsweek:

Had they Googled Cambridge News and JFK they would have found that Michael Eddowes wrote about this in his 1977 book, The Oswald File. They also failed to call the Cambridge News where this had been a source of discussion for years. Senior reporter Jock Gillespie said this: “There is no way in hell that would have happened without being talked about. There are three or four of us that still get together, 'the old farts', and there's no way that wouldn't have been talked about—that would have never ever got past us. People I knew at that time wouldn't have shut up about that—it would have been published as well. That's been a windup—are you sure it isn't Cambridge Massachusetts they are talking about?" Other senior reporters, who are still alive, also disputed the story and wondered why on earth somebody would call the Cambridge Times, of all newspapers, with such a story. As Dale Myers puts it, “the assassination files are filled with examples of unsubstantiated clairvoyance relating to every aspect of the assassination story.”


What would really help is the digitization of the JFK collection. Digitization would help in parsing all of the available documents for any particular name or story. You never know what new connection might become apparent once everything is online. In addition, as NARA digitizes its collection, missing documents might be found and misfiled documents may be corrected.


A good example is the HSCA Outside Contact Report with Jay Stocks, a Secret Service agent in Chicago. A large part of this report is missing, and perhaps it might have been misfiled some time in the past. Full digitization might find this record.


NARA's digitization project is way behind schedule. When I was at NARA last August, they told me they were digitizing the Warren Commission records first, and then they would go on to the HSCA (only a small percentage of HSCA documents are currently digizited). It's high time for an update from NARA.



In addition, there is still material at NARA which needs processing. For instance, there are many boxes of the ARRB just sitting there:

The other collection of documents that needs to be released is the massive collection of the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC). Approximately 400,000 pages have been digitized by the Mary Ferrell Foundation but they have not put these documents on line. Many audio recordings are in that collection. And that's not the whole collection. Supposedly there is a plan to digitize the material that still resides in several warehouses in the D. C. area.


Lastly, there are also JFK documents held in Moscow, Minsk, Mexico City, and Havana. Those documents will tell more than the 3,000+ redactions. The Moscow documents might even tell us additional details on past KGB operations to influence the American public. The Minsk documents will tell us more about Oswald, and the Mexico City documents will tell us more about Oswald visit in September 1963.


In the meantime, I suggest everybody take a deep breath. Nothing earth-shattering is going to be released.
















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