National Archives Decides to Withhold JFK Assassination Records Instead of Declassifying Them

[LR Trotter]

It is my understanding that National Geographic Channel is part of the Fox Corporate Family.
eggsplat

[Jan Klimkowski]

It is my understanding that National Geographic Channel is part of the Fox Corporate Family.
eggsplat

NatGeo is part of Murdoch's empire:

Owned by

National Geographic Channel U.S.
Owned by:
Fox Cable Networks (News Corporation) (67%)

National Geographic Channel International Owned by:
Fox Entertainment Group (News Corporation) (50%)

[Albert Doyle]

NatGeo is part of Murdoch's empire:

OK. Now I understand the National Geographic program on the crash of TWA Flight 800. A program that showed the official government version in a National Geographic format.

Murdoch should be jailed for aiding and abetting in the violation of federal crash investigation laws and crimes against democracy.

[Vasilios Vazakas]

From Jefferson Morley article:

The Archives' decision comes as two former CIA officers have gone public with the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that Cuban leader Fidel Castro had advance knowledge of JFK's assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. In a piece published in the Daily Beast this week, retired CIA officer Glenn Carle claimed that "the Cuban dictator knew of Lee Harvey Oswald's intention to kill President Kennedy." Carle also defended a deceased CIA colleague, David Phillips, from allegations of JFK conspiracy theorists that he connived in JFK's death.

The still-secret CIA records could clarify the issue. The records include more than 600 pages of material on the career of Phillips, the chief of the Agency's anti-Castro operations in 1963. Phillips oversaw the surveillance of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City six weeks before Kennedy was killed. Antonio Veciana, an anti-Castro Cuban who worked for the CIA in the 1960s, told congressional investigators in 1976 that he saw an Agency officer whom he knew as "Maurice Bishop" with Oswald two months before JFK was killed. At the time, the CIA unequivocally denied that Phillips had ever used that name. In the Daily Beast article, Carle, a colleague of Phillips, admitted what the Agency has long denied: that Phillips had used the name "Maurice Bishop."

A CIA spokesman said the Agency declined to comment on Carle's claims.

Phillips, who died in 1988, told conflicting stories about what he knew of Oswald before JFK's murder, but always rejected accusations he was involved in the assassination itself. Phillips may have been sensitive about such allegations because, unbeknownst to JFK investigators, he had been involved in another high-profile political assassination while working for the CIA. In 1999, the nonprofit National Security Archive obtained Agency records revealing that Phillips, as a senior CIA official in 1970, had orchestrated the murder of a Chilean general on behalf of the Nixon White House.

There is considerable question about Lee Harvey Oswald being in Mexico City at the time. FBI Director Hoover spoke with President Lyndon Johnson on Saturday, November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination and told him that the voice the FBI heard on a telephone call made by a person calling himself Oswald in Mexico City was not the real Oswald's voice. The CIA claimed to have a picture of Oswald in Mexico City, but when it was produced, it was of a heavy set man with no resemblence to Oswald. There had been a blond "Oswald" claimant in the Cuban Consulate there who had created a scene.

David Atlee Phillips of the CIA is one person who should be scrutinized as a conspirator in the murder of John Kennedy.

Adele

Could it be possible that the Oswald in Mexico was Miguel Casas Saez or Policarpo Lopez? Do we have knowledge of their physical description? Ira Wood in 'JFK assassination chronology wrote "...He is believed to be one Miguel Casas Saez. According to the CIA, Casas was born in Cuba, is either twentyone or twenty-seven, 5'5" in height, weighs 155 lbs. He fits the description of the short blond Oswald 5'6", i have never a photo of Saez or Lopez.

[Vasilios Vazakas]

The witholding of informatiom from NARA, is disappointing, frustrating and makes me think if there is any point trying to solve the JFK assassination, it seems that we are trying
to win a game where the cards are marked and the result is predetermined.
I am now convinced that the truth will be too painful, too embaracing, too disastrous that they will never allow it to surface, ever. It is almost certain that those who ordered the assassination were the most powerful figures of the establishment who also forced the government and the media to cover up the crime for the last 49 years.
If the truth ever came out it would rock the US to its core, it will take the world by storm it will destroy the fabric of USA. So at all cost, they will never let you know the truth,
and they will perpetute the Big Lie, as Charles Drago said in a previous post, the the ultimate Sponsor is the Big Lie and people laughed. OK the instigators are dead now, but how the government and the media will admit that they were lying all along, how they will justify that they knew that Oswald was innocent and yet they chose to insist that he was the lone nut killer? So they decided to be part of the Lie but 49 years later they have become the Lie and there is no way out.
We are all together stuck in the hamster's wheel, how sad it is to realize it.

[Adele Edisen]

Vasilios Vazakas said:

The witholding of informatiom from NARA, is disappointing, frustrating and makes me think if there is any point trying to solve the JFK assassination, it seems that we are trying
to win a game where the cards are marked and the result is predetermined.
I am now convinced that the truth will be too painful, too embaracing, too disastrous that they will never allow it to surface, ever. It is almost certain that those who ordered the assassination were the most powerful figures of the establishment who also forced the government and the media to cover up the crime for the last 49 years.
If the truth ever came out it would rock the US to its core, it will take the world by storm it will destroy the fabric of USA. So at all cost, they will never let you know the truth,
and they will perpetute the Big Lie, as Charles Drago said in a previous post, the the ultimate Sponsor is the Big Lie and people laughed. OK the instigators are dead now, but how the government and the media will admit that they were lying all along, how they will justify that they knew that Oswald was innocent and yet they chose to insist that he was the lone nut killer? So they decided to be part of the Lie but 49 years later they have become the Lie and there is no way out.
We are all together stuck in the hamster's wheel, how sad it is to realize it.

It may seem hopeless to learn the real and total truth of who were responsible for the murder of President Kennedy (and Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, Jr.) because we lack access to those documents which belong to the American people that are locked away in government vaults, but because they are, we know that the guilty who are being thereby protected must be, and must have been, extremely powerful people with enormous economic and political power, more powerful than any U.S. President. We may only be able to know of the lower level creatures who did their biddings; however, we can connect many dots from the knowledge we already possess and that which we will continue to uncover in the future.

Perhaps a collected listing of names and idenities to which we all could contribute would be a start for concentrated research by everyone - under the name of the assassinated person.

I could start with the names of five persons who I believe were involved in some fashion with the assassination of President John Kennedy:

1) Jose A. Rivera
2) David Atlee Phillips
3) Gordon McLendon
4) E. Howard Hunt
5) Charles Cabell

Adele

[Peter Lemkin]

Department of Justice Accused of Undermining FOIA Ombudsman
Friday, 15 June 2012 10:37
By Jason Leopold, Truthout

The Obama administration continues to disseminate a flawed narrative about President Obama's commitment to open government. Just last week, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters during a press briefing that President Obama has taken steps, "unprecedented in American presidential administration history," to "enhance transparency."

But Carney's rhetoric is not supported by the facts, as has been documented time and again over the past three years.

Indeed, one veteran Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requester said, "there's no question about it," the Obama administration is "the worst on FOIA issues."

"This administration is raising one barrier after another.... It's gotten to the point where I'm stunned - I'm really stunned," Washington lawyer Katherine Meyer told Politico earlier this year.

The government agency largely responsible for thwarting the administration's transparency promises is the Justice Department's (DOJ) Office of Information Policy (OIP), which is supposed to ensure all federal agencies comply with the executive order on open government Obama signed immediately after he was sworn into office and the new FOIA guidelines Attorney General Eric Holder issued shortly thereafter.

Instead, "OIP has introduced FOIA regulations that would have allowed lying to requesters, excluded online media from news media fee waivers, made it easier for the DOJ to capriciously deny requests and begun charging students for making FOIA requests," said Nate Jones of George Washington University's National Security Archive, a historical research group that files thousands of FOIA requests and publishes declassified documents, in an interview with Truthout. "In its FY 2011 FOIA report, OIP cooked its FOIA stats to present a laughably high 95.4 percent FOIA release rate. (The actual release rate was closer to 56.7 percent.)"

"In March 2009, Holder pledged that the DOJ would only defend FOIA agencies' FOIA denials when true harm would occur from the release of documents," Jones added. "There is not a single known case of the DOJ refusing to defend any agency FOIA decision." (Emphasis added by Jones.)

Further demonstrating its disdain for transparency, OIP, for the past several months, has apparently been trying to sideline the independent Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) and the agency's FOIA ombudsman, set up in 2007 through bipartisan legislation. OIP is headed by Melanie Pustay, who was appointed director in 2007 by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

OGIS, housed at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), according to its web site, "works with executive branch agencies and requesters to promote compliance with the FOIA." It's responsibilities include:
Reviewing agencies' FOIA policies and procedures;
Reviewing agency compliance with the FOIA;
Recommending to Congress and the President ways to improve the FOIA;
Providing facilitation and mediation services to FOIA requesters and agencies to resolve disputes; and
Issuing advisory opinions, at the Office's discretion, when mediation does not resolve disputes.

Open government experts and advocates have long suspected tension between OIP and the FOIA ombudsman, largely due to the fact that the ombudsman is supposed to demonstrate true independence when disputes arise between the government and FOIA requesters over denial of records.

In March, the DOJ tried to muscle in on the ombudsman's turf by publishing a notice in the federal register describing an ombudsman program run by OIP, to handle "disputes between federal agencies and individuals who submit requests under" FOIA, that would have conflicted with the work performed by OGIS as FOIA ombudsman.

DOJ's proposal prompted Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), the lawmakers who sponsored the 2007 Open Government Act that led to the creation of the FOIA ombudsman, to send a strongly worded letter to Holder stating, "DOJ's proposal is inconsistent with the plain language of [the Open Government Act] and with our intent."

Suzanne Dershowitz, in a report published in March on the web site of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), noted the DOJ has tried once before to interfere with the FOIA ombudsman's duties:

Just weeks after the enactment of the FOIA reform legislation of 2007, President Bush buried a provision in the administration's fiscal year 2009 budget proposal that would have moved the functions of newly created OGIS from independent NARA to DOJ. When the Bush Administration attempted to defund OGIS at NARA and instead set up the ombudsman role within DOJ, Congress deflected the effort. As Sen. Leahy argued in a 2008 statement, it was important to install the ombudsman outside DOJ:

When Senator Cornyn and I drafted the OPEN Government Act, we intentionally placed this critical office in the National Archives, so that OGIS would be free from the influence of the Federal agency that litigates FOIA disputes - the Department of Justice.

Now, Leahy and Cornyn are being urged to hold hearings to again clarify their intent in light of a recent court filing pertaining to a FOIA lawsuit in which the DOJ mischaracterized and undermined OGIS' responsibilities as FOIA ombudsman.

Kel McClanahan, the executive director of Arlington, Virginia-based public interest law firm National Security Counselors, has been litigating against the CIA since February a fee dispute where the CIA refused to process FOIA requests without a commitment by the requester to pay all fees. (Full disclosure: McClanahan is representing this reporter in a FOIA lawsuit filed against the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies, in which National Security Counselors is also a plaintiff.)

Before suing the CIA, McClanahan worked closely with the FOIA ombudsman over the course of several months to resolve the case. The ombudsman's office engaged in a half-dozen discussions with the CIA and OIP alerting the agencies to some discrepancies under the law associated with its demand that requesters commit to paying all fees before the agency begins to process FOIA requests, according to a May 9 letter sent to McClanahan by OGIS Director Miriam Nisbet.

"As you know, non-commercial [FOIA] requesters are statutorily entitled to two free hours of search time and 100 free pages of duplication regardless of whether they commit to paying fees and regardless of whether the remainder of any responsive records is processed," Nisbet wrote.

The CIA and DOJ, however, refused to budge, claiming its demand that requesters commit to paying all fees is perfectly legal. In a June 1 court filing, the DOJ said the ombudsman's "opinion is incorrect and unsupported."

Moreover, the government contended that the FOIA ombudsman "offers mediation services and does not set government policy," a statement contradicted by the language contained in Leahy and Cornyn's Open Government Act and a description of the ombudsman's responsibilities posted on its web site.

The government's position led McClanahan to write to lawmakers requesting they initiate hearings, "or at the very least communicate such intent to the Attorney General in official correspondence in such a way that emphasizes that these continuing attempts to erode OGIS' role within the Executive Branch will no longer be tolerated."

In an interview, McClanahan said the government's response "clearly shows ... the true feelings DOJ harbors for [the ombudsman], the 'new kid' who should stick to mediation and not get involved in such 'adult' matters as analyzing FOIA policy."

"The fact that one federal agency would go on record and ask a federal judge to endorse such an opinion about another federal agency speaks volumes about the disdain that DOJ apparently holds for its sister agency," McClanahan said.

In his letter, a copy of which was also sent to Reps. Darrell Issa (R-California) and Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland), chairman and ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, McClanahan said the FOIA ombudsman did not "reach this conclusion on a whim, it did so after three months of consideration and six telephone discussions with the head of the CIA FOIA office, as well as consultation with OIP."

"Second and more importantly, though, the DOJ has just stated for the record that OGIS 'just performs mediations,' and in support of this position cites its own regulations as if a DOJ regulation can supersede the plain language of a statute and the clear will of Congress," McClanahan's letter stated. "This public attempt by the DOJ to convince a federal court to marginalize OGIS and relegate it to an office which 'offers mediation services' is in direct conflict with both the letter and intent of the OPEN Government Act and I ask for your support in protecting the delicate balance of power between the DOJ and OGIS and ensuring that OGIS continues to be able to operate at full effectiveness despite such blatant power plays by the DOJ."

Jessica Brady, a spokeswoman for Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Leahy received McClanahan's letter, but it's the committee's policy not to comment on pending litigation.

Nisbet, the director of OGIS, also said, "we would not want to comment about ongoing litigation."

The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment.

Jones, of the National Security Archive, said right now "OIP appears to be winning the turf war."

"For the FOIA to work, the public needs an independent agency - such as OGIS - that strives to release as much information as possible to the American people, rather than instinctively defend all agency withholdings for its government clients," Jones said. "Obama has made some impressive transparency reforms (Consumer Product Safety Database, Regulations.gov, the Open Government Initiative, the Open Government Partnership and more) but he has consistently put what he defines as 'classified national security information' outside the realm of transparency and accountability. So, to avoid this accountability, more and more agencies and individuals seek to classify what they do. And the universe of 'untouchable' classified information has grown faster than ever before."

[Peter Lemkin]

CIA closes office that declassifies historical materials

The Historical Collections Division is the latest casualty of sequester cuts. The office handling Freedom of Information Act requests will take over the work.
By Ken Dilanian

August 21, 2013, 6:44 p.m.


WASHINGTON The budget ax has fallen on a CIA office that focused on declassifying historical materials, a move scholars say will mean fewer public disclosures about long-buried intelligence secrets and scandals.
The Historical Collections Division, which has declassified documents on top Soviet spies, a secret CIA airline in the Vietnam War, the Cuban missile crisis and other major operations, has been disbanded. The office that handles Freedom of Information Act requests will take over the work.
CIA officials said they closed the Historical Collections Division to accommodate federal budget cuts that the White House and Congress proposed last year to create pressure for a deficit reduction deal. No deal materialized, so across-the-board budget cuts known as the sequester were imposed.

"As a result of sequestration, elements of one program office were moved into a larger unit to create efficiencies, but CIA will continue to perform this important work," said Edward Price, a CIA spokesman.
He said the agency remained committed to the "public interest mission" of declassifying significant historical documents.
But outside experts criticized the CIA for shutting down an office that academics, lawyers and historians use.
"This move is a true loss to the public," said Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer who frequently litigates against the CIA. He said the CIA office that handles Freedom of Information Act requests "is the most obstructionist and unfriendly of those I have dealt with during the last two decades."
"This is very unfortunate," said Robert Jervis, a Columbia University professor who chairs the CIA's Historical Review Panel, which advises the agency on declassification. "There will be fewer releases. We shouldn't fool ourselves."
Because the CIA's budget is classified, it's unclear how much it has shrunk, or how much was saved by closing the Historical Collections Division.
Unlike the Pentagon, which has forced more than 600,000 civilian employees to take unpaid leave, the CIA has not told its civilian staff to take furloughs. It instead has cut spending on outside contractors, including those who handle much of the labor-intensive work of declassifying CIA documents.
Some of the declassification is required by law, so the Historical Collections Division, which focused on discretionary declassification involving topics that scholars found compelling, was the easiest target for trimming costs, Jervis said.
ken.dilanian@latimes.com

[Phil Dragoo]

He said the agency remained committed to the "public interest mission" of declassifying significant historical documents.

Oh, it's twoo! It's twoo!

[ATTACH=CONFIG]5175[/ATTACH]

But nobody reads.
Don't believe people read in this country.
There will be a few professors that will read the record...
The public will read very little.

[Jim Hackett II]

"That's a 40 dollar hand cart, boys."

"You can take the boy out of Nazi Germany but you can never take the Nazi Germany out of the boy."

That is funny, and really humorous if not so revealing.
I am thankful to have been educated before Momma had to go to work for the working class families to survive.

Too many left to be under educated in the 1970s and after by the "incorporated" schools and the IDIOT TV hypnotist of "only lights and wires in a box" as Ed Morrow put it.
It all serves Empire so well. Shut up and take your Soma....
Go back to sleep America we have it under control for you.
Knowledge is unimportant now, we'll teach you a trade...
anything but critical thinking and citizenship.
Hence more classification for any reason at all is acceptable as long as no one threatens my rice bowl.
Jeez Louise.......

How in the hell does anyone graduate high school being unable to read at a Junior High or Grade school level????
Seek a job in that condition? Condemned to poverty by the school game leaving the poor behind with no weapons to fight ignorance.
Sunstein has to be loving this crap....just like the fascists.
Empowers the traitors.

Somebody ran off with the $$$$ for schools, the administrators, not the teachers that is for damn sure.