Newly released records shed light on JFK assassination. Image: The Guardian.
(The Post News)– The US government has released the final batch of documents on the assassination of President John F Kennedy (JFK). Kennedy was shot during a visit to Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. JFK’s assassination is a case that still inspires conspiracy theories more than 60 years later.
It follows an executive order by President Donald Trump that required remaining unredacted files in the case to be publicised. Experts are currently going through the papers, not all of which have appeared online. According to the experts, the job will take time, and they are not expecting much ground-breaking information.
Hundreds of thousands of JFK documents have been previously released by US authorities but held some back, citing national security concerns. It’s believed by many Americans that the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, didn’t act alone. Beforehand, Trump said that 80,000 pages would be released.
The National Archives released about 1,123 documents, but the amount of new material was unclear in Tuesday’s disclosure of records initially. Many documents have previously been released in partially redacted form. But some of the hundreds of files released on Tuesday night did appear to have blacked-out passages. According to specialists, some were difficult to read as they were faded or were poorly scanned photocopies or appeared to bear little relevance to the JFK case.
Jefferson Morley has estimated that about 3,500 documents in the government’s official collection of JFK files contained redactions before the latest release. There were 1,123 documents of varying lengths unveiled Tuesday; that means about a third of the remaining redacted documents have been released fully. The CIA produced about 75% of those records. More than 500 IRS records have been withheld from public release entirely.
Although the unveiling of key portions of the records was hailed by researchers and academics who had long argued that the details in certain reports by the CIA and FBI should have been disclosed years ago. The CIA and FBI have argued over the years that the release of the information would harm national security, even decades after the fact.
A 1992 law required all of the documents related to the assassination to be released within 25 years, but the law also included national security exceptions. The push for greater transparency has led to more releases over time. Both President Trump in his first term and President Biden, as recently as 2023, released batches of documents.
Before the new release, President Trump said that he requested his staff not to redact anything from them.That doesn’t appear to be entirely the case, as new documents still have some redactions. Although experts largely agree that the recent release was a step forward for transparency.
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