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Most of the documents were declassified already, I think 99% of 170,000 files or some large number. This was through the The President John F. Kennedy Assassina
by adamredwoods 2y ago
Most of the documents were declassified already, I think 99% of 170,000 files or some large number. This was through the The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. I don't know what's to gain in this release other than closure?
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoThe theory is that there must be a big reason why those last 1% haven't been disclosed. I dunno, but curiosity did kill the cat. It's a powerful force.
- LastTrain 2y ago[flagged]
- SecretDreams 2y ago[flagged]
- nomel 2y agoSomeone previously decided that the remaining 1%, 1700 files, shouldn't be viewed by the public. Why? 1700 files is plenty to hold some interesting truths.
- ttyprintk 2y agoSome people have seen those and are allowed to talk about them: https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/spycast/646/transcript https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/spycast/646/transcript https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/spycast/647/notes https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/spycast/647/notes
- petee 2y agoAllowed to talk about classified material? Doubtful
- ttyprintk 2y agoJudge for yourself: > the correct figure now is about 3,600 documents in the collection of 320,000 documents still contain redactions. That might mean we might have most of the document except for a sentence, a word, a name. In other cases, you know, several pages or, you know, I don't think there's any document that's withheld in its entirety. But, you know, it's still a lot of records. The bulk of those are CIA records. A lot you can tell from the context, like Mark says, stuff about surveillance techniques, covert arrangements with foreign governments. They're very -- they guard those very closely. That's one of the things that they're still keeping. But, you know, why is this necessary? I mean, again, to step back, you know, the JFK Records Act, all this stuff was supposed to be made public in 2017. Judge Tunheim, the head of the review board, I asked him, I said, What did you expect after 25 years? How many records would have to be -- remain secret? And he said, Out of the stuff that I saw, you know, maybe 100 documents. Not, you know, and when in 2017 the CIA and FBI came to Trump and said, We have 14,000 documents that have redactions that we couldn't possibly remove. So it's like, why is the presumption around a Presidential assassination that we're going to keep -- you know, keep these secrets for good?
- petee 2y agoSounds like that person knows very little and wants to sound important for a podcast. Security clearances are taken very seriously, you can't just spitball about classified things you've seen. My dad had classified knowledge from his time in the air force, and he wouldn't even discuss the category of information let alone give an overview of the contents, 50 years onward
- ttyprintk 2y agoWell, these records are special because of an act. Just because a President proactively blocked release does not promote them to a classification. But Mark Zaid on that podcast is a lawyer who specializes in people’s classification. There are many, many more people less qualified than him who are trying to sound important in this domain, like Roger Stone.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoI think the idea was to wait for people mentioned in those documents to die, so as to not affect their privacy. You want people to tell the truth to government investigations in the future, and not hold something back because they think in 15 years the government might just release a transcript of everything you told them.
- declan_roberts 2y agoThat's not the stated reason why they're dragging their feet.
- dehrmann 2y ago> I think the idea was to wait for people mentioned in those documents to die, so as to not affect their privacy I also remember that story, but it's no justification for keeping something with this much public interest secret.
- MeetingsBrowser 2y agoSo you would like people to feel comfortable telling the whole truth, unless it’s something really important?
- dehrmann 2y agoSecret witnesses aren't allowed to testify in the US. Not that these were court trials.
- legitster 2y agoFormer directors have answered this pretty openly. Anything that is left is just because it contains identifiable information for people still alive. Lots of home addresses, names of investigators, etc.
- rat87 2y agoInteresting truths? Maybe. Possibly some embarrassing things for FBI Or CIA. But nothing likely to satisfy conspiracy theorists. We know who killed JFK https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/671ky4/is_the_official_explanation_for_the_jfk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/671ky4/is_th... > Yes, the official explanation that Lee Harvey Oswald was, on his own, responsible for murdering President Kennedy is overwhelmingly accepted as correct. It has largely held up to intense scrutiny over the past 50 years and there is no substantial evidence toward any other explanation. > As I mentioned in my older post linked elsewhere, one of the reasons why there was so much criticism of the official explanation after the fact is that the investigation was not handled well. This resulted in a lot of seemingly contradictory and unexplained information that opened the door to questioning the overall conclusion as a whole.
- kelipso 2y agoIt was a campaign process and obviously people want to know the whole story.
- SecretDreams 2y ago> obviously people want to know the whole story. And, yet, they never will.
- conception 2y agoOr they already do.
- bentobean 2y agoThe remaining 1% is almost certainly where the good stuff is.
- CSMastermind 2y agoOr just people's names. Something like "Joe Blow said he saw a person with a brown bag." You'd redact Joe's name even if there's nothing particularly interesting about him.
- giantg2 2y agoYou'd redact a name, but not an entire file.
- 3eb7988a1663 2y agoDepending on what remains, it may be possible to unblind the redacted names by considering the sum total of evidence. For example, these 10 people in the room all would have given testimony, but we only have nine statements with attached names. Who could this 10th unnamed persona be? Far easier to just keep the entire thing redacted.
- vkou 2y agoAnd if it turns out that there isn't anything interesting in that 1%, will you abandon this heuristic, and be more ready to accept that maybe the mundane explanation of 'they were kept classified because the people involved are still alive' is the norm for stuff like this?
- karaterobot 2y agoTo play devil's advocate, you could declassify 99% of the files, and still leave out the incriminating parts. I don't believe this is what happened, I'm just saying 99% of the truth can still leave a lot out.
- uoaei 2y agoAre you assuming that the decisions of which pages were declassified was a random sample? Why would they have selected any pages to remain hidden?
- fastball 2y agoBecause they have assets who are still in the field that they don't want to expose or similar. Classified status is somewhat contagious, in that many of those documents aren't from the time period in question, they could be from yesterday if some government agent had a discussion about it.
- whycome 2y agoWhy do you think a certain amount has remained classified?
- moralestapia 2y agoJFK's assasination is one canonical event of US history. Why would you not want this to be released? Weird.
- adastra22 2y agoThis isn't quite true. Those files were redacted. Now they would be unredacted.
- matwood 2y ago> I don't know what's to gain in this release other than closure? Classic Trump PR move. Claim he's doing something that's already done and then take credit loudly.