Next year will
be a half-century since the death of JFK. And the Obama Administration
thinks we need to keep secret the records on the matter….a little
longer yet.

Believe it
or not, more than 50,000 pages of JFK assassination-related documents
are being withheld in full. And an untold number of documents have
been partially withheld, or released with everything interesting
blacked out. But why?

Since the government
and the big media keep telling us there was no conspiracy, and that
it was all Lee Harvey Oswald acting on his own, why continue to
keep the wraps on?

We don’t have
an answer, but in understanding this and any number of other mysteries,
we can begin looking for patterns in the way the administration
handles information policy.

We
Want to Hear From You (But That’s It – We Just Want to Hear
From You)

Earlier this
year, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) asked,
on its online Open Government Forum, for suggestions from the public
about what it could do to create greater transparency. The #1 most
popular idea? Get those Kennedy records out – before
Nov. 22, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of the Dallas tragedy.

But instead
of dealing honestly with this matter, the feds have resorted to
disinformation. In an interview with the Boston Globe, the
Archivist of the United States claimed
that at two public forums held on open records, the most public
comments came from people interested either in the JFK assassination
or….in UFOs.

Except for
one thing: James Lesar, an attorney and co-founder of the Assassination
Archives and Research Center (AARC), a DC-based nonprofit that has
fought a long and valiant fight on behalf of the public interest
in disclosure, attended both of those forums and says that as he
recalls there were no people there asking about UFOs, or
that at most it was of negligible interest. In fact, a look at NARA’s
online idea forum (now closed) showed no UFO proposals
or comments.

So, what’s
with claiming otherwise? One could be excused for seeing in the
Archivist’s statement a deliberate, and unworthy, attempt to smear
the legitimacy of JFK inquiries by trying to make them appear “kooky.”
(Not to judge the merits of the idea that there could be life elsewhere
in the Universe, but the term “UFO conspiracist” is a well-worn
dysphemism.)

Here’s what
actually happened at the NARA forums.

The first was
held in 2010. The assistant archivist, Michael Kurtz, said that
withheld JFK assassination records would be processed, along with
other documents, for declassification – and that the process
should be completed by the end of 2013.

But by 2011,
Kurtz, who had been at NARA for decades, had retired. At the 2011
forum, Jim Lesar was told that JFK assassination records are not
part of the declassification process. Hence, they will not
be reviewed for release.

Huh?
What Happened

For some perspective,
meet Sheryl Shenberger. She’s the head of the Archives’ National
Declassification Center. What would you guess Sheryl’s professional
background would be? Library of Congress? Academic research? Nope.
Before NDC, Sheryl worked for….the Central
Intelligence Agency.

The most logical
and reasonable explanation for this is that the Obama administration
placed an ex-spook in charge of declassification because this would
induce her old colleagues in Langley to cooperate. (Which of course
raises the question of whether, in a real democracy, you would want
to have a bunch of people secretly deciding to do whatever they
wanted with 50-year-old documents pertaining to a supposed loony
loner who whacked a president.)

Frustrated
by the administration’s foot-dragging on JFK, AARC sent a letter
urging the government to get off its duff. One signer was G. Robert
Blakey, who served as a Chief Counsel to the House Select Committee
on Assassinations (which in its 1978 final report said that, um…it
looks like an organized
conspiracy was responsible for JFK’s death.)

ARRC’s
letter was dated January 20, 2012. According
to Lesar, there has still been no reply – though NARA says
it is working on it.

Release of
the remaining documents, under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination
Records Collection Act of 1992, can be postponed
until October 26, 2017. Not so bad, you say? Actually, the Act further
states that even in 2017, the president may decide to drag this
on further, by withholding records indefinitely.

Records activists
expect the CIA to petition for just such a decision. Any bets on
President Hillary or President Mitt – or, quite possibly, President
Jeb Bush, doing the right thing? With all the secrets
Jeb’s father has to hide?

Playing
Games with Numbers

One of the
problems is that we’re being asked to trust these folks at all.
Even the number of documents being withheld – 50,000 –
is a guess. At the 2010 public forum, Asst. Archivist Kurtz said
that only about one percent of the five million pages had been withheld.
Now the government is likely to say the number is even smaller.
But think about it: what would they withhold, except the stuff that
really tells us something important? So whether
it is 50,000 or 500 documents, it appears that government officials
are hiding something, and they’re not about to give it up.

One of the
many wonderful spook tricks is to designate files as “Not Believed
Relevant.” Among those so designated when the House Assassinations
Committee investigated in the 1970s, we later learned, were files
on the Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko. He had claimed to have been
in charge of the KGB’s Oswald files; and on the Cuban Revolutionary
Council, a CIA front group set up by the ubiquitous master planner
E. Howard Hunt that was connected in multiple ways to the Oswald
story.

“Not Believed
Relevant”? We’ll take one of each of those documents, please.

Amazingly,
the CIA under George W. Bush may turn out to be more compliant than
Obama’s “open government” advocates. In 2004, on Bush’s watch, the
Agency voluntarily agreed to accelerate the release of postponed
JFK assassination documents, and did indeed release some early.

By contrast,
in the spring of 2012, three DC attorneys with long experience in
litigating Freedom of Information cases expressed their disappointment
with Obama in an opinion
piece. They noted that the Department of Justice under Eric
Holder seems willing to go to bat for any and every agency and
department that wants to withhold information.

Open
Government Plans….So Where’s the Open Government?

On his first
day in office, President Obama signed a government-wide
directive–widely reported by the media – establishing
a whole new level of commitment to openness and transparency. The
administration has made some real strides. But arguably not on the
most sensitive – and hence most important – matters.

On April 9,
federal agencies were supposed to post updates to their Open Government
Plans, this according to Cass Sunstein, administrator of the Office
of Information and Regulatory Affairs, writing on the White
House blog. Some agencies, including the Environmental Protection
Agency, did so. But others, such as the Department
of Labor, did
not – and still have not. NARA is one of those that has
not complied.

As the expression
goes, sunshine is the best disinfectant. Opening up the nooks and
crannies of government to public view was supposed to aid the process
of discovering and rooting out the rot. This would, we were assured,
help return Washington to the people. Obama selected Sunstein, a
Harvard professor and old friend, to oversee this effort.

Not long ago,
when I asked to discuss this with Sunstein, I was told he was “not
available” for interviews.

Here’s the
exchange:

From:
Russ Baker
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2012 11:12 PM
To: Sunstein, Cass R.
Subject: interview request

Mr.
Sunstein, wonder if I might be able to do a phone interview with
you about Open Records policy?

From:
Strom, Shayna L.
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 12:25 PM
To: Russ Baker
Subject: FW: interview request

Unfortunately,
Administrator Sunstein is unavailable for an interview. That said,
you might try the Archivist of the United States at NARA? Best of
luck!

Warmly,
Shayna

From:
Russ Baker
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 12:33 PM
To: Strom, Shayna L.
Subject: RE: interview request

Is
he generally unavailable for interviews? What is the policy on that?
Seems relevant given that this is about open government.

From:
Strom, Shayna L.
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 5:00 PM
To: Russ Baker
Cc: Mack, Moira K.
Subject: RE: interview request

No,
he’s not generally unavailable – but the Archivist is intimately
involved in one of our big open government initiatives (records
modernization), so he’s just a particularly good person to speak
to on this.

So the person
in charge of the overall governmental effort on open records wants
me to talk to the person running one of the agencies that is….having
difficulties complying with the spirit if not letter of Obama’s
announcement.

No
Mr. Sunshine, That Mr. Sunstein

Actually, Sunstein
has good reason to lay low. Watch this slightly raw video
of someone confronting him about a paper he
wrote a few years ago. In it, he actually advocated “cognitive
infiltration” of groups that espouse alternative views on controversial
issues like the events of Sept. 11, i. e, conspiracy theories.

Here’s a quote
from Sunstein’s paper:

[W]e
suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists
who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist
groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either
virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will
undermine the crippled epistemology of those who subscribe to such
theories. They do so by planting doubts about the theories and stylized
facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial
cognitive diversity.

Sunstein is
a sort of caricature of everything people don’t like and don’t trust
about government. The fact that he’s in charge of “open government”
speaks volumes.

Apparently
not a great enthusiast for the Freedom of Information Act, Sunstein
has said that judges are not qualified to second-guess executive
branch decisions on what the public should or should not be told.

In light of
this record, it’s useful to consider Sunstein’s broader mandate:
to make government more efficient and accountable. Releasing records
involves, in part, cutting red tape. Another aspect of cutting red
tape is getting rid of bureaucracy. And that’s where things get
even more interesting. Under cover of making government more accountable,
Sunstein gets to push for elimination of regulations that corporations
find onerous. Here’s
a Washington Post article on Sunstein holding up (for more
than a year) food safety legislation that the industry doesn’t like.

What’s going
on here? Why the seeming shift away from Obama’s initial commitment
to openness? One attorney involved with these matters says he suspects
this may be traceable to Obama’s order, shortly after he took office,
to release many of the so-called “torture memos.” The President
seemed taken aback by vociferous public demands that he prosecute
the torturers – a perilous
policy due to internal resistance – and quickly shifted
to favoring the intelligence community and restricting disclosure.
As the attorney points out, the broader concept – that transparency
leads to public awareness which in turn leads to demands for political
changes – certainly does not sit well with dominant sectors
in this country. Obama has hardly distinguished himself for seriously
taking on those sectors. Maybe because he doesn’t want to, maybe
because…he can’t. (For more on this, see our 2010 piece, “What
Obama is Up Against.”)

NARA is now
saying that the White House gave “small agencies” (meaning NARA)
a June deadline for publishing its revised open government plan.
But no White House postings support that claim. In any case, even
if and when NARA becomes more responsive, don’t bet on the government
releasing the most valuable JFK-related documents…in your lifetime.

By the way,
here’s more on the new head of the Archives’ declassification center:
“Ms. Shenberger served as a Branch Chief in the CIA Counter Terrorism
Center between 2001 and 2003…” before being assigned declassification
work for the Agency.

That’s very
interesting – since one gets the sense that the Agency is not
eager to release inside dope on the government’s astounding failures
relating to one particular date in 2001.

Reprinted
from WhoWhatWhy.com.

June
1, 2012

Russ
Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter. He has written
for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Nation,
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village
Voice and Esquire and dozens of other major domestic and
foreign publications. He has also served as a contributing editor
to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005
Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush’s
military record. He is the author of Family
of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in
the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America
(Bloomsbury Press, 2009); it was released in paperback as Family
of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and
the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. For more information
on Russ’s work, see his sites, www.familyofsecrets.com
and www.russbaker.com.

Copyright
© 2012 WhoWhatWhy.com