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.
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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:
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