The CIA continues to sit on some materials about Lee Harvey Oswald's connection with Cuba raising suspicions -- maybe unwarranted -- that there's more to the Kennedy assassination than we've ever been told.
The New York Times reports that even non-conspiracy researchers are asking questions about the CIA's continued secrecy.
The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his earlier role.
That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about C.I.A. activities. The agency’s deception was first reported in 2001 by Jefferson Morley, a journalist and author who has doggedly pursued the files ever since, represented by James H. Lesar, a Washington lawyer specializing in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.
“The C.I.A.’s conduct is maddening,” said Mr. Morley, 51, a former Washington Post reporter and the author of a 2008 biography of a former C.I.A. station chief in Mexico. After years of meticulous reporting on Mr. Joannides, who died at age 68 in 1990, he is convinced that there is more to learn.
“I know there’s a story here,” Mr. Morley said. “The confirmation is that the C.I.A. treats these documents as extremely sensitive.”
Morley is hardly alone. Even a federal judge who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board is now calling for the records release.
Best guess for why the CIA is holding onto the material? It's the principle of the thing. Give in to outsiders with these records, they'll start asking the CIA for more.
Max Holland, who is writing a history of the Warren Commission, said the agency might be trying to preserve the principle of secrecy.
Many of us, however, believe that open government is more important that any "principle of secrecy." Particularly after 45+ years.
One commentator remarked today, in a panel discussion about whether we should continue to be in Afghanistan, that after all the extremists out to harm the USA are spread out all over the world. Perhaps, she suggested, a much better intelligence and security system here would do the job better than sending our military to one of the many countries where militants could and do hang out. Makes sense.
Sure, but that would mean forcing the CIA to work for our security instead of its own.
