If we define assassination records by their history since 1963, we can divide them into three categories. There are those records previously supplied by source agencies to bodies such as the Warren Commission and the HSCA. There are those which have been consistently denied to such bodies: the most conspicuous example of these probably being Oswald's Marine G-2 (intelligence) records. The third category are those records in between: records which either escaped the notice of earlier investigating bodies or have been generated since.

To judge from the public record of the ARRB to date, most of its attention has been paid to the first category, documents previously supplied. Many documents have been reviewed and released, particularly from the CIA's voluminous GPFLOOR (assassination) file, and from HSCA records.

With the finite amount of time remaining in the ARRB's mandate, most researchers would probably agree that it is urgent now to focus on obtaining assassination records, rather than on reviewing and releasing them. This means that primary attention should be paid to records in the second and third categories.

Records in the third category, those persistently denied, present a special problem: experience has shown that merely requesting them will produce no results. Both the Warren Commission and the HSCA requested to see all of Oswald's Marine records, yet ended up with no more than his unclassified personnel record. In this record is a single reference to two confidential documents. The Warren Commission, had it seen them, would have learnt that they were adds to a regional office of Marine G- 2, and thus that Marine G-2 files also contained Oswald records.

But the Warren Commission did not see them; neither did the HSCA. Neither did the general counsel of the Department of Defense. John McNaughton, whose explicit oral request for them on November 22, 1963, was followed up by an explicit written request three months later. McNaughton's initial request was countered by the misleading reply that the two documents were transmittal sheets with no new information.

On March 16, 1964, the Warren Commission was informed that it had already been supplied with all known Oswald records in the Department of Defense. This assurance was clearly false. The matter of the two denied documents was also apparently not pursued by the HSCA, which also failed to pin down other reports of Marine G-2 records on Oswald.

It would appear that ONI records on Oswald have also been persistently denied, and indeed that the so-called ONI file on Oswald" is in fact an abbreviated extract from three other files compiled hours after the assassination. Despite gaps in the record, it is also clear that operational counter-intelligence files on Oswald were maintained, as well as merely investigative ones. The evidence from CIS also indicates that there, also, the primary generators of CIA Oswald records were counter-intelligence operations officers.

To round out this story of deception, we should not that there were also denied records from the Department of State. Although State supplied the Warren Commission with thirteen Oswald files comprising 546 documents, this documentation failed to include Oswald records from INR, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. It was only many year later, with the release of Oswald's 01 file in CIA, that the public learned that INR had also generated one or more records pertaining to Oswald. Also the State Department employee Otto Otepka kept his own Oswald records in his Security Office safe. But he was denied access to these records in June 163, as the public has been ever since.

One can sum up the preceding paragraphs by the statement that there has been persistent denial of intelligence, operational, counter-intelligence, and security files on Oswald from many federal agencies. All this suggests that the public story of Oswald, as a loner of no intelligence interest, is a myth, possibly concealing a sophisticated counter-intelligence operation. As yet it is unclear whether the ARRB, a temporary body confronted by immensely powerful permanent agencies, will move to perpetuate that myth, or to learn the truth behind it.

Certainly to challenge this myth will be difficult, for both political and practical reasons. It is possible, even likely. that the original ONI and Marine G-2 files no longer exist. There have been oral reports that in the wake of the assassination many Navy and Marine records were quickly destroyed.

If the purpose of the ARRB is to restore public confidence, then they should give the highest priority to resolving, as far as possible, the fate of Oswald's denied military records. Requesting them is clearly not a sufficient step, nor should the ARRB cease after receiving yet another denial that such records exist or existed.

I have already supplied the ARRB with a lengthy demonstration that Marine G-2 maintained important files on Oswald both at Headquarters and in regional offices. I also supplied a list of witnesses, who should be deposed and if necessary placed under oath to testify about what happened to these records.

The ARRB staff has replied that the matter is being investigated. However, if the best use is to be made of the ARRB's remaining months, I would argue that a more aggressive and above all more public approach to these denied records needs to be pursued.

It is clear that officials in many agencies are still trying to maintain the public myth of Oswald as loner, a myth that requires concealment and lying with respect to the maintenance of operational counter-intelligence files on Oswald. If the ARRB confines itself to behind-the-scenes negotiations, one can confidently predict that the permanent agencies will simply out-wait the ARRB, until the Board passes out of existence.

I suspect that the only hope of learning the truth about these denied records is to subpoena an official, hear from this person under oath, and if necessary raise the possibility of prosecution for penury. Perhaps one should begin with those officials (even if remote from the generation of the records) whose past denial of the existence of these records, would have (if uttered under oath) constituted perjury.

What is needed, immediately, is the relentless pursuit of one such official, to encourage more compliant response from all the others. To ask the ARRB and its staff to pursue this path is to expect extraordinary courage from them. To challenge a public myth of this importance is not the normal way to enjoy a happy and prosperous future in Washington.

On the other hand, failure immediately to pursue this public and aggressive path will mean failure to resolve the unanswered questions about Oswald's relation to the U.S. Government. I see this as a quite different issue from the relation of the assassination to the U.S. Government. Nevertheless I see it as a leading priority for resolution by the ARRB, because it is in this area that we have the most incontrovertible evidence of official lying.

Failure of the ARRB to accept and publicly acknowledge this priority would, I believe, lead to the following unsatisfactory outcome. The ARRB would primarily continue to review and release records previously screened by originating agencies. The result would be to strengthen, rather than weaken, the erroneous picture of an Oswald at arm's length from the government, an erroneous picture already painted by the Warren Commission and HSCA.

The hope for a resolution of the nation's doubts, which led to the passage of the JFK Records Act, would thus have been frustrated yet again.

The ARRB recently provided COPA members and others the opportunity to appear and comment on the upcoming work and process of review contemplated by the Board in relation to the documents gathered by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and those requested and "segregated" by the CIA on their behalf. Clearly, they shared our concern that time is limited to complete their task. They sought guidelines for prioritizing review of files in this collection, and methods of dealing with files whose "relevancy to the assassination could not be determined." On the 16th of October, they followed up with a public meeting on their own internal guidelines developed after this public input.

Before attempting to provide the Board with any guidelines for prioritizing their review of the HSCA segregated files, we made clear that the position of the Coalition on Political Assassinations and its member groups remains in favor of full release of all JFK assassination records. Thus, our suggestions toward priorities did not imply consent to any more limited scope of release, nor do they indicate any lack of interest in the records not prioritized. We recommended that the Board extend its legal life and seek additional resources by act of Congress if it cannot complete its task before a full review and release are finished.

Also, the original drafters of the JFK Records Collection Act included language demanding a "presumption of release" of all records relating to the JFK assassination, and crafted a narrow set of categories that could suffice to postpone any such release, even temporarily It is clear that the Congress did not feel that more than a tiny portion of such documents, kept secret for over 30 years, could possibly endanger national security or intelligence agency concerns in the current period. In fact, Senator Boren, then head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, estimated that 99.9999% of all such records would be fully released using these narrow standards.

The percentage of documents postponed by Board decisions to date may already exceed that estimation, however, despite the bulk of the records sent for release. Certainly the number of records sent for requested review and possible postponement to the Board by the CIA and FBI alone seem to have exceeded one tenth of IX of the total, and so have severely taxed the capabilities of staff and resources for the short duration of the Board's legal life. In addition to this, the FBI has repeatedly challenged the decisions reached by such reviews to the office of the President.

Before suggesting how to separate the "wheat" from the "chaff" of these documents, as the Board put it in their public announcement, we extended the metaphor to suggest that gathering more wheat should be the first priority at hand. While the process of review is important, the expansion of the universe of documents is paramount to the intent of the law. In the time remaining to the Board, a concerted effort should continue to be made to insure full compliance by all federal agencies. to seek cooperation from foreign governments, and to gather records from private individuals and contracting corporations as envisioned by the law. Documents which are not sought and retrieved by the end of October, 1997, will likely never be released to the public. Documents located now, even if postponed, will eventually be released, by the year 2017 at the latest. Thus, securing the maximum number of documents must be the first priority of the Board's work.

Realizing that the ratio of "wheat" to "chaff" cannot be detected at the distance we are put from the documents, we recognized that the Board is in a much better position to determine priorities. Our choices are made "sight unseen" in some degree. We were concerned that the Board considered sections of the HSCA materials as "not relevant" to the assassination, since we are forced to conclude that any files sought by such an official investigation take on an automatic relevance, at least in relation to the investigation itself, if not the crime. Our job is not to choose the proverbial shell that is most likely to harbor the pea, but to work to turn over all the shells until the pea, or its absence, is discovered. We must rely on the Board to reach this goal.

In fact, our preference was to establish a process whereby those records sent for review which cannot be decided upon by the Board at the time it ends its work should fall under the "presumption of release" mandate of the law, and not under an unintended "presumption of postponement," solely because the agencies would prefer it. We argued that the provisions for postponement serve the limited interests of the intelligence agencies, and that the broader and more compelling interest of public disclosure must rule the fate of any discovered documents not reviewed by the Board. The agencies requesting such postponements do so in view of the final authority which rests with the ARRB andor the President. Have any of these agencies also worked to provide the necessary resources and adequate time to complete these reviews? We also recommended that a process of continuing release and re-review of postponed documents be implemented as part of any plans for termination of the Board. These guidelines should be binding on both federal agencies and the National Archives. We fear a de facto postponement of files based on time constraints for review, and feel that this goes against the intent of the JFK Records Act.

We also recommended the following possible priorities, without in any way giving sanction to postponement of unreviewed documents. These comments are drawn from members of our Governing Board:

A chronological priority, focused on documents dated in the pre-assassination period up to the completion of the Warren Commission investigation, may bear the most fruit.

A priority on the microfilm section of the "segregated files", which appear to have more textual and historical content than the paper files.

A focus on documents relating to Lee Harvey Oswald and those who knew him, were alleged to have had contact with him, organizations and members who allegedly had contact with him, or those people who claimed to have special knowledge of the crime, or were held suspect by the original investigators. Within this set, focus on those documents which have been withheld or are currently requested for postponement on any but the narrowest standards laid out in the JFK Records Act. Such inappropriate withholding may be a key to the importance of the documents for researchers.

A search for any "missing" files or unexplained empty folders in the collection, as well as files that relate to the categories above that are obviously absent. Peter Dale Scott suggests that among these are files pertaining to Carlos Quieroga, Ed Scanlan Butler, and Ruby's contact, McWillie.

A cognizance that FBI materials should not be overlooked in this focus on CIA records, especially those relating to any relationship between Oswald the the FBI or the ONI.

We were sure that our member group, Citizens for Truth About the Kennedy Assassination, would recommend a focus on the Garrison investigation files, and on the suspects pointed to by that query (i.e. Shaw, Ferrie, and others in New Orleans, if they have not done so already.

We were really at a loss to determine priorities on what we have not seen, although some researchers would recommend that the Board prioritize the focus based on their particular thesis about the assassination. While there are a range of these, most focus on the involvement individually or in combination of elements of organized crime, anti-Castro Cubans, CIA and other domestic intelligence agencies, and the Pentagon.

We appreciate, maybe more than others in the public or the government, the daunting task faced by the Review Board under the provisions of the Act. We suggest putting public pressure on the appropriate Congressional oversight committees to review and recommend the additional resources or time necessary to meet this task, and to provide the additional leadership necessary to insure full compliance by all government agencies, individuals and foreign governments before the Review Board closes its doors.

We are also concerned about the repeated FBI challenges to Review Board decisions for full release that have been forwarded to President Clinton each month for some tine without any resolution y the White House. Our reading of the Act would require release of the files at the end of the 30-day review period unless the President reverses the Board. This has put key files into a limbo, neither released nor postponed, but effectively unavailable to the public. The special access being given to journalists and writers who support the official version of the assassination, while the public is denied the same opportunity, such as is the case with the Garrison investigative files in New Orleans and the Garrison grand jury files that are being withheld by constant manipulation and legal appeals by New Orleans D.A. Harry Connick, Sr. are a source of concern as well.

If we hope to use the JFK Act as a model for the release of other government files, perhaps we need to seek general legislation of this sort that applies to all government classified records, not just specific or individual examples. The weaknesses of the JFK Act are apparent to us at this point, but so are it's advantages over the so-called Freedom of Information Act that has been frustrated in its intent by the agencies required to carry it out.

The weaknesses, in my view, include:

Choosing board members solely from nominations provided by professional associations, who will tend to pick members who have already been given special access to government records based on voluntary secrecy agreements. To insure compliance with a "presumption of release" the choice of researchers as board members would have been a logical addition. The requirement of security clearance vetting of each board and staff member may make such public participation unlikely in future models as well. Our original suggestion to establish a civilian advisory board was never implemented, but would increase public trust.

Leaving the schedule of appointment of board members up to the White House cost nearly a year and a half in the short life of the Board and required additional legislation to correct. In the meantime, the nomination process had to be repeated with a new administration, and the original 300-day deadline for transfer of files from all agencies was ignored because there was no agency to enforce or even oversee it.

Failure to define "JFK assassination records" in the broadest possible terms from the beginning has also led to problems with full compliance and full release in my view. Also, tracking one or a few "assassination stories" as guides for where to seek records may bear particular fruit, but has left many government files unsought, and sources unrecognized.

The failures of the research community to cooperate and communicate among themselves, turning instead to the Board individually or organizationally in private, deprived us of the opportunity to aggressively define those records we were seeking, and to follow up on files recommended to the Board, since all such private correspondence is postponed for release until 2017. Only those researchers who have informed others about their quests allow the possibility of review and action before the Board goes out of existence. Compilation of such "unreleased files" can also be used to convince the public and the Congressional oversight committees that the files are not yet open at this late point.

The necessary federal subpoena power that the Board has been granted has been used sparingly, and in one case used to seek the files of a researcher which reportedly contains government-generated records. Other more obvious repositories open to subpoena, and testimony of those who know the record files has not yet been sought. We applaud the efforts of the Board to secure new film evidence, and the Garrison records, as well as testimony from the autopsy doctors and medical personnel. Understanding that certain files are beyond the scope of the law and such subpoenas, we still feel that many federal and local employees not yet queried hold the key to either missing, destroyed or still concealed records.

Congressional oversight committees appointed by the legislation have paid little attention to this process, and the process has been carried out with little or no public exposure. This is not the fault of the Board or the research community alone, but we have been remiss in not sharing important new document releases with the public via COPA, which could regularly demonstrate the importance of this process to the general public. I can already see the headlines in October of next year: ARRB closes doors and all files are released - nothing new there, case closed. This approach, which greeted us on the same day that the JFK Act was passed and Posner's book Case Closed were simultaneously promoted. But we know there is important new information in these files. Too many of us are searching them only for our own purposes or profit, hoping to solve the case" on our own. This is not only futile, it is counter- productive.

The Board we want does not have a termination date. Even President Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, on the eve of the issuance of the Warren Report, agreed that the JFK case would always remain open, and that new information would continue to be considered into the future. The process of release must also survive. The Board is underfunded and understaffed as well just as the HSCA was. This does not reflect the public priority for release of these records. The question arises: should we spend the next year attempting to extend the life of this Board by an act of Congress, or to replace this with a new board that will continue?

Finally, can we move the Congressional Government Operations and Affairs committees to force the non-compliant federal agencies to give up their records. Will foreign governments or contracting agencies ever give up records? Or will October 1, 1997 pass with our goal of taking back our own history unfulfilled? And if so, what then?

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