Public Once Again In Dark

              PENN JONES' T H E
CONTINUING
INQUIRY
VOLUME IV NUMBER 5 DECEMBER 2 2 , 1979
Public once again in dark
By EARL GOLZ
Sixteen years after the assassina­tion
of President John F. Kennedy, a
vast volume of government material
on the case remains sealed from the
American public.
A 50-year secrecy lid on testimony,
reports and other documents gener­ated
by the House Assassinations
Committee has private researchers
end historians fuming.
The only committee products
made public about the assassinations
of Kennedy and civil rights leader
Martin Luther King Jr. were a final
report and 25 supporting volumes.
The committee, which disbanded
at the end of 1978, concluded that
Kennedy was slain in Dallas in 1963
probably as a result of a conspiracy.
Except for Lee Harvey Oswald, who
was named by the Warren Commis­sion
in 1964 as the sole assassin, the
committee did not identify conspira­tors
by name.
Some researchers and historians
suspect committee staff members
were too selective in publicly releas­ing
information that basically bol­stered
their version of a conspiracy.
Other information not in this catego­ry,
they say. was either publicly re­leased
In a partial and Inconspicuous
way or not released at all.
AN ESTIMATED 800 boxes of files
— much of it testimony in executive
session by the committee's own pref­erence
— has been restricted from
public access for half a century. Un­like
many FBI and CL^ reports ini­tially
classified by the Warren Com­mission
16 years ago, sealed records
of congressional committees are not
accessible through requests under
the Freedom of Information Act.
A 50-year restriction is automati­cally
placed on all records not pub­licly
released by committees of the
US. House of Representatives. Al­though
more than 90 percent of the
records of congressional committees
are publicly released, the House As­sassinations
Committee chose to take
testimony from witnesses in execu­tive
session except for several weeks
of public hearings late last year.
G. Rot>ert Blakey, who was chief
counsel to the committee, said he is
"sure the critics are uptight" about
the restrictions
"They would have preferred to
have gotten immediate access to
everything," said Blakey, now back
as professor at the Cornell University
law school. "And the answer is they
will if they are historians and they
live long enough . . . Most of the stuff
that was worthwhile was made pub­lic.
Not all, but most of it was. We just
ran out of time, out of time, out of
people and out of money
"In a sense, they (committee files)
are all restricted." Blakey said. "They
are all restricted since the only way
you could get to them would be by
resolution of the rules committee."
He made a "gross guess" at the vo­lume
of committee files of investiga­tions
of both assassinations which
were placed in the National
Archives. He estimated the gray file
boxes, 8-by-8-by-12 inches, covered
the surface of a floor about 20-by-30
feet.
"NOW WHAT we did is nothing
special," Blakey said. "We haven't
buried anything unusually, we
haven't suppressed anything unusu­ally.
What happened was that our
committee fell within the normal
rules of the house of representatives
and nobody did anything to change
it.
"It would have been a large pre­cedent.
No congressional committee
in the history of congress has done it.
The committee just felt that it bad
enough problems without taking that
on and probably losing it.'
The former chief counsel said that
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Thursday. November 22.1979
I
much "of what we had access to
could never be declassified. Not be­cause
It's anything inherent in what
it says, but because it deals with sen­sitive
sources and methods (of intel­ligence
gathering) overseas.
"And the existence of that sensi­tive
source and method, even though
it was employed 20 years ago. would
be a matter of international embar­rassment
today if it were made pub­lic.
Because sometimes the sensitive
sources and methods are still in
operation . . . What we made an effort
to do was print as much material as
we could, sanitizing it — that is. get­ting
it in such a form as it was not
classified."
"There's just a whole lot of
(restricted) areas that could be
pursued." said J. Gary Shaw of Cle­burne,
one of the most meticulous re­searchers
of the assassination of Ken­nedy.
"Here we paid $6 million for
another investigation and they are
going to restrict, ala the Warren
Report, a lot of their information.
The question has to be asked What, if
anything, are they not telling us?' "
THE DEAN OF assassination
researchers, Harold Weisberg of
Frederick, Md., said "the only reason
they chose to do it (restrict materi­als)
was so they could hide it. None of
the politicians will be hurt by the ter­rible
excesses (of some committee
staffers).
••What he (Blakey) didn't tell you
is there was nothing requiring them
to take executive session testimony."
Weisberg said. "They don't protect
people by holding executive sessions
and then giving out from the execu­tive
sessions whatever serves their
interest."
Researcher Paul Hoch. a professor
at the University of California at
Berkeley, said it is "a question of how
much you trust the staff to have
picked out everything (that was