JFK Assassination & Sunshine Week 2013

Sunshine Week 2013

Sunshine Week – March 10 -16, is dedicated to bringing the issues of Secrecy and Open Government before the American people and the government, and every year since it began in 2002 I have tried to include and emphasize the still classified records on the assassination of President Kennedy, with little success.

As explained at the web sit http://sunshineweek.rcfp.org/, “The Florida Society of Newspaper Editors launched Sunshine Sunday in 2002, and in June 2003, the American Society of Newspaper Editors hosted a Freedom of Information Summit in Washington where the seeds for Sunshine Week were planted. With a grant from John S. and James L. Knight Foundation,…Sunshine Week was launched in March 2005. This non-partisan, non-profit initiative…is about the public’s right to know what its government is doing, and why.”

Although the assassination of President Kennedy is an issue of high public interest, those journalists, historians and civil activists who have taken up the open records cause generally greet the mention of the secret records on the Kennedy assassination with moans and protests, consigning it in the same dump as UFOs and other amusing issues.

Actually the legally unresolved and unsolved homicide of the President, as Jim Hougan has pointed out, is an issue of national security of the first order – there is no other matter more significant than the murder of the president – it is the key political and historical issue of our time.

While the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been rightly touted at previous Sunshine Week forums, this year is the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy and the 20^th anniversary of the JFK Act of 1992, which has released more records (4 million) than any other single law, yet it remains unenforced.

Since the temporary Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) dissolved, their recommendations have gone unheeded, [http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/12/implimenting-arrb-recommendations.html]

especially the one requesting that the historical and archival associations that recommended them continue to conduct oversight of the law. Officially responsible for oversight of the law it unanimously created, Congress has failed to hold any oversight hearings on the JFK Act in over 15 years and has no intention to do so. [http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-last-congressional-hearing-on-jfk.html]

As explained by James Douglas, author of “JFK and the Unthinkable,” [http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/COPA2009.html]

Congress will not act again until the same forces that convinced them to create the law in the first place is marshaled once again as a mass movement to push for Congressional action, an unlikely occurrence, unless Oliver Stone and other similar celebrities get involved.

This year however, being the 50^th anniversary of the assassination, we can redirect the conversation from debate over the Single Bullet Theory, the Zapruder film and other mineuta, to the issue of the official government JFK Assassination records, and why many of them were deliberately destroyed, are now missing and are being wrongfully withheld from the public because of national security.

Not a few records – many important military and Secret Service files have been destroyed rather than revealed publicly, some are missing – including the original Air Force One radio recordings, and many thousands of records – hundreds of thousands of pages of documents are still classified and could be withheld for ever, at least for our lifetime.

If the president was killed by a deranged lone nut, why are so many records considered so significant? Why were they destroyed? Who destroyed them? Who ordered their destruction? Where are the Air Force One tapes? Why can’t they find them? Why are so many documents classified for reasons of national security? Why doesn’t Congress oversee the law? Why don’t they hold public hearings on these issues and get answers to these questions?  

Why don’t you care enough about it to ask them?

Sign the petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/free-the-jfk-files?utm and pass it on to others you know. Write a letter to your Congressman, especially if they are on the House Oversight Committee  http://oversight.house.gov/committee-members/  and ask them why they don’t hold public oversight hearings of the JFK Act?  Then email it, post it on their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Oversight as well as your Congressman’s  page, fax it to their home and DC offices and then email it by US Mail with a request for a response. 

Join our Facebook Focus Group Release JFK Assassination Records Now!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/113396402136384/