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CIA resists releasing JFK assassination records

More than 40 years after the JFK assassination, the Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to release certain assassination-related records that it holds.

"We are asking for discovery of JFK assassination records related to the late George Joannides, chief of the Psychological Warfare Branch of the CIA's Miami Station in 1963," said Jefferson Morley, a researcher and Washington Post writer who is pursuing the CIA records.

"The CIA has acknowledged that it has an unspecified number of documents about Joannides' activities in the summer and fall of 1963 but says it will not release any of them for reasons of 'national security'," he explained.

A conference on the matter will be held at DC District Court next Wednesday.

The case has garnered significant outside support.

"As published authors of divergent views on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we say the agency's position is spurious and untenable," wrote some two dozen assassination specialists in a joint letter on the Morley case.

("It's probably the first time ever that George Lardner and Oliver Stone agreed on a JFK question," Morley told Secrecy News.)

The CIA refusal "defies the will of Congress. It obscures the public record on a subject of enduring national interest. It encourages conspiracy mongering. And it undermines public confidence in the intelligence community at a time when collective security requires the opposite."

See "Blocked," New York Review of Books, August 11, 2005: