US Declassifies Final Batch of JFK Assassination Documents

The Trump administration has declassified the final batch of documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK), which has confounded historians for decades and to this day, continues to fuel conspiracy theories.

Around 2,200 files, consisting of more than 63,000 pages, were posted on the website of the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on Tuesday. The vast majority of the archives’ six million of pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination had already been available to the public. Trump had said beforehand that about 80,000 pages would be unsealed.

The release of the documents follows an executive order signed by President Trump shortly after he was sworn into office. He directed the national intelligence director and attorney general to develop a plan to release the records. After signing the order, Trump handed the pen over to an aide and directed that it’d be given to Robert F. Kennedy, the US government’s top health official—nephew of JFK and son of Robert F. Kennedy.

The order also aimed to declassify the remaining federal documents on the 1968 assassinations of politician Robert F. Kennedy and activist Martin Luther King Jr.

History buffs already looking into the newly declassified JFK assassination documents

History buffs have begun looking into the previously secret files in search for new clues over what happened over that fateful day of President Kennedy’s assassination.

“You got a lot of reading,” Trump told reporters on Monday, previewing the release. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”

But some of the hundreds of files appeared to have parts blacked out while others were hard to read because they were faded or were poorly scanned photocopies, or appeared to bear little relevance to the JFK case, specialists told the BBC.

Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” said it will take time to fully review the records. “We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” he told the Associated Press.

“This is the most positive news on the release of JFK files since the 1990s,” Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, said.

Interest in details related to Kennedy’s assassination has been intense for over 60 years, with countless conspiracy theories spawned about multiple shooters and involvement by the Soviet Union and mafia.

The fateful day when JFK was assassinated

The United States was rocked by JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, in Dallas Texas. Kennedy was riding in a motorcade with his wife Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis when assassin Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from above, killing the president instantly.

Oswald, who was a former US Marine, was perched in the Texas School Book Depository waiting for the president to pass as his motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

Oswald was shot and killed just two days after the assassination took place by a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby as he was being moved to county jail.

The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, more commonly known as the Warren Commission, was established the following year to investigate Kennedy’s assassination. Although the Commission decided that the assassination was the product of a single individual’s actions and not the result of a wider conspiracy, these findings have been heavily criticized.

Πηγή