President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992

Background

The final report of the Act's Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) partially credited the conclusions in Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK with the passage of the Act. The ARRB stated that the film "popularized a version of President Kennedy’s assassination that featured U.S. government agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the military as conspirators."

Requirements and process

The Act requires that each assassination record be publicly disclosed in full and be made available in the collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of enactment of the Act (which will be October 26, 2017), unless the President of the United States certifies that: (1) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and (2) the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

The definition of "assassination record" was left broad by the Act and determined in practice by the ARRB; a final definition was published in the Federal Register on June 28, 1995. The basic definition was:

"An assassination record includes, but is not limited to, all records, public and private, regardless of how labeled or identified, that document, describe, report on, analyze, or interpret activities, persons, or events reasonably related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and investigations of or inquiries into the assassination."

This was supplemented with coverage of all government records relating to investigations of the assassination (including those specified in Section 3(2) of the Act), as well as supplementary records required to clarify meanings of other documents (such as code names used).

The ARRB determined that agencies could not object to disclosure "solely on grounds of non-relevance," stating that the ARRB is responsible for making decisions that determine relevance.

Assassination Records Review Board

The Act established, as an independent agency, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), to consider and render decisions when a U.S. government office sought to postpone the disclosure of assassination records. The Board met for four years, from October 1, 1994 to September 30, 1998. When the Act was passed in 1992, 98 percent of all Warren Commission documents had been released to the public. By the time the Board disbanded, all Warren Commission documents, except income tax returns, had been released to the public, with only minor redactions.

The ARRB collected evidence starting in 1992, then produced its final report in 1998. The ARRB was not enacted to determine why or by whom the murder was committed but to collect and preserve the evidence for public scrutiny. After the enactment of the federal law that created the ARRB, the Board collected a large amount of documents and took testimony of those who had relevant information of the events. The Committee finished its work in 1998 and in its final report, the ARRB outlined the problems that government secrecy created regarding the murder of President Kennedy.

Some of the information was gathered by way of testimony from witnesses that had eyewitness knowledge of the events. For example, the Board interviewed the physicians who treated the president's massive head wound at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. This was a highly trained team of emergency care physicians, some of whom testified in secret before the Warren Commission. These transcripts have now also been made public. Other information consists of a large number of documents from the FBI and CIA that were required to cooperate with the turnover of relevant records held secret by these agencies.

Status

By ARRB law (of 1998), all existing assassination-related documents will be made public by October 2017. At the moment, 40,000 documents are still not fully available to the public, and among them, 3,000 have never been seen by the public.

In 2013, the ARRB's former chairman John R. Tunheim and former deputy director Thomas Samoluk wrote in the Boston Globe that after the ARRB had declassified 5 million documents, "There is a body of documents that the CIA is still protecting, which should be released. Relying on inaccurate representations made by the CIA in the mid-1990s, the Review Board decided that records related to a deceased CIA agent named George Joannides were not relevant to the assassination. Subsequent work by researchers, using other records that were released by the board, demonstrates that these records should be made public." Tunheim and Samoluk pointed out that the CIA had not told the Warren Commission that George Joannides was the CIA lead for the Agency's links with the anti-Castro group Oswald had a public fight with in mid-1963; nor had they told the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), of which Joannides was the CIA's liaison. Tunheim said in a separate interview that "It really was an example of treachery... If [the CIA] fooled us on that, they may have fooled us on other things."