Biden orders release of secret unedited JFK assassination files
The White House has ordered the release of thousands of documents related to the murder of US president John F Kennedy.
The government has ordered the documents to be released in full – without any edits.
With the publication of some 13,173 files online, the White House said more than 97% of records in the collection were now publicly available.
There are not expected to be any major revelations from the release of the papers, but historians hope to learn more about the alleged assassin.
Some files still withheld
President Kennedy was shot in the head during a visit to Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963.
A 1992 law required the government to release all the documents on the assassination by October 2017.
President Biden has authorised the latest release, but said some files would be kept under wraps until June 2023 to protect against possible “identifiable harm.”
The US National Archives said that 515 documents will remain withheld in full, and another 2,545 would be partly withheld.
What happened to JFK?
JFK’s death has spawned decades of conspiracy theories.
In 1964 the Warren Commission found that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a US citizen who had previously lived in the Soviet Union and acted alone. He was killed in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters – two days after his arrest.
On Thursday, the CIA said they had “never engaged” Oswald and did not withhold information about him from US investigators.
Theorists are hoping the release will reveal more information about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City, where he met a Soviet KGB officer in October 1963.
But the CIA said all information held by the agency related to his trip to Mexico City had previously been released, adding: “There is no new information on this topic in the 2022 release.”
What will we learn?
Washington said the release of the new files would give the public a better understanding of the investigation into JFK’s assassination.
The Trump administration released thousands of pages over the four years he spent in office, but withheld others on the basis of national security, despite the 1992 law forcing the release of all information by 2017.
Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter and author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, says the new files could shed light on whether the government may have known of Oswald’s intentions.
“I suspect there may be information in these documents to suggest that other people knew before the Kennedy assassination that this man Lee Harvey Oswald was a danger and that he may have talked openly about his intention to kill the president,” he told BBC News.
“And the question has always been did the agencies of government, the CIA and FBI, have some sense that this man was a danger to President Kennedy, and if they had acted on that information could they have saved the president?”
