An Open Letter to Rep. Anna Luna and Chief of Staff Bill Christian
Dear Congresswoman and Mr. Christian:
I am writing on behalf of Mark Adamczyk, Andrew Iler, the Kennedys and King webmaster Craig Bouzarth, and finally myself, Jim DiEugenio. We all admire you both for the fine work you have done in trying to draw attention to the fact that the assassinations of the sixties have never been solved, and the classification of documents is still with us. It is hard to believe that this is the awful state of affairs at this late date.
You have had two hearings on the John Kennedy case, and one on the Martin Luther King case. We hope you do one on the Robert Kennedy case. If you do so, Lisa Pease should be a witness. Her book on that case, A Lie Too Big to Fail, is simply stellar.
But what I wish to focus on in this letter is something that Judge John Tunheim said at your second hearing on the John Kennedy case. Tunheim was the Chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) for all four years of its existence. As you know, the Board did not have enough time to finish its goal of declassifying all the government documents on the JFK case. But they were supposed to have at least been aware of what was in the cache. In fact, Tunheim once said many years ago that he did not think there was anything that he saw that should be withheld.
This made his most recent comments on the matter at your May 20th hearing rather jarring. He said that he had never seen some of the most recently declassified documents. He further stated that, as of October 2017, there should have only been about 1,500 total redactions to deal with. Those statements should be of the utmost importance to your committee. Because it clearly implies that some things—or perhaps many things—were not revealed to the ARRB. The quite natural follow up questions would be: how much was not; and why not?
This brings me to the central reason for this communication. Mark Adamczyk and Andrew Iler are two legal experts on the 1992 JFK Act. Mark practices in Florida and Andrew in Canada. They have written several articles on the 1992 legislation which led to the creation of the Review Board. They have now co-authored a three-part essay entitled “The War on Oliver Stone’s JFK Records Act” (Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-war-on-oliver-stone-s-jfk-records-act-part-1).
This important article goes to the heart of Tunheim’s startling declaration. It poses some of the most disturbing questions about the probable avoidance of the spirit and letter of the 1992 law. Let us be frank. What Mark and Andrew are indicating is that the CIA deliberately avoided submitting everything they had to the Board. Hence, Tunheim’s jarring comment.
It is clear from the work of these two experts that the CIA had planned on an avoidance pattern for both before and after the Review Board was in existence. As Tunheim said, “…many of these releases were not seen by the ARRB and were apparently transferred to NARA at a later time…It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know they [the CIA] were waiting us out.”
The second major issue which the authors bring up is that of the ARRB’s Final Determination Notifications (FDNs). They make the case that, from interviews they did with the staff of the Review Board—including Executive Director David Marwell—that there were such notices on every document not yet declassified in 1998. Therefore, the result should have been that the FDNs should have been the final word on when a document should have been declassified. Every document the ARRB saw should have been disclosed before the legislative terminal date of October, 2017. Therefore, whatever later presidential acts that took place by Donald Trump or Joe Biden should have been irrelevant. Yet, the question is, where are these 27,000 FDNs today? As Mark and Andrew write, the FDNs were issued, they were transferred to the National Archives (NARA), and yet they are unaccounted for.
As Tunheim has said, the National Archives (NARA) never got into contact with him after the Board closed down in 1998. Should they not have in reference in a continual declassification process of the JFK Collection? And this process includes records of congressional committees like the Church Committee and its offshoot, the Schweiker-Hart subcommittee.
Most disturbing in the essay is that the CIA may have influenced a streamlining of the document release methods for the Board in the spring of 1997. This may have happened through the secret CIA memo written by Barry Harrelson on March 5, 1997. He was chief of the Agency’s JFK Records Project.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the JFK Act mandated that once the collection was completed, the Archivist of the United States must announce this to the President and to Congress. And once announced, a catalog and index should accompany that collection. And that collection should include all records of the ARRB.
To the knowledge of all concerned, this has not been done. And it is now almost ten years beyond what the JFK Act designated as the termination date of October of 2017. What makes it worse is that there have been no congressional hearings about why this has not been done, either in the Senate or in the House. Yet the JFK Act was passed overwhelmingly by both chambers. This kind of avoidance and defiance has led many people to wonder about two things: first, who is really running the country? And second: Why are things still being hidden? As Yale lawyer Allard Lowenstein once said, in his experience, people with nothing to hide don’t hide things.
We urge you both to read this key essay. It is much worth your time. But further, we implore you to call either a hearing or at least an in-chambers conference about these crucial matters. In attendance at that meeting should be former Executive Director David Marwell, former Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn, former ARRB Chair John Tunheim and the Acting Chief Archivist at NARA, Ed Forst.
Frankly, these questions about the completeness of the collection, a working index, and the fate of the FDNs should not exist today. But they still do. You might be the last chance we ever have of finding out why.
ADDENDUM - Action Alert to our Readers
We think it's important for Rep. Luna to call for a conference among those we mentioned in the above letter: David Marwell, John Tunheim, Jeremy Gunn, and the Acting Archivist at NARA. The matters mentioned in the letter about the FDNs, the lack of a usable index, no certification of a final collection, and whether the CIA influenced the ARRB in its final year all need to be clarified.
But we need your help to make it work. Please take a few minutes to do the following:
E mail Bill Christian, Luna's chief of staff at William.Christian@mail.house.
Or call the D.C. office at 202-225-5961
Just leave a message that you would like the office and the subcommittee to act on the matters addressed in the Kenendysandking.com letter of April 19th and posted on the website.
Thanks for your attention and effort.
