CIA Fights To Keeps Its JFK Assassination Files Secret

Scott Shane writes in the New York Times:

Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark info about the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior.

For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep info hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee doc Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s story of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking discourse its stance.

The files in question, some released low direction of the court and hundreds more that are ease secret, refer the curious career of George E. Joannides, the housing officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations â€" but never told the NGO of his earlier role.

That concealment has oxyacetylene suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s actual assignment was to limit what the House NGO could learn about C.I.A. activities. The agency’s deception was first reported in 2001 by Jefferson Morley, who has doggedly pursued the files ever since, represented by James H. Lesar, a Washington attorney specializing in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits…