by Andrew Kreig
Did the CIA try to thwart the nation’s last investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination?
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| G. Robert Blakey |
“The
CIA not only lied, it actively subverted the investigation,” says G.
Robert Blakey, the former general counsel of the House Select Committee
on Assassinations (HSCA), which issued its report in 1979.
“It is time that either Congress or the Justice Department conducts a
real investigation of the CIA,” Blakey continued. “Indeed, in my
opinion, it is long past time.”
Blakey, shown at left, urged the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA) to comply promptly with a federal law unanimously
passed by congress in 1992 requiring release of JFK records.
But the Archives refuses to release the documents until 2017 without
CIA or presidential approval. The CIA has said it lacks resources to
process the documents earlier to protect national security. But at what
point does refusal to cooperate with a murder investigation signify a
broken system?
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| George Joannides |
As part of our ongoing Justice Integrity Project Readers Guide to the
JFK murder, today’s column examines Blakey’s complaint, the most recent
example of the intelligence community's ongoing resistance to
congressional oversight. Future columns will deal with related issues
that include potential motives for CIA secrecy. More generally, the
Kennedy murder has prompted more than two thousand books in whole or
part about it, as summarized in our Readers Guide book catalog, published earlier this week.
For today, the relevant controversy involves the late CIA officer
George Joannides, at right, whom Blakey relied upon for advice on
location of CIA records and personnel relevant to the HSCA’s
reexamination of the Warren Commission report.
Blakey announced his views Sept. 26, 2014 at a three-day conference
in Bethesda, MD organized by the non-profit Assassination Archive and
Research Center (AARC).
The AARC conference
title was “The Warren Report and the JFK Assassination: Five Decades of
Significant Disclosures,” recognizing the 50th anniversary of the
assassination report of the commission led by Supreme Court Chief
Justice Earl Warren.
The seven-member commission included former CIA Director Allen Dulles
among its membership of high-ranking federal officials and former
officials. The commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, acted
alone in killing Kennedy with three shots from behind.
Critics have long attacked the report as a whitewash. Some critics
cite medical and other scientific evidence to show that it was
impossible for Oswald to have accomplished the crime alone, especially
if Kennedy's fatal shot was from the front. Others argue the commission
intentionally covered up the truth.
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