Release of Secret Documents on Kennedy’s Assassination: Why Now?

• 11.01.2017, 19:42
•  America,  World

HauensteinCenter

The other day the US President Donald Trump released previously secret documents on the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy (35^th US President). On the occasion he noted:

"The American public expects - and deserves - its government to provide as much access as possible to the President John F Kennedy assassination records so that the people may finally be fully informed about all aspects of this pivotal event. Therefore, I am ordering today that the veil finally be lifted," Trump said in a statement.

Why now? The timing is not occasional and it is not directly connected with the personality of the current US President Donald Trump. In 1992 the US Congress unanimously passed the JFK Assassination Records Act, which was in the same year signed by at that time US president George W Bush to provide transparency on the murder of Kennedy within 25 years, Independent reports. The law mandated that all assassination-related records in the government’s possession had to be made public within 25 years. The deadline for the complete disclosure of the documents, according to the law, was October 26, 2017.

So far President Donald Trump released nearly 3,000 previously secret documents on the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy, but hundreds were held back despite a law ordering them be made public. Commenting on this, Trump informed that some US agencies had requested that some documents remain secret "because of national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns", Aljazeera reports.

He added that those files would be reviewed, and information that allegedly affects national security would be blacked out before release.  "I have no choice today but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation's security," he said.  To note by the US law, federal agencies such as the CIA and FBI may contest the release of these records, but in that case, the president would make the final call.

To inform JFK Assassination Records Act was passed by the Congress after the controversial 1991 film, JFK, by Oliver Stone. The film examines the events leading to the assassination of John F. Kennedy (below is the trailer of the famous movie).

After Kennedy was shot dead in his car in November 1963 in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, there have been many theories: who was really behind his murder? Those theories blamed the Russians, the Cubans and even the CIA.  Such versions of his murder come to the scene after it was revealed that Oswald was monitored by the CIA during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination, and that he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies there.

Over the years, opinion polls have consistently shown that more than 60 percent of Americans don’t believe the official story—that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, Newsweek reports.

Thus we can see that the release of the secret document on Kennedy’s assassination has a background history and cannot be directly connected with the personality of the current US president. However, it is also obvious that Donald Trump can derive side benefits from this whole process: first he did not hinder the release of the documents, which is a positive PR for him, and second the noise raised over those secret documents can somehow mitigate the continuous opposition against the current US president in the country.