10 July 13-19, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents of the United States recommended that the release of certain redacted documents be temporarily postponed. Some docu- ments that were previously withheld, however, were scheduled for release by Friday. Between April and June, the Na- tional Archives and Records Administra- tion put out 2,672 documents with new information regarding the JFK assassina- tion, according to the archive’s website. There’s no information on when the rest of the documents will be released. The National Archives and Records Ad- ministration did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. In an emailed statement, Nicola Long- ford, an executive director for Dallas’ Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, a JFK assassination museum housed in the building from which alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot, said: “These much- anticipated releases may provide addi- tional insights to researchers and historians, helping to advance the muse- um’s mission helping to place into context the assassination of President Kennedy. We anticipate that the availability of pre- viously withheld records could lead to a broader understanding of the assassina- tion and the time period.” One person who took issue with the de- layed release was Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “It’s not about conspiracy – it is about transparency,” JFK’s nephew said in a post on Twitter. He called the White House’s announce- ment unlawful. “In 1992 the JFK Records Act was passed unanimously by Congress with the promise that all assassination re- lated records would be released no later than October 2017,” Kennedy wrote. He said this promise has been broken by Biden’s re- cent announcement. Kennedy said that trust in government is at an all-time low and that releasing the rest of the documents could be a small step to- ward restoring that trust. Of course, this is the same Kennedy who doubts the effective- ness of vaccines and, according to Rolling Stone, says that “vaccine research has actu- ally created some of the worst plagues in our history.” Some more serious voices on the JFK assassination documents can be found at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which maintains the largest online archive of JFK assassination documents. It was named af- ter a legal secretary who was working in downtown Dallas on the day of the assassi- nation. Ferrell and her sons compiled re- cords on the assassination until she died at the age of 81 in 2004. The foundation’s work, however, continues. It sued the Biden Administration in Octo- ber in an attempt to get the remaining JFK documents released. The suit claims that JFK assassination documents have been un- lawfully redacted and withheld from public disclosure. The last time records were released, back in December, a memo from the president set a June 30 deadline for the release of the re- maining documents. However, this time around there’s no such deadline. Biden said in his memo that this was the last certification he would be doing on the JFK assassination records. Instead of having the president authorize the release of re- cords, intelligence agencies like the CIA sub- mitted what Biden called transparency plans to the National Archives that will help deter- mine the release of records going forward. Journalist Jefferson Morley, vice presi- dent of the Mary Ferrell Foundation and ed- itor of jfkfacts.org and its Substack newsletter, told the Observer, “The presi- dent is out of the picture,” when it comes to the remaining documents. “So, he’s washing his hands of JFK records,” Morley said. “That’s not a service to history, and it’s not consistent with the law. The JFK records act says the president has certain nondelegable duties and he has delegated his duties.” The Mary Ferrell Foundation will be in court on July 13 in San Francisco, where it will argue for an injunction to stop the im- plementation of the transparency plans be- cause it’s a violation of the law, he said. People might say that there’s nothing new in the recently released records or the ones that haven’t been released yet, Morley said. “That is simply false,” he said. “We’ve had a bunch of really interesting releases in the past six months.” For example, a memo released in Decem- ber said a CIA station in Miami conducted its own JFK assassination investigation, Morley said. The memo, which detailed the investigation, was written by an undercover CIA officer named Donald Heath. This in- vestigation was taking place at a time when many said that Oswald had acted alone, and there was nothing else to it, Morley said. The results of this CIA Miami investigation have never been made public. “So, the Heath memo is a very significant document because it shows that the official story was doubted from day one, not by con- spiracy theorists but by the CIA itself,” Mor- ley said. Another example is a memo written by historian Arthur Schlesinger, who was a spe- cial assistant and court historian to President Kennedy. He wrote a memo to the president in 1961 after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. According to Morley, Kennedy was thinking of reorganizing the CIA after the failure of the invasion, and he asked Schlesinger how to do it. Schlesinger wrote a five-page memo talking about problems that the CIA causes for U.S. foreign policy. One and a half pages of this memo were redacted by the CIA. “It’s outrageous,” Morley said. In December, the memo was released again, with just one more sentence unre- dacted. This is one of the documents at issue in the Mary Ferrell Foundation lawsuit. The lawsuit asks for the release of several other specific sets of documents. These in- clude files on three CIA officers tied to Os- wald and a 1962 Defense Department false flag plan called Operation Northwoods, which called for a staged violent incident in the U.S. to be blamed on Cuba. The suit claims records regarding plots to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, a JFK-related document from Watergate bur- glar E. Howard Hunt’s security file and 44 other documents related to a CIA agent named George Joannides have been unlaw- fully redacted as well. Joannides operated a covert Cuba-related program that allegedly came into contact with Oswald months be- fore the assassination of JFK. “They’re acting like they have something to hide,” Morley said. “So, the most reason- able conclusion is they have something to hide. That’s what they’re telling us. That’s what they’re acting like. So, that’s where we’re at.” Now, Morley said, the fight for the docu- ments will mostly take place in court. “What Biden did was he kind of slammed the door on working through the process as it has ex- isted,” Morley said. “So, now the struggle re- ally does move to court. We can’t work within the system anymore.” ▼ CITY HALL HOPE FOR THE HOMELESS? NEW TASK FORCE REPORT PINPOINTS ISSUES WITH RESPONSE TO HOMELESSNESS. BY JACOB VAUGHN D anielle Hollowell has been in and out of homeless encampments for al- most a year while waiting for the housing assistance that she signed up for. “I’m still in limbo waiting,” she said. Whenever encampments get swept, she said, residents are directed to homeless shel- ters. But she said the shelters are always full and many won’t take people with pets, like her. She used to have two dogs, but one was stolen. She now has one young pit bull that she calls her service animal. “I’ve yet to re- ally get any assistance other than ‘Hurry up and wait,’ and it’s been since last August that I applied for the housing.” Hollowell said she hasn’t heard from her case worker for some time. The last she heard is that she’s on a waiting list for rapid rehousing. Hollowell has since applied for several forms of housing assistance with no luck. She said all she needs is safe, stable housing so she can start looking for a job. “But I can’t do that when I’m having to worry about keeping it all together in 105 degree heat and not overheating or killing my service animal in the process,” she said. “That’s hard. It’s really hard.” “I’m so ready to go to work,” she said. “I just feel like I’m being stonewalled in the process.” Hollowell’s experience is similar to oth- ers living on the streets in Dallas. According to a recently released report, the number of unsheltered homeless people, like Hollow- ell, has increased over the last decade and things won’t get much better for them until the city has more affordable housing. In February, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson formed a task force to answer a few questions he had about how the city and its partners were tackling homelessness. He called it the Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness Orga- nizations, Policies, and Encampments, or HOPE for short. It’s made up of several lead- ers in the city’s homeless response system: Peter Brodsky, chair of Housing Forward; Betty Culbreath, Dallas Housing Authority chair and former director of Dallas County Health and Human Services; and Ellen Mag- nis, president and CEO of Family Gateway. The mayor gave them a few months to put together a report answering 12 questions aimed at what Dallas and its homeless re- sponse system can do better to house the homeless. The task force has spent the last four months meeting with numerous na- tional and local experts to find answers to these questions. “I strongly urge the Dallas City Council to carefully review this report, as I believe it can be a useful tool in helping us achieve our goal of improving Dallas’ worsening unshel- tered homelessness problem,” the mayor said in a press release. The report found that there were 242 un- sheltered homeless people in Dallas in 2014; by 2022, that number was in excess of 1,300. This rise outpaces the national average, ac- cording to the report. But it’s not all bad news. There have been some improvements over the last 12-18 months. The 2023 census of the homeless in Dallas and Collin counties showed a small decrease (2%) in overall homelessness. There were bigger declines in unsheltered and chronic homelessness, at 14% and 32%, respectively. These results “provide early indications that the state of homelessness in Dallas is heading in a positive direction,” ac- Unfair Park from p8 >> p12 National Archives / Getty Images Oswald did it. OK? He just did.
