The White House has ordered the full release of thousands of documents related to the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy for the first time.
With the publication of some 13,173 files online, the White House said more than 97 percent of the records in the collection are now publicly available.
The papers are not expected to reveal much, but historians hope to learn more about the alleged killer.
Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963, during a visit to Dallas, Texas.
A 1992 law required the government to release all documents related to the killing by October 2017.
On Thursday, President Joe Biden issued an executive order authorizing the latest disclosure.
But he said some files would be kept under wraps until June 2023 to protect against possible “detectable damage”.
The U.S. National Archives said 515 documents will be fully withheld, and another 2,545 will be partially withheld.
A 1964 US inquiry, the Warren Commission, found that Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, an American citizen who had previously lived in the Soviet Union, and that he acted alone. He was murdered in the basement of Dallas police headquarters two days after his arrest.
JFK’s death sparked decades of conspiracy theories, but the CIA said on Thursday that the US intelligence agency had “never engaged” with Oswald, and had not withheld information about him from US investigators. were
Longtime JFK scholars and theorists have hoped the latest release will reveal more about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City, where he met with a Soviet KGB officer in October 1963.
In its latest statement, the CIA said all information the agency had about his trip to Mexico City had been previously released, adding: “There is no new information on this subject in the 2022 release. are.”
But researchers at the Mary Farrell Foundation, a nonprofit that sued the government to release the files, said the CIA was withholding information about Oswald’s time in Mexico.
Some of the CIA records were never deposited in the archives and therefore were not part of the batch just released, the foundation said.
A newly declassified document reveals that the Mexican president helped the United States wiretap the Soviet embassy in Mexico without the knowledge of other Mexican government officials.
According to the JEE News, this piece of information was hidden by redactions in a previously released version of the file.
The White House said the release of the files would increase public awareness of the assassination investigation.
“The agencies have conducted a comprehensive effort to review the complete set of approximately 16,000 records that were previously released in redacted form and have determined that 70 of these records are not in the nature of the records,” President Biden wrote in his order. More than a percent can now be fully released.”
The Trump administration released thousands of pages during his presidency, but has withheld others on national security grounds, despite a 1992 law requiring the release of all information by 2017.
In October 2021, Mr. Biden released about 1,500 documents, but said he was sealing the rest.
