[[ Folks: Joe Backes has done a tremendous amount of work in relation
   to gathering information at the various ARRB meetings across the 
   country. He brings the news back to us, and below you will read his
   appeal to us that we do our part in contacting those in government
   who will be making decisions about keeping the ARRB active. Let's
   each do as he suggests and make our opinions known.      Deanie  ]]
======================================================================
From: <JoeBackes@aol.com>
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 23:32:54 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Save the ARRB

there is an excellent web page that will tell people information on their
Congressional representatives- http://www.visi.com/juan/congress.  Can I ask

Why the ARRB must be SAVED!
(C)Joseph Backes


     You should be aware that the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB)
will go out of existence this October.  I, for one do not want that to
happen.  This is why I am writing this article.  The Assassination Records
Review Board was created by an outgrowth of Oliver Stone's much maligned
"JFK".  This movie caused such a stir with the American public that
Washington was forced to do something with the mountain of records that
relate to the assassination of President Kennedy that were not scheduled to
be opened until well into the 21st century.  The result of this public outcry
was Public Law 102-526.  It was this Public Law that created the
Assassination Records Review Board.
     You should know that Public Law 102-526 was signed by President George
Bush only days before the presidential election.  The change in
administrations caused quite a considerable delay in the appointment of the
Board members,  more than a year after they were supposed to be appointed,
and the ARRB by statute lost one year of their two year life.
     A new law had to be created to restart the clock to give the ARRB the
time Congress originally intended it to have.  Fortunately, this was done.
 This was Public Law 103-345.
     The statute also gave the ARRB Board members the ability to grant
themselves an additional year of existence.  They have recently done so.
     However, their work is nowhere near completed.  They need extra time.  I
urge you to contact your elected representatives in Congress, and President
Clinton, and beg them to extend the life of this Review Board.  I suggest
another 5 years.
     Then Senator David Boren said at a press conference in 1992 televised on
C-SPAN that this law would release more than 99.999% of the records.  This
will not be the case if the ARRB ceases to exist this October.     
     Representative John Conyers in 1993 said, "A key purpose of the Records
Act is to end unjustified secrecy that has fed speculation about the
assassination and undermined public trust in the institutions of government."
 This one agency, the ARRB, is doing the most to restore faith in our
democracy by revealing our largely still hidden history.
     My name is Joseph Backes.  I have paid close attention to the ARRB.  I
have written about them extensively.  My articles can be read on the world
wide web magazine "Fair Play" at http://rmii.com/~jkelin/fp.html. and also in
"The Assassination Chronicles" and "The Fourth Decade". I have testified
before the ARRB twice.  I have attended nearly all of their open meetings,
public hearings and presentations.  I am in the process of reviewing all the
documents they have released.
     I can assure you that they need more time to do their work.  I cite the
following examples.
     1.)  We have seen no releases from the JFK Library in Boston as a result
of any Review Board action, despite the ARRB visiting the JFK Library and
holding a public hearing in Boston.  This needs some explanation, the Records
Act allowed agencies to determine for themselves what "assassination records"
are until such time as the ARRB came into existence and defined the term
"assassination record".
The JFK Library did release some material but that was at own their own
initiative.  A great deal of material remains to be opened.  One of the items
the JFK assassination research community wants released is an audiotape of a
National Security Council Meeting held October 2, 1963 in which President
Kennedy discuses his intention to withdrawal from Vietnam.  This tape was the
object of an editorial by Oliver Stone in "Newsweek" October 21, 1996. p. 14
"Was Vietnam JFK's War?"
     2.)  We have seen precious little and in many cases nothing at all  from
Department of Defense agencies.  Peter Dale Scott has written some very
interesting pieces on Oswald's Marine G-2 records that have not been
released.
     3.) The ARRB is not going to review the CIA "segregated collection"
created by the HSCA as was revealed at the open meeting October 16, 1996
because of time constraints.
     4.)  The ARRB members themselves have repeatedly acknowledged that they
do not have the time to do their job.  The time needed to create the
Assassination Records Review Board, hire it's staff and make sure all who
needed to had the necessary security clearances was never addressed in the
original legislation and should not be subtracted from the time of the
Board's life and the task they have to perform.
     a.)  The first meeting of the ARRB Tuesday, April 12, 1994 Chairman
Tunheim stated, "This Board does need sufficient time in which to do its
work."  This was when the Board met for the first time which was as Dr.
Kermit Hall, a Board member, noted 18 months after the original legislation
was passed.  The ARRB needed to get emergency funds from the President's
Unanticipated Needs Fund to the tune of $250,000 to get started as they were
not then funded by the Congress.
     b.)  Chairman John Tunheim again stressed the need for the Board to have
the time it needs to do its job at the July 12, 1994 meeting of the ARRB.
 The Board voted to extend its life as the original legislation gave them
this ability.  At this time they were to expire in less than 6 months in
October of 1994.  The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records
Collection Extension Act" was passed on October 6, 1994.
     c.)  5 days later Dr. William Joyce, a member of the Review Board, asked
Mr. Jim Lesar, esq., president of the Assassination Archive and Research
Center of the possible need for prioritizing in creating a definition for the
term "assassination record" at the October 11, 1994 public hearing in
Washington, D.C. because of "the reality of congressional allocations of a
budget nature and time constraints" (emphasis added; see p. 11 of the
transcript for this hearing.)
     d.)  Chairman Tunheim spoke of how the first year was spent on hiring
and organizing the staff in his introductory remarks at the Boston Public
Hearing March 24, 1995.
     e.)  At the October 23, 1995 meeting Jeremy Gunn, the ARRB's chief legal
counsel said, "One of the problems that obviously confronts a review of
records in the Kennedy assassination is determining priorities for review of
records.  There is an enormous number of records there, they can't all be
reviewed at the same time and we need to come up or we need to be operating
under standards that would allow relatively more important records to come up
first
     f.)  Mr. Gunn also spoke of the lateness of getting consent from
Congress to review records of the HSCA at the October 23, 1995 meeting (see
p. 30 of that transcript)
     g.) And at the same October 23, 1995 meeting Mr. Gunn said "I need to
say that we do not feel that we have had stellar compliance from the military
community generally."
     h.) Again, at the same October 23, 1995 meeting Mr. Gunn said, "I think
it would be fair to say that the agency with which we have had the most
difficulty thus far has been the Secret Service both in understanding what
their responsibilities are under the statute and in making records
available."
     i.)  Chairman Tunheim also spoke of the difficulty the Board has had
with the Secret Service at the Board's presentation at the American
Historical Association (AHA).  The Secret Service has also destroyed records
in clear and open violation of the JFK Records Act.  These destroyed records
relate to President Kennedy's travels in 1963.  I believe they were destroyed
in March 1996.
     j.) "... I do think that it is at least fair to say that the public
mind, when it comes to the assassination, rests upon a series of images
largely generated on the basis of inadequate evidence.  There are literally
millions of documents that have not been either partially or wholly revealed
to the searchers of all stripes.  I would think it a fair statement to say
that without having access to those materials the chance of getting close to
understanding the assassination, whether it was a conspiracy or whether it
was something else, will not take place.", stated Dr. Hall at the Board's
presentation at the AHA.  Dr. Hall also commented, "What we face is the
general problem of trying to make sense of an event whose explanation eludes
us by turning to evidence that has been kept from us."
     k.) A woman,  at the ARRB's presentation at the AHA, asked the Board
when do they stop.  Chairman Tunehim responded, "We have 21 months left in
our tenure (this was said in January of 1996) unless the Congress decides to
add additional time, which I think the Congress is certainly willing to do if
there is some evidence of foot dragging, delays or roadblocks that have been
thrown up in our path."  I think we have a few examples of foot dragging,
delays, and roadblocks.  
     l.) At the Board's presentation at the Organization of American
Historians it was noted that the State Department "lost" a request from the
Board to contact a foreign government for four months.
     m.) At the October 16, 1996 open meeting Dr. Anna Nelson spoke of how
the ARRB does not have the time to look at everything which is why they were
holding this particular meeting to decide what to do with the "sequestered
collection", roughly some 290,000 pages of documents.
     5.) Mr. Steve Tilley, National Archives liaison to the ARRB and the man
in charge of the JFK Records Collection at College Park has commented on
numerous examples of agencies that have assassination material that the
National Archives is still awaiting.   
      6.  District Attorney Harry F. Connick of New Orleans is still refusing
to turn over documents from the Garrison investigation of Clay Shaw.  Mr.
Connick testified to the ARRB on June 28 that the reason why some material
from that investigation might be missing was because when Garrison lost the
election for D.A. to Connick Garrison staffers took material with them.  This
turned out to be a lie when a staffer came forward with the grand jury
transcripts and stated in a sworn affidavit that Connick ordered the material
destroyed, instead he kept them for more than 20 years turning them over
initially to a WDSU-TV reporter who then forwarded them on to the ARRB.
 Connick won convictions against Gary Raymond, the staffer and Richard
Angelico, the reporter.  These convictions were later thrown out.
       7.)  Mr. Tilley commented that time was taken up in the creation of
the database that the Act required the Archives to create.  "The database
which we devised was required by law to be set up in 45 days.  Because of
that it was a fairly simple system...it had to be usable in almost any kind
of hardware government wide...that led to some problems...the computer
problems were part of the problems that led to some of the delays. 
        8.)  Records the JFK Research Community still await
          a.) Audiotapes and transcripts of 3 telephone conversations
President Lyndon Johnson made.  This is developed further in Harold
Weisberg's "Never Again!" p. x-xi, "Contrary to the impression given the
public, the disclosed transcripts were selected with some care.  All were not
disclosed, nor by far were all the tapes heard.  What was disclosed  -and I
have copies of what was-includes no indication of any kind of the three
Johnson phone conversations concerning the Hoover-Katzenbach conspiracy not
to investigate the crime itself.  (This concerns the infamous Katzenbach
memo.)  Not (Bill) Moyers call to Johnson, not Johnson's immediate call to
Hoover, and not his call to Katzenbach placed as soon as he spoke to Hoover.
 Also, not disclosed was Johnson's call made early the night of the day of
the assassination, that according to Hoover's Warren Commission testimony,
directed him to investigate and report on the crime.  
          b.) Materials used by William Manchester for his book "Death of a
President".
          c.) Materials from foreign governments.
               1.) Minsk, Belorussia, where Oswald lived while in U.S.S.R.
               2.) Japan-Oswald was a Marine in Japan.
                  Dick Russell spoke at the ARRB's public hearing in Boston
that Cabinet Research Office, essentially the equivalent of the CIA, may have
files on Oswald.
               3.) Mexico
               4.) Holand - Oswald stayed at an apartment in Amsterdam,
reputedly a CIA safehouse, when returning to America from his stay behind the
Iron curtain.
               5.) Cuba
               6.) Italy  
                    The alleged assassination weapon was an Italian
Manlicher-Carcano 6.5mm rifle.  SIFAR, the Italian armed forces intelligence
service identified the rifle as a 7.35mm rifle in appearance rebarrelled to
6.5mm.  These documents in their original Italian would be important to
acquire.
     d.)  An appendix and part of the Lopez report with the title "Was Lee
Harvey Oswald an agent of the CIA" has not been released at all!  Don't be
fooled by anyone who says the Lopez report has been released.  Large sections
of it have been released but not this crucial appendix to the report.
     And there are many, many more examples.  We need the ARRB to continue to
exist if the American public is to stand a chance at all of seeing these
materials released to them.  Please contact your elected representatives in
Congress and President Clinton and urge them to extend the life of the
Assassination Records Review Board.
       I think we all know it is an uphill battle but I am going to ask that
you do something.  I don't have the resources to lead this campaign or spend
or give money.  I can only ask, persuade others to do, or try to do
something.  Good luck to you, good luck to us all.

Joseph Backes