If Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, why are the Kennedy files still classified?

Five decades after President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot and long after official inquiries ended, thousands of pages of investigative documents remain withheld from public view. The contents of these files are partially known – and intriguing – and conspiracy buffs are not the only ones seeking to open them for a closer look.

Some serious researchers believe the off-limits files could shed valuable new light on nagging mysteries of the assassination – including what U.S. intelligence agencies knew about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before Nov. 22, 1963.

It turns out that several hundred of the still-classified pages concern a deceased CIA agent, George Joannides, whose activities just before the assassination and, fascinatingly, during a government investigation years later, have tantalized researchers for years.

“This is not about conspiracy, this is about transparency,” said Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and author embroiled in a decade-long lawsuit against the CIA, seeking release of the closed documents. “I think the CIA should obey the law. I don’t think most people think that’s a crazy idea.”

Morley’s effort has been joined by others, including G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel for a House investigation into the JFK assassination in the 1970s. But so far, the Joannides files and thousands more pages primarily from the CIA remain off-limits at a National Archives center in College Park, Md.

Others say the continued sealing of 50-year-old documents raises needless questions in the public’s mind and encourages conspiracy theories.

“There is no question that in various ways the CIA obfuscated, but it may be they were covering up operations that were justifiable, benign CIA operations that had absolutely nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination,” said Anthony Summers, a British author who has written extensively about the JFK case.

“But after 50 years, there is no reason that I can think of why such operations should still be concealed,” Summers said. “By withholding Joannides material, the agency continues to encourage the public to believe they’re covering up something more sinister.”

Even the New York Times noticed it!

I was watching this film from 1946 and man, things sure have changed:

I don’t take any of that stuff literally, because so much of what the military does is push propaganda. But this is still a little shocking.

This stuff is so infuriating:

The American Civil Liberties Union revealed Wednesday that Virginia State Police (VSP) used automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to record the identities and locations of people attending political events in the state, including President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration and 2008 campaign rallies for both Democratic and Republican candidates.

According to a press release at ACLU.org, state law enforcement agencies went on to compile a massive database of Virginians that they used to track the location of citizens throughout the state.

The ACLU obtained information about the program through a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, and says that the findings further illustrate the need for strict oversight of government use of technology to spy on citizens.

The organization said that while ALPRs have a legitimate function in law enforcement — tracking stolen vehicles or those which are frequently involved in crimes — the Virginia program “crossed well over the line from legitimate law enforcement to oppressive surveillance.”