the disclosure of national security classified information. The Supreme Court upheld the Exemption 1 claim. The majority opinion placed the blame for its rigid interpretation of the exemption squarely on Congress, stating that it "has built into the Freedom of Information Act an exemption that provides no means to question an Executive decision to stamp a document "secret," however cynical, myopic, or even corrupt that decision might have been."
Congress reacted quickly to the Mink decision, and moved to amend Exemption 1. While a bill to do this was pending before the Senate, Senator Phillip Hart of Michigan moved to introduce an amendment to the bill which would override Weisberg and the bad Exemption 7 cases which had followed in its wake. On the floor of the Senate, Senator Edward Kennedy asked Senator Hart if his amendment would override the decision of the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in Weisberg and three other cases. When Hart said it would, Senator Kennedy said he would support it. With the passage of the 1974 amendments, the FOIA was at last given some vitality. The Weisberg and Mink cases and the political reaction to the Watergate scandal propelled passage of the amended FOIA over President Gerald Ford's veto.
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In an irony of history, however, while Exemption 7 opened up access to law enforcement records after the 1974 amendments became effective on February 19, 1975, Exemption 1, the issue which had upset Congress the most, has proved largely feckless over the past four decades. While litigation over the issue does force some degree of accountability in court, effective judicial supervision is minimal at best. Contrary to congressional intent, the judiciary routinely rubber stamps Exemption 1 claims.
After the passage of the amended FOIA, it became possible to obtain substantial amounts of information about the assassinations of the Kennedys, Dr. King and others, but it remained impossible to get any comprehensive picture. While several hundred thousand pages of records were obtained by Harold Weisberg and Mark Allen between 1975 and 1992, the disclosures
remained highly unsatisfactory due to the large number of withholdings and redactions.
D. The Impact of the JFK Act
The picture changed dramatically in 1992, after Oliver Stone's groundbreaking movie "JFK" made its debut. A Kennedy assassination researcher, Kevin Walsh, had written to Stone suggesting that he add a tag line to the film calling on the American people to write Congress demanding
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that it put an end to the policy of withholding the records until 2039. A monumental deluge of communications engulfed Congress, which soon began to hold hearings on the issue of whether there should be new legislation regarding the release of Kennedy assassination records. In this connection, I testified before several congressional committees in support of such legislation. Despite the public outpouring, passage of the legislation remained uncertain. One day Steve Katz, a legislative aide to Senator John Glenn's Governmental Affairs Committee came to the AARC's office to talk about the Senate bill. At a meeting of the Committee, objections had been raised to the bill. The Senators didn't understand why the legislation was needed in view of the ability requesters had to seek release of records under the FOIA. I took Steve out into the hallway outside my office and
pulled a huge black binder filled with hundreds of pages down off a file cabinet. The folder contained a couple hundred pages listing thousands of pages of documents that were the subject of a FOIA lawsuit by Mark Allen against the CIA. Page after page after page listed documents that were the subject of Allen's request. And again and again and again the determination with respect to each document was "DENIED." Steve got the point. "Can I borrow this?" he asked. "Sure," I replied.
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When he brought this Vaughn index of these withheld materials back to me later, he said it had been passed around by the Senators, who concluded "you just don't get anything." That killed the opposition to the bill. It became the President John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992 when President George Herbert Walker Bush signed in on October 26, 1992.
The JFK Act was the most liberal disclosure law ever passed. It removed the major impediments to disclosure posed by the FOIA. Most importantly, it was not restricted to Executive Branch records. For the first time ever, the American people would have direct access to congressional records. Thus, the records of the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations would all be subject to the search and
disclosure provisions of the JFK Act. Secondly, the basic concept of mandatory disclosure was radically altered; whereas the FOIA was based on the concept that records were either exempt or nonexempt from disclosure, the JFK Act provided that the release of information could only be "postponed," not "exempted." This new concept eliminated a serious flaw in the FOIA which permitted information found to be exempt from disclosure to be withheld forever. Under the JFK Act, absent personal
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