More of the FBI's Church Committee File Has Just Been Released
The FBI couldn't find its justification for including Muhammad Ali on an NSA watchlist. And a Church Committee investigator accidentally uncovered an FBI operation while exiting the Post Office.
Yesterday, in my guide to COINTELPRO I wrote a little bit about the FBI’s Church Committee file. Identified by the late Ernie Lazar as HQ 62-116395, it has been sought after by FOIA requesters and the subject of lawsuits.
In spite of this, I observed that little fanfare has been made about the sections of the file released in past disclosures under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. I also noted I was uncertain if the released pages, which likely number in the tens of thousands, constituted the whole file.
Several hours after I hit “publish” on my guide to FBI Counter Intelligence Programs, 13,000 additional pages of government files were released under the JFK Assassination Records Collection.
My first act upon the files release was to search to see if any released files came from HQ 62-116395.
And the answer is…a lot of them do!
I’ve barely made a dent in the files, but they look like they include documents about the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King and possibly additional information on COINTELPRO.
I want to start by saying I’ve only had the time review a tiny sliver of the released documents. But my initial impression (which is admittedly based on a very limited sample size) is how little justification there was for withholding any of these files during past rounds of disclosures.
The files deal with intelligence operations that were once highly secret and deeply sensitive. But they have all been public knowledge for nearly half a century.
For example, a number of the files I looked at are internal FBI communications dealing with Church Committee investigators’ requests for information on the NSA Watch List. The NSA Watch List was written about in great detail in the Church Committee report. Past FBI files released from HQ 62-116395 include far more sensitive information about the Watch List, such as a 1965 memo to head of FBI domestic intelligence on communications intelligence in Cuba, and multiple requests from Hoover to the NSA director for help investigating “racial extremists.”
To be clear, it is interesting (and historically relevant) to know that Church Committee investigators were incredulous about the FBI’s claim about a lack of paper documentation on parts of the Watch List or the FBI’s reasons it thinks it had Muhammad Ali added to the NSA Watch List. But given what we already know about this program, what justification was there for withholding this information this information in 2017 and 2018?
Certainly, there is a question of capacity. There are huge amounts of files to review. But Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992. All of these agencies had ample to get this information released in compliance with statutory deadlines.
All claims from the government about its need for secrecy must be met with skepticism. But the latest round of releases, add weight to the doubts about whether the FBI and CIA have been acting in good faith when demanding first Trump and now Biden continue to keep secret information the Congressionally-mandated Assassination Records Review Board has stated should be public.
One interesting set of files in yesterday’s release concerns a Church Committee investigator’s visit to a New York Post Office. When trying to exit, he accidentally stumbled into a room where a man was photographing the outside of envelopes. He was informed it was an FBI agent conducting a sensitive mail cover. That particular surveillance program had not been disclosed to the Church Committee.
There just isn’t oversight like that anymore!
