HAVE WE EVER LIED TO YOU BEFORE ? ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: =============================================================== Clinton's out-of-work egghead buddies get thier noses in the trough and have a mandate to look for the truth, in the hands of private citizens for years, and "dispel notions" of deciet. =============================================================== WASHINGTON - Hoping to DISPEL notions that the GOVERNMENT is CONCEALING information about President Kennedy's assassination, an independent panel is gearing up to launch a NATIONWIDE SEARCH for records. "We may DEBUNK certain CONSPIRACY THEORIES because the RECORDS aren't there to support those theories, or we might CREATE NEW POSSIBILITIES," said John Tunheim, Minnesota's chief deputy attorney general and chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board. "At least we will have gotten to the point where THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS NO LONGER HIDING information from the public," Tunheim said in a recent interview. "That's an issue of TRUST." After a SLOW START, the board, with a 1995 budget of $2.15 million and $2.4 million proposed for 1996, is beginning its work of seeking out new materials related to the assassination and reviewing records that government agencies would rather keep SECRET. To UNCOVER materials that MIGHT be in the hands of PRIVATE CITIZENS, it is counting on getting leads from experts, documents and a series of public meetings. {ed- they want your PRIVATE records ? } "I'm prepared to see anything," Tunheim said. "What I'm trying to do is to ORGANIZE a very SYSTEMATIC and very DETAILED process of finding every scrap of paper, every photograph, every film. Whatever exists." Created by Congress in 1992 in the hopes of SQUELCHING any public sense that the government has not divulged all it knows about the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination, the board was not appointed until President Clinton took office. Five members, four from universities and Tunheim, were confirmed by the Senate and sworn in in April 1994. On Tuesday, the board is scheduled to hold its third public meeting, in Washington. It met last November in Dallas, and plans a trip to Boston to visit the John F. Kennedy Library later this month. The board is considering trips to New Orleans, Miami and Los Angeles, and is in the middle of defining an assassination record to help set PARAMETERS for its work. { ED- parameters = fancy lingo for limits} In 1992, RESPONDING to renewed public demands created by Oliver Stone's film "JFK," which portrayed a plausable conspiracy, Congress voted to compel the release of VIRTUALLY all assassination-related documents to the National Archives. So far, the Archives have indexed 120,000 records, with an additional 60,000 pending for addition to the data base. After a CIA file on Lee Harvey Oswald was made public in 1993, 2,000 research REQUESTS were logged in under three months.{ED-no mention of how many were filled} One of the board's main jobs is to review records that government agencies DO NOT WANT released, possibly for national security or privacy concerns. It can DELAY release, but ONLY UNTIL 2017, the deadline set by law. {ed- unless they have an EO for an extension} Ultimately, the goal is to have all the records available to the public at the archives, or possibly by computer. "But our focus is really on the records themselves," Tunheim said, "to get them available to the public so that they can read them and TRY TO UNDERSTAND them for themselves."