After looking at ARRB’s “Final determination forms” (here), I am back poking around in the ARRB’s record notices for information I might have overlooked. This note describes what I found.
Caveat lector! This note is pure bean counting, and will be deathly boring for most readers. If you are interested in ARRB record releasing, however, you must count beans. For the select few who actually enjoy this, I have 100+ beans to add to the big pile.
The 28 September records
The JFK Act required the ARRB to publish lists of the records it reviewed in the Federal Register. By 1998, because of the volume of records it was processing, the ARRB gave up publishing a complete list of records reviewed and switched to short summaries of its work.
In their own records, however, the ARRB maintained detailed lists of review results; in particular, they kept track of all records for which they agreed to “postpone” (redact) information . These detailed lists included identifying record numbers, number of postponements (redactions), and dates that these postponements were to be released.
These detailed lists are available in the ARRB electronic records, released by NARA in 2017. When I looked through these lists, however, I discovered that there was no detailed list for the ARRB’s last record review, which supposedly took place on 28 September, 1998.
A summary description for this review was published in the Federal Register, as the Act required. The summary is available here. The relevant section reads:
On September 28, 1998, the Review Board made formal determinations on records it reviewed under the JFK Act.
Notice of Formal Determinations
1 Church Committee Document: Postponed in Part until 10/2017
2 CIA Documents: Postponed in Part until 05/2001
2 CIA Documents: Postponed in Part until 10/1999
110 CIA Documents: Postponed in Part until 10/2017
1 HSCA Document: Postponed in Part until 10/2017
2 LBJ Library Documents: Open in Full
1 LBJ Library Document: Postponed in Part until 10/2017
1 NSA Document: Postponed in Part until 10/2017
The Review Board also determined that the following record is not
believed relevant to the JFK assassination.
US ARMY (IRR) Document
194-10010-10424
Notice of Other Releases
After consultation with appropriate Federal agencies, the Review
Board announces that documents from the following agencies are now
being opened in full: 3 Church Committee documents; 5 CIA documents; 52
LBJ Library documents.
The Board voted on the records under “formal determinations” to determine how many postponements to approve and when the postponed information was to be released. The section “Notice of other releases” identifies records where the originating agencies dropped their requests for postponement. The Board called such records “consent releases”. Adding these two sets together, the ARRB processed 181 records on 28 September.
There was also a “corrections” section in the notice, which described 7 other records where the Board revised its original decisions. I omit this irrelevant section.
As one can see, the summary notice gives the originating agency, a count of records reviewed, and the release date for postponements in the records, but it does not specify the identifying record numbers or the number of postponements.
Both the summary notices, and the detailed notices that the summaries describe, were included in the electronic records of Peter Voth, an ARRB analyst and computer specialist. They are available at the MFF website (here).
Unfortunately, I could not find a detailed list for the 28 September meeting in Voth’s records. There may be a copy of the detailed list in the hard copy ARRB records, which are not on line, but I don’t believe there is a copy in the electronic records.
However, after going through all the pdfs in Voth’s archive, and a ton of other records as well, I have found pieces of the September 28 detailed list in a couple of pdfs.
The 28 September “consent releases” are all recorded in this file.
A portion of the 28 September formal determinations are recorded in this file. (I count 76 records here, as opposed to the 121 that the summary indicates.)
As a result of my latest digging, I am still missing 45 records out of the 181 reviewed, but recovered 136.
My two cents
The 136 records which I found in Voth’s papers were released by NARA in July 2017. There were originally over a thousand records released in July that I could find no formal determination notices for. Thanks to this new find, that number has shrunk by over a hundred.
It’s only a small dent in my pile of question marks, but it’s still an improvement. Coming soon, I’ll take a look at those “unnoticed” releases, and see what’s up there.