Why classify information?

[Jake Maxwell]

It would seem that classifying any information in a “Lone Nut” assassination would be completely unnecessary...
The very fact that information is still classified... is a fairly strong suggestion that Oswald was not a “Lone Nut”... but that a larger conspiracy involving entities that have the power to classify information... are trying to protect themselves from being exposed....

[Jake Maxwell]

Jefferson Morley, editor of JFKFacts.org and a former Washington Post staff writer, says that the most significant JFK files not released, are tapes of interviews the historian William Manchester conducted with Jacqueline Kennedy, the late president’s wife, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy in 1964 and 1965 - who both, according to Morley, “Said privately JFK was killed by his domestic enemies. That’s what’s on these tapes and why they are so sensitive.”

[W. Tracy Parnell]

It would seem that classifying any information in a “Lone Nut” assassination would be completely unnecessary...
The very fact that information is still classified... is a fairly strong suggestion that Oswald was not a “Lone Nut”... but that a larger conspiracy involving entities that have the power to classify information... are trying to protect themselves from being exposed....

Mark Zaid quote:

"… there is the possibility there's some information within these files that still needs to be protected … I'll give you one example. Lee Harvey Oswald, the expected assassin, went to Mexico City in September of 1963. We know he visited the Soviet and the Cuban embassies. We might have had, probably did, sources in those embassies, both human and technical, and protecting those sources, especially human, they could still be alive 58 years later. They could be in their 80s right now."

[Martin Weidmann]

Mark Zaid quote:

"… there is the possibility there's some information within these files that still needs to be protected … I'll give you one example. Lee Harvey Oswald, the expected assassin, went to Mexico City in September of 1963. We know he visited the Soviet and the Cuban embassies. We might have had, probably did, sources in those embassies, both human and technical, and protecting those sources, especially human, they could still be alive 58 years later. They could be in their 80s right now."

Oswald's trip to Mexico hasn't got any direct relation to the assassination. In a lone nut scenario he's just one guy who shoots the President. I haven't seen any other murder case where it was in any way relevant where the defendant was in the months prior to the crime.

Bringing up Oswald's trip to Mexico serves no apparent purpose in relation to the crime. The mere fact that they brought it up nevertheless seems to indicate that there was more going on than a single lone nut scenario.

[Jake Maxwell]

[Richard Smith]

It would seem that classifying any information in a “Lone Nut” assassination would be completely unnecessary...
The very fact that information is still classified... is a fairly strong suggestion that Oswald was not a “Lone Nut”... but that a larger conspiracy involving entities that have the power to classify information... are trying to protect themselves from being exposed....

Very silly.  The CIA and FBI would have used intelligence sources in the USSR, Cuba, Mexico, and Mob to investigate nutty Oswald and Ruby.  Some of those intelligence sources and their families might be endangered by disclosure of their cooperation.  Of course, when these documents are all released and they provide no evidence of a conspiracy, CTers will move on to something else.  The narrative will become "of course the conspirators wouldn't document their efforts to kill the President etc."  And on and on for eternity.  The evidence just always eluding them. 

[W. Tracy Parnell]

Oswald's trip to Mexico hasn't got any direct relation to the assassination.

Your remarks are correct to this extent. There was an "over classification" of documents after the JFK Records Act. Some things certainly should not have been named as JFK documents but they were. Those documents that contain sources and methods must be protected. There is a moral obligation to do so.

An example. Thete was a document (104-10054-10008) about a mother and son team who worked photographing the Cuban embassy (if I am remembering correctly-I didn't reread it) for the CIA. Presumably, they are now dead and their names have been released. But their names were shielded for a time and details about their situation were also held back possibly because they related to similar operations.

What does their story have to do with the assassination? Nothing, but they were in the documents that were "over classified." 

[Martin Weidmann]

That is known as having a "bias" outside a criminal trial context.  At least you are honest about that unlike many CTers.

Says the guy with the biggest bias of them all.