FBI releases files on John Lennon after 25-year wait

The FBI has released 10 files on late former Beatle John Lennon which it had withheld for nearly three decades on the grounds that releasing them could threaten the United States.
.The files were published on the Internet Wednesday at www.lennonFBIfiles.com after authorities agreed to release them following a long-running legal campaign by California academic and historian Jon Wiener and rights groups.
.Although the US authorities repeatedly resisted calls for the documents to be released after Wiener's first request was turned down in 1981, the revelations contained in them are hardly startling and many are well-known.
.Among the observations are that Lennon, a noted liberal and peace activist, had given an interview to an underground newspaper in 1971 in which he had "emphasized his proletarian background" and "sympathy with the oppressed and underprivileged people of Britain and the world."
.The files record the fact that Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, had signed a petition in support of the Cambodian monarchy when the Southeast Asian nation was being bombed by the United States during the Vietnam War.
.Lennon had also encouraged the belief that he held revolutionary views "by the content of some of his songs," the documents added, an apparent reference to his song "Power of the People."
.Despite the innocuous nature of the information in the files, the FBI had fought against their release because they contained "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality."
.Publication could "reasonably be expected to ... lead to foreign diplomatic, economic and military retaliation against the United States," lawyers for the FBI told the courts during a 1983 hearing.
.In a statement by the American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday, Wiener described the FBI's rationale for refusing to release the documents as "absurd."
.Although the foreign government mentioned in the documents has never been named, most analysts believe it refers to Britain.
."I doubt that Tony Blair's government will launch a military strike on the US in retaliation for the release of these documents," said Wiener.
."Today we can see that the national security claims the FBI has been making for 25 years were absurd from the beginning. The Lennon FBI file is a classic case of excessive government secrecy."Wiener had already secured the release of 300 pages of FBI documents on Lennon in 1997, information which formed the basis for his book "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI File."
.A court ruled in 2004 that the documents should be released, but the FBI appealed the decision before finally agreeing to release them on Tuesday. — AFP