“Twenty-five years after John Lennon was murdered, a court battle to release the last 10 pages of secret FBI files on the former Beatle still rages on, with no end in sight. The FBI assembled about 300 pages of files on the singer-turned-activist in 1971 and 1972 as part of President Richard Nixon’s effort to deport and silence Lennon as a critic of the Vietnam War, according to historian Jon Wiener, who has led the court battle to release the files. ‘After years of litigation, the FBI has released all the pages except for 10, which it is withholding using a national security claim,’ said Wiener, a history professor at the University of California-Irvine. ‘At a time when we are confronted by life and death issues of terrorism, the FBI is trivializing national security in the name of political expediency,’ he said. Wiener and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California first filed the Freedom of Information lawsuit in 1983 to gain access to the secret files on Lennon. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court before the FBI settled in 1997, agreeing to release the files except for the last 10 pages.” (12/08/05)