Chapter 20: Conclusions and Confusions:

A New Perspective on the Shots That Killed The President

Shot #1. Approximate firing time:  Zapruder frame 188.

Hit Kennedy in back around 190, fell out in limousine. (Possibly a hand-loaded bullet.)

From: the sixth floor window of the TSBD.

Heard by: pretty much everyone in Dealey Plaza between the time of the shot and 10 frames afterwards.

Other evidence for: the wound in Kennedy’s back. Kennedy’s jerky head and hand movements beginning around Zapruder frame 194. Jackie Kennedy’s turning to her husband beginning at 190. Phil Willis' testimony that Mrs. Kennedy snapped her head in that direction at the sound of the first shot. Kennedy’s lowering his right arm and lifting his left before frame 224.  Nearly intact bullet found on a gurney in Parkland hospital. Secret Service Agent George Hickey's turning to his right starting around frame 193. Secret Service Agent John Ready’s turning to his right around Zapruder frame 203.  Hugh Betzner’s photograph, believed by him to be taken just before the first shot, determined to have been taken at frame 186.  Rosemary Willis’s turning to her right around frame 198 in the Zapruder film. Phil Willis’ photograph taken as a reaction to the first shot, determined to have been taken at frame 202. Connally’s testimony that he believed the first and second shot were fired very close together and indicative of automatic rifle fire.  The testimony of numerous witnesses indicating that the first shot rang out as the limousine approached the Thornton Freeway sign.

Jiggle analysis:  Zapruder’s camera jiggles at 194.

 

Shot or shots #2. Approximate firing time:   Zapruder frame 222.

Hit Kennedy in hairline at frame 224, exited his throat. Connally wounded in his chest, wrist, and thigh.  Wounds seem instantaneous, but it's quite possible they were created by separate bullets fired from an automatic weapon. Should it be shown Governor Connally's chest and wrist wounds could not have been created by a single-subsonic bullet, moreover, it seems possible they were created by two separate bullets from this same burst of gunfire.

From: most likely the upper floors of the Dal-Tex Building. (A more complete study of whether or not a bullet fired from this location would be likely to hit Connally in his armpit and/or wrist is pending.)

Heard by: a few near Houston and Elm, perhaps a few on the railroad bridge. Bullet and/or bullets were either fired from a rifle equipped with a silencer, or one firing subsonic ammunition, or both. It’s noted that Nellie Connally, both in her book and in her testimony, says “and then--a second shot” or “and then there was a second shot;” and that she rarely mentions hearing this second shot. In fact, she didn't mention hearing this second shot until 1966, when she said as much to Life Magazine. Since she also swore she saw her husband get hit by this shot and that it came after he yelled “No, no, no,” and since her husband’s testimony and the Zapruder film demonstrate she didn’t even look at him till frame 230 and he didn’t yell anything until after he’d already been hit, it’s safe to say she might have been confused. Neither her husband, for that matter, nor Mrs. Kennedy, recalled hearing a shot between the first shot which hit the President, and the last, which killed him. As a result it seems possible that, due to her proximity, Mrs. Connally simply heard this shot strike the President and/or her husband, and registered it as a shot, without noting that it was not as loud as the first shot.

Other evidence for: Kennedy’s wounds in his hairline and throat. Connally’s wounds. Movement of Connally’s jacket forwards which briefly obscures his shirt from view in the Zapruder film.  Rapid lifting of Kennedy’s hands towards his throat as seen in frames 226 and 227. (His hands were actually dropping towards his chest between 224 and 225, but they shot sharply upwards at 226.)  Connally’s hair jumping up and his being straightened out in his seat, only to collapse back to his right around 234.  Bullet fragments removed from Connally’s wrist that do not match the bullet found on the gurney nor the fragments found in the President’s skull. (Actual bullet or bullets may have bounced out of the car off Connally’s leg, or been picked up by a Secret Service Agent.  There were rumors that a hole in the floor of the limousine was discovered in early 1964, which could account for the bullet leaving Kennedy’s neck should it have been a separate bullet.)

Jiggle analysis:  Zapruder’s camera jiggles around 227 and again at 231. 

 

Shot #3. Approximate firing time:  Zapruder frame 310-311.

Hit Kennedy near the temple at frame 313.  Bullet fragmented.  One piece of its core may have continued on to chip the concrete near Tague around 319.

From: the sixth floor window of the TSBD

Heard by: everyone in Dealey Plaza from the time of the shot up to 10 frames afterward.  Tague would have heard this shot around 319 or 320.

Other evidence for: extensive damage to the head of the President.  Explosion of skull as visible in the Zapruder film.  Bullet fragments found in the President’s brain.  Additional fragments believed to be linked to these fragments found underneath Nellie Connally’s seat as well as on the front seat of the limousine. Front seat fragments linked to Oswald’s gun.

Jiggle analysis: Zapruder’s camera jiggles around 318 and 324 and again at 331.

 

Sound or Shot #4. Approximate firing time:  Zapruder frame 320-327.

Missed or possibly not even a shot.  Quite possibly a loud firecracker used as a diversionary device. Combat Lessons #6, a 1944 publication of the U.S. Army, noted that, in both the Pacific and European theaters of World War II, "enemy troops have used firecrackers for diversionary purposes, especially when trying to deceive our troops as to the positions of snipers."  Combat Lessons #4, from 1942, notes as well  that German snipers used slow-burning fuses so that no one would be near the firecrackers when they exploded. This tactic was therefore not only known to snipers in 1963, but was one likely to be used, should there have been multiple shooters in buildings requiring minutes to escape.

From: somewhere west of the Texas School Book Depository, possibly the railroad yards. A diversionary device in this location would, of course, draw attention from the buildings behind the President when he was shot. If this was the plan, of course...it worked. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the bulk of the Police and eyewitnesses looking for the shooter ran towards the railroad yards, and ignored the buildings behind the motorcade.

Heard by: everyone in Dealey Plaza from the time of the explosion to 10 frames afterwards.  Due to their proximity, many interpreted this shot or sound as being the same shot as shot #3. Tague would have heard this explosion around 331-334, which might explain why he was initially convinced he was hit before the third shot.

Other evidence for: reports of smoke near the stockade fence. There were gusts of wind up to twenty miles an hour which may have blown the smoke in that direction. The statements of Dallas officer Joe Smith, who thought he smelled gunpowder in the parking lot west of the School Book Depository.

Jiggle analysis: camera jiggles at 324 and again at 331.

The testimony of virtually every witness in Dealey Plaza can be accommodated through this simple four shot (or sound) scenario.  It doesn’t rely on the hard-to-believe single bullet theory of an undamaged bullet nor on the widespread but scarcely supported by the evidence theory of a shooter-at-the-stockade fence.  Its main drawback, as far as testimony goes, is that it calls for 4 shots (or sounds) when most witnesses heard only three. This can be effectively overcome through the argument that the second shot was silenced and heard by only a few. This scenario also fails to account for three shots in the TSBD, where three shells were found.  While this could be explained by the sniper’s dropping an extra shell or by the Dallas Police Department planting a shell, the thought occurs that there was seemingly an extra shell at the Tippit killing as well, where the 4 recovered casings didn’t match the 4 bullets removed from Tippit. This uncomfortable development led the Warren Commission to conclude that in fact 5 bullets were fired at Tippit, even though most witness heard only three shots. This extra shell, however, may have reflected an empty shell pulled by Oswald from his revolver. Perhaps Oswald kept an empty shell in the chambers of his weapons, perhaps as protection for his children or perhaps as protection for himself should his wife Marina get a hold of his weapons during one of their frequent domestic squabbles.  It is worth noting here that the shell of the bullet fired at General Walker was never located. If Oswald had left it in the chamber of his rifle, this could very well explain the third shell found in the sniper’s nest.

Supporting this speculation is the testimony of the three men on the floor directly beneath Oswald.  The testimony of all three supports that there was no first shot miss, and that the last two shots came right after another. Harold Norman’s statements, so often used to prove that Oswald was the lone assassin, not only reflected that Kennedy was hit by the first shot, but that only two shells dropped to the floor in the firing sequence. 

 

The View From Afar

To be clear, the scenario listed above is not "my theory".  It is a possibility more in line with the evidence as I see it than any of the scenarios offered by the government, and any of the scenarios as yet offered by the research community, that is all. I will change it as I learn more, and better understand the evidence, or as elements of my research are proven incorrect.

There are, in fact, aspects of the scenario with which I am uncomfortable. I'm not sure if a small-caliber subsonic bullet could do the damage to Kennedy or Connally I've proposed. For a long time, I was also unsure if Kennedy and Connally would be properly aligned for a burst of shots from the roof of the Dal-Tex Building circa frame 224 of the Zapruder film.

In 2009, I finally realized I could use the Warren Commission's re-enactment photos to answer this last question. Since a bullet fired from the roof of the Dal-Tex would be descending at 24-25 degrees, I looked at the relationship between Kennedy and Connally at frame 207 of the Zapruder film, when a bullet fired from the sniper's nest window would be descending 24-25 degrees. Sure enough, Warren Commission Exhibit 892 recreating frame 207 shows that the entrance wound on the back of Kennedy's head would have been on the same vertical plane as the wound in Connally's armpit. 

But what about the right-left relationship of Kennedy and Connally? Well, since the proposed sniper on the Dal-Tex roof was firing from almost directly behind the limo, I decided to look at Warren Commission Exhibit 901, a re-enactment photo taken from almost directly behind the limo. Well, in keeping with most current re-enactments, this showed Connally to have been sitting slightly to the right of Kennedy in the limo... This proved that, from the perspective of the roof of the Dal-Tex Building circa frame 224 of the Zapruder film, the entrance wound low on Kennedy's head and the entrance wound in Connally's armpit were but inches apart, well within the spread of bullets fired from an automatic weapon.

So maybe I'm onto something... Either that or I've stumbled on yet another coincidence.

 

Breaking Through the Wall of Silence

The next step, of course, beyond putting my findings on the internet for everyone to see, is to seek the input of professionals and experts, make any obvious corrections in my findings, and build a consensus.

This building of consensus is quite an arduous task. While I've received positive feedback from a number of historians, several anonymous radiologists, a biophysicist, and even a neurologist, I haven't received one comment for attribution from a medical professional using his or her own name. 

This is undoubtedly disappointing. While I have read far more about the issues discussed in this online investigation than most doctors, people have a natural tendency to trust "experts" with credentials over those who merely read a lot--as if the reading comprehension of those with letters after their name is automatically higher than that of someone like myself, who opted not to accept the full scholarships he was offered. 

This readiness to believe "experts", by the way, is nothing new. Dr. Pitirim A. Sorokin discussed this quirk in the March, 1932 American Journal of Sociology, when he described an experiment in which people were told that musical experts were in agreement that one of two recordings of a classical piece was far superior to the other, and were then played the two recordings. He found that 1) people were incredibly open to suggestion, as less than 5% of his subjects noticed that he in fact replayed the same recording; and 2) people's perceptions were skewed by their awe of expertise, as almost 60% agreed that whichever version they were told was superior, was indeed superior, and barely 40% thought the two recordings (which were in fact the same recording) of equal merit.

Although Sorokin's test subjects were blindly (or should I say deaf-ly) deferring to musical experts, I suspect the average reader feels at least as lost in the world of forensic pathology as he does in the world of classical music, and that the percentage of people who would automatically defer to the opinions of an "expert" in forensic pathology, no matter how poorly thought-out, would be even greater than 60%. As a consequence, I've attempted to demonstrate, over and over, that the experts on this case are in disagreement, and that much of this case can only be resolved through a re-examination of the evidence. Certainly, with enough study, the "experts" should be able to come to an informed opinion on whether a photograph is of the back of someone's head, or his forehead. It's just that, to do that, they'd have to look at the photograph, and openly discuss their impressions. 

Which they're incredibly reluctant to do... As demonstrated on the slide above, taken from a book compiled by Clark Panel member Alan Moritz, books on legal medicine preach conservative behavior and conservative opinions, even if it means withholding the truth. In his 2006 book, Postmortem, Stefan Timmermans dissects the culture of medical examiners and comments repeatedly on the conservatism prescribed in these books. He notes: "Consistent with their cautious approach to forensic evidence, medical examiners are more likely to negate police suspicions of homicide with natural explanations than they are to discover a homicide...In routine homicide investigations, medical examiners thus document the pathological and toxicological signs of murder in an ongoing dialogue with law enforcement agencies. In the same way that medical examiners depend on medical histories written by their clinical colleagues to make the case for natural death and suicide, they depend on law enforcement to initiate what will become a forensic homicide investigation. As distinct yet interlinked  professionals, police and forensic pathologists continuously and closely coordinate findings and evidence during the evolving investigation, further reflecting the privileged role of law enforcement in the organizational ecology of death investigation. Although forensic pathologists do occasionally discover a homicide, they are more likely to remove the suspicion of it in ambiguous cases. This caution is in line with their conservative approach to drawing inferences from forensic evidence." 

In other words, they tend to avoid pushing that something unnatural or unexpected occurred unless they feel reasonably sure something unnatural or unexpected occurred, and rely on those tasked with investigating crimes to give them guidance. This helps explain why both the doctors performing Kennedy's autopsy, and the doctors re-examining the case for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, followed the lead of the investigators. The Dallas Police and FBI agreed it was Oswald firing from the sniper's nest; the autopsy doctors then said the shots came from above and behind (even though there was nothing on the body to suggest the head shot had been fired from above). Similarly, the HSCA received word from Dr. Vincent Guinn that the bullet fragment removed from Connally's wrist matched the bullet found on a stretcher, and that the single-bullet theory was therefore consistent with the evidence, and the doctors, save Cyril Wecht, then jumped in a conga line and said the single bullet theory was consistent with the evidence (even though the damage in the neck was inconsistent with the passage of a military rifle bullet, and the bullet trajectory required Kennedy be leaning forward when hit).

At another point in Postmortem, Timmermans discusses the reasons for this conservatism: "Medical examiners strike a cautious balance in order to maintain authority: they generally opt for conservative interpretations to lower the chance of criticism, and when threatened by knowledgeable parties, they tend to retreat rather than confront." This, in turn, helps explain why no medical examiners or pathologists have commented, one way or the other, on my online videos critical of Dr. Baden, and his testifying with his exhibit upside down.

Even so, I'm still hoping that some medical professionals and scientists will step up to the plate, and tell me what they really think. I will post their comments, both good and bad, on my webpage.

 

Why We Fight 

I suspect the time is right for such a dialogue. Those assuming that they need to play along with the "conservative" view of the assassination in order to get ahead in the medical profession miss that the medical professionals who have chosen to associate themselves with the single-assassin theory have been among the least credible individuals associated with the case.  We have already discussed the failings of Dr. Michael Baden, and the many foolish and easily disproved statements he's made about the assassination. We have also discussed Dr. John Lattimer, a Urologist, with his strange belief Kennedy was a hunchback, and his odd diagrams presenting Kennedy's lung above his throat, and his long-time obsession with Nazis, and his odd habit of collecting celebrity genitalia. We have also discussed Dr. Chad Zimmerman, a Chiropractor, and the many flaws in his "experiments". But what we haven't fully discussed is that there has been virtually NO ONE from the world of medicine to publicly associate themselves with the single-assassin conclusion over the past 20 years, with whom other doctors would want to be associated.

If one gets the opportunity to view a video of the 1993 symposium on the medical evidence held in Chicago one will see precisely what I'm talking about. 

First up was Dr. George Lundberg, then editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.  (Thanks to researcher Dave Reitzes for posting Lundberg's statements online.) 

Lundberg opened by admitting he knew next to nothing about the case, and then concluded:

"What then and whom then do I trust? I have known Dr. James Humes, the principal autopsy pathologist, personally since 1957. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, who was paraphrasing Lloyd Bentsen: I know Jim Humes. He's a friend of mine. I would trust him with my life.

Dr. Humes is an outstanding general pathologist, before and after 1963, acclaimed by his peers for thirty years -- forty years, perhaps -- but never was before, during, or after a fully trained forensic pathologist and never claimed to be. He didn't volunteer to do that job; he was assigned.

Moving from 1963 to 1968, the United States Attorney General appointed a four-person, blue-ribbon panel to study and reevaluate the JFK autopsy. The reason that was appointed was a request by the second autopsy pathologist, Dr. Jay Boswell, that there be such an independent investigation. This four-member panel had developed unanimous support for the autopsy report, results and interpretation.

A key member of that panel was the late Dr. Russell Fisher, Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Maryland, probably the world's top forensic pathologist of his time. I knew Russell Fisher. He was a friend of mine. I would trust him with my life. He concurred: two bullets from the rear. A simple story.

In 1979 the forensic pathology subcommittee of the House Select Committee on Assassinations included nine members. It voted eight to one in support of the autopsy findings and basic interpretation. One of the members was Dr. Earl Rose, a forensic pathologist in Dallas in November 1963 whose legal responsibility it was to autopsy President Kennedy and who tried to stop the illegal movement of the body from Dallas.

I have known Dr. Earl Rose since 1973. He is a friend of mine. I would trust him with my life. He concurs: two bullets from the rear.

Another member of that 1979 subcommittee was Dr. Charles Petty. Dr. Petty is Professor of Pathology at the University of Texas-Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas. He heads up the Forensic Science Institute there, which was built in large part because of the Dallas embarrassment over the assassination and their recognition of the need for outstanding forensic science.

Dr. Petty has been quiet on the JFK issue for many, many years. This year he volunteered to write for JAMA on this subject. Last week's JAMA has his editorial, which confirms and explains the Single Bullet Theory.

I have known Chuck Petty since 1968. He is a friend of mine. I would trust him with my life.

These are the keys to trust: Jim Humes in 1963, Russell Fisher in 1968, Earl Rose in 1979 and again in JAMA in 1992, Chuck Petty in 1979 and again in JAMA in`1993, and then there is me.

To imagine or state that somehow these people say we have been duped, misled, or are somehow part of the conspiracy to deny the truth on this issue for all ages, strains the vocabulary to find strong enough words to describe such absurdity. Such charges are somewhere among the descriptors: wild and crazy, off the wall, out in left field in Cubs Park, incredible, insulting, or worse."

Well, this was not exactly scientific, was it? In 1999, for reasons apparently unrelated to his controversial stance on the Kennedy assassination, Lundberg was fired from JAMA.

Next up was Dr. Lattimer, reciting material from his book, claiming he knew Kennedy and Kennedy had a big hump on his back, etc. Then came Dr. Michael West, reciting more stuff from Lattimer's book, and showing a film he'd made supporting the single-bullet theory. 

Well, what happened to Dr. West, you might ask?

The 1998 book Tainting Evidence notes that Dr. West was a forensic dentist from Mississippi who, up through 1996, appeared as a scientific expert more than 60 times in 10 states. The book notes further that other medical examiners began testifying against West when it became clear that he was seeing marks on bodies that others failed to see, and that at least 20 of his appearances were in murder cases in which a suspect's life lay in the balance. The 2008 book Forensics Under Fire fills out the story, and uses West as a case study of an expert gone awry. On multiple occasions, Dr. West testified that he saw bite marks on murder victims unseen by the pathologists at autopsy, and then matched these marks to the teeth of the police department's #1 suspect. Despite West's claims that a special blue light he'd personally developed had allowed him to reach these conclusions, the "science" of this light was never quite established. As a result other experts began to question West's conclusions, and he gradually fell out of favor. Within a year of his presentation at the 1993 Symposium, in fact, Dr. West was pressured into leaving the international Association of Identification and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He was also suspended by the American Board of Forensic Odontology. As a result, the convictions of two men against whom he'd testified were overturned, and the charges against still another were dropped. Word rapidly got out that his word was suspect. His court appearances dropped off considerably. In 2008, after the arrest of a man who'd admitted killing two toddlers in the early nineties, the lawyers for the two men previously convicted of these crimes--after West had testified that he'd found their bite marks on the victims--called for West's arrest. Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal organization that examines questionable convictions and has won the exoneration of more than 200 inmates, declared in an ABC News report that West was "a criminal" and that he'd "deliberately fabricated evidence and conclusions which were not supported by the evidence, the data or the rules of science." Neufeld then explained "If you fabricate evidence in a capital murder case, where you know that if the person's convicted they are going to be executed — as far as I'm concerned that's the crime of attempted murder.'' He then concluded "These are not cases of sloppy forensic science. This is intentional misconduct. It's fabricated evidence to send people to death row.''

Pretty harsh words. Provocative words. Still, even though Neufeld's charges would seem a clear case of libel (should he not have been telling the truth), West refused to respond to his charges. West did, however, tell CBS' Steve Kroft that he stood by his prior testimony, and that if the DNA evidence implicated someone other than the defendants in the rapes and murders of the children they'd been convicted of killing, it meant only that someone else had raped and killed the children after the defendants had bitten them. Not willing to give an inch, West even stood by his absurd testimony that one of the defendants had bitten his victim 19 times--using only his upper teeth! 

And from there things only got worse for wild, wild, West. In February 2009, Reasononline posted links to a 1993 video of West (http://reason.com/news/show/131527.html) rubbing a suspect's dental impressions on the cheek of a dead child. Finding bite marks on the cheek, curiously, allowed prosecutors to charge the man responsible for her apparently accidental death with deliberation, and this, in turn, allowed them to seek the death penalty. After seeing this video, Dr. Michael Bowers, a dentist and medical examiner for Ventura County, California, broke ranks with his colleague and told Reasononline that marks appeared on the young girl's cheek after West rubbed the suspect's dental impressions on her cheek because "Dr. West created them. It was intentional. He's creating artificial abrasions in that video, and he's tampering with the evidence. It's criminal, regardless of what excuse he may come up with about his methods...You never jam a plaster cast into a possible bite mark like that. It distorts the evidence. You take a photograph, or if there are indentations, you take an impression. But you don't jam plaster teeth into them."

Dr. David Averill, a former President of The American Board of Forensic Odontology, concurred with this appraisal. He told Reasononline "The video is troubling. I don't know how you can explain where those marks come from. And there's just no justification for him to push the cast into the skin like that...That isn't an acceptable way to perform a bite mark analysis."

But that wasn't the end of it. The writer of the article, Radley Balko, reported that Forensic Odontologist Richard Souviron, who'd served as an expert for the defendant, Jimmie Duncan, was never shown the video prior to Duncan's trial and conviction, and had signed a new affidavit claiming the video showed  "'Dr. West, violently and repeatedly, forcing a mold of Jimmie Duncan's teeth into Ms. Oliveaux's right cheek. In doing so, Dr. West creates a mark that was not previously present. Dr. West's behavior and methods are absolutely not supported by any scientific standards or protocol.' Souviron added in the affidavit that hospital photographs show that 'none of the marks were present when Ms. Oliveaux was at the hospital,' and that the abrasions that Reisner testified about for the prosecution 'were created by the flagrant misconduct of Dr. Michael West.'"

Is it any wonder then that single-assassin theorists have stopped citing West as an authority? 

But Dr. West was neither the last to speak at the symposium nor the one to make the strangest claims. Shortly after West's presentation, Dr. Robert Artwohl, an emergency room doctor, took the stage and discussed his recent trip to the National Archives. He then flipped through the Kennedy autopsy photos available to the public and discussed his impressions of these photos after inspecting the originals. His impressions were eye-opening. Significantly, and amazingly, Dr. Artwohl insisted that the scalp in the mystery photo had been reflected over the left forehead. This was a unique interpretation. He also claimed that what appears to be neck lines in the photo was in fact a yellow block holding up Kennedy's head. Another unique interpretation. 

This is almost laughable. There was not on that night, nor on any other night since Kennedy's death, a consensus among America's doctors on the locations of the President's wounds...even among those arguing that one sniper, firing from behind, killed Kennedy. There simply is no "established truth" or "established wisdom" to which one can defer. The doctors blindly "trusted" by Lundberg couldn't agree about the location of the head wound. The doctors on the stage with Lundberg  disagreed with those he'd "trusted" on the location of the back wound.

This is not as it should be. While the case may never be solved, it's not nearly as solved as it could be, and ought to be. Certainly, with enough discussion, America's doctors can reach some sort of consensus on what can be observed in the President's autopsy photos and x-rays.

So, if you're willing to smash on through this massive wall of silence, send a comment or criticism to  pat@patspeer.com.

I will, of course, reserve the right to comment on your commentary, Even the good guys get it wrong sometimes. As we shall see...

 

Doctor!  Doctor!

Throughout this study of the evidence, I have attempted to show how the medical evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy was twisted by the Warren Commission and HSCA to fit their agendas.  At times, I have questioned the integrity of the men who distorted this evidence. Some of their “errors” are so outrageous in fact that it’s easy to believe they were designed to conceal an inconvenient truth. I would like to have finished this study without questioning the integrity of anyone in the research community, men whose support will be necessary for this study to achieve any widespread recognition.  But, as the saying goes, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. When one looks at the questionable mistakes of some of those in the conspiracy community, one should be equally unforgiving. 

When I first noticed that no one on the conspiracy community had identified the Humes entrance on the “mystery photo” I wrote this off to a willful ignorance. It was right there in the photo, but no one seemed to notice it.  While at the November, 2005, JFK LANCER conference, however, I noticed something which forced me to reconsider the ‘innocence” of all those in the research community.

Dr. Charles Crenshaw saw President Kennedy at Parkland Hospital. In 1992 he wrote a book, JFK: Conspiracy of Silence, which related his memories of November 22-24, 1963, and his theories on the assassination.  After its publication, he was widely criticized.  Articles were printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting he was a liar—that he’d never even seen Kennedy—and so on.   After winning a lawsuit against JAMA, he corrected some minor errors in his book, and updated his story to include a section on the lawsuit.  He also added a section on the current state of the medical evidence, which was written by two leading members of the research community, Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Gary Aguilar. The new version of Crenshaw’s book, released in 2001, was sold as Trauma Room One.

In Trauma Room One, on page 281 to be exact, there is a reproduction of the mystery photo, the photo of the President’s brainless cranium which has been the focus of so much of my study.  What is astounding about this presentation of the photo, however, is that it is not printed in a way one can make sense of it.  It is not printed so that the bone in the photo appears to be forehead, and it is not printed so that the bone in the photo appears to be the back of the head.  If one is to believe this photo is of the back of the head, it is, in fact, printed upside down.  Even worse, the scalp triangle and lock of hair at the top of the photo, and the neck lines and bullet hole at the bottom of the photo, have been cropped off the photo.  This makes it even harder to orient. Suspiciously, this supports the book's argument that when inspecting the photo it "is virtually impossible to know which side is up, to know which bones are in the image, what part of the skull is being photographed, etc." It also makes it hard to second-guess the writers when they ask "Is frontal bone or occipital bone visible in this image. Not even Kennedy's pathologists know for sure."

Since both doctors had inspected the photo at the archives—Wecht was, in fact, not only the second non-government-affiliated doctor, after Lattimer, to inspect the photos, but had testified before both the Rockefeller Commission and HSCA—one has to question why they would not only make the argument that the photo is indecipherable, but crop it to make it far less decipherable.  After all, even single-assassin theorists such as Chad Zimmerman and Larry Sturdivan present the photo un-cropped in their work.  The website of single-assassin theorist John McAdams even presents the photo in the back of the head orientation so that his readers can judge for themselves. 

Why would two leading lights of the research community misrepresent something so important?

Well, one possibility is that they were protecting their own reputations.  Wecht’s disagreement with the HSCA was chiefly over their support for the single-bullet theory; he accepted the higher entrance in the skull and accepted that there was no clear-cut evidence for the Humes entrance on the autopsy photos.  Similarly, Dr. Aguilar has built his reputation in part on his belief that the many eyewitnesses describing a large exit at the rear of the head were correct, and that the autopsy report is a sham.  It is in neither of the doctors’ personal interest, therefore, to reveal that Humes was right about his low entrance.  But are Wecht and Aguilar capable of such “skullduggery”?  Would they deliberately mislead the American public just to further their own agenda?

I think not. I find it hard to believe these two men, whose work and statements have been hugely influential in the research community, and who have always pushed for the government to open up the archives and let the truth be known, would go to such lengths to conceal something of such importance.  I suspect that, instead, they had a blind spot. 

In re-reading the works of both men, in fact, neither seems to attach much significance to the photo.  In Aguilar’s excellent 144 page on-line article, How Five Investigations into JFK’s Medical/Autopsy Evidence Got it Wrong, co-written with Kathy Cunningham in 2003, he devotes 16 pages to the Justice Department’s inspections of the autopsy photos in November 1966 and January 1967 (the so-called Military Review) and fails to mention that the mystery photo changed in orientation between the two inspections.  This was probably the single-most important element of the inspections.  And yet it goes unmentioned.  Are we to assume from this that Aguilar deliberately left this out?  Similarly, in his 42 page chapter in Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), entitled The Converging Medical Case for Conspiracy, Aguilar declared, when discussing the possibility of a missing photo, “no images survive in which JFK’s scalp is shown reflected from the skull so as to demonstrate the skull wound.”  This blanket dismissal of the significance of the mystery photo so alarmed Dr. Fetzer, the editor of the book (who is not a medical doctor), that he felt it necessary to insert an editor’s note, reminding the reader “Apart from F8.”  (F8 is writer Harrison Livingstone’s term for the mystery photo.)  While the probability exists that Dr. Aguilar, who is in everyday practice an ophthalmologist, was simply being short-sighted, and was referring specifically to the small entrance wound described by Dr. Finck, the fact is, as I’ve maintained throughout this presentation, that this wound is EXACTLY where Dr. Finck said it was.  Why can’t Aguilar see this?  

Dr. Wecht, for his part, never mentions the mystery photo in his 1993 book Cause of Death.  There is a passage in the 63 page chapter on the assassination that reveals his blind spot, however.  When discussing his first inspection of the autopsy photos, Wecht states “As I reviewed the X-rays and autopsy photographs, I noticed a little flap of loose tissue visible just above the hairline on the back of the President’s head…the loose flap very easily could be an exit wound, which would prove there was a second gunman shooting from the front.  But even if it is an entrance wound from a bullet, it would destroy the Warren Commission’s conclusion that only three bullets were fired.”   

It's undoubtedly revealing that Wecht’s immediate suspicion upon seeing something which could be a wound in the location where the autopsy doctors placed the entrance wound was that it could be an exit wound.  This shows that Wecht had little doubt there was an entrance in the Clark Panel’s location.  Apparently, It never occurred to him that the autopsy doctors could be right and Russell Fisher, the Clark Panel's ringleader, wrong. Wecht’s suggestion that the acceptance of even a lower entrance would destroy the Warren Commission’s theory is further evidence of this short-sightedness.   It is the existence of a higher/cowlick entrance, a wound observed by NOT ONE witness, that would immediately destroy the Warren Commission’s conclusions.  And yet Wecht fails to argue for the existence of such an entrance.  As so many others, he readily accepts that the Clark Panel's red oval-shaped mark in the cowlick is an entrance wound. As with George Lundberg of JAMA, who blindly trusted Humes, it would appear that Wecht blindly trusted Fisher. 

I suspect otherwise, however. I suspect that instead Wecht blindly trusted his own experience.  In preparing for the writing of this study, I read dozens of papers and books on wound ballistics, most of which included photos of typical head wounds. The red mark in the cowlick noted by the Clark Panel does look a bit like the entrance of a low-speed, small-caliber, bullet. As a result, it may have looked like a typical entrance to Wecht.  By no means, of course, is it a typical entrance for a high-speed, military-jacketed bullet, breaking up on the skull.

So maybe the cropping of the mystery photo was just a misunderstanding.  On August 1, 2006, Dr. Aguilar responded to my questions about the photo in Trauma Room One.  He said: “Somewhere along the line, after the images left our control, someone unknown to us shoehorned the image for reasons I don’t understand. At that time I had too many balls in the air and was at risk of dropping a more important one if I paused to catch this one.” 

Upon my acceptance that Wecht and Aguilar did not deliberately mislead us by publishing a cropped version of the mystery photo, I have to accept the possibility that many of the misleading "mistakes" noted in my study of the evidence, even those by Arlen Specter, Robert Blakey, Dr. Michael Baden and Thomas Canning, were equally innocent. 

To this end it should be noted that the doctors testifying in the American Bar Association's 1992 mock trial all made substantive mistakes. Dr. Martin Fackler, testifying for the prosecution, incorrectly asserted that Dr. Robert Shaw only claimed that Connally's back wound was 1 1/2 centimeters long at a point "later on," after he'd already determined it to be 3 cm. This was not true. While Dr. Shaw wrote "3 cm" on a report describing Connally's wounds, he testified from the first that this was the measurement after he cut away some skin around the edges of a 1 1/2 cm wound. Thus, there is no evidence that he ever "changed his recollection, " as claimed by Fackler. Similarly, Dr. Piziali testified that Kennedy's head "wound location and head motion shows that the shot was fired from the sixth floor of the TSBD," a statement without any real support. The location and movement may have been consistent with a shot from the TSBD, but came nowhere near "showing" that a bullet was fired from the sniper's nest, as purported. Piziali then said this shot was fired from "88 yards...290 feet", thereby confirming both his lack of basic math skills and lack of familiarity with the case. He then stated that the FBI's tests on Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition showed that it broke up on human skulls. The skull tests were, of course, not conducted by the FBI but by Edgewood Arsenal, a government contractor working with the Army. On the other side, showing that  experts on both sides of the case were equally capable of error, Dr. Roger McCarthy testified that the 2 bullet fragments removed from Kennedy's brain were "in fact found in his scalp." He then embarrassed himself further by asserting that "the record is very clear on this."  

Experts are mere humans, and busy humans at that, and, as such, prone to mistakes. It's sad, but true. 

I suspect that only through this acceptance will we come to any consensus on what really happened on November 22, 1963. 

 

The Power of Suggestion

The realization that Wecht's errors were quite possibly related to a misapplication of his extensive experience led me down a dark road of thought. I began to question whether it's possible for those "with knowledge" to ever learn anything new. Does our frame of reference frame our reality? 

Let's use Wecht as a case study. On August 23 and August 24, 1972, Dr. Cyril Wecht became the first fully independent pathologist to inspect the autopsy materials.  He also became the first conspiracy theorist to see these materials. He reported his findings in a 1974 article in Forensic Science. 

As a long-time critic of the original autopsy, and as a long-time proponent of forensic science, Wecht undoubtedly had a chip on his shoulder. He resented, justifiably, that military doctors with little forensic experience were chosen to perform the most important autopsy of the century. It was indeed an insult to his profession. When the Clark Panel, made up of better-qualified civilians, had its report released in 1969, and concluded that the autopsy doctors had indeed made major mistakes, one can only assume Wecht shouted "Told you so!"  There can be little doubt then, that he went into the Archives prepared to confirm the Clark Panel's basic findings.

Sure enough, in section 3.3 of the 1974 Forensic Science article discussing his findings, Dr. Wecht concluded "Generally speaking, the author's observations and measurements of the wounds and locations of bullet fragments are in agreement with the findings of the Clark Panel in 1968."  At no point in his paper does Wecht side with the interpretations of the original autopsists over those expressed by the Clark Panel.   

Wecht's failure to question the Clark Panel becomes painfully clear when one inspects Fig. 3 in his article. This is a drawing of a skull, purportedly showing the locations of the bullet fragments visible on Kennedy's x-rays. Wecht failed to properly assess the forward tilt of the skull in the x-ray. As a result the fragment in the middle of the forehead on the x-rays was depicted just above the right eye on his drawing.  Wecht described: "A fragment from this location is reported to have been removed surgically and later subjected to spectrographic analysis." This helped fuel the mistaken and ongoing belief that the forehead fragment on the x-ray was the one recovered at autopsy. Far worse, Wecht's drawing depicted a large fragment on the back of the head by the Clark Panel's entrance. A close look at the x-ray purportedly studied by Wecht, however, shows THERE'S NOTHING THERE. 

Even more intriguing, Wecht KNEW there was nothing there. In his best-selling book, Best Evidence, David Lifton reveals that he accompanied Dr. Wecht to the Archives, and that they discussed Wecht's findings both during and after his examination. Lifton recalls: "During the afternoon session, it became quite obvious that Wecht had great difficulty reading the X-rays--that he couldn't find the entry wound reported by the Clark Panel or by Dr. Lattimer. There was no hole there at all, said Wecht." Lifton then recalls that he discussed this with others and told Wecht that he shouldn't be looking for a "hole", but for a "subtle shading". He then recalls that Wecht "was still not able to locate the entry wound." Lifton then recalls that he measured out the length of thread the supposed entrance would be from the external occipital protuberance and gave this to Wecht to help him find the entrance on the x-rays. He recalls "Wecht did this, and that was how he found the entrance wound in the back of President Kennedy's head." (Unstated by Lifton but clear from his account is that Wecht was unable to locate the large fragment purportedly just below this entrance wound; if he'd seen the fragment, after all, he would not have needed to use this thread to find the location of the "hole.")  Lifton then cites Wecht's dictation on the "finding" of this entrance. Wecht said "This is a change in density which apparently is what is referred to in the previous panel as a 'hole.' This either takes imagination or some very sophisticated radiological expertise because it is difficult for me to consider this a hole. In any event, it has to be because it fits the measurements that they give about 100mm from the external occipital protuberance."

Thus, Dr. Cyril Wecht, under pressure from David Lifton to confirm that the autopsy doctors were wrong, and unable to conceive that the civilians on the Clark Panel were so badly mistaken, ignored his own better instincts and came to not only accept that the cowlick entrance he could not find was there, but to depict the bullet fragment purportedly just below this entrance in his exhibits.

But this was not the only point on which Wecht wrongly deferred to the Panel. When discussing the angle of descent from the back wound to the neck wound, Wecht announced "Adopting also the Clark Panel's measurement of the vertical position of the exit hole, namely 9 cm below the same crease (although the author was unable to corroborate this measurement from his own observations) we are able to compute the trajectory of the bullet relative to the horizontal and sagittal planes through the President's body at the time he was struck. The downward angle works out to be 11 1/2 degrees..." As a more accurate measurement would have helped Wecht in his efforts to debunk the single-bullet theory, Wecht's acceptance of the Clark Panel's measurements made little sense, and suggests he'd given the Clark Panel's measurements and conclusions undue weight.

To his credit, Wecht seems fully aware the influence an "expert" can hold over another "expert."  An April 19, 1975 memo in the files of the Rockefeller Commission reveals that when Dr. Wecht spoke to the Commission's Robert Olsen, he voiced his displeasure with the make-up of the commission's medical panel. Olsen related "Dr. Wecht was very unsettled by the identity of the members of the panel. Indeed, he was very angry to the point of shouting and indulging in frequent profanity.  He said that almost the whole panel is made up of people from the Washington-Baltimore community; that all of them are under the control and influence of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland, Dr. Russell Fisher; that we should have looked elsewhere for impartial experts; that Dr. Fisher is a very strong-willed and influential man who has succeeded in getting more Federal grants in the field of forensic pathology than all other doctors in the United States combined...Dr. Wecht readily acknowledged the professional qualifications of all members of our panel. He said that among their fellow professionals each enjoyed a high standing. He stated, however, that it was wholly unrealistic to expect that anybody on this panel would express views different from those expressed by the Ramsey Clark Panel in 1968, which included Dr. Fisher and a radiologist from John Hopkins, Dr. Russell Morgan." It seems Wecht knew of which he spoke. 

Perhaps Wecht was thinking of Paul L. Kirk. Kirk was a respected criminalist, whose post-conviction study of the blood-spatter evidence in the Sam Sheppard murder case (the basis for the TV show and movie The Fugitive) brought Sheppard a new trial, and release. Understandably, this greatly upset Samuel Gerber, the coroner whose work helped convict Sheppard in the first place. Gerber is reported to have been so upset by this, in fact, that he retaliated against Kirk by using his influence with his fellow coroners to deny Kirk membership in the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. (This blackballing was only partially corrected  by the Academy's naming a yearly award for excellence after Kirk. The Paul Kirk award was first issued in 1979, at which point Kirk had been dead for nine years.)

Or perhaps Wecht was thinking of a more benign form of influence. It goes without saying that people indebted to Fisher would be less likely to question his conclusions than those with a clean slate. It should also be evident that, once fed an interpretation of facts from someone one respects, it is difficult to completely shake off their interpretation and see this set of facts with fresh eyes. 

In 1993, in his book Cause of Death, Wecht once again questioned the impartiality of his colleagues. This time, however, it was the impartiality of his colleagues on the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel, whose reports, much as the Rockefeller Commission Panel before them, pretty much rubber-stamped the findings of Russell Fisher and the Clark Panel. When discussing why he alone among the panel was willing to dispute the single-bullet theory, which he calls "absolute nonsense," and the concurrent conclusion that there was only one shooter, Wecht reveals: "I believe it's more of a pre-determined mindset that many of my colleagues have that a cover-up or conspiracy of this magnitude by the federal government is unthinkable, or, at the very least, unlikely. Just as lawyers disagree over what a particular law or court ruling means, forensic pathologists frequently have differences of opinion. I have no reason whatsoever to doubt my colleagues' sincerity. However, it should be noted that many of these same people had a long-standing involvement with the federal government--many had received federal grants for research and appointments to various influential government boards. To be highly critical of a government action could end that friendly relationship with Uncle Sam."

As strange as it may seem, Wecht was being far too kind. It is beyond doubt a gross injustice that, of the nine pathologists on the HSCA panel, five--Dr.s Spitz, Petty, Baden, Coe, and Loquvam--had a professional relationship with Dr. Russell Fisher, whose findings they would be reviewing. Dr. Spitz had co-edited the widely-praised book Medico-legal Investigation of Death with Fisher. Dr. Petty had co-edited Forensic Pathology: A Handbook For Pathologists with Fisher. Forensic Pathology was published in July 1977, only two months before Petty was to review Fisher's findings. Even worse, Forensic Pathology was written under contract to the Justice Department, under whose guidance Fisher made his findings in 1968. Even worse, of the eleven contributors to Forensic Pathology beyond Fisher and Petty, three--Baden, Coe, and Loquvam--ended up on the panel reviewing Fisher's findings. 

Now how can this be? Does it make any sense whatsoever that, of the six pathologists to enter the archives on 9-17-77 and review the medical evidence, four had contributed to a book written for the Justice Department only months before? And that this book was edited by the prestigious Dr. Fisher, whose findings they would be reviewing? And that of the remaining two, one--Dr. Earl Rose--was the coroner of Dallas in 1963, and highly unlikely to say anything that might suggest a conspiracy, and cast doubts upon the "innocence" of his former home? And what about the second panel, made up of those who'd already studied the evidence? Does it make any sense that Dr. Wecht was deliberately isolated on a panel in which the other two members--Dr.s Spitz and Weston-- had already gone on record as saying the evidence supported Fisher's findings? And that Dr. Spitz was Fisher's closest colleague? The answer, of course, is that it does make sense--but only if you accept that the membership of this panel and its organization was designed to protect the reputation of Dr. Russell Fisher and the Justice Department.

Dr. Wecht's suggestion that money played a role in the panel's decisions is also understated. That the economic interests of doctors can influence their conclusions has been confirmed numerous times. By way of example, a survey by Mildred Cho and Lisa Bero published in the March 1996 Annals of Internal Medicine revealed that 98% of the studies of drug effectiveness funded by the drug's manufacturer came to a favorable conclusion, while only 76% of the studies funded by independent sources shared this conclusion. This suggests that a drug company is 12 TIMES as likely to avoid an unfavorable conclusion about its product if it funds the doctors making the conclusion. A survey published in the October 1999 Journal of the American Medical Association was almost as discouraging. It found that a study sponsored by a drug company was only about 8 TIMES as likely to avoid an unfavorable conclusion on its new drug than a study sponsored by a non-profit organization. Perhaps, as suggested by writers Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their book "Trust Us, We're Experts!," the physician's motto of "First, do no harm" should be changed to "First, do no harmful publicity." 

Of course, money is not the only motivating factor that can consciously or subconsciously color a doctors' perceptions, conclusions, and testimony. None less than Dr. Baden, in his book Dead Reckoning, has noted: "Physicians may be the worst witnesses. They are often swayed by whoever asked them to be an expert. If that lawyer is smart enough to ask their advice, they conclude, he must know what he is doing. That being the case, physicians therefore adopt whatever the lawyer tells them as the facts of the case and become, if only subconsciously, an advocate for the lawyer rather than an independent adviser." The ease with which  scientists and doctors can be molded by lawyers into supporting otherwise unsupportable conclusions is such common knowledge, in fact, that it was the subject of a well-received book, Gallileo's Revenge, by Peter Huber. Huber, a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, was so disturbed by what he found that he was led to conclude "Malpractice by scientific and medical professionals is not only tolerated but encouraged, so long as it is solicited by lawyers themselves." Damning words indeed.

But one doesn't have to question the motivation of doctors to question their ability to see evidence with absolute clarity. The susceptibility of doctors to innocent suggestion, and their innocent resistance to data challenging this suggestion, has also been studied. In 1972 Dr. David Rosenhan of Stanford University, along with seven recruits, checked themselves into psychiatric hospitals. These eight subjects told the hospitals they'd heard voices in their heads repeating words with no apparent meaning. After admission, however, the subjects claimed the voices had stopped, and started acting perfectly normal. The psychiatrists "treating" these subjects, however, routinely interpreted the "normal" behavior of these subjects as additional signs of their psychopathology. As a result, the patients were hospitalized for an average of 19 days, and fed an average of over 250 pills. Seven of them were diagnosed as being schizophrenic, and one as being bi-polar. Rosenhan himself was confined for almost two months. After his release, Dr. Rosenhan began the second half of his study. He told the hospitals of their mistakes, and that he'd be sending them more fake patients over the next three months. During this period 193 patients were admitted to one of the hospitals. 20% of these patients were identified by at least one staff member as being one of Dr. Rosenhan's "fake" patients. In fact, none of them were. Dr. Rosenhan had simply planted the suggestion that there could be fake patients in the minds of the hospital's employees, and they had begun to see them everywhere. Whereas not one of the original 8 patients had been spotted as a fake, over 40 actual patients were subsequently, and inaccurately, accused of being fakes.

The resistance to new perceptions, once one's frame of reference has been set, had been tested even before Rosenhan. In 1949, in a landmark study performed by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman, subjects were flashed playing cards, some of which had a wrong color, i.e. red spades, black diamonds. They found that people would always recognize a normal card within 350 milliseconds, but would fail to recognize what they called a "trick card" 10% of the time, even when given a full second. They found, furthermore, that as one was exposed to more "trick cards," the speed in which one could identify the trick cards drastically improved.

Historians have also studied this resistance. In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published a landmark work of his own, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". As part of his study, Kuhn looked at the time lapse between the development of new scientific theories and their general acceptance by the scientist's peers. He found, amazingly, that very few scientists, once committed to a theory, have ever changed their minds and embraced the findings of another scientist, even if the other scientist's new theory better answered the questions answered by their old theory. Kuhn relates:

"Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus' death.  Newton's work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the Principia appeared. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on.  The difficulties of conversion have often been noted by the scientists themselves.  Darwin, in a particularly perceptive passage at the end of the Origin of the Species, wrote: "Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume...,I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine...But I look with confidence to the future,--to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality." And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." 

So...if you've made it this far and have failed to be convinced by any of my arguments, I can only say that I hope you die soon... Just kidding. No, really, if you think I'm wrong about everything, but have nevertheless made it this far, I'm delighted to have entertained you on whatever level I've entertained you. Particularly in that there remains a chance I can convince you of something.

Let's go back to Dr. Wecht. In 2003, in an article co-written with radiologist Dr. David Mantik, Wecht publicly reversed his position on the 6.5 mm fragment he'd once portrayed on the back of Kennedy's head. This article, published in a compendium entitled The Assassinations, presented an image of Kennedy's computer-enhanced A-P X-ray with the caption "The 6.5 mm (white) object seen within the right orbit is almost certainly a deliberate artifact that was added to the original X-ray; the latter was then lost or destroyed." Above this image is an image of Kennedy's computer-enhanced lateral X-ray. It has an arrow pointing to the back of Kennedy's skull, where Wecht depicted the 6.5 mm fragment in his 1974 article. Only this new image is captioned: "The arrow at the rear identifies the corresponding site for the 6.5 mm fragment." It seems clear from these captions then that Wecht now readily acknowledges that he fails to see the 6.5 mm fragment at this site. While I would like to show Wecht my own work and convince him that the large fragment on the A-P x-ray is actually not an artifact, but the fragment behind Kennedy's right eye described and removed at autopsy, it is nevertheless comforting that some "experts", some time, can be convinced to change their opinions. 

I suppose, in this light, I should also take comfort that Larry Sturdivan has changed so many of his opinions, and that Dr. Lattimer, while sure of Oswald's guilt to the end, nevertheless changed his opinion on the entrance wound on the skull. I'll work on that. Taking comfort.

 

Cognitive Dissonance and Psychosomatic Blindness

But it'll be hard. Real hard. Yes, unfortunately, I now suspect that the divide between what the evidence suggests in the Kennedy case and what most single-assassin theorists believe stems not from people refusing to change their minds, but from people refusing to use their minds. (Or, at least, the fully rational part of their minds.) 

People get used to what they know, without realizing a large part of what they "know" is what they've been told. People used to thinking that communists are insidious and will stoop to anything to undermine American life find it hard to believe a communist sympathizer like Oswald could be innocent. Similarly,  people used to thinking an ambitious "loser" like Oswald is likely to be desperate and dangerous find it easy to believe Oswald could just wake up one morning and decide to kill the President he admired, and then pretend that he didn't do it. Thus, Oswald's guilt seems perfectly reasonable or even readily apparent to those with a rightward bent, as well as those from the upper castes of society, ever-fearful of what they believe to be the jealous rabble down below.

This bias undoubtedly clouds their thinking. While many will argue that their opinions are based purely on the evidence, they fail to see that they have a built-in bias that filters out the evidence they consider unimportant. They will say that Oswald's palm-print was on the rifle, without considering that this evidence is tainted by the strange fact that the palm print was not identified until after the FBI said there was no such print, and that the Dallas detective who found this print, Lt. J.C. Day, said it was an old print. They will say that Howard Brennan identified Oswald as the shooter, without admitting that Brennan's refusing to ID Oswald in a police line-up, but then later saying he knew it was him all along, and then later changing his story about how many shots he heard and where he was looking when he heard these shots, damages his credibility. 

The intellectual integrity of single-assassin theorists is rarely as suspect, in fact, as when it holds Brennan up as its star witness. While the literally dozens of witnesses to state the first shot struck Kennedy and/or the last two shots were closer together than the first two are inevitably dismissed by these theorists due to "eyewitnesses not being credible" they nevertheless hypocritically persist in using Brennan to prove Oswald was the shooter in the sniper's nest. This signals that there is some sort of disconnect going on...that their emotional response to the case--that it must have been Oswald--has led to their unplugging their rational minds from its wall socket. 

A February, 2009 online discussion with single-assassin theorist David Von Pein further illustrates this point. On the IMDB Forum for the film "JFK" Von Pein kept citing a 2003 ABC News poll as evidence the majority of Americans think Oswald shot Kennedy. I tried to correct him on this, and point out that the poll's question "Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald was the only gunman in the Kennedy assassination, do you think there was another gunman in addition to Oswald there that day, or do you think Oswald was not involved in the assassination at all?"" was misleading. I argued that by saying "not involved in the assassination at all" at the end, the questioner misrepresented this as the only remaining alternative and pressured people convinced that Oswald was somehow involved to pick one of the first two options. I likened this to asking people "Do you think the Warren Commission was created to deceive, do you think the Warren Commission decided on their own to deceive, or do you think the Warren Commission told the American people the truth ABOUT EVERYTHING?", a question that, in my opinion, would lead people to overwhelmingly state that the Warren Commission deceived the public. But Von Pein would have none of this. He continued to claim, and continues to claim, that ABC's poll showed that 32% of Americans believed Oswald was the lone gunman, 51% thought Oswald was one of multiple gunmen, 10% had no opinion, and only 7% of the American people thought someone other than Oswald fired from the sniper's nest in the school book depository. 

This was obviously wrong. If 83% believed Oswald fired from the book depository, and only 7% believed he did not, then it follows that for every conspiracy theorist suspecting that Oswald was framed, TWELVE people thought Oswald was guilty. This is ludicrous. If, as Von Pein claims, only 7% of the American people thought then and continue to think Oswald innocent of shooting Kennedy, then why are he and his fellow single-assassin theorists so driven to convince others of Oswald's guilt? I mean, far more than 7% of the American people think Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster, or that AIDS was designed by the CIA, and you don't see a nation-wide movement of journalists, historians, and "researchers" arguing that these people are wrong. Such wild theories, when held by only a small minority of people, are just ignored. Furthermore, if by 2003 only 7% of Americans thought there was anything to the possibility raised by Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK--that Oswald was framed by the American government--then where in the world do people like Vincent Bugliosi and Von Pein get off blaming Oliver Stone for misleading the American people? Are we to believe that BEFORE the movie "JFK" hit the theaters, far FEWER than 7% of the American people thought Oswald innocent of killing Kennedy? 

A year later, as part of his ongoing campaign to paint those believing Oswald innocent of killing Kennedy as kooks, Von Pein started up on this again.This time, however, I asked him WHO the supposedly 51% of the public thinking Oswald fired shots as part of a team thought Oswald was working for. For this, he referred me to yet another poll, one in which 34% of the public said they believed the CIA was involved. This makes Von Pein's assertion only 7% of the public thinks Oswald innocent of shooting Kennedy positively bizarre. Could he really believe that at least 27% of the public believes Oswald shot Kennedy as part of a CIA plot? Could he really believe those thinking Oswald fired shots on behalf of the CIA outnumbered those thinking he was a patsy by a ratio of almost 4 to 1? And if so, how could he or his hero Vincent Bugliosi possibly believe the public was remotely swayed to believe such a thing by Oliver Stone's movie JFK, or any other film or publication? Outside a few researchers claiming Oswald was part of a CIA mind-control program, and a Manchurian Candidate-type assassin programmed by the CIA, no one, and I mean no one, in the conspiracy research community believes Oswald was an assassin for the CIA. I have talked to hundreds of non-buffs over the years, and can absolutely assert that this suspicion is next to non-existent in the non-buff public as well. Von Pein's assertion that as many as one out of every four Americans thinks Oswald was a hit man for the CIA is just plain wacky, and is proof positive that his thoughts on the assassination are not grounded in anything resembling reality.

And when I pushed him on this...he admitted as much. On March 4, 2010, on the alt.assassination.JFK newsgroup, he admitted: "if I WERE to disbelieve that "7%" ABC poll, where does that really lead? I'll tell you where -- such a belief leads to a vast MAJORITY of Americans actually falling into "Kookville"." Yes, you read that right. In Von Pein's mind, his acceptance of that poll equates to his rescuing the vast majority of Americans from "Kookville." He doesn't want to believe HE is in the vast minority, so he trumpets flawed polls from years past to convince himself he is not, even though his acceptance of this poll leads to the inescapable conclusion that a substantial percentage of Americans believe Oswald to have been a hit man for the CIA, something he KNOWS isn't true.

 

Clognitive Thinking 101

One can see such cognitive dissonance, or "clognitive thinking", if you will, at work in our everyday lives. At times we all lack the ability to step outside our normal frame of reference and look at something with a fresh pair of eyes. On the image above, for example, the middle square on the side of the cube in shadow appears to be a much lighter color than the middle square on the side on top. Even after blacking out the squares surrounding these squares, and realizing that they are both the same shade, I still see the one in shadow as much lighter than the other every time I look at the image. My mind is stuck in its way of interpreting color. I propose then that many of those interpreting evidence in the Kennedy case are similarly stuck.

I have an anecdote that further illustrates this phenomena. One day, some years back, I was talking with a woman of above-average intelligence. She was telling me about a friend who'd purportedly had terrible luck with the lottery, and had bought over 150 "scratchers" without ever winning a dollar. When I pointed out that her friend was obviously exaggerating, as the odds of winning back a dollar at that time were 1 in 10, this college-educated woman with two degrees said no, that's what her friend said, and she believed her friend. I probably should have let it drop, but this annoyed me. I whipped out a calculator, and got her to agree that the odds of not winning on each scratcher were .9, and then multiplied .9 by .9 by .9 etc., and showed her that there was effectively a 0% chance someone could buy 150 scratchers in a row without encountering a single winner. Perhaps as a response to my arrogance, she STILL refused to believe that her friend was exaggerating her bad luck. Her friend had told her the truth and had had an amazing run of bad luck. Period.

The "Monty Hall Problem" presented in the movie "21" provides yet another example. In the problem, modeled on TV's Let's Make a Deal, someone is offered a choice of 3 doors. Behind one there is a prize. After the selection of the door, however, the host, who knows which door has the prize, opens up a door that has no prize, and then asks the contestant if he/she would like to stick with his/her original selection, or choose the other remaining door. Intuition tells most of us that the odds of choosing the right door at this point are 50/50 and that maybe we should stick with out first choice. But our intuition is wrong. The odds of our first choice being right are only 1 in 3, while the odds of the other door being right are 2 in 3. 

The explanation is simple but, for some, incredibly hard to follow. (It took me awhile to figure it out myself) It goes like this. Since, the odds of your first choice NOT being right are 2/3, the other 2 doors represent a 2/3 probability of having the prize. When the host opens one of these doors, however, the remaining un-opened door becomes the sole bearer of this 2/3 probability. This is clear, right? And yet, we're so conditioned to look at two doors, and assume the odds of something being behind one of those doors is 50/50, that many can not accept this explanation. They just can't grasp it. To one acquaintance, an entirely different woman from the one described above but one equally intelligent and college-educated, I tried to demonstrate the concept by using sugar packets instead of doors. I put seven sugar packets on a table. I told her that one of them held a prize. She picked a packet. Playing the role of the game show host, I then excluded prize-less packet after prize-less packet, until there was but one packet beyond the one chosen. I then offered her a choice between these two. Even though the remaining non-chosen packet had effectively passed a series of 5 tests indicating it could hold the prize, and the chosen packet was entirely untested, she couldn't see how this effected the odds, and still thought her first choice had a 50/50 chance of being correct.  

I believe these examples correlate to the resistance of some to the possibility of a conspiracy. Much as the first woman, they resent the know-it-alls in the conspiracy research community telling them what they should think. Much as the second woman, they've made their choice and are sticking to it, no matter how much the odds add up on the other side. They see that there is evidence implicating Oswald in the crime, but fail to see how most all this evidence is tainted, and that the Zapruder film and eyewitness evidence suggests at least two shooters. They fail to see how the obvious fact that both the Warren Commission and HSCA skewed the evidence to their advantage suggests that maybe, just maybe, both of them knew that the evidence never pointed to Oswald as a lone gunman, and yet pretended it did for political reasons. Similarly, they fail to see how the vastly different conclusions of the autopsy doctors and HSCA medical panel demonstrate the likelihood that at least one of these groups was incompetent, or less than truthful, either of which suggests the case is far from closed. 

From the thousands of online discussions I've had with single-assassin theorists, it's also clear that they just can't perceive of a world in which the FBI could be wrong and conspiracy theorists like Mark Lane and Oliver Stone could be right. In direct opposition and yet perfect congruity with the Kennedy cultists they so despise, their world view revolves around their fervent belief that Jack Kennedy was a bad president, or a playboy, or an anti-communist, or all three, and that, in any event, no right-winger could possibly have conspired to kill him. To them, conspiracy theorists are not just wrong, but "dangerous."

Their mind has put them in a box and their eyes can't see their way out.

Their cognitive dissonance is deafening.

This cognitive constipation, of course, is not unique to the single-assassin theorist community. Some conspiracy theorists are so desperate to believe there was a conspiracy that they will present the wackiest statements made by witnesses decades after the shooting as some sort of "proof." These people will claim that Jean Hill's latter-day recollections are credible and that the statements of Gordon Arnold, who claimed to have been on the grassy knoll at the time of the shooting--but whose presence can not be detected in any of the photographs--is all the proof they need. One such theorist, in fact, has written me numerous times arguing that Robert Knudsen's 1978 testimony, in which he stated that he first became aware of the autopsy photos on the morning after the autopsy, did not suggest that he was not in attendance at the autopsy, as one would suspect, but suggested instead that he only took photos of the autopsy after midnight. Such cloudy thinking is so widespread, in fact, that conspiracy theorists holding that the mystery photo was taken from the front are as likely as single-assassin theorists to dispute the obvious fact that the original description of the mystery photo (that of a photo depicting a "missile wound over entrance in posterior skull, following reflection of the scalp") indicates it was taken from behind.

 

Hypocritical Thinking 101

In fact, as hard as it is to admit, I've been forced to conclude that many conspiracy theorists are just as "stuck" in their ways of thinking, and just as unable to see the world through a fresh pair of eyes, as the blindest single-assassin theorists. To use the image on the Clognitive Thinking slide as a metaphor, they are stuck seeing the world in shade and the middle square of this world (the Kennedy assassination) as light brown, or even orange. To continue on with this metaphor, then, single-assassin theorists see the world in light, and the middle square (the Kennedy assassination) as dark brown. Meanwhile, in the eyes of someone looking at the squares separate from any particular world view, both squares are really the same color, and a shade somewhere in the middle. (This shade, should one find it, is the truth.)

The search for the shade in the middle, moreover, alienates both those seeing the middle square as dark brown and those seeing it as light brown. I've tried to see the shade in the middle, and have upset many individuals in the process. As we've seen this has lead to some weird exchanges. Well, here's yet another one...

In late 2009 and early 2010, I had a number of heated exchanges on the Education Forum, an online discussion group, with Dr. James Fetzer. He kept attacking me for being closed-minded and not subscribing to his and Jack White's claims that the autopsy photos, x-rays and assassination films are all fake. He also kept accusing me of never having read any of his books. On January 4, 2010, after I posted the Eye of the Beholder section from chapter 13 of this webpage to demonstrate that 1) I had read at least one of his books, and 2) he had never read my webpage or else he'd have known that, he responded in a changed manner. He suddenly acknowledged:

"Pat, 

You have made an extraordinary discovery here, by which I am referring to the apparent second entry wound at the back of the head in the HSCA photographs, which simply stuns me. To the best of my knowledge, you are the first and only person to have made this observation...At the very least, this means that a photograph that the HSCA used to justify its shift in the entry location by four inches was actually contradicted by the lower entry location shown on the the same photograph. I am fairly astonished that no one has noticed this before. I would compare it to the photo showing Arlen Specter illustrating the path of the 'magic bullet' had to have taken, while the circular patch showing the actual entry is visible well-below his hand, which means that a photo intended to illustrate the 'magic bullet' theory actually refutes it."

Well, this is it, I thought, finally an acknowledgment from Fetzer and his colleagues that I am not just a nay-sayer to their wild theories, but am actually pushing the investigation forward in new and revealing directions. 

But no such luck. Three hours later, he added:

"I don't know what to say, Pat, because Jack has taken a look and says that the hole you have 'discovered' isn't there. This will take some sorting out. I will invite David Mantik, David Lifton, and John Costella to take a look, too. Something is not right."

Well, we can agree on that. Something is not right when a supposedly independent thinker such as Fetzer, who taught critical thinking at the university level, has to check with his colleagues--all of whom have embraced theories which I have publicly rejected--before allowing himself to acknowledge what he has already admitted he sees.  Something is especially not right, moreover, when his admitted reason for doing so is that Jack White, an octogenarian who believes not only that the Kennedy autopsy photos, x-rays and assassination films are all fake, but that no astronauts landed on the moon, no jet hit the Pentagon on 9/11, and the theory of evolution is a fraud, has told him that we are mistaken.

Or does that sound too harsh? Well, here is Jack's response to a January 20, 2010 post on the Education Forum in which I pointed out that his harshest critics are not the single-assassin theorists who write him off as a hopeless crackpot, but his fellow conspiracy theorists, who think the prism through which he sees the world is too far out there.

Your prism on things is too narrow. There ARE conspiracies. Vast conspiracies. Not "far out," as you have been led to believe. Politicians faked going to the moon. Exotic weaponry tested in Oklahoma City was then used to bring down the twin towers. The war on "terrorism" is a fake. "Presidents" past and present have been elected unconstitutionally and illegally. Agencies of the government fake evidence to suit their purposes...as far back as the JFK assassination.

It is YOU who need to learn how FAR OUT conspiracies have become. WAKE UP and smell the fakery...from Zfilms to fake presidents.

On February 11, 2010, furthermore, White expanded on this theme, and acknowledged on the Forum that he perceived the election of America's first black President, Barack Obama, and America's humanitarian response to the then-recent devastating earthquake in Haiti, as all part of some master plot: 

There are not as many paid provocateurs in the JFK affair as in other more monstrous charades such
as 911, Apollo, OKC, TWA800, etc. JFK was "just" the killing of a single man. Much more serious are the
callous murders of thousands in other events in deceptions on an enormous scale (to say nothing of
the ensuing wars).

These nitpickers have no concept of the gigantic struggle between GOOD and EVIL we are involved in.
The sinister forces of the New World Order do not consider it wrong to "eliminate" the masses if it serves
their corrupt agendas. The Skull and Bones elite death cult promotes death as a means toward progress.
The evil international bankers, led by David Rockefeller, decide who our "leaders" will be (ala Obama).
S&B and other evil groups promote EUGENICS as a means of wiping out entire populations, especially
in third world nations, especially those places with abundant natural resources that can be taken over.
Weaponry has been developed for weather control and creation of simulated natural disasters which
can provide excuses for occupying countries in the guise of "humanitarian relief".

"Democracy" that the revolutionists brought to America will soon be gone in a world ruled by propaganda and mind control. Truth is the only lantern to shine light into the dark places and only truth can rip away the Oz curtain and expose the fraudulent wizards. 

Fetzer's deference to White is particularly ironic in that his presence on the forum was in large part fueled by his desire to push the then-recent release of Doug Horne's 5 volume set Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. The irony is that Horne has sought to distance himself from the non-JFK related statements of both Fetzer and White, and would most certainly question Fetzer's rejection of what he sees in the autopsy photo based upon what Jack White claims not to see. 

From the very book Fetzer was on the Forum to promote...

Another pet peeve I have is the false association by many in academia and the media of all JFK assassination researchers with persons who don't believe we landed on the moon six times (from 1969-1972); or with persons who believe that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were really 'controlled demolitions' set off by the government, and were not caused by fanatics flying airplanes into buildings.

I think the principal lesson of the JFK assassination is that we should not defer to arguments about major historical events (such as assassinations, and how wars begin) based on authority—we should study the primary evidence ourselves and reach our own conclusions. If people don't learn to do a better job of this in the United States, our democracy will remain in peril, and our society will continue to just 'muddle through,' rather than excel in tackling its many challenges.

FWIW, Fetzer never got back to me...  

This was not true of Jack White...whose response, no surprise, would have us believe that right is wrong...

 

And Left is Right?

There is a key difference, however. Men such as Fetzer and White do not have a support team, so to speak, in the mainstream media, and they aren't taken seriously by historians. 

This brings us back to a question raised in the last chapter--why so many supposedly rational people in the media embrace the work of irrational theorists.

Well, one possibility is that it feeds into their vanity. Members of the media who left the story behind to tell other stories can take satisfaction that they didn't miss out on the biggest story of the century. They can get on the ride at Disneyland and sing "It's an Oswald, after all" between refrains of Beethoven's "Hallelujah!" chorus, and not look back with discomfort. Similarly, mainstream historians, who take tremendous pride in their status as "professionals" and "recognized experts", can take comfort that the wacky amateur sleuths and wanna-be "Quincys" of the conspiracy research community, were wrong. The single-assassin theory promotes the belief that the government's experts were right, after all, and that we should, therefore, have more faith in "experts," including, by extension, professional historians. While this is dime store psychology at a discount, I have little doubt this is a factor in the widespread acceptance of the works of Posner and Bugliosi, e.g., by those who definitely should have known better.

Should this proposal sound ludicrous, and should one assume the competitive nature of the mainstream press would have led to the discovery of any hidden truths about the Kennedy assassination, should any truths be hidden, one should consider the wise words of Walter Lippman, one of the most respected journalists of the twentieth century. In 1920, in a detailed study published in the New Republic, Lippman argued that the New York Times, and by extension all the mainstream press, was biased in its coverage of the Russian Revolution. He reported that articles on the Revolution written by American journalists were "dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organization" and had inaccurately reported 91 times that the revolution was on the verge of collapse, while citing events that never happened, and atrocities that never took place. He summarized that "In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see" and that, in their pushing what they wanted to see on the public, these men were guilty of a "boundless credulity, an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on many occasions a downright lack of common sense." 

One can only assume then that the failure of the mainstream press to accurately report Kennedy's death was no surprise to Lippman. In fact, although Lippmann, in the days after the assassination, voiced his support for President Johnson, and later voiced his support for the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone, he later told his biographer Ronald Steel that he had never ruled out a conspiracy.

Now, to that ticklish question of WHODUNNIT...I offer but a morsel to the feast supplied by Anthony Summers in his book Not in Your Lifetime, and Larry Hancock in his book Someone Would Have Talked.

 

Silenced Witness? 

After my study of the eyewitness statements and Zapruder film suggested that at least one burst of shots--the one (or two) shots hitting Kennedy and Connally around frame 224--was not heard by the crowd, I decided to read up on the use of silencers and subsonic ammunition. While some "experts", including the FBI's Robert Frazier in the trial of Clay Shaw, have been dismissive about the use of a silencer on 11-22-63, claiming the shots would still have been heard, they ignore that the use of a silencer still had its advantages. Vincent Bugliosi, in his book Reclaiming History, admits as much. In arguing that Oswald could not have been a hit man, because a hit man would have used a silencer, he unwittingly undercut many of his supporters, who'd been insisting for years that the use of a silencer was impractical and unlikely. On page 1452, Bugliosi quotes an unnamed LAPD firearms expert and asserts that by 1963 silencers were sophisticated enough to reduce the sound of a rifle to nothing louder than "the hitting of a pile of wood with a hammer." Bugliosi's expert said, furthermore, that state-of-the-art silencers at the time "probably wouldn't have even been heard above the background noise of the motorcade and crowd."

The realization from my study of the eyewitnesses that a silenced weapon may have been fired from the Dal-Tex Building, when combined with Connally’s testimony that he initially suspected automatic weapons had been fired, when merged with the fact that both the hole in Kennedy’s hairline and the hole in his throat were smaller than what one would expect from a 6.5 mm bullet, and that a smaller caliber would be more easily deflected in the manner proposed, led me to wonder about the availability of .22 caliber automatic rifles in 1963. Surprisingly, I discovered that a brand new .22 caliber automatic rifle, the AR-15, had just exploded on the market, and was, in November 1963, undergoing tests by U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam. The Special Forces is, of course, the wing of the military that works most closely with the CIA, a favorite suspect of the conspiracy community.  To make matters worse, the Air Force and Navy had also received shipments, and the Army was in the process of switching from the M-1 over to their own version of the AR-15, re-christened as the M-16.  In light of Oliver Stone’s theory that the military was behind Kennedy’s murder this made me a little paranoid. 

While looking through the book Silencers, Snipers, and Assassins to see what I could learn about M-16 silencers, I noticed something which pushed me even further down Paranoid Road.  When reading about the M16 silencer HEL M4, I noticed on the photo credit that the photo came courtesy of Aberdeen Proving Ground, where both Warren Commission ballistics expert Alfred Olivier and HSCA ballistics expert Larry Sturdivan found employment. (I would eventually discover that a number of experimental silencers had been developed by the Human Engineering Lab (HEL) at the Aberdeen Proving Ground starting in the early sixties but that HEL4A itself  did not become available until 1967. I also found that Sturdivan and Olivier did not work in HEL but at the Edgewood Arsenal building of Aberdeen Proving Ground. It’s unclear how much interaction the scientists of the Edgewood Arsenal had with HEL.)  This coincidence made me wonder if the ballistics experts who testified before the committees hadn’t had a hand in designing the very weapon used in the assassination.  And so I decided to re-read the pertinent parts of the book Mortal Error, which theorized that Secret Service Agent George Hickey mistakenly discharged an AR-15 from the President’s follow-up car, and accidentally killed the President. 

But then I discovered something even more startling. Illustration #27 within Mortal Error included not only HSCA Exhibit #113, which depicted a gelatin test of an M-16 bullet, but a photograph of a list of the other exhibits from the day it was submitted, which had been included in a press package. (This list is now online and can be viewed here)  On this list, Exhibit 114, was identified as an “M-193 bullet at 800 FPS velocity.”  800 FPS…as in Feet Per Second…as in slower than the speed of sound, (which travels at roughly 1087 feet per second), which means no shock wave or sonic boom…a silenced shot!

And so I hopped on the internet to download HSCA Exhibit 114. Only when I scrolled through the website of John McAdams, one of the most prominent websites on the net, and certainly the most prominent with a single-assassin bias, I came across something which made me even more paranoid.  For on this website Exhibit 113, which represents a gelatin test of M-16 ammunition fired at 3,000 fps, is identified as being the gelatin test of a 30 caliber bullet, and Exhibit 114 is listed as being the “composite of two photographs of bullet exploding in gelatin.” All reference to the M-16 and its cartridge, the M-193, were absent!  I then went to the History Matters website, where the entire HSCA Report has been scanned and uploaded straight out of a book, and confirmed that officially the exhibits were indeed those of the bullets used in an M-16.  I then printed out a list of the HSCA exhibits from the History Matters website and compared them to the same list on the McAdams website, and found that, while there were a few other discrepancies on the McAdams list, there were none back to back which completely disguised the nature of the exhibits. It really made me wonder if some of the researchers who smell CIA involvement in the single-assassin theorist community weren’t on to something. (Months later, after I'd calmed down a little, I realized that the website with the suspiciously incorrect descriptions of F-113 and F-114 was the website of researcher Mike Russ, and that the McAdams website had merely provided a link.)   

My concern was heightened yet again when I re-read Larry Sturdivan’s HSCA testimony to see if Exhibit 114 was indeed an M-193 bullet shot at 800 fps.  He stated, regarding Exhibit 113: “This is the bullet that is fired from the M-16 rifle that was used extensively in Vietnam.  It is a caliber .22 but at a high velocity, approximately 3,000 feet per second…This bullet entered, and as you can see, it goes nice and straight for a little while.  Then the yaw increases dramatically.  The pressure is increased dramatically, and the bullet begins to fragment, pieces are broken off…”  He went on to state “F-114 is the same bullet at a lower velocity. That velocity would be encountered at about 800 meters per second…This bullet, of course, was not deformed because the pressures, due to the lower velocity, were never high enough to deform the bullet.”  Although Mr. Sturdivan is recorded as saying 800 meters per second it occurred to me that the difference between a bullet traveling at 3,000 feet per second and 800 meters per second (2,625 feet!) would not be so great that the slower-moving bullet would fail to deform.  Particularly since elsewhere in his testimony Mr. Sturdivan stated that an M-16 bullet “would break up, as I said before, at anything above 1,000 feet per second; it would begin to deform at about 1,000 feet per second.” It occurred to me at this point that Mr. Sturdivan’s testimony had been changed from 800 feet per second to 800 meters per second.  It occurred as well that in all his testimony there was no other use of the term “meters per second.” I decided to see if this was true.  Upon re-examination of Sturdivan’s testimony, I counted 39 mentions of “feet per second,” which was the standard unit of measurement used in ballistics calculations, and only the one mention of “meters per second.”  Within the work he performed in the internet paper written with Kenneth Rahn, Sturdivan mentioned “feet per second” 16 more times, and never once used “meters per second.”  Furthermore, Alfred Olivier, in his Warren Commission testimony, used “feet per second” 11 times and never mentioned “meters per second.”  I concluded from this that Sturdivan’s testimony was probably changed.  The only reason I could come up with is that discussion of silenced M-16 bullets was ruled a violation of national security by someone somewhere somehow.  That one or more of these bullets was used on President Kennedy, and that a faction within the government was aware of this and covered it up, might very well explain a lot of our recent history.  But this made me uncomfortable, and so I hopped back on the internet to see what else I could find out about the wound ballistics of M-16 ammo.   

Well, one of the first things I found was that M-16 ammunition is designed to fragment and incapacitate its victims.  While many Americans like to cry about the violations of the rules of war committed by other nations, we decided with the M-16 to defeat the purpose of full metal jacket ammunition, which was promoted and accepted worldwide after WWI to reduce the brutality of war, by creating a bullet that was so unstable that it tumbled and broke-up even though it was technically a full metal jacket bullet.  The problem, according to Dr. Martin Fackler, a former military surgeon and ballistics expert considered by some to be the guru of the field of wound ballistics, is that M-16 ammunition fails to break up when striking ballistics gelatin at speeds less than 2500 feet per second, a speed it reaches after traveling but 200 meters, (or even less, depending on the model and the length of the barrel).  Due to the small size of its bullet, therefore, which was designed so that soldiers could carry a lot more ammunition into combat, and its corresponding inability to create massive damage when striking at a reduced speed, the M-16 is ineffective as a long-range sniper weapon.  

This gave me momentary doubt about its use in Dealey Plaza. But then I realized that I couldn’t dismiss its use as easily as all that. One reason was that in 1963 many of these tests had not yet been performed, and the assassin would have had no reason to doubt that the M-16 was a top flight killing machine.  Another was that all the shots fired in Dealey Plaza were almost certainly less than 200 meters in length, and were probably less than 100 meters, and were therefore well within the M-16’s range of optimum performance.  Yet another was that Fackler’s studies show that between 2500 and 2700 fps an M-193 bullet will usually break in half, making it highly unlikely the bullet in Sturdivan’s test, which didn't break up at all, was really going 2625 fps.  Still, another reason to doubt came from my discovery of websites devoted to reduced-charge ammunition, which fires at less than 1,000 fps and creates no sonic boom. Some of this ammunition was even designed for M-16s already equipped with silencers, for the ultimate in silent killing. 

It then hit me that Sturdivan had identified the speed of the bullet in F-113 as 3,000 fps when elsewhere in his testimony he said that M-16 bullets were fired at 3,200 fps, and that this 3,200 number was repeated all over the net as the definitive speed of M-16 ammunition. This led me to believe that the F-113 test was a simulation of a bullet fired from a distance of a few hundred feet.  The thought occurred then that the F-114 test might be the same, and that the F-114 bullet was originally fired at about 1,000 fps, just under the speed of sound.  Subsequently, I came across an article on sound suppressors by Mark White, in which he presents a chart demonstrating the drop-off in decibels of a shot once the speed of the bullet drops below the speed of sound.  Not surprisingly, it revealed that a sub-sonic charge fired in a suppressed .308 rifle (under normal conditions, somewhat louder than a Carcano) would be roughly the sound of the surrounding traffic and would be unlikely to be noticed by those more than a hundred feet away (which, in the case of a possible shooter on the roof of the Dal-Tex, would mean everyone on the street.)  It seemed reasonable to assume from this that Sturdivan had been testing the wounding effects of bullets which he’d already determined would not have been heard, to see if such a bullet was likely.  If so, that this whole area of inquiry was hidden from the public would have to be considered suspicious, and might even be taken as an indication he decided such a shot was possible.

Ultimately, however, my decision to accept the possibility that a silenced M-16 was used in Dealey Plaza, and was tested by the HSCA, came from the exhibits themselves.  I just couldn’t believe that the damage shown in F-113 came as a result of a bullet impacting at a speed only 15% faster than the speed of the bullet in F-114.  Since, according to Dr. Fackler, if an M-16 bullet doesn’t have enough velocity to cause fragmentation the result is a deep .22 caliber hole, I decided to compare his drawings of a .22 caliber hole to Exhibit F-114.  After confirming that both Fackler and Dr. Olivier in his tests performed for the Warren Commission used 15 inch test blocks of 20% gelatin, I found Dr. Fackler’s drawings of a .22LR quite similar to F-114.  The .22 long rifle wound was slightly deeper, which was as one would expect since a 40 grain bullet traveling at 1122 fps should transfer 43% more energy to the gelatin than a 55 grain bullet traveling at 800 fps. (The formula to determine energy release is mass x speed x speed.)  When I considered the opposite, that if the bullet in F-114 was traveling at 2625 fps it should represent 7.5 TIMES THE ENERGY released in the wound in Fackler’s drawing, I realized I was almost certainly right, and that F-114 was definitely a test of a bullet traveling 800 fps.  When  I took into account that Sturdivan told the HSCA, when describing F-113, that after the bullet broke up, “although it is not clearly visible, from here it continues to exit from the corner of the block”, it became obvious that the speed of the bullet tested in F-113 was several  times that of the bullet in F-114, and that the amount of energy release was somewhere near the fourteen-fold increase in energy release one would expect when comparing a bullet traveling at 800 fps and 3000 fps  and nowhere near the 30% increase expected between 800 mps and 3000 fps.

In January 2006, after gathering up the nerve, I contacted Larry Sturdivan and asked him about his HSCA testimony. As to whether Exhibit F-114 represented a bullet strike at 800 meters per second or 800 feet per second he responded: “It has a simple explanation.  I misspoke. The bullet is obviously a low-velocity strike, probably at a simulated range of several hundred meters. The figure of 800 feet per second is certainly the one that is closest to the actual impact velocity. At work, I always used metric measure, but for the public hearings it was suggested that I use feet, inches, and pounds.  This is one instance in which I slipped.  There may be others.  In other cases, the person who transcribed the testimony misinterpreted a few of my words.  It likely happened with other witnesses for the HSCA and WC as well.”

When I asked him if his use of an exhibit depicting an M-16 bullet traveling at a subsonic speed indicated he’d studied the possible use of silenced weapons in connection with the Kennedy assassination, he responded: “It was just one of the thousands of pictures we had of military bullets we had tested.  I used it because it showed the instability of a bullet in a soft tissue simulant, without the deformation and breakup.  Like the WCC/MC, it was a bullet that did not deform in soft tissue.  Modern military bullets deform at full velocity, so I showed a picture of one at reduced velocity. The only bullets fired in the WC tests were the WCC/MC.”

When I followed up and asked him if the HSCA had ever asked him about the possible use of silenced weapons, he answered:  “Never came up.  Several witnesses who were familiar with supersonic rifle fire, such as John Connally, stated that the shots were identifiable as "high-powered rifle" fire.  A subsonic bullet is much quieter -- and is much less injurious, has a more arced trajectory (due to its low speed) and, as a result, is much less accurate, etc.  A sniper using a subsonic weapon (e.g., a handgun) could fire a volley of shots from the upper floors of the Depository and be unlikely to hit the target with any of them.  Such a weapon is more likely to be used in point blank shooting, like the Tippit murder.”  (Sturdivan’s comments here are intriguing.  He ignores the possibility of subsonic rifle fire even though he’d studied the ballistics of subsonic rifle fire, as proven by F-114.  His statement that a subsonic bullet has a more arced trajectory is also intriguing when one considers that the trajectory of the bullet creating Kennedy’s back wound was initially reported as heading sharply downwards.)

When I wrote back and asked if he felt handicapped by the limits of the HSCA investigation, he wrote:  “No.  The HSCA didn't tell me much.  They just asked a lot of questions.  The most irritating thing is that they kept most of the scientists isolated from each other, so that I didn't meet Bill Hartmann 'til years later.”

Sturdivan’s response forced me to do some soul-searching.  Here I had taken several pieces of information: 1) that Exhibit F-114 had been misrepresented in Sturdivan’s published testimony; 2) that it was in fact the ballistics gelatin of a subsonic bullet; and 3) that it was also misrepresented on a website created by Oswald-did-it theorist John McAdams, and convinced myself that this represented some sort of  conspiracy. And yet I was wrong. I was right about points one and two, but they had an innocent explanation. And I was wrong about point 3 altogether.  When I realized that it was possible Sturdivan had merely told me a cover story, and that it was also possible that Russ had deliberately misrepresented the exhibit on his website, I had a revelation.  In that moment, I fully understood what I will call “the seduction of intrigue”.  For a split second, it seemed rational to me to assume Sturdivan was lying etc… This was because I had quietly changed gears and begun thinking of reasons to believe I wasn’t wrong, rather than reasons to believe that I was right.  It occurred to me that such thinking takes place when someone has spent a lot of time developing a theory, and someone else  comes along and wrecks it.  I at once understood why my presentation had upset so many alterationists, i.e. why they had refused to honestly look at my presentation etc. They’d thought so long and hard when developing their theories that they couldn’t bear to believe they’d been wrong.  What had been their theory had become their religion.

I decided to lose my religion and accept that the mislabeling of F-114 had been some sort of mistake.  

Only it turned out my bout with intrigue was far from over. In April, 2006, I acquired video footage of some of the HSCA hearings, including parts of Sturdivan’s testimony.  Unfortunately, the footage of Sturdivan began just after he discussed F-114, so I was unable to determine whether he, in fact, said 800 feet or 800 meters. Nevertheless, when I compared the published transcripts of Sturdivan’s testimony against his actual testimony, a few new questions arose.

When I e-mailed Sturdivan and asked about these new (at least for me) discoveries, he was once again quite forthcoming. When asked why his published testimony reflects his actual words, when the testimony of Dr. Baden appears to have been significantly re-written, he replied “Perhaps Baden asked to be allowed to revise his own testimony, I don't know.” (Another witness, Jack White, told me that every witness was given the opportunity to change their testimony.  Perhaps Sturdivan was simply not informed he could do so.)  When I asked who changed the exhibit numbers in his testimony—Exhibit 583 was twice corrected to read Exhibit 853-- Sturdivan replied: “I guess Mathews corrected the exhibit numbers.”  (Mathews refers to I. Charles Mathews, the HSCA Special Counsel responsible for Sturdivan’s testimony.) When I asked why some of the questions asked Sturdivan had been changed, Sturdivan’s response surprised me.  He replied:  “In the case of (Congressmen) Fauntroy and Ford, the staff probably published the questions as phrased on the script they were supposed to follow.  Some of the Congressmen had trouble following the script -- or just did what politicians do; i.e., speak without thinking what they are trying to say, just because they like the sound of their own voices…”  When I asked him WHAT script he was talking about, he clued me in on how the HSCA conducted its “public” hearings. (Dr. Baden had previously mentioned the use of scripts in his 1989 book Unnatural Death, but it had fallen below my radar). Sturdivan replied: “A couple of weeks before the open hearings, I got a copy of the questions to be asked, keyed to each Congressman in turn.  I prepared my "probable answer" to each so that the staff and/or Congressman could pre-prepare any follow-up questions.  I.e., the Committee's staff did it.  I suggested a few changes to questions and a few additional questions to make the story more complete.  However, the Congressmen had a lot of trouble following the script.  Some asked questions I had already been asked by another person and did not ask some of the questions they were scripted to ask.  As a result the story got scrambled and less understandable.”   In light of the fact that someone (probably Mathews) changed Sturdivan’s testimony to reflect the proper exhibit numbers, I asked Sturdivan if he remembered that he mis-spoke and said F-114 represented a bullet traveling 800 meters per second, or had simply assumed he’d done so.  His response was illuminating:  “The 800 meters per second, referring to F-114, is an obvious mistake.  This is an M-193 bullet.  Had it hit at 800 m/s, it would have been deformed, probably would have broken in two, and the bullet (or fragments) would have exited the block.  800 f/s is a handgun velocity that would have produced this type of picture.  I don't know whether I said it wrong or they wrote it wrong or later changed it to be wrong.” 

And there it sat until Christmas Eve, 2009, when I received a copy of Sturdivan's HSCA testimony from the Poage Library at Baylor University. I put the DVD in my DVD player, convinced that I would soon be able to resolve whether Sturdivan said "800 meters per second" and confused the HSCA, or said "800 feet per second," only to have some unidentified person change his testimony and exhibits to read "800 meters per second." But I was in for another surprise. Sturdivan said "F-114 is the same bullet at a lower velocity. That velocity would be encountered at about 800 meters per second", but then corrected himself and said "800 meters range". This was quite interesting. First of all, at all other points in his testimony, Sturdivan discussed bullet velocity in terms of feet per second, and here he was discussing a bullet's velocity in "meters down range." By describing the bullet in such a manner, Sturdivan thereby hid from the record that the bullet tested was not fired from 800 meters down range, but was a reduced charge bullet designed to simulate the effects of a bullet fired from 800 meters down range. Such a bullet was subsonic. Such a bullet was the type used in weapons designed for silent killing. 

In retrospect, Sturdivan's verbal gymnastics only made sense. Sturdivan was, after all, testifying on behalf of a government widely suspected of assassinating its President. He'd done work for the military. Included in this work was studying the wounding effects of the subsonic ammunition used in assassination weapons. Needless to say, this was not a topic the committee would want him to touch upon. And so he testified not how fast the bullet was traveling, but how far down range it would normally take the bullet to slow to that speed. And screwed up. 

But it's not as simple as that. While on the surface it seems possible Sturdivan's mistaken claim the bullet was traveling 800 meters per second led someone to not only include this mistake in the transcript, but mistakenly re-title his exihibit, this fails to explain why Sturdivan's correction, "800 meters range," was left off his testimony. He was clearly correcting himself. And his words were clearly spoken. 

This effectively puts me back where I began, wondering why the exhibit title was changed, and wondering whether it's just a coincidence that this exhibit was of a bullet type used in assassination weapons.

But it also takes me further. In finding that Sturdivan's correction had been omitted from the transcript of his testimony, a door was opened to the possibility that much of what we know FROM SWORN TESTIMONY, is an inaccurate presentation of said testimony.

More on this later...

 

The Seduction of Intrigue

While trying to figure out if the bullet fired in F-114 had indeed been subsonic, I discovered that there was an historical basis for my suspicion that a small caliber weapon firing subsonic ammunition had been used in the assassination. While reading about the CIA’s overthrow of the Guatemalan Government in 1954, I discovered that, among the supply lists, lists of communists to be killed after the take-over, and other documents released in 1997, there was a CIA Manual on Assassination. In this manual there were several relevant passages. At one point, when discussing the advantages and disadvantages of assassinating people with firearms, the manual relates "Public figures or guarded officials may be killed with great reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion. The propaganda value of this system may be high.” (Note that the propaganda chief for this operation was future Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, who, shortly before his death, admitted an involvement in the Kennedy assassination to his son, and claimed David Morales, one of the CIA's para-military trainers for the Guatemalan Operation, and presumably one of those handing out the CIA' Manual on Assassination, was also involved.)  Elsewhere, the manual deals specifically with the issue of subsonic charges, noting “pistols, submachine guns and any sort of improvised carbine or rifle which will take a low velocity cartridge can be silenced,” and then cautioning “Because permissible velocity is low, effective precision range is held to about 100 yards with rifle or carbine type weapons.”  

Further confirmation came from studying the supply lists prepared for the Guatemalan op.  On one such list there is the surprising item  ".22 cal. rifles w/silencers."  As larger caliber rifles were available, this gives a clear indication that .22 caliber rifles with silencers were a preferred assassination weapon, and that the 100 yard limit mentioned in the assassination manual was true for these weapons. While I've taken a lot of guff from shooters about this, as they all seem convinced that a sniper rifle firing a small subsonic bullet would be nearly worthless at the distances of Dealey Plaza,  I suspect their concern is overstated. Geoffrey Boothroyd, the English Firearms expert who advised James Bond creator Ian Fleming on the weapons described in his books, once famously wrote Fleming: "Silencers. These I do not like. The only excuse for using one is a .22 rifle using low-velocity ammunition, i.e., below the speed of sound." Former sniper Craig Roberts, in his book Kill Zone, moreover, wrote of his suspicion that a "CIA-issued .22 caliber Model 74 Winchester silenced sniper rifle" was fired at Kennedy, wounding him in the throat.

In 2007, at a swap meet, I came across an old book entitled Everyday Ballistics that gave me more reason to believe a silencer was used on 11-22-63. This book had been the property of the U.S. Navy. In the chapter on bullet drop, it reports that a fully charged .22 long rifle bullet would only drop a foot or so over a distance of 270 feet, the approximate distance from the roof of the Dal-Tex Building to Kennedy at the moment of the single-bullet theory. In a subsequent chapter, it makes the surprising assertion that a subsonic bullet fired at 1000 fps would have less wind deflection than a similar bullet fired at a faster speed.  It goes on to note that a .22 long rifle bullet fired at 1000 fps. in a 5 MPH cross wind would suffer less than two inches of deflection at 100 yards and less than a half inch deflection at 50 yards.  From this it seems clear that a well-practiced shooter firing a subsonic .22 caliber rifle or M-16 from the Dal-Tex Building could easily have hit Kennedy, or Connally, or both.  

So does that mean I think the CIA was involved? Not necessarily. Let’s just say that the killers were probably aware of CIA assassination techniques, and may very well have been CIA-trained. If the CIA suspected as much, it might very well explain why the CIA has been less than forthcoming on so many aspects of the assassination.

Yes, after all this time, literally years spent on this investigation, I still think it's possible that the numerous government lies I've uncovered are unrelated to the assassination itself, and are more indicative of a vast cover-up of information embarrassing to the CIA and the Federal Government than a vast conspiracy to kill Kennedy, and an ongoing conspiracy to cover-up this event.

But sometimes I have to wonder... In early 2009, while preparing to mail out something I'd sold over the internet, using an assumed name, I noticed that the buyer's name was quite familiar. It was John McAdams, the Marquette University Professor whose single-assassin theorist website remains top-ranked by google. Now, by early 2009, I'd sold thousands of items over the internet, none to anyone with whom I'd ever had any contact. And here was the one person with whom I'd had regular contact--through the alt.assassination.JFK newsgroup--who was also widely rumored to be a CIA operative...and he was buying something from me. Did he know the name under which I'd been selling my possessions? Was he sending me a message? Was it even him?

I decided to google his name along with the city provided on the address, to see if it was indeed THE John McAdams, and not just A John McAdams. And I came across an internet radio station programmed by THE John McAdams with the same home town. Hmmm...I thought. So it is him... Now ain't that a coinkydink... But then I noticed that the three rotating banner ads across the top of McAdams' radio station web page were all sponsored by the CIA. All of 'em. There were other ads off to the side. But the ads above McAdams' face were all CIA ads. Now what are the odds of that? I have contact with one person rumored to be a CIA operative. I find a photo of him online. Above this photo--by pure coincidence?--there are ads placed by the CIA. 

I just couldn't buy this was a coincidence. I decided that there must be some sort of connection. It then hit me that most internet ads are placed by computer programs, and that McAdams' having people google his name together with CIA may had led some program to associate his name with the CIA, and place ads for the CIA above his name and photo. I mentioned this possibility to a few JFK assassination website owners and they told me that this was indeed the most logical explanation

Some months later, however, McAdams himself insisted this wasn't so. McAdams had stupidly attacked one of the website owners who'd defended him as a "fascist". This, in turn, led me to point out that this man had defended McAdams when I had asked him if the CIA ads had been more than a coincidence. McAdams then grew quite defensive, and claimed that the appearance of these ads above his face was obviously a coincidence, and that only a kook or loony would think otherwise. When I mentioned that it seemed perfectly reasonable to me to assume that someone at the CIA considered his JFK website a friendly website, and wanted to reward him by supporting his music web page, John fought this as well, insisting that, since CIA ads could be found on the home page of the website hosting his radio station, it was all obviously just a coincidence. In the end, he was unwilling to accept any possibility that the ads on his web page were more than a coincidence, even if this possibility reflected no wrong-doing on his part.

So here we were again...at a cognitive divide. Perhaps then, conspiracy theorists are those who see something unlikely--like the one person you know who might have connections to the CIA having CIA ads on their web page--as suspicious, while those denying the possibility of conspiracy see this same event as just another, yawn, coincidence. One side sees what could be a coincidence as a possible clue, while the other side sees what could be a clue as an obvious coincidence. 

That said, there's no getting around the nightmarish ramifications of the HSCA's questions and answers having been scripted and re-written, with certain substantive statements excised from the record. This means the supposed "historical record" of the hearings most commonly used by historians--the transcripts--are not reliable records of what actually transpired. Still, this problem is partially offset by the fact there are video and audio tapes of much of the testimony, which may one day be widely available. But what about the Warren Commission? Their hearings were not only conducted in secret, they were not recorded in any way, outside the transcripts. Could their transcripts have been changed as well?

Unfortunately, yes. We know, beyond any doubt, that at least some of the transcripts have been doctored. An apparently unedited transcript of Jacqueline Kennedy's testimony, we should recall, revealed that she originally reported that Governor Connally screamed "like a stuck pig" when shot. This reference was deleted from the published transcript. An 8-28-64 memorandum from Commission Counsel Wesley Liebeler, in which he cites an early version of the commission's report, moreover, quotes the testimony of the FBI's fiber expert Paul Stombaugh as follows: "In my mind I feel that these fibers came from this shirt, but I know of no scientific method to prove this, so therefore I am unable to say this." This differs greatly from the same paragraph in the final report, where his words were changed to "There is no doubt in my mind that these fibers could have come from the shirt. There is no way, however, to eliminate the possibility of the fibers having come from another identical shirt." As the former line appears nowhere in the published transcript, and reads much more like human speech, it seems apparent that this line was re-written and that the new line was added into both the transcript and the report in the final days of the Commission's existence, when their sole focus was on the issuance of the report. This should force us to question what else was changed, and by whom. It should also make us wonder what guarantees were used to make sure that changes like this one, presumably undertaken to remove the implication of Stombaugh's words--that if there was a scientific method to prove the fibers on the gun came from Oswald's shirt he would have gladly said it had been proven--were the exception, and not the rule, and that greater, more substantive changes were not made as well.

This is a real concern. In 1992, a presumably unaltered transcript of the 4-30-64 testimony of FBI paper expert James Cadigan was released by the National Archives. As reported by Jim Marrs, this transcript revealed that, when asked if he knew why an identification card of Oswald's was damaged by silver nitrate, a chemical used to unveil hidden fingerprints, Cadigan responded "I could only speculate...It may be that there was a very large volume of evidence being examined at the time. Time was of the essence, and this material, I believe, was returned to the Dallas Police within two or three days, and it was merely in my opinion a question of time. We  have a very large volume of evidence. There was insufficient time to desilver it. And I think in many instances where latent prints are developed they do not desilver it." Well, one can see how the FBI might find this embarrassing. But this was sworn testimony, supposedly taken to create a permanent record of the murder of a president and its aftermath. How can changing Cadigan's rambling answer to "No, this is a latent fingerprint issue", as was done, possibly be justified? 

Particularly when, as Marrs reports, the cover sheet to the transcript reveals "Stenotype Tape, Master Sheets, Carbon and Waste turned over to Commission for destruction"? I mean, how is this even legal? If anonymous FBI officials and political appointees have the right to change the words of people representing the Bureau in sworn testimony, and to destroy the record of what's been changed, who is responsible if the changes amount to perjury? Someone in the Bureau who never appeared in court? Or the man with the lies shoved in his mouth? I mean, don't the accused have the right to face their accuser, and not have their accuser hide in an office and sneak words into transcripts? That the cornerstone of the judicial process--the taking of sworn testimony under penalty of perjury--was undermined by the very body tasked with protecting the integrity of the judicial process--the FBI--and done so as a matter of routine--should not be readily dismissed.

Perhaps, then, with time, a scholar will undertake the journey of reading through all the available transcripts, and all the versions of the report, and note the changes, and note all the quotes that were changed in the process. Such an undertaking would be of enormous interest to historians, and possibly win the undertaker a prize or two.

Anyone interested?

 

Scintilla

In conclusion, I should make it clear I don’t pretend to know who killed Kennedy. The decision within the Johnson Administration to shut down independent inquiry and staunchly defend the flawed conclusions of the Warren Commission does not in itself prove that anyone within the administration was involved in the murder itself, or was deliberately covering up a conspiracy.  By way of example, when one studies Lyndon Johnson's expansion of the Vietnam War, one finds that Johnson would frequently worry out loud to his advisers and make them uncomfortable, so uncomfortable in fact that they would tell him what they thought he wanted to hear just so they could leave the room. While this may have been a deliberate tactic of Johnson’s designed to get others to back him on controversial decisions (he would often misrepresent what amounted to a capitulation on the part of one of his advisers as a ringing endorsement, saying “I’m just a poor old country schoolteacher, but Walt Rostow’s from Harvard, and he says we oughta bomb that country into the stone age, etc.”), it's possible this was merely an unfortunate aspect of his character, and one which prevented his receiving the best advice from his best advisers. As a result, it seems plausible that men such as Assistant Attorney General Katzenbach, FBI Director Hoover, and even Chief Justice Earl Warren took from their meetings with Johnson that he’d be much more comfortable if the investigation didn’t really dig too deep, and that he (the President) felt this would be the best course of action for the country, for national security purposes, etc. and that they then took it upon themselves to alleviate his concerns. This may not have been his overtly expressed desire. The Watergate burglary and the Iran/Contra scandals are perfect examples of crimes committed and covered up in the President’s name, without the President’s full knowledge beforehand. 

That said, it hardly seems likely that, should Johnson have wanted the Warren Commission to say Oswald acted alone, he would have been shy about letting his feelings be known. It is indisputable that, once he became President, the Senate's investigation into the crimes of his close associate Bobby Baker slowed to a halt. It is also indisputable that a January 10, 1964 phone conversation between Johnson and Senator George Smathers captured the two men discussing the investigation and figuring out how to get the Republican Senators pushing the investigation to "behave". Irregardless of whether Johnson passively or actively pushed a cover-up, however, it is clear that an inadequate investigation occurred on his watch. It took the United States 90 years to correct its official view on slavery; one can only hope the government’s forthcoming admission it erred on the Kennedy assassination will not take as long.

But in the meantime, I’m hopeful I’ve been able to show those who habitually claim there’s just not one “scintilla” of evidence for a conspiracy that there is, in fact, a whole boatload of scintillas.  No, scratch that, a flotilla of scintillas.  If nothing else, I pray my efforts have lessened the chances of anyone taking the “not one scintilla” argument seriously. In Latin, scintilla means spark. If the evidence in this presentation has sparked your curiosity, then you should conclude there is a scintilla of evidence.

For those of you still in denial, in this presentation, it has been demonstrated that:

1.  There was a verifiable lack of interest by the FBI in uncovering the facts of Kennedy’s autopsy. 

2.  The drawings prepared by the autopsy doctors and presented in their Warren Commission testimony ignored their own measurements of the President’s wound locations and presented a grossly distorted picture of his wounds. During his testimony, Dr. Humes lied about the use of the measurements in creating these drawings.

3.  There was a verifiable lack of interest on the part of the Warren Commission in determining the facts regarding the President’s wounds, and how these related to the possibility of conspiracy.

4.  The assassination re-enactment on May 24, 1964 was deliberately not as accurate as it could have been, in ways that indicate it was designed not to uncover the likelihood of the single-bullet theory, but merely whether it was remotely possible.

5.  Warren Commission counsel Arlen Specter elicited knowingly false testimony about this re-enactment from Secret Service Agent Thomas Kelley. This false testimony obscured the fact that Specter and Kelley had used the autopsy photos to determine the location of the President's back wound in order to best test the possibility a bullet entering this location from a rifle in the sniper's nest could exit the President's neck wound and go on to hit Governor Connally in his right armpit. That Kelley falsely claimed they'd used the drawings created by the doctors to establish this location, and that no photos of the location used were entered into evidence, is evidence both men were in fact engaged in a massive deception. Perjury and subornation of perjury.

6.  A report was created in 1967 that misrepresented the autopsy photos of the President at the very time CBS News was pressuring the administration to create a report confirming that these photographs supported the conclusions of the Warren Commission.

7.  A similar report was created in 1968, and released in the final days of the Johnson Administration. This report is false in its defense of the single-bullet theory. Its re-appraisal of the President’s head wounds is also in conflict with the autopsy photos as published.

8.  This incorrect appraisal of the head wound was seconded by the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel in 1979. To support their conclusions a number of contradictory exhibits were presented. 

9.  Dr. Michael Baden presented an important exhibit to the HSCA upside down, and inaccurately depicted the President's head wound to the committee. He made statements in his testimony that, when compared to the pathology report created by his panel, reflected his total confusion about Kennedy’s head wounds.  He also misled the committee about Dr. Humes' Warren Commission testimony about the head wounds.

10.  The enhanced x-rays as presented by the HSCA were cropped in a suspicious manner, with areas of supreme interest in the un-enhanced x-ray, the occipital region of the skull and the upper cervical region of the neck, deliberately excluded.

11.  The interpretations of the autopsy photos and x-rays by the HSCA’s various panels and consultants were frequently in disagreement with each other. The committee for the most part ignored these conflicts, and presented the reports of the consultants as if they had all been accepted by the committee.  While this may have spared the doctors some embarrassment, it left an extremely confusing public record.

12. The x-rays as presented included fractures and fragments that were in conflict with the HSCA’s conclusions on the head wounds. While some of these items of interest were acknowledged by the HSCA’s radiology consultants, they were left unexplained by the pathology panel.

13. The HSCA’s trajectory analysis was conducted against the advice of both its forensic pathology panel and wound ballistics expert and presented false depictions of both Governor Connally’s position in the car at Zapruder frame 190, and President Kennedy’s posture at frame 313. These false representations supported the committee’s conclusions on the single-bullet theory and its assertion that Oswald fired all the bullets striking Kennedy.

14. The conclusions of the bullet lead analysis performed on behalf of the HSCA were almost certainly incorrect and were undoubtedly in conflict with the earlier and subsequent writings of its author.  These conclusions were also in conflict with the guidelines of the FBI in place at that time.

15.  The exhibit titles and testimony of the HSCA’s wound ballistics expert were changed in such a manner as to disguise that he'd been studying the wound ballistics of subsonic ammunition. This was apparently done on purpose and without his knowledge.

16.  The single-bullet theory simulations and recreations shown on TV in recent years have all been deceptive in one way or another. None of them present the proportions of Kennedy and the locations of his wounds accurately. They are quite often deceptive about Connally’s position in the limousine as well.  Even worse, neither the Warren Commission, nor any of the subsequent medical panels, nor any of the television programs defending the single-bullet theory, have demonstrated the internal passage of the magic bullet through Kennedy and, specifically, how this bullet evaded bone.

17.  The autopsy photos and x-rays available on the internet, whose authenticity has been acknowledged by several of those who’ve inspected the originals, reveal an entrance on the skull right where the autopsy doctors said it was. I am at a loss to explain why so many men who’ve viewed the originals of these photos and x-rays, lone-nut theorist and conspiracy theorist alike, including the autopsy doctors themselves, have failed to notice this entrance. If this failure is due purely to human error, then perhaps many of the suspicious “mistakes” listed above are not so suspicious at all.  Perhaps the level of competence we expect from our “experts” is simply unrealistic.  Or perhaps I am simply wrong in my appraisal of these photos and x-rays.

But am I wrong about all of this?   

Has my Gump-like quest been in vain?