Myths and Errors in ABC's "Truth and Lies" Documentary

[Michael T. Griffith]

Brennan ran up to the police immediately after the shooting and told them he saw a shooter in the window. This was when many were running around the grassy knoll and fence area.

Did he make that all up? He didn't see anything? And then got lucky about a story he made up? Other people also saw a gunman and/or rifle. He lucked out by being right?

You must be kidding. You simply must be kidding. It's 2026, and you're still defending Brennan's "identification" of Oswald? Just unbelievable. Again, you guys exhibit a cult-like mentality when it comes to dealing with the JFK case. You just can't bring yourselves to deal with contrary evidence in a rational, credible manner.

Have you ever stood where Brennan was standing and looked up at the sixth-floor window at around noon? I have. I say "total hogwash" to anyone who claims they could see someone clearly enough from that position, at that distance, while he was firing from behind the window, to ID him in a police lineup. Hogwash. Even the HSCA's chief counsel, who was anxious to accept any evidence against Oswald, did not buy Brennan's ID.

For starters, Brennan couldn't even identify which sixth-floor window he supposedly observed, and the Zapruder film shows he was not even looking up until after Z207.

Brennan said the man he saw in the window was standing when he fired each of the shots, a fanciful proposition that even the Warren Commission rejected.

In addition, Brennan failed to positively identify Oswald in a police line-up on November 22, even though he had seen Oswald's picture beforehand. Posner deals with this problem by advancing Brennan's claim that he could have identified Oswald in the November 22 line-up but was afraid to do so because he feared Oswald had accomplices who would kill him if he made the identification! Yet, on November 22, Brennan spoke with reporters about the assassination, and he even gave them his name--strange behavior for a man who supposedly feared he would be killed if he identified Oswald in a police station.

Moreover, Brennan said that when he looked up after the presidential limousine had driven away, he still saw Oswald in the sixth-floor window. Brennan added that Oswald remained at the window for at least a few seconds after that. Then, said Brennan, Oswald "simply moved away from the window until he disappeared from my line of vision. He didn't appear to be rushed," recalled Brennan. Really? Do you buy that nonsense?

To have had any remote chance of getting to the sixth-floor lunchroom before Roy Truly reached the second-floor landing, Oswald could not possibly have lingered at the window in the manner described by Brennan.

Yet another often-overlooked problem with Brennan's testimony is that Brennan said he saw three-fourths of the rifle in the sixth-floor window and that he saw no scope on it. But if the rifle had been the alleged murder weapon, the scope would have been visible to Brennan.

Brennan may well have seen someone firing from the sixth-floor window, but the gunman he saw was not Oswald. Brennan's description of the gunman's clothing matches that given by four other witnesses who reported seeing a man in the window. Brennan and the other witnesses described the man's shirt as a regular "light-colored" shirt. However, Oswald did not wear a light-colored shirt to work that day. He wore a brown, rust-colored shirt that day, and he was seen in that shirt in the second-floor lunchroom less than ninety seconds after the shots were fired.

I should add that two witnesses who saw the sixth-floor gunman said his hair was light-colored or light-brown, whereas Oswald's hair was solid brown and not light-colored at all.

Howard Brennan's specious ID of Oswald and his dubious claims about what he saw during and after the shooting are another prime example of why discussions with you guys go nowhere. You guys won't admit anything, no matter how obvious it is, if it contradicts the lone-gunman theory. It's 2026, and yet, incredibly, here you are still claiming that Howard Brennan's ID of Oswald was credible. Brennan's ID of Oswald would have been torn to shreds in a trial, partly for the reasons discussed above, as well as other reasons.

[Zeon Mason]

Mr.Griffith, thanks for staying around on this forum and taking all the flak from LN diehards. For 25  years I have questioned the WC conclusion that Oswald was the only gunman and that he acted alone without any other persons having influenced him.

Although I have concluded that the WC theory is possible I have not seen any conclusive reenactment using an MC rifle in the same condition as the one found on the 6th floor TSBD at 1:20 pm by Boone and Weitzman.

I’ve seen attempts by shooters with newer better quality MC rifles with fully functional and better quality scopes that don’t drift or lose their zero after the 1st shot.

I’ve seen the CBS shooting trial which is a poorly done experiment which essentially “cheats” by allowing the shooters to know in advance exactly how the target will travel along a white rail and the target itself is a composite RED silhouette  figure stuck on a larger black square. The shooters were allowed to be already in position to aim at the target BEFORE it begins to move. There was no tree in the way. There was no requirement to use the stacked boxes as a firing platform. There was no attempt to have the shooter first sitting on a box and then lean over to rest the rifle on the 2 boxes just before beginning to aim and track the moving target.

I’ve seen the 2003 Beyond Conspiracy documentary that Peter Jennings hosted and I’ve found so many errors in that documentary that I’ve concluded it was an intentional fraud.

For me, there are just too many suspicious people interacting with Oswald, such as George Demorhenshield, Jack Ruby. Guy Bannister, and Alpha 66 members who just coincidentally are in a photo with Oswald.

Then as Mr Griffith keeps reminding us, the evidence itself is very suspect and I see no way to reconcile these discrepancies.

Most disturbingly is the  incompetence of Will Fritz ( or was it purposeful obfuscation?) in handling Oswald and failing to  make  a satisfactory recording of interviewing Oswald.

So I remain a Skeptic especially since new evidence seems to keep emerging such as the recording of LBJs advisor talking with Billy Sol Estes.

[Benjamin Cole]

Are there photos of Alpha 66 members and LHO together? Are you speaking figuratively?

I think there is a possibility of a couple of guys, possibly Alpha 66'ers, somehow hoodwinking or cooperating with LHO in the JFKA. One was the GK smoke-and-bang show, and the other was a second shooter behind JFK.

But there is no hard evidence of this scenario. It is speculative. 

In general, I suspect a very small JFKA plot (three guys), which is why everything is vapors when it comes to explaining larger plots.

LHO's connections to G2 and KGB'ers have never been heavily researched, except somewhat by Gus Russo.

[Tom Graves]

One was the GK smoke-and-bang show, and the other was a second shooter behind JFK. But there is no hard evidence of this scenario.   

There is no evidence whatsoever.

[Michael T. Griffith]

One was the GK smoke-and-bang show, and the other was a second shooter behind JFK.

But there is no hard evidence of this scenario. It is speculative.

There is no evidence whatsoever.

There's plenty of evidence of a shooter on the grassy knoll:

-- We have photographic evidence of gun smoke hanging over one of the trees in front of the fence on the knoll (Wiegman film). That smoke could not have come from the steam pipe in the railyard; the pipe was over 100 feet away from the area where the smoke was seen.

-- Several eyewitnesses reported seeing gun smoke coming from a spot near the fence on the grassy knoll.

-- Dozens of witnesses heard shots coming from the grassy knoll.

-- A number of witnesses smelled the pungent smell of gun powder on and near the grassy knoll after the shooting.

-- There is scientific acoustical evidence, in the form of the Dallas police dictabelt recording, that a shot was fired from the grassy knoll.

Acoustical scientists Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, who specialized in processing acoustical signals for military applications, determined that gunshot impulse 144.9 on the dictabelt came from the grassy knoll. Weiss and Aschkenasy calculated there was no more than a 5.3% probability (P=0.053) that the 144.9 impulse pattern was not caused by gunfire, and they argued that the probability was likely lower than that. This is why they reported there was a 95% probability or higher that this shot came from the grassy knoll.

In a stunning admission that has been ignored by lone-gunman theorists, the NRC/NAS/Ramsey panel acknowledged that their analysis found that the probability that the 144.9 impulse pattern was not gunfire from the knoll was 22.3% (P=0.223), which means their analysis found that the probability that the impulse pattern was caused by gunfire from the knoll was 77.7%.

Let me repeat that: Even the NRC/NAS/Ramsey panel, endlessly cited by lone-gunman theorists, said there was a 77.7% probability that the 144.9 impulse was caused by gunfire from the grassy knoll.

Moreover, former USDA research scientist Dr. Donald Thomas has proved that the NRC/NAS/Ramsey panel committed crucial errors in reaching their P=0.223 calculation, and that the probability that the 144.9 impulse pattern was caused by grassy knoll gunfire is virtually 100% (https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Acoustics_Overview_and_History_-_part_2.html).

BTW, the NRC/NAS/Ramsey panel also admitted there was a 93% probability that the locational-movement correlations identified by the BBN acoustical experts between the DPD dictabelt impulses and the impulses from Dallas test firing were not the result of chance. The BBN scientists determined that the probability that chance caused these correlations was “less than 1%.”

-- Two witnesses saw a man running into the railyard from the fence on the knoll right after the shooting.

-- DPD Chief Jesse Curry's first reaction to the shooting, seconds after it happened, was to order officers to go to the area of the triple underpass, which was right next to the grassy knoll.

-- Dozens of the people in the plaza rushed toward the grassy knoll after the shots were fired.

[Lance Payette]

Mr.Griffith, thanks for staying around on this forum and taking all the flak from LN diehards. For 25  years I have questioned the WC conclusion that Oswald was the only gunman and that he acted alone without any other persons having influenced him.

Although I have concluded that the WC theory is possible I have not seen any conclusive reenactment using an MC rifle in the same condition as the one found on the 6th floor TSBD at 1:20 pm by Boone and Weitzman.

I’ve seen attempts by shooters with newer better quality MC rifles with fully functional and better quality scopes that don’t drift or lose their zero after the 1st shot.

I’ve seen the CBS shooting trial which is a poorly done experiment which essentially “cheats” by allowing the shooters to know in advance exactly how the target will travel along a white rail and the target itself is a composite RED silhouette  figure stuck on a larger black square. The shooters were allowed to be already in position to aim at the target BEFORE it begins to move. There was no tree in the way. There was no requirement to use the stacked boxes as a firing platform. There was no attempt to have the shooter first sitting on a box and then lean over to rest the rifle on the 2 boxes just before beginning to aim and track the moving target.

I’ve seen the 2003 Beyond Conspiracy documentary that Peter Jennings hosted and I’ve found so many errors in that documentary that I’ve concluded it was an intentional fraud.

For me, there are just too many suspicious people interacting with Oswald, such as George Demorhenshield, Jack Ruby. Guy Bannister, and Alpha 66 members who just coincidentally are in a photo with Oswald.

Then as Mr Griffith keeps reminding us, the evidence itself is very suspect and I see no way to reconcile these discrepancies.

Most disturbingly is the  incompetence of Will Fritz ( or was it purposeful obfuscation?) in handling Oswald and failing to  make  a satisfactory recording of interviewing Oswald.

So I remain a Skeptic especially since new evidence seems to keep emerging such as the recording of LBJs advisor talking with Billy Sol Estes.

Three of the less pleasant years of my legal career had me representing the local mental health agency. I was the “prosecutor” (as it were) for the involuntary commitment of folks suffering from serious mental disorders. In every case, I had to present the testimony of two licensed psychiatrists. Hence, I eventually had a pretty good grasp of the medical issues. It was unpleasant because many of these folks were intelligent and had loving families; they just badly needed help and were incapable of facing this reality on their own.

As I’ve described in other posts, conspiracy-prone thinking is not necessarily pathological – but don’t kid yourself, much of it is. What passes for “normal” on a JFKA forum is definitely not normal in the outside world. I see little thinking in the CT community, even at the highest levels, that I wouldn’t describe as “highly aberrant” at best. (Some, yes.)

I won’t engage in amateur diagnosis, but anyone who can’t see that the posts of someone like MTG and several others here do not reflect a mind tracking in the channels of normality needs to take a hard look in the mirror at himself.

It is entirely rational to see that the LN narrative is less than watertight and to attempt to think through whether the holes can be plausibly plugged. It is entirely rational to entertain a conspiracy theory that bears at least some resemblance to what a real-world Presidential assassination might have looked like. To become caught up in the sort of nonsense propounded by MTG and his ilk, and to fail to recognize it for what it is, is ... well, an epistemological problem in itself. The sort of CT stuff propounded by MTG and his ilk actually does a disservice to serious, rational analysis of the JFKA.

The thought process seems to be, "If I can argue that absolutely everything associated with the JFKA was in furtherance of a conspiracy, then people are sure to believe that at least some of it was." Well, no, that's not how rational analysis works.

[Michael T. Griffith]

No one will believe me, but this is completely true: Last night, I actually had my first-ever JFKA-related dream. Oswald, JFK and Dealey Plaza weren't in it. I wasn't even in it. I was just the audience. Some guy was engaged in a comical effort to frame a bizarre cast of characters for the JFKA. When I awoke at 2 AM and could actually remember some of the details, I was laughing at the sheer cleverness. It then occurred to me: Wouldn't that make a great counterpart to "JFK" - i.e., an intensely serious black comedy portraying all the insane stuff that people like MTG believe? Instead of just talking about this nonsense, which gives it a sort of quasi-credibility, partly because you can focus on each insane claim in isolation and don't have to think about it in context, actually portray it all on the screen! Every facet of the elaborate, multi-facted conspiracy, from the grooming and framing of Oswald, to the battle scene in Dealey Plaza, to the Tippit murder, to the two autopsies, to the massive cover-up, to the mystery deaths, to ... well, you get the idea. I promise you, people would be holding their sides and rolling in the aisles. If I were younger, and Harry Dean Stanton were still around to play Oswald, I think I might actually get to work on a screenplay. In the meantime, people, just try to use your imaginations and think through what the events so seriously hypothesized by CTers like MTG would actually have looked like.

Oh, so now you're appealing to your dreams to bolster your minority viewpoint, while still pretending that people who disagree with you believe "insane stuff"! I guess you just don't realize the embarrassing irony of your posturing.

Are you ever going to get around to explaining how you guys can still believe Howard Brennan's identification of Oswald given the gaping holes and contradictions in Brennan's story? Let me refresh your memory:

You must be kidding. You simply must be kidding. It's 2026, and you're still defending Brennan's "identification" of Oswald? Just unbelievable. Again, you guys exhibit a cult-like mentality when it comes to dealing with the JFK case. You just can't bring yourselves to deal with contrary evidence in a rational, credible manner.

Have you ever stood where Brennan was standing and looked up at the sixth-floor window at around noon? I have. I say "total hogwash" to anyone who claims they could see someone clearly enough from that position, at that distance, while he was firing from behind the window, to ID him in a police lineup. Hogwash. Even the HSCA's chief counsel, who was anxious to accept any evidence against Oswald, did not buy Brennan's ID.

For starters, Brennan couldn't even identify which sixth-floor window he supposedly observed, and the Zapruder film shows he was not even looking up until after Z207.

Brennan said the man he saw in the window was standing when he fired each of the shots, a fanciful proposition that even the Warren Commission rejected.

In addition, Brennan failed to positively identify Oswald in a police line-up on November 22, even though he had seen Oswald's picture beforehand. Posner deals with this problem by advancing Brennan's claim that he could have identified Oswald in the November 22 line-up but was afraid to do so because he feared Oswald had accomplices who would kill him if he made the identification! Yet, on November 22, Brennan spoke with reporters about the assassination, and he even gave them his name--strange behavior for a man who supposedly feared he would be killed if he identified Oswald in a police station.

Moreover, Brennan said that when he looked up after the presidential limousine had driven away, he still saw Oswald in the sixth-floor window. Brennan added that Oswald remained at the window for at least a few seconds after that. Then, said Brennan, Oswald "simply moved away from the window until he disappeared from my line of vision. He didn't appear to be rushed," recalled Brennan. Really? Do you buy that nonsense?

To have had any remote chance of getting to the sixth-floor lunchroom before Roy Truly reached the second-floor landing, Oswald could not possibly have lingered at the window in the manner described by Brennan.

Yet another often-overlooked problem with Brennan's testimony is that Brennan said he saw three-fourths of the rifle in the sixth-floor window and that he saw no scope on it. But if the rifle had been the alleged murder weapon, the scope would have been visible to Brennan.

Brennan may well have seen someone firing from the sixth-floor window, but the gunman he saw was not Oswald. Brennan's description of the gunman's clothing matches that given by four other witnesses who reported seeing a man in the window. Brennan and the other witnesses described the man's shirt as a regular "light-colored" shirt. However, Oswald did not wear a light-colored shirt to work that day. He wore a brown, rust-colored shirt that day, and he was seen in that shirt in the second-floor lunchroom less than ninety seconds after the shots were fired.

I should add that two witnesses who saw the sixth-floor gunman said his hair was light-colored or light-brown, whereas Oswald's hair was solid brown and not light-colored at all.

Howard Brennan's specious ID of Oswald and his dubious claims about what he saw during and after the shooting are another prime example of why discussions with you guys go nowhere. You guys won't admit anything, no matter how obvious it is, if it contradicts the lone-gunman theory. It's 2026, and yet, incredibly, here you are still claiming that Howard Brennan's ID of Oswald was credible. Brennan's ID of Oswald would have been torn to shreds in a trial, partly for the reasons discussed above, as well as other reasons.