It's time for another recap in response to the feeble, inane, square-peg-in-round-hole excuses being offered by WC apologists for their refusal to accept Dr. Young's account.
-- First and foremost, we need to understand that if WC apologists are correct, we must believe the following:
* That Dr. Young lied when he said that he phoned Chief Mills to verify his recollection, and that Chief Mills verified his recollection:
Now just to reassure myself, Chief Martinell unfortunately has died. Chief Mills had become a Lieutenant Commander in a Medical Service Corps and retired from the Navy.
However, I found him living in Johnson City, Texas, where he had been working for the Johnson family on the ranch and whatnot. But he had retired in Johnson City. I picked up the phone and I called him. He confirmed exactly what I had put down in my notes, that there was a bent brass slug that they had brought out that they had picked up off the floor. . . ."
As we should all know by now, when Dr. Young mentioned "what I had put down in my notes," he was referring to his 11/23/63 essay "What Price a Rose?"
* That Dr. Young did not really read from his 11/23/63 essay during his 2001 Navy oral history interviews, even though both of the 2013 Navy articles on Dr. Young's interviews state that he did, and even though the transcript of the third interview says he did.
* That Dr. Young lied when he said that Chiefs Mills and Martinell brought the limo bullet to him at the autopsy.
* That Dr. Young lied when he said the bullet was brass in color, half a centimeter in diameter, deformed/misshapen, and "slightly bent on the end."
Needless to say, there was no bullet fragment at the autopsy that Dr. Young could have mistaken for a deformed brass-colored bullet that was "slightly bent on the end."
* That Dr. Young was only pretending to have seen the bullet when he described its color, diameter, and deformation, and when he said it did not "look like" a copper-jacketed military bullet.
He could not have honestly said these things if he had not seen the bullet.
* That Dr. Young was carrying out some kind of enormous fraud or grand delusion when he described the bullet in a letter to President Gerald Ford, in his conversation with Arlen Specter, and in his third 2001 oral history interview.
-- I agree that there may well have been phone contact between the White House garage and the Bethesda morgue. If so, this makes Dr. Young's account all the more plausible, since we have abundant testimony from autopsy witnesses that the autopsy doctors were anxiously looking for the back-wound bullet and were distraught that they could not find it. If Humes had found out that a bullet had been found in the limo, he would have wanted it brought to the autopsy right away so he could compare it with the back wound.
When Dr. Young handed the skull fragments and bullet over to Humes, Humes either realized the bullet was problematic for the single-assassin scenario (which he was already being fed) or he was ordered to discard the bullet for this reason.
-- I notice that WC apologists are citing selected portions of Sibert and O'Neill's ARRB testimony regarding the missile receipt. Humm, well, now this is curious because WC apologists routinely reject pro-conspiracy ARRB testimony with the argument that "oh, they were talking about things that happened 34-35 years earlier," as if no one can remember things that happened 35 years ago. This is literally Fred Litwin's main argument against most of the historic ARRB disclosures, such as autopsy photographer James Stringer's bombshell ARRB testimony about the autopsy photos.
Even in this thread, WC apologists have attacked Dr. Young's account because it was supposedly given "38 years after the fact," ignoring the fact that most people can remember important events that happened 30-plus years ago, and ignoring the fact that Dr. Young's 11/23/63 account was written less than 24 hours after the fact.
Heck, my dad is 90 years old, and he can remember all kinds of things that happened 40-50 years ago with remarkable accuracy.
-- I again point out that Sibert and O'Neill did not mention the missile receipt in their 11/26/63 report on the autopsy. This is a very strange omission. They mentioned the 7x2 mm and 3x1 mm bullet fragments but said nothing about signing for those fragments. That was a major piece of information to leave out. This could logically be viewed as an indication that they were troubled about having signed the "missile" receipt. Sibert made it clear in his HSCA interview that he had serious misgivings about having signed the receipt.
-- WC apologists are still peddling the Loeffler memo as their one alleged example of the term "bullet/missile" being used to describe bullet fragments. This is really a stretch, not to mention the hundreds of examples that I documented of the terms "bullet" and "missile" being distinguished from the terms "fragments," "bullet fragments," and "missile fragments" in the Warren Report, in the WC hearings, in Sibert and O'Neill's 11/26/63 report, in Sibert and O'Neill's HSCA testimony, and in the HSCA FPP's report. The Loeffler memo was part of the documentation relating to the chain of evidence for the alleged stretcher bullet, CE 399. At this very time, the FBI was trying to find out about the bullet that had been reportedly found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Keep in mind that this memo was written on 11/22/63.
Loeffler begins the one-page memo by noting that O.P. Wright was contacted regarding "the present location of the bullet that was taken from the body of Governor Connally." Now, come on, folks. This is clearly, undeniably a reference to the stretcher bullet. This becomes even more obvious with Loeffler's next sentence: "Mr. Wright said he had given instructions to his supervising nurse to preserve the bullet."
Then, Loeffler mentions that Wright advised that some fragments were found in Connally's wrist and were turned over to Texas highway patrolman Nolan. Loeffler next says that Wright assumed that Nolan would take the bullet to the state lab in Austin.
So, we can either believe that Loeffler somehow thought the stretcher bullet was really just the wrist fragments, even though he had just referred to "the bullet" twice, or we can make the more logical assumption that Loeffler simply reverted to referring to the stretcher bullet when he said Nolan would take the bullet to the state lab. The focus of the memo was the location of the stretcher bullet, not the wrist fragments.
If Loeffler thought "the bullet" was the wrist fragments, why did he use the term "bullet" at all in the memo? Why didn't he simply explain that "we thought that a bullet had been removed from Connally's body, but it turns out that only some fragments were removed from his wrist"?
-- WC apologists are so caught up in the cover story for the missile receipt that they don't seem to stop and think about how implausible it is.
I mean, think about it. You're an FBI agent at the autopsy of the president of the United States in the crime of the century. You understand the importance of ballistic evidence and ensuring a proper chain of possession for it. You have a Navy hospital corpsman hand you a receipt that says you're signing for a "missile," but you look at the evidence bottle and see there's no bullet in it, not even close. You see that the bottle only contains two small fragments that make up only a tiny fraction of the mass of a bullet. Are you going to sign such a severely inaccurate receipt? Wouldn't you insist that the corpsman retype the receipt so that it accurately described the contents of the evidence bottle? Of course you would -- unless, that is, you were ordered or pressured to sign the receipt.
-- Everyone now admits that Dr. Young was telling the truth when he said he sent Mills and Martinell to the White House garage to search JFK's limo, but we're supposed to believe that he lied through his teeth or experienced a remarkable hallucination when he wrote on 11/23/63, less than 24 hours after the autopsy, that Mills and Martinell brought back some skull fragments and a misshapen bullet from the limo.
-- In his 11/23/63 essay, Dr. Young not only described the bullet but he also described the three skull fragments:
The envelope contained three pieces of skull bone, one about three inches in diameter, another two inches in diameter and the third about one to one and a half inches in diameter. It also contained a brass slug about half a centimeter in diameter and distorted. These were found on the floor of the blood-spattered convertible.
-- By even the most critical, narrow analysis of Jan Herman's statements to Dr. Robertson about his phone call with Chief Mills, at the very least Chief Mills confirmed that Dr. Young later called him to verify his recollection. This alone confirms a key part of Dr. Young's account and shows that Dr. Young wanted to ensure that his recollection was correct.
Moreover, the fact that Mills did not deny the finding of the bullet is clear tacit confirmation that a bullet was found. As Dr. Robertson notes, if no bullet had been found in the limo, Mills surely would have immediately made this clear to Herman. If Mills had done this, it would be strong evidence that Young was wrong about receiving the limo bullet -- but Mills gave no indication whatsoever that Dr. Young was mistaken on this issue.
-- At every point, Dr. Young behaved exactly like we would expect him to behave if he had actually received the limo bullet from Mills and Martinell at the autopsy. At every turn, his actions indicate sincerity and truthfulness. He had no motive or reason to lie, and there was no fragment at the autopsy that he could have mistaken for a bullet.
-- Finally, I haven't brought this up yet, but there are many doubtful claims, discrepancies, and suspicious omissions in the official story (or stories) about the skull fragments, what they looked like, and when and how they arrived at the autopsy. And then we have the fact that two autopsy witnesses, including one of the morticians, saw Humes sawing JFK's skull before the official autopsy began, and the mortician insisted that the damage to the top of the head seen in the autopsy photos was done by the autopsy doctors and was not present when the body first arrived.
