JFK Assassination Forum
The JFK Assassination Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Discussion & Debate => Topic started by: Michael T. Griffith on June 23, 2026, 03:03:59 PM
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Numerous scholars have uncovered serious problems, contradictions, and clear cases of fraud in the JFK assassination medical evidence, ballistics evidence, crime-scene evidence, and other evidence. This should not be surprising if we remember the following facts:
-- The autopsy materials and other materials that the Warren Commission (WC) sealed were not supposed to be released until 2039. The WC put a 75-year seal on those records. Thus, those involved in the cover-up believed that no one would see those materials for another 75 years (1964-2039).
WC apologists often ask, "How could any halfway intelligent cover-up not have destroyed this evidence?" Answer: One, because they didn't think anyone would see it for 75 years. Two, because they didn't realize the implications of some of the evidence at the time. Three, because criminals sometimes make mistakes, some of them bad ones.
Few conspiracies are perfect. Even carefully planned military operations sometimes go wrong because a few things were overlooked or misjudged.
-- The historic evidence revealed in the House Select Committee on Assassinations' (HSCA's) sealed documents by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990s was not supposed to be released until 2029. The HSCA put a 50-year seal on those records. Thus, they thought it would be another 50 years before anyone would read the Lopez-Hardway report on the Oswald impersonations in Mexico City two months before the assassination and the explosive information disclosed by the autopsy witnesses and the Dallas doctors and nurses, for example.
-- The plotters could not have known in 1963 that new scientific disciplines would later provide hard evidence of conspiracy. They could not have known that the science of optical-density measurement would later prove that the autopsy x-rays were altered, and that the science of acoustical identification of gunfire would later prove that more than three shots were fired during the assassination and that one of the shots came from the grassy knoll.
And, again, the WC placed a 75-year seal on the autopsy photos and x-rays, so the plotters thought that no one would even see those materials for 75 years, long after the plotters would be dead and gone.
-- The plotters most likely believed that their cover-up version of the shooting would be readily, uncritically accepted by the vast majority of Americans, since back then most Americans believed that when all government officials from both parties said the same thing about a major event they must be telling the truth. Surely the plotters were surprised when opinion polls done a few years after the Warren Report was published revealed that over 60% of Americans doubted that only one man was behind JFK's death.
-- The plotters were not all powerful and omnipresent, and some of their cover-up operatives made mistakes, some of them severe. Most of the people who aided in the cover-up were not part of the conspiracy and did not realize they were helping to cover up a high-level assassination plot. Many of them believed they were acting patriotically and/or in the interest of national security. Some of them were ordered to do what they did.
This is why some evidence of multiple shooters and of a cover-up escaped the notice of the cover-up operatives. Not all FBI agents misrepresented or suppressed what witnesses told them. Not all local Dallas law enforcement personnel misrepresented the physical evidence and what witnesses told them. Not all FBI lab personnel misstated or suppressed the results of the lab's findings. Most of the autopsy witnesses told the truth about JFK's wounds and about the autopsy.
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Just who were these "plotters" and how do you know what they were thinking?
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Ignore is such a beautiful feature when it comes to John Corbett.
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Ignore is such a beautiful feature when it comes to John Corbett.
It comes from knowing where the focus should be placed. I choose to focus on solid evidence, that would be accepted by our criminal courts. That includes forensics, medical evidence, photographic evidence, expert testimony, etc. It also includes eye and ear witness accounts with the caveat that all such accounts should be scrutinized. Having served on four juries, two criminal and two civil, I know that is how judge's instruct jurors to treat such evidence and that is what I try to do with witness statements regarding the JFKA. That excludes the opinions of amateur sleuths and other people offering opinions about the evidence that falls outside their area of expertise.
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Just who were these "plotters" and how do you know what they were thinking?
Oh, surprise, surprise: One of our two worst resident know-nothing trolls is offering another unserious, frivolous reply.
It is indeed ironic that three of the seven members of the WC, which you claim got everything right, rejected the single-bullet theory, the very foundation of the lone-gunman theory. One of those three, Congressman Hale Boggs, said that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover "lied his eyes out to the Commission, on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullet, the gun, you name it." Another of the three, Senator Richard Russell, rejected the lone-gunman theory and the SBT and believed there was a conspiracy. Another of the three, Senator Sherman Cooper, did not believe that Oswald acted alone, did not believe the single-bullet theory, said there was corruption in the WC, said the WC knew about Jack Ruby and the Mafia but did not care, and said that the "true believers" on the Commission stated they were acting for “God and country.”
Who were the plotters? We know who some of them were:
-- Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello, who told two people, one of them a federal informant, that he was involved in the assassination.
-- Mafia kingpin Santo Trafficante, who was overheard on federal wiretaps talking about the need for JFK to die, and revealed his knowledge of/role in the plot to two people.
The four best books on the evidence that Marcello and Trafficante were involved in the plot are Dr. David Kaiser's The Road to Dallas, Dr. David Scheim's The Mafia Killed President Kennedy, Dr. Richard Mahoney's The Kennedy Brothers, and Lamar Waldron's The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination.
-- Mafia operative Jack Ruby, whose foreknowledge of the assassination was revealed in FBI documents released in 2017. The documents reveal that a federal informant reported to his federal contact in 1977 that Ruby knew about the assassination in advance. The informant logically thought that this vital information would be of interest to the newly formed HSCA, and he assumed the FBI would make the HSCA aware of this information. The Dallas FBI office forwarded the documents about the informant's disclosure to FBI HQ, but FBI HQ did not give them to the HSCA and did not even tell the HSCA about them.
-- High-ranking CIA officer and avowed Kennedy hater William King Harvey. Mark Wyatt, who served as Harvey's aide in 1963, told his children and a French journalist that he saw Harvey on a flight to Dallas in November 1963, and that Harvey made comments to him soon after the assassination that indicated Harvey had either known about the murder in advance or had been involved in it. Wyatt’s daughter urged him to testify to the HSCA, but he could not bring himself to do it because of his sense of loyalty to the CIA.
-- CIA hitman David Sanchez Morales, who proudly admitted to two close associates in 1973 that he and some other CIA personnel "took care" of Kennedy in retribution for Kennedy's alleged treason in the Bay of Pigs operation. The two witnesses were Morales' lifelong friend, Ruben Carbajal, and Morales' attorney, Bob Walton. Morales made this admission to them at the same time in the same room. Both Carbajal and Walton confirmed this to HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi. Fonzi discussed this in his book The Last Investigation.
I'm pointing out these things for the sake of others, not because I have any hope that you will read any of the books that document this evidence.
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-- Mafia operative Jack Ruby, whose foreknowledge of the assassination was revealed in FBI documents released in 2017. The documents reveal that a federal informant reported to his federal contact in 1977 that Ruby knew about the assassination in advance. The informant logically thought that this vital information would be of interest to the newly formed HSCA, and he assumed the FBI would make the HSCA aware of this information. The Dallas FBI office forwarded the documents about the informant's disclosure to FBI HQ, but FBI HQ did not give them to the HSCA and did not even tell the HSCA about them.
Yawn.
The man's insane. Reading his posts will only make you stupider.
Let’s examine this “Ruby foreknowledge” CT bombshell:
1. Our hero was Robert Murray Vanderslice, born in 1926 and died (in Dallas) in 1979.
2. He was an IRS tax informant, focusing on bookies, from 7/23/76 to 2/18/77 (six months). He was paid $135 for his services and $2.89 for expenses.
3. His last contact with the IRS was on 1/24/77. The IRS special agent to whom he was assigned, Lawrence Sandri, said he had never mentioned Ruby or anything about the JFKA.
4. At a restaurant lunch with the IRS local Intelligence Division Manager, Arlen Fuhlendorf, early in 1977 (some 14 years after the JFKA), he started talking about stripper Candy Barr (who did have a non-romantic, non-employment relationship with Jack Ruby a decade before the JFKA).
5. This somehow led to a discussion of Ruby. Vanderslice told Fuhlendorf that on the morning of the JFKA, Ruby had contacted him to watch the motorcade and had asked if he’d like to “watch the fireworks.” In CT world, this remark can have no meaning other than Ruby’s foreknowledge of the JFKA.
6. They watched the motorcade together from a corner near the Postal Annex. Following the JFKA, Ruby left, without comment, for the Dallas Morning News.
7. At the same lunch, Vanderslice divulged that he had been arrested and incarcerated at the Dallas County Jail at the same time Ruby was there. As a jail trustee, he said, he got to know Ruby better – but he said nothing further about the supposed foreknowledge or motorcade incident.
8. Fuhlendorf told the FBI that “as far as he knew” Vanderslice had been a reliable tax informant, but he did not know if he was truthful about Ruby. He initially reported the lunch conversation in a memorandum to the IRS national office for transmission to the HSCA, but the IRS returned the memo and told him to contact the Dallas office of the FBI. (The memorandum never surfaced.)
9. Vanderslice went to astounding lengths to avoid repeated efforts by both the FBI and IRS to contact him about his Ruby tale. Fuhlendorf thought he might have “been untruthful” or perhaps had “second thoughts” and had gotten “cold feet” after being told he might have to testify before the HSCA.
10. Because Vanderslice’s tale was inconsistent with Ruby’s WC testimony and that of a Dallas Morning News advertising department employee concerning Ruby’s activities on 11-22-63, and because Vanderslice was clearly avoiding both the FBI and IRS, the FBI abandoned further efforts to contact him.
11. On the last attempted contact, his wife said he was in Wichita Falls, “trying to make a buck here and there.”
Ho-hum, such is the stuff of which conspiratorial bombshells are made in MTG’s goofy end of the CT spectrum.
“Foreknowledge of the assassination.” BWAHAHA. :D :D :D :D
Not exactly a major exercise in factoid-busting, I’ll concede, but an interesting 30 minutes of mental exercise for your intrepid Factoid Buster.
Minor addendum: When the Vanderslice tale surfaced with the 2017 document release, it was of course of considerable news interest. THE VAST MAJORITY of news outlets, including major MSM, described Vanderslice - in headlines, no less - as an "FBI informant." Sexier than "small-time IRS tax informant," I guess. More like "FBI non-informant," as it turned out.
I reposted the above in response to He's Insane as recently as June 3.
You're welcome. Carry on.
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Oh, surprise, surprise: One of our two worst resident know-nothing trolls is offering another unserious, frivolous reply.
So you think asking you to tell us what you think happened is frivolous? That says a lot.
It is indeed ironic that three of the seven members of the WC, which you claim got everything right, rejected the single-bullet theory, the very foundation of the lone-gunman theory. One of those three, Congressman Hale Boggs, said that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover "lied his eyes out to the Commission, on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullet, the gun, you name it." Another of the three, Senator Richard Russell, rejected the lone-gunman theory and the SBT and believed there was a conspiracy. Another of the three, Senator Sherman Cooper, did not believe that Oswald acted alone, did not believe the single-bullet theory, said there was corruption in the WC, said the WC knew about Jack Ruby and the Mafia but did not care, and said that the "true believers" on the Commission stated they were acting for “God and country.”
Who were the plotters? We know who some of them were:
-- Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello, who told two people, one of them a federal informant, that he was involved in the assassination.
-- Mafia kingpin Santo Trafficante, who was overheard on federal wiretaps talking about the need for JFK to die, and revealed his knowledge of/role in the plot to two people.
The four best books on the evidence that Marcello and Trafficante were involved in the plot are Dr. David Kaiser's The Road to Dallas, Dr. David Scheim's The Mafia Killed President Kennedy, Dr. Richard Mahoney's The Kennedy Brothers, and Lamar Waldron's The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination.
-- Mafia operative Jack Ruby, whose foreknowledge of the assassination was revealed in FBI documents released in 2017. The documents reveal that a federal informant reported to his federal contact in 1977 that Ruby knew about the assassination in advance. The informant logically thought that this vital information would be of interest to the newly formed HSCA, and he assumed the FBI would make the HSCA aware of this information. The Dallas FBI office forwarded the documents about the informant's disclosure to FBI HQ, but FBI HQ did not give them to the HSCA and did not even tell the HSCA about them.
-- High-ranking CIA officer and avowed Kennedy hater William King Harvey. Mark Wyatt, who served as Harvey's aide in 1963, told his children and a French journalist that he saw Harvey on a flight to Dallas in November 1963, and that Harvey made comments to him soon after the assassination that indicated Harvey had either known about the murder in advance or had been involved in it. Wyatt’s daughter urged him to testify to the HSCA, but he could not bring himself to do it because of his sense of loyalty to the CIA.
-- CIA hitman David Sanchez Morales, who proudly admitted to two close associates in 1973 that he and some other CIA personnel "took care" of Kennedy in retribution for Kennedy's alleged treason in the Bay of Pigs operation. The two witnesses were Morales' lifelong friend, Ruben Carbajal, and Morales' attorney, Bob Walton. Morales made this admission to them at the same time in the same room. Both Carbajal and Walton confirmed this to HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi. Fonzi discussed this in his book The Last Investigation.
I'm pointing out these things for the sake of others, not because I have any hope that you will read any of the books that document this evidence.
Well, it's a start. So now tell us how the Mafia knew 6 weeks in advance of the assassination to place Oswald in the TSBD overlooking a motorcade route that had not yet even been planned. How did the conspirators get access to Oswald's Carcano rifle?
These questions will do for now. I'm sure I'll have more once I see your replies.
It's easy to propose a vague plot. The devil is in the details. That's what I never see CTs able to do. Hence the two questions I posed.
FYI. One of the first conspiracy books I read was Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. That was about 35 years ago. I didn't find it very compelling. Two others were David Lifton's Best Evidence and Mark Lane's Plausible denial. It's not nice to speak ill of the dead so I just won't say anything at all about them.
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So you think asking you to tell us what you think happened is frivolous? That says a lot.
Well, it's a start. So now tell us how the Mafia knew 6 weeks in advance of the assassination to place Oswald in the TSBD overlooking a motorcade route that had not yet even been planned.
CT beanie back on (whew, I'm getting dizzy): I noticed you said this same thing as having been some sort of epiphany for you in the video with Fred Litwin. In my Mafia scenario, the lads didn't have to plant Oswald in the TSBD or know anything in advance about the motorcade route. Why would this be a necessity?
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CT beanie back on (whew, I'm getting dizzy): I noticed you said this same thing as having been some sort of epiphany for you in the video with Fred Litwin. In my Mafia scenario, the lads didn't have to plant Oswald in the TSBD or know anything in advance about the motorcade route. Why would this be a necessity?
If they intended to us Oswald as either the shooter or the patsy, they would need him in a place where he could do the deed. As it was, the route wasn't made public until Monday of that week. That would have meant they had four days to locate a suitable shooter/patsy. What evidence is there that anybody in the Mafia knew Oswald was working in the TSBD? Even if they knew, that is a very small amount of time to convince Oswald to be the shooter. If he was intended to be the patsy, how did they get him to make the preparations to retrieve his rifle from Irving, then make the trip on Thursday night to fetch the rifle, and smuggle it into the TSBD the next day. The same questions apply no matter who one hypothesizes was behind the assassination.
On, the other hand, it is perfectly plausible that Oswald upon learning the motorcade would be passing directly in front of his workplace would hatch a scheme to take out JFK for reasons known only to him. It was a crime of opportunity.
If you disagree with my analysis, present a plausible explanation for how the Maffia, or anybody else could have hatched this plot using Oswald as either the shooter or the patsy.
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If they intended to us Oswald as either the shooter or the patsy, they would need him in a place where he could do the deed. As it was, the route wasn't made public until Monday of that week. That would have meant they had four days to locate a suitable shooter/patsy. What evidence is there that anybody in the Mafia knew Oswald was working in the TSBD? Even if they knew, that is a very small amount of time to convince Oswald to be the shooter. If he was intended to be the patsy, how did they get him to make the preparations to retrieve his rifle from Irving, then make the trip on Thursday night to fetch the rifle, and smuggle it into the TSBD the next day. The same questions apply no matter who one hypothesizes was behind the assassination.
On, the other hand, it is perfectly plausible that Oswald upon learning the motorcade would be passing directly in front of his workplace would hatch a scheme to take out JFK for reasons known only to him. It was a crime of opportunity.
If you disagree with my analysis, present a plausible explanation for how the Maffia, or anybody else could have hatched this plot using Oswald as either the shooter or the patsy.
Now you're arguing something different from it being a definitive conspiracy-killer that the Mafia would've had to place Oswald in the TSBD and known the motorcade route in advance.
The bare fact of JFK's upcoming trip to Dallas was known before Oswald even went to Mexico City. His uncle's relationship with Marcello was longstanding. If he was part of a Mafia plot, either as a knowing participant (as John Orr believes) or the perfect patsy, it may have been pure happenstance that his perch in the TSBD turned out to be ideal a few days before the deed. Had it not been, perhaps he would have been placed elsewhere.
I don't have to articulate an entire Mafia scenario. I will await what John Orr and Larry Schnapf come up with, in terms of both evidence and theory. I did happen to watch a video interview today of John Orr by Matt Douthit, and Orr said it was an "entirely Mafia" JFKA but didn't expand on how he thought Oswald had been brought into the plot.
I can agree that the LN scenario is a more plausible explanation, at least unless Orr and Schnapf can convincingly show that the one-gunman scenario is ballistically impossible. You are the one who said the realization that the conspirators would have had to have placed Oswald in the TSBD and known the motorcade route long in advance was what ended your days as a CTer. I simply say that your realization is not correct. While being open to the Mafia theory, I don't think for a moment anyone placed Oswald in the TSBD or knew the route long in advance.
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Now you're arguing something different from it being a definitive conspiracy-killer that the Mafia would've had to place Oswald in the TSBD and known the motorcade route in advance.
The bare fact of JFK's upcoming trip to Dallas was known before Oswald even went to Mexico City. His uncle's relationship with Marcello was longstanding. If he was part of a Mafia plot, either as a knowing participant (as John Orr believes) or the perfect patsy, it may have been pure happenstance that his perch in the TSBD turned out to be ideal a few days before the deed. Had it not been, perhaps he would have been placed elsewhere.
I don't have to articulate an entire Mafia scenario. I will await what John Orr and Larry Schnapf come up with, in terms of both evidence and theory. I did happen to watch a video interview today of John Orr by Matt Douthit, and Orr said it was an "entirely Mafia" JFKA but didn't expand on how he thought Oswald had been brought into the plot.
I can agree that the LN scenario is a more plausible explanation, at least unless Orr and Schnapf can convincingly show that the one-gunman scenario is ballistically impossible. You are the one who said the realization that the conspirators would have had to have placed Oswald in the TSBD and known the motorcade route long in advance was what ended your days as a CTer. I simply say that your realization is not correct. While being open to the Mafia theory, I don't think for a moment anyone placed Oswald in the TSBD or knew the route long in advance.
Knowing JFK was coming to Texas isn't specific enough knowledge to place Oswald in the TSBD. The only way that works using Oswald as either the shooter or the patsy is if you know he would have perch overlooking the motorcade route.
Three sites were under consideration for the luncheon. Had either of the other two been selected, the motorcade would have been routed down Main St. in a west-to-east direction, making a shot from the TSBD almost impossible. The decision to use the Trade Mart, which dictated an east-to-west route down Main St. was made by JBC. I've actually seen CTs over the years claim that JBC was complicit in the assassination, even though he would have known he would be placing both himself and his wife in harm's way. But nothing is too silly for some folks.
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Knowing JFK was coming to Texas isn't specific enough knowledge to place Oswald in the TSBD. The only way that works using Oswald as either the shooter or the patsy is if you know he would have perch overlooking the motorcade route.
Three sites were under consideration for the luncheon. Had either of the other two been selected, the motorcade would have been routed down Main St. in a west-to-east direction, making a shot from the TSBD almost impossible. The decision to use the Trade Mart, which dictated an east-to-west route down Main St. was made by JBC. I've actually seen CTs over the years claim that JBC was complicit in the assassination, even though he would have known he would be placing both himself and his wife in harm's way. But nothing is too silly for some folks.
You are (intentionally?) missing the point. No one has to place Oswald in the TSBD at all. No one has to know the motorcade route long in advance at all. They only have to know that JFK is coming to Dallas (or Miami, or Chicago) and that Oswald is someone amenable to an assassination plot, either as a participant or a perfect patsy if he can be convinced it's a pro-Castro plot. Orr has him as a reluctant but knowing participant because Marcello made him an offer he couldn't refuse. If the route had been different, Oswald presumably would have been shooting from a different location. There is indeed at least something resembling evidence that he scouted other possible locations in Dallas. As it turned out, the motorcade route was ideal for Oswald, especially if he was a patsy, and for a gunman in or on the Dal-Tex or County Records building. There simply is no compelling reason that conspirators had to have placed Oswald in the TSBD or known the motorcade route long in advance. I don't think Dan O'Meara's LBJ-Byrd-Cason-Shelley theory has Oswald being placed in the TSBD or the route being known in advance either.
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You are (intentionally?) missing the point. No one has to place Oswald in the TSBD at all. No one has to know the motorcade route long in advance at all. They only have to know that JFK is coming to Dallas (or Miami, or Chicago) and that Oswald is someone amenable to an assassination plot, either as a participant or a perfect patsy if he can be convinced it's a pro-Castro plot. Orr has him as a reluctant but knowing participant because Marcello made him an offer he couldn't refuse. If the route had been different, Oswald presumably would have been shooting from a different location. There is indeed at least something resembling evidence that he scouted other possible locations in Dallas. As it turned out, the motorcade route was ideal for Oswald, especially if he was a patsy, and for a gunman in or on the Dal-Tex or County Records building. There simply is no compelling reason that conspirators had to have placed Oswald in the TSBD or known the motorcade route long in advance. I don't think Dan O'Meara's LBJ-Byrd-Cason-Shelley theory has Oswald being placed in the TSBD or the route being known in advance either.
How do you get Oswald into another position to kill JFK. If the motorcade went down Main St. west-to-east he would have faced an almost impossible cross shot from a block away and would be lucky to get off more than one shot as the limo passes the intersection of Main and Houston. The other possibility is the motorcade would have taken Commerce to Houston and then taken Houston to Main to begin the trek through downtown. That presents a whole different set of problems for a shooter from the TSBD.
How do you get him into another building with his rifle? He had no car and didn't know how to drive. If you have somebody take him to another location, that pretty much shoots down the narrative that he was acting alone.
I don't think Oswald would have attempted the assassination if the motorcade had not be routed down Elm St. It was a crime of opportunity. I also can't imagine conspirators using Oswald as a shooter or a patsy if the motorcade had not been routed down Elm St.
Your difficulty in coming up with a plausible scenario using Oswald as a shooter or patsy should tell you why this question was instrumental in me doubting any and all conspiracy theories. There would have to be a plausible explanation for how the conspirators could have known well in advance that TSBD employee Oswald would be useful to them as either the shooter or he patsy. If you are going to postulate him as the patsy, you would also need an explanation for why he was such a cooperative patsy.
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How do you get Oswald into another position to kill JFK. If the motorcade went down Main St. west-to-east he would have faced an almost impossible cross shot from a block away and would be lucky to get off more than one shot as the limo passes the intersection of Main and Houston. The other possibility is the motorcade would have taken Commerce to Houston and then taken Houston to Main to begin the trek through downtown. That presents a whole different set of problems for a shooter from the TSBD.
How do you get him into another building with his rifle? He had no car and didn't know how to drive. If you have somebody take him to another location, that pretty much shoots down the narrative that he was acting alone.
I don't think Oswald would have attempted the assassination if the motorcade had not be routed down Elm St. It was a crime of opportunity. I also can't imagine conspirators using Oswald as a shooter or a patsy if the motorcade had not been routed down Elm St.
Your difficulty in coming up with a plausible scenario using Oswald as a shooter or patsy should tell you why this question was instrumental in me doubting any and all conspiracy theories. There would have to be a plausible explanation for how the conspirators could have known well in advance that TSBD employee Oswald would be useful to them as either the shooter or he patsy. If you are going to postulate him as the patsy, you would also need an explanation for why he was such a cooperative patsy.
Oswald was a well-known commodity to the pro- and anti-Castro communities, especially in New Orleans – Marcello’s turf – long before the JFKA. His uncle Dutz Murret had underworld connections, which in New Orleans meant Marcello connections; the Oswald-Dutz relationship was not a distant one by any means, and Oswald knew of Dutz’s shady activities and discussed them with Marina. JFK’s trip to Dallas was known in September before Oswald visited Mexico City and reportedly made JFK-related threats. I have no idea precisely whose radar Oswald may have been on before or after his employment at the TSBD, but there are numerous possibilities for him coming to the attention of Marcello as either a possible JFKA participant or a patsy.
Also distinctly odd is Oswald’s inquiry about employment at the Allright Parking Garage just a week before the JFKA and his curious interest in the height of the building and its view of downtown Dallas. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth190240/m1/1/. I muse upon this oddity here: https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php/topic,4612.0.html.
It’s entirely possible, it seems to me, that Oswald had been recruited into a JFKA plot before the motorcade route was finalized and then – voila – the TSBD in which he happened to be employed turned out to be perfect for both a patsy and a pro in the Dal-Tex or County Records building when the route was finalized. I have a hard time with Orr’s theory of Oswald as a knowing participant because having him shoot from TSBD6 would have been fantastically, absurdly risky for the Mafia (i.e., if he had even the faintest inkling that this was a Mafia plot), but I can easily see him as a patsy in what he thought was a pro-Castro plot, with Marcello et al. having no reason to care if he was captured or killed.
My level of conviction is probably 80% that the LN narrative is true and 20% that a Mafia plot is true, but that 20% could go up substantially if Orr’s trajectory analysis delivers all that he and Schnapf seem to promise.
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Oswald was a well-known commodity to the pro- and anti-Castro communities, especially in New Orleans – Marcello’s turf – long before the JFKA. His uncle Dutz Murret had underworld connections, which in New Orleans meant Marcello connections; the Oswald-Dutz relationship was not a distant one by any means, and Oswald knew of Dutz’s shady activities and discussed them with Marina. JFK’s trip to Dallas was known in September before Oswald visited Mexico City and reportedly made JFK-related threats. I have no idea precisely whose radar Oswald may have been on before or after his employment at the TSBD, but there are numerous possibilities for him coming to the attention of Marcello as either a possible JFKA participant or a patsy.
Also distinctly odd is Oswald’s inquiry about employment at the Allright Parking Garage just a week before the JFKA and his curious interest in the height of the building and its view of downtown Dallas. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth190240/m1/1/. I muse upon this oddity here: https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php/topic,4612.0.html.
It’s entirely possible, it seems to me, that Oswald had been recruited into a JFKA plot before the motorcade route was finalized and then – voila – the TSBD in which he happened to be employed turned out to be perfect for both a patsy and a pro in the Dal-Tex or County Records building when the route was finalized. I have a hard time with Orr’s theory of Oswald as a knowing participant because having him shoot from TSBD6 would have been fantastically, absurdly risky for the Mafia (i.e., if he had even the faintest inkling that this was a Mafia plot), but I can easily see him as a patsy in what he thought was a pro-Castro plot, with Marcello et al. having no reason to care if he was captured or killed.
My level of conviction is probably 80% that the LN narrative is true and 20% that a Mafia plot is true, but that 20% could go up substantially if Orr’s trajectory analysis delivers all that he and Schnapf seem to promise.
I am 100 to 0% that Oswald was the shooter. I'll generously make it 99.99 to 0.01% he was acting on behalf of anyone but himself.
You still have the problem of explaining how any plotters could have possibly known 6 weeks in advance that the TSBD was going to be a perfect location to kill JFK from. You seem to suggest that after recruiting Oswald, they got an unbelievable stroke of luck when the found out JFK's motorcade was going to ride right past Oswald's workplace. The were bringing the mountain to Mohammed. What are the odds?
Having people who knew Oswald in New Orleans isn't going to be much of a help. Do you think anyone of those people were even aware of the fact Oswald had taken the job at the TSBD. Even if they did, so what? Would those people even know the motorcade was going past the TSBD.
Oswald getting his job at the TSBD was pure happenstance. It wasn't part of any plot. What if he had taken the job at the parking garage instead of the TSBD. What would these mysterious plotters have done then. I see no plausible scenario in which Oswald taking his job at the TSBD was part of any nefarious plot. There were other reasons I gave up on being a CT but this one was as important as any of them. In 35 years of posing this question to CTs on various forums, I have yet to see a plausible answer.
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MTG--
The real LHO was in MC, and did meet with three KGB'ers there.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/oswald/
see about 1:05 mark.
LHO may have been impersonated while in MC, by both CIA'ers or KGB'ers, in the normal course of Spy v Spy antics. Larry Hancock thinks so.
LHO evidently did meet with G2'ers while in MC, who, by some accounts, encouraged him to perp the JFKA.
LHO spent three or four days in MC, and no one knows where he went or met.
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MTG--
The real LHO was in MC, and did meet with three KGB'ers there.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/oswald/
see about 1:05 mark.
LHO may have been impersonated while in MC, by both CIA'ers or KGB'ers, in the normal course of Spy v Spy antics. Larry Hancock thinks so.
LHO evidently did meet with G2'ers while in MC, who, by some accounts, encouraged him to perp the JFKA.
How did these G2ers know that two months later Oswald would have a perch overlooking the motorcade route. Oswald didn't even know that.
LHO spent three or four days in MC, and no one knows where he went or met.
Do you realize you contradicted yourself in just two sentences. After telling us he met with G2ers, you now say no one know who he met.
CTs never seem to care if the pieces of their puzzle actually fit together. They just say anything that pops into their heads if it sounds good to them at the time.
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I am 100 to 0% that Oswald was the shooter. I'll generously make it 99.99 to 0.01% he was acting on behalf of anyone but himself.
You still have the problem of explaining how any plotters could have possibly known 6 weeks in advance that the TSBD was going to be a perfect location to kill JFK from.
How many times do I have to say they didn't have to know in advance? Did LN Oswald have to know 6 weeks in advance?
You seem to suggest that after recruiting Oswald, they got an unbelievable stroke of luck when the found out JFK's motorcade was going to ride right past Oswald's workplace. The were bringing the mountain to Mohammed. What are the odds?
What are the odds of many things in the JFKA? What are the odds of the SBT, the Magic Bullet, the Ruby hit, many other aspects of the LN narrative? In the LN scenario, what are the odds TSBD6 would just happen to be an ideal location? One could go on and on.
Having people who knew Oswald in New Orleans isn't going to be much of a help. Do you think anyone of those people were even aware of the fact Oswald had taken the job at the TSBD. Even if they did, so what? Would those people even know the motorcade was going past the TSBD.
If Oswald was actively on the radar screen of someone like Marcello through Murret, or in communication with pro- or anti-Castro types, they certainly could have known when JFK's trip to Dallas was announced that Oswald was in Dallas and then when he took the job at the TSBD.The job at least placed him in downtown Dallas. Oswald's apparent scouting of the Allright Parking Garage a mere week before the JFKA could suggest he was going to be used "somewhere" in Dallas.
Oswald getting his job at the TSBD was pure happenstance. It wasn't part of any plot. What if he had taken the job at the parking garage instead of the TSBD. What would these mysterious plotters have done then. I see no plausible scenario in which Oswald taking his job at the TSBD was part of any nefarious plot. There were other reasons I gave up on being a CT but this one was as important as any of them. In 35 years of posing this question to CTs on various forums, I have yet to see a plausible answer.
There is "outside the box" thinking, and then there is "so locked into the box that I don't even realize I'm in it" thinking. Yes, I agree, the TSBD was pure happenstance. That does not rule out a plot. Oswald never even filed an application with the Allright garage - he may have just been on an assignment to scout locations, or he may have done this entirely on his own as part of the LN scenario.
The debate will go on unless something definitively proves that the shots could not have been fired by one gunman.
I happened to notice this from Pat Speer at the Ed Forum today. Note that, as others described, two shots happened in such rapid succession that a bystander who was attributing the "first" shot to a firecracker could not even finish his sentence before the next two followed:
Robert Jackson, a Dallas Times Herald photographer, was sitting on the right rear seat of the car. (11-22-63 interview on KRLD radio, at approximately 3:15 P.M.) "We were just turning the corner and a gunman would have about a 45' angle from the buildings to the car. I looked to my left and I could see both cars in front speeding off, the President's car and the car behind him carrying the Vice President. They disappeared under the underpass. Then I could see a colored family covering up their child on the grass. A policeman was down on his knee. I couldn't tell if he were hit. I thought the child was dead or something. Then the negro parents picked up the boy and ran. (On the shots at Kennedy and Connally) As soon as I saw the rifle, I knew someone was trying to kill them, but it never entered my mind that he could be dead. I just couldn't believe it at first." (11-22-63 AP eyewitness account, sent over the teletype at 3:47 PM CST) “When we heard the first shot, the president had already turned the corner. We had not made the corner yet. Then we heard two more shots. As far as I know, three shots were all I heard...Since I was facing the building where the shots were coming from, I just glanced up and saw two colored men straining to look at a window just above them. As I looked up to the window above, I saw a rifle being pulled back in the window. It might have been resting on the window sill. I did not see a man. I didn't even see if it had a scope on it...The President's car was about halfway between Houston Street and the underpass.” (11-23-63 AP article found in the L.A. Times) "Bob Jackson, a photographer for the Dallas Times Herald, heard one shot, then two rapid bursts as he rode in an open convertible in the presidential motorcade." (11-23-63 FBI report based upon an 11-22-63 interview, CD5 p.15) “he advised the car in which he was riding was proceeding north on Houston Street…and the presidential car had already turned left on Elm Street…when he heard three loud reports which sounded like shots from a gun. He stated that there was a “pause” after the first shot, followed by the second and third shots in rapid succession. Jackson advised that upon hearing the three shots, he looked upward and straight ahead at a window in the Texas School Book Depository…in time to see the barrel of a rifle being pulled inside the window.” (3-10-64 testimony before the Warren Commission, 2H155-165) “I was in the process of unloading a camera and I was to toss it out of the car as we turned right onto Houston Street to one of our reporters…And that I did as we turned the corner…as I threw it out the wind blew it, caught it and blew it out into the street and our reporter chased it out into the street, and the photographers in our car, one of the photographers, was a TV cameraman whom I do not recall as his name , and he was joking about the film being thrown out and he was shooting my picture of throwing the film out… Well as our reporter chased that film out in the street, we all looked back at him and were laughing, and it was approximately that time that we heard the first shot, and we had already rounded the corner, of course, when we heard the first shot. We were approximately half a block on Houston Street…as we heard the first shot, I believe it was Tom Dillard from Dallas News who made some remark as to that sounding like a firecracker, and it could have been somebody else who said that. But someone else did speak up and make that comment and before he actually finished the sentence we heard the other two shots…We were still moving slowly, and after the third shot the second two shots seemed much closer together than the first shot, than they were to the first shot.” (Interview presented on the Capitol Records release The Controversy, 1967) (After the shooting) "We looked around and I just looked straight up ahead, and the first thing I saw was these two negro men in the window. And immediately my eyes just followed up to where they were looking. And that's when I saw the rifle. I saw no figure behind the rifle. All I could was about 3/4 of the rifle, maybe for no more than a second."
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WC defenders ignore or summarily brush aside the fact that on November 16-17, five days before the assassination, David Ferrie spent the weekend with Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello at Marcello's Churchill Farms estate. Supposedly, the two were discussing "defense strategy" for the final week of Marcello's deportation trial in federal court. However, strangely enough, Marcello’s attorneys were not there.. Humm. . . . Ferrie was no lawyer. It is very hard imagine what legal strategy Marcello and Ferrie could have discussed for two entire days; it is also hard to fathom how a weekend-long legal defense strategy meeting would not have included at least one of Marcello's attorneys. Dr. Richard Mahoney correctly and logically suspects that Marcello and Ferrie were finalizing some of the details of the planned assassination of JFK in Dallas (The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby, 2017 edition, p. 386).
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How many times do I have to say they didn't have to know in advance? Did LN Oswald have to know 6 weeks in advance?
It isn't enough to say it. You need a plausible explanation. It seems far fetched that the Mafia or any other entity would have chosen Oswald as their shooter/patsy without knowing in advance he would be handed a golden opportunity to shoot JFK from his workplace. Oswald didn't need to know in advance that taking the job at the TSBD would provide him with that opportunity. Killing JFK would have been the furthest thing on his mind when he took that job. He took it so he could feed his family. So did Oswald just get lucky? Yes, he did and that might seem far-fetched too. If Oswald was the only twisted individual in the country with a propensity to do what he did, it would have been a remarkable piece of bad luck that JFK would cross paths with him. But we don't know how many dozens, maybe hundreds of similarly twisted individuals there were around the country at the time who would have done what Oswald did if given the opportunity. Combine that with a President who had a fondness from riding through crowded urban streets in a slow moving open top car, it doesn't seem remarkable at all that JFK would happen to end up within easy rifle range of one of them. It was Oswald who happened to be the one who won the assassin's lottery.
What are the odds of many things in the JFKA? What are the odds of the SBT, the Magic Bullet, the Ruby hit, many other aspects of the LN narrative? In the LN scenario, what are the odds TSBD6 would just happen to be an ideal location? One could go on and on.
I just dealt with the issue of odds. I don't need to repeat myself.
If Oswald was actively on the radar screen of someone like Marcello through Murret, or in communication with pro- or anti-Castro types, they certainly could have known when JFK's trip to Dallas was announced that Oswald was in Dallas and then when he took the job at the TSBD.The job at least placed him in downtown Dallas. Oswald's apparent scouting of the Allright Parking Garage a mere week before the JFKA could suggest he was going to be used "somewhere" in Dallas.
Of all the people the Mafia could have chosen to do a hit, why the hell would they pick somebody like Oswald and why would they pick him without knowing the opportunity he would have one day?
Ditto for the pro/anti/Castro groups.
Why would Oswald be scouting a shooting location without knowing where the motorcade be going or even if there was going to be a motorcade.
There is "outside the box" thinking, and then there is "so locked into the box that I don't even realize I'm in it" thinking. Yes, I agree, the TSBD was pure happenstance. That does not rule out a plot. Oswald never even filed an application with the Allright garage - he may have just been on an assignment to scout locations, or he may have done this entirely on his own as part of the LN scenario.
I've already said countless times that the time for being open minded about Oswald's innocence expired a long time ago. That is idiotic. So I freely admit I am "locked into the box" of Oswald's guilt. As I said earlier, I leave the door open a very tiny crack to the possibility he was working in cahoots with somebody else. To be convinced of that, I would have to see compelling evidence of that. Wild speculation is a poor substitute for actual evidence.
The debate will go on unless something definitively proves that the shots could not have been fired by one gunman.
That is problematic because the evidence tells us the shots definitely were fired by one man. There is zero evidence of another. Do you think after 62 years, some additionaly evidence is going to magicly appear that will force us to completely rethink the JFKA.
The evidence is all out on the table. Anybody who thinks there is going to be more forthcoming is fooling themselves. If they can't make their case for conspiracy with what they have now, they never will. There's a greater chance they will find Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa before anyone finds any credible evidence anyone other than Oswald took part in the JFKA.
I happened to notice this from Pat Speer at the Ed Forum today. Note that, as others described, two shots happened in such rapid succession that a bystander who was attributing the "first" shot to a firecracker could not even finish his sentence before the next two followed:
Oh, goody. Another witness with another version of how they think it happened. Forgive me if I ignore this one.
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WC defenders ignore or summarily brush aside the fact that on November 16-17, five days before the assassination, David Ferrie spent the weekend with Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello at Marcello's Churchill Farms estate. Supposedly, the two were discussing "defense strategy" for the final week of Marcello's deportation trial in federal court. However, strangely enough, Marcello’s attorneys were not there.. Humm. . . . Ferrie was no lawyer. It is very hard imagine what legal strategy Marcello and Ferrie could have discussed for two entire days; it is also hard to fathom how a weekend-long legal defense strategy meeting would not have included at least one of Marcello's attorneys. Dr. Richard Mahoney correctly and logically suspects that Marcello and Ferrie were finalizing some of the details of the planned assassination of JFK in Dallas (The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby, 2017 edition, p. 386).
CTs love when they get a blank sheet of paper they can fill with their wild speculations.
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Quote from: Michael T. Griffith on Today at 04:12:18 PM
WC defenders ignore or summarily brush aside the fact that on November 16-17, five days before the assassination, David Ferrie spent the weekend with Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello at Marcello's Churchill Farms estate. Supposedly, the two were discussing "defense strategy" for the final week of Marcello's deportation trial in federal court. However, strangely enough, Marcello’s attorneys were not there.. Humm. . . . Ferrie was no lawyer. It is very hard imagine what legal strategy Marcello and Ferrie could have discussed for two entire days; it is also hard to fathom how a weekend-long legal defense strategy meeting would not have included at least one of Marcello's attorneys. Dr. Richard Mahoney correctly and logically suspects that Marcello and Ferrie were finalizing some of the details of the planned assassination of JFK in Dallas (The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby, 2017 edition, p. 386).
CTs love when they get a blank sheet of paper they can fill with their wild speculations.
Your lack of education is again showing.
We're hardly talking about a "blank sheet of paper" but about standard deductive analysis of an obviously suspicious event, the kind of analysis that police investigators and district attorneys do every day. It is only logical to believe that if this two-day meeting at Marcello's estate had really been a legal strategy meeting, at least one of Marcello's attorneys would have been there, and not just David Ferrie, who had no legal training of any kind.
Both Marcello and Ferrie are logical suspects in JFK's death. Ferrie had publicly called for JFK's assassination and made a highly suspicious trip to Houston on the night of the assassination. Marcello harbored an intense hatred of the Kennedys, had voiced the desire to see JFK dead, had expressed foreknowledge of a plot to kill JFK, and unwittingly revealed to a federal informant after the assassination that he played a role in JFK's death.
One would have to be quite gullible to believe that a Mafia kingpin like Marcello and a volatile right-winger with no legal background like David Ferrie spent two days at Marcello's estate talking about legal strategy for Marcello's deportation trial.
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Your lack of education is again showing.
We're hardly talking about a "blank sheet of paper" but about standard deductive analysis of an obviously suspicious event, the kind of analysis that police investigators and district attorneys do every day. It is only logical to believe that if this two-day meeting at Marcello's estate had really been a legal strategy meeting, at least one of Marcello's attorneys would have been there, and not just David Ferrie, who had no legal training of any kind.
If your figuring was standard for police investigators, few bad guys would ever go to jail.
Both Marcello and Ferrie are logical suspects in JFK's death. Ferrie had publicly called for JFK's assassination and made a highly suspicious trip to Houston on the night of the assassination. Marcello harbored an intense hatred of the Kennedys, had voiced the desire to see JFK dead, had expressed foreknowledge of a plot to kill JFK, and unwittingly revealed to a federal informant after the assassination that he played a role in JFK's death.
How many death threats do you supposed are made against all presidents. Only in extremely rare instances does the individual act or even intend to act on such threats.
One would have to be quite gullible to believe that a Mafia kingpin like Marcello and a volatile right-winger with no legal background like David Ferrie spent two days at Marcello's estate talking about legal strategy for Marcello's deportation trial.
So in lieu of any evidence as to what Marcello and Ferrie were talking about, you leap to the conclusion they were discussing the assassination of JFK.
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WC defenders ignore or summarily brush aside the fact that on November 16-17, five days before the assassination, David Ferrie spent the weekend with Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello at Marcello's Churchill Farms estate. Supposedly, the two were discussing "defense strategy" for the final week of Marcello's deportation trial in federal court. However, strangely enough, Marcello’s attorneys were not there.. Humm. . . . Ferrie was no lawyer. It is very hard imagine what legal strategy Marcello and Ferrie could have discussed for two entire days; it is also hard to fathom how a weekend-long legal defense strategy meeting would not have included at least one of Marcello's attorneys. Dr. Richard Mahoney correctly and logically suspects that Marcello and Ferrie were finalizing some of the details of the planned assassination of JFK in Dallas (The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby, 2017 edition, p. 386).
Let’s see how MTG’s Mahoney Factoid holds up.
Ferrie was a highly intelligent guy and enough of a pilot to have flown for Eastern Airlines. When he was fired by Eastern on morals charges in 1961, he was represented by very high-profile New Orleans attorney G. Wray Gill in his efforts to be reinstated. When the initial effort to get Ferrie reinstated failed, Gill hired him as an investigator and law clerk from March 1962 to December 1963, with Gill continuing to represent Ferrie throughout 1963 in his efforts to be reinstated by Eastern. The hiring of Ferrie was in lieu of Ferrie paying Gill’s steep attorney fees. Gill's clients had included Carlos Marcello since 1951, and Gill would continue to represent the mobster until Gill's own death in 1972.
Ferrie was interviewed by the FBI on 11-25-63 and volunteered that "since the end of August, 1963 and up until November 22, 1963 he has been working on a case involving CARLOS MARCELLO who was charged in Federal Court in connection with a fraudulent birth certificate. FERRIE stated that the trial of MARCELLO began in Federal Court in New Orleans, Louisiana on November 4, 1963 and ended on November 22, 1963 and that he was in New Orleans working with Attorney G. WRAY GILL on the case during this period. He stated that on November 9 and November 16, 1963 he was at Churchill Downs which is a farm owned by CARLOS MARCELLO, mapping strategy in connection with MARCELLO's trial." (Marcello was acquitted of all charges.)
Ferrie was present at the defense table in the courtroom during the trial, which means he was intimately involved with the case. Gill told the FBI on November 27 that he worked closely with Ferrie on trial strategy. Churchill Farms was a secluded 4,000-acre estate used by Marcello for all sorts of dubious purposes. It’s apparently still in the Marcello family.
Lamar Waldron says in The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination that Ferrie was with Marcello at Churchill Farms on November 9-10. He says nothing about November 16 and does not say who was in attendance. Exhaustive searches on Google and specifically at the Ed Forum turned up no discussion whatsoever about the supposed Mahoney bombshell or who was or was not in attendance when Ferrie met with Marcello.
November 9-10 and 16-17 were both weekends (Saturday and Sunday), so the court was not in session. The 32-page HSCA report on Marcello does not mention Ferrie at all and mentions Gill only once (in relation to something that occurred in 1970). The HSCA report on Ferrie says he was at Churchill Farms both weekends, ostensibly working on trial strategy, but says nothing further.
Richard D. Mahoney is a respected JFK author (and former Arizona Secretary of State!) who endorses a two-gunman “crossfire” view of the JFKA without attempting to flesh out the conspiracy. Mahoney’s book The Kennedy Brothers says only that “Marcello had spent that weekend [November 16-17] at Churchill Farms closeted [closeted?] with Lee Harvey Oswald’s associate and Cuban exile activist David Ferrie [Oswald’s associate?]. The source for this is Mafia Kingfish by John H. Davis. Mahoney says the HSCA “reached a similar conclusion about Marcello’s and Ferrie’s weekend together” (what conclusion, apart from the fact they were together?). The only other thing he says is “Strangely, Marcello’s attorneys were not present” – for which he cites no source. There is no explicit suggestion that Ferrie and Marcello were hatching JFKA plans.
You can read Mahoney’s latest (March 2026) conspiratorial effort, “Will we ever get the truth about the JFK assassination?”, here: https://journals.econsciences.com/index.php/JSAS/article/download/2721/3469/8949. There is a fair amount about Ferrie in connection with his book but, alas, nothing about being “closeted” with Marcello to hatch JFKA plans.
So is this a busted factoid? Eh, maybe, maybe not. The fact is, Marcello was in the middle of a criminal trial. Ferrie was the investigator for Marcello’s prominent attorney, who said he worked closely with Ferrie on trial strategy. Ferrie may have had a pilot relationship with Marcello dating back to 1961 (according to the HSCA), so perhaps the invitation was partly social. Churchill Farms was a huge estate used for lots of purposes. We don’t really know who was present when Ferrie met with Marcello; Mahoney cites no source for his claim that “Marcello’s attorneys were not present.” Ferrie is such a strange and mysterious figure, and Marcello figures so prominently in any Mafia-did-it JFKA scenario, that I would “never say never” – but to call it a "correct and logical" conclusion that Ferrie and Marcello were "finalizing some of the details" of the JFKA seems exceedingly far-fetched - albeit entirely MTG-like - to me; moreover, the conclusion is MTG's, not Mahoney's.
You just can't trust this MTG character. Someday the light bulb will go on for even the most trusting of you.
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Mafia Kingfish was one of the first conspiracy books I read after diving into the JFKA following the release of Oliver Stone's movie. I don't remember a lot of the details from the book. I just remember being very unimpressed by its arguments. Reading over the Cliff Notes version provided by Lance Payette has brought back some of the details to me and reminded me why I was unimpressed.
Two other conspiracy books I bought were Plausible Denial by Mark Lane and Best evidence by David Lifton. I did learn something from these three books. I learned I should be much more careful about what I spend my money on. I've kept these books on my shelves to remind me of that.
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JC--
The whereabouts of LHO in MC are largely unknown, after his visits to the Russian and Cuban facilities. It is known he met with G-2'ers, who encouraged him to assassinate JFK.
No one knew LHO would have a perch in the TSBD6 at that time.
I have stated many times, LHO and his confederates simply got lucky on the motorcade route, and took advantage of the situation.
LHO did prospect other locations along the parade route.
If, in a counterfactual, the motorcade had chosen a different route, LHO and confederates likely would have altered their plans.
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JC--
The whereabouts of LHO in MC are largely unknown, after his visits to the Russian and Cuban facilities. It is known he met with G-2'ers, who encouraged him to assassinate JFK.
No one knew LHO would have a perch in the TSBD6 at that time.
I have stated many times, LHO and his confederates simply got lucky on the motorcade route, and took advantage of the situation.
LHO did prospect other locations along the parade route.
If, in a counterfactual, the motorcade had chosen a different route, LHO and confederates likely would have altered their plans.
Do you honestly think that these alleged plotters would have counted on luck to get the motorcade route to pass in front of their chosen shooter's workplace? What reason would they have had to hire Oswald before 11/18/1963. Then we are supposed to believe that after getting extremely lucky with the motorcade route, they decided to press their luck again by letting Oswald leave the TSBD and falli into police custody instead of having a car waiting for him outside the TSBD to drive him to his death.
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Do you honestly think that these alleged plotters would have counted on luck to get the motorcade route to pass in front of their chosen shooter's workplace? What reason would they have had to hire Oswald before 11/18/1963. Then we are supposed to believe that after getting extremely lucky with the motorcade route, they decided to press their luck again by letting Oswald leave the TSBD and falli into police custody instead of having a car waiting for him outside the TSBD to drive him to his death.
I really don't understand your obstinancy on this. Oswald was a very visible Pro-Castro Guy in the hotbed of New Orleans long before the JFKA. We don't know what contacts he may have made in the pro-Castro community or the anti-Castro-posing-as-pro-Castro community. JFK's trip to Dallas was announced even before he went to MC. In MC he reportedly said some wild-and-crazy things. We don't know what contacts he may have made there. It is not at all implausible that he would have been on the radar screen of anyone, up to and including Marcello's guys, long in advance of the JFKA. There was going to be a hit on JFKA in Dallas, and Oswald was one of Their Guys, either as a participant or a dupe. Possible locations in Dallas were scouted before the motorcade route was finalized - hence Oswald's inquiry at the Allright Parking Garage a week before. If he was a dupe in a Mafia or anti-Castro conspiracy, the conspirators would not have cared whether he was killed in the TSBD or lived to stand trial because anything he knew - or thought he knew - pointed exactly where they wanted it to point.
There is nothing inherently implausible about this scenario. The issue is, what evidence supports it? Gus Russo is clearly a Grade A researcher of the JFKA. I only wish he hadn't dropped from the scene and had been a little more forthcoming about his contacts with the G2 folks.
Your logic seems to flow backwards. You start with the unlikelihood that JFK's motorcade would pass at 11 mph directly in front of Oswald's perch - which is equally unlikely regardless of whether there was any conspiracy - and then declare it impossible that conspirators would have known this in advance. They DIDN'T NEED TO KNOW this long in advance. Once the motorcade route was announced, they realized they had indeed got extremely lucky. (We could go off on the tangent that the turn onto Elm was "arranged," but I am trying to keep this as realistic and plausible as possible.)
The Mafia and G2 are two of the scenarios that can't simply be dismissed with a wave of the hand. They may be 100% incorrect, but they can't just be dismissed.
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I really don't understand your obstinancy on this. Oswald was a very visible Pro-Castro Guy in the hotbed of New Orleans long before the JFKA.
In New Orleans. Not in Dallas. Do you have any reason to believe anybody in New Orleans knew or cared about Oswald's whereabouts once he left that city?
We don't know what contacts he may have made in the pro-Castro community or the anti-Castro-posing-as-pro-Castro community.
Don't you think that is an important thing to establish if you are going to theorize that he conspired with one of those groups to kill JFK.
JFK's trip to Dallas was announced even before he went to MC.
People knew he was coming to Dallas. BFD. You need much more specific information if you are going to set up an assassination.
In MC he reportedly said some wild-and-crazy things. We don't know what contacts he may have made there. It is not at all implausible that he would have been on the radar screen of anyone, up to and including Marcello's guys, long in advance of the JFKA. There was going to be a hit on JFKA in Dallas, and Oswald was one of Their Guys, either as a participant or a dupe. Possible locations in Dallas were scouted before the motorcade route was finalized - hence Oswald's inquiry at the Allright Parking Garage a week before. If he was a dupe in a Mafia or anti-Castro conspiracy, the conspirators would not have cared whether he was killed in the TSBD or lived to stand trial because anything he knew - or thought he knew - pointed exactly where they wanted it to point.
For it to make any sense for any of the aforementioned groups to include Oswald in their plans, they would need to know the motorcade route and that Oswald would have access to a building along that route. The route was not announced until 11/18/1963. There is zero evidence the Mafia or any Cuban group was in contact with Oswald before or after that date. You can speculate wildly if you want but if you are going to make a compelling argument, you need some actual evidence.
There is nothing inherently implausible about this scenario. The issue is, what evidence supports it?
None whatsoever.
Gus Russo is clearly a Grade A researcher of the JFKA. I only wish he hadn't dropped from the scene and had been a little more forthcoming about his contacts with the G2 folks.
I've already asked this question. Is there a certification process for being a Grade A JFKA researcher? What are the requirements? I already got duped once by someone who had a reputation as a top-notch investigative reporter, Jack Anderson. He briefly had me convinced the assassination was a collaboration between the CIA and the Mafia who had a shared interest in getting rid of Castro. It took me a few years to figure out his story was BS and that he was a charlatan.
Your logic seems to flow backwards. You start with the unlikelihood that JFK's motorcade would pass at 11 mph directly in front of Oswald's perch - which is equally unlikely regardless of whether there was any conspiracy - and then declare it impossible that conspirators would have known this in advance. They DIDN'T NEED TO KNOW this long in advance. Once the motorcade route was announced, they realized they had indeed got extremely lucky. (We could go off on the tangent that the turn onto Elm was "arranged," but I am trying to keep this as realistic and plausible as possible.)
What reason would they have had to include Oswald in their plans prior to 11/18/1963? I find it a bit far-fetched to believe they planned to use Oswald as either the shooter or the patsy and then they the route is announced and they said, "Oh, look. The guy we hired to shoot JFK works right along the motorcade route.". It makes little sense that they would have hired Oswald for the biggest contract killing in history even after the motorcade route was announced and makes zero sense they would have had any interest in using Oswald before they knew where the motorcade was going.
The Mafia and G2 are two of the scenarios that can't simply be dismissed with a wave of the hand.
Yes it can. It makes no sense.
They may be 100% incorrect, but they can't just be dismissed.
You seem to be trying really hard to convince yourself this is a plausible scenario.
[/quote]
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WC defenders ignore or summarily brush aside the fact that on November 16-17, five days before the assassination, David Ferrie spent the weekend with Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello at Marcello's Churchill Farms estate. Supposedly, the two were discussing "defense strategy" for the final week of Marcello's deportation trial in federal court. However, strangely enough, Marcello’s attorneys were not there.. Humm. . . . Ferrie was no lawyer. It is very hard imagine what legal strategy Marcello and Ferrie could have discussed for two entire days; it is also hard to fathom how a weekend-long legal defense strategy meeting would not have included at least one of Marcello's attorneys. Dr. Richard Mahoney correctly and logically suspects that Marcello and Ferrie were finalizing some of the details of the planned assassination of JFK in Dallas (The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby, 2017 edition, p. 386).
Not only was David Ferrie an operative for Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello, and not only had he publicly said JFK should be shot over the Bay of Pigs, but he associated with anti-Castro Cubans and with Lee Harvey Oswald.
Among other evidence of a Ferrie-Oswald association, six credible witnesses saw Oswald with David Ferrie (and with Clay Shaw) in Clinton, Louisiana, in late August/early September 1963. There were six Clinton witnesses, including a member of the state legislature, a deputy sheriff, and a registrar of voters. The HSCA was understandably skeptical of any evidence produced by Jim Garrison's investigation, so they reinterviewed the six Clinton witnesses. After doing so, the HSCA concluded the witnesses were "credible and significant":
The reports of Oswald in Clinton were not, as far as the committee could determine, available to the Warren Commission, although one witness said he notified the FBI when he recognized Oswald from news photographs right after the assassination.25(182) In fact, the Clinton sightings did not publicly surface until 1967, when they were introduced as evidence in the assassination investigation being conducted by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.(184) In that investigation, one suspect, David W. Ferrie, a staunch anti-Castro partisan, died within days of having been named by Garrison; the other, Clay L. Shaw, was acquitted in 1969.(185) Aware that Garrison had been fairly criticized for questionable tactics, the committee proceeded cautiously, making sure to determine on its own the credibility of information coming from his probe. The committee found that the Clinton witnesses were credible and significant. They each were interviewed or deposed, or appeared before the committee in executive session. (HSCA report, p. 143)
Yet, WC apologists ask us to believe that Ferrie and Marcello spent two days together at Marcello's estate the weekend before the assassination merely to discuss legal strategy for Marcello's deportation trial, even though not one of Marcello's lawyers was there, and even though Ferrie had no legal background whatsoever.
The fact of the matter is that most WC apologists are simply not interested in credible evidence of conspiracy, and they will look for any excuse, no matter how lame and vacuous, to dismiss such evidence.
Yes, I've read the replies of Lance Payette and John Corbett in this thread. I don't think they're worth answering. Payette has at least done enough research to be able to give the occasional appearance of credibility, but his replies fail to explain the evidence I've presented and contain numerous invalid arguments and disingenuous posturing. Corbett seems to know very little about the JFK case and seems to have only read snippets on pro-WC websites. The unserious and erroneous nature of Corbett's replies are highlighted by the fact that he has recently declared that he doesn't have to explain the indisputable conflicts in the medical evidence (even ones documented by medical experts who supported/support the single-assassin scenario) and that the sciences of trajectory analysis, acoustical identification of gunfire, and wound-ballistics testing are worthless when it comes to the JFK assassination.
If anyone has any questions about Payette's and Corbett's arguments, please message me or post them in a reply.
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The fact of the matter is that most WC apologists are simply not interested in credible evidence of conspiracy, and they will look for any excuse, no matter how lame and vacuous, to dismiss such evidence.
I'd be very interested in such evidence if I ever saw any.
Yes, I've read the replies of Lance Payette and John Corbett in this thread. I don't think they're worth answering.
If I had made a statement like that, you'd accuse me of dodging.
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In New Orleans. Not in Dallas. Do you have any reason to believe anybody in New Orleans knew or cared about Oswald's whereabouts once he left that city?
Don't you think that is an important thing to establish if you are going to theorize that he conspired with one of those groups to kill JFK.
People knew he was coming to Dallas. BFD. You need much more specific information if you are going to set up an assassination.
For it to make any sense for any of the aforementioned groups to include Oswald in their plans, they would need to know the motorcade route and that Oswald would have access to a building along that route. The route was not announced until 11/18/1963. There is zero evidence the Mafia or any Cuban group was in contact with Oswald before or after that date. You can speculate wildly if you want but if you are going to make a compelling argument, you need some actual evidence.
None whatsoever.
I've already asked this question. Is there a certification process for being a Grade A JFKA researcher? What are the requirements? I already got duped once by someone who had a reputation as a top-notch investigative reporter, Jack Anderson. He briefly had me convinced the assassination was a collaboration between the CIA and the Mafia who had a shared interest in getting rid of Castro. It took me a few years to figure out his story was BS and that he was a charlatan.
What reason would they have had to include Oswald in their plans prior to 11/18/1963? I find it a bit far-fetched to believe they planned to use Oswald as either the shooter or the patsy and then they the route is announced and they said, "Oh, look. The guy we hired to shoot JFK works right along the motorcade route.". It makes little sense that they would have hired Oswald for the biggest contract killing in history even after the motorcade route was announced and makes zero sense they would have had any interest in using Oswald before they knew where the motorcade was going.
Yes it can. It makes no sense.
You seem to be trying really hard to convince yourself this is a plausible scenario.
Oh my goodness, this is hilarious. Here we have John Corbett, who is truly and literally a know-nothing troll, attacking Lance Payette for showing some open-mindedness on two widely believed and credible conspiracy scenarios (Mafia and Cuban G2). As usual, the adamance and arrogance in Corbett's arguments are matched only by his raw ignorance of JFK assassination research.
Regarding Gus Russo and his book Live By the Sword, I reviewed the book back in 2012. Here's a little bit of what I said about the book in my review:
I would like to stress that, in spite of the problems discussed above, I believe Russo's Live by the Sword is an important, worthwhile book. It contains a great deal of new information on key aspects of the JFK assassination. Russo does a superb job on the possible involvement of Cuban intelligence in Kennedy's death, on the reports that Oswald had contacts with Cuban intelligence in Mexico City, on the possibility that some intelligence elements had foreknowledge that Kennedy was going to be killed, on the flaws in the Warren Commission's investigation, on the conflicts among the Warren Commission's staff and members, on Lyndon Johnson's political standing with John Kennedy at the time of the shooting, on the suspicious activities at Red Bird Airport, and on several other subjects. (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1juiglUsXuJrapG3c9CSsam7Qp8F0UD7B/view)
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Oh my goodness, this is hilarious. Here we have John Corbett, who is truly and literally a know-nothing troll, attacking Lance Payette for showing some open-mindedness on two widely believed and credible conspiracy scenarios (Mafia and Cuban G2).
The are only credible to gullible people.
As usual, the adamance and arrogance in Corbett's arguments are matched only by his raw ignorance of JFK assassination research.
My arrogance is a biproduct of my certainty that I am right that Oswald was the assassin and recognizing that in 62 years no one has produce any credible evidence he had even a single accomplice.
Your arrogance is a biproduct of your inability to weight evidence.
Regarding Gus Russo and his book Live By the Sword, I reviewed the book back in 2012. Here's a little bit of what I said about the book in my review:
I would like to stress that, in spite of the problems discussed above, I believe Russo's Live by the Sword is an important, worthwhile book. It contains a great deal of new information on key aspects of the JFK assassination. Russo does a superb job on the possible involvement of Cuban intelligence in Kennedy's death, on the reports that Oswald had contacts with Cuban intelligence in Mexico City, on the possibility that some intelligence elements had foreknowledge that Kennedy was going to be killed, on the flaws in the Warren Commission's investigation, on the conflicts among the Warren Commission's staff and members, on Lyndon Johnson's political standing with John Kennedy at the time of the shooting, on the suspicious activities at Red Bird Airport, and on several other subjects. (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1juiglUsXuJrapG3c9CSsam7Qp8F0UD7B/view)
Once again, nobody cares.
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I really don't understand your [John Corbett's] obstinancy on this.
You really don't? After all this time?
I'm sure you meant to say "obstinacy." There's no such word as "obstinancy." I mention this only because of your repeated references to your "IQ or academic honors."
Oswald was a very visible Pro-Castro Guy in the hotbed of New Orleans long before the JFKA. We don't know what contacts he may have made in the pro-Castro community or the anti-Castro-posing-as-pro-Castro community. JFK's trip to Dallas was announced even before he went to MC. In MC he reportedly said some wild-and-crazy things. We don't know what contacts he may have made there. It is not at all implausible that he would have been on the radar screen of anyone, up to and including Marcello's guys, long in advance of the JFKA. There was going to be a hit on JFKA in Dallas, and Oswald was one of Their Guys, either as a participant or a dupe. Possible locations in Dallas were scouted before the motorcade route was finalized - hence Oswald's inquiry at the Allright Parking Garage a week before. If he was a dupe in a Mafia or anti-Castro conspiracy, the conspirators would not have cared whether he was killed in the TSBD or lived to stand trial because anything he knew - or thought he knew - pointed exactly where they wanted it to point.
There is nothing inherently implausible about this scenario. The issue is, what evidence supports it? Gus Russo is clearly a Grade A researcher of the JFKA. I only wish he hadn't dropped from the scene and had been a little more forthcoming about his contacts with the G2 folks.
I agree with you completely: there's absolutely nothing inherently implausible about this scenario. I also agree that Gus Russo produced a lot of valuable research.
But, well, as you know, John Corbett says the scenario is inherently implausible and dismisses Russo's important discoveries with the juvenile response of "once again, nobody cares."
Your [John Corbett's] logic seems to flow backwards.
Now you're catching on!
You start with the unlikelihood that JFK's motorcade would pass at 11 mph directly in front of Oswald's perch - which is equally unlikely regardless of whether there was any conspiracy - and then declare it impossible that conspirators would have known this in advance. They DIDN'T NEED TO KNOW this long in advance. Once the motorcade route was announced, they realized they had indeed got extremely lucky. (We could go off on the tangent that the turn onto Elm was "arranged," but I am trying to keep this as realistic and plausible as possible.)
Actually, the HSCA proved that the turn was not necessary and that the WC and the Secret Service were wrong for claiming it was unavoidable. And, Vince Palamara, recognized as the foremost authority on the Secret Service aspect of the case, has documented suspicious conduct by certain SS personnel before, during, and after the assassination.
The Mafia and G2 are two of the scenarios that can't simply be dismissed with a wave of the hand. They may be 100% incorrect, but they can't just be dismissed.
You're absolutely correct, once again. However, as you know, John Corbett insists they are total "BS" and can indeed be summarily dismissed.
BTW, it's worth mentioning that Rockefeller Foundation fellow Henry Hurt, author of the best-selling book Reasonable Doubt, allowed that Cuban intelligence may have played a role in the assassination.
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Key and revealing information about the cover-up surfaced when the ARRB interviewed autopsy x-ray technician Jerrol Custer. Custer's testimony proves that the plotters were already exploring ways to produce altered skull x-rays the day after the autopsy.
Custer told the ARRB that the morning after the assassination, he was called into the radiology suite by Dr. John Ebersole, the autopsy radiologist, and was told to tape some metal fragments to skull bones and x-ray them. Custer x-rayed them with the same machine, at the same distance, that he used the night before during the autopsy. Custer stated that Ebersole said these x-rays would be used to make a bust of JFK. Custer added that Dr. Ebersole suggested that he “should forget” everything he was about to see:
A: The next morning I took them.
Q: And where did you take those X-rays?
A: In the main department, in a private room, with a portable X-ray unit.
Q: Was it the same x-ray unit that was used m to take the autopsy -
A: Yes, sir. The same distance.
Q: And what was the purpose of taking these x-rays?
A: I was told by Dr. Ebersole that they were to be taken to make measurements, to make a bust of President Kennedy.
Q: What did you do when you took the x-rays? What were the procedures? How did you go about taking them?
A: All I did was place the bone fragments on the film, and I made different exposures at different distances.
Q: Did Dr. Ebersole say anything to you about metal fragments?
A: He gave me three or four different metal fragments, varying in size. And he asked me to tape them to the bones. . . .
Q: Let me try asking you one question, just to make sure that the record is clear on this. Did Dr. Ebersole ask you to tape the metal fragments to the bone after he had returned from the White House? Are you able to say with certainty?
A: Absolutely. As soon as he walked in, that’s the first thing he said. “I want these bone fragments x-rayed with metal fragments taped”. . . .
Q: Is there any question in your mind whether you, in fact, taped metal fragments to the bones?
A: Absolutely no question at all in my mind. . . .
Q: Did Dr. Ebersole ever subsequently explain to you the purpose for taping metal fragments to the bones to be -
A: No, he didn’t. He just stated to me, when he brought the film -- the bone fragments and the metal fragments to me, that he had just come back from the White House after being debriefed.
Q: And what did he say about that debriefing?
A: WelI, he just said that he was debriefed by the Secret Service. And that was it. High-ranking people had talked to him. And he suggested to me that everything that I see from now on, I should forget. (“Deposition of Jerrol Francis Custer,” ARRB, Transcript of Proceedings, October 28, 1997, pp. 143-146)
Obviously, taping bullet fragments to skull bones and then x-raying the bones had nothing to do with making a bust of JFK. Ultimately, the plotters opted not to use these x-rays because they realized that the x-rays could be altered via darkroom techniques that would be virtually impossible to detect at the time.
Scientific proof of the alteration was not discovered until Dr. David Mantik performed optical density (OD) measurements on the skull x-rays in the 1990s. Dr. Mantik discovered that the 6.5 mm object is not metallic and that the white patch in the lower rear parietal-occipital area is a physical impossibility for a human skull.
Dr. Mantik discovered that the 6.5 mm object was ghosted over a somewhat smaller genuine bullet fragment and a tiny bullet fragment. The largest of the two fragments is an irregular and jagged fragment measuring 2.0 mm at its narrowest point and 2.5 mm at its widest point, and measuring right around 6.3 mm in height. The tiny fragment is roughly circular and has a diameter of about 0.25 mm.
The density of these two genuine metal fragments is far less than the impossibly density of the 6.5 mm object as established by its OD measurements. The density of the two fragments is consistent with the density of metal fragments, whereas the 6.5 mm object's density is a physical impossibility if the object is metallic, proving that it is a ghosted image.
Dr. Mantik was even able to duplicate how the 6.5 mm object was added to the AP skull x-ray. The 6.5 mm object does not appear on the lateral skull x-rays, further absolute proof that the object is not metallic.
BTW, when Dr. Mantik read Custer’s ARRB testimony, he contacted Custer and was able to interview him at length. Custer reaffirmed his ARRB testimony in every detail.
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Key and revealing information about the cover-up surfaced when the ARRB interviewed autopsy x-ray technician Jerrol Custer. Custer's testimony proves that the plotters were already exploring ways to produce altered skull x-rays the day after the autopsy.
Custer told the ARRB that the morning after the assassination, he was called into the radiology suite by Dr. John Ebersole, the autopsy radiologist, and was told to tape some metal fragments to skull bones and x-ray them. Custer x-rayed them with the same machine, at the same distance, that he used the night before during the autopsy. Custer stated that Ebersole said these x-rays would be used to make a bust of JFK. Custer added that Dr. Ebersole suggested that he “should forget” everything he was about to see:
A: The next morning I took them.
Q: And where did you take those X-rays?
A: In the main department, in a private room, with a portable X-ray unit.
Q: Was it the same x-ray unit that was used m to take the autopsy -
A: Yes, sir. The same distance.
Q: And what was the purpose of taking these x-rays?
A: I was told by Dr. Ebersole that they were to be taken to make measurements, to make a bust of President Kennedy.
Q: What did you do when you took the x-rays? What were the procedures? How did you go about taking them?
A: All I did was place the bone fragments on the film, and I made different exposures at different distances.
Q: Did Dr. Ebersole say anything to you about metal fragments?
A: He gave me three or four different metal fragments, varying in size. And he asked me to tape them to the bones. . . .
Q: Let me try asking you one question, just to make sure that the record is clear on this. Did Dr. Ebersole ask you to tape the metal fragments to the bone after he had returned from the White House? Are you able to say with certainty?
A: Absolutely. As soon as he walked in, that’s the first thing he said. “I want these bone fragments x-rayed with metal fragments taped”. . . .
Q: Is there any question in your mind whether you, in fact, taped metal fragments to the bones?
A: Absolutely no question at all in my mind. . . .
Q: Did Dr. Ebersole ever subsequently explain to you the purpose for taping metal fragments to the bones to be -
A: No, he didn’t. He just stated to me, when he brought the film -- the bone fragments and the metal fragments to me, that he had just come back from the White House after being debriefed.
Q: And what did he say about that debriefing?
A: WelI, he just said that he was debriefed by the Secret Service. And that was it.
High-ranking people had talked to him. And he suggested to me that everything that I see from now on, I should forget. (“Deposition of Jerrol Francis Custer,” ARRB, Transcript of Proceedings, October 28, 1997, pp. 143-146)
Obviously, taping bullet fragments to skull bones and then x-raying the bones had nothing to do with making a bust of JFK. Ultimately, the plotters opted not to use these x-rays because they realized that the x-rays could be altered via darkroom techniques that would be virtually impossible to detect at the time.
Scientific proof of the alteration was not discovered until Dr. David Mantik performed optical density (OD) measurements on the skull x-rays in the 1990s. Dr. Mantik discovered that the 6.5 mm object is not metallic and that the white patch in the lower rear parietal-occipital area is a physical impossibility for a human skull.
Dr. Mantik discovered that the 6.5 mm object was ghosted over a somewhat smaller genuine bullet fragment and a tiny bullet fragment. The largest of the two fragments is an irregular and jagged fragment measuring 2.0 mm at its narrowest point and 2.5 mm at its widest point, and measuring right around 6.3 mm in height. The tiny fragment is roughly circular and has a diameter of about 0.25 mm.
The density of these two genuine metal fragments is far less than the impossibly density of the 6.5 mm object as established by its OD measurements. The density of the two fragments is consistent with the density of metal fragments, whereas the 6.5 mm object's density is a physical impossibility if the object is metallic, proving that it is a ghosted image.
Dr. Mantik was even able to duplicate how the 6.5 mm object was added to the AP skull x-ray. The 6.5 mm object does not appear on the lateral skull x-rays, further absolute proof that the object is not metallic.
BTW, when Dr. Mantik read Custer’s ARRB testimony, he contacted Custer and was able to interview him at length. Custer reaffirmed his ARRB testimony in every detail.
It's truly amazing what you accept as proof. 30 year old recollections from an x-ray technician don't prove anything. Even if true, the conclusions you draw from his statement are highly illogical. You assume every unexplained event has sinister connotations.
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Part of understanding the cover-up is understanding the fact that some law enforcement agents pressured some witnesses to change their stories or misrepresented what the witnesses told them.
A prime example of this is the case of Kenny O'Donnell and Dave Powers. O'Donnell and Powers were two of JFK's best friends and top aides. They rode in the follow-up car during the assassination. Both men revealed to Congressman and future Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill in 1968 that they were certain they heard shots fired from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. It should be noted that both men were World War II combat veterans. Yet, both men changed their story in their Warren Commission statements and went along with the claim that all the shots came from the TSBD.
Why the change? What happened? In O'Donnell's case, we know what happened.
When O’Donnell was interviewed by the FBI, he told the agents he was certain he had heard two shots fired from behind the fence on the knoll. The agents responded by telling him that that could not have happened and that he must have been imagining things. As a result, O’Donnell decided to testify “the way they wanted me to.” O’Donnell revealed this to Tip O’Neill at a private dinner in Boston in 1968, and Powers confirmed O’Donnell’s account of grassy knoll shots to O’Neill at the dinner and later. Powers, like O'Donnell, heard shots fired from the fence. O’Neill discussed O’Donnell’s revealing disclosure in his 1987 memoir:
I was never one of those people how had doubts or suspicions about the Warren Commission’s report on the president’s death. But five years after Jack died, I was having dinner with Kenny O’Donnell and a few other people at Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant in Boston, and we got to talking about the assassination.
I was surprised to hear O’Donnell say that he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the fence.
“That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” I said.
“You’re right,” he replied. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to”. . . .
Dave Powers was with us at dinner that night, and his recollection of the shots was the same as O’Donnell’s. Kenny O’Donnell is no longer alive, but during the writing of this book I checked with Dave Powers. As they say in the news business, he stands by his story. (Tip O'Neill, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O'Neill, Random House edition, 1987, p. 178).
If the FBI could pressure two presidential aides into changing their stories, imagine how many ordinary witnesses decided to change their stories after being pressured the way O'Donnell was.
It is also worth remembering that we have a long list of witnesses who later said their FBI statements misrepresented what they told the interviewing agents.
From a number of eyewitness accounts of being pressured to change their stories about the origin and number of the shots, we gather that the following arguments were used to try to persuade them to alter their stories:
-- "You could not have heard more than three shots because we have hard medical and physical evidence that only three shots were fired and that they all came from behind."
-- "You were merely hearing echoes of the shots that Oswald fired from the sixth-floor window. The echoes made it sound like there were more than three shots, but we know for a fact that only three shots were fired."
-- "If you insist on claiming you heard more than three shots or shots from the front, in spite of the clear evidence to the contrary, you're only going to cause more pain and confusion for the Kennedy family. They need closure."
We still see lone-gunman theorists repeating the argument that the many witnesses who said they heard shots fired from the grassy knoll merely heard echoes of the sixth-floor gunman's alleged three shots. WC skeptics have refuted this argument many times. In his superb 1998 book Cover-Up, mathematician Stewart Galanor explains why the echoes argument is invalid:
Echoes are caused by sound bouncing off large, hard surfaces. . . . There are no buildings on the knoll or overpass that would have reflected sound back to confuse witnesses in Dealey Plaza. Beyond the knoll the terrain is flat with railroad tracks, while the knoll is covered with grass, shrubs, and trees that absorb sound. If there were any echoes, they would have been caused by the sound of rifle fire from the knoll echoing off the Book Depository (p. 76).
I should add that the sound of rifle fire from the knoll could have also bounced off the Dal-Tex Building and the County Records Building.
Galanor documents that of the 218 witnesses in Dealey Plaza for whom we have a record of their interviews, 58 of them said shots came from the grassy knoll; 35 said they could not tell where the shots came from; and 70 of them were not asked to say where they thought the shots came from (Cover-Up, pp. 171-176).
Additionally, Galanor devotes 10 pages to discussing the cases where eyewitness accounts were misrepresented by federal agents (Cover-Up, pp. 66-75).
More of the evidence that shots came from the grassy knoll:
-- Six railroad workers said they saw smoke arising from a point on the knoll during the shooting.
-- The Wiegman film shows a small cloud of smoke hanging above the fence on the knoll. This smoke could not have come from the steam pipe in the railroad yard nor from exhaust from the patrol bikes.
-- Two witnesses saw a man running from the fence into the railroad yard after the shots were fired.
-- Several witnesses said they smelled the pungent odor of gun powder on or near knoll right after the shots were fired.
-- Three cars clearly seem to have scouted the area behind the knoll during the 35 minutes before the shooting. The first car came at 11:55, the second at 12:15, and the third at 12:20. One of the driver's appeared to be talking into a microphone. We know they were not local police or federal personnel, and they surely were not looking for a parking space.
In his 11/22/1963 FBI statement, Lee Bowers, who observed the cars from his railroad tower behind the parking lot, said that three cars entered the parking lot behind the knoll in separate trips before Kennedy’s motorcade entered the plaza. He said the cars drove around slowly and then left the area. He told the WC that the first car appeared to be “checking the area,” and he used the words “probed” and “searching” to describe the actions of the second and third cars.
-- A credible eyewitness, Julia Ann Mercer, the wife of a former U.S. congressman, said that before the assassination she saw a man exit the back of a truck with an encased rifle in his hand on Elm Street, and that the man headed toward the grassy knoll.
Both of her first two documented accounts that she gave to federal and local law enforcement contain the same essential elements: there was a parked truck; there were two men in the truck; the man who was not driving took something from the back of the truck; the object that the man took from the back of the truck looked like a rifle encased in some kind of material; the man who exited the truck carrying an encased rifle headed up the grassy knoll.
In tacit recognition of the consistency in Mercer's accounts, WC apologist John McAdams allowed that her initial statements to the Dallas sheriff’s department and the FBI were truthful, but he suggested that she innocently mistook a tool box for a gun case. However, even in her first statement, Mercer specified that the object the man was carrying was 3.5 to 4 feet long and 8 inches wide at its widest point and tapered down to 4 or 5 inches wide at its narrowest point, which obviously rules out a tool box.
Moreover, to his credit, McAdams also acknowledged that soon after the assassination, Mercer told a Secret Service agent who was talking to witnesses in the sheriff’s office that she had seen a man with a gun case. The agent was Special Agent Forrest Sorrels. Sorrels told the WC that he spoke with a lady in the sheriff’s office who told him that she had seen “somebody that looked like they had a gun case.” McAdams conceded that “the lady pretty much has to be Mercer,” and that she said this before she was interviewed by the sheriff’s department.
-- Acoustical scientists consulted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) determined with a probably of over 95% that a gunshot impulse pattern on a police dictabelt recorded in Dealey Plaza during the shooting was caused by a shot fired from the grassy knoll. Even the NRC/NAS panel that was formed to discredit the HSCA's acoustical evidence was only able to reduce the probability of the grassy knoll shot down to 77.7%, and they did so by introducing two outright errors into their calculations, as several scientists have pointed out (e.g., Dr. Paul Chambers, Dr. Don Thomas, and David Scheim).
New research on the acoustical evidence conducted by BBN scientists from 2015 to 2018 proves that the alleged Decker "hold everything" crosstalk that critics have claimed refutes the acoustical evidence is not crosstalk at all but is an overdub that occurred during the copying process. Dr. Josiah Thompson spends over 100 pages discussing this historic new research in his 2020 book Last Second in Dallas.
The argument that the Decker transmission proves the impulse patterns on the dictablet were recorded after the assassination never made any sense from the outset. The argument always required the specious assumption that Channel 2 on the dictabelt stopped recording for 31 to 60 seconds.
As several scientists pointed out years ago, for this Channel-2-recording-pause theory to even be theoretically possible, there would have to be an offset in the dispatcher time notations on the dictabelt after that point, but there is none. The 12:35 and 12:36 time notations occur exactly five and six minutes respectively after the 12:30 time notation. The NRC/NAS failed to explain this problem, as did Linsker, Garwin, Chernoff, Horowitz, and Ramsey in their 2005 rebuttal to Dr. Don Thomas's 2001 article on the acoustical evidence.
In a 14-page critique of Dr. Thompson's 100-plus-page presentation on the acoustical evidence in Last Second in Dallas, Louis Girdler, writing under the pseudonym "Premier Kissov," says absolutely nothing about any of these things -- says nothing about the new BBN research (such as Dr. Richard Mullen's PCC testing of the Decker transmission, which proves it is an overdub and not crosstalk), and says nothing about the impossible Channel-2-recording-pause theory, which was the crucial assumption of the debunked Decker-crosstalk argument ("'Your Lying Eyes'--Josiah Thompson's Lonely Labrinth: A Critical Review of 'Last Second in Dallas,'" pp. 27-40).
Instead, Girdler simply rehashes some of the arguments made by the NRC/NAS panel, by Anthony Pellicano (who actually accidentally provided strong evidence against the Channel-2-recording-pause theory and provided evidence that the bell sound on the dictabelt does not automatically mean it was not recorded in Dealey Plaza during the assassination), by the FBI's Technical Services Division (who employed no acoustical scientists and proved they didn't even understand how N-waves can be identified in audio recordings), by some Sonalyst analysts (who didn't even understand how AGC works), and by amateurs such as Jim Bowles and Michael O'Dell.
You would think that any critical review of Thompson's book would deal with the historic new BBN research on the acoustical evidence, especially the two addendums written by Dr. Barger and Dr. Mullen, but Girdler says nothing about any of this. Girdler also says nothing about the NRC/NAS panel's admissions about the high probabilities of the timing-movement correlations and the grassy knoll shot, nor about the windshield-distortion correlations.
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Part of understanding the cover-up is understanding the fact that some law enforcement agents pressured some witnesses to change their stories or misrepresented what the witnesses told them.
Why the hell would they do that?
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Why the hell would they do that?
Why "would" they do that?! They did do that with Kenny O'Donnell, a presidential aide and a close friend of JFK's.
Did you even bother to read beyond the first sentence of my reply? If you did, how did you miss the fact that FBI agents did this with O'Donnell?
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Why "would" they do that?! They did do that with Kenny O'Donnell, a presidential aide and a close friend of JFK's.
You negated the question which is why would they do that. Instead of answering you just doubled down. It's funny because you are always accusing me of dodging questions.
Would you like to take another crack at it?
Did you even bother to read beyond the first sentence of my reply? If you did, how did you miss the fact that FBI agents did this with O'Donnell?
No. Why would I. When you start with a false pretense, there's really no point in going beyond that. When you miss the first turn on your journey, it makes no sense to continue in the wrong direction.
If you expect me to accept your premise, you first must establish its validity.
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You negated the question which is why would they do that. Instead of answering you just doubled down. It's funny because you are always accusing me of dodging questions.
Would you like to take another crack at it?
No. Why would I. When you start with a false pretense, there's really no point in going beyond that. When you miss the first turn on your journey, it makes no sense to continue in the wrong direction.
If you expect me to accept your premise, you first must establish its validity.
I can tell you have no idea how badly you've embarrassed yourself here.
I pointed out that Kenny O'Donnell said that FBI agents pressured him into changing his account of where he heard shots coming from. And you replied by ignoring O'Donnell's account and posed a question that assumed the whole issue was hypothetical, as if O'Donnell never said that FBI agents pressured him into changing this story.
It's as if I pointed that Ronald Reagan cut taxes and you answered by saying, "Why would he have cut taxes?" as if he did not cut taxes.
The valid question to ask is, Why did some FBI agents pressure witnesses into changing their stories, and why did they misrepresent what some witnesses told them? We know this happened. It's been documented in spades. The question is, why did it happen?
Well, it's not complicated: There was a high-level cover-up underway. Some federal agents were ordered to suppress unwelcome testimony and evidence. Some agents did not even need to be told to do this because they didn't want to be the agents who forwarded reports that contained information that contradicted the government's version of the shooting. Some agents may have actually been totally convinced that the government's version was correct and believed that therefore witnesses whose accounts contradicted that version must have been mistaken, must have "imagined" that they heard shots from the knoll, must have "imagined" that they heard more than three shots (or must have heard echoes of the three shots), etc., etc.
We see similarly serious and varied actions of cover-up and reasons for those actions in the Iran-Contra Scandal of the 1980s. Many of the personnel who aided in the attempted massive cover-up did not realize they were aiding a massive cover-up. Some of the personnel suppressed or destroyed evidence because they were ordered to do so. And some personnel, the higher-level ones, knew exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it. Moreover, the cover-up came very close to succeeding. If just a few more key documents had been shredded, the Iran-Contra conspiracy may not have been exposed for years or even decades.
Sometimes I'm almost tempted to ask if you live on a different planet or in some alternative reality where federal agents and police officers never plant evidence, never alter photos or films, never misrepresent witness interviews, never suppress evidence, never destroy evidence, never try to pressure witnesses into changing their stories, etc., etc. That's a fantasy world, not the world that we inhabit.
Do you have any idea how many times FBI agents have been caught altering evidence, suppressing evidence, giving false statements, etc., etc.?
Here's what a Google AI response says on the subject:
Documented instances of FBI personnel planting or altering evidence or official records include the following cases:
Kevin Clinesmith (2020): An FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to altering an email submitted for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) application during the "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation. The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General Special Report found he had changed the wording of an email from another agency to incorrectly state that an individual was not a "source" for another government agency.
Matthew Lowry (2015): An FBI agent in Washington, D.C., was charged with obstructing justice and falsifying records after he allegedly stole heroin from evidence, ingested it, and replaced the missing volume with a cutting agent before returning the evidence bags to the vault.
The FBI Crime Lab Scandal (1990s): Following reports by whistleblower Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, an extensive Department of Justice Inspector General investigation revealed systemic misconduct inside the elite FBI Crime Lab. The findings highlighted cases of scientists and agents altering reports, selectively presenting evidence, and providing scientifically invalid, pro-prosecution testimony in major criminal trials.
Frederic Whitehurst's reports to agency officials ultimately forced the bureau to overhaul its lab practices and launch widespread reviews of historical forensic testimony.
Links:
https://whistleblowersblog.org/government-whistleblowers/intelligence-community-whistleblowers/dr-whitehurst-and-the-fbi-lab-scandal/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32380051
Shall we talk about the conduct of some FBI agents and the FBI lab in the JFK case? Let's see: destruction of evidence, contradictory lab reports, producing witness interview reports that misrepresented what the witnesses said, etc. etc. I just have to wonder what you have read on the JFK case to not know these things.
Ditto for some police departments, especially the Dallas and Los Angeles police departments. Do you have any idea how many times the Dallas police and the LA police have been caught planting evidence, suppressing evidence, giving false statements, etc.?
Heard of the Ramparts Scandal involving the LA police where some officers and detectives were found to have planted evidence and given false statements? The city of LA had to pay a massive settlement to settle all the lawsuits that came when these cases were exposed.
Some links for your education:
https://journals.library.wustl.edu/lawreview/article/4627/galley/21460/view/
https://peabodyawards.com/award-profile/fake-drugs-real-lives/
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2006/mar/15/dallas-fake-drug-cases-settle-for-millions-jury-awards-damages/
https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1208&context=fac_pm
"Dallas Police Officer Accused of Planting Evidence Turns Himself In" (https://share.google/CdhWCDW4l4X8hWizl)
"Crooked Cop Caught Red Handed Planting Evidence" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9DCE2yYkHA)
https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr129/BILLS-117hr129ih.htm
EXCERPT: In what became known nationally as the ``Sheetrock'' scandal, Dallas police officers and undercover informants were found to have set up dozens of innocent people, mostly Mexican immigrants, by planting fake drugs on them consisting of chalk-like material used in sheetrock and other brands of wallboard. The revelations led to the dismissal of over 40 cases (although some of those arrested were already deported). In April 2005, a former Dallas narcotics detective was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the scheme. Charges against others are pending.
https://pelleylaw.com/blog/2017/08/cops-planting-drugs-it-doesnt-just-happen-in-the-movies/
https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2004/January/04_crt_041.htm
https://markshawbooks.com/assets/docs/New-Evidence-Proving-Warren-Commission-Corruption_Oct-26-2023-1.pdf
FBI Crime Lab scandal and Other Cases of Evidence Tampering/fabrication:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/kelly-evidence.html?scp=8&sq=Ultraviolet&st=Search
https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9704a/index.htm (even this quasi-whitewash of the crime lab scandal by the DOJ IG contains a great deal of damning evidence of misconduct and incompetence by FBI crime lab experts)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/08/06/minimal-punishment-meted-in-fbi-lab-flap/074b8ecc-8190-4983-a112-86504ff21be4/
https://makejusticeblind.com/a-roundup-of-the-key-facts-of-the-tampering/ (discusses a case where photos were altered by the FBI to help convict someone--gee, sound familiar?)
https://www.forensicscolleges.com/blog/resources/real-cases-of-forensic-fraud-flawed-evidence
Secret Service Misconduct in JFK Case and Other Cases:
We now know that HSCA staff counsel Belford Lawson, who conducted the Committee’s investigation of the Secret Service, suspected that a Secret Service agent planted CE 399 at Parkland Hospital. In a memo on the interview with Nathan Pool, who had seen a bullet on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, Lawson noted that a Secret Service agent was close enough to the area where the bullet was found to have planted the bullet, and that following up on Pool’s testimony could have led to identifying the agent:
A Secret Service agent was for a significant period of time close enough to the elevator to plant a bullet; may lead to an identification of that agent; and will reveal the superficiality of the Warren Commission’s approach. (“Untaped Interview of January 10, 1977, with Nathan Pool,” HSCA memorandum from Belford Lawson to Robert Tanenbaum, January 12, 1977, record number 180-10089-10189, available at
https://ia801206.us.archive.org/31/items/nsia-PoolNathan/nsia-PoolNathan/Pool%20Nathan%2001.pdf)
Dr. Donald Wilkes, "The Secret Service and the JFK Assassination"
https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1174&context=fac_pm
https://www.amazon.com/Survivors-Guilt-Service-Failure-President/dp/1937584607
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/slideshows/prostitutes-grenades-and-drunk-driving-20-years-of-secret-service-scandals
https://time.com/3449641/secret-service-scandal/
A good introduction to the subject of the dubious evidence cited against Oswald is Donald Wilkes' article "Lee Harvey Oswald, the Patsy: An Objective Review of the Evidence Concludes That Oswald Was Framed," published by the University of Georgia in 2013 on the University of Georgia Digital Commons: Popular Media website. At the time, Wilkes was an emeritus professor of law at the University of Georgia. Here's a link to his article:
https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&article=1184&context=fac_pm
The case of Randall Adams. The award-winning 1988 Errol Morris documentary The Thin Blue Line documents the now-infamous case of Randall Adams, who was framed and railroaded by the DPD and the Dallas District Attorney's (DA's) office in 1976 on the false charge of killing a police officer named Robert Wood.
The film documents that the DPD used false witnesses, suppressed exculpatory evidence, discarded the most likely suspect (who later confessed), and refused to let Adams talk to a lawyer for two weeks. Gee, sound familiar? The DA was Henry Wade. The DPD officer who engineered the frame-up was Gus Rose. Humm, do those names sound familiar?
The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals overturned Adams' conviction in 1989 on the grounds of prosecutorial malfeasance (misconduct) and inconsistencies in the evidence. It had become clear that Adams had nothing whatsoever to do with Officer Wood's murder.
Yet, even after the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals voided Adams' conviction, DA Wade vowed to retry Adams, saying there was no room in his book "for a cop-killer getting off with anything else than the death penalty"! Mind you, this was after the state's criminal appeals court had found the DA's office guilty of misconduct! This says volumes about Wade's ethics and integrity.
Because of public pressure created by the release of The Thin Blue Line and pressure from state government officials, the Dallas DA's office eventually decided against retrying Adams.
Here's the transcript of The Thin Blue Line:
https://www.errolmorris.com/film/tbl_transcript.html
Here are links with more information on the DPD's sleazy record, running clear into the 2020s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Police_Department#:~:text=in%20July%202008.-,Fake%20drug%20scandal,were%20actually%20not%20illegal%20substances.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/fourth-former-dallas-officer-in-fake-drug-scandal-gets-one-year-probation/287-338790876
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Dallas-police-hammered-for-fake-drug-scandal-1486478.php
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/6-dallas-police-officers-on-leave-linked-to-illegal-search/2748127/
Here are links with information on cases of other police departments planting and fabricating evidence:
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6013&context=law_lawreview
https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4692-cops-planting-evidence
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/faculty_scholarship/article/1903/&path_info=S_Fisher_Just_the_Facts.pdf
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/police-corruption-revealed-los-angeless-rampart-division
Discusses the LAPD's Rampart scandal, where the LAPD was caught planting and fabricating evidence in the 1990s. The city of LA eventually was forced to pay millions to settle the civil lawsuit brought by some of the victims.
https://jmarshlaw.com/chicago-police-planted-evidence/
Discusses three cases where the Chicago Police Department was caught planting evidence from the 1980s to the mid-2000s.
https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249850.pdf
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I can tell you have no idea how badly you've embarrassed yourself here.
I pointed out that Kenny O'Donnell said that FBI agents pressured him into changing his account of where he heard shots coming from. And you replied by ignoring O'Donnell's account and posed a question that assumed the whole issue was hypothetical, as if O'Donnell never said that FBI agents pressured him into changing this story.
Telling a witness he was wrong about his observation does not equate to pressuring him to change his story. The FBI knew the shots had not come from the GK and they told O'Donnell that. If he decided to alter his testimony, that is on him.
You don't quote Kenny O'Donnell. You quote Tip O'Neill quoting Kenny O'Donnell so we don't know how O'Donnel actually described the encounter. You are describing your impression of the impression O'Nell got from what O'Donnell said. A hearsay account hardly establishes that the FBI "pressured" O'Donnell to change his story.
So I'll ask my question again. Why would the FBI pressure O'Donnell into changing his story.
The more fundamental question is, were any shots actually fired from the GK. There is no forensic evidence pointing to a shot from the GK. There were no eyewitness to a shot from the GK. There was an eyewitness who had a perfect view of the are behind the wooden fence when the shots were fired and he saw no one there. The only "evidence" of shots from the GK are the impressions of a group of earwitnesses who said all the shots came from the GK. They are contradicted by another group of witnesses who said all the shots came from the direction of the TSBD. The latter group is corroborated by 3 spent shell found in the sniper's nest and the murder weapon found elsewhere on the same floor. No corroboration for the earwitnesses who thought the shots came from the GK. That includes Kenny O'Donnell.
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Telling a witness he was wrong about his observation does not equate to pressuring him to change his story. The FBI knew the shots had not come from the GK and they told O'Donnell that. If he decided to alter his testimony, that is on him.
You don't quote Kenny O'Donnell. You quote Tip O'Neill quoting Kenny O'Donnell so we don't know how O'Donnel actually described the encounter. You are describing your impression of the impression O'Nell got from what O'Donnell said. A hearsay account hardly establishes that the FBI "pressured" O'Donnell to change his story.
So I'll ask my question again. Why would the FBI pressure O'Donnell into changing his story.
The more fundamental question is, were any shots actually fired from the GK. There is no forensic evidence pointing to a shot from the GK. There were no eyewitness to a shot from the GK. There was an eyewitness who had a perfect view of the are behind the wooden fence when the shots were fired and he saw no one there. The only "evidence" of shots from the GK are the impressions of a group of earwitnesses who said all the shots came from the GK. They are contradicted by another group of witnesses who said all the shots came from the direction of the TSBD. The latter group is corroborated by 3 spent shell found in the sniper's nest and the murder weapon found elsewhere on the same floor. No corroboration for the earwitnesses who thought the shots came from the GK. That includes Kenny O'Donnell.
Ken O'Donnell denied the allegations that he changed his testimony under pressure from anyone. He told the Chicago Tribune in an interview that they were "an absolute, outright lie." And Dave Powers, also quoted by O'Neill, denied the story as well.
I'll be lazy here and quote Wikipedia on this:
"In their memoir of Kennedy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, both O'Donnell and David Powers reported hearing only three shots and did not offer any speculation as to their origin.[12] According to a June 15, 1975 report in the Chicago Tribune, an unnamed "Central Intelligence Agency liaison man" told Congressmen that O'Donnell and David Powers had initially told assassination investigators that the shots that struck Kennedy came from a location other than the Texas School Book Depository, but that the two men were convinced, reportedly by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover or his main aides, to alter their accounts to the Warren Commission to avoid the possibility of revealing the CIA's plots to kill Fidel Castro which might result in an international incident.[12] During a telephone interview, O'Donnell said he testified truthfully and called the allegations "an absolute, outright lie."[12] In his 1987 autobiography Man of the House, former House Speaker Tip O'Neill wrote that he had dinner with O'Donnell and Powers in 1968, and that both men indicated that two shots were fired from behind the fence on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza.[13] According to O'Neill, he pointed out to O'Donnell that he gave different information to the Warren Commission, and O'Donnell replied: "I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn't want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family."[13] However, Dave Powers denied such conversation and claim occurred and criticized his autobiography.[14]
Again, O'Neill's allegations were denied by both men.
See here: https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=lQhIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TQANAAAAIBAJ&pg=1934%2C3948488&hl=en
This is another example of how Michael Griffith uncritically accepts information that supports his pre-determined conspiracy view. And it doesn't matter whether it contradicts other claims he believes. Remember again he believes in the acoustics evidence that concluded three shots were fired from the TSBD and another shot came from behind the fence. But he quotes allegations that O'Donnell said the shots came from in front of the limo. That is, of course, completely at odds with the acoustics analysis. But he doesn't care.
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Ken O'Donnell denied the allegations that he changed his testimony under pressure from anyone. He told the Chicago Tribune in an interview that they were "an absolute, outright lie." And Dave Powers, also quoted by O'Neill, denied the story as well.
I'll be lazy here and quote Wikipedia on this:
"In their memoir of Kennedy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, both O'Donnell and David Powers reported hearing only three shots and did not offer any speculation as to their origin.[12] According to a June 15, 1975 report in the Chicago Tribune, an unnamed "Central Intelligence Agency liaison man" told Congressmen that O'Donnell and David Powers had initially told assassination investigators that the shots that struck Kennedy came from a location other than the Texas School Book Depository, but that the two men were convinced, reportedly by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover or his main aides, to alter their accounts to the Warren Commission to avoid the possibility of revealing the CIA's plots to kill Fidel Castro which might result in an international incident.[12] During a telephone interview, O'Donnell said he testified truthfully and called the allegations "an absolute, outright lie."[12] In his 1987 autobiography Man of the House, former House Speaker Tip O'Neill wrote that he had dinner with O'Donnell and Powers in 1968, and that both men indicated that two shots were fired from behind the fence on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza.[13] According to O'Neill, he pointed out to O'Donnell that he gave different information to the Warren Commission, and O'Donnell replied: "I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn't want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family."[13] However, Dave Powers denied such conversation and claim occurred and criticized his autobiography.[14]
Again, O'Neill's allegations were denied by both men.
See here: https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=lQhIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TQANAAAAIBAJ&pg=1934%2C3948488&hl=en
This is another example of how Michael Griffith uncritically accepts information that supports his pre-determined conspiracy view. And it doesn't matter whether it contradicts other claims he believes. Remember again he believes in the acoustics evidence that concluded three shots were fired from the TSBD and another shot came from behind the fence. But he quotes allegations that O'Donnell said the shots came from in front of the limo. That is, of course, completely at odds with the acoustics analysis. But he doesn't care.
Thanks for the info. As long as I've been at this, I should know better than to simply accept these claims made by the CTs at face value. In fairness to MTG, it appears this lie originated with O'Neill although from the passage he quoted, it doesn't sound like he was saying the FBI pressured O'Donnell into changing his story. It appears MTG embellished O'Neill's words a bit.
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Thanks for the info. As long as I've been at this, I should know better than to simply accept these claims made by the CTs at face value. In fairness to MTG, it appears this lie originated with O'Neill although from the passage he quoted, it doesn't sound like he was saying the FBI pressured O'Donnell into changing his story. It appears MTG embellished O'Neill's words a bit.
The O'Neill book came out in 1987 while the original claim that O'Donnell altered his testimony was first made in 1975. The Chicago Tribune story that quotes him denying he changed his testimony goes over this in greater detail. And Dave Powers, who was alive in 1987 when the book came out, also denied the story that he and O'Donnell told O'Neill they had changed their testimony.
In any case, according to several people quoted in the book O'Neill simply flat out made things up. He's simply not a credible source on this issue.
Bud called these "conspiracy trading cards", allegations that they continually pass around and repeat. It doesn't matter how many times you disprove them they continue to trade them around.
Here's the O'Neill account (he says it was in 1968) from his book (again, Powers denied the story, O'Donnell had died in 1977):
(https://www.drivehq.com/file/DFPublishFile.aspx/FileID13618630421/Key2e01w217yi91/oneill two.jpg)
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The O'Neill book came out in 1987 while the original claim that O'Donnell altered his testimony was first made in 1975. The Chicago Tribune story that quotes him denying he changed his testimony goes over this in greater detail. And Dave Powers, who was alive in 1987 when the book came out, also denied the story that he and O'Donnell told O'Neill they had changed their testimony.
In any case, according to several people quoted in the book O'Neill simply flat out made things up. He's simply not a credible source on this issue.
Bud called these "conspiracy trading cards", allegations that they continually pass around and repeat. It doesn't matter how many times you disprove them they continue to trade them around.
When you say Bud, I'm guessing you are referring to Bud from alt.assassination.jfk. I hadn't heard from Bud since the McAdams forum shutdown. I hope he's doing well.
I always appreciated Bud's take on whatever issue he was talking about, even the few times I would disagree with him.
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MG: Key and revealing information about the cover-up surfaced when the ARRB interviewed autopsy x-ray technician Jerrol Custer. Custer's testimony proves that the plotters were already exploring ways to produce altered skull x-rays the day after the autopsy.
Custer told the ARRB that the morning after the assassination, he was called into the radiology suite by Dr. John Ebersole, the autopsy radiologist, and was told to tape some metal fragments to skull bones and x-ray them. Custer x-rayed them with the same machine, at the same distance, that he used the night before during the autopsy. Custer stated that Ebersole said these x-rays would be used to make a bust of JFK. Custer added that Dr. Ebersole suggested that he “should forget” everything he was about to see:
A: The next morning I took them.
Q: And where did you take those X-rays?
A: In the main department, in a private room, with a portable X-ray unit.
Q: Was it the same x-ray unit that was used m to take the autopsy -
A: Yes, sir. The same distance.
Q: And what was the purpose of taking these x-rays?
A: I was told by Dr. Ebersole that they were to be taken to make measurements, to make a bust of President Kennedy.
Q: What did you do when you took the x-rays? What were the procedures? How did you go about taking them?
A: All I did was place the bone fragments on the film, and I made different exposures at different distances.
Q: Did Dr. Ebersole say anything to you about metal fragments?
A: He gave me three or four different metal fragments, varying in size. And he asked me to tape them to the bones. . . .
Q: Let me try asking you one question, just to make sure that the record is clear on this. Did Dr. Ebersole ask you to tape the metal fragments to the bone after he had returned from the White House? Are you able to say with certainty?
A: Absolutely. As soon as he walked in, that’s the first thing he said. “I want these bone fragments x-rayed with metal fragments taped”. . . .
Q: Is there any question in your mind whether you, in fact, taped metal fragments to the bones?
A: Absolutely no question at all in my mind. . . .
Q: Did Dr. Ebersole ever subsequently explain to you the purpose for taping metal fragments to the bones to be -
A: No, he didn’t. He just stated to me, when he brought the film -- the bone fragments and the metal fragments to me, that he had just come back from the White House after being debriefed.
Q: And what did he say about that debriefing?
A: WelI, he just said that he was debriefed by the Secret Service. And that was it. High-ranking people had talked to him. And he suggested to me that everything that I see from now on, I should forget. (“Deposition of Jerrol Francis Custer,” ARRB, Transcript of Proceedings, October 28, 1997, pp. 143-146)
Obviously, taping bullet fragments to skull bones and then x-raying the bones had nothing to do with making a bust of JFK. Ultimately, the plotters opted not to use these x-rays because they realized that the x-rays could be altered via darkroom techniques that would be virtually impossible to detect at the time.
Scientific proof of the alteration was not discovered until Dr. David Mantik performed optical density (OD) measurements on the skull x-rays in the 1990s. Dr. Mantik discovered that the 6.5 mm object is not metallic and that the white patch in the lower rear parietal-occipital area is a physical impossibility for a human skull.
Dr. Mantik discovered that the 6.5 mm object was ghosted over a somewhat smaller genuine bullet fragment and a tiny bullet fragment. The largest of the two fragments is an irregular and jagged fragment measuring 2.0 mm at its narrowest point and 2.5 mm at its widest point, and measuring right around 6.3 mm in height. The tiny fragment is roughly circular and has a diameter of about 0.25 mm.
The density of these two genuine metal fragments is far less than the impossibly density of the 6.5 mm object as established by its OD measurements. The density of the two fragments is consistent with the density of metal fragments, whereas the 6.5 mm object's density is a physical impossibility if the object is metallic, proving that it is a ghosted image.
Dr. Mantik was even able to duplicate how the 6.5 mm object was added to the AP skull x-ray. The 6.5 mm object does not appear on the lateral skull x-rays, further absolute proof that the object is not metallic.
BTW, when Dr. Mantik read Custer’s ARRB testimony, he contacted Custer and was able to interview him at length. Custer reaffirmed his ARRB testimony in every detail.
JC: It's truly amazing what you accept as proof. 30 year old recollections from an x-ray technician don't prove anything.
Perhaps another one of your ailments is a poor memory, but most people can remember the essentials of important events they experienced decades earlier. Custer expressly said he had absolutely no doubt about his recollection of this incident.
It is clear that the incident with Dr. Ebersole still bothered Custer, and understandably so. When a senior officer who is the chief of radiation therapy, the training director for nuclear medicine, and the director of the Radiation Exposure Evaluation Laboratory at your hospital tells you to perform the very odd action of taping bullet fragments onto skull bones and x-raying them, then gives you the transparently phony excuse that this is being done for a bust of JFK, and then tells you that you should forget everything you're about to see--that's gonna get burned into your memory.
Even if true, the conclusions you draw from his statement are highly illogical. You assume every unexplained event has sinister connotations.
Really? Then let's hear your innocent explanation for why senior White House officials sent Ebersole back to the hospital with orders to have x-rays made of bullet fragments taped to skull bones. Let's hear it.
I notice you at least had enough sense not to parrot the farcical "JFK bust" explanation. I guess you realized that even a high school student would understand that x-rays of bullet fragments taped to pieces of skull would have been worthless for making a bust of JFK. The White House press office alone had literally hundreds of high-quality photos of JFK's head that could have been used to make a bust of him.
My conclusions about this incident are not the least bit "highly illogical." The Ebersole-Custer incident was clearly an early attempt by high officials to create composite x-rays that would show images not found on the original x-rays. The only reason they didn't use the fraudulent Ebersole skull x-rays was that they realized they could alter the autopsy skull x-rays with darkroom techniques.
We know the autopsy skull x-rays are altered copies of the originals from the following facts:
(1) The hard scientific evidence of multiple and independent optical-density (OD) measurements of the x-rays.
(2) The hard physical evidence that the x-ray film of the lateral neck x-ray has no emulsion missing from the side of the film in the area where the T-shaped symbol was etched into the x-ray, which is a physical impossibility unless the x-ray is a copy.
(3) The fact that the 6.5 mm object has been positively determined to be a ghosted image (both by high-magnification analysis and by independent OD measurements, not to mention that Dr. Mantik was able to duplicate how the object's image was added to the AP x-ray, and not to mention that forensic science tells us that an FMJ bullet will never "shear off" a fragment into the outer table of the skull as it penetrates the skull, especially not from the bottom side of the bullet when it's striking the skull at a downward angle of 15 degrees).
(4) The fact that the impossibly dense white patch on the lateral x-rays is not seen on the AP x-ray, a physical impossibility if the x-rays are pristine originals.
(5) The fact that the impossible white patch is not seen on JFK's pre-mortem skull x-rays.
(6) The fact that any area resembling the impossible white patch did not appear on any of the skull x-rays that Dr. Mantik and Dr. DeSalles used as controls.
I quote from my book A Comforting Lie: The Myth That a Lone Gunman Killed President Kennedy:
Doug Horne, a former chief analyst for the ARRB, provides more detail on the historic research on the white patch:
As a scientific “control,” Mantik and his research partner Dr. Doug DeSalles took OD measurements of lateral skull x-rays from nine coroner’s cases to obtain a range of numerical measurements between the brightest and darkest areas on these skull x-rays. In general, the brightest areas of the nine coroner’s cases transmitted about two or three times as much light as the darkest areas.
Furthermore, subjective, visual examination of the lateral x-rays of these nine skulls did not reveal the extreme contrast between very bright and very dark areas that is seen in the JFK lateral skull x-rays. The subjective visual evidence was consistent with the OD measurements, and vice-a-versa.
On the right lateral JFK skull x-ray, Dr. Mantik took many OD measurements of two specific areas. The optical density measurements for one extremely bright area located anatomically behind the ear, which he labeled “P” (for posterior) in a diagram at his lectures [i.e., the white patch], was compared with the optical density measurements for a very dark area in the front of the cranium [skull] labeled “F” (for front).
Amazingly, on the right JFK lateral skull x-ray, OD measurements revealed that area “P” (in the rear of the skull behind the ear) transmitted about 1100 times more light than area “F” (in the forward part of the skull which appears so dark in the x-ray image). That’s worth repeating: The “great white area” in the rear of the skull behind the ear in the JFK right lateral skull x-ray transmitted about1100 times more light than the dark area in the front of the cranium, whereas on the “control” x-rays the ratio was only about 2 or 3 to 1 between the brightest area and the darkest area on each lateral x-ray. (205:546)
Horne further notes that on four of the nine control lateral skull x-rays, the front part of the skull was brighter than the rear part of the skull (205:546 n 28). (A Comforting Lie, pp. 275-276)
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Sarah Stanton is very lucky she didn't end up having one of those suspicious deaths that others like her had...
From what her grand daughter told me we have to assume Sarah told FBI the same thing that she told her relatives at gatherings...That she met Lee Harvey Oswald on the 2nd Floor staircase landing outside the 2nd Floor Lunch Room on her way down to see the motorcade...Oswald was waiting for Mrs Reid to clear out the 2nd Floor Lunch Room in order to have a safe place to hide him while he was being set-up on the 6th Floor...Stanton asked Oswald if he was going down to watch the motorcade...Oswald responded "No, I'm going back in to the Break Room"...That Break Room was the 2nd Floor Lunch Room that Carolyn Arnold would see Oswald eating lunch in alone shortly after...Stanton's grand daughter Wanda told me that Sarah was conservative and authority-obeying and would not challenge an institution like the FBI...She also told me that Sarah was embarrassed about her obesity and avoided public exposure...So when FBI dealt with this dangerous threat to expose the conspiracy by lying and entering that Stanton did not see Oswald that day Stanton would be unlikely to publicly challenge it and did not...She probably never even read that altered statement...Seeing what got witnesses killed and why, Stanton is very lucky she did not experience one of the strange deaths many witnesses like herself experienced...
This is being kept off The Education Forum for what reason again???
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Perhaps another one of your ailments is a poor memory, but most people can remember the essentials of important events they experienced decades earlier. Custer expressly said he had absolutely no doubt about his recollection of this incident.
It is clear that the incident with Dr. Ebersole still bothered Custer, and understandably so. When a senior officer who is the chief of radiation therapy, the training director for nuclear medicine, and the director of the Radiation Exposure Evaluation Laboratory at your hospital tells you to perform the very odd action of taping bullet fragments onto skull bones and x-raying them, then gives you the transparently phony excuse that this is being done for a bust of JFK, and then tells you that you should forget everything you're about to see--that's gonna get burned into your memory.
So now you are pretending to be a memory expert.
Really? Then let's hear your innocent explanation for why senior White House officials sent Ebersole back to the hospital with orders to have x-rays made of bullet fragments taped to skull bones. Let's hear it.
I don't know what the explanation is but I'm smart enough not to assume an answer to an unknown because I don't know what the answer is.
I notice you at least had enough sense not to parrot the farcical "JFK bust" explanation. I guess you realized that even a high school student would understand that x-rays of bullet fragments taped to pieces of skull would have been worthless for making a bust of JFK. The White House press office alone had literally hundreds of high-quality photos of JFK's head that could have been used to make a bust of him.
My conclusions about this incident are not the least bit "highly illogical." The Ebersole-Custer incident was clearly an early attempt by high officials to create composite x-rays that would show images not found on the original x-rays. The only reason they didn't use the fraudulent Ebersole skull x-rays was that they realized they could alter the autopsy skull x-rays with darkroom techniques.
It's clear to people with illogical minds and active imaginations.
We know the autopsy skull x-rays are altered copies of the originals from the following facts:
Not "we". It's "you". You seem to know a lot of things that aren't true.
(1) The hard scientific evidence of multiple and independent optical-density (OD) measurements of the x-rays.
(2) The hard physical evidence that the x-ray film of the lateral neck x-ray has no emulsion missing from the side of the film in the area where the T-shaped symbol was etched into the x-ray, which is a physical impossibility unless the x-ray is a copy.
(3) The fact that the 6.5 mm object has been positively determined to be a ghosted image (both by high-magnification analysis and by independent OD measurements, not to mention that Dr. Mantik was able to duplicate how the object's image was added to the AP x-ray, and not to mention that forensic science tells us that an FMJ bullet will never "shear off" a fragment into the outer table of the skull as it penetrates the skull, especially not from the bottom side of the bullet when it's striking the skull at a downward angle of 15 degrees).
(4) The fact that the impossibly dense white patch on the lateral x-rays is not seen on the AP x-ray, a physical impossibility if the x-rays are pristine originals.
(5) The fact that the impossible white patch is not seen on JFK's pre-mortem skull x-rays.
(6) The fact that any area resembling the impossible white patch did not appear on any of the skull x-rays that Dr. Mantik and Dr. DeSalles used as controls.
This is MTG playing doctor again. This time a radiologist.
I quote from my book A Comforting Lie: The Myth That a Lone Gunman Killed President Kennedy:
Oh, goody. You're quoting from your own book to support your argument.
I did an AI search and found your book is #1,989,139 on Amazon's list of best sellers. I'd love to know what #1,989,139 is.
Doug Horne, a former chief analyst for the ARRB, provides more detail on the historic research on the white patch:
You're citing Doug Horne? A guy with zero medical training, i.e. another amateur like you.
As a scientific “control,” Mantik and his research partner Dr. Doug DeSalles took OD measurements of lateral skull x-rays from nine coroner’s cases to obtain a range of numerical measurements between the brightest and darkest areas on these skull x-rays. In general, the brightest areas of the nine coroner’s cases transmitted about two or three times as much light as the darkest areas.
Furthermore, subjective, visual examination of the lateral x-rays of these nine skulls did not reveal the extreme contrast between very bright and very dark areas that is seen in the JFK lateral skull x-rays. The subjective visual evidence was consistent with the OD measurements, and vice-a-versa.
On the right lateral JFK skull x-ray, Dr. Mantik took many OD measurements of two specific areas. The optical density measurements for one extremely bright area located anatomically behind the ear, which he labeled “P” (for posterior) in a diagram at his lectures [i.e., the white patch], was compared with the optical density measurements for a very dark area in the front of the cranium [skull] labeled “F” (for front).
Amazingly, on the right JFK lateral skull x-ray, OD measurements revealed that area “P” (in the rear of the skull behind the ear) transmitted about 1100 times more light than area “F” (in the forward part of the skull which appears so dark in the x-ray image). That’s worth repeating: The “great white area” in the rear of the skull behind the ear in the JFK right lateral skull x-ray transmitted about1100 times more light than the dark area in the front of the cranium, whereas on the “control” x-rays the ratio was only about 2 or 3 to 1 between the brightest area and the darkest area on each lateral x-ray. (205:546)
Horne further notes that on four of the nine control lateral skull x-rays, the front part of the skull was brighter than the rear part of the skull (205:546 n 28). (A Comforting Lie, pp. 275-276)
You've enlisted a radiation oncologist and a Family Medicine Specialist to analyze forensic medical evidence. What's the matter? Couldn't you find a gynecologist to weigh in on the matter?
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Ken O'Donnell denied the allegations that he changed his testimony under pressure from anyone. He told the Chicago Tribune in an interview that they were "an absolute, outright lie." And Dave Powers, also quoted by O'Neill, denied the story as well.
I'll be lazy here and quote Wikipedia on this:
"In their memoir of Kennedy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, both O'Donnell and David Powers reported hearing only three shots and did not offer any speculation as to their origin.[12] According to a June 15, 1975 report in the Chicago Tribune, an unnamed "Central Intelligence Agency liaison man" told Congressmen that O'Donnell and David Powers had initially told assassination investigators that the shots that struck Kennedy came from a location other than the Texas School Book Depository, but that the two men were convinced, reportedly by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover or his main aides, to alter their accounts to the Warren Commission to avoid the possibility of revealing the CIA's plots to kill Fidel Castro which might result in an international incident.[12] During a telephone interview, O'Donnell said he testified truthfully and called the allegations "an absolute, outright lie."[12]
In his 1987 autobiography Man of the House, former House Speaker Tip O'Neill wrote that he had dinner with O'Donnell and Powers in 1968, and that both men indicated that two shots were fired from behind the fence on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza.[13] According to O'Neill, he pointed out to O'Donnell that he gave different information to the Warren Commission, and O'Donnell replied: "I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn't want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family."[13] However, Dave Powers denied such conversation and claim occurred and criticized his autobiography.[14]
Again, O'Neill's allegations were denied by both men.
See here: https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=lQhIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TQANAAAAIBAJ&pg=1934%2C3948488&hl=en
This is another example of how Michael Griffith uncritically accepts information that supports his pre-determined conspiracy view. And it doesn't matter whether it contradicts other claims he believes. Remember again he believes in the acoustics evidence that concluded three shots were fired from the TSBD and another shot came from behind the fence. But he quotes allegations that O'Donnell said the shots came from in front of the limo. That is, of course, completely at odds with the acoustics analysis. But he doesn't care.
Uh-huh, to believe Powers, you'd have to believe that O'Neill must have inexplicably fabricated the conversation.
I don't buy Powers' denial. I can't imagine why someone like Tip O'Neill, a close friend of the Kennedys and a sober and serious elected official who was not a WC skeptic at the time, would have lied about this.
Did it ever occur to you that Powers didn't realize how much publicity O'Neill's account would generate and didn't want to spark controversy by acknowledging that he had in fact confirmed O'Neill's account at the dinner and later when O'Neill checked with him?
So do you think O'Neill also lied about contacting Powers to confirm his account before deciding to include the account in his memoir? Why would he have done such a thing?
I find it much more plausible to believe that Powers gave a false denial because he was surprised by the attention sparked by O'Neill's account and because he did not want to cause further controversy by acknowledging that O'Neill's account was correct.
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I can tell you have no idea how badly you've embarrassed yourself here.
I pointed out that Kenny O'Donnell said that FBI agents pressured him into changing his account of where he heard shots coming from. And you replied by ignoring O'Donnell's account and posed a question that assumed the whole issue was hypothetical, as if O'Donnell never said that FBI agents pressured him into changing this story.
It's as if I pointed that Ronald Reagan cut taxes and you answered by saying, "Why would he have cut taxes?" as if he did not cut taxes.
The valid question to ask is, Why did some FBI agents pressure witnesses into changing their stories, and why did they misrepresent what some witnesses told them? We know this happened. It's been documented in spades. The question is, why did it happen?
Well, it's not complicated: There was a high-level cover-up underway. Some federal agents were ordered to suppress unwelcome testimony and evidence. Some agents did not even need to be told to do this because they didn't want to be the agents who forwarded reports that contained information that contradicted the government's version of the shooting. Some agents may have actually been totally convinced that the government's version was correct and believed that therefore witnesses whose accounts contradicted that version must have been mistaken, must have "imagined" that they heard shots from the knoll, must have "imagined" that they heard more than three shots (or must have heard echoes of the three shots), etc., etc.
We see similarly serious and varied actions of cover-up and reasons for those actions in the Iran-Contra Scandal of the 1980s. Many of the personnel who aided in the attempted massive cover-up did not realize they were aiding a massive cover-up. Some of the personnel suppressed or destroyed evidence because they were ordered to do so. And some personnel, the higher-level ones, knew exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it. Moreover, the cover-up came very close to succeeding. If just a few more key documents had been shredded, the Iran-Contra conspiracy may not have been exposed for years or even decades.
Sometimes I'm almost tempted to ask if you live on a different planet or in some alternative reality where federal agents and police officers never plant evidence, never alter photos or films, never misrepresent witness interviews, never suppress evidence, never destroy evidence, never try to pressure witnesses into changing their stories, etc., etc. That's a fantasy world, not the world that we inhabit.
Do you have any idea how many times FBI agents have been caught altering evidence, suppressing evidence, giving false statements, etc., etc.?
Here's what a Google AI response says on the subject:
Documented instances of FBI personnel planting or altering evidence or official records include the following cases:
Kevin Clinesmith (2020): An FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to altering an email submitted for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) application during the "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation. The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General Special Report found he had changed the wording of an email from another agency to incorrectly state that an individual was not a "source" for another government agency.
Matthew Lowry (2015): An FBI agent in Washington, D.C., was charged with obstructing justice and falsifying records after he allegedly stole heroin from evidence, ingested it, and replaced the missing volume with a cutting agent before returning the evidence bags to the vault.
The FBI Crime Lab Scandal (1990s): Following reports by whistleblower Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, an extensive Department of Justice Inspector General investigation revealed systemic misconduct inside the elite FBI Crime Lab. The findings highlighted cases of scientists and agents altering reports, selectively presenting evidence, and providing scientifically invalid, pro-prosecution testimony in major criminal trials.
Frederic Whitehurst's reports to agency officials ultimately forced the bureau to overhaul its lab practices and launch widespread reviews of historical forensic testimony.
Links:
https://whistleblowersblog.org/government-whistleblowers/intelligence-community-whistleblowers/dr-whitehurst-and-the-fbi-lab-scandal/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32380051
Shall we talk about the conduct of some FBI agents and the FBI lab in the JFK case? Let's see: destruction of evidence, contradictory lab reports, producing witness interview reports that misrepresented what the witnesses said, etc. etc. I just have to wonder what you have read on the JFK case to not know these things.
Ditto for some police departments, especially the Dallas and Los Angeles police departments. Do you have any idea how many times the Dallas police and the LA police have been caught planting evidence, suppressing evidence, giving false statements, etc.?
Heard of the Ramparts Scandal involving the LA police where some officers and detectives were found to have planted evidence and given false statements? The city of LA had to pay a massive settlement to settle all the lawsuits that came when these cases were exposed.
Some links for your education:
https://journals.library.wustl.edu/lawreview/article/4627/galley/21460/view/
https://peabodyawards.com/award-profile/fake-drugs-real-lives/
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2006/mar/15/dallas-fake-drug-cases-settle-for-millions-jury-awards-damages/
https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1208&context=fac_pm
"Dallas Police Officer Accused of Planting Evidence Turns Himself In" (https://share.google/CdhWCDW4l4X8hWizl)
"Crooked Cop Caught Red Handed Planting Evidence" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9DCE2yYkHA)
https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr129/BILLS-117hr129ih.htm
EXCERPT: In what became known nationally as the ``Sheetrock'' scandal, Dallas police officers and undercover informants were found to have set up dozens of innocent people, mostly Mexican immigrants, by planting fake drugs on them consisting of chalk-like material used in sheetrock and other brands of wallboard. The revelations led to the dismissal of over 40 cases (although some of those arrested were already deported). In April 2005, a former Dallas narcotics detective was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the scheme. Charges against others are pending.
https://pelleylaw.com/blog/2017/08/cops-planting-drugs-it-doesnt-just-happen-in-the-movies/
https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2004/January/04_crt_041.htm
https://markshawbooks.com/assets/docs/New-Evidence-Proving-Warren-Commission-Corruption_Oct-26-2023-1.pdf
FBI Crime Lab scandal and Other Cases of Evidence Tampering/fabrication:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/kelly-evidence.html?scp=8&sq=Ultraviolet&st=Search
https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9704a/index.htm (even this quasi-whitewash of the crime lab scandal by the DOJ IG contains a great deal of damning evidence of misconduct and incompetence by FBI crime lab experts)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/08/06/minimal-punishment-meted-in-fbi-lab-flap/074b8ecc-8190-4983-a112-86504ff21be4/
https://makejusticeblind.com/a-roundup-of-the-key-facts-of-the-tampering/ (discusses a case where photos were altered by the FBI to help convict someone--gee, sound familiar?)
https://www.forensicscolleges.com/blog/resources/real-cases-of-forensic-fraud-flawed-evidence
Secret Service Misconduct in JFK Case and Other Cases:
We now know that HSCA staff counsel Belford Lawson, who conducted the Committee’s investigation of the Secret Service, suspected that a Secret Service agent planted CE 399 at Parkland Hospital. In a memo on the interview with Nathan Pool, who had seen a bullet on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, Lawson noted that a Secret Service agent was close enough to the area where the bullet was found to have planted the bullet, and that following up on Pool’s testimony could have led to identifying the agent:
A Secret Service agent was for a significant period of time close enough to the elevator to plant a bullet; may lead to an identification of that agent; and will reveal the superficiality of the Warren Commission’s approach. (“Untaped Interview of January 10, 1977, with Nathan Pool,” HSCA memorandum from Belford Lawson to Robert Tanenbaum, January 12, 1977, record number 180-10089-10189, available at
https://ia801206.us.archive.org/31/items/nsia-PoolNathan/nsia-PoolNathan/Pool%20Nathan%2001.pdf)
Dr. Donald Wilkes, "The Secret Service and the JFK Assassination"
https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1174&context=fac_pm
https://www.amazon.com/Survivors-Guilt-Service-Failure-President/dp/1937584607
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/slideshows/prostitutes-grenades-and-drunk-driving-20-years-of-secret-service-scandals
https://time.com/3449641/secret-service-scandal/
A good introduction to the subject of the dubious evidence cited against Oswald is Donald Wilkes' article "Lee Harvey Oswald, the Patsy: An Objective Review of the Evidence Concludes That Oswald Was Framed," published by the University of Georgia in 2013 on the University of Georgia Digital Commons: Popular Media website. At the time, Wilkes was an emeritus professor of law at the University of Georgia. Here's a link to his article:
https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&article=1184&context=fac_pm
The case of Randall Adams. The award-winning 1988 Errol Morris documentary The Thin Blue Line documents the now-infamous case of Randall Adams, who was framed and railroaded by the DPD and the Dallas District Attorney's (DA's) office in 1976 on the false charge of killing a police officer named Robert Wood.
The film documents that the DPD used false witnesses, suppressed exculpatory evidence, discarded the most likely suspect (who later confessed), and refused to let Adams talk to a lawyer for two weeks. Gee, sound familiar? The DA was Henry Wade. The DPD officer who engineered the frame-up was Gus Rose. Humm, do those names sound familiar?
The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals overturned Adams' conviction in 1989 on the grounds of prosecutorial malfeasance (misconduct) and inconsistencies in the evidence. It had become clear that Adams had nothing whatsoever to do with Officer Wood's murder.
Yet, even after the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals voided Adams' conviction, DA Wade vowed to retry Adams, saying there was no room in his book "for a cop-killer getting off with anything else than the death penalty"! Mind you, this was after the state's criminal appeals court had found the DA's office guilty of misconduct! This says volumes about Wade's ethics and integrity.
Because of public pressure created by the release of The Thin Blue Line and pressure from state government officials, the Dallas DA's office eventually decided against retrying Adams.
Here's the transcript of The Thin Blue Line:
https://www.errolmorris.com/film/tbl_transcript.html
Here are links with more information on the DPD's sleazy record, running clear into the 2020s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Police_Department#:~:text=in%20July%202008.-,Fake%20drug%20scandal,were%20actually%20not%20illegal%20substances.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/fourth-former-dallas-officer-in-fake-drug-scandal-gets-one-year-probation/287-338790876
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Dallas-police-hammered-for-fake-drug-scandal-1486478.php
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/6-dallas-police-officers-on-leave-linked-to-illegal-search/2748127/
Here are links with information on cases of other police departments planting and fabricating evidence:
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6013&context=law_lawreview
https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4692-cops-planting-evidence
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/faculty_scholarship/article/1903/&path_info=S_Fisher_Just_the_Facts.pdf
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/police-corruption-revealed-los-angeless-rampart-division
Discusses the LAPD's Rampart scandal, where the LAPD was caught planting and fabricating evidence in the 1990s. The city of LA eventually was forced to pay millions to settle the civil lawsuit brought by some of the victims.
https://jmarshlaw.com/chicago-police-planted-evidence/
Discusses three cases where the Chicago Police Department was caught planting evidence from the 1980s to the mid-2000s.
https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249850.pdf
Just so no one gets the wrong impression, I am not saying that federal agents or local police officers frequently fabricate, alter, or suppress evidence. These are not things that happen all the time or very frequently, but they have happened, and they will likely continue to happen on an occasional basis.
As some here know, I am very pro-law enforcement. I strongly oppose the leftist push to defund local police forces. Also, in my many years in the intelligence community, I worked with a number of FBI agents and found the vast majority of them to be honorable and trustworthy.
I am confident that most of the federal agents and military officers who altered evidence, suppressed evidence, misrepresented witness accounts, etc., in JFK case were ordered to do so and were led to believe they were acting in the interest of national security.
Harold Rydberg, the person who drew the diagrams of JFK's wounds that were published in the Warren Commission's (WC's) report, was the director of the Medical Illustration School at Bethesda Naval Hospital at the time. He knew Dr. James Humes and Dr. J. Thornton Boswell, two of the autopsy doctors, quite well. In fact, Humes and Boswell attended Rydberg's wedding.
When interviewed in 2003 by William Matson Law, Rydberg said he believed that the autopsy doctors were ordered to misrepresent JFK's wounds and to suppress evidence of any frontal shots to JFK. (William Matson Law, In The Eye Of History; Disclosures in the JFK Assassination Medical Evidence, 2004, pp. 152-153, 420-428).
I find it interesting that Rydberg held the same view of Humes that I formed a few years ago: that Humes tried to leave clues to indicate there was more information about JFK's wounds than was described in the autopsy report.
Rydberg also said the following:
-- That the "stare of death" autopsy photo does not show the damage that was visible on JFK's face during the autopsy.
-- That there are many autopsy photos missing from the official collection.
-- That he doubted that the autopsy photos in evidence are the authentic autopsy photos.
-- That he and other hospital personnel involved with the autopsy or JFK medical evidence in any way were placed under strict gag orders.
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Rydberg also said the following:
-- That the "stare of death" autopsy photo does not show the damage that was visible on JFK's face during the autopsy.
-- That there are many autopsy photos missing from the official collection.
-- That he doubted that the autopsy photos in evidence are the authentic autopsy photos.
-- That he and other hospital personnel involved with the autopsy or JFK medical evidence in any way were placed under strict gag orders.
It's nice that Ryberg has skill as an artist. If he believes some of the things you attribute to him, he is a real kook.