Dr. Joseph Dolce was never called to testify to the Warren Commission (WC), even though he was one of the WC's wound ballistics consultants and was the Army's most knowledgeable expert on wound ballistics at the time. Dr. Dolce was a battlefield surgeon in the Pacific, so, needless to say, he had dealt with hundreds of gunshot victims. In 1964, he was the chairman of the Army's Wound Ballistics Board. Dr. Dolce's experience and expertise were so highly regarded that if a VIP or member of Congress were injured, Dr. Dolce was asked to review the case. He had much more experience than the WC's two other wound ballistics consultants, Dr. Alfred Olivier and Dr. Arthur Dziemian. WC staff attorney Arlen Specter never arranged for Dr. Dolce to testify because Dolce had already told him that the single-bullet theory (SBT) was "impossible" and that the wound ballistics test proved this. Michael Green explains:
When Dr. Dolce informed the WC that the tests proved the SBT was "impossible," they ignored him and began to rely on the more compliant and less qualified Olivier and Dziemian. That's why Olivier and Dziemian were asked to testify but Dolce was not.
Whenever MTG quotes a single word out of context rather than a complete quote, it's a safe bet he is misrepresenting that the person he cited actually said.
Because it was impossible to avoid consulting him on the matter of CE 399 after the autopsy report had been completed, Joseph Dolce, M.D., was part of a staff conference April 21, 1964, chaired by WC counsel Melvin Eisenberg and attended by Dr. Alfred Olivier, chief of the Wound Ballistics Branch of the Biophysics Division at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland; Dr. F. L. Light of the Wound Assessment Branch at Edgewood Arsenal; Drs. Charles Gregory and Robert Shaw from Parkland Hospital; and later in the conference, Governor John Connally and his wife, J. Lee Rankin, and Warren Commission member John J. McCloy.
Dr. Dolce told the Commission personnel emphatically that it was impossible for CE 399 to have made those wounds. The Commission lawyers and staff tried to muscle him into changing his professional opinion, but he refused, so he was never called as a witness and the test findings were distorted and suppressed.
Dolce advised Chip Selby in 1986,
“The disturbing feature at this conference was that the lawyer [Specter] says, ‘Now Doctor, we want you to tell us exactly how this bullet traveled, the velocity traveled, the velocity lost during the period of travel. And why it came out as a pristine bullet, unmarked bullet.’ I said, ‘Sorry, it doesn’t happen that way. This bullet should have been deformed.’ … they wanted this [CE 399] to be the bullet that caused all of the damage and I did not go along with that". . . .
At last, an in context quote. Dolce says the bullet should have been deformed. The fact is, it was deformed. There was a flattening of the base and the bullet was also bent. The nose was not severely deformed because the nose never struck a solid object. It only hit soft tissue before it yawed.
There are a few questions a critical thinker would apply to Dolce's observations.
1.In treating wounded soldiers during WWII, had Dolce ever come across a FMJ rifle bullet that struck only soft tissue but remained in the body?
2. If so, was such a bullet deformed?
3. Did Dolce ever come across a bullet in a soldier's body that he knew had first passed through another soldier's body first?
If the answers to these questions are no, then who is Dolce to say what would happen to a FMJ military round that had passed through one soldier and gone on to wound another?
In fact, after Dr. Dolce told the Commission principals that “This is impossible. It doesn’t work that way,” his group was told to conduct tests at the Edgewood Arsenal using Oswald’s alleged rifle. Dr. Dolce told Selby “that our experiments have shown beyond any doubt, that merely shooting the wrist deformed the bullet drastically [even without it also smashing a rib]. . . in every instance [of 10 bullets] the front, or the tip of the bullet, was smashed. This was not so with [with CE 399]. They did not accept this.” (Harold Weisberg, Never Again, pp.298-299) (Green, "Besmirching History: Vincent Bugliosi Assassinates Kennedy Again -- The Military and Warren Commission Cover-up," https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Besmirching_History.html#ref4)[/font]
Not pertinent because Oswald did not fire one of his rounds directly into JBC's wrist, striking it nose first. The bullet that struck JBC's wrist had first been slowed by passing through the torsos of two men and had yawed so that it was no longer traveling nose first when it struck the wrist.
In the Australian produced documentary Inside the Target Car, the team used animal carcasses to simulate the bodies of JFK and JBC. It took them several tries before they got a bullet to strike bone as Oswald's shot would have, but they did get a round to pass through soft tissue, strike rib cage, and then a bone simulating the wrist. It came out looking very much like CE399. The bullet's nost was intact and there was a bend to the bullet, similar to CE399, thus disproving Dolce's contention that it was impossible for CE399 to have caused all the wounds and emerge as it did.
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Green continues by discussing the fraud that Specter committed in leading Olivier through his testimony, and that even then Olivier provided some damaging information:
Instead of Dr. Dolce, Arlen Specter called as his expert witness Alfred G. Olivier, D.V.M, and a supervisory research veterinarian at Edgewood Arsenal. Specter had Dr. Olivier compare CE 399 with a test bullet, CE 853, which was fired through a goat, x-rays of which showed a broken rib. I note that Specter fails to establish that CE 853 broke the rib shown in the x-ray of the goat only because he immediately engages in two other forensic frauds. The first fraud is to have Olivier compare a bullet that testimony implies broke a goat rib with a bullet that allegedly broke both a rib and a radius as though that were a relevant comparison. Even so, Olivier testified that CE 853 was much more badly damaged than CE 399, and was “quite flattened throughout [its entire length, with] lead core extruding somewhat from the rear.” The extruded core looked like a nipple at the base of the bullet. By contrast, Dr. Olivier noted that CE 399 showed only “a suggestion of flattening” and only at its base. The FBI concealed how much more badly damaged CE 853 was by photographing it only along its side, with the flattening symmetrically distributed along its axis so that no damage can be observed. Dr. Olivier testified of CE 399, “Also, the lead core has extruded from the rear in the same fashion, and it appears that some of it has even broken from the rear” (5H80).
CE853 did not fully mimic what CE399 had done which was to pass through the soft tissue of two men's bodies before striking rib bone and then wrist. The aforementioned Australian team was able to achieve that and the test bullet sustained damage very similar to CE399.
Arlen Specter’s second fraud, with Dr. Olivier’s complicity, is to pretend that the base of CE 399 has been damaged. The “extrusion” and the part “broken from the rear” is merely the divot that the FBI cut out to perform its analysis of the bullet core. No forensic expert could testify about a bullet that is the basis for comparison for all its tests and not know that the FBI cut a tiny nick from the tip and a substantial divot from the base for its tests. The divot is visible in the National Archives photo of CE 399 above, and a very clear photo of the divot will be given later in this essay. FBI agent Robert Frazier testified that visual inspection of CE 399 did not demonstrate loss of material from the base. Henry Hurt’s Reasonable Doubt, 1985, provides a pre-divot photograph of CE 399 without extrusion or loss of material, which is one of many reasons why the honest Dr. Dolce stated that the Edgewood Arsenal tests proved it could not have smashed both rib and wrist bones.
It proved no such thing. It didn't mimic what CE399 had done.
Specter and Dr. Olivier address the capacity of a single bullet to cause all the damage done to Kennedy and Connally, and they address a possible bullet flight pattern. In between we see a bullet that shattered a radius bone, and it is “very severely flattened on the end,” looking like a cigarette stubbed out hard in a glass ashtray (5H82, see also CE 856). Specter leads Olivier to testify that CE 399 was “capable” of producing all the wounds – but in that context they ignore whether breaking the bones would leave CE 399 so little blemished (5H90).
Specter never asks the obvious:
“Dr. Olivier, is CE 853 the bullet that broke the goat’s rib shown in this x-ray?”
“How many times did you have to fire bullets through goats’ ribs to obtain a bullet so little damaged as CE 853?”
“Did you ever break a goat’s rib with a bullet that was as little damaged from the impact as CE 399?”
“Dr. Olivier, let us put aside the pretense that the FBI divot was actual damage to CE 399. Even assuming it were possible that CE 399 had been so considerably less damaged after breaking Governor Connally’s rib than CE 853 was after breaking the goat’s rib, would you expect its going on to shatter a radius bone to leave it no more deformed?”
Neither Specter nor Olivier ever alluded to the other nine bullets from the Edgewood Arsenal tests that were grossly deformed from smashing only a radius bone. ("Besmirching History: Vincent Bugliosi Assassinates Kennedy Again -- The Military and Warren Commission Cover-up," https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Besmirching_History.html#ref4)[/font]
Of course bullets that smashed only radius bone would be much more deformed than CE399. That's a no-brainer. Again I reference the tests done for the documentary Inside the Target Car. No shooting can be perfectly replicated because there are so many variables, but the tests done showed it was possible for a Carcano bullet to have passed through as much flesh and bone as CE399 did and emerge in the condition it did.
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