"Even if you could establish that Givens made up this story, which you haven't, it doesn't negate all the other evidence that positively establishes Oswald was the one who fired the shots from the sniper's nest."
I've not said it negates any other evidence. How could it negate any other evidence? What a stupid point to make. But what does it mean? If it can be established that the Givens story is a fiction, what does that mean?
I have to note that there have been 91 views of this thread so far.
I reckon a chunk of that number are LNers who have decided to keep their opinion to themselves on this matter.
But don't be shy, let's hear what you have to say.
Do you, like Corbett here, accept Givens' account of returning to the 6th floor?
Do you accept the WC's conclusion that Givens was the last TSBD employee to see Oswald prior to the assassination?
Here's some context as far as Givens is concerned:
On the day of the assassination Givens was a Wanted man. An APB was put out on him at 1:46pm by Sawyer:
We have a man we would like to have you pass this up on to the CID to see if we can pick this man up. Charles Douglas Givens, G-I-V-E-N-S. He's a colored male, thirty-seven, six foot three, a hundred sixty-five pounds. He has an ID number in the Sheriff's Department, 37954. He's a porter that worked on this floor up here. He has a police record and he left.
The search for the killer was still on. Two men had left the TSBD and were unaccounted for - Givens and Oswald (isn't it odd an APB wasn't put out for Oswald).
The interest in Givens wasn't just because he was missing. One of the first pro-active decisions Fritz made as part of his investigation was to round up everyone who had worked on the 6th floor that day and Givens was one of these men - the shots had been taken from the 6th floor, Givens worked on the 6th floor and he was missing.
When Fritz returned to the DPD he his first task was to get someone out to Oswald's house only to find Oswald was already in custody for Tippit's murder - one of the men who worked on the floor from where the shots were taken and who had 'fled the scene', was in custody for the murder of a police officer less than an hour after the assassination.
Meanwhile, Givens had returned to the TSBD to collect his coat only to be gripped by a police officer and taken down to DPDHQ. When he arrived there he was grilled for 45 minutes by Captain Fritz!!
During this extensive questioning Givens failed to mention his little trip back up to the 6th floor and seeing Oswald near the southeast corner.
Let that sink in for a minute...
The President had been assassinated.
A Dallas cop had been killed.
A prime suspect for the murders sat in the cells.
Now Fritz had in front of him one of the men who worked on the 6th floor that day.
It's safe to say Givens was grilled about his own actions, what he knew about Oswald and what he knew that might be useful to the investigation.
And he failed to mention that he had seen Oswald moving around near the crime scene!
Who, in their right mind, would think this was possible?
What logic could be applied to make this work?
Common Sense, Logic, Reason and Occam's Razor are pointing to one possibility, and one alone - Givens never mentioned going back up to the 6th floor and seeing Oswald because it never happened. There was no need to mention something that had not occurred.
Yes, bullseye. If you've never dealt with John Corbett before, I can assure that you're wasting your time trying to reason with him, although your replies will likely help lurkers and newcomers.
Anyway, yes, Givens' belated and oh-so-convenient tale about going back up to the sixth floor and seeing Oswald coming from the southeast corner has zero credibility. As you correctly note, if Givens' story were true, he surely would have told it to the police when he was grilled for nearly an hour shortly after the shooting.
As Anthony Summers and Barry Ernest have documented, partly with the help of newly discovered information that was suppressed by the WC, the eyewitness evidence powerfully puts Oswald on the first and second floors shortly before, during, and after the shooting.
The Martha J. Stroud document, found by Barry Ernest in the National Archives in 1999, refutes the WC's fairy tale about Oswald scrambling down the stairs after allegedly shooting JFK. Stroud informed the WC that "Miss Garner, Miss Adams’ supervisor, stated this morning, that
after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Truly and the policeman come up."
This proves that Adams was on the stairs far earlier than the WC falsely said she was, which in turn proves Oswald did not come down the stairs before Adams went down them and before Baker and Truly came up them. This blows to pieces the idea that Oswald was on the sixth floor during the shooting.https://www.pennlive.com/entertainment/2016/11/harrisburg_man_appears_in_docu.html WC staffers deliberately changed Vicki Adams' timeline. In her original FBI interview, she said she left the fourth floor no more than 30 seconds after the shooting, but the WC changed "15 to 30 seconds" to 1 minute.
Adams said she arrived on the first floor within 1 minute of the shooting. The WC changed that to several minutes.
BTW, when Barry Ernest located and interviewed Dorothy Garner, she confirmed the Stroud memo. She told Ernest that she was at the window with Vicki Adams, that Adams left the window immediately, that she followed Adams out of the office and to a point where she could see her going down the stairs, and during that whole time she never saw Oswald.
Keep in mind, too, that Jack Dougherty, who was working on the fifth floor near the stairway, said he heard no one coming down the stairs.
Mrs. Lillian Mooneyham was a law clerk who worked in the Criminal Courts Building. She told the FBI soon after the assassination that she saw a man standing in the sixth-floor window four to five minutes after the shots had been fired. From her position at the window on the west side of the County Courts Building, Mrs. Mooneyham had an excellent view of the TSBD. She was a highly credible witness who reported what she had seen in a straightforward, matter-of-fact manner. The Commission made no effort to refute her account, nor did it attack her credibility nor claim she could not have seen what she said she had seen. So, what did the Commission do with this credible and important account? Nothing. The Commission simply ignored it. The man Mrs. Mooneyham saw could not have been Oswald.
Summers was impressed with the evidence that indicates Oswald was not on the sixth floor during the shooting, noting, among other things, that Oswald correctly described Junior Jarman and Harold Norman as walking through the first-floor lunchroom at around noon, strongly indicating that he was indeed in that lunchroom at noon. If one wants to argue that Oswald made a lucky guess, such a guess would have been amazingly lucky indeed since 75 people worked in the Book Depository. Says Summers,
Other evidence suggests that Oswald not only declared his intention of going downstairs to lunch, but actually did so. It is evidence which, with disregard for the facts, official inquiries have either probed little or ignored.
When Oswald’s coworkers left the sixth floor for their lunch break around 11:45 a.m., they left behind them an Oswald vocally impatient to come down and join them. Two, Bonnie Ray Williams and Billie Lovelady, remembered Oswald shouting to them as they went down in the elevator, “Guys! How about an elevator?” and adding words to the effect: “Close the gate on the elevator” or “Send one of the elevators back up.” Sometime after this, around noon, Bonnie Ray Williams went back to the sixth floor to eat his own lunch in peace and quiet. Later, his lunch bag, chicken bones, and empty pop bottle were found there to prove it. Williams stayed on the sixth floor until at least 12:15 p.m., perhaps until 12:20. He saw nobody, certainly not Oswald.
Under interrogation, Oswald insisted he had followed his workmates down to eat. He said he ate a snack in the first-floor lunchroom alone, but thought he remembered two black employees walking through the room while he was there. Oswald believed one of them was a colleague known as Junior, and said he would recognize the other man but could not recall his name. He said the second man was short. There were two rooms in the Book Depository where workers had lunch, the “domino room” on the first floor and the lunchroom proper on the second floor.
There was indeed a worker called Junior Jarman, and he spent his lunch break largely in the company of another black man called Harold Norman. Norman, who was indeed short, said later he ate in the domino room between 12:00 and 12:15 p.m., and indeed thought “there was someone else in there” at the time, though he couldn’t remember who. At about 12:15, Jarman walked over to the domino room, and together the two black men left the building for a few minutes. Between 12:20 and 12:25 -- just before the assassination -- they strolled through the first floor once more, on the way upstairs to watch the motorcade from a window. If Oswald was not in fact on the first floor at some stage, it is noteworthy that he described two men -- out of a staff of seventy-five -- who actually were there. This information is nowhere noted in the Warren Report. (Not In Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the JFK Assassination, 2013, pp. 90-91)As I point out in my article "Where Was Oswald During the Shooting?", since Oswald was seen by Eddie Piper on the first floor at noon, and since Williams was on the sixth floor at noon to eat his lunch, the only time Oswald could have gone up to the sniper's nest was after Williams left the sixth floor at 12:15 or 12:20, but Carolyn Arnold saw Oswald on the first or second floor at 12:15 or 12:20.
And on and on we could go.