JFK Assassination Forum

The following extract is what the HSCA claimed. For some reason they think that the rear box wall that encapsulates the sniper's nest was 6 inches from the plane of the pane of glass, which puts the boxes up against the bricks?

But as seen in the very early Tom Alyea footage, the boxes were closer to two to three feet back and upon closer examination, we can see the higher box on the left side of the stack which in actual fact never moves between Dillard and Powell. And my original question still stands, why the heck would someone remain behind and move some boxes, it's just another absurd CT belief, because when you have no evidence of any conspiracy you end up clinging to illogical garbage.

The above HSCA extract comes from a section of HSCA Volume VI and since they understandably weren't sure they used a lot of terms like "approximate", "suggests", "not known precisely", "probable error" ETC ETC ETC.
https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol6/pdf/HSCA_Vol6_4A_Gunmen.pdf

And now that we have a clearer understanding of where the higher box was actually located, NOT 6 inches back but at least two feet behind the glass pane, the varying perspectives can be easily explained by the following graphic.JohnM

You don't know what you're talking about. You clearly don't grasp the points made by the HSCA photographic experts on this issue. And, obviously, you still have not bothered to read Barry Krusch's exhaustive analysis that proves the HSCA experts were correct.

Does it ever, ever occur to you to read the other side before you get on here and repeat your debunked claims? I know you haven't read Krusch's detailed analysis, yet you responded to my reply by doubling down on your claim that the movement of boxes is just an optical illusion created by two different perspectives. The HSCA experts considered that explanation and rejected it. Krusch demolishes it.

Finally, I notice that you once again declined to discuss the witnesses who saw two men with a rifle on the sixth floor 10-15 minutes before the shooting, the law clerk who saw a man in the sniper's window 4-5 minutes after the shooting when Oswald could not have been there and long before any law officer had gone to the sixth floor, and the two well-dressed men coming down the stairs from the sixth floor at no later than 12:50.

Hi, JM!

You are clearly the master of the photographic record and most all evidentiary stuff, and your contributions are always excellent.

The only quibble I have is that engaging with MTG and other Gee-Whiz True Believers is essentially just feeding the trolls. He gains some sort of curious credibility just by virtue of the fact that someone like you engages with him on his turf. I don't think there is any way his stuff really resonates with anyone other than a fellow Gee-Whiz True Believer. It's actually kind of bizarre to me that he keeps posting his stuff on this forum, as though the audience here hadn't already heard it all 5,000 times.

As you can see at his "Extremely Fragile House of Cards" thread, I personally think the only effective way to engage with these characters is at the level of:

1. Epistemology.
2. Psychology.
3. Ridicule.

Of course, my engagement is only "effective" with those still having enough critical-thinking skills to recognize "Yes, that's right. This is a mind not tracking in the channels of normality. These arguments do not hold together rationally and logically."

My engagement is not at all effective with Michael himself because, as I set forth in my post about the four defining characteristics of far-fetched conspiracy thinking, he lives in a cocoon (or echo chamber, if you will) where his theories are bullet-proof and his faith in them is unshakeable.

At the "Extremely Fragile" thread, he just blew right past my posts and blithely posted his next batch of nonsense.

One more, which is somewhat off-topic, but the epistemological aspects of what we see on forums such as this continue to fascinate me.

It occurred to me on our morning walk (4 miles after Achilles surgery on August 21, thanks for asking) that, apart from all the psychological/sociological jargon, there are really four defining characteristics of far-fetched conspiracy thinking (as opposed to more rational conspiracy thinking, such as I credit Larry Hancock with doing). We see these again and again throughout this forum and the JFKA community in general:

1. An inability – more than a mere stubborn refusal, I think – to step back and view things from the proverbial 30,000-foot level. An inability to ask, “How would my theory have worked, from A to Z, out in the real world? What would it actually have looked like, out in the real world? Would it have made any sense, out in the real world?”

2. An obsession with irrelevant minutiae – attaching huge importance to people and evidence that are actually of little or no importance at all. Together with #1, this results in the proverbial inability to see the forest for the trees (and the shrubs, and the weeds, and the pine cones).

3. A perverse desire for everything to be different – indeed, the very opposite – from what common sense and the evidence tell us it is. Those who simply follow the evidence and apply common sense just don’t “get it,” just don’t grasp how diabolical the conspirators were.

4. An almost cult-like reliance on authorities and sources that mainstream historians, academics and researchers regard as being of dubious expertise and reliability. To the conspiracist, the mainstream thinkers likewise just don't "get it" and are either pawns of or fellow travelers with the conspirators.

These collectively result in the conspiracy theory being almost bullet-proof and the conspiracist’s belief being almost unshakeable.

Why these are the defining characteristics of believers in far-fetched conspiracy theories, even believers who are otherwise intelligent and rational and high-functioning, is where the psychological and sociological studies kick in. But you don’t need them to be able to look at many of the denizens of JFKA World and say, “Yes, that’s exactly who he is and what he's doing.”

The following extract is what the HSCA claimed. For some reason they think that the rear box wall that encapsulates the sniper's nest was 6 inches from the plane of the pane of glass, which puts the boxes up against the bricks?





But as seen in the very early Tom Alyea footage, the boxes were closer to two to three feet back and upon closer examination, we can see the higher box on the left side of the stack which in actual fact never moves between Dillard and Powell. And my original question still stands, why the heck would someone remain behind and move some boxes, it's just another absurd CT belief, because when you have no evidence of any conspiracy you end up clinging to illogical garbage.



The above HSCA extract comes from a section of HSCA Volume VI and since they understandably weren't sure they used a lot of terms like "approximate", "suggests", "not known precisely", "probable error" ETC ETC ETC.
https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol6/pdf/HSCA_Vol6_4A_Gunmen.pdf

And now that we have a clearer understanding of where the higher box was actually located, NOT 6 inches back but at least two feet behind the glass pane, the varying perspectives can be easily explained by the following graphic.



JohnM

Still more examples:

-- If Silvia and Annie Odio were not mistaken, the lone-gunman theory collapses.

In September 1963, two Hispanics using the "war names" of Leopoldo and Angelo visited the apartment of Silvia Odio in Dallas, Texas. Leopoldo and Angelo were accompanied by an American whom they introduced as "Leon Oswald." Silvia's sister Annie was in the apartment at the time and witnessed the meeting. "Leon" the American said virtually nothing. Leopoldo did most of the talking. He wanted Silvia, whose father had been deeply involved in anti-Castro efforts, to help in the anti-Castro cause. Silvia declined because she did not want to be involved with a group that would commit violence. The three men sat a few feet from Silvia, so she got an up-close prolonged look at them.

Within 48 hours after the visit, Leopoldo phoned Silvia and told her that the American, "Leon Oswald," was an expert marksman and a former Marine. He said Oswald believed the Cubans should have shot JFK after the Bay of Pigs:

"He said that the Cubans, we did not have any guts because we should have assassinated Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs." (10 HSCA 27)

Disturbed by such talk, Silvia told Annie about the troubling phone call.

Silvia Odio wrote to her father about the encounter and also told several of her friends about it.

Soon after the assassination, Silvia and Annie independently recognized Oswald on TV as the "Leon Oswald" who had visited Silvia's apartment two months earlier. They were both very frightened and worried about their safety. They feared that the two anti-Castro Cubans and the American had been involved in JFK's death.

David Slawson, the WC attorney who interviewed Silvia Odio, said Silvia was "checked out thoroughly” and that “the evidence is unanimously favorable, both as to her character and reliability, and as to her intelligence." WC attorney William Coleman agreed with Slawson about Silvia Odio. Both Slawson and Coleman went so far as to suggest in an internal memo, based on the evidence they had uncovered, that Oswald, despite his public posture as a Castro sympathizer, was actually an agent of anti-Castro exiles. We now know that WC chief counsel J. Lee Rankin and WC attorney Wesley Liebeler also believed Silvia Odio was credible.

Silvia Odio and her story posed a serious problem for the WC, since her sister Annie was in the room when Leopoldo introduced the American as "Leon Oswald." The WC asked the FBI to check into the matter. The FBI provided a fraudulent explanation for the Odio incident. The FBI explanation was based on a fabricated story told by Loran Hall, who said that he and two associates were the ones who visited the Odios, and that one of his associates looked a lot like Oswald. This gave the WC an excuse to conclude that the Odio incident was a case of mistaken identity.

Forced into a corner by the force and character of Odio's account, WC apologists have resorted to the lame claim that she was prone to hyper hysteria and panic attacks to the point of being mentally ill, even though she was educated and earned a good income, even though her sister Annie backed up every essential part of her account, and even though the WC attorneys who investigated the matter believed she was credible.

What makes Odio's account so deadly to the lone-gunman theory is the phone call she received from Leopoldo soon after the visit, when Leopoldo told her that "Leon Oswald" was a crazy sharpshooter who thought anti-Castro Cubans should have killed JFK after the Bay of Pigs. The phone call was the main reason she and her sister were so disturbed when they saw Oswald on TV after he was arrested.

The phone call was clearly an attempt to frame Oswald for the assassination weeks before it occurred. This is why lone-gunman theorists have to find any excuse, no matter lame, to reject Silvia Odio's account.

Even if one wants to swallow the WC's spurious claim that the three men who visited the Odio sisters were Loran Hall, William Seymour, and Lawrence Howard, this does not explain the phone call. It is pretty hard to argue that Silvia "misunderstood" what the caller said, much less that she just made up the account of the call.

BTW, when the FBI showed Silvia photos of Hall, Seymour, and Howard, she said none of them looked like the three men who came to her apartment.

Mitrokhin Archive can be read online here: https://archive.org/details/mitrokhinarchive0000andr

The KGB went through great efforts to try and locate Nosenko. The plan was to try and isolate him and kill him. Kalugin book also goes over the plans the KGB had to try and either kidnap or kill Nosenko. Kalugin, who was head of counter intelligence for the KGB (sort of a Soviet equivalent of James Angleton), said Nosenko caused a lot of damage to the KGB including forcing him to return to the USSR. I used to believe that Nosenko was a false defector - the evidence was strong; but a great deal of new evidence that came out, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, indicates he was legitimate. Yes, he told lies, made up stories, puffed up his credentials; but so did Golitsyn, e.g., the Sino-Soviet split was a ruse.

Nut graf from Mitrokhin:

 

. . . . . . .

Dear Steve M.,

Here's a post I made back on 12 June 2025 on my thread titled "KGB disinfo re: Clay Shaw & the CIA, and the effect on The Jolly Green Giant," which was read 1183 times, but you didn't reply to.

Perhaps you missed it?

Major Vasily Mitrokhin, the KGB’s official archivist who was given the task of organizing its operations files and moving them to a new building, was supposedly so distraught by Khruschev’s 1956 anti-Stalin speech and the 1968 USSR / Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that he hand-copied 25,000 KGB documents between 1972 and 1985, retyped them, hid them under the floorboards of his dacha, and smuggled them to the West after the fall of The Iron Curtain — and no one noticed him doing it.

Really?

The putative KGB documents that MI5’s official historian, Christopher Andrew, wrote about in his books The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB and The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, either repeat what CIA already knew or strongly suspected (e.g., Lee Harvey Oswald’s “Dear Mr. Hunt” letter was a KGB forgery, and Mark Lane was financially supported by the CPUSA) or, if new, add little to our overall understanding of The Cold War. What’s more interesting to me is what they do not mention, e.g., that Yuri Nosenko was a false-defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 and that MI5’s Roger Hollis was a Soviet spy. In fact, they lend “documentary support” to what KGB-influenced espionage writers like Tom Mangold and David Wise have written about those cases.

One can only wonder why.

(sarcasm)

It’s interesting to note, however, that one of Mitrokhin’s documents says a 1967 KGB “active measures” operation involved "placing an article in a NYC newspaper.”

Hmm.

Okay, but it would have been nice if Andrew and Mitrokhin had admitted that the article (see below) was placed in the "National Guardian," a left-wing NYC independent weekly newspaper on 18 March 1967, and that the article referenced another article — one which the KGB had published in a Communist-owned Italian newspaper, "Paese Sera," on 4 March 1967.

Bertrand Russell’s London secretary, Ralph Schoenman, gave Garrison the translated-into-English "Paese Sera" article, and Garrison's assistant from LIFE magazine, Richard Billings, wrote in his journal on 16 March 1967, "Garrison now interested in possible connections between Shaw and the CIA [...] Two leads re: CIA tie: article in March issue of Humanite [sic; L'Humanité]."

These articles motivated the overly ambitious, scandal-plagued and revengeful Garrison to change his reason for having arrested Clay Shaw, a highly successful and closeted gay New Orleans businessman, from suspecting he had masterminded a homosexual "thrill-kill" assassination to fervidly believing he had organized it for the evil, evil CIA.

How did that work out, you ask?

Well, the jury returned a “not guilty” verdict in less than an hour, Garrison wrote a specious book, On the Trail of the Assassins, about the case in 1988, the book’s far-left publisher, Ellen Ray, gave a copy of it to Vietnam War-traumatized Oliver Stone at a Havana film festival, and in 1991 Stone partly based his self-described mythological (“to counter the myth of the Warren Report”) pseudo-documentary, “JFK,” on it.

Which film helped to make our body politic cynical, paranoiac, and apathetic to the point that “former” KGB officer Vladimir Putin, with help from his professional St. Petersburg trolls, et al., was able to install “useful idiot” (or worse) Donald J. Trump as our president in 2017 and 2025.

Here, for your reading pleasure, is the first part of the longish National Guardian article. The bit about "Paese Sera" is in bold text.

By Robert L. Allen on 18 March 1967:

The complicated skein of events involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy became even more tangled with the arrest March 1 of Clay L. Shaw, described in the press as "a prominent New Orleans businessman." New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who made the arrest, contended in a search warrant that at secret meetings in September 1963, "there was an agreement and combination among Clay Shaw (alias Clay Bertrand), Lee Harvey Oswald, and David W. Ferrie and others to kill John F. Kennedy." . . . The Guardian has received reports from Rome linking Shaw with various right-wing organizations and individuals, and possibly with the CIA. The Guardian's Rome correspondent, Phyllis Rosner, quoting the Rome daily PAESE SERA, reported that from 1961 till 1965 Shaw was on the board of directors of the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, which the paper said was engaged in obscure dealings in Rome . . .

. . . . . . .

My comments:

1) To counter the misconceptions and misstatements in the above "National Guardian" article, I highly suggest that you read Patricia Lambert’s 1998 book, False Witness, about Dean Andrews, Jack "Suggs" Martin, Perry Russo, and overly ambitious, scandal-plagued, and revengeful Jim Garrison, et al. ad nauseam. To read it for free, google “false witness” and “archive” simultaneously.

2) In his 1988 memoir, Garrison said he wasn’t aware of the Paese Serra, L'Humanité, and National Guardian articles until after the 1969 trial, but Ralph Schoenman’s ex-wife, JFKA conspiracy theorist Joan Mellen, told researcher Max Holland, after conferring with Schoenman, that he had given the Paese Serra article to Garrison in 1967.

3) It’s interesting to note that on 25 April 1967, the New Orleans-States Item newspaper referenced or summarized claims from the Paese Sera articles, particularly the CIA-PERMINDEX angle involving Shaw's Italian connections, and that one of the newspaper’s former editors told investigator Max Holland that the newspaper got said information from Jim Garrison.

4) The fact that Andrew and Mitrokhin included this partial nugget in The Sword and the Shield but said nothing about the likes of Igor Kochnov, Yuri Guk, "Alexander Kislov," Oleg Gribanov, Aleksey Kulak, Dmitry Polyakov, Boris Orekhov, and Roger Hollis, et al. ad nauseam, lends support to James Angleton's statement, "A good double agent will tell you 98% truth and 2% lies and really mess you up, boy."

Or words to that effect.


-- Tom