Assassination Page IV
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"Gettin' A Kick Out Of Truth"
 Photo (Available On Request) by Thomas Dillard shows black men on floor beneath the one from where Oswald supposedly fired. In the procession, Dillard was in camera car number three as he took the picture (left) only three seconds after the shooting, about ten seconds after the first shot. In this one picture one can see which windows were open and which were closed at that time. The photo was then enhanced and severely cropped by the Warren Commission and all that survived is depicted within the right photo. The negative, along with enhancement portions leading to the west side of the building simply vanished.
Point #4 - These five
employees, including one named Bonnie Ray Williams, had spent the morning of
November 22nd, 1963 placing a new plywood floor on the sixth floor of the
TSBD. The "white debris" which became such a point of concern,
bordering close to paranoia, for Williams and two other employees, James
Jarman, Jr. and Harold Norman (not associated with the floor construction),
during testimony before the Commission in which they unanimously stated had
fallen on their hair from the fifth floor ceiling and caused by the
cartridge shell explosions taking place on the floor above was, in
actuality, bits of white plaster which had accumulated in their hair from
the ceiling of the sixth floor as the new plywood was being hammered into
place.
Though Jarman and Norman were not members of the construction crew, it has been testified by Norman, himself, that he made regular visits to the sixth floor for the purpose of "shooting the breeze". According to Williams! testimony, however, Norman did more that simply "shoot the breeze". Norman would "help us move stock around". Based on Warren Commission testimony, it is not possible to place James Jarman, Jr. on the sixth floor during the morning prior to the assassination but the events that would occur, just after the crew would break for lunch will suggest strongly that he was present on the floor. At least for a period of time long enough for "white debris" to accumulate in his hair.
Point #5 - James Jarman
Jr., though consistantly mentioned by various reports, including the Warren
Commission's, as having been on the fifth floor with Norman and Williams at
the time of the assassination, and even referred to when the Dillard
photograph is discussed (he is NOT in the picture, though it was snapped by
Tom Dillard within seconds of the shooting), in extreme probability,
committed the assassination. The added fact that he was employed at the
Texas School Book Depository as a wrapper and regularly utilized paper and
tape, exact in make-up, as the paper and tape used to package the murder
weapon indicates, again quite strongly, that it was he who prepared and
provided the make-shift bag for Oswald when Oswald returned home on the
evening of November 21st, 1963. Probably under the pretext that Jarman would
purchase the weapon on the following day. It being known that Oswald, after
being taken into custody had $13.87 on his person and shortly before had
spen! t $1.00 on a cab ride and about .40c in loose change for a bus ticket
and a coca-cola, presents the strong possibility that Jarman actually did
purchase the assassination weapon from Oswald on the morning of the 22nd far
an agreed upon price of $15.00. Oswald's own frame of mind at this point in
time was likely to be that he was glad at the opportunity to rid himself of
a weapon, and evidence, which easily tied him into his own attempt to take
the life of General Walker some months earlier.
Point #6 - The "white
spot" seen on the back of the head of the assassin by eye-witness, Amos
Euins, was, in reality, the bits of white plaster in the hair of James
Jarman, Jr. Jarman's paranoia before the Warren Commission when testifying
about the plaster was simply due to the fact that he had forgotten to bruse
the powder from his hair before pulling the trigger.
Point #7 - The appearance, two weeks after the assassination, of a hand made paper bag, similar to the one used to package the murder weapon, at the dead-letter office of the Post Office near Dallas suggests that one of the conspirators attempted to guide investigators toward the appropriate direction. Perhaps in fear for his own life. *NOTE* The assassination was most likely the result of circumstances which existed in Dallas on the afternoon Of November 22nd,1963 including the following; Point #8 - The arrival, of course, of the presidential motorcade to the front of the Tex! as Schoolbook Depository on Elm Street (Jarman had read the papers and testified to his previous knowledge of this fact). The presence of a high powered rifle in the hands of a minimum of three employees of the TSBD on the morning of the assassination. The existence of a combined group mentality of a six year old child ("I dare ya'!!", "Oh Yeah!?", "Yeah!!", "OK, Watch Me!!") Point #9 - The presence of a man fully capable (Jarman's eight years military experience, alone, indicates familiarity with weapons. His testified use of the word "action" when describing the metalic sounds he heard from the weapon, in addition, suggests his capability. It is a word commonly used among rifle enthusiasts), of sighting down the barrel of a Mannlicher-Carcano, pulling the trigger three times and ending the life of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Sadily, the series of small events that would lead up to the catastrofic
event which would take place in Dealey Plaza began on Wednesday afternoon,
November 20th, 1963. Warren Caster, an assistant manager for Southwestern
Publishing Company, with offices at the Depository's 411 Elm Street address
had purchased two rifles during the noon break. A Remington, single shot,
.22 caliber rifle, to be given his son for Christmas and a .30odd.06
sporterized Mauser, intended for his own! use in hunting. As Caster displayed the rifles, Oswald, probably in an attempt to relate to fellow employees (along with ridding himself of incriminating evidence), mentioned to one of the shipping department employees present that he, too, owned a rifle and that it might be for sale. This employee, in extreme likelihood, was James Jarman, Jr., the shipping department's wrapper. Jarman's probable suggestion to Oswald was that he bring the rifle in the following day. That he would be interested toward the purchase of the weapon. When Oswald appeared the following day without the rifle, he indicated to Jarman that he lacked the carrying case necessary to transport the rifle. Jarman, quick to oblige because of a sincere interest in the weapon, walked to his wrapping station, un-rolled a long sheet of wrapping paper and, utilizing tape at the same table, constructed the paper bag. He then gave it to Oswald. Oswald folded the hand made sack (FBI analysis would later uncover! eight fold indentations on the paper) to a size suitable to either hip pocket or toward placing the bag into his belt and went on his way. Having returned home that evening with fellow worker, Buell Wesley Frazier, Oswald would package the Mannlicher- Carcano and return the following morning, again with Frazier, and complete the sale with Jarman. Oswald's frame of mind at this point was that he was glad to be rid of the rifle. It is even possible to conclude that he was attempting to pull his life together. Fearful of losing his wife and family because of his erratic and demented behaviour of the previous months (including his attempt to shoot General Walker, of which Marina was aware), he responded to his wife's complaints about hand washing the laundry by leaving all his cash, $170.00, on the dresser before leaving for work on Friday, the 22nd. As the motorcade approached Dealey Plaza that afternoon, Oswald sat in the first floor lunch room in a semi-state of bliss. After spending some six months living with fear that, at any day, police detectives could show up at his door, handcuffs at the ready, and haul him off for the attempted murder of General Walker, he was now free of the single piece of evidence that would convict him. The Mannlicher-Carcano. Oswald's state of bliss, however, would soon be shattered. Having just left the first floor lunch room to purchase a cola from a vending machine in a lounge on the second floor, he would be confronted by Dallas Police officer Marrion L Baker. In all reality, Oswald hadn't even known as he was being challenged by Officer Baker that shots had been fired at the motorcade and would not know until a moment later. Mrs. Reid, a secretary for the TSBD, would comment to a confused Oswald as they passed each other and just after Oswald had left the lounge, "Oh, the President has been shot, but maybe they didn't hit him!". Upon learning this, something bordering on phsychotic probably snapped within Oswald. Common sense had told him, especially since an armed police officer had rushed into the Depository, that the Mannlicher-Carcano he had sold to Jarman only hours earlier was involved in the shooting. All hope was lost. From this point on, Oswald was running from the furries and would culminate, some forty minutes later, with his fatal shooting of Officer Tippit on a residential street in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Just when and where James Jarman, Jr. acquired the Mannlicher-Carcano from Oswald is difficult to determine, but in light of the surprisingly candid elements of testimony by Jarman, the exchange may have taken place in the morning hours of the 22nd on the first floor. When asked by Warren Commission attorney, Joseph A. Ball, when he had met with Oswald on that day, Jarman replied, "I had him correct an order. I don't know what time it was". When pressed by Ball, Jarman said, "It was around, it was between 8 and 9 I would say". Concerning a second meeting he had with Oswald that morning Jarman replied, "It was between 9:30 and 10:00 o'clock, I believe". Responding to Joseph Ball's question as to where this meeting took place Jarman said, "In between two rows of bins. On the first floor". It is between these same two rows of bins, near the front windows, that Jarman will eat his lunch, alone, just before noon. He will be shortly joined at this same location by Charles Douglas Givens (a member of the floor construction crew) and Harold Norman. What is quite possible is that the rifle had been concealed within this same general area for much of the morning hours. Together, they will leave the building, stand for awhile out in front and begin to walk toward the intersection of Elm and Huston Streets. Here, they separate. According to the Depository's Supervisory, Roy S. Truly, "I noticed them there on the corner and starting across the street, but whether they completed it, I don't know". Given's did, however, complete the trek across the intersection, continue east up Elm to eventually join with James and Edward Shields to observe the motorcade from the intersection of Main and Records streets. As for Jarman and Norman they will, according to Jarman's own testimony, turn left o! n Huston, head north along the side of the Book Depository and disappear back into the building through a rear entrance. If the Manlicher-Carcano had not been on the sixth floor at this point, the weapon was most likely retrieved from between the two rows of bins on the first floor by Jarman and Norman and carried, via the west rear freight elevator, and on up to the sixth floor assassin's lair. Having already surveyed Dealy Plaza and satisfied themselves that most of the Depository's employees, especially the supervisors, were in front of the building anxiously awaiting the arrival of the motorcade, Jarman's and Norman's movements about the building were done quite freely. They would even take a moment to insure that Oswald was out of the way. Oswald, sitting in the first floor lunch room eating a cheese sandwich and a piece of fruit at the time, would later mention the encounter to the Dallas Police.
Now on the sixth floor,
Jarman will familiarize himself further with the weapon by dry-loading
rounds into the chamber (FBI later concluded that at least one shell had
markings indicating that it had been loaded and reloaded within the chamber
a number of times) and moving from window to window to determine the
clearest shot. Soon, he will be standing, with rifle in a military port arms
position, at the south-west corner window. Observing from the street below
is Arnold Rowland. About Norman's movements as Jarman peers from the
south-west window, Rowland will later testify to Warren Commission counsel
member, Representative Gerald R. Ford that, "At the time I saw the man
in the other window, I saw the man hanging out the window first. It was a
colored man, I think". Questioned further by Ford, who wanted Rowland
to be more clear about the man hanging from the window, Rowland responded,
"The east, south-east corner". Harold Norman was making a final
survey to insure that! their activities on the sixth floor went on
un-disturbed.
Bonnie Ray Williams, quite possibly an unwilling participant also enters into the conspiracy at this point. Where and when is difficult to determine, but he could very well have stumbled accidentally onto the scene when he went up to the sixth floor to meet with Danny Arce and Billy Lovelady, two fellow members of the floor laying crew he had pre-arranged to meet for the purpose of viewing the motorcade. Without informing Williams, however, Arce and Lovelady had joined most of the Depository's employees outside the building and when Williams arrived on the floor, lunch in hand, he found himself alone. The time was about noon. When counsel member Joseph Ball, asked him how long he stayed on the floor, Williams replied, "I was there from 5, 10,maybe 12 minutes".
Upon hearing window
movement on the floor immediately below him, Williams will descend to the
fifth floor in the east elevator to find Jarman and Norman near the
south-east corner. Up to this moment, it is easy to conclude that Williams
had no prior knowledge to the events that were about to take place on the
sixth floor but, whether he wanted to or not, he now became a part.
Otherwise he would not have backed up Jarman's testimony that he (Jarman)
had been on the fifth floor with Norman and himself (Williams) at the time
of the shooting.
Since the bulk of testified time elements place William's on the sixth floor before Jarman and Norman, it is highly likely that these two prime players in the conspiracy, after becoming aware of William's presence on the sixth floor, created a rouse that would draw William's away from the sixth floor assassin's lair. Both Jarman and Norman testified that before leaving the first floor aboard the west elevator, they had "peered up the elevator shaft" and observed that the east elevator was on the sixth floor. At the very least, they knew that someone was up there. The rouse they would use simply amounted to making their presence known by sliding windows just below where Williams was sitting. It worked, and William's joined then on the fifth floor. Events would now escalate to a near frenzy. With adrenaline flowing, Jarman and Norman will ascend to the sixth floor assassin's lair. Considering that Williams had been on the same floor from noon to "5, 10, maybe 12 minutes", Jarman and Norman had more than fifteen minutes to complete final preparations for the assassination. As the motorcade made it's turn onto Huston from Main Street, Jarman was probably already in place as Norman descended back down to rejoin William's on the fifth floor. Most likely, if Williams was unaware of the plot, to keep him occupied as Jarman completed his task on the floor above. What would follow next can best be explained in Jarman's own words. As Warren Commission counsel, Joseph Ball, questioned Jarman about the three shots, Jarman would dismiss the first shot as, "A back-fire or an officer giving a salute to the President". It is Jarman's referral to the second shot, though which would set a wheel turning ! in the mind of another counsel member. As Jarman replied, with reference to this shot, "And then the second shot was fired, and that is when the people started falling on the ground and the motorcade car jumped forward ---", Representative Gerald R. Ford would listen, allow that single statement to sink in and sit in silence as a full five pages of testimony would continue to be recorded. About fifteen minutes. In Ford's mind, he knew that something was amiss. Having been privy to a film of the presidential limousine taken by Abraham Zapruder as the assassination took place, a film that had not been made public and would not for many years, Ford knew that the car did not "Jump forward", as Jarman had indicated, after the second shot. Agent William Greer would not accelerate the car until after agent Clint Hill, having just leaped from the follow-up car to assist Mrs. Kennedy (who was attempting to retrieve a portion of her husband's skull) back into the rear sea! t after the third shot, had a secure hand hold on the rear-left portion of the automobile. It was then, and only then, that the car, and to use the words of agent Roy Kellerman, "Just literally jumped out of the god-damned road!!". As Representative Ford continued to sit in silence, a suspicion that may have begun to formulate is that a target may give the illusion of "Jumping forward" to an assassin peering through a scope. The car did not jump forward. The rifle and assassin, because of recoil, had jerked backwards. Ford's suspicion was probably confirmed minutes later after hearing Jarman's response to another question by council member, John J. McCloy. McCloy had asked, "Did you see the President actually hit by the bullets?".
Jarman's reply was,
"No sir, I couldn't say that I actually saw him hit, but after the
second shot, I presumed that he was, because I had my eye on his car from
the time it came down Huston until the time it started toward the
freeway".
Again, any suspicion that Ford had that Jarman was describing events as viewed through a high-powered scope were confirmed at this point as he heard Jarman use the word "eye", not in the plural sense, but in the singular sense. After hearing Jarman respond to McCloy"s question, "You saw him crumble, you saw him fall, did you?", by saying, "I saw him lean his head", Representative Ford had had enough. He interrupted with a question concerning the statement Jarman had made much earlier. The following exchange took place between Gerald Ford and James Jarman, Jr.
Representative Ford:
"You actually saw the car lurch forward did you?"
James Jarman: "Yes sir" Representative Ford: "That is a distinct impression?" James Jarman: "Yes" Representative Ford: "And you followed it as it turned from Main onto Huston and followed it as it turned from Huston onto Elm?" James Jarman: "Right, sir". Representative Ford: "Had your eye on the car all the time?" James Jarman: "Yes, sir" Representative Ford: "Where did you think the sound of the first shot come from? Do you have a distinct impression of that?" James Jarman: "Well, it sounded at first it had come from below. That is what I thought" Representative Ford:" As you looked out the window and you were looking at the President's car" James Jarman: "Yes, sir" Representative Ford: "Did you have a distinct impression as to whether the sound came from your left or came from your right?" James Jarman: "I am sure it came from the left" Repres! entative Ford: "But your first reaction, that it was from below?" James Jarman: "Yes, sir" Representative Ford: "When the second shot came, do you have any different recollection?" James Jarman: "Well, they all sounded just about the same" Representative Ford: "You distinctly recall three shots?" James Jarman: "Yes, sir" Representative Ford: "And at what point did you get up from where you were on your knees in the window?" James Jarman: "When the motorcar picked up speed" Representative Ford: "Was this after you thought was the third shot?" James Jarman: "The third shot; yes". Representative Ford: "Have you ever been in trouble with the police or did you ever have any disciplinary troubles in the army?" James Jarman: "No, sir". We can only speculate as to just where Representative Ford's questioning would have eventually led if fellow council, Joseph Ball, had not interrupted at this point to lead Jarman into a completely different line of questioning that would concern the style of clothes worn by Lee Harvey Oswald on the day of the assassination. Obviously, Ford was quite suspicious of this 34 year old shipping department employee. Speaking in terms of boxing it can be said that Ford had Jarman on the ropes just before Joseph Ball's untimely interruption. Further, it is plausible to conclude, that if Representative Gerald R. Ford had been allowed free reign, he may have ended his questioning, in his own time, with, "Mr. Jarman, did you shoot President John Fitzgerald Kennedy?". James Jarman, Jr., considering the amazing level of candor possessed by this assassin, would have answered simply, "Yes, sir". To the reader- I felt it necessary, in
order to provide a steady flow while describing escalating major events
unfolding within and outside the Depository, to speculate with regard to
minor events. For this, I apologize. Hopefully, simple testimony, time
frames and fact will out-weigh all.
1st -Though not mentioned
in the above scenario of the events which unfolded that afternoon in Dallas,
a journalist and Assistant News Director of Dallas's KRLD Television &
Radio, James R. Underwood, was riding with fellow journalists in a limousine
which had just turned off Main Street onto Huston Street as the salvo of
shots rang out. Jumping from the limo and running to the front of the
Depository, he met briefly with Amos Euins, an African American teenager.
Amos Euins, who later turned out to be the only viable witness who actually
watched the assassin aim and fire the rifle, responded to the journalist's
question as to whether the gunman was white or black, Euins responded,
"It was a colored man". I said (Underwood), "Are you
sure?". Euins responded, "Yes, sir".
2nd - Last, but definitely not least, the stenographer, an unnamed and unsung hero of the Warren Commission, is worthy of mention. If someone, whether it be council or witness, paused in ! speech with the same audible sound we all utter from time to time, she would record the word "Uh". Movements not pertaining to testimony she would record between a pair of parenthesis. Seconds after Representative Gerald R. Ford was interrupted in his questioning of James Jarman, Jr., he was approached by someone, whispered too, and than left the room. Returning shortly (also recorded by our hero), he returned to his seat and sat silently for quite a length of time.
The question no longer is
who shot President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The Warren Commission Report, in
reality, was a glamorized version of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI Report to
President Johnson and the Commission, simply put, was a collaboration of
both men. The burning question now appears to be, "Who, within the
upper echelon, knew the actual truth ?".
Warren Commission Testimony Roy S. Truly - Depository Superintendent Vol.#7-Pg.380, 591 Warren Caster - Employee Vol.#7-Pg,386 Arnold Rowland - Eyewitness Vol.#2-Pg.165 Amos Lee Euins - Eyewitness Vol.#2-Pg.201 Bonnie Williams - Possible Co-Conspirator Vol.#3-161 Harold Norman - Co-Conspirator Vol.#3-Pg.186 James Jarman, Jr. - Assassin Vol.#3-Pg.198 James R. Underwood - Witness Vol.#6-Pg.167, 170 Stenographer - GOD BLESS HER
To all:
I've enclosed (below) a copy of Jarman's signed affidavit to the Dallas Police on Nov. 23rd, 1963. Hopefully, you will pick up on his strong insinuation, "before" he was aware of photographic evidence being in play, that he watched the motorcade from curb-side. Sincere regards, Mike Regan
COUNTY OF DALLAS BEFORE ME, Patsy Collins, a Notary Public in and for said County, State of Texas, on this day personally appeared James Earl Jarman, Jr., c/m 33, 3942 Atlanta Street, Dallas, Texas HA8-1837 who, after being by me duly sworn, on oath deposes and says: I work for the Texas School Book Depository, 411 Elm Street, as a Checker on the first floor for Mr. Roy S. Truly. On Friday, November 22, 1963, I got to work at 8:05 a.m. The first time I saw Lee Oswald on Friday, November 22, 1963 was about 8:15 a.m. He was filling orders on the first floor. A little after 9:00 a.m. Lee Oswald asked me what all the people were doing standing on the street. I told him that the President was supposed to come this way sometime this morning. He asked me, "Which way do you think he is coming?". I told him that the President would probably come down Main Street and turn on Houston and then go down Elm Street. He said, "Yes, I see". I only talked with him for about three or four minutes. The last time I saw Lee Oswald on Friday, November 22, 1963 was between 11:30 a.m. and 12:00 noon when he was taking the elevator upstairs to go get some boxes. At about 11:45 a.m. all of the employees who were working on the 6th floor came downstairs and we w! ere all out on the street at about 12:00 o'clock noon. These employees were: Bill Shelley, Charles Givens, Billy Lovelady, Bonnie Ray (last name not known) and a Spanish boy (his name I cannot remember). To my knowledge Lee Oswald was not with us while we were watching the parade. /s/ James Earl Jarman, Jr. SUBSCRIBED AND SWORN BEFORE ME THIS 23rd DAY OF November A.D. 1963 /s/ Patsy Collins Notary Public, Dallas County, Texas
With hope of dispelling, at least within the thoughts of some of you, many of the theories with regard to frontal shots (storm drains, grassy knolls, picket fences, etc...), I've enclosed an excellent article by Jerry Organ. Smoking Gun Found!By Jerry Organ So little has changed in Dealey Plaza that -- if one could ignore the towering monoliths of post-1963 Dallas -- it is easy to imagine the motorcade is about to arrive. The Zapruder film has now become familiar to the public, and it stands as the best-quality film taken from a near-ideal vantage point. But we are also familiar with footage of the aftermath, thanks in good measure to broadcast-quality newsreel film taken by several cameramen back in the motorcade. This was the footage that was shown on the networks as that awful afternoon unfolded. The Rush to the Knoll! In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, numerous witnesses and policemen found themselves in the parking lot atop the infamous Grassy Knoll. Their presence is often cited as evidence of an assassin firing from behind the fence. The "rush" to the knoll actually occurred over a minute after the shots, and was triggered by a Dallas motorcycle policeman in the parade, Clyde Haygood, who had no firsthand knowledge of the shot direction. Officer Haygood was a block away when he heard the first of three shots. After racing to Elm Street, he stopped just pass the fallen Newman family, parked his cycle, and ran up to confer with a policemen he saw on the railbridge. Only then did people start running up after him, falsely thinking he was after a culprit. The "rush" up through the walkway by the Bryan Colonnade occurred even later. Prominent witnesses like the Newmans didn't begin for over a minute; Jean Hill didn't cross the street for over two minutes. The initial reaction of most people close to the shooting was to simply drop to the ground or seek cover. Later, media reports and affidavits from witnesses would describe their impression -- perhaps aided by the sight of Haygood and the tricky acoustics of the Plaza -- that shots seemed to come from the area to the front of the car. Initially, the Grassy Knoll wasn't suspected by researchers as a source of shots. Thomas Buchanan, in his 1964 book Who Killed Kennedy? based a shot from the Triple Underpass on a "bullet hole" that reportedly passed through the limousine's windshield. Only when the Warren Commission demonstrated the windshield could only have been hit from the interior (probably a lead fragment from the fatal shot), and released the testimony of Sam Holland, did attention shift onto the knoll. The Grassy Knoll has since been a favorite of researchers, who've deduced "assassins" and "puffs of smoke" from numerous photographs that captured the area. In 1967 came the sensational announcement that a "classic gunman" shape was apparent on a frame of the poor-quality 8mm film taken by Orville Nix. Within months, Josiah Thompson had laid that one to rest, noting the same shadow pattern effect in a frame taken long after the assassination. In 1965, critic David Lifton studied copies of the Moorman Polaroid, which included much of the Grassy Knoll at the near-instance of the fatal shot. Lifton thought one of the bushes on the knoll was an artificial blind for a sn iper. In 1976, yet another shape materialized from the shadows in a Moorman blowup in Robert Groden's book JFK: The Case for Conspiracy. From the same image, Texas researchers Gary Mack and Jack White presented a shape they called "Badgeman" in the 1988 documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy. That same year, at NOVA's request, technicians at MIT analyzed the shape, concluding it "took some imagination" to render it into a human figure. One shape on the knoll has been confirmed as human; the "Black Dog Man" figure at the Bryan Colonnade's retaining wall seen in the Willis and Betzner photographs as the limousine moves down Elm. Critics have made much of this shape, some even suggesting he was holding a "rifle." But a long-forgotten interview of Marilyn Sitzman by Josiah Thompson determined the shape was quite benign. Who Was Black Dog Man? The 1993 book Killing of a President by Robert Groden offers enlargements from the Moorman Polaroid, and Muchmore and Nix films that purport to show Black Dog Man at the corner of the retaining wall. On an episode of Geraldo in 1991, Groden played a rotoscoped sequence of the Nix film showing a "tan-colored object [dropping] downward and to the left" as evidence of Black Dog Man's suspicious activity. That program opened with a live remote from Dealey Plaza that included one of the last interviews with the late Marilyn Sitzman, the secretary who steadied Abraham Zapruder as he filmed atop an abutment of the Bryan Colonnade. Pointing towards the corner of the retaining wall, Sitzman recalled:
"What had happened, there was a couple sitting right over here in a park bench and they dropped a pop bottle, right after the car went under the Triple Underpass. And when that pop bottle hit the cement, it kind of woke us up. And both Mr. Z and I was still standing up here. Everybody else was laying down flat. And all's I can remember then, was going through my mind: 'What am I doing standing up here?'" The movements in the Nix film Groden later showed on the same program do resemble the event recalled by Sitzman. The couple were gone when Zapruder panned over the retaining wall seconds later, having fled "towards the back." Two years later, Groden still had not connected the couple to the grainy shapes at the retaining wall he presented in the most suspicious light in The Killing of a President. Nor, apparently, did Josiah Thompson care to associate the couple Sitzman first described to him in 1966 with the errant "fourth" shot recalled by the featured witness of his 1967 book Six Seconds in Dallas. Sam Holland, signal supervisor for the Union Terminal Railroad, who witnessed the assassination from atop the Triple Underpass. Sitzman told Thompson of a young black couple who were eating lunch and drinking Cokes on a bench behind the retaining wall. When the motorcade arrived, the Willis and Betzner photographs showed they had repositioned themselves near the wall's corner, apparently leaning with their elbows on top of the wall. Sitzman recalled hearing "a crush of glass and I looked over there and the kids had thrown down their Coke bottles, just threw them down." Her description of the bottle-breaking being "much louder than the shots were" and the possibility that sunlight reflected from the flying shards would account for Holland's claim of gunfire and a puff of smoke from the knoll. Thompson doesn't acknowledge it, but a likely reason Holland looked towards the knoll area in the first place was because -- from Holland's position atop the railbridge -- the Oswald window loomed above it. Holland later thought he could distinguish three shots from "the north end of Houston Street," also in the vicinity of the Oswald window. Holland's alleged shot from "under the trees" becomes an aberration of the exploding Coke bottle. Sitzman's revelation to Thompson was re-discovered by Massachusett archivist Richard Trask in 1985, who "in 1991 located the bench photo and put the scenario of the black couple together." Trask's 1994 landmark book, Pictures of the Pain, publishes an image taken on the afternoon of the assassination by Dallas Morning News photographer Johnny Flynn showing:
"two plainclothes men, one with a stenographer's note pad in hand, leaning over and examining a paper lunch bag, and a wrapper marked 'Tom Thumb 8 Buns 25 cents.' The lunch leavings are resting on an odd-looking metal frame slat bench positioned perpendicular to the concrete wall and next to the walkway leading to the stairs at the knoll." The black couple have never been identified -- they may very well be the elusive "smoking gun" needed to crack the so-called "great mystery" of the Kennedy assassination. Smoke and Mirrors Holland's co-workers on the rail-bridge also described "smoke" but take a closer look. Austin Miller located the incident "coming from a group of trees north of Elm off the railroad tracks." This is the tree grouping, at the retaining wall, described by Holland. Miller testified: "I turned and looked toward the -- there is a little plaza sitting on the hill. I looked over to see if anything was there, who threw the firecracker or whatever it was." The "little plaza" is the concrete pergola structure, that includes the retaining wall. Nothing about gunfire from the fence. James Simmons located it "near the embankment in front of the TSBD." The wall is closer and more "in front of the TSBD" than the fence. In 1966, Simmons told Mark Lane it "came from the left and in front of us, toward the wooden fence, and there was a puff of smoke that came underneath the trees on the embankment." Simmons stood next to Holland -- the only cluster of trees from their vantage point was that later described by Holland. Marilyn Sitzman was a lot closer to the stockade fence corner than Holland, yet the only unusual event she noticed was the bottle-smashing by the black couple -- nothing about gunfire. That same day she told a police detective the shots came from the Depository. Likewise, Emmett Hudson, the Dealey Plaza groundskeeper, was standing halfway up the steps on the knoll, and heard nothing like a gunshot from the fence, a few feet behind him. Hudson would clarify for the HSCA that he meant the Depository when he described the shots as coming from "behind" him; critics had misused him as a second-gunman witness for years. The "haze of gunfire" Groden presents on page 204 of The Killing of a President is, of course, a burst of fall foliage as better revealed in the blow-up on page 46. There is little doubt that what David Lifton purports to be "smoke" on a Nix film frame is simply the tree shadow pattern on the sunlit portion of the retaining wall, seen clearer on the Moorman and Bond photos. The Nix film did, however, unmistakably capture the swinging motion of the bottle-breaking. Many of the witnesses who indirectly saw or heard the bottle-breaking and the couple's dark shapes immediately running from the scene understandably associated the events at the wall with the President's head explosion so nearby. The witnesses' insistence that what they saw was a "puff of smoke," the Parkland doctors' snap judgment of frontal shots, the failure of the black couple to come forward -- and later on, the "rearward" head snap as seen on the Zapruder film -- left the Grassy Knoll open to all sorts of speculation. The sad part is that Sam Holland gave an honest impression of what he saw which critics later molded to fit their agenda. Josiah Thompson had the opportunity in 1966 to ask Holland whether the "puff of smoke" could have been the bottle-breaking recalled by Sitzman, but it would have challenged his hypothesis of a simultaneous double-impact on the President's head. Ironically, Sam Holland had complained to Thompson about the subterfuge of an alias used by Mark Lane to gain a interview. Having been a Dallas Deputy Sheriff for 17 years, Holland had checked out Thompson with his old friend, Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker. Thompson's credibility was no doubt helped by being Life magazine's Special Consultant on the assassination. In Thompson's words, Holland complained that critics:
"had lied to him about the use to which his words would be put and had badgered him unceasingly, trying to prove one point and then another. Thus the first part of the evening was spent in salving the wounds Holland had suffered in earlier interviews." Despite assurances that Thompson "wished to plead no special case," Thompson admits to an agenda: "Holland's story fitted the last piece into a jigsaw puzzle … whose shape I had first perceived some five months earlier." Newman and the Umbrella The November 22, 1963 affidavits of the Newman couple were published in Volume XIX of the Hearings; subsequently to be misrepresented by critics like Meagher, Thompson and Marrs. It wasn't until 1984, in the TV production On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald, that Vincent Bugliosi simply asked William Newman to specify the bit about the "garden directly behind me" that was in his affidavit of November 22, 1963. Newman specified the area to the east of the pergola; between the Depository and Newman's position on November 22 is a landscaped walkway. In his affidavit, Newman thought the shots came from the direction of the Depository, but was unsure as to the shooter's elevation and so looked no higher than the "garden." The Moorman photo shows the fence on the Grassy Knoll is more to Newman's right than rear, whereas the "garden" -- and Depository -- are more rearward. To millions of viewers of the Zapruder film, it does initially appear that, in Newman's words, a shot "hit the President in the side of the temple." The autopsy finding and discovery of the Z312-313 forward movement reveal the explosion of the upper right skull was actually an exit wound. In the JFK movie, a man with an umbrella in the heart of Dealey Plaza acts as a visual signalman for the assassination teams. No, Stone didn't make this up; there was a man pumping an open umbrella as the limousine passed him. But what Stone left out was that the man has been identified. In his Select Committee testimony, Louie Steven Witt recalled his symbolic protest action in the Plaza using an umbrella. To many researchers, Witt offered the type of innocent explanation Thompson thought “most likely” in 1967. There was another protester, with a handwritten sign across Elm from Witt. Both Witt and that man, like many others, lingered in the Plaza long after the assassination. Witt told the Committee that he wanted to taunt Kennedy, since the umbrella was supposedly symbolic of Joseph Kennedy's sympathy for Neville Chamberlain's attempts to appease Germany before the start of World War II. Chamberlain's famous "peace for our time" was read -- in front of newsreel cameras -- under an umbrella at a rainy airport. During the cajoling of convention delegates on the day JFK received the nomination in 1960, Lyndon Johnson chided his opponent’s father, saying "I was never any Chamberlain umbrella man." Critics note Witt said he didn't see "the President shot or his movements" because Witt was preoccupied walking towards the sidewalk and raising up the umbrella. Photographs show the Umbrella Man was already stationed on the sidewalk with a raised umbrella, and thus a clear view of the approaching motorcade. But consider the dynamics of the moment, such as the possibility that the first and second loud reports diverted Witt's attention towards the Depository as the President neared. Recall that Witt was in the Plaza to protest against the President -- at the last moment, Witt could have seen the Secret Service agents and Mrs. Kennedy, realized the absurdity of his silly protest, and just couldn't face the President. Years later, he would not be able to recall the exact sequence. Louie Witt's open admission should have ended speculation over the Umbrella Man. Like other conspiracy candidates, such myths die a hard death in the critical community. It may be the questionable principals and skewed analysis of conspiracy authors that's the ultimate "smoking gun" in this case. They continue to lead millions on a wild-goose-chase up the Grassy Knoll. © copyright 2000 Jerry Organ. All rights reserved.
Could This Be A Final Note...??? YES There also appears to be a major level of research concentration on the autopsy and it's results. In consideration of the simple fact that numerous doctors and nurses were attempting to save a man's life, hopes for any evidence (after their heroic efforts) even remotely viable to the puzzle should be regarded as minimal. With special regard to the throat wound. Insertion of the tracheotomy tube shortly after the arrival of President Kennedy vertually insured the complete obliteration of that evidence and to take serious any of the speculation (which I believe is at about 50/50 concerning "exit" or "entrance") offered by these hospital personnel, with extreme limitations in ballistic science, is a mistake. With the above in mind, my own thought is that research concentration should be guided toward existing "physical" evidence within the TSBD. With a bit of emphasis on the construction of the assassin's lair. Concerning these boxes, it is already an established "Fact" that they were placed during the course of the morning work hours by members of the floor-laying crew, an obvious "Prep" to assist the intention of an assassin. Not just a few minutes before the shooting. What's left to debate is who, and how many, within the construction crew were involved in this prep and toward whom was the assist intended. There has been some suggestion that some sort of stranger, perhaps a member of a yet to be identified "Black Ops" performing for yet another unknown group of high level conspirators. Yet, with the exception of Danny Arce's guidance of an elderly man to a first floor toilet as the parade was getting under way (Observed leaving moments later after completing his call to nature.), no employee of the TSBD, and I mean nobody, ever testified about seeing any kind of "stranger" in the building that day. Trying to keep this as objective as possible, the debate is whether the assassin fired the three shots, swiftly fled down the entire length of the east wall, turned left, and continued the entire length of the north wall (A diagonal run was impossible.), properly placed the rifle in an upright position near the N/W stairwell, not tossed, mind you, in a mad scramble to allude potential captors, and concluded his dash down four flights of stairs to be observed, in a cool, calm and collective manner, some ninety seconds (give or take thirty) later by a Dallas motorcycle police officer. Or as to whether the assassin did all of the above up until after placement of the rifle. And in this scenario, simply boarded an elevator or dashed down a single flight of stairs to join up with buddies (Norman & Williams) at the S/E corner of the fifth floor. But not before Tom Dillard, having just turned onto Huston from Main Street, had snapped the photograph of that same corner. A photographic image which would "EXCLUDE" evidence of his "testified" 5th floor presence at the time of the shooting. So now you're left with a process of elimination. Dump one of these guys in your mind and you've hit on the culprit. Would any member of the crew risk facing accessory charges to the assassination of a world leader to satisfy the whim of some fellow they had been working with for a grand total of 38 days (Actually, it rings up to about 26 when weekends are omitted.)..?? By prepping up his "lair"..?? And have you ever lifted a box of books..!!? Other than ridding himself of evidence linking him to his shot at General Walker the previous April, Oswald does'nt fit into the assassination scenario in any way, shape or form. He truly was what he declared to the national media. A "Patsy". Jarman, on the other hand, had a well established working relationship with two members of the floor-laying crew. Both Harold Norman and Charles (Slim) Givens. These are the fellows who represent the "only" conspiracy which existed that day in Dallas. Bonnie Ray Williams probably represents the most fascinating witness. He, like Oswald, was a young and fairly new employee at the Texas School Book Depository, caught within the same escalation of events that were out of their control. And could, if he's still kicking around, provide the ultimate closure. If relieved of whatever fear may exist, and prodded by appropriate authorities in law enforcement. Sincere regards, Mike Regan
" JFK
Forever"
The story regards a small
group of Marines, haggard and tired from day's events, sitting at their
jungle outpost as night approaches and attempting to find solice after the
loss of friends in battle. Cerimony, designed to sooth, and which normally
surrounds loss of those close to us is not to be. Mingling among family
and friends at the wake, kind words from the preacher, the funeral
procession to the cemetery for more kind words and capped off with roast
turkey, drinks and even a bit of laughter as the pleasant memories take
over. To be able to pay respect. In a proper way, to a friend. None of
this was to be. Simply there one moment, with talk of the future and, of
course, tales about the incredible babes back in "The World".
And gone the next moment, with the unceremonious zipping of a body bag.
For reasons only an
infantryman can fathom, the talk turns to the atom. It seems, according to
one Marine, that every thing as we know it, the wind, the rain, the hub
cap off a '55 Chevy, even those of us, are made up of different
combinations of only eighty some odd atoms. Each with it's select number
of electrons orbiting at various levels above a proton/neutron nucleus.
"Did ya'
know?", he adds, "That the ratio of the nearest electron to it's
nucleus is greater in distance as compared to the earth from the
sun.". His friends are impressed. "Not only would you need a
million atoms, piled on top of each other, to equal the thickness of a
page, but to be able to compress the electrons into the nucleus would also
mean that you could fit an entire sky-scraper into the eraser head of a
pencil.". Now his friends are amazed.
A few moments of silence.
"Kinda' makes you wonder about the guys.", another Marine
suggests. "I mean, if all those millions of bucks were spent to split
a single atom, are they really dead? Seems to me that those electrons are
still goin' through a spin cycle."
Discussion continues,
cigarettes are smoked in cupped hands and, bingo, ARE is founded.
Atomic Recovery Employment systems. Until someone pointed out that ----
------- would be ticked off if recovered with the head of a moose. A long
moment of laughter, and they pondered some more.
To the scientist, there
is the atom. To the theologian, there is spirit. To that young group of
Marines, having found their solace, there is Comparable Atomic Recovery
Employment systems. CARE.
Seeming to sum things up,
one of the Marine's who has remained silent throughout, simply listening,
finally speaks. "You guys are gonna' think me wacko on this one, but
when I was a kid my family went on a cross-country trip and at one point I
found myself in one of those rare moments in a large family. I was
standing alone with my dad. We were at the very lip of the Grand Canyon,
gazing at the incredible beauty, when he says to me, completely out of the
blue, and we're not talking a religious fanatic here, "Ya' know,
sport, I think this is what Christ had in mind when He said, probably in
frustration, "The Kingdom of Heaven is here, now."
Heads nod, cigarettes are
snuffed, and talk comes to an end as a Marine glances at his watch, stands
with an M-16, and heads off to guard duty.
"Catch you guys
later.", he concludes.
Semper Fi'
Michael Regan
Paraview Press is a small innovative publisher < http://www.paraview.com/ >. I have one book from them this year, another out in January. However, I have to uncomfortably report that two authors from the small stable of writers at Paraview have died this year. Charles Crenshaw is the most recent. Joe Fisher, who died by suicide on May 9, 2001, was the other. For more on Joe, see http://www.anomalist.com/milestones/fisher.html Loren http://www.lorencoleman.com
Charles A. Crenshaw believed that Oswald wasn't lone gunman 11/19/2001 By DRAKE WITHAM and LINDA STEWART BALL / The Dallas Morning News Dr. Charles Andrew Crenshaw, one of several who treated President John F. Kennedy's gunshot wounds nearly 38 years ago, went to his grave insisting Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone gunman. Dr. Crenshaw, chairman emeritus of the Department of Surgery at John Peter Smith Hospital, died of natural causes at his Fort Worth home Thursday. His family said Dr. Crenshaw's health had been deteriorating in recent years. He was 68 years old. Dr. Charles Crenshaw "He was quite a guy," said Dr. David McReynolds, chairman of the surgery department at John Peter Smith. "He's one of those guys that demanded respect, earned it, and got it. It wasn't Chuck. It was Dr. Crenshaw or The Chief." Dr. Crenshaw started the surgery department at John Peter Smith single-handedly in 1966, Dr. McReynolds said, and was its backbone in those early years, on call practically every night. But some controversy surrounded Dr. Crenshaw's later years when he recounted his emergency room treatment of Kennedy and Oswald in two books questioning the findings of the Warren Commission. Dr. Crenshaw, an emergency room doctor at Parkland Memorial Hospital on the days Kennedy and Oswald died in November 1963, wrote about his experience in the 1992 book JFK: Conspiracy of Silence. In it, Dr. Crenshaw detailed his contention that Kennedy had been shot twice from the front, contradicting the findings of the Warren Commission that Oswald was the lone assassin, firing from behind the president. "It was just supposed to be this little book, a paperback in which he wanted to say what he saw," said his wife, Susan Lea Crenshaw. "Then it just exploded, and he was getting all of this national, and even international, attention." JFK Travel back in time almost four decades to the saddest day in Dallas history. The book was criticized by some fellow doctors. "He was disappointed that some of the other doctors did not come to his defense," Ms. Crenshaw said, adding that the few who did remain good friends. "I'm very sad that he died," Dr. Bob McClelland said. The professor of surgery at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas was in the operating room at Parkland when Dr. Crenshaw, then a resident, found him. The pair rushed to the emergency room to help tend to the president. "He was a very bright person," Dr. McClelland said of Dr. Crenshaw. "Of course, he got a lot of notoriety with that book he wrote. He certainly was not writing on the basis of his imagination. ... Unfortunately, there were some misconceptions about it on both sides of the fence - on his side, and on the side of people who criticized him." The published account made him somewhat of a hero in the eyes of those who have said all along that there was more than one gunman. "Other doctors spoke out, but he was the most vocal of them," said Tom Bowden, president of the Conspiracy Museum in Dallas. "That's the key." Mr. Bowden said Dr. Crenshaw was well known among those who discount the Warren Commission's findings. Many were eagerly awaiting his next book, released last week. "Unfortunately, a lot of the witnesses of those days are dying off," Mr. Bowden said. "That does create a loss for the conspiracy community, those guys who believed in what we believe in." Dr. Crenshaw's second book, Trauma Room One, includes the first book, plus information about lawsuits that Dr. Crenshaw brought against his detractors and details that had come out since his first book was published, Ms. Crenshaw said. "He was so happy that the book came out," Ms. Crenshaw said. "He just wanted to live long enough for this book to come out so it would prove that what he said in the first book was true." But she said her husband's true passion was medicine. "His legacy is not a book," she said. "His life was building John Peter Smith Hospital, and that's his legacy." Dr. Crenshaw was born and raised in Paris, Texas, before graduating from Southern Methodist University in 1953 with a bachelor's degree. He earned a master's degree in biology from East Texas State Teacher's College, now Texas A&M-Commerce, in 1955 and a doctorate from Baylor University in 1957. He earned a medical degree at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in 1960 and interned at the Veterans Administration Hospital in 1961. He completed his assistant residency in surgery at Parkland in 1965 and his senior residency in surgery in 1966. He served as the chairman of the surgery department of John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth from 1966 to 1992, and he was a member of several medical associations. Services will be at 3 p.m. Monday at First Presbyterian Church, 100 Penn St., in Fort Worth. Cremation will precede the services. Besides his wife, Dr. Crenshaw is survived by his son, Charles A. Crenshaw II; his daughter, Adelaide Andrews; and two grandchildren. Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/obituaries/STORY.ea4359bfb1.b0.af.0.a4.2bb1d.htm
Quote: "And it was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated," Nixon said without making clear why he considered the Warren Commission findings a sham. Nixon Sought to Tie Wallace Shooting to Democrats Thu Feb 28, 7:17 PM ET By Jim Wolf WASHINGTON (Reuters) President Richard Nixon sought to paint the would-be assassin of White House hopeful George Wallace in 1972 as a backer of rival Democratic candidates, audio tapes made public on Thursday showed. Nixon, a Republican, was maneuvering at the time -- before the Watergate scandal broke -- to beat back a Democratic challenge in the November 1972 presidential elections. "Look, can we play the game a little smart for a change?" he barked at aides on May 15, 1972, hours after the assassination attempt by loner Arthur Bremer left Wallace paralyzed below the waist. Wallace, who died in 1998, was a long-time Alabama governor and avowed segregationist who entered the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries. Nixon's tape-recorded conversation in the Old Executive Office Building was provided on Thursday by the National Archives, the U.S. document keeper. It was part of about 500 hours of newly released White House tape recordings from the Nixon presidency, the third of five chronological segments and the largest such opening of its kind by the archives. In the conversation with top aides, Nixon suggested that the Democrats had somehow smeared U.S. conservatives by pinning on the "right wing," as he put it, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A commission chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who once defected to the Soviet Union, acted alone in killing Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. "And it was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated," Nixon said without making clear why he considered the Warren Commission findings a sham. Turning back to the wounding of Wallace in Laurel, Maryland, he added: "And I respectfully suggest, can we pin this on one of theirs?" Nixon was speaking to H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, then his chief of staff, and Charles Colson, then a special counsel to the president. 'PUT THAT OUT!' "Just say he (the shooter) was a supporter of McGovern and Kennedy," Nixon ordered, referring to Democrats George McGovern of South Dakota, who lost the 1972 election in a landslide to the incumbent, and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who went on to make a brief White House run in 1980. "Now, just put that out!" Nixon said, his voice rising for emphasis. "Just say you have it on unmistakable evidence." Haldeman interrupts Nixon to say that the suspect had been arrested previously "so there ought to be a record on him." "Screw the record!" Nixon shot back. "Just say he was a supporter of that nut, and put it out." The president did not make clear whom he meant by that "nut." "Just say we have an authenticated report," he went on. Turning to Colson, Nixon urged that the story be relayed via Kenneth Clawson, a White House aide, to an unspecified "friend" in the media. "Bob," he added, addressing Haldeman, "the moment you get into the business of whether it's authenticated or not, you're dead." Nixon made clear that he disliked Wallace, a controversial figure because of his support for racial segregation. "Incidentally, Wallace is an evil man," he said at one point. "McGovern is too ... because McGovern believes in evil ... Wallace uses evil." Wallace ran a strong third-party race in 1968 when Nixon barely edged out Democrat Hubert Humphrey for the presidency and was considered a major candidate in 1972 when he was shot. Nixon became the only president to resign his office on Aug. 9, 1974, after he was implicated in a cover-up of the June, 17, 1972, break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington. Bremer, now 51, was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 53 years in prison, which he is currently serving in Maryland. The 170 newly released White House tapes covered a wide range of domestic and foreign topics, including preparations for Nixon's ground-breaking trip to China on Feb. 17, 1972 and discussions with Henry Kissinger on the ramifications of losing the Vietnam War. Also included is the so-called smoking gun conversation about the Watergate break-in and the conversation with an 18-1/2 minute gap that helped doom Nixon's presidency. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020301/pl_nm/politics_nixon_dc_2
Answering
Chomsky's Challenges You May Not Believe the Solution © Acacia Press, Incorporated
In his book Rethinking Camelot (Boston: South End Press, 1993), Noam Chomsky challenges the plausibility of all the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories because their core argument, "holding that that JFK's plans for withdrawal from Vietnam (or some other broader policy claims) provide the motive for the cabal" is "entirely without foundation." Chomsky believes the only assassination theories "of any general interest are those that assume a massive cover-up, and a high-level conspiracy that required that operation." He notes the cover-up "would have to involve not only much of the government and the media, but a good part of the historical, scientific, and medical professions. An achievement so immense would be utterly without precedent or even remote analogue." He also notes, "There is not a phrase in the voluminous internal record hinting at any thought of such a notion." These are the same issues addressed by Michael Morrissey in an article which first appeared in The Fourth Decade 1.4 (May 1994) and is available on-line from Lisa Pease's home page. Morrissey quotes Chomsky's own words from the book Manufacturing Consent (NY: Pantheon, 1988) to assert a smaller conspiracy capable of "manufacturing consent" within the media, historical, scientific, and medical professions to implement the cover-up. He also builds a case to suggest Kennedy's policies were significantly changed after his assassination. This article will propose another answer to Chomsky. It will demonstrate historical precedents and identify an organizational infrastructure capable of implementing the assassination, powerful enough to conceal the truth and motivated to commit the act. It is an answer few Americans will easily accept. The organization that could have pulled off the Kennedy assassination cover-up is American Freemasonry. Freemasonry is secret society with millions of American members. A British investigative work, Inside the Brotherhood by Martin Short (copyright © 1989), quotes a member of the fraternity to help explain the purpose of the organization: Freemasonry is a mechanism of social control. It's a feudal pyramid, whereby people of influence in British society can mix with the ordinary bloke and lend a little lustre to his dreary life. But only certain kinds of bloke. Have you ever thought why the police are so cultivated by Freemasonry? I have met scores of policemen throughout my Masonic career, but I haven't met a single fireman or postman. There must be some firemen and postmen in Freemasonry but nowhere near as many policemen, lawyers, local government officials and businessmen. By drawing these kind of people into this network, the landed aristocracy and big business filter their values down through the social structure. One of the first things you are taught in Freemasonry is to obey rank. There is a line in the ritual that tells how the workmen building Solomon's Temple were split into small lodges in a way 'best calculated to ensure promotion to merit, preserve due subordination and prevent confusion in the work'. Well, you can forget about merit. Freemasonry is all about due subordination. (pg 136) On Masonic business dealings: This petty corruption becomes second nature to Masons, so that in the end they cannot see how corrupt it is. I know one Mason who used to work as manager of a local water board. As soon as he retired he formed a company with other Masons to tender for pipeline work from the water authority. You can be sure he won a lot of contracts not just because he knew about water but because he was 'on the square'. Freemasonry is insider trading by another name. I was particularly disturbed by the attitudes of top Masons. I got to know several who are high court judges. In private they talk as if ordinary people are an expendable nuisance. I've also become very friendly with Harley Street surgeons. One told me how he'd invested his exorbitant fees in all sorts of doubtful, money-making rackets. He would brag about them over dinner after the lodge. These people say appalling things about the working man. Once my provincial grand master made a ferociously anti-Labour remark in Open Lodge. I was a local Conservative official at the time but even I was shocked by his sentiments. (pg 135) American Freemasonry dates back to the revolution and concerns over its influence dates back almost as far. The historical precedent for a massive conspiracy to cover-up an assassination occurred in the early 19th century, when Captain William Morgan was abducted and murdered by Freemasons for his efforts to expose the organization's inner working. The crime, which led to the formation to the first third party political movement in this country, was described in The Address to the People of the United States issued from the United States Anti-masonic Party convention, held in 1830: In 1826, William Morgan, your free fellow citizen, was, by highly exalted members of the masonic fraternity, with unlawful violence, seized,-- secretly transported through the country more than one hundred miles, to a fortress of the United States, then in charge of freemasons, who had prepared it for his reception,-- there imprisoned, several days and nights, against his utmost efforts to escape,-- and after suffering the most unmanly insults, and the most inhuman abuse, he was privately murdered. Previously to his seizure, numerous meetings of freemasons, in lodges and otherwise, were held for the purpose of contriving and adopting the most certain means of carrying into effect, their unlawful objects upon him. These meeting were attended, and the designs of them approved, by several hundred of the most respectable and intelligent of the masonic brethren. They included legislators, judges, sheriffs, clergymen, generals, physicians, and lawyers. And they proceeded in discharge of, what they deemed, their masonic duties. After the crime was exposed, a massive cover-up was required and executed by the Masonic brotherhood. It was also described in The Address to the People of the United States: In this alarming emergency, the agents of government seemed paralyzed. Our public institutions for the preservation of tranquillity, and the repression of crime, seemed nugatory.... No arts were left untried by freemasons to baffle the pursuit of truth, and defeat the administration of justice. The lion's grip of the order was upon our courts, and loyalty to that, displaced fealty to the state. A large proportion of the constables, justices of the peace, lawyers, judges, sheriffs, and jurymen, of the counties where these acts were performed, were members of the society, and had taken oaths binding them,..., to conceal each other's crimes. The high sheriffs were all masons, and at that time, summoned as grand jurors, at their discretion, any such men as had the common qualifications. The preface to former President John Quincy Adams's 1847 book Letters on the Masonic Institution describes the implementation of the crime: That so many men, at so many separate points, should have acted in perfect concert in such business as they were engaged in, would scarcely be believed, without compelling the inference of some distinct understanding existing between them. That they should have carried into effect the most difficult part of their undertaking, a scheme of the most daring and criminal nature, in the midst of a large, intelligent and active population, without thereby incurring the risk of a full conviction of their guilt and the consequent punishment, would be equally incredible, but for the light furnished by the phraseology of the Masonic oath. The preface goes on to say of the oaths: Upon the first hasty and superficial glance, a feeling might arise of surprise that the frivolity of its unmeaning ceremonial, and ridiculous substitution of its fictions for the sacred history, should not long ago discredited the thing in the minds of good and sensible men everywhere. Yet upon closer and more attentive examination, this first feeling vanishes, and makes way for astonishment at the ingenious contrivance displayed in the construction of the whole machine. A more perfect agent for the devising and execution of conspiracies against the church or state could scarcely have been conceived. The preface also describes difficulties in energizing the public against the conspirators: Multitudes preferred to believe the Masonic oaths and penalties to be ceremonies, childish, ridiculous and unmeaning, rather than to suppose them intrinsically and incurably vicious. They refused to credit the fact that men whom they respected as citizens could have made themselves parties to any promise whatsoever to do acts illegal, unjust and wicked. Rather than to go so far, they preferred to throw themselves into a state of resolute unbelief of all that could be said against them. The results of the Anti-masonic movement were described in the Anti-Masonic Scrap Book, published by the National Christian Association in 1883. The excitement caused by Morgan's abduction and murder lasted ten years. And Daniel Webster, Edward Everett. John Quincy Adams, John Marshal, Wm. H. Seward, Thaddeus Stevens, and other great men condemned the lodge in the strongest languages men can use. The lodges feigned dead in the free States, and hid beyond discussion in the slave. The Anti-masonic army disbanded, and the lodges silently crept back into power. This 19th century event could be dismissed as an irrelevant bit of Masonic history, except upon investigation one finds Freemasonry has not been inactive. It has been identified as the parent of a violent and far right American organization, the Ku Klux Klan. In the book Christianity and American Freemasonry, by William J Whalen, on pages 17-18 we find: A former Confederate general and Freemason, Nathan Bedford Forrest, founded the Ku Klux Klan and served as its first Imperial Wizard. Albert Pike held the office of Chief Justice of the Ku Klux Klan while he was simultaneously Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction. Pike's racism was well known. He expressed his concept of Masonic brotherhood succinctly: "I took my obligation to White men, not to Negroes. When I have to accept Negroes as brothers or leave Masonry, I shall leave it." Some believe Pike concocted the ritual for the original KKK. In The Ku Klux Klan by William Pierce Randel, on page 200 we learn: The Klan shared its Protestant restrictiveness with the Masons and more than once sought to capitalize on the parallel. Kleagles commonly remarked to prospects, in an offhand manner, that 'the Klan is, in fact, a Masonic movement.' Many leading Klansmen, in both the old Klan and the new were Masons; [Hiram] Evans himself gained the 32nd degree. In his book Inside the Brotherhood, Martin Short points out, "It seems wherever Masons have common political aims, but cannot pursue them through Freemasonry, they set up parallel public movements (pg 239). Martin Short also describes how the OSS, later to become the CIA, reintroduced Freemasonry into Italy after WWII as a tool "to prop up a sickly democracy threatened by Soviet-inspired destabilization and the prospect of a communist election victory" (pg 399). From 1970 through 1981 a far right Italian Freemasonic lodge, P2, with links to Ronald Reagan, the Republican party, the CIA, British Intelligence and British Freemasonry are now believed to have been preparing for a coup against "clerico-Communists", should they seize power (pg 399-401). This lodge was disbanded when its activities became public. The P2 case is a documented modern example of a Freemasonic lodge positioned as an extra-governmental body for the execution a coup. It is therefore not implausible to suggest that the American Freemasonic lodges successfully executed a coup in the United States by assassinating President John F. Kennedy. It should be noted that Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson was identified as a Freemason by Stephen Knight in his book, The Brotherhood, as was Warren Commission appointee, Gerald Ford. Additionally, a Masonic scholar, A. E. Roberts, identifies J. Edgar Hoover, Earl Warren and Sen. R.B. Russell (member of the Warren Commission) as Masons in his book, Freemasonry in American History. It is difficult to reliably determine if other members of the Warren Commission were also Freemasons, because no published records of membership exist. It is clear that millions of American's have taken the Masonic oaths to secrecy and obedience. These would include people in the government and the media, historical, scientific and medical professions. It is quite possible masonic elements representing many interests conferred and reached a consensus on Kennedy's fate, as occurred in the Morgan case in 1826; each knowing their discussions would be held in confidence. Their motives would probably be to protect and advance business interests and their social positions (wealth and power). These would include: Taking the presidency for Freemason Lyndon B. Johnson Protecting his control of the FBI for Freemason J. Edgar Hoover Eliminating Kennedy's softening position on communism, a threat to a wide variety of American business interests overseas Slowing the progress of the civil rights movement, an irritation to the KKK Eliminating Kennedy's challenges to the CIA's leadership; he'd fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (another Warren Commission member) and Deputy Director Charles Cabell There is also an interesting religious element, at that time Kennedy's Church, Catholicism, explicitly condemned membership in Freemasonry "under pain of excommunication". The level of hostility that Freemasons felt toward Kennedy was documented in February 1960 issue of New Age magazine, a Masonic publication, where Luther A. Smith, Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction, told his readers: "whatever bigotry is in evidence in the United States is exhibited solely by the Roman Catholic hierarchy; that the Canon Law of the Roman Church and the directives of the Pope validate the fears of the people that the dual allegiance of American Catholics is a present danger to our free institutions, and lastly that the people in passing upon the qualifications of a Catholic candidate for the Presidency will be guided by their knowledge of history and their great store of plain old-fashioned common horse sense, and their innate caution not to gamble when their liberties and the national security are at stake. Among American citizens there should be no question or suspicion of allegiance to any foreign power, but in the case of the Roman Catholic citizen, his church is the guardian of his conscience and asserts that he must obey its laws and decrees even if they are in conflict with the Constitution and laws of the United States." The assassination was probably executed by CIA resources developed in the anti-Castro campaign Kennedy was canceling, and redirected against the internal threat, Kennedy. The investigation which followed the assassination was overseen and directed by Freemasons, who could influence the selection of the rest of the investigative team and effectively control the results. The Kennedy assassination appears to have been part a campaign of assassinations against a generation of leaders, who posed challenges to the entrenched power structure. The death toll included John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Viewed as a whole, one is driven to the conclusion that the anyone advocating or supporting serious social reforms (share the wealth and power) will not be tolerated in a leadership position. You can read The CIA's Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer for an overview of the assassination cases. These assassinations suggest the merger of KKK ethics with CIA resources and techniques. The CIA and modern Freemasonry can be viewed as tools, available to support US strategic interests, business interests. The CIA principally focused on influencing events overseas, Freemasonry's old-boy network used to influence domestic interests. The domestic campaign of social repression and control seems to have moved from assassinations to manipulation of the media and economic reprisals against any person or institution which pose a serious challenge to business interests or the entrenched power structure. As Americans are bombarded by the media with information on a host of social issues, largely irrelevant to the business community, a massive consolidation of wealth has occurred, labor unions crushed, social welfare programs attacked and media outlets consolidated. It is remarkable that no effective voice has been raised in opposition, until one realizes we have lost those voices. We have a new generation of "pro-business" Democrats and a history of ineffective or dishonest civil rights and union leadership. A Freemasonic conspiracy addresses all the points raised at the start of this article: It provides historical precedents It provides an existing organizational structure capable of covering-up the crime It explains the absence of internal records It provides many potential motives. The larger question, which still needs to be answered, was asked in an American Anti-Masonic pamphlet published in 1829 and holds true for today: Ought a secret society to exist amongst us whose members can commit murder and yet escape punishment? MASONS HAVE done this, and their brethren ... are sworn to protect them. Fellow citizens, are men bound by such obligations and possessing such principals, FIT to be rulers of a FREE PEOPLE." It also warned us: It is to be hoped that an institution whose very principles lead directly to such horrid outrages, and which is entirely made up of dissimulation and fraud, will be completely suppressed in this country and throughout the world, and that a barrier be instituted to prevent it from ever again polluting the earth with its insidious influence. But the public must not expect to accomplish this desirable object without unwanted pains and incessant vigilance; their task is but commencing, and, should they lack in circumspection or perseverance, the monster will yet flourish with more power and commit greater enormities than ever. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Acacia Press is working to re-publish early 19th and early 20th century books and pamphlets on Freemasonry. It also resells modern books on Freemasonry. http://www.crocker.com/~acacia/antim.html .
By John Chuckman "If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?" -- Bertrand Russell Bertrand Russell's penetrating question, one of sixteen he asked at the time of the Warren Commission Report, remains unanswered after forty years. That should trouble Americans, but then again there are many things around national secrecy today that should trouble Americans. The most timely lesson to be taken from the fortieth anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination concerns secrecy and the meaning of democracy in the world's most powerful nation. Perhaps no event better demonstrates the existence of two governments in the United States, the one people elect and another, often far more influential, as capable of imposing false history about large events as the fabled Ministry of Truth. Since the time of the Warren Commission we have had the investigation of the House Select Committee and, in the last decade, the release of truckloads of previously-secret documents. These documents were suppressed originally in the name of national security, but the fact is, despite their release, much of their content is heavily blacked out, and dedicated researchers know many documents remain unreleased, particularly documents from the CIA and military intelligence. Would any reasonable person conclude anything other than that those documents are likely the most informative and sensational? Was it ever reasonable to believe that material of that nature would be included in document releases? Just a few years ago, records of some of the CIA's early Cold War activities, due for mandated release, were suddenly said to have "disappeared," and that declaration was pretty much the end of the story for a press regularly puffing itself as the fourth estate of American society. You do not have to believe in wild plots to recognize here the key to the Warren Commission's shabby job of investigation. As it was, several members of the Commission expressed private doubts about the main finding of Oswald as lone assassin. There is a sense in these matters of being treated as a child sent to his or her room for not eating the spinach served. This is not so different to the way the American government treats its citizens about Cuba: it restricts them from spending money there so they cannot freely go and judge for themselves what is and isn't. As it happens, the two things, Cuba and the assassination, are intimately related. Almost no one who studies the assassination critically can help but conclude it had a great deal to do with Cuba. No, I don't mean the pathetic story about Castro being somehow responsible. That idea is an insult to intelligence. No matter what opinions you may hold of Castro, he is too clever and was in those days certainly too dedicated to the purpose of helping his people, according to his lights, ever to take such a chance. Even the slightest evidence pointing to Castro would have given the American establishment, fuming over communism like Puritan Fathers confronting what they regarded as demon possession, the excuse for an invasion. There never has been credible evidence in that direction. Yet, there has been a number of fraudulent pieces of evidence, particularly the testimony of unsavory characters, claims so threadbare they have come and gone after failing to catch any hold, remaining as forgotten as last year's fizzled advertising campaign for some laundry detergent. The notion that Castro had anything to do with the assassination is like an old corpse that's been floating around, slowly decomposing, periodically releasing gases for decades. And it is still doing so, Gus Russo's Live by the Sword of not many years ago being one of the most detailed efforts to tart-up the corpse and make it presentable for showing. Any superficial plausibility to the notion of Castro as assassin derives from the poisonous atmosphere maintained towards him as official American policy. Researchers in science know that bias on a researcher's part, not scrupulously checked by an experiment's protocols, can seriously influence the outcome of an otherwise rigorous statistical study. How much more so in studies of history on subjects loaded with ideology and politics? When you consider with what flimsy, and even utterly false, evidence the United States has invaded Iraq, it is remarkable that an invasion of Cuba did not proceed forty years ago. But in some ways the U.S. was less certain of itself then, it had a formidable opponent in the Soviet Union, and there was an agreement with the Soviets concerning Cuba's integrity negotiated to end the Cuban missile crisis, an agreement which deeply offended the small army of Cuban exiles, CIA men, and low-life hangers-on who enjoyed steady employment, lots of perquisites, and violent fun terrorizing Cuba. Considering America's current crusade over the evils of terrorism, you'd have to conclude from the existence of that well-financed, murderous mob in the early 1960s that there was a rather different view of terror then. Perhaps there is good terror and bad terror, depending on just who does the wrecking and killing? If you were a serious, aspiring assassin, associated with Castro and living in the United States during the early 1960s, you would not advertise your sympathies months in advance as Oswald did. You would not call any attention to yourself. It is hard for many today to have an adequate feel for the period, a time when declaring yourself sympathetic to Castro or communism could earn you a beating in the street, quite apart from making you the target of intense FBI interest. Oswald was physically assaulted for his (stagy) pro-Castro efforts in New Orleans, and he did receive a lengthy visit from the FBI while held briefly in jail, but this was not new interest from the agency since he was already well known to them. Whatever else you may think of Castro, he is one of the cleverest and most able politicians of the second half of the twentieth century. He survived invasion, endless acts of terror and sabotage from the CIA and Cuban exiles, and numerous attempts at assassination, and he still retains a good deal of loyal support in Cuba. A man of this extraordinary talent does not use someone like Oswald to assassinate an American president. And if Castro had made such a mistake, he quickly would have corrected the error when Oswald made a (deliberate) fool of himself, over and over, in New Orleans well before the assassination, his actions there looking remarkably like the kind of provocateur-stuff a security service might use to elicit responses and identify the sympathies of others. Oswald's (purported) visit to Mexico and clownish behavior in New Orleans laid the groundwork for the myth of Castro's involvement, and that almost certainly was one of the purposes of the activity, laying the groundwork for an invasion of Cuba. The motive for the assassination is likely found there. It is just silly to believe Castro risked handing the U.S. government a new "Remember the Maine." In recent years, we've had Patrick Kennedy say he believes Castro was responsible, but his views on this matter are more like built-in reflexes than informed judgment. Besides broadcasting a tone agreeable to America's political establishment, his statement comes steeped in de' Medici-like conviction that Castro's success stained the honor of his ferociously ambitious family. Cross that family's path, and you earn a lifetime grudge. That's the way the family fortune's founder always behaved. Robert Kennedy hated Castro (just as he hated other powerful competitors including Lyndon Johnson), and he took personal oversight of efforts to assassinate him. Robert also hated certain elements of the Mafia, who, after supporting his brother with money and influence in the election, felt betrayed by Robert's legal actions against them. The killing of Castro would have made all these people much happier, Havana having been one of the Mafia's gold mines before Castro. Interestingly enough, it appears that the FBI, under pressure from Robert, was at the same time making efforts to crackdown on the excesses of the Cuban refugees. Their excesses, including insane acts like shooting up Russian ships and killing Russian sailors in Cuban ports, threatened relations with the Soviet Union. One of the centers of the FBI's crackdown effort was New Orleans, and that is where it appears clearest that Oswald worked for them. His defector background made him a logical candidate for provocative activities like handing out leaflets about Castro. At the same time he was offering his services as an ex-Marine to at least one of the refugee groups. Oswald almost certainly had a minor role in American intelligence, an assumption that explains many mysterious episodes in his life. We know the Warren Commission discussed this in closed session. We also know Texas authorities believed they had discovered such a connection. And we know the FBI in Dallas destroyed important evidence. If you're looking for Cuban assassins, why not some of those nasty refugee militia groups, armed to the teeth by the CIA and trained to terrorize Castro's government? They also terrorized their critics in Florida. The extensive preparations necessary for assassinating the President might have raised little suspicion from the CIA or FBI at a time when these groups, subsidized and protected by the CIA, were carrying out all kinds of violent, lunatic acts. There are strong parallels here with the suicide-bombers of 9/11, who undoubtedly eluded suspicion because the CIA had been regularly bringing into the country many shady characters from the Middle East to train for its dark purposes in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The Cuban extremists in Florida were furious over the Bay of Pigs and felt betrayed by Kennedy's terms for settling the missile crisis. You couldn't find a better explanation for the CIA's unhelpful behavior over the years since. Imagine the impact on the CIA, already badly damaged by the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy's great anger over it, of news that some of its subsidized anti-Castro thugs had killed the President? I don't say that is what happened, only that there is at least one conjecture with far more force and substance than the official one. Assassination-theorizing is not one of my hobbies, but I have contempt for the official explanation, and it seems rather naive to believe that the American security establishment would have been satisfied with the insipid conclusions of the Warren Commission. Furthermore, it is difficult to believe that the vast resources of American security and justice employed at the time -- that is, those not concerned with kicking up dust into the public's eyes -- were not able to identify the assassins and their purpose. Documents covering a surreptitious, parallel investigation almost certainly exist because what we know includes suggestions of two investigations intersecting at times. Perhaps, the best example of this is around the autopsy (discussed below). Kicking-up dust around the assassination is an activity that continues intermittently to this day. In a piece a few years ago in the Washington Post about new Moscow documents on the assassination, a reporter wrote, "Oswald...defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and renounced his American citizenship." Oswald never renounced his citizenship, although he made a public show of wanting to do so. This was one of many theater-of-the-absurd scenes in the Oswald saga. We now know that on one of his visits to the American embassy in Moscow, Oswald was taken to an area reserved for sensitive matters, not the kind of business he was there to conduct. The Soviets let him stay, never granting him citizenship, always treating him as an extraordinary outsider under constant scrutiny. The Washington Post reporter also wrote, "Historians have expressed hope that the documents could shed light on whether Oswald schemed to kill Kennedy when he lived in the Soviet Union...." That begs the genuine question of whether Oswald killed Kennedy and kicks-up more dust. No historian of critical ability could think that way. The Soviets went out of their way at the time of the assassination to reassure the U.S. government that they had no connection with it. Any credible evidence they could produce, we may be absolutely sure, was produced. The stakes were immensely high. The testimony of many Soviet citizens who knew Oswald agreed that he was a man temperamentally incapable of killing anyone. An exception was his (estranged) wife, Marina, who found herself, after the assassination, a Soviet citizen in a hostile country, able to speak little English, the mother of two young children with absolutely no resources, and hostage to American agents who could determine her destiny. Even so accomplished and discerning a journalist as Daniel Schorr has assisted in kicking-up dust, writing some years ago at the release of more than a thousand boxes of memos and investigative reports from the national archives that there wasn't much there. Somehow, Schorr had managed to digest and summarize that monstrous amount of information in a very short time. Then again, in view of all the blacked-out information, maybe Schorr's assertion owed less to incredible skills at reading and digesting information than to serene confidence in the methods of the establishment. Schorr went from the merely silly to the ridiculous with his assertion; "There remains no serious reason to question the Warren Commission's conclusion that the death of the president was the work of Oswald alone." How re-assuring, but, if you think about that for a moment, it is the equivalent of saying what never was proved has not now been disproved, so we'll regard it as proved -- absurd, yet characteristic of so many things written about the assassination. Schorr went on to praise Gerald Posner's new book, Case Closed, as "remov[ing] any lingering doubt." We'll come back to Posner's book, but Schorr also saw fit to trot out the then obligatory disparaging reference to Oliver Stone's movie JFK. Why would a piece of popular entertainment be mentioned in the same context as genuine historical documents? Only to associate the movie with Schorr's claim that the documents had little to say. Every handsomely-paid columnist and pop news-celebrity in America stretched to find new words of contempt for the Stone movie, miraculously, many of them well before its release. The wide-scale, simultaneous attack was astonishing. You had to wonder whether they had a source sending them film scraps from the editing room or purloined pages from the script. When Stone's movie did appear -- proving highly unsatisfactory, almost silly, in its explanation of the assassination -- you had to wonder what all the fuss had been about. I was never an admirer of President Kennedy -- still, the most important, unsolved murder of the 20th century, apart from the lessons it offers, is a fascinating mystery for those who've studied it. The President's head movement at the impact of the fatal shot, clearly backward on the Zapruder film, a fact lamely rationalized by the Warren Commission, is not the only evidence for shots from the front. In the famous picture of Mrs. Kennedy reaching over the back of the car, she was, by her own testimony, reaching for a piece of the President's skull. Equally striking is the testimony of a police outrider, to the rear of the President's car, that he was struck forcefully with blood and brain tissue. The doctors who worked to save the President at Parkland Hospital in Dallas said that the major visible damage to the President was a gaping wound near the rear of the skull, the kind of wound that typically reflects the exit of a bullet with the shock wave generated by its passing through layers of human tissue. We've all seen a plate glass window struck by a B-B where a tiny entrance puncture results in a large funnel-shaped chunk of cracked or missing glass on the opposite side. The President's head wound, as described in Dallas, is not present in published autopsy photographs. Instead, there is a pencil-thin entrance-type wound in an unknown scalp. Although the Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, who climbed aboard the President's car after the shots, testified to seeing a large chunk of skull in the car and looking into the right rear of the President's head, seeing part of his brain gone, the autopsy photos show no such thing. The wound at the front of the President's neck, just above his necktie, which was nicked by the bullet, was regarded by those first treating him in Dallas as an entrance wound since it had the form of a small puncture before a tracheotomy was done. But the throat wound in the published autopsy photos is large and messy. The nature of the pathologists forcefully raises Russell's question. Why would you need military pathologists, people who must follow orders? Ones especially that were not very experienced in gunshot wounds, far less so than hospital pathologists in any large, violent American city? Why conduct the autopsy at a military hospital in Washington rather than a civilian one in Dallas? Why have the pathologists work with a room full of Pentagon brass looking on? The President's body was seized at gunpoint by federal agents at the hospital in Dallas where the law required autopsy of a murder victim. Why these suspicious actions and so many more, if the assassination, as the Warren Commission and its defenders hold, reduces to murder by one man for unknown motives? The autopsy, as published, was neither complete nor careful, rendering its findings of little forensic value. There is some evidence, including testimony of a morgue worker and references contained in an FBI memo, pointing to autopsy work, particularly work to the President's head, done elsewhere before receipt of the body for the official autopsy, but no new documents expand on this. We do learn the relatively trivial fact that the expensive bronze casket, known to have been damaged at some point in bringing it to Bethesda, was disposed of by sinking in the ocean, but the morgue worker said the bronze casket arriving with Mrs. Kennedy was empty and that the body, separately delivered in a shipping casket, displayed obvious signs of work done to it. The FBI memo, written by two agents at the "earlier stages" of the official autopsy, states that the unwrapped body displayed "surgery of the head area." The same FBI agents also signed a receipt for a mysterious "missile removed" by one pathologist. The official autopsy avoided some standard procedures. For example, the path of the so-called magic bullet through the President's neck was not sectioned. A mysterious back wound, whose placement varies dramatically from the hole in the President's jacket (a fact officially explained by an improbable bunching-up of the jacket), was probed but no entrance into the body cavity found. The preserved brain -- what there was of it, and with its telltale scattering of metal fragments -- later went missing. One of the pathologists admitted to burning his original draft before writing the report we now see. The Warren Commission did no independent investigation (it did not even examine the autopsy photos and x-rays), adopting instead the FBI as its investigative arm at a time when the FBI had many serious matters to explain. The FBI had failed to have Oswald's name on its Watch List even though they were completely familiar with him, seeing him at intervals for unexplained reasons. His name even had appeared earlier in an odd internal FBI advisory memo signed by Director Hoover. The FBI also had failed to act appropriately on an explicit threat from a known source recorded well before Kennedy went to Dallas. And the agency destroyed crucial evidence. With a lack of independent investigation and the absence of all proper court procedures including the cross-examination of witnesses, the Warren Report is nothing more than a prosecutor's brief, and a sloppy one at that, with a finding of guilt in the absence of any judge or jury. The only time the skimpy evidence against Oswald was considered in a proper court setting, a mock trial by the American Bar Association in 1992, the jury was hung, 7 to 5. Oswald's background is extraordinary. By the standards of the 1950s and early 1960s, aspects of his life simply make no sense if viewed from the official perspective. Here was a Marine, enlisted at 17, who mysteriously started learning Russian, receiving communist literature through the mail, and speaking openly to other Marines about communism -- none of which in the least affected his posting or standing. He became a defector to the Soviet Union, one who reportedly threatened to give the Soviets information about operations of the then top-secret U-2 spy plane. Some even assert he did provide such information, making it possible for a Soviet missile to down Gary Power's U-2 plane just before the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit. Unlikely as that is, for Oswald would certainly have been treated harshly on his return to the United States were it true, he did know some important facts about the U-2's capabilities, because this Russian-studying, communist literature-reading Marine was posted at a secret U-2 base in Japan as a radar operator before his defection. At a time when witch-hunting for communists was a fresh memory and still a career path for some American politicians, Oswald returned to the U.S. with a Russian wife, one whose uncle was a lieutenant colonel in the MVD, the Ministry of the Interior, but the CIA and other security agencies supposedly took little interest in him. Oswald's source of income in the U.S. at critical times remains a mystery. A mystery, too, surrounds the connections of this young man of humble means to some well-heeled, anti-Soviet Russian speakers in Dallas after his return from the Soviet Union. His later ability to get a passport for travel to Mexico in just 24 hours -- with a personal history that must have ranked as one of the most bizarre in the United States -- is attributed to "clerical error." Oswald, so far as we know, was a patriotic individual when he joined the Marines. There is no evidence that he was ever actually a communist or member of any extremist organization. In fact, there is striking evidence suggesting he did work supporting the opposite interest after his return to the United States. Thus the address on some of the "Fair Play for Cuba" pamphlets he distributed in New Orleans was the office of Guy Bannister, a former senior FBI agent and violent anti-communist, still well-connected to the agency. Oswald's connections with the FBI have never been satisfactorily examined. There are many circumstances suggesting his being a paid informant for the FBI, especially during his time in New Orleans. A letter Oswald wrote to a Dallas agent just before the assassination was deliberately and recklessly destroyed by order of the office's senior agent immediately after the assassination with no reasonable explanation. One way or another, all the major police or intelligence agencies were compromised during the assassination or its investigation. The Secret Service performed abysmally, in both planning the motorcade and responding to gunfire. Some of the agents on duty had actually been out late drinking the night before, as it happens at a bar belonging to an associate of Jack Ruby, Oswald's own assassin. The performance of the Dallas police suggests terrible corruption. The FBI failed in vital respects before and after the assassination. The CIA failed to cooperate on many, many details of the investigation. These facts understandably encourage the more farfetched assassination theories. The CIA has never released its most important information on Oswald, importantly including documentation of his supposed activities in Mexico City at the Cuban and Russian embassies where every visitor was routinely photographed and identified by the CIA. We may speculate what a thorough vetting of CIA files would show: likely that Oswald was a low-grade intelligence agent during his stint in the Soviet Union, perhaps working for military intelligence to collect information on day-to-day living conditions and attitudes there, one of several men sent for the purpose at that time; that he was trained at an American military school in basic Russian and encouraged to build a quickie communist identity by subscribing to literature and talking foolishly before defecting. We would also likely find that he was serving American security, probably the FBI, during the months before Dallas in the murky world of CIA/FBI/Cuban refugee/Mafia anti-Castro activities; and that in the course of that anti-Castro work, he was sucked without realizing it into an elaborate assassination plot, offering the plotters, with his odd background, a tailor-made patsy. The CIA assessment of Oswald would likely show, just as testimony from his time in the Soviet Union shows, that Oswald was not capable psychologically of acting as an assassin, lone or otherwise. The case against Oswald is a flimsy tissue. It includes a poor autopsy of the victim offering no reliable evidence; a rifle whose ownership is not established; a rifle never definitively proved to have actually killed the President; a claim that jacketed bullets were used, a type of ammunition that could not possibly cause the kind of wounds to which many testify; the accused's record of mediocre marksmanship in the Marines; a paraffin test which showed no residue on his cheek despite his supposedly firing three shots from a bolt-action rifle; a single palm print claimed to have been obtained from the rifle after earlier failed attempts; gimmicky, suggestive photographs of Oswald with a rifle declared montages by several experts; a completely unacceptable evidence chain for the shell casings from the site of Officer Tippit's shooting, those submitted as evidence being almost certainly not those found at the scene; a bizarre history for the bullets supposed to have killed Tippet; an illogical weighting of witnesses who told different stories about Tippit's shooting; plus many other strange and contradictory details. Moreover, Oswald had no motive, having expressed admiration for Kennedy. And Oswald was promptly assassinated himself by Jack Ruby, a man associated with the murky world of anti-Castro violence, someone whose past included gun-running to Cuba and enforcer-violence in Chicago. There is a kind of cheap industry in publishing assassination books, most of which are superficial or silly. This fact makes it easy to attack credible efforts to question the official story, but in this respect the subject is no different from others. Just look at the shelves of superficial or trashy books on psychology, business management, or self-help available in bookstores. Russell's question echoes again and again down the decades as adjustments are made to the official story. Employing techniques one expects to be used for covering up long-term intelligence interests, various points raised by early independent researchers like Joachim Joesten or Mark Lane, have been conceded here or there along the way without altering the central finding. This is an effective method: concede details and appear open to new facts while always forcefully returning to the main point. A significant writer along these lines is Jacob Epstein, an author whose other writing suggests intelligence connections. His first book on the assassination, Inquest, conceded numerous flaws in the Warren Report. Epstein went on in subsequent books, Counterplot and Legend to attack at length -- and for the critical reader, quite unconvincingly -- ideas of conspiracy, Oswald's intelligence connections, and his innocence. The Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 1979, was the grandest effort of this type. The Committee was used for selective leaks and plants, as for example the publication of some bootlegged autopsy photos, which ended by raising only more questions. Leads often were not followed-up, greatly frustrating some of the able investigators employed. The Committee squandered the last opportunity to pursue an independent, well-financed investigation -- last, in the sense of never again being able to overcome the inertia against assembling the needed resources and authorities and in the sense that with passing time evidence deteriorates, memories fade, and witnesses die. Despite the Committee's attention-getting conclusion from technical analysis of an old Dictabelt recording that a shot probably was fired from the front, it also concluded that the shot missed, a truly bizarre finding that welds hints of conspiracy to yet another assertion that Oswald was the only killer. Gerald Posner's Case Closed, 1993, was another of these. You couldn't help noticing this lamentable book being widely reviewed and praised. Why would that be? Because, without producing any new evidence and despite a number of errors, it freshly re-packaged the main speculations of the Warren Report, but no repackaging of the Report's jumble of partial facts, guesses, and accusations can strengthen its conclusions. You can't build a sound house with large sections of the foundation missing. Priscilla Johnson's Marina and Lee, 1980, was another kind of book, one of several resembling the kind of quickie books churned out to discredit Anita Hill in the Judge Clarence Thomas confirmation. Ms. Johnson managed to interview Oswald in Russia -- I wonder what connections might have made that possible? -- and later used that fact to gain access to Oswald's widow, Marina. Impressing many who had heard her as a distracted and confused person, Marina was a woman who had been subjected to immense, frightening pressure from the FBI and other security services after the assassination. The book is an almost unreadable hatchet-job on Oswald's character, effectively diminishing the image that comes through many photographs and anecdotes of a rather naïve, brash, sometimes rude but not unlikable young man caught up in events he incompletely understood. The official story of the assassination remains pretty much unchanged from just a few days after events of forty years ago: one man with an almost broken-down rifle, no expertise, no resources, and no motive killed the President, and he was himself killed by a man with the darkest background simply out of sympathy for the President's wife. Those with no vested interest and critical faculties intact can never accept such a fable explaining the brutal work of a well-planned conspiracy. Now, the really horrifying possibility is that the security agencies never discovered the assassins despite vast efforts. That means officials hold tenaciously to the Oswald story to cover national nakedness. The FBI has a long and shabby record of blunders and going after the wrong people, and when you think of the CIA's many failures assessing the capabilities and approaching demise of the Soviet Union, the many failures in Vietnam, and its miserable failure around 9/11, that is not a farfetched possibility. The answer to Russell's question then becomes that national security indeed applies, if only in the unexpected form of hiding miserable failure. But if you can write false history of an event so large as a Presidential assassination, what truly are the limits? [John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. He has many interests and is a lifelong student of history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency. He is a member of no political party and takes exception to what has been called America's "culture of complaint" with its habit of reducing every important issue to an unproductive argument between two simplistically defined groups. John left the United States as a poor young man from the South Side of Chicago when the government embarked on the murder of millions of Vietnamese in their own land because they happened to embrace the wrong economic loyalties. He lives in Canada, which he is fond of calling "the peaceable kingdom."] John Chuckman encourages your comments: chuckman@YellowTimes.org YellowTimes.org is an international news and opinion publication. YellowTimes.org encourages its material to be reproduced, reprinted, or broadcast provided that any such reproduction identifies the original source, http://www.YellowTimes.org . Internet web links to http://www.YellowTimes.org are appreciated.
Document 100.1.3.2.0 31 of 39........ "The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the Americans freedom and before I leave office I must inform the Citizen of his plight." PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY(10 days before he was murdered) On June 4, 1963, a virtually unknown Presidential decree, Executive Order 11110, was signed with the authority to basically strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the United States Federal Government at interest. With the stroke of a pen, President Kennedy declared that the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank would soon be out of business. The Christian Common Law Institute has exhaustively researched this matter through the Federal Register and Library of Congress and can now safely conclude that this Executive Order has never been repealed, amended, or superceded by any subsequent Executive Order. In simple terms, it is still valid. When President John Fitzgerald Kennedy - the author of Profiles in Courage -signed this Order, it returned to the federal government, specifically the Treasury Department, the Constitutional power to create and issue currency -money - without going through the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank. President Kennedy's Executive Order 11110 [the full text is displayed further below] gave the Treasury Department the explicit authority: "to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury." This means that for every ounce of silver in the U.S. Treasury's vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation based on the silver bullion physically held there. As a result, more than $4 billion in United States Notes were brought into circulation in $2 and $5 denominations. $10 and $20 United States Notes were never circulated but were being printed by the Treasury Department when Kennedy was assassinated. It appears obvious that President Kennedy knew the Federal Reserve Notes being used as the purported legal currency were contrary to the Constitution of the United States of America. "United States Notes" were issued as an interest-free and debt-free currency backed by silver reserves in the U.S. Treasury. In the illustrations below, a "Federal Reserve Note" issued from the private central bank of the United States (the Federal Reserve Bank a/k/a Federal Reserve System), is compared with a "United States Note" from the U.S. Treasury issued by President Kennedy's Executive Order. They almost look alike, except one says "Federal Reserve Note" on the top while the other says "United States Note". Also, the Federal Reserve Note has a green seal and serial number while the United States Note has a red seal and serial number. President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 and the United States Notes he had issued were immediately taken out of circulation. Federal Reserve Notes continued to serve as the legal currency of the nation. According to the United States Secret Service, 99% of all U.S. paper "currency" circulating in 1999 are Federal Reserve Notes. Kennedy knew that if the silver-backed United States Notes were widely circulated, they would have eliminated the demand for Federal Reserve Notes. This is a very simple matter of economics. The USN was backed by silver and the FRN was not backed by anything of intrinsic value. Executive Order 11110 should have prevented the national debt from reaching its current level (virtually all of the nearly $9 trillion in federal debt has been created since 1963) if LBJ or any subsequent President were to enforce it. It would have almost immediately given the U.S. Government the ability to repay its debt without going to the private Federal Reserve Banks and being charged interest to create new "money". Executive Order 11110 gave the U.S.A. the ability to, once again, create its own money backed by silver and real value worth something. Again, just five months after Kennedy was assassinated, no more of the Series 1958 "Silver Certificates" were issued either, and they were subsequently removed from circulation. Perhaps the assassination of JFK was a warning to all future presidents not to interfere with the private Federal Reserve's control over the creation of money. It seems very apparent that President Kennedy challenged the "powers that exist behind U.S. and world finance". With true patriotic courage, JFK boldly faced the two most successful vehicles that have ever been used to drive up debt: 1) war (Vietnam); and, 2) the creation of money by a privately owned central bank. His efforts to have all U.S. troops out of Vietnam by 1965 combined with Executive Order 11110 would have destroyed the profits and control of the private Federal Reserve Bank.
Reproduced gratefully from: American Patriot Friends Network APFN
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Opium Lords by Salvador Astucia Israel, the Golden Triangle, and the Kennedy Assassination
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