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Copyright AARC

A CRUEL AND SHOCKING MISINTERPRETATION

© 2015 Dan Hardway —

Phil Shenon and I agree on at least a few things. In any resolution of the mysteries surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mexico City will undoubtedly be important. The investigation into what happened there in 1963 was, for some reason, seriously curtailed by the U.S. government. The government has, since then, fought tooth and nail to keep the full story about what happened there secret.

While I have never met Mr. Shenon, I have spoken with him several times by telephone. I first heard from him when he called me around 2011. He introduced himself as a reporter for Newsweek Magazine. He said he was working well in advance on an article for that magazine for the 50th anniversary of JFK’s murder. He wondered whether I would be willing to talk about the HSCA’s investigation in Mexico City. I agreed to speak with him.

Over the course of that first conversation, and several follow-up calls from him over the next couple of years, it became apparent to me that Mr. Shenon was only interested in our work investigating what had happened in Mexico City in 1963 insofar as it might provide some kind of basis for linking Oswald to Castro or the Cubans. I tried to discuss the details of the HSCA investigation into what happened in Mexico City in its anomalous issues, but he was uninterested in those details. While there is an acknowledgment in his book, A Cruel and Shocking Act, stating that Ed Lopez and I were “generous with their time and interviews for this book,” precious little, if any, of what we shared with him made it into the book or any of his subsequent writing on the subject of Mexico City. Not only does Mr. Shenon ignore the post-HSCA materials we tried to bring to his attention, he also ignores the primary thrust of our report written for the HSCA.
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I would not take issue with Phil Shenon if I thought what he is claiming is, merely, that the possibility of Cuban assistance to Oswald should be investigated. While I think the evidence of that is very weak at best, I will not deny that any avenue of investigation that remains open should be pursued. What I take issue with Mr. Shenon about is his single-minded concentration on that one issue and the resultant misrepresentation of facts and questions related to, and arising from, Lee Oswald’s activities in Mexico City. It appears to me that Shenon may be carrying water for the proponents of the original conspiracy theory – that Castro did it – rather than offering any objective review of the complete evidentiary base of that underlies the Mexico City visit. Shenon deliberately ignores the indicators and evidence that suggest Oswald’s trip to Mexico was either designed in advance, or spun in the aftermath, to give the appearance of Cuban and Soviet collusion in the Kennedy assassination.

Shenon’s thesis, as most recently explicated in his article in Politico, “What Was Lee Harvey Oswald Doing in Mexico?”, is built on suspicions expressed by some government officials after the assassination and Charles Thomas’s reporting of the Duran twist party – a report based on a story first told by Elena Garro de Paz. Many had initial suspicions after the assassination: Lyndon Johnson alleged a communist conspiracy within twenty minutes of JFK’s death; Bobby Kennedy’s first question to CIA Director John McCone that day was, “Did some of your guys do this?” (The Warren Commission, in Executive Session, was very concerned about Oswald’s intelligence connections, but Allen Dulles told them it was something that couldn’t really be proven, as a good intelligence officer would lie under oath to the Commission.) When Shenon and I talked, I tried to get him to consider evidence and facts that have come to light about Mexico City and the CIA’s handling of various investigations since, including the one I worked on in 1978, in his evaluation of the twist party story that lies at the root of his speculations. My efforts had no effect. Any possible explanation other than Cuban complicity has been ignored by Mr. Shenon who seems hell-bent on promoting the idea that Castro was behind the assassination, refusing to address any other possibility.

I tried, in vain as it turns out, to get Mr. Shenon to consider that what we had learned about Oswald’s activities, and the government’s reaction to those activities, could support a different explanation which also pointed to an additional avenue of investigation that needed to be publicized and followed. In my view, Oswald’s activities are more consistent with his being involved in an intelligence operation being run by U.S. intelligence than with him trying to make contact with Cubans to garner support for an assassination attempt on the sitting leader of this country.

To fully appreciate why I say that, a little background from Washington in 1978, is necessary. In 1978 the CIA resisted the HSCA’s inquiry into Mexico City more than any other area of inquiry. The chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, told the Committee on August 15, 1978, “[T]he deeper we have gotten into the Agency’s performance in Mexico City, the more difficult they have gotten in dealing with us, the more they have insisted on relevance, the more they have gone back in effect on their agreement to give us access to unsanitized files. For a while we had general and free access to unsanitized files. That is increasingly not true in the Mexico City area….” And we have since learned that they used George Joannides to shut down the investigation into Oswald and Mexico City. In doing so, they lied to us about who he was. He ran propaganda operations in

George Joannides

George Joannides

Miami in 1963-64 and was the case officer for DRE, the anti-Castro group that scored the anti-Fair Play for Cuba Committee coup using Oswald in New Orleans in August of 1963. As G. Robert Blakey has since acknowledged, “The CIA not only lied, it actively subverted the investigation.” I think the CIA expected we would take the superficial approach of considering the “Castro did it” theory, but when we went beyond the initial appearances and began pushing our investigation into the propaganda sources, seeking interviews with the actual penetration and surveillance agents, seeking to find others in Mexico City who may have seen Oswald, then the Agency resistance to our investigation turned to a stonewall. Shouldn’t it be enough to raise serious questions that when a Congressional Committee investigating specific disinformation operations ran by the CIA, the CIA brings one of those involved in the operation being investigated and uses him in an undercover capacity to forestall and subvert the investigation? But that’s not all.

Consider the scenario of U.S. intelligence involvement in Oswald’s activities in Mexico City that we were not able to fully investigate in 1978. Let’s start with some background on David Phillips. David Phillips was one of, if not the, most experienced, ingenious, respected, and qualified disinformation officers in the CIA. In 1963 he was stationed in Mexico City, but, in early October, he was temporarily assigned to duty at Headquarters because he was being promoted from running anti-Castro propaganda operations to overseeing all anti-Castro operations in the

David Atlee Phillips

David Atlee Phillips

Western Hemisphere. He was an experienced hand. In the late 1950’s he had been under non-diplomatic cover in Havana, where he worked  with student leaders who would eventually form the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (“DRE”). During the Bay of Pigs, Phillips was stationed at CIA Headquarters where he had responsibility for the propaganda and psychological warfare aspects of the antiCastro operations. In running those operations he not only oversaw the operations he ran personally from Headquarters, he was also the supervisor of the propaganda operations flowing out of the JMWAVE station in Miami by William Kent (aka Doug Gupton, William Trouchard). When the students who had been recruited by Phillips fled Cuba, they were reorganized under Kent’s tutelage into the DRE based in Miami.

Phillips was transferred to Mexico City later in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs. Kent was promoted to Headquarters, and George Joannides took over Kent’s position in Miami, including supervision of DRE. While still stationed in Headquarters in the early 60’s, David Phillips had worked with Cord Meyer to develop the first disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting and disrupting a group of Castro sympathizers who had organized themselves into the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). In the summer of 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald formed a chapter of the FPCC in New Orleans. In August of 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald, still in New Orleans, had an encounter with DRE which led to a lot of publicity linking Oswald to communists, labeling him as pro-Castro, and discrediting the FPCC. In July and August of that year there is strong evidence that Oswald was used to identify and contact pro-Castro students at Tulane University. In early September, Oswald was seen with David Philips in Dallas.

On September 16, 1963, the CIA informed the FBI that it was considering action to counter the activities of the FPCC in foreign countries. To my knowledge, the operational files on this new anti-FPCC operation have never been released by the CIA. In New Orleans, on September 17, 1963, Oswald applied for, and received, a Mexican travel visa immediately after William Gaudet, a known CIA agent, had applied for one. On September 27 Oswald arrived in Mexico City. This activity did not occur suddenly or in a vacuum. Oswald had started establishing his pro-Castro bona fides earlier that summer in New Orleans, including establishing an FPCC chapter there.

There are too many similarities between Oswald’s activities in New Orleans and Mexico City to simply dismiss, without investigation or discussion, the possibility that he was being used in an intelligence operation, either wittingly or unwittingly, in both cities. In addition to his contacts with the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic facilities in Mexico City, which could have been part of an intelligence dangle, an attempt to discredit the FPCC, or both, there is now also evidence of Oswald’s contacts with students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his presence at social events with Cuban Consulate

Secret Wars Diary by David Atlee Phillips

Secret Wars Diary by David Atlee Phillips

employees. David Phillips frequently lied about Oswald and Mexico City, but in a footnote in a little known book he self-published, Secret Wars Diary, he wrote: “I was an observer of Cuban and Soviet reaction when Lee Harvey Oswald contacted their embassies.” [Emphasis added.] One purpose served by an intelligence dangle is to enable the dangling agency to observe the reaction and, from that observation, identify roles of employees, procedures and processes of the enemy.

There can be little doubt that Oswald’s activities, especially the more flagrant, blatant and egregious ones such as those alleged by Shenon to have occurred at the Cuban Consulate, could only have scandalized the Cuban diplomats who heard the threats and bluster – all to the discrediting of the FPCC, just as the publicity about the New Orleans encounter between Oswald and the DRE formed one of the propaganda nails in that organization’s coffin. It is much more likely, in my opinion, that the seasoned Cuban diplomats would be offended than it is that they would support someone exhibiting Oswald’s alleged behavior to attempt an assassination. It is much more likely that the Cuban diplomats would have, as the evidence shows they did, consider Oswald as a U.S. intelligence provocation. The Cubans knew of the surveillance on their facilities. Why would they use someone to do such a job who showed up under surveillance and announced his plans? On the other hand, someone as provocative as Oswald should have generated a cascade of response that, when observed by the watchers, would have revealed an abundance of information. It could also serve to discredit the FPCC with the Cubans. The CIA prevented us, in 1978, from interviewing then surviving penetration and surveillance agents who would have known more about such an operation.

In 1978, we knew not only about the allegations of the twist party, but also about the stories of Oswald’s contact with students. The CIA prevented us from interviewing Oscar Contreras, a student Oswald contacted. But Anthony Summers, and others, have interviewed him since. Contreras acknowledges that Oswald, in late September, 1963, approached him and three other students who were members of a pro-Castro student organization. He asked them for help getting a visa to Cuba from the Consulate. Contreras did have contacts at the Consulate and spoke to the Consul and an intelligence officer. Both warned him to have nothing to do with Oswald as they suspected he was trying to infiltrate proCastro groups. Contreras still wonders how Oswald identified him and his friends as the students, out of the thousands attending the University, as the ones with contacts in the Consulate. Shenon, some way or another, sees this incident as supporting possible Cuban involvement in the assassination. No mention is made to the similarity to what Oswald was doing with Tulane students in New Orleans.

While in New Orleans, Ruth Paine had asked fellow Quaker, Ruth Kloepfer, to check on the Oswalds while they were in New Orleans. Mrs. Kloepfer’s husband was a professor at Tulane University. There is information in the extensive records in this case that Oswald passed out FPCC leaflets near Tulane University and the homes of some of the professors there who were members of a local leftist group. The

Lee Oswald in New Orleans leafleting for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee

Lee Oswald in New Orleans leafleting for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, 9 August, 1963

individuals who helped pass out pamphlets on the last occasion when Oswald passed out his FPCC literature in downtown New Orleans, were introduced by Oswald as students from Tulane. There are, keeping things in parallel, indications in the documentation about the case that Oswald, while in Mexico City, made contact with Quakers studying at the Autonomous University. There are indications that one Quaker student at the University at that time was an active agent of the CIA, although that person has never been identified and it has not been determined that he had any contact with Oswald in Mexico City. The reason that it has not been determined is that it has not been investigated.

It has to be pointed out that June Cobb, a known CIA agent, was very involved in Agency actions aimed at the FPCC in the early 1960’s. She appears again as the first person to report Elena Garro de Paz’s story about the Duran/Oswald twist party. At the time she made that report to the Mexico City CIA station, Cobb, a CIA asset, was renting a room from Elena Garro de Paz, Sylvia Duran’s cousin. And Shenon bases most of

Elena Garro De Paz

Elena Garro De Paz

what he writes on a supposition that, based on this twist-party story, Duran was at the center of the Cuban recruitment of Oswald. But the fact is that it is still very much in question whether Duran had been recruited as an asset by the CIA. David Phillips, as well as other CIA employees, in 1978, were of the opinion that she may have been targeted for recruitment by the CIA. The CIA, then and since, has gone out of its way to keep details about Duran buried, claiming, among other things, to have destroyed her Mexico City P file.

But the point is, the activities in Mexico City in September and October, 1963, are a capsule version of Oswald’s activities in New Orleans in June, July and August of 1963. In the context of the other information we’ve learned about the CIA’s FPCC black propaganda operation, the people involved in those operations and the role of at least one of those people, George Joannides, in subverting the HSCA investigation, how can anyone not seriously consider whether Oswald’s Mexico City activities were part of a CIA anti-FPCC operation? The very first conspiracy theory, that Castro and the communists killed JFK – the one expressed by President Johnson 20 minutes after the assassination, and first seeing print in the DRE’s CIA funded newspaper, Trinchera, on November 23, 1963 – still has followers and proponents, the latest being Phil Shenon. None of the proponents, it seems, have ever really considered whether they may be the victims – or a part – of a very good, deliberate disinformation operation – possibly the best Phillips and Joannides ever ran.

 

 

________________________

Dan Hardway, J.D. Attorney in private practice; former investigator, House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Filed Under: News and Views

FILED: Notice of Appeal in the FOIA case for records on DH Byrd, Werner von Alvensleben and the Doolittle Report.

Notice of Appeal filed 23 March, 2023, in the AARC FOIA case for records on DH Byrd, Werner von Alvensleben and the unredacted Doolittle Report.
For context and additional background please click HERE: AARC Seeking Documents relating to D.H. Byrd, Werner von Alvensleben, Jr. and the Doolittle Report.

 

 

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

ASSASSINATION ARCHIVES AND
RESEARCH CENTER
:
and
:
JAMES H. LESAR :
: Civil No. 21-1237 (CRC)
Plaintiffs,
:
v.
: CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY :
et al.
:
Defendants.
:

NOTICE OF APPEAL

 

 

Notice is hereby given this 23rd day of March, 2023, that plaintiffs Assassination Archives and Research Center and James H. Lesar appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from the opinion (ECF #28) and order (ECF #27) of this Court entered on the 22nd day of February, 2023 in favor of defendant Central Intelligence Agency, et al. against said plaintiffs, and previous orders of the court in this case.

Respectfully submitted,

/s/_Daniel S. Alcorn
Case 1:21-cv-01237-CRC Document 29 Filed 03/23/23

Daniel S. Alcorn
Counsel for Plaintiff Assassination Archives and Research Center
D.C. Bar No. xxxxxx
XXXX Xxxxxxxxxx Xxxx
McLean, VA 22101
Phone: (xxx) xxx-xxxx

James H. Lesar
Co-counsel for Assassination Archives and Research Center
D.C. Bar No. xxxxxx
XXX Xaaaa Xxxxxx
Unit xxxx
Silver Spring, MD 20910

Phone: (xxx) xxx-xxxx

Attorneys for Plaintiffs/Appellants

 

AARC2 c. CIA Notice of Appeal as filed

Click on the above link to download.

Filed Under: News and Views

Last Second in Dallas: A Granular Account of the Final Second of the Assassination

Courtesy of The Sixth Floor Museum, Dr. Josiah Thompson gives a special presentation based upon his 2021 book, Last Second in Dallas.

Feb 14, 2023

In this special 90-minute program, first-generation Kennedy assassination researcher Dr. Josiah Thompson discusses his decades-long involvement with the case and the making of his critically acclaimed 1967 classic, Six Seconds in Dallas. Thompson then brings his research full circle with a presentation based on his 2021 book, Last Second in Dallas.

This video contains graphic imagery which may be disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.

This presentation took place on November 18, 2022 in the Dallas County Records Building. To see related films, photos, documents and oral histories from The Sixth Floor Museum’s collection, visit our online collections database (http://emuseum.jfk.org).

A previous video of this program has been replaced to correct technical problems with the Zapruder Film slides and Clint Hill’s interview. Each of these sections are now shown in their entirety.

[Dr. Thompson serves on the AARC Board of Directors.]

Filed Under: News and Views

Memphis Conference 13 – 15 April

The JFK Historical Group, in collaboration with Project JFK, will bring some of the nation’s top researchers and experts to the Crowne Plaza in Memphis on April 13-15 to shed light and bring new evidence on the political assassinations of the 1960s that changed the course of American history. This conference opens on Thursday evening with an “early bird” meet and greet between speakers and attendees. The next two days will involve full days and evenings of presentations and features with keynote speakers. Also your ticket price includes a tour of The Civil Rights Museum at the Loraine Hotel where MLK Jr. was assassinated.

People in the Memphis area may purchase access to individual presentations for a fee of $20, $30 for a day, and $75 for the entire weekend. Tickets may be purchased at the door. Anyone interested in watching the conference via zoom can go to jfkhistorical.com and sign up in the “tickets” area for $45.

Filed Under: News and Views

A New Essay by Professor David R. Wrone (No. 1)

25TH jfk

Lest We Forget

David R. Wrone    December 18, 2022                                                                                                                                              no. 1

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

JFK Paths

In the late morning of December 15, 2022, news stations round the nation came alive with a report that the National Archives had released 3,000 pages of formerly held top secret documents linked to the 1964 federal investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which occurred on November 22, 1963, at 12.30 p.m., on the public street in the dreary city of Dallas, Texas. Imagine! They became public nigh on to 60 years and three generations afterwards.

Almost immediately a responsible critic noted a disturbing feature in the archival press release that might trip up the scholars not aware of the issue.  50% of the documents had been released in an earlier release.  See, publication exposing this in Clayton Ogilvie, “Recent and Present: JFK Document Release Overlap of December 2022.” NH pvt, digital: Christmas Eve, 2022.

The news consumed press and public with speculation on whether new factual nuggets on the murder would be turned up; many hoped with special concern that in the mass sinister data would be found on the background of Lee Harvey Oswald the official sole assassin of JFK. Some sought to find revelations on dark forces operating through the deed of the 24-year-old book handler when he fired a claimed three shots out of the eastern most window of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas where he worked. All commentators though to the last man and woman parroted the official conclusion that was as certain to them as the pull of gravity: Oswald by himself and without any help slew JFK.

But grim reality shows an Oswald as claimed assassin to be a great diversion from grim reality. Among the many, two key factors stand out, one minor and one major. The minor aspect of JFK’s murder relates to the number of documents available for coming to terms with the death. With the recent addition of the massive number of pages in the INV file Archives, one would not know from the paucity of announced released pages that the total quantity that rests in public and private archives and libraries is 20,000,000 pages. The number is carefully honed, fully articulated, and quite sound.  And, reviewers of this most recently released batch largely do not mention even a page of them.

In addition to not addressing the mass of information already available, the greeters of the new information also in a major fault did not discuss the relation of official evidence on the young man’s guilt. He just killed him. Let me show how in basic and well-known error this is.

I shall take as my approach merely the evidence levied against Oswald associated with the 6th floor of the Depository universally proclaimed as valid and definitive. The official accounting for Oswald’s activities that day inside the Depository, a Baron Munchausen scenario par excellence, can be divided for discussion into five components.

For space concerns I shall look only into part of the sixth-floor facts, and present the official as well as true evidence.  Federal and local authorities mustered them to confirm there he lurked and from there he shot. The true nature of that sixth-floor evidence though carries enough weight to show beyond question that Oswald had nothing to do with the assassination and officials corrupted the facts.

R = 912 pp. Warren Report, often viewed by the unwashed with the same respect as would be given a 67th Book of the Bible. WCH = evidentiary volumes. WC = Warren Commission. F = forgery or deliberately false.

DPD = Dallas police.

Window:

For Oswald to have killed JFK, he had to be standing in the open window shooting him with his Carcano 6.5mm bolt action repeating rifle. This is an iron factor in the charge of assassin levied against him. The Commission as well as police and federal investigators so concluded.

  1. However, it is not true. The official evidence in x1312 WCH taken almost immediately after the shooting depicts the window as it was at the time. There is only three inches opening between the lower frame and the foot wide sill. To shoot JFK riding 61 feet beneath the window and close to the curb one could only do so on a perch firing down through double class panes. The glass is not broken.
  2. The WC overcame this exculpating fact by simply masking it in the R, and deploying a fake scenario, p. 199. The officials staged a reenactment corrupt to the fact rather than appeal to the actual evidence for they had to be able to show Oswald shot JFK through the open window. Needs must. F

The WC prints a full half page photo of the window open three feet (!) presented in the veritable teeth of its own evidence as the opening at 12:30 the 22nd.  It attached the rifle atop a tall tripod stationed on the floor before it.  The Carcano points through the window. This is supposed to be what occurred Nov. 22.  It is a forgery.  F

  1. More however. The barrel’s angle of downward depression from the horizontal is approx. 5-10 degrees. It has to be this shallow of a degree to fit the sighting claim of the only witness the WC could find out of 750 persons on the plaza and surround external to the building. [of the 750, 60 said the shots came from the grassy knoll to the west, 7 others saw bullets hit sod and sidewalk, street and building; they were dismissed because said WC, FBI, DPD, Oswald was in the Depository and CBS among others said they were a case of the madness of the crowds]

He claimed to have seen Oswald in the window. To hit JFK who is riding relatively close to the base of the Depository the rifle would have to be strongly cocked, the barrel deflected down many degrees. Again, we observe, this is a knowing and deliberate corruption of the facts. F

  1. Additionally, we observe the rifle sticks out the window, again to match the exterior witness’ comments. This is improbable. Regard. No one shoots deer, elk, turkey or other game from a blind or stand, by first waving the rifle in the air outside. You shoot from inside the stand. In military training that I am familiar with, it was seen as wrong and irrational.

In the instance of the famous Soviet WWII woman sniper who shot 309 Nazis plus a few of their rotten Romanian and Galician mercenaries, she did not shoot with the rifle sticking out in the open. In this 22nd case if it had happened so it would have endangered the rifleman by alerting JFK’s guards, which would seem to be a mighty pertinent consideration not to do so. You shoot from inside the window.

  1. External to the building there were two pertinent motion pictures taken at the exact time of the shooting. One depicted the window. Navy photographic specialists, FBI photographic specialists, and private photo experts all determined without a whisker of doubt that the window was empty; neither Oswald nor a rifle was in the window. The FBI said in a lab report that the “witness” was in fantasy land. This cannot be gainsaid.

To overcome this definitive fact excluding Oswald from being in the window, the WC simply wrangles Oswald there by making the film invisible in the R. This is a type of blatant evidence forgery. F

The FBI to assist the WC with a happy way around the Oswald exculpating fact, simply doctored the evidence but cutting out from a frame used as an exhibit the evidence of time and of JFK below in the street and presented the truncated hoax as true fact. It now sleeps corruptly in WC files as the reality. {FBI #29] This is another forgery. F

And the witness? In addition to the film capturing the vacant window the other film by Abe Zapruder shows the witness viewing not the Depository building straight ahead of him as he testified under oath to be doing, but rather peering over his shoulder to his far right [!}, away from the building, a fact WC lawyers, we know from their records, knew. F

Additionally, and a wooden stake to the heart, the external witness also lied at police lineups. He was twice shone a lineup with Oswald in it.  On the first viewing he swore under oath the man he alleged to have seen in the window was not Oswald.  After being told by the Secret Service that the man was a communist [which he was not] and after seeing Oswald twice on television [!], he, a self-important man with mind riddled by extreme conservative ideology orientation, then picked the red out of the lineup.

Each is proof of perjury of the other. P

He was also near blind and according to WC attorneys in private conversations (to Meagher & also at NYC critic meeting, among other instances) he could barely make out even the fuzzy frame of the window, let alone any window occupant. F

To have the witness reenact [the WC R is mainly a mass of reenactments passed off as original facts] his viewing the WC positioned him on the street at his viewing site. The WC closed the windows of the front of the Depository with only the witness required selection they needed left open R. F  Even then, he sitting as he said at the time and staring at the building, got the wrong window, one permanently closed and sealed, which became evidence he saw Oswald. R

In the R the WC said Oswald fired the rifle.  There is, though, no evidence to that.  In normal investigation of gunfire crime, the barrel is swabbed with a cotton ball to detect if debris can be found from a transiting bullet. If it had been fired the swab picked up indications. A Bureau agent years later under oath in a court hearing said it was not swabbed.  At any rate, I failed to find in WC records any indication of a swab. F

A central fact in the charge against Oswald was the claim his fingerprint was found on the underside of the barrel.  WC and WCH.  The police reported they took, or lifted as they say, a print, but it did not match the circumstances of a regular lift—no lifting dust as is normal, appeared, no tape covered the alleged place as is standard procedure, it was from a flat object, the barrel round, it turned up in Washington ten days later [!], it was mailed [!] by Dallas police to the FBI lab.

The Dallas police specialist much later in testimony revealed he had made copies from the hands of Oswald when just arrested and provided no accounting for them. F From the DPD attitude it seemed to consider it nobody’s business but theirs.  WC later stamping it as authentic rested on a statement it was Oswald’s print based on a generated document that came weeks later mailed into its offices [!}by a clerk in FBI offices who had no training, experience, or ability. And, he was not under oath. The document is undecipherable; I never heard of or met anyone—commoner, law enforcement expert, or specialist– who could make sense of the strange appearing gobbledygook on it. WCH. F

But three years later in a court room, before a judge and jury, and under oath, an FBI print specialist said of the rifle that its metal was so poor it could not take prints. There were no prints and in fact could not be.  Oswald print claim is a fraud. F.

The rifle had major mechanical problems. WCH

The telescopic sight was for a left-handed shooter, Oswald was right-handed.  It also wobbled a bit and the cross hairs were not clear. If used by a shooter it would miss a sighted target, which CBS-TV solemnly announced actually improved Oswald’s aim. [sic]

Repairs had to be made before it could be test fired. WCH

  1. The WC tried and failed [by the true evidence] to maintain that Oswald had the shooting ability and character flaw to have shot and hit JFK. It used a bogus reenactment to deceive the world. It spurned the exculpating evidence.

I.

The WC and its investigators used a team of expert military and private rifle marksmen—America’s finest–to simulate the alleged shooting feat it had assigned to Oswald to show it was in fact possible for Oswald with that Carcano to shoot from the 6th floor and hit and kill JFK as they charged. It was patent office hokum and yet proclaimed as proof indisputable that Oswald, therefore, did it.

They shot at a target with conditions said to be like the alleged firing scenario used by Oswald—a true copy the WC said, as it had to be, to be valid as evidence. And, it was passed off as more proof he killed JFK.

  1. The target they shot at was closer than JFK was on the 22nd..
  2. The paper target set up was larger than JFK’s head and thus easier to see and hit.
  3. Only one of the several was able to work the mechanism in the required time to squeeze off three shots—and that was done without witnesses, only his FBI Agent word.
  4. Their target was not true to motion, JFK had been in a moving limo.
  5. The reenactors practiced afore test shooting, whereas Oswald did not and had no recorded genuine instance of having ever shot the rifle or any rifle in the last three years, let alone worked it in the speed required. None.
  6. In Russia he was a joke as a shooter. He was such a poor shot hunting with his buddies with a shot gun he could not hit a near rabbit and his companions had to shoot for him. Instead of marksmen the WC, to duplicate, should have pulled utter strangers off breadlines.
  7. False premise. The rifle used to reenact was not Oswald’s rifle of the 22nd, but one repaired and modified, stabilized. Incredible. His as original would have damaged the shooter’s eye and could not have been fired.
  8. The reenactment must be seen as F.

II.

The WC also excluded matter that showed Oswald’s character to be positive and not disposed to kill. For examples: a) The local FBI office before the 22nd said to one of the mindless Dallas citizen fascist commie hunters who tried to have Oswald known as a commie by informing on him as a red that he was “alright.”  b) He lectured against the anti-democratic system in Russia and blessed the U. S. at an Alabama Jesuit college seminar.  c) He spoke in New Orleans to warn a group against a coming danger to overthrow America. Etc. d) He carried CIA and FBI identification numbers. [Wrone files with numbers, ms.] e) Soviet persons who knew him, saw him universally as a decent human: e.g., Prof. Ernst Titovets in his Oswald: Russian Episode. (Minsk, 2010) and to me.  The WC did not seek them out, for as commies they would lie, unlike Americans.

The WC though presented it in the R that, as found, it was a good rifle.

Three spent shells were found on the floor. R Analysis revealed ejector marks clearly proved they had been ejected from a different rifle than the Oswald rifle, which is a conspiracy. WCH Ignored by the WC. F

Moreover, the DPD, FBI, WC performed forensic tests on Oswald to ascertain if he had fired the rifle.  There were three.

When that rifle was fired it left a chemical cloud blowback that drifted onto the face of the shooter embedding bullet defining chemical elements in his pores. Applied paraffin to the cheek would lift any traces off. They first submitted the paraffin matter to a chemical wash in police laboratory and it was negative; Oswald had by this test not fired the rifle.

The FBI then took the matter to Washinton and applied a Spectrographic, or light wave that picked up he waves from each distinct element. It fought the release of the test results.

The WC then arranged to have the cheek matter tested in a nuclear reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Seven control subjects were used.  They fired the Carcano, paraffin tests were nuked and showed they had fired the weapon.  Oswald’s matter nuked showed he had not.  He had not fired a rifle that day. The FBI admitted his innocence in its administrative memos. [Wrone, FBI serials.] To overcome this the WC lied saying in its R that the tests were inadequate, saying they could not prove he fired the weapon, when in fact the tests proved he did not—the negative.

                                                end

Filed Under: News and Views

A New Essay by Professor David R. Wrone (No. 2)

26TH jfk

Before Taps
At Arlington National Cemetery
The afternoon of November 25, 1963

David R. Wrone    January 2, 2023                                                                                                                                              no. 2

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

This was the noblest Roman of them all.
His life was gentle and the elements
So mixed in him that nature might stand up And say to all the world
“This was a man.”
–Julius Caesar
Act 5, Scene 5

A thick crowd of kings, presidents, foreign military, and notables trailing the several bands and marching units, muffled drums and flapping flags had crossed the Potomac River following President John F. Kennedy’s funeral cortege to attend his burial rites. They clustered near and around the grave site during the brief service.

Near the close and farewell, after the 21-gun artillery salute, the 26 members of the Irish Defense Guards specially flown in from the weeping isle of his ancestors who with their Lee-Enfield No. 4 rifles conducted the slow, silent, soul stirring Queen Anne’s Funeral Drill, a 350-year-old Irish salute to the battle fallen.  As the Irish poet Quinlan wrote, ‘twas “Jackets green across the ‘bowl of tears’ from the plain of Liffey to a shield’s length of earth.” At 3.08 p.m. the army bugler blew taps but cracked the sixth harmonic note one too high. To a few it was a Banshee stutter, a keen for a great loss of one who had as “a heart, an acorn from an oakwood.” (8th century Irish ms.).

Before the last faint, silver notes of the 101-year-old military leave-taking to eternal rest had faded across the rolling rain swept green grass and over the seemingly endless, somber, vast rows upon rows of gray-white tomb stones patiently waiting for a comrade and had gently wafted over the new grave to close the burial ritual for the slain, most powerful man who had ever trod this faulted earth, three of the top pols in the nation had the day before, the 24th, solved the question of who had killed him on the 22nd.

Like the ancient Greek god Procrustes, they thrust down their spasm of a verdict upon the bereaved nation the solution.  It was a tightly kept secret, known but to their mindless lieutenants who put its doctrines into military and political systems and for many years covertly and faithfully defended it from public knowledge to serve as the sterling predicate of later official inquiries.

Of the trio, in the political sphere stood the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, in the legal system stood the Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, and in the criminal investigative arena stood the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. With truth found by a few responsible critics who pieced it together through logs of desperate telephone conversations, careful Secret Service records, and footprints left in notes, we know they in one voice had decided who was responsible for the shooting at 12:30 p.m. the 22nd on the public street of a faraway dismal Texas city of Dallas.

The shooting had shaken Johnson who traveled with the Dallas presidential party. A little after 1:00 at the city’s Love Field he joined the shocked departing members who bordered the great silver, white, and blue, Air Force One, for the flight back to the capital.  The plane, though, with motors running paused on the runway waiting for the new president who was somehow missing.

JFK’s military aide Godfrey McHugh looked everywhere in the plane for LBJ, only finally to find him in the rear toilet room sitting on the stool as a chair behind a drawn curtain weeping.  Hysterically, he moaned to the Brigadier, “They are going to get us all.  It’s a plot.  It’s a plot. They are going to get us all.”

The politically astute Hoover reacted much differently than the new president. In his Washington office, he was distraught but acute, able quickly to think and immediately to judge on his feet.  This we know from a phone call he got from the far west made by former Vice President Richard Nixon who recounted on a later television interview that he had telephoned J. Edgar Hoover “an hour” after the shooting to ask him who had shot Kennedy.  (D Wrone, essay letter, “Nixon’s ‘history’ a memorable distortion,” Milwaukee Journal, May 2, 1984.)

In reply Hoover trotted out the old fascist boogeyman that had done him such good stead for many years as a lauded whore of the powerful troglodytic right in his rampant destruction of the liberal structure of the nation.  He told the man who in four years would assume the presidency that “a communist” had killed him. He lied; but truth was a necessary stranger in order to protect the FBI as a political weapon of the far right. Reality did not matter.

Why did he lie?  He had over decades with his propaganda machine incessantly pounded the minds of the nation, beguiled the plastic members of Congress, and especially promoted the diverse culture mechanisms with the belief his Seat of Government, as he called the FBI, kept them safe. Only a foreign system as culprit that he could not control could avoid a potential rupture of his power base derived, fueled, and celebrated by the nigh worshipful right through several decades of dedicated crushing of the democratic forces as the nation’s shield and buckler.

Observe the brazenness of the lie. Oswald was not arrested until 1:45 and not identified for some time, and further his complex background had not then been probed and defined, and he was not charged until the wee hours of the next morning, the 23rd. Furthermore, there were only six members of the communist party in Dallas, three of them undercover FBI agents, and none of them Oswald.

To be noted is the FBI anti-communist knowledge of Oswald; on one occasion the FBI office had informed an inquiring fascist embracing nosey citizen that “Oswald was alright.” And, not to be omitted, was that Oswald, among his other activities, was an FBI informant with the FBI number of S179; and, further, there were many other anti-red, pro American aspects to his peripatetic Dallas Orwellian activities.

Of the troika, Katzenbach was also rattled. This is seen in the records of a telephone call he got in the immediate aftermath from the reactionary Dean of Yale Law, his mentor. The Yaler, as if chanting a verse from sacred text, believed Oswald killed JFK, based, if it can be believed and it is true, on a television report by a half-baked soap salesman (tv anchor).  Imagine! a top lawyer taking for the truth about the fate of the nation a TV report based on hearsay from a reporter in the Dallas field, which in turned was based on hearsay from stressed self-important city and police officials seeking in their mediocre lost lives a nipperkin of personal fame, that was in its turn based on their guess work that was wrong on all counts. It was broadcast in between segments of TV ads pushing soap and toilet paper, considered fitting for a nation in perhaps fatal distress. The Dean helped calm his former student down and suggest he think of a political resolution of the crisis.

Not for the AAG or his misbegotten dean were principles of criminal judgment allegedly taught in Yale, if it was it did not stick.  They suffused the history of law as in the legal masterpiece of Wigmore or the legal work of James Otis, John Adams, or Zola. Or, district attorneys and detectives work in thousands of cities, or the common sense of an ordinary farm hand. Even the Wizard of Oz asked for facts before judgment.

We must concur with the ancient criticism of the tribe that has rung true down through the ages: “Woe unto you lawyers for you have taken away the key of knowledge, ye entered not in yourselves and them that were entering, ye hindered.” L,23,12

Before noon the day before burial, November 24, 27 hours after JFK’s death, Johnson, Katzenbach, and Hoover in a concert diabolical had decided that Lee Harvey Oswald, an impoverished 24-year-old book handler allegedly shooting from his workplace on the sixth floor of the Dallas Texas School Book Depository, had alone, and unaided for purely personal reasons shot JFK.

In long hand pen and black ink at his home desk, a bewildered, scared, and rather witless Katzenbach, wrote up the decision of these men, ideological cousins of the figures in the opening scene of Macbeth, in a page and a quarter document thereafter known as the Katzenbach Memorandum.  It circulated through the government as distributed from the White House with the title of LBJ’s clerk, “Memorandum for Moyers”.  At the same time, powerful Hoover had before on the 22nd just before 1:00 had ordered, without permission or legal authority, his proto-fascist agents to investigate along-side local authorities.

The KM made two basic points. First, it hight {true word} Oswald as the culprit, a) “the public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin, and that he did not have confederates who are still at large.” Next, it set up the argument for a Commission, b) “appointment of a Presidential Commission of unimpeachable personnel.” Its purpose was explicit: the great ones were tasked to examine the criminal evidence and report its conclusions.

The KM with its twin doctrines firmly embraced by the powers that be and the supine intellectuals, blindly accepted by ditto artists in the press, and welcome beyond measure by businessmen happy with the industrial spurt of the new war LBJ generated, it became the political reality of the nation, fully as solid in national life as the Constitution. Robert Kennedy, though, did not for a minute believe it and even sent a messenger to Moscow, enroute while JFK was being buried, not to believe what the pols and military were asserting about who killed his brother.

The decision we observe was made before basic elements had been defined and examined. These include the following categories ignored and of course before charging Oswald.

Medical

Ballistics

Film

Witnesses

Threats

Forensics

Fingerprints

Chain of possession

Military

The decision on Oswald also occurred without having addressed the serious threats on President Kennedy’s life in the time frame of the 22d. These include:

  1.  Miami (1)
  2.  Miami (2)
  3.  Nashville
  4.  Chicago
  5.  New Orleans.(1)
  6.  New Orleans. (2)
  7.  New Orleans. (3)
  8.  Richardson, Tx
  9.  Denton, Tx
  10.  Dallas (1)
  11.  Dallas (2)
  12.  Dallas (3)
  13.  Dallas (4)  One was a worker Cuban in Parkland hospital.

In addition, Dallas Police on two occasions informed a private investigator (HW) that in the city and region there were 50 groups who wanted JFK dead and could kill him. They had not only the ability, but also the means.  They were from left and right orientation as well as from several racial groups. None were investigated by authorities and the trio formulating the KM did not inquire or have the lightest knowledge of them or for that matter want to find out if anyone in Dallas had killed him.

Further to observe, the decision was also made in the teeth of the bulletry facts in Dallas. For Oswald to be the assassin according to the immediate facts there could be only three bullets fired at JFK and from his rear and only from the eastern most window of the sixth floor of the Book Depository.

  • 52 persons on Dealey Plaza said shots came from the grassy knoll.
  • Four bullet strikes hit the pavement, in front and around the limo.
  • One bullet hit the sidewalk and left a scar.
  • One bullet hit the curb and scarred it.
  • Two were reported having struck the grass.
  • Connally was hit by two bullets, one from the rear and one from the front.
  • Eight witnesses including two motorcycle cops plus the Zapruder film saw a Bullet hit JFK’s right temple coming from the right.
  • The medical folk at the hospital were never thoroughly examined for what they had seen.
  • Another bullet hit JFK from the front {true} in the throat.
  • Another bullet hit JFK in the high back.
  • There are probably more in the area not found.

Rex non potest pecarri

The king can do no wrong

 

Filed Under: News and Views

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