Dr. Gary Aguilar ARCHIVE

Courtesy of the AARC
What We Now Know That We Didn’t Know Then | September, 2014

Confirmation bias occurs when people actively search for and favor informational evidence that confirms their preconceptions or hypothesis while ignoring or slighting adverse or mitigating evidence. It’s a type of cognitive bias, a pattern of deviation in judgement that occurs in particular situations leading to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgement or illogical interpretation, and represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study.

“This happens all the time in my specialty. I see it all the time in papers that I’ve reviewed … JFK’s autopsy report says, “according to available information, 3 shots were heard and the president fell forward bleeding from the head.” A body was given to these guys and they’re told that he was shot from above and behind: ‘Here’s the body. Figure it out. Give us the evidence that will prove the conclusions that you already know he was shot from above and behind.’ They weren’t dishonest men. They weren’t lying. They were trying to put together something that they knew had to fit… Junk science is everywhere pervasive.”

Dr. Gary Aguilar is an author and lecturer, a leading authority on the medical evidence associated with President Kennedy’s assassination, and is one of the few non-government experts ever given access to the JFK autopsy photos and x-rays. Dr. Aguilar is an AARC Board member.

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Courtesy of History Matters

HOW FIVE INVESTIGATIONS INTO JFK’S MEDICAL/AUTOPSY EVIDENCE GOT IT WRONG

Gary L. Aguilar, MD and Kathy Cunningham
May 2003

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Gary AguilarGary L. Aguilar, MD, is one of the few physicians outside the government ever permitted to examine the still-restricted photographs and X-rays taken during President Kennedy’s autopsy.  He has published widely on the medical evidence in professional journals, books and on-line.  He has  lectured before academic medical, academic medico-legal, and non-professional public audiences on the subject. He is currently Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology, U.C. San Francisco, and the head of ophthalmology and the Vice Chief of Staff at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco.

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Courtesy of Max Good

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NOVA’s Cold Case: JFK – the Junk Science Behind PBS’s Recent Foray into the Crime of the Century

Written by Gary Aguilar | 14 July 2016

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Courtesy of Bart Kamp and The Lone Gunman 

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AARC BOARD RESPONDS TO SABATO AND SHENON

On July 25, 2017 The Washington Post published an opinion piece, President Trump, give us the full story on the JFK assassination, by Larry Sabato and Phil Shenon. The following three responses to that article are contributed by AARC Board members Dr. Don Thomas, Malcolm Blunt, and Dr. Gary Aguilar.

 

thomas-1 AARC BOARD RESPONDS TO SABATO AND SHENONDr. Donald B. Thomas: In an otherwise persuasively reasoned op-ed in the Washington Post arguing for unfettered release of JFK assassination documents (as required by law), Philip Shenon and Larry Sabato indulged in uninformed and unsupported overstatement by claiming that “… 21st-century forensic science demonstrates that Oswald was almost certainly the lone gunman in Dallas…” A novice reading that statement would likely conclude that there have been recent (since 2000) scientific studies that incriminate Lee Harvey Oswald in the JFK murder case. But there are none. Not one. There is not even one that claims to be. There have been excellent (and otherwise) forensic studies on the JFK evidence in recent years, but none of them inculpate anyone. In short it is a Trumpism – made up –  fake news. Shenon and Sabato’s bald claim about the forensics is an alternative fact, the very sort of invention the Washington Post should be striving hard to avoid.

 

blunt AARC BOARD RESPONDS TO SABATO AND SHENONMalcolm Blunt21st Century bullshit is no different than 20th century bullshit. Forensic evidence is so debased now; Posner and Failure Analysis were the first nail in the coffin; the belief that computers can be so programmed that the solution to the problem is 100% solved, hence: “Case Closed.”

God, spare me from this.

Better we should look at the documents being released and work on what I’m sure to most is irrelevant minutiae. Although most of these releases are going to be absolutely meaningless to Post and Times reporters, really we are being given missing pages from an incomplete dictionary. Agency cryptonyms, pseudonyms, internal systems and management… Very valuable.

 

513009016_295x166 AARC BOARD RESPONDS TO SABATO AND SHENONDr. Gary Aguilar: Sabato and Shennon write, inter alia, “… 21st-century forensic science demonstrates that Oswald was almost certainly the lone gunman in Dallas … .”  
 
Sweeping statements such as this are easy to make, not so easy to back up. But perhaps the authors are referring to the forensic science presented in the 2013 Koch-funded, PBS Nova show, “Cold Case: JFK.” If so, it’s notable that Nova expert, anti-conspiracist Mr. Lucien Haag, published his findings in several articles published in ’15 and ’16 in the “peer-reviewed” AFTE Journal.  
 
Cyril Wecht, MD, JD and I published two rebuttals in that very journal that are worth examining by anyone who believes that “21st-century forensic science” supports Oswald’s guilt.