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Richard J. Smith

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  1. Bill, You're adding suspicion where there is none. You can assure me it means something when JD's brothers assure us it doesn't? Is it really suspicious that a poor someone born in rural Texas in 1924 could carry such a moniker? Nobody names anyone with a nickname? No one? Ever? “Edgar Lee and Lizzie Mae Tippit named their son JD, after a character in a book Edgar once read, JD of the Mountains. ‘The initials JD, despite some claims over the years, never stood for anything.’” Don Tippit, November 13, 1999
  2. Charlie, "I feel that Lee was both a Patsy and a Cop Killer... but not a Presidential assassin." Wow, we actually agree on this one. I also believe LHO shot and killed Tippit, but not JFK. BTW, JD Tippit's name wasn't "Jefferson Davis". JD was his real name, the initials not standing for anything. RJS
  3. http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/...piracy_Believer
  4. Hi Terry, While this may be worthy of a separate thread, and really has nothing to do with the reviews, I note your "Lisa Pease's input", and what she said at Amazon: "The hard evidence that only two casings (not three) and one live round were found in the TSBD has not changed." Could someone please show me hard evidence that 2 empty casings were found on the 6th floor? Yes, there is dated documentation that evidence turned over to the FBI included 2 shell casings. There is also dated documentation the third was turned over to FBI SA Vince Drain a week later by Will Fritz, having resided in the possession of the DPD. IMO, this is inadequate research that gets us into trouble with conspiracy doubters. You'll notice that people like DVP cannot address the unquestionable evidence of conspiracy(especially the medical evidence), but will jump all over speculative or incomplete research(and they would be right). Stick to the facts, and we can win. Keep speculating, and those like Bugliosi will rub your nose in it. RJS
  5. Tim and I have been forum compadres for several years, and although I've never met him face to face, I've not only considered him an investigative associate but a friend. I am completely shocked and saddened by this news. My best wishes Tim. RJS
  6. Seems to me the back wound as depicted is an inch or 2 too low. But in essence, yes, Humes stuck a finger into the wound at the autopsy. Also, according to several autopsy witnesses, including O'Connor, Sibert, O'Neill, and Jenkins, there was no perforation into the pleura. In other words, the bullet didn't traverse the body. A bruise on the back side on the uppermost lobe of the lung was more than likely caused by blunt force trauma, not by the bullet passing the lung and exiting the front. From O'Connor's interview by William Law in In the Eye of History: O’Connor: When we started an autopsy, the first thing we always did…was to weigh and measure the body. We’d check for any scars, contusions, any abnormalities, and so on. But in this case, we didn’t turn the body over to look at the back while we were doing that. Finally we turned the body over, and there was a bullet wound—an entrance wound—in his back, on the right side of his spinal column. To emphasize where it was in proximity to the rest of his body: if you bend your neck down and feel back, you feel a lump and that’s the seventh cervical vertebra. This bullet wound was about 3 inches down and an inch or two to the right of the seventh cervical vertebra. I remember there was a big gush of surprise that nobody actually thought about turning him over right away, you know after we had done our initial investigation of the president’s body. Dr Humes took his finger and poked it in the hole---the bullet wound hole, the entrance wound hole---and said it didn’t go anywhere. There was a very big argument, a lot of consternation, that he shouldn’t have stuck his finger in the hole. Law: What difference would it make? O’Connor: Well, when you take your finger and stick it into a bullet wound, you avulse the wound. Law: You think that happened when he stuck his finger in the back? O’Connor: Yes Law: It could have create a false track: O’Connor: Well, not necessarily a false track as much as a false impression of the entrance of the missile that went into his back. Law: Who was arguing? O’Connor: Dr Finck strongly objected to Commander Humes doing what he did. He(Finck) took a sound, which is a probe, a metal malleable, non rigid probe. We started out with a rigid probe and found that it only went in so far. I’d say maybe an inch and a quarter. It didn’t go in any further than that. So we used a malleable probe and bent it a little bit and found that the bullet entered the body, went through the intercostals muscles---the muscles between the ribs. The bullet went in through the muscles, didn’t touch any of the ribs, arched downwards, hit the back of the pleural cavity and stopped. So we didn’t know the track of the bullet until we eviscerated the body later. That’s what happened at the time. We traced the bullet path down and found that it didn’t traverse the body. It did not go in one side and come out the other side of the body. Law: You can be reasonably sure of that? O’Connor: Absolutely Law: And these doctors knew that? O’Connor: Absolutely Law: While it happened? O’Connor: Absolutely. And another thing we found out while the autopsy was proceeding, that he was shot from a high building, which meant the bullet had to be traveling in a downward trajectory and we also realized that this bullet is what we call in the military a “short shot”. It didn’t have the power to push the projectile clear through the body. If it had…it would have come out through his heart and through his sternum. O’Connor: We were told(in the report of the Warren Commission) that he was shot in the back and it came out his throat. That didn’t jibe with what we saw, and when I say we, I’m talking about Dr. Boswell and myself. When shown the photo of the back by Law: O’Connor: That’s a very accurate portrayal of the entrance wound to his back, which as you know, is quite a ways down from his neck. At the angle he was shot…the laws of physics will not let a bullet strike there and go up and go out his throat…I helped roll him over…one of these arms might have been mine, because I was at the head of the body and helped roll him over. It wasn’t rolled over until quite a ways into the autopsy, and that’s when they discovered the bullet wound. O’Connor: Now I had this drawing made at the University of Florida showing the back wound and this is exactly what happened. The bullet struck him in the back, it passed through the outer layer of muscle and through the inner layer of muscle between the vertebrae. These are intercostals muscles and they connect the spinal column together. This bullet came in, arched downward, and bulged against the pleural cavity, which is the protective cavity around both lungs. It did not penetrate that lung area. It just bruised it real badly. I had it highlighted showing there was bruising on the right lung. The back if the right lung was bruised, but wasn’t torn. It was bruised badly enough to hemorrhage in the tissues, but not enough to tear the lung or the cavity. RJS
  7. Al didn't think "Pakse Base Man" was the guy on the lamppost at Main and Houston, although we were in agreement that members of Team 5 from Laos, a secret shooting team often utilized by CIA, was involved. "Pakse Base Man" was a misnomer however, since that photo of him was taken at Long Tieng, Laos. I am still convinced that the guy on the lampost and the CIA "case officer" pictured at Long Tieng were one and the same. I was never able to put a name on him, although I tried for over 2 years. None of the Ravens I contacted would talk. IMO the head shot was fired from the South Knoll parking lot, by a Team 5 member. I believe the other shooters were Cuban exiles. As for CIA not using military types as shooters, think again. These guys have worked together since the late 50's in Laos, through Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places around the world. The US Delta Force is very closely associated with the intel community, as are other secretive commando types. RJS
  8. What a ridiculous post. I'd bet I could do a search for Steven Gaal and find a serial killer or other such lunatic of the same name. While I don't always agree with Charlie, I know him to be a vociferous CT, a believer in Z film alteration, and believes a coup took place in Dallas on November 22, 1963. This accusation should be referred to the moderating committee. RJS
  9. Mary Moorman Krahmer has decided it's time. Her famous original Polaroid photo will be auctioned. I saw the piece on MSNBC this morning where Mary said she was ready to sell the photo. Mary decided to sell the photo after the TSBD 6th floor window was auctioned. She said she can get a lot of money for it and "at my age, why not?" She wants to travel with the money she makes. The photo is currently in the possession of the Sixth Floor Museum, which has a copy on display. http://www.nbc5i.com/news/11641784/detail.html
  10. Interesting article from the LA Times on Hunt's sons: Watergate plotter may have a last tale Two of E. Howard Hunt's sons say he knew of rogue CIA agents' plan to kill President Kennedy in 1963. Los Angeles Times By Carol J. Williams Times Staff Writer March 20, 2007 EUREKA, CALIF. — Howard St. John Hunt remembers the night of the Watergate break-in as a bonding experience with his father. A sweating and disheveled E. Howard Hunt roused his 19-year-old son from a dead sleep to help him wipe fingerprints from the burglars' radios and pack the surveillance equipment into a suitcase. Then, father and son raced to a remote Maryland bridge, where they heaved the evidence into the Potomac River just before dawn on June 17, 1972. "From that point on I felt relevant in his life, that I was the one he could count on," said Howard St. John Hunt, now 52, who is called St. John. It also was a turning point for St. John's brother and two sisters. They learned that their father wasn't just a Washington advertising executive and former diplomat. He was an ex-CIA agent and veteran of the ill-fated Cuban Bay of Pigs operation who worked for the Nixon White House as part of a secret team of "plumbers" that fixed information leaks. The unmasking of Hunt, who was convicted in 1973, sent his family into a tailspin: His first wife, Dorothy, was killed in a plane crash in 1972 while carrying $10,000 in hush money from the White House to the burglars' families; son David was sent to live with his militant Cuban godfather in Miami; St. John later became a drug addict and daughters Kevan and Lisa became estranged from their father. But before his death at age 88 in January, E. Howard Hunt had reconciled with his children and left the sons one last tantalizing story, they say. The story, which he planned to detail in a memoir and could be worth big money — was that rogue CIA agents plotted to kill President Kennedy in 1963, and that they approached Hunt to join the plot but he declined. Unfortunately, when the old spy's memoir appeared this month, there was something missing. Before Watergate Before the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office complex, the Hunt family of Potomac, Md., was, to outward appearances, fairly typical for a beltway power player. Their father was in advertising; the mother worked at the Spanish embassy; and the four children, ages 8 to 23, attended private schools. Watergate was a bomb that detonated under the family. "Our life as we knew it came to an explosive end," recalls daughter Kevan Hunt Spence, now 54, of Pioneer, 50 miles east of Sacramento. "Our home was lost. Our financial security was lost. Our mother was dead. Our father was in prison.'' Kevan, who was 20 at the time, and her sister Lisa, then 23, distanced themselves from a father they blamed for their mother's death and took refuge with friends, away from the besieged family home. Kevan played her own role in the Watergate fallout. Instead of burning records of White House payoffs as her father had asked, she hid them in her Smith College dorm room for a nearly a year, when her father's lawyer needed them to prove White House complicity to get her father a reduced sentence. David, the youngest of Hunt's children with Dorothy and 8 at the time of the break-in, was effectively orphaned when Hunt went to prison in 1973. At his father's request, lifelong friend William F. Buckley Jr. spirited David from the house to get him away from Lisa and St. John, who, Hunt notes in a posthumous memoir, were furious with their father. David left his privileged life to spend three years at the crowded Miami home of his Cuban exile godfather. A Bay of Pigs veteran and anti-communist militant, Manuel Artime would take David on gun-running missions to Central America, letting the boy fire pistols with the bodyguards of right-wing dictators the exile visited. Hunt's daughters headed west to create new lives. Kevan came to California, where she has practiced law for 25 years. Lisa became a fundamentalist Christian and runs an insurance firm in Las Vegas. St. John was estranged from his father from the late 1970s to the start of this decade. He was convicted twice on felony drug charges in the Bay Area but served no prison time. When he became homeless, he renounced his drug habit, renewed ties with his father and siblings and moved to this Pacific Coast timber and fishing town. He now works assisting elderly patients in their homes and is a student at College of the Redwoods. David, now 43, also abused drugs after his mother's death and the years he spent in the violent milieu of Cuban exile politics. He now sells Jacuzzis at a West L.A. spa shop. The sisters remain estranged from the brothers but all were on good terms with Hunt and his widow Laura and their children, Austin and Hollis, when the veteran CIA operative and spy novelist died. Hunt had been preparing for publication of "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond," released this month. St. John says it was he who suggested the idea of a memoir when he convinced his father that it was time to reveal anything he knew about the Kennedy assassination. It had always been suspected that Hunt shared his Cuban exile friends' hatred of Kennedy, who refused to provide air cover to rescue the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion that Hunt helped organize. "He told me in no uncertain terms about a plot originating in Miami, to take place in Miami," said St. John. He said his father identified key players and speculated that then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was responsible for moving the venue to Dallas, where the Texan could control the security scene. But the memoir's published passages about the assassination have an equivocal tone. Hunt provides only a hypothetical scenario of how events in Dallas might have unfolded, with Johnson atop a pyramid of rogue CIA plotters. The brothers insist their father related to them a detailed plot to assassinate Kennedy. Hunt told them he was approached by the conspirators to join them but declined, they say. That information was cut from the memoir, the brothers say, because Hunt's attorney warned he could face perjury charges if he recanted sworn testimony. Hunt also had assured Laura before they married in 1977 that he had nothing to do with the assassination. St. John said he respected his father's wishes while he was alive but felt no obligation now. He is writing a script about his father, and David is shopping for a publisher for their father's account of CIA involvement in the Kennedy shooting. Despite the brothers' efforts, their father's role will probably never be known. The materials they offer to substantiate their story, examined by the Los Angeles Times, are inconclusive. Hunt answers questions on a videotape using speculative phrases, observing that various named figures were "possibly" involved. A chart Hunt sketched during one conversation with St. John shows the same rogue CIA operation he describes in the memoir. None of the accounts provides evidence to convincingly validate that their father disclosed anything revelatory. Hunt's widow and her two children, 27-year-old Austin and 23-year-old Hollis, dismiss the brothers' story, saying it is the result of coaching an old man whose lucidity waxed and waned in his final months. Kevan bitterly accuses her brothers of "elder abuse," saying they pressured their father for dramatic scenarios for their own financial gain. Hunt's longtime lawyer, Bill Snyder, says: "Howard was just speculating. He had no hard evidence." St. John, who sports a mustache and longish graying coif combed back from a receding hairline, has a more personal reason to believe in his father's disclosures. He said he was instructed by Hunt in 1974 to back up an alibi for his whereabouts on the day Kennedy died, 11 years earlier. "I did a lot of lying for my father in those days," St. John said. The brothers, who both possess Hunt's piercing pale-blue eyes, concede they would like to profit from their father's story but insist he meant them to. "My father died utterly unapologetic about anything he did," David said. "People do that kind of thing all the time," St. John said of the prospect of making money from his father's deeds. Nor does he think the story will reflect badly on their father. "I don't think it was terrible that he was approached and turned them down." That Hunt, a skilled obfuscator, might have left contradictory accounts of the Kennedy plot to protect friends and preserve the mystery is not lost on his sons. "That's the way spies are," David says with a wry smile, remembering a father he never really knew. "They lead double lives and maintain cover."
  11. You're kidding right? No Richard. I am not kidding Richard. I am pointing out a FACT Richard. Ruling out some evidence is not the same as PROVING that one person did not commit a crime. Stating that FACT is not the same as giving an opinion, one way or the other, about what I believe in the case of Files. Stating that FACT is not the same as saying what I think of the individuals on either side of the issue. Just a straightforward statement of a FACT. How's this for FACT Myra...Files has been proven to be a xxxx again, and again, and again. By your reasoning, NO ONE is precluded from being an assassin if they were even near Dallas on November 22, 1963. How about doing some research for once. If you're so interested in FACTS, try using some once in a while.
  12. Thanks for posting this Bernice. A fine piece of research, Allan may have driven in the last nail in Files' coffin. Yet another confirmation of Files' fraudulent claims. Thanks Allan, and well done. RJS
  13. Hi Francesca, I normally don't believe everything I read and hear simply because it adds to the conspiracy aspect. I'll check out things and dig as deeply as I can for corroboration. I was interested in Craig also, so did some digging a few years ago. I wanted to believe, but there were just too many discrepancies. I can't write it off as memory failure or misstatement. Craig contradicted himself so many times I found him to be totally unbelieveable. I hate making comments without sources, but several years ago I found or was told something pertaining to Craig's wife, who had indicated Roger was a troubled man. She said there were no attempts on his life, no shots fired at him, no car bombs, etc. Perhaps she was just playing the game, but if anyone has actual documented evidence that what Craig claimed was true, I'd like to see it. RJS
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