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Danny Arce and the peeing old man


Guest Mark Valenti

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I’m not going to sit here and try to guess who this “old man” was. Doing so is a completely futile exercise.

My point is very simple; the Warren Commission and the FBI lied about this event and it is another very blatant example of how they used information they had collected in a completely corrupt and unconscionable manner to suit their own purposes.

Danny Arce’s story changed when he was in the hands of the FBI. Either wittingly or unwittingly he changed the timeframe that he saw this stranger in the building to make it less problematic for the official story ....

It's not as if that's really a novel concept or a point that needs to be driven home to the vast majority of people who know anything more than mere generalities about the case. Harold Weisberg signed, sealed and delivered it a hundred dozen different ways, a long, long time ago.

That said ...

In fact the March, 1964, FBI interviews of all TSBD employees were conducted at the behest of Wesley Liebeler. Upon hearing Danny Arce under oath reaffirm his 11-22-63 statement that he saw the old man in the building 10-15 minutes before the assassination, did Joseph Ball say, “Hang on a minute there, Amigo. We have here a couple of interviews you gave to the FBI in December of last year and one from March this year where you say something completely different. What going on here, friend? Did you tell the FBI you saw this man 45 minutes before the assassination?”

However, Counselor Ball thought nothing of pulling out Jack Dougherty’s FBI statement when he was giving his testimony the day after Arce had given his:

Mr. BALL - When you talked to the FBI men, I've got a statement here dated the 19th of December 1963, a statement from Special Agent William O. Johnson, and he reports that you told him that you saw Lee Harvey Oswald at approximately 8 a.m. when he, Oswald, arrived.

Mr. DOUGHERTY - That's right.

Mr. BALL - That you saw Oswald again at approximately 11 a.m. on the sixth floor?

Mr. DOUGHERTY - That's right.

Mr. BALL - But you didn't see him again after that, is that your testimony?

Mr. DOUGHERTY - Yes.

Mr. BALL - Is that the truth?

Mr. DOUGHERTY - That's right.

The FBI and the Warren Commission were once again hiding something that I believe was very important.

Leaving aside the fact that Jack Dougherty was a "special case" of his very own - neither the "village idiot" as some would have it, nor quite the sharpest pencil in the pack either - this is hardly anything like the only instance where someone once told an interesting story at one point, only to have it ignored, disregarded, overlooked or denied when it came time to report on it.

Take the case of Harry Olson who, while in the hospital in December with broken knee, told FBI investigators that Jack Ruby was "no more upset than the average guy" when the two of them, together with Harry's girlfriend-cum-wife (by March, when she could no longer be compelled to testify against him in any way in their back-to-back interviews), met Jack in the parking garage downtown the night before Ruby shot Oswald.

By the time of the March interview, however, Jack was practically a blubbering idiot in the Olsons' tales, and moreover they added the little detail of the garage attendant, whom they identified as "Johnny" (no last name), joining them in the conversation. When the FBI finally tracked "Johnny" down, they not only found he was named differently, but only knew any of his supposed car-mates in passing, perhaps waving to them as they picked up their cars or left the garage, but not well enough to carry on a conversation with them, much less join them in a car.

As the Olsons concocted a damning (for Ruby; exonerating of themselves) new tale which had no apparent basis in earlier stated fact, WC counsel blithely accepted their testimony and never once questioned their previous interview comments so diametrically opposite their sworn statements.

The list goes on and on with those two, and they are but one of many additional examples.

More to the point, however, is the question of how or why, in light of the DPD, FBI and WC questioning of Danny Arce and their - not his - supression of potentially relevent data, does Danny Arce become a "suspect" or "person of interest?" If he'd meant to hide the information, he simply needed only say nothing about it (it's not as if he "got caught" by someone else's statements and had to cop to the old man thing) yet he does comment on it voluntarily several times however slightly differently.

Dissecting the times he estimated seeing the old man is likewise a futile endeavor inasmuch as most of the guys who were working in TSBD at the time were not poster boys for Timex: one would say he was downstairs at lunch at 11:40 with Oswald and the next would say they came downstairs "at noon" with Danny on the way to lunch leaving Oswald behind, while few stop to consider that both things cannot be true, yet every statement is examined in a vacuum.

(If that's not an exact example, it's illustrative. There are plenty of others, including particularly Bonnie Ray Williams who most likely was on the 6th floor to within 2-3 minutes of the shooting while every effort was made - successfully, for the purposes of the Report - to get him back downstairs to the 5th before 12:15.)

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Duke raises a very valid point, that given the circumstances of conducting a criminal investigation into the President of the United States, the professionalism, or rather the lack of professionalism as given by example, at times was on a par with something I would associate with a backwards country in a backwards time. Or maybe the best example I can think of is at the end of Casablanca when Bogart shoots the Nazi Major and the Vichy official looks at his troops and says, "Major Strasser has been shot.....round up the usual suspects."

There are more or less three conclusions that can be drawn...either the WC and other investigative agencies were just that bad, didn't care or they knew the whole official version was a pile of crap, and didn't want the truth to come out. I don't even give the KGB/Cuban connection serious consideration, mainly because I don't believe anyone who was high up in the government ever believed that garbage either, and what my research led me to was a whole lot of nothing.

Even if I die with the majority of American's thinking LHO did it. I am proud that from an early age I never bought that swill. And I've lived in Dallas all my life. You also might be surprised to know that in 54 years, I haven't met more than a dozen Dallasites that believe Oswald did it either.....Who would've thought that.

Edited by Robert Howard
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