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Harry Livingstone new book reviews Doug Horne's "Inside the ARRB"


Guest Robert Morrow

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Guest Robert Morrow

"Kaleidoscope: A Review of Douglas Horne's Inside the Assassination Records Review Board " by Harrison Livingstone

Web link to book: http://www.amazon.co...son livingstone

Book Description

Publication Date: November 13, 2012

This is the new line. The JFK case is solved, and has been for a long time. The JFK case is really very simple. I know that may sound ridiculous to many who have studied the mystery, but most of us began that study on the wrong footing and did not understand that underlying the alleged evidence was a massive sham and shell game designed to get us off the track. Once derailed, it has seemed impossible to "solve: the case." In order to think clearly about it, we must sweep away and throw out a great deal of trash, often deliberately put there to screw us up. Conspiracies do things like that to cover the truth. There are three shell games-the original one; a second that soon followed the assassination soon run by a group who provided leadership for the so-called "research community" that proclaimed the murder was a conspiracy, and, often keeping their true agendas and provenance secret, played a game with true facts in the evidence while either sabotaging it, or actually tying everyone up in knots with puzzles and games. The horrid truth is that far too much of the conflict and disputes about evidence were staged to make us appear to retain a semblance of democracy after Kennedy was gone through a violent overthrown of his administration. The third shell game followed the murder by 18 years, and was inserted by novelist David s. Lifton. This was the most destructive of all, and it still plays a rôle in the controversy, creating vastly more controversy, and now threatens to close down any further inquiry whatsoever due to the age of the case, the death of key witnesses, and ennui in the new generation.

Here is Harry Livingstone's web site: http://harrisonelivi...=169#simplicity

Doug Horne’s five volume work is focused on the medical evidence, but he discusses other matters — especially devoting Chapter 14 to the Zapruder film.

I’ll attempt in this space from time to time to make comments on Horne’s landmark 5 volumes now available on Amazon, and published in 2009. This is some 1,800+ pages of work with continuous page numbering from the first page to the end of the 5th volume at p. 1,807. There does not seem to be an index, but perhaps that will come along and will be offered separately. I suggest that you keep lists and notes by copying some of the subtitles dealing with important issues with the page and volume number for each, and using post-it tabs for sections and chapters, as well as witnesses and issues. Otherwise, it may be impossible to find the subjects easily for restudy.

I feel that Horne’s work is brilliant in many ways and takes the JFK case much farther and essentially proves three huge criminal conspiracies through the medical evidence: 1) Conspiracy to murder President Kennedy; 2). Fabricate medical evidence; 3) Cover-up the conspiracy. Other major crimes, such as perjury, subornation of perjury, coercion of witnesses, abuse of official power, etc. were also products. The books show the enormous power that was in play to kill the President and to hide what happened while the conspirators consolidated their power obtained by a violent seizure of the government.

There are mistakes in Horne’s work, in my opinion, and some of them seem to me to be quite dangerous to the progress of the JFK case. The most serious kinds of conflicts emerge. I’ll discuss the issues as time goes by in hopes we can mitigate the damage (if I can hold up physically), and try to correct mistakes and discuss broader issues. We all owe a vote of thanks to Doug for his devotion, for his hard work and his struggle while working for the ARRB in the 1990s to get at least some additional interviews, and pass beyond the official Congressional mandate merely to collect records. He knows and spells out that the Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Robert Blakey (formerly of the Organized Crime Task Force at the Dept. of Justice), was a xxxx and worked some major frauds on the evidence and on history while running the investigation by the House of Representatives. For this, Blakey was rewarded by appointment to the faculty of law at a famous football school, Notre Dame. Equally, many times in these five books, when Horne encounters fraud and other chicanery, he does us a favor by calling a spade a spade. Yes, the JFK inquiry all of these 49 years was shot full of fraud and corruption, like so much of our national life, society, politics, and economy. It is important to state this now for all of us who seek the truth in the terrible murder that so shook much of the world. This is a key part of the story and why past investigations often failed — at least in part.

Doug relies heavily on certain researchers that he praises to the sky. He also relies very heavily on my work, for which I’m grateful, and appears to validate my previous and most major findings with regard to misrepresenting the images of most of the autopsy photos, that 3 of the X-rays, at least, are greatly false and give the wrong impression, that the autopsy report is altered and there were three different versions, and that the Zapruder film, as I first named it in Killing Kennedy, (1995) is “the Hoax of the Century.” At times he does not go far enough, and he misses some points that would have helped. At times he’s just plain wrong. But perhaps many of us are wrong about something.

In the Introduction to the short (1,400 pp coming soon) 2012 edition of my work which is on the home page of this website, I tried to alert you to theft at the Archives, to other outright criminality that may get you oriented to knowing how severely truth seekers are boxed in by corruption and human nature. This plays a vast role in understanding the history of the JFK case to now.

A vast problem in studying the case is the people in it, and that often revolved on how easily suckered we are by “credentials” and the reputations of people in the case and their backgrounds. Flaws of human character are important issues in understanding this case. It’s too easy in life to be fooled.

Another big problem was the damage done to the case by the Zapruder film, because it is as phony as a $3 bill, and Doug came to the same conclusion that I did on that score. But I was the first researcher to open a full scale attack on it since Newcomb and Adams many years ago questioned the film, for which they were castigated and buried, and their work was not published for a very long time, and then, it was somewhat flawed. They also did not have much information and were unable to conduct the major investigation I did in my 500pp book on the film. But first, I began publishing chapters on the “Hoax of the Century” in three major books starting with High Treason 2 in 1992, then Killing the Truth in 1993, and Killing Kennedy and the Hoax of the Century in 1995, one of the finest books I’ve ever written alone with High Treason 2.

Kodak offered to work for the ARRB pro bono, and also dispatched a retired Kodak engineer, Roland Zavada, to offer his services. The Board could not refuse the offer of free help, so Zavada was in, though no one thought to inquire into his credentials and resume. The result was a disaster because Rollie prepared a completely false report that was then deposited in The National Archives just as the ARRB closed up with no other paper to question or counteract it. It was all but impossible to obtain a copy, but I got it, and struck up a relationship with Rollie and quickly knew that he was not who he said he was. He turned out to be, as Horne agrees, totally biased against any question of the film’s authenticity. Nobody thought to ask seriously, if at all, what Kodak’s motive was in horning into the issue, but Kodak was a long time military contractor, and it had, as it turned out, the original film within hours of the assassination. Evidently major alterations were done at its Rochester, NY plant by NPIC, a CIA film facility there. Kodak, also, had to protect the fact that its shop in Dallas developed Zapruder’s film. What had happened there that was such a threat? News of extra copies made for the rich oil men of Dallas or anyone else was a long time getting out.

The story of Rollie’s trip across the U.S. to meet with me for several hours in a taped session over the news that the book I was preparing on the film and his “report” had greatly rattled him, and is quite a tale. He figured he could steam roll over me, I suppose. It took me weeks to transcribe the tapes but you will find it all in The Hoax of the Century: Decoding the Forgery of the Zapruder Film, though broken up in pieces and spread through the book. This was my fourth book dealing with the film.

Let me repeat a quote that Doug uses from a famous researcher who was one of those who relied greatly upon the Zapruder film without ever questioning it, and this played a role in the inquiry into the film and autopsy photos and X-rays that had some work on them by the now failed giant in the photographic industry: Eastman Kodak.

Doug writes: “In his long essay published in 2007 on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, Josiah Thompson told us “we should all trust Rollie Zavada’s judgment and defer to his authority.” What authority? Zavada hasn’t got any, nor does he have credentials for authenticating film other than the acetate and chemicals. Thanks. That’s right: trust authority! That’s what I need: someone to tell us what to think, especially when they employ handy mind-control devices.

In the next sentence we come to one of the basic problems that has led to so much failure in understanding the JFK case, and so many bum steers. We trusted too much. Doug quotes Tink as writing, “Roland Zavada has a towering reputation in the field and no conceivable reason for cooking his conclusions.” (Horne, Vol. 4, p. 1,292). This was of course a response to my massive book on Zavada and the film published in 2004-5.

Josiah “Tink” Thompson, was the author of Six Seconds in Dallas, a well received 1967 book that argued strongly for some of the central evidence establishing a conspiracy, but also relied on the Zapruder film greatly at a time when people never thought to ask the right questions about it and what the film apparently showed, or events that many witnesses testified to but no longer were in the film, such as the limousine stopping during the ambush. Worse, there was a long stretch of motorcade that was cut out of it, as seems to have happened in several other of the amateur films taken that day. The Warren Report presented the “no conspiracy” lone-gunman Official Story Lie and ignored the massive amount of evidence supporting a major conspiracy – such as many witnesses to gunmen in the front of the limousine (much of which the Warren Commission actually published but ignored), that the propaganda film (to myself and Daryll Weatherly) became the fundamental underpinning of the Big Lie in the case.

Horne quotes Tink Thompson as backing the Kodak Engineer’s qualifications as follows, and there are several subtexts here: one is anyone having to do with anything connected to Mary Ferrell, who was assigned by the governor of Texas our so-called research community as her subject for investigation and surveillance, and although dead, remains a great threat to the rest of us, as was her husband, a member of the KKK. These people were radical Rightists who hated JFK, and many more of the two-faced frauds posing as critics have/had no caring for him, either, or the issue of inserting violence into our political process. Ferrell used to photograph everyone who came to her house and kept voluminous files on all of us. One of her specific tasks was to mislead us with countless bum-steers and her website still does it. She was certainly the most dishonest person I ever knew, and there were many in the JFK “research community,” so called. The rank and file of hard working researchers and fans of the case were rarely heard from. They were kept down, of course. Some people can’t stand competition.

Another issue was what Doug and the staff were trying to find out about the film: That was complicated because Kodak’s mission is not clear in the record. My book on the film records a great deal about the fact that the record shows that Zavada was never tasked to study the film for authenticity issues, and in fact was forbidden to do so (by his own admission). The problem was that too much is missing from the film that should be in it such as the car stop during the shooting. Worse, the film is contradicted in some respects by other films. Yet Horne gives the impression often enough that the ARRB tasked him to authenticate the film. What did that mean? All that Zavada’s training qualified him to authenticate was the acetate and the chemicals used, and he was no expert in forgery or special effects. He claims that he never looked at the content in the film or had any interest in it. In fact he could care less because he sounded to me as though he was glad JFK was dead, and he certainly made it clear that he believed the “lone-gunman theory.” He was out and out an apologist for the Warren Report. No question. There is a huge dissociation between Horne and Zavada on his mission.

Doug writes on: “Now that we have concluded examining his report and Zavada’s changes of mind since that time, it is clear that he has cooked his conclusions. In particular, he has ignored—trashed—key testimony.” (See four key issues Zavada ignored on p. 1,292, Vol. 4). “Furthermore, Zavada’s opposition to the shooting of a control film in Zapruder’s actual camera in Dealey Plaza—which was inexplicable and extremely frustrating when it occurred in 1997—now takes on a very different taint, one of possible sabotage of the authentication effort by the ARRB staff. An incredible charge, you say? Not necessarily. BUT, is an authentication effort a figment of Doug’s imagination? Wasn’t he the only person on the staff (or Board) that wanted to know?

“In 1996-8, I viewed Rollie Zavada as an independent thinking Kodak retiree who, although he had a strong natural disposition to believe the Zapruder film in the Archives was authentic, was still an honest broker who simply had to believe the Zapruder film in the archives was authentic, was still an honest broker who simply had to be steered from time to time with the right questions, to ensure that what I then viewed as his ‘natural bias’ did not get in the way of performing a proper authenticity study. His refusal, in the autumn of 1997, to endorse my very strong request to the shooting of control film in Zapruder’s camera made me question whether or not I could trust his judgment.” There is much more in this paragraph which follows (p. 1,293, top). This entire issue is bogus because Zavada was forbidden to do such a study, had refused to do it, and no-one on the Board wanted it. Only Doug either wanted it (or pretended to). Sure the job needed to be done, but not by Kodak and certainly not by someone as biased and incompetent for the job as Mr. Zavada.

I would have you read the several pages from my book’s Chapter 9 of The Hoax of the Century: Decoding the Forgery of the Zapruder Film, on Zavada and his having been forbidden by the ARRB to look into authentication, and see if you can sort it out. Of course in a bureaucracy, however small, the old saw about one hand not knowing what the other is doing may explain this disconnect between Doug and others. Perhaps the ARRB’s bosses knew just how biased and incompetent Zavada was. They only had certain tasks for Kodak and Zavada and wanted those things and nothing more, since they were free. We certainly know that Doug had a strong interest in a study of authenticity, but it wasn’t going to happen. Nevertheless, as soon as Zavada made his deposit in the rest room of the National Archives (it was not published), he began a campaign across the nation to claim that the film was authentic. And to back it up, he could claim that he had done a great deal of testing and study, not that a lot of it was a trick. But to put Doug’s claims into perspective, it is necessary to read the documentation available in my book. No, I’m not trying to plug it. It’s just the only source available that deals with the extensive conflict and has the documentation with a massive transcript of what Rollie really had to say. The Kodak—Zavada—ARRB matrix, however, with all its double-talk, sure fooled many people into thinking that the film had been authenticated. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.

Edited by Robert Morrow
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Guest James H. Fetzer

Doug writes: “In his long essay published in 2007 on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, Josiah Thompson told us “we should all trust Rollie Zavada’s judgment and defer to his authority.” What authority? Zavada hasn’t got any, nor does he have credentials for authenticating film other than the acetate and chemicals. Thanks. That’s right: trust authority! That’s what I need: someone to tell us what to think, especially when they employ handy mind-control devices. In the next sentence we come to one of the basic problems that has led to so much failure in understanding the JFK case, and so many bum steers. We trusted too much. Doug quotes Tink as writing, “Roland Zavada has a towering reputation in the field and no conceivable reason for cooking his conclusions.” (Horne, Vol. 4, p. 1,292). This was of course a response to my massive book on Zavada and the film published in 2004-5.

Josiah “Tink” Thompson, was the author of Six Seconds in Dallas, a well received 1967 book that argued strongly for some of the central evidence establishing a conspiracy, but also relied on the Zapruder film greatly at a time when people never thought to ask the right questions about it and what the film apparently showed, or events that many witnesses testified to but no longer were in the film, such as the limousine stopping during the ambush. Worse, there was a long stretch of motorcade that was cut out of it, as seems to have happened in several other of the amateur films taken that day. The Warren Report presented the “no conspiracy” lone-gunman Official Story Lie and ignored the massive amount of evidence supporting a major conspiracy – such as many witnesses to gunmen in the front of the limousine (much of which the Warren Commission actually published but ignored), that the propaganda film (to myself and Daryll Weatherly) became the fundamental underpinning of the Big Lie in the case.

Horne quotes Tink Thompson as backing the Kodak Engineer’s qualifications as follows, and there are several subtexts here: one is anyone having to do with anything connected to Mary Ferrell, who was assigned by the governor of Texas our so-called research community as her subject for investigation and surveillance, and although dead, remains a great threat to the rest of us, as was her husband, a member of the KKK. These people were radical Rightists who hated JFK, and many more of the two-faced frauds posing as critics have/had no caring for him, either, or the issue of inserting violence into our political process. . . .

Very nice, Harry. I look forward to reading more. You are doing a great job!

Edited by James H. Fetzer
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Every new piece of information corrupts the last "latest" new information

All we basically know is the JFK went to Dallas and got himself shot

The lies were in place before the event and the cover up was operative

Soon after the last shot.

As long as Oswald (or patsy of choice ) was in Dallas they could get away with it

People will throw information at you blaming every group with a grudge

And finding information to suit where will it all end?.

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  • 2 years later...

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