Solving the Gary Shaw mystery

[Pat Speer]

In 1980, researcher Gary Shaw discovered a document in the Archives that was identical to a previously known document but for one sentence. The line, about the paper sample taken from the depository on 11-22, reads "This paper was examined by the FBI Laboratory and found not to be identical with the paper gun case found at the scene of the shooting." The line of the nearly identical document on page 129 of the FBI's 11-30 report, however, reads "This paper was examined by the FBI Laboratory and found to have the same observable characteristics as the brown paper bag shaped like a gun case which was found near the scene of the shooting on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building." It seemed clear to Shaw that someone had changed the document, and that he had discovered the original document before it was changed. This has been widely discussed.

Gary Mack has claimed to me that Drain, the writer of the report, told reporter Earl Golz he wrote two versions of the report, in anticipation of the test results, and that both versions ended up in the files. This makes no sense. The report was written 11-30-63, based upon an 11-29 discussion, and the tests were performed on 11-23. Writer Henry Hurt, for his book Reasonable Doubt, also talked to Drain about the document switch. Drain reportedly claimed "I am certainly as perplexed as you are," and that he believed the correct report to be the one stating the paper was the same.

In 2007, in his book Reclaiming History, Vincent Bugliosi dealt with this problem in another manner. He claimed the report was a reference to a test performed on a bag created by the Dallas FBI, from paper found in the school book depository days after the shooting. Bugliosi's solution, however, was ridiculous on its face. The second bag was not created till 12-1. How could Drain, on 11-29, be discussing tests performed on a bag that did not yet exist?

Well, the wonder of the Mary Ferrell foundation has provided us the answer. FBI file 105-82555, sec 39, p7 is a 12-18-63 airtel from the Dallas Special-Agent-in-Charge, Gordon Shanklin back to FBI Headquarters, reporting that he is replacing page 129 of the FBI's 11-30 report to the Commission (CD5, page 129) with a different page. This airtel references two other documents, a 12-6 airtel from Washington to Dallas obviously requesting a change be made (I haven't yet found this document), and a 12-11 response from Dallas listing the progress of a number of investigations, while also noting, under point 11, that the "Necessary actions to correct inaccuracy" are "being taken." (This page can be found in FBI file 105-82555, sec 27, p44.)

SO...the FBI did, at least on occasion, change reports, after they had been disseminated and placed in the record. This is problematic for researchers, such as myself, sifting through the record under the assumption the documents were actually written on the day they claim, and that the writer of the documents actually wrote the words in the document. If Drain had simply admitted he'd screwed up, and had reported the FBI Lab's report on the paper sample incorrectly, and that he was made to correct it later, this issue could have been resolved. His initials do, after all, appear on the revised document. But since he refused to come clean on this issue, or forgot all about what would have to be considered a major mistake on his part, we are still left to wonder...

Did the paper sample match the bag, or were they found to be "not identical"?

12-18-63 Airtel

12-6-63 Airtel

[Guest Tom Scully]

Good thread, however, your polite and understated line I've highlighted above [and the same would be true of many other agencies and entities] makes the whole thing the Gordian Knot it has been and is for those trying to find the truth. Those in power [who were behind the assassination and more so - almost to the agency and all its leading people - behind the cover-up] do NOT want the Truth to be known. They know, and I know, that if the truth were to come out (about Dallas and all the related/interrelated covert ops against the American and World People) America as we know it would no longer exist IMO [oh, the land and People would], but all those in power would mostly be in prison and all those oppressed [most of us] would perhaps really start a democracy - which we do NOT have now, at all. We are a conquered People.

The other tricks have been to just deny documents; destroy them or hide them where a FOIA or Commission can't get at them; and create de novo new conflicting documents, rather than tamper with the old one. Just to list the number of times the FBI PURPOSELY mis-spelled the names of those complicit or witnesses and changed 180 degrees the statements made by witnesses would fill a book..Th.or this thread. It is a disgusting shame. In fact, it is a crime and I'd suggest the FBI, NSA, CIA, NSC, ONI, MI, and many others be placed in the dock and convicted for their treason and other crimes. And don't hold your breath - but don't stop fighting either. And just to highlight how bad it is, look at Gary Shaw who 'chose' to withdraw from JFK research for his 'health' and Gary Mack who rides high in the saddle controlling what passes for the objective 'story'. How much money does Pozner make compared to, say, Larry Hancock on a book - or Joan Mellen? Gus Russo is on the ascent. Well, fellow inmates, time for a rebellion or die on your knees.

At the risk of being accused of moving attention and credit away from Pat Speers and his hard work and great sleuthing resulting in this significant discovery, I cannot let Peter's points pass without comment. This forum is not radicalized to the point of the outraged tone evident in Peter's post(s) because of any discouraging policy or intent of John Simkin that I can detect; in fact quite the contrary.

Here are excerpts of John's research and commentary with regard to the prominent advisor to nine US presidents and influential member of the Warren Commission, John McCloy:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmccloyJ.htm

....Mitsuye Endo, a Nisei, petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus on the grounds that detention in a relocation camp was unlawful. In December 1944 the Supreme Court ruled in her favour and over the next few weeks the Japanese Americans in the camps returned to their homes in California.

On 9th April 1944, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, managed to escape from Auschwitz. The two men spent eleven days walking and hiding before they got back to Slovakia. Vrba and Wetzler made contact with the local Jewish Council. They provided details of the Holocaust that was taking place in Eastern Europe. They also gave an estimate of the number of Jews killed in Auschwitz between June 1942 and April 1944: about 1.75 million.

On 29th June, 1944, the 32-page Vrba-Wetzler Report was sent to John McCloy. Attached to it was a note requesting the bombing of vital sections of the rail lines that transported the Jews to Auschwitz. McCloy investigated the request and then told his personal aide, Colonel Al Gerhardt, to "kill" the matter.

McCoy received several requests to take military action against the death camps. He always sent the following letter: "The War Department is of the opinion that the suggested air operation is impracticable. It could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations and would in any case be of such very doubtful efficacy that it would not amount to a practical project."

This was untrue......

....Goldman was later to say: "McCloy indicated to me that, although the Americans were reluctant about my proposal, they might agree to it, though any decision as to the targets of bombardments in Europe was in the hands of the British". Once again, this was untrue. .....

...Throughout the summer and autumn of 1950 McCloy told the French that "continuous efforts to locate Barbie are being made". In reality, no search of any kind was conducted as they knew where he was living. In fact, he continued to draw a CIC salary during this period.

In March 1950, McCloy was given the task of appointing a new head of the West German Secret Service. After discussing the matter with Frank Wisner of the CIA, McCloy decided on Reinhard Gehlen, the Nazi war criminal. This resulted in protests from the Soviet Union government who wanted to try Gehlen for war crimes. ....

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/12/books/ul...;pagewanted=all

...AS High Commissioner for occupied Germany, McCloy granted clemency to dozens of Nazi war criminals. He freed, or reduced the sentences of, most of the 20 SS extermination squad leaders, whose crimes he freely conceded were "historic in their magnitude and horror." Of the 15 death sentences handed down at the Nuremberg trials, McCloy carried out a mere five. Of the remaining 74 war criminals who were sentenced at Nuremberg to prison terms, he let many go free -- most notoriously the industrialist Alfried Krupp, who had been sentenced at Nuremberg to 12 years in prison for using concentration camp inmates as slave labor. Krupp, accompanied by most of his board of directors, walked out of the Landsberg prison in 1951 to a cheering crowd and a champagne breakfast -- with his fortune and industrial empire intact.

Much of the world was outraged. "Why," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to McCloy, "are we freeing so many Nazis?" The answer, Mr. Bird explains, was far from simple. For one thing, McCloy faced threats on his own life, and immense pressure from the German public and even from Pope Pius XII to grant a blanket amnesty -- "a well-organized conspiracy," McCloy recalled, "to intimidate me."....

It isn't a tone or a policy set for the forum that results in Peter seeming to be radical or unique in his level of outrage against and condemnation of authority and the wealthy and powerful interests keeping it in place in it's present form. It isn't the influence of the details in the historical record, or in the tug of war currently playing out, either.

So then......what is it? Why, on a forum where many now know that during their formative years, much of what "everybody knew", who read Time or Life, or who watched the news on the major American TV networks or read the newspapers, was a tainted presentation brought to you by "Operation Mockingbird", does the mainstream POV seem so divorced from Peter's POV? Why does the tone here seem as "center right", as it does anywhere else?

Isn't it a political decision to question the findings of the Warren Commission? How can it not be? Instinctively I can't be comfortable on the same side of the political centerline as McCloy, Earl Warren, and J. Edgar Hoover were. How are so many able to accomplish it, seemingly in defiance of a reaction applied to "everyday life", to knowing what so many here know.....described so well in Peter's few posted sentences, quoted above?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sach...s_b_177982.html

Geithner and Summers have now announced their plan to raid the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Federal Reserve (Fed) to subsidize investors to buy toxic assets from the banks at inflated prices. If carried out, the result will be a massive transfer of wealth -- of perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars -- to bank shareholders from the taxpayers (who will absorb losses at the FDIC and Fed). Soaring bank share prices on the morning of the announcement, and in the week of leaks and hints that preceded it, are an indication of the mass bailout at work. There are much fairer and more effective ways to accomplish the goal of cleaning the bank balance sheets.....

http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/20...3/200613pap.pdf

Currents and Undercurrents: Changes in the Distribution of Wealth, 1989–2004

January 30, 2006

Abstract

This paper considers changes in the distribution of the wealth of U.S. families over the 1989–2004 period using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Real net worth grew broadly over this period. At the same time, there are indications that wealth became more concentrated, but the result does not hold unambiguously across a set of plausible measures. For example, the Gini coefficient shows significant increases in the concentration of wealth from 1989 to 2004, but the wealth share of the wealthiest one percent of families did not change significantly. Graphical analysis suggests that there was a shift in favor of the top of the distribution, while for the broad middle of the distribution increases were about in proportion to earlier wealth. Within this period, there are other interesting patterns. For example, from 1992 to 2004 the wealth share of the least wealthy half of the population fell significantly to 2.5 percent of total wealth....

page 27

...Ownership shares. For some assets, the distributions of the amounts held are far more disproportionate than the differences in ownership rates. MOST STRIKING is the 62.3 percent share of business assets OWNED BY THE WEALTHIEST 1 percent of the wealth distribution in 2004 (table 11a); the NEXT-WEALTHIEST 4 percent OWNED ANOTHER 22.4 percent of the total. Other key items subject to capital gains also show strong disproportions: THE WEALTHIEST 5 PERCENT OF FAMILIES OWNED 61.9 percent of residential real estate other than principal residences, 71.7 percent of nonresidential real estate, and 65.9 PERCENT OF DIRECTLY- AND INDIRECTLY HELD STOCKS. For bonds, 93.7 PERCENT OF THE TOTAL WERE HELD BY THIS GROUP....

http://hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc080922.htm

September 22, 2008

An Open Letter to the U.S. Congress Regarding the Current Financial Crisis

John P. Hussman, Ph.D.

In 2006, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis noted "Everyone knows that a policy of bailouts will increase their number." This week, Congress is being asked to hastily consider a monstrous bailout plan on a scale nearly equivalent to the existing balance sheet of the Federal Reserve.

As an economist and investment manager, I am concerned that the plan advocated by Treasury is essentially a plan to bail out the bondholders of financial institutions that made bad lending decisions, with little help to homeowners that are actually in financial distress. It is difficult to believe that the U.S. government is contemplating taking on the bad assets of these institutions at probable taxpayer loss and effectively immunizing the bondholders (and shareholders) of these companies. ....

....TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY: $100

Now, as these bad assets get written off, shareholder equity is also reduced. What has happened in recent months is that this equity has become insufficient, so that the company technically becomes insolvent provided that the bondholders have to be paid off:

Good assets: $95

Assets gone bad (written off): $0

TOTAL ASSETS: $95

Liabilities to customers/counterparties: $80

Debt to bondholders of company: $17

Shareholder equity: ($2)

TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY: $95

These institutions are not failing because 95% of the assets have gone bad. They are failing because 5% of the assets have gone bad and they over-stretched their capital. At the heart of the problem is "gross leverage" – the ratio of total assets taken on by the company to its shareholder equity. The sequence of failures we've observed in recent months, starting with Bear Stearns, has followed almost exactly in order of their gross leverage multiples. After Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac went into crisis, Lehman and Merrill Lynch followed. Morgan Stanley, and Hank Paulson's former employer, Goldman Sachs, remain the most leveraged companies on Wall Street, with gross leverage multiples above 20.

Look at the insolvent balance sheet again. The appropriate solution is not for the government to replace the bad assets with public money, but rather for the government to execute a receivership of the failed institution and immediately conduct a "whole bank" sale – selling the bank's assets and liabilities as a package, but ex the debt to bondholders, which preserves the ongoing business without loss to customers and counterparties, wipes out shareholder equity, and gives bondholders partial (perhaps even nearly complete) recovery with the proceeds.

The key is to recognize that for nearly all of the institutions currently at risk of failure, there exists a cushion of bondholder capital sufficient to absorb all probable losses, without any need for the public to bear the cost.

For example, consider Morgan Stanley's balance sheet as of 8/31/08. Total assets were $988.8 billion, with shareholder equity (including junior subordinated debt) of $42.1 billion, for a gross leverage ratio of 23.5. However, the company also has approximately $200 billion in long-term debt to its bondholders, primarily consisting of senior debt with an average maturity of about 6 years. Why on earth would Congress put the U.S. public behind these bondholders? ...