Stu Wexler

Has anyone in any of these legacy groups ever grappled with the very clear and alarming evidence that the CIA misled JFK about the prospects for the invasion fully knowing it would likely fail? Or, with that in mind, the fact that overtly committing air power after would be a clear violation of international law and norms? I keep waiting for them to shift the blame to where it belongs as we have known this for at least 20 years now (the latter point since 1961). Stu

https://emuseum.jfk.org/objects/21494/jack-davis-oral-history?ctx=e8763525cd7e0f4ac6afd77f9c0ca7ff1cdc9547&idx=0 You can also go to the 50m mark, so just a few minutes in, and he describes it quite clearly-- it being Oswald sitting down next to him (Davis.)

See description

Three questions: 1. What is your background/expertise? 2. What software did you use? 3. Have you had any other experts double check your work? Stu

Greg, I would have to go back and find the study, but the issue with fingerprint analysis (and potential flaws) has less to do with the intrinsic ability of examiners to make a blind match (or mismatch) but with confirmation bias. In this study, they sent fingerprint examiners a set of two prints for comparison-- one lifted from a crime scene, one from a fingerprint card. The examiners were almost universally correct in their assessments, just as in the study you posted. There was one problem: these were not truly blind sets of fingerprints but prints the examiners in question had analyzed for police/the prosecution in past cases. And in some alarming percentage-- like 25% of them-- they offered a *different* opinion than the one they gave years before. The study's researchers argued that it was because in their earlier analysis, the examiners were given background information from the cops or prosecutors. Which was the actual problem in the Mayfield case as well. I was told about this by the lats Dr. Cliff Spiegleman a decade or more ago. Cliff had made it almost his life's work to make sure crime labs conducted almost every analysis completely blindly (not just fingeprints) because of confirmation bias issues. I would also add that there was a refutation-- "no match to Wallace"-- not long after Darby's match. From one of the former heads of a national fingerprint professional association. If you want an amazing presentation on the fingerprint issue-- find James Olmstead's 2003 Wecht Conference presentation on Youtube. Stu

Vince did you run down the Puerto Rican nationalists who were ID'd as the men arrested on the eve of the Chicago trip? They are named in documents. I have tried to see if there are any connections to usual JFK suspects and did not find any.

Could they have been trying to find a mole in the get-Castro regime change/assassination efforts? Given how often said operations had failed? Stu

Good job on this, Jim. Re: fact checkers. While folks like you a me would welcome a final episode that hashed out the debunking, I am not sure that is in the financial interest of Netflix to do so. Better to have the more sensationalist offering. If I gave them the benefit of the doubt, it is what I said earlier. People just do not understand the lengths some people will go to grift using or insert themselves into a famous crime or historical case. JFK is an extreme example. But it happened with the Black Dahlia case. I bet it happened with the Jack the Ripper case. And it can even involve multiple people. Stu

Could new AI tech help?

Has anyone made another go at enhancing the tapes of the Buell Frazier HSCA interviews. Some other attempts were borderline bizarre. I asked him about it at a Lancer conference and he confidently denied the rendition. Stu

I have the VHS somewhere for the original. Lol. Glad to know it is still good.

What is the best online version of the Z-film? Not just frames but a fully moving film. Stu

I have had a few days where I have wondered about Hurt's materials. I have quoted his book here more than once. He had a huge investigative bduget from I think he had established contacts from prior books. He may have deposited his materials at a university. The Easterling stuff really discredited him with people like Hoch (who I respect) and I think we maybe threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Looking further the above essay was written (I think) by Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn, who sure looks zany. But at the same time he appears to be sourcing it to *something* 1988 or before. Just without footnotes or endnotes!

The earliest reference I can find is the 1988 edition of Rights magazine. Seems like a right wing type deal. Unfortunately Google Books gives only a snippet view of the page.

Yes, I explored the issue of elemental discriminants in some depth for my work. Guinn argued for 3: copper, antimony and silver. Copper could not work possibly because of the copper jacket. Silver actually suggesting a grouping of fragments inconsistent with the official scenario. That left only Antimony. The problem is that forensic chemists, since Guinn, were arguing for more and more, not fewer, elemental discriminants. Guinn gets a bit of pass because of when he did the HSCA analysis but not much-- using one element was never satisfactory. But Rahn and Sturdivan do not get any pass. They went all in on the magic of antimony-- but only for MC rounds. Poor Oswald picked the only brand of bullets that are fabricated like rainbow crayon boxes and the only one that can tell us everything about a shooting using just one element. I had independent forensic chemists, one of whom worked on MC rounds, outright ridicule that assertion. But Grant and Randich took it further by pointing out, from their extensive background with bullet fabrication, that low levels of antimony in bullets is far from rare. There are like 10 levels on which the Guinn/Rahn material fail.

*The* Orlando Bosch?

Pat: I believe you have one aspect of the bullet story confused, inter-bullet heterogeneity. It is actually and quite deliberately the case that multiple bullets in a production lot-- we are talking thousands-- will have almost precisely the same amount of key elements from bullet to bullet. This is done deliberately by metallurgists-- to ensure a brand of bullets shares the same flight characteristics. A box of bullet may all be the same or, based on production lots, there might be say, 3 sets of chemical profiles constituting a bullet box. And hundreds of boxes just like that will be put into pallets and sent to the same geographic region. The end result is: you can never tell if a bullet came from a box, or a pallet of boxes, or a freight of pallets sent to the same part of the U.S. This is well known to metallurgists and chemists who are part of the bullet fabrication and shipment process. It was scandalously "left out" of analyses by forensic chemists at the FBI and state crime labs-- until the entire comparative bullet lead field was taken down by the likes of Spiegelman, Tobin, Grant and Randich, all of whom specifically used the JFK case to help promote the problem. I helped both groups, and am the historian for the Spiegelman paper. Our key contribution to the JFK field was to show that the supposed rainbow crayon box theory of the MCC ammo was bogus-- contrary to LN theorists and consistent with common sense, MC bullets were fabricated and distributed like other bullet boxes. This means, again, that multiple bullets in the same box, gun store, city will share a chemical profile. You can not say, with any confidence, that a fragment came from a specific box much less a specific bullet. Moreover-- and this always gets lost-- you cannot count bullet profiles and say "only and exactly X bullets contributed to this suite of fragments" found at a crime scene. You can only say-- at LEAST x bullets are in this suite of fragments/bullets, based on chemical profiles. Randich and Grant contributed three other key insights. First-- they showed that the mysterious intra-bullet heterogeneity one sees with MC rounds is not unusual. It is a function of poor sampling from the rounds-- if one hits micro sections that have elemental spikes. For that reason they confirmed Wallace Milam, who pointed out that based on intrabullet variation, you cannot even say the wrist fragments are from one MC bullet grouping (to CE399) rather than another. Finally, they pointed out, as experienced metallurgists and chemists dealing with bullet fabrication, that the supposedly low range of Antimony that Rahn and Guinn highlighted as being unique to MC rounds is not unique. Many other brands of bullets, especially softnosed, share that low range of Sb. Pat, you made a great contribution with your analysis of the cheek cast NAA. I only wish it could be duplicated with a much larger sample size. Stu

Matt. I tend to agree with your take. And I especially agree, as I said earlier, re seeing these kinds of characters in JFK. JFK people could have saved Octopus people a lot of time. I see it in other cases too. No one understands the capacity of others for grifting, quasi-truth telling, hoaxing, delusion and fabulism (if that is a word.) But astute JFK people have a sixth sense for it after a while.

Hopefully Daniel Jones has been working on antipication on deep throws and rehabbing his knee (I kid, for anyone who gets it.)

Oh my goodness. Sorry for the mistake.

Fyi, Jim: his (Oliver's) son just passed. Condolensces if you knew him.

See above

So it is clear: the journalist herself argues that the Z-film thing was a quasi-psyop (and not government) by what amounts to a grifter to keep her off balance. There are a bunch of grifters in this story.

They definitely raise questions about Cuellar and the presence of someone, possibly Cuellar, entering Danny's room. It is a mix of actual broll plus reenactments. I think the main documentarian actually "plays" Danny.