I Was A Teenage Warren Commission Report Dupe

[Joe Bauer]

On 12/2/2018 at 7:57 PM, Ron Bulman said:

 

Regarding the development of suspicions that there was something fishy about the lone nut story, I think for me that started with Watergate.  I remember the assassination in that I'd just turned seven, walked home three blocks for lunch from Gust elementary in Denver, mother had the radio on the whole time I was there which was unusual and she got a phone call and seemed excited.  I went back to an empty school and a crying teacher that told me to go back home.  Then nothing but news on the black and white tv for days.  No Friday night movie, Saturday morning cartoons.  Don't remember anything about Oswald getting shot.  Do remember watching the funeral.  But I don't ever remember it being discussed in our house then or later.  Both my parents voted but they weren't "political".

Then as a high school senior in 1974 our civics teacher told us to pay attention to what was happening to the President, that it was historical.  Wow, the President was a crook.  He had to quit or get kicked out of office.  All of the people in government were not necessarily the good guy's wearing white hats.  At the same time, living in the middle of the D/FW (now) metromess one of myself and friends cruises to get out of town was to head down the still relatively new 2 lane each way airport freeway through Irving to Dallas.  Our turnaround was to get off on Commerce and make a loop through Dealy Plaza to head back home.  I remember thinking the angle from the sixth floor could have made it a tough shot to a moving target small as a head (had no idea who Greer was then or that he damn near stopped).  I'd seen my dad, a good shot, miss a deer from a steep slope in Colorado shooting first high and breaking her back then over correcting low and breaking a leg.  Much as I like venison (though I've not hunted in years) I've always felt sorry for that deer.  I was taught not to shoot unless you thought you had a clear clean kill shot.  The man who taught me that thought he could kill the deer with one shot, but elevation increases difficulty, I've read about it since.  That made me think as we passed the TSBD that Oswald must have been a real good shot to hit him twice.

Then 3-4 years after high school I started seeing articles in news papers and magazines and news clips on tv about JFK and new investigations but I didn't pay close attention.

I think the next time I wondered about something being not right about our government was when the day Reagan took office the Iranian hostages were finally released.  I wondered, why did they hate Carter so much, why do they like or trust Reagan so much to do this on this significant day?

In the late 80's I came across mafia did it books like Contract on America and Mafia Kingfish and I jumped on the Blakey train though I didn't know who he was.  Though misguided these did make me come to the conclusion Oswald didn't do it alone.  He wasn't a lone nut.

Then 91 came around with High Treason and the movie JFK.  Holy Cow, could rouge elements of the CIA have possibly been involved?  In 93 the paperback version of Crossfire came out and I bought it a year or so later.  By then I Really didn't believe Oswald acted alone.  In the late 90's this thing called the internet came to my house.  In the early 2000's I started seeing the JFK assassination become a subject of interest.  Which led me to books like Destiny Betrayed, Best Evidence, the Radical Right and the Murder of JFK, and The Man Who Knew Too Much and ultimately many more.  Then I found this site a little before the 50th along with JFKFacts and CTKA which led to even more reading and finally commenting.  So in essence I'm still a newby in the search for the Truth still trying to catch up.  But I think I have developed a healthy skepticism.  There is a lot of BS out there, best to evaluate info trying to use reason as well as using it and facts for backup in any speculation.  For example I've come to doubt Oswald took a shot at anyone, likely he was just a patsy after all, I.E., he likely didn't shoot Tippit either.  Beware of false idols, or misdirection.  LBJ didn't have the power, imagination or gumption to plan, organize, direct and control it, for example.  

The above post is an excellent and honest summary of decades of thoughtful and rational common sense thinking, reading and reasoning imo.

Vincent Bugliosi proclaimed, almost frantically, over and over and over in his 10 pound lead heavy 1,600 page high-toned dogmatic book "Reclaiming History" how those who believed the JFK assassination was the result of a conspiracy were kooks, loons and nut cases. As if he repeated this dismissive mentally deranged characterization of CTers enough somehow the American people ( his jury ) would accept this as reality.

The truth over time however is more and more relegating Bugliosi's book and his hyper-promoted, and irrationally over -repeated CT loon characterizations throughout it as more worthy as a super heavy doorstop versus a literary effort of any honest truth revealing value.

 

 

Edited December 6, 2018 by Joe Bauer

[James DiEugenio]

I really did not like that either Joe.  In fact, I was a bit surprised that Vince took that path.

That is why I decided to reply at length and as fast as I could.  I thought the critical community reply to Posner was not strong enough.  Or immediate enough.

So after actually reading the whole thing, and taking copious notes, I determined his book was really an argument made by length, and by invective.  I was really surprised at how little there was that was new.  The other thing is, I could detect no evidence that Vince actually left his office the whole time he worked on it.  And that is  bad in my view.  Its always better when you talk to people in their own environment, and sometimes that leads you to others who are nearby.

On the up side, if Bugliosi's cinder block was their last gasp, then its like Chaplin and his cannon.  Big build up, and the cannonball rolls out of the barrel and hits the ground right below.

[Cory Santos]

3 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Hypothetical question for Cory….

Apologies for asking for a free legal opinion, but we’re all obviously interested in this case, and so I thought you wouldn’t mind.

Let’s say you were defending a client against criminal charges at a jury trial, and that the prosecution presented ten pieces of evidence seeming to indicate your client was guilty as charged.  Let’s also say you were able to show that three of those pieces of evidence were clearly invented or substantially altered by police or someone else on the prosecution’s side, i.e., the false evidence was clearly not the result of simple errors or sloppy investigation techniques but by all reasonable analyses was out and out fraud meant to deceive the jury.

Let’s also say you were unable to prove the other seven pieces of evidence were phony, but you were able to give the jury a reasonable explanation why they, like the three debunked pieces of evidence, were fraudulent.  Would you have a chance of getting your client off the hook based on those three pieces of clearly fraudulent evidence?

With OJ it took one piece and a poorly prosecuted case.  The standard is reasonable doubt. I’m not suggesting LHO would be convicted had he been tried, but that does not mean he was not connected to the events that day. He was arrested and had a gun in him.  If you have other information I am happy to consider it. 

[Denny Zartman]

5 hours ago, Cory Santos said:

With OJ it took one piece and a poorly prosecuted case.  The standard is reasonable doubt. I’m not suggesting LHO would be convicted had he been tried, but that does not mean he was not connected to the events that day. He was arrested and had a gun in him.  If you have other information I am happy to consider it. 

Who says that Oswald was not connected to the events that day?

[Jim Hargrove]

1 hour ago, Denny Zartman said:

Who says that Oswald was not connected to the events that day?

Indeed!  He played the starring role of The Patsy!  And to do so successfully, he clearly had to follow orders.  The question I've always wondered is, What kind of story was he told to do the things he did that day.

 

[W. Niederhut]

9 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

I really did not like that either Joe.  In fact, I was a bit surprised that Vince took that path.

That is why I decided to reply at length and as fast as I could.  I thought the critical community reply to Posner was not strong enough.  Or immediate enough.

So after actually reading the whole thing, and taking copious notes, I determined his book was really an argument made by length, and by invective.  I was really surprised at how little there was that was new.  The other thing is, I could detect no evidence that Vince actually left his office the whole time he worked on it.  And that is  bad in my view.  Its always better when you talk to people in their own environment, and sometimes that leads you to others who are nearby.

On the up side, if Bugliosi's cinder block was their last gasp, then its like Chaplin and his cannon.  Big build up, and the cannonball rolls out of the barrel and hits the ground right below.

 

There seems to be a kind of "cinder block" theory in CIA psy ops-- "the more massive the tome, the more persuasive the thesis."

I don't remember where I read the story, (possibly in Sylvia Meagher's book, Accessories After the Fact) but Allen Dulles, apparently, told someone, "Don't worry about all of this Warren Commission Report stuff-- no one is ever going to read it."

[Cory Santos]

4 hours ago, Denny Zartman said:

Who says that Oswald was not connected to the events that day?

Many, not I, believe he was completely clueless as to what happened that day.  Some claim he actually was working to infiltrate the conspiracy. 

[James DiEugenio]

That is an accurate quote about Dulles  WN.  

But some people actually did read it the 26 volumes.  And they concluded that the report's conclusions did not match up to the evidence in the volumes.  In fact, it often contradicted it.  And that is what most people do not understand.

In my article about Quillette that I just posted, I talk about this book that the late Maggie Fields was writing back in the sixties. She actually cut out the conclusions of the WR and pasted them to the top of a poster, and then she cut out the evidence in the volumes that either neutered it or contradicted it.  And she made these  big poster boards and put them in her basement.  She insisted that this is the way she wanted her book published.  But back in those days, the production cost would have been too high so  it was not.

What a devastating book that would have been.

[Denny Zartman]

7 hours ago, Cory Santos said:

Many, not I, believe he was completely clueless as to what happened that day. 

Who?

[Denny Zartman]

12 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Indeed!  He played the starring role of The Patsy!  And to do so successfully, he clearly had to follow orders.  The question I've always wondered is, What kind of story was he told to do the things he did that day.

Wasn't it David Atlee Phillips that said the people he was with were told they were on a mission to prevent the assassination?

I don't believe Oswald was the lone assassin, but it's obvious (at least it was and is to me) that Oswald was involved in the machinery of the conspiracy. I don't know what role Oswald believed he was playing, but you're correct, the conspirators certainly considered him part of the plot since he was to be the patsy.

Edited December 6, 2018 by Denny Zartman

[Denny Zartman]

18 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

I really did not like that either Joe.  In fact, I was a bit surprised that Vince took that path.

That is why I decided to reply at length and as fast as I could.  I thought the critical community reply to Posner was not strong enough.  Or immediate enough.

So after actually reading the whole thing, and taking copious notes, I determined his book was really an argument made by length, and by invective.  I was really surprised at how little there was that was new.  The other thing is, I could detect no evidence that Vince actually left his office the whole time he worked on it.  And that is  bad in my view.  Its always better when you talk to people in their own environment, and sometimes that leads you to others who are nearby.

On the up side, if Bugliosi's cinder block was their last gasp, then its like Chaplin and his cannon.  Big build up, and the cannonball rolls out of the barrel and hits the ground right below.

Hi James, I quite like "Reclaiming Parkland" and I'm grateful that you did the work to write a detailed rebuttal against Bugliosi's book. Thanks.

To me, Bugliosi's book read like something he mostly dictated into an audio recorder and barely bothered to edit. There's so much focus on himself and attacking conspiracy theorists that if I were a neutral reader I would wonder about Bugliosi's objectivity.

And his reasoning is so circular it's almost ridiculous. It's basically "we know Oswald is guilty because we know Oswald is guilty, and we know that anything we can't explain can be explained in a way that's consistent with Oswald's guilt, because we know Oswald is guilty" rephrased a thousand different ways.

Edited December 6, 2018 by Denny Zartman