Pat Speer

John, I didn't mean to come across as a nay-sayer. I interpreted your efforts as efforts designed to make people dismiss Tague's statements, so that they could convince themselves the shots came from the front. Something struck Tague. You are correct in pointing out that it has never been proven that whatever struck him first struck the curb. I find it intriguing, nonetheless, that you seem to be arguing that the bullet drop from Kennedy's head to the curb was too great to have been created by a fragment from the head shot. This is the exact opposite of what most CTs have argued over the years. They claim that that there was no way a fragment could travel so far. I think they're wrong. A .22 caliber bullet traveling at subsonic speeds has an effective range of a hundred yards or more. The fragment in question was only slightly smaller and traveling only slightly slower. I find it hard to believe such a missile would NOT leave a mark after striking a curb.

I watched the DVD today, and thought that the only video related material that I have viewed on the same scale of importance was the CBS 1977 Documentary "The C.I.A.'s Secret Army." Any serious researcher should have a copy. I watched the DVD some months back. It is very good and has a lot of unique footage. It has an interview with Connally, for example, in which he explains his movements just before the first shot. He says he took advantage of the thinning crowds to turn to his left and stretch his neck. This interview was in mid-64, shortly after Connally had seen the Zapruder film. I have a sneakin' suspicion that he knew it looked bad for him to be looking for the shooter BEFORE any shots were fired, and came up with the stretching his neck excuse to explain his actions. But that's just a hunch...

Douglas Caddy has written that he was hired by the Moody family of Galveston to represent Billie Sol Estes. Billie Sol in turn implicated LBJ in the assassination. This was shortly after the HSCA implicated Marcello and Trafficante in the assassination. After reading this from Caddy, I wondered if perhaps the whole Estes affair was not designed to throw the hound dogs off the trail. I knew that the Moody family was quite powerful in Galveston and that the Maceo family, also from Galveston, ran a criminal gambling empire that included Dallas, had ties to Jack Ruby, and, more importantly, had ties to Lansky, Marcello, and Trafficante. But this was all conjecture.. While reading Sally Denton and Roger Morris' The Money and the Power, however, I came across their assertion that the Moodys were connected to the Maceo family, and that the Moodys, even after the Maceo brothers died, continued on in the gambling trade, through an insurance company with massive investments in various Vegas hotels. Many of these hotels had ties to Lansky as well. Another piece of the puzzle comes from the realization that Galveston oilmen Johnny Mitchell (and his still-living billionaire brother George) were close friends with the Maceo brothers. So who is Johnny Mitchell, you might ask? Johnny Mitchell was my dad's boss at Jade Oil when I was a kid. I met him a number of times. He'd hand you a silver dollar and wink at you. Anyhow, when this really gets interesting, at least for me, is when you throw in that Mitchell was, according to Robert Maheu's memoirs, a close friend of Maheu's. He is in fact pretty much the only non-intelligence agent, non-lawyer, non-mobster, non-Hughes employee, in Maheu's book. Making it even more intriguing is that Maheu's wife purportedly met Mitchell and his wife in Florida, Trafficante's stomping ground. While all this probably means nothing, there is this additional fact. My mom has been telling the story for years that when LBJ came to Los Angeles in 67 or 68 to stay at the Century Plaza Hotel, the Secret Service tailed Mitchell and my father. Jade Oil's Century City offices were right down the street and Mitchell was purportedly placed on a watch list.. She said LBJ hated Mitchell from way back. I never believed her until recently. If one considers that it was around this time that LBJ read the IG report on the hits on Castro, and that, as a result, LBJ would have reason to suspect Maheu's and Rosselli's involvement in Kennedy's death, it makes sense that he would want the SS to keep close tabs on Maheu's friends, particularly oilmen with mob ties and with whom he had had a long-term feud. I recently uncovered this AP article from May 22, 1967. This was shortly after word had leaked about the Castro hits. This may have been around the time LBJ visited Los Angeles...(I still haven't placed an exact day to the visit.) Anyhow, the article reads... "More and more oilmen are saying President Johnson has junked his 1963 decision that the Interior Department--not the White House--set national oil policy. Johnson made the decison just 18 days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It was interpreted as an obvious effort for the new President to free himself in advance of any suggestion his Texas background might influence such policy matters. The decision drew relatively little criticism until two months ago when the Interior Department announced increased imports might be used as a weapon to force a rollback of a gasoline price hike....Johnny Mitchell, president of the Jade Oil Co. of Houston and Los Angeles, expressed regrets, but said the real problems of independent producers "can be traced down to our own President Johnson." Mitchell said Johnson, as a senator, failed when faced with an opportunity to have good import controls spelled into law. He said the Johnson administration now is cutting loopholes in the controls that became mandatory in 1959. "The attitude of our President has not swerved one inch from the pattern that the independent segment is no longer necessary and of concern to him or the nation," he said. Mitchell charged that the nation has been dependent upon foreign oil the past five years and no longer is in position oilwise to sustain a major war." While the timing and content of this article could have little relation to the Kennedy assassination, if Kennedy was killed by right-wing oilmen (as Johnson purportedly told his mistress) and LBJ knew it, Mitchell's comments could be interpreted as a veiled threat--"Look, we put you in office and now we want a piece of the Vietnam War pie." If LBJ saw this as a threat, moreover, and was aware of Mitchell's ties to Maheu, it would help explain the SS tails on Mitchell and my father. The more I look into the Galveston connection, the curiouser and curioser it gets...

Some New Yorkers also use axe innstead of ask. I once had a (gorgeous young black) female friend whose ambition was to go to law School. I spent considerable time coaching her in how to say "ask" instead of Axe. I told her that the trick was to first learn to say "Ass", and then learn to add the letter K. (True story, no kidding). This young lady had obviously been well brought up, and was reluctand to use the word "Ass." From what I have read, Lee Oswald was also brought up to avoid the use of vulgar language. I believe "Axe" is a Southern thing. Many of the tell-tale signs of Southern poverty---saying "axe," eating chitlins, greens, and eating other delicacies such as raccoon, appear to northerners as signs of black culture, primarily because the only Southerners most Northerners come in contact with are transplanted blacks. My dad was from Arkansas. We were the only white family I knew to eat scrambled cow brains and okrah.

Sid, the aceptance of "documentation" is often a subjective thing. One should always consider the source. The Glenn piece, for instance talks about the insulting references to Christ and the Virgin Mary in the Talmud, as if this was a proven fact. I did a little digging and found that Jeiwsh scholars have long-held that the references to Yeshu and Ben Panidra were references to people other than Christ. They hold that, if anything, Christ was a legend constructed from the earlier stories of Yeshu and Ben Panidra. Glenn's inclusion of this reference was an obvious attempt to incite Christians---these Jews blaspheme your God---you should hate them--when the affront was imaginary. I asked a few of my Jewish friends if they'd ever heard a Rabbi denigrate Jesus or Mary in Temple, and they all said that Jesus was never discussed, one way or the other.

Indeed, Mark. Saying "Axe" is indicative of low Southern birth. Some of my black friends cringe when they hear an African-American of Southern heritage say "Axe' instead of "Ask". To them, it's the same as hearing someone say "yessum, boss" or "massah".

You're kidding me. Because the curb cut MAY have been caused by a metal rim, we are supposed to ignore Tague's statements that he felt a sting during the shooting, not to mention the actual blood on his cheek? There was no traffic at the time to send an unseen rim flying towards the curb. The only way for your theory to hold true is for Tague to be a xxxx, or at least severely misguided. You may want to at least read his book before you make such claims.

Jeff, what I found disturbing about Glenn's post was his blindness to his own blindness. Ditto Sid. Whenever someone talks about the "Zionist agenda" blah blah blah, as if there is some big conspiracy beyond wanting a homeland, financial security, and to be left alone--THE SAME THINGS EVERY OTHER GROUP OF PEOPLE ON EARTH SEEM TO WANT-- I get a little queasy. Such an obvious and lame scapegoating of a relatively small number of people reeks of self-pity. "The world would have been super if those darned Jews didn't want a homeland." Yeah, right. What about every other darned group of people who ever wanted a homeland? Like those freakin' Americans who overthrew their King for lower taxes and gave an heroic face to revolution? What about the American agenda? What about the Aussie agenda? Yeah, let's get thrown out of our homeland for bad behavior and go to some isolated place where our only competition are some dingoes and some backwards natives and take their land and shoot the dingoes and natives alternately for sport? As far as Israel's supposed motivation in killing Kennedy? Yes, I agree...Israel's will to survive was such that IF they felt their backs were against the wall and their ONLY chance for survival was nukes, and IF Kennedy was the SOLE obstacle to their getting nukes, they would have killed him. After lining up like sheep for Hitler, they'd understandably vowed "never again." However, NONE of these circumstances were true. Kennedy was not a true obstacle. They illicitly developed nukes and faked out the inspectors. I don't believe there is any indication Kennedy could have prevented that. But, more importantly, there was no pressing need for nukes at that instant in time. Some 4 years later, using only conventional weapons, Israel absolutely obiterated their hostile neighbors. Absolutely destroyed them. Mopped up the floor with them. IMO, only someone with an irrational hatred of Israel would believe that israel was so desperate for nukes in 1964 that they would kill an American President, and risk losing the support of their Ace-in-the-hole, the good will of the American people. Maybe you'd have to step into my shoes to understand why I think it's so ridiculous. I was raised Christian but went to school with a number of Jews. Fifty percent of my elementary school friends were Jews. I spent a lot of time in Jewish homes. American Jews are most often Americans first and Jews second. For the most part, they would no sooner harm America to save Israel than an Irish cop would harm America to help Ireland. They think of Israel as their homeland, not as their land. For Israel to harm an American president, it would be risking the good will of not only the American people, but, more specifically, the Jewish-American people. That is unrealistic. That anyone would think that Israel can be ruthless is one thing. That someone would write a whole book whose central thesis holds that Jews are unnecessarily ruthless, and wreckless, and that this nonsensical version of history makes more sense than a book as well-grounded in reality as Larry Hancock's Someone Would Have Talked, or Anthony Summers' Not in Your Lifetime, is another. If someone would explain why Israel felt so incredibly desperate for nukes in 1964 that they would have no other option but to kill Kennedy, I'm willing to listen. How does Piper support that they had no alternative? Does he simply subscribe it to "bloodlust?"

Thank you Jeff - always nice to start the day with a link to a site of such sickening and easy racism I agree with you on this Andy. I do not consider myself a "supporter" of Israel, by any means. Yet even the most cursory understanding of history should enlighten one enough to realize that the Glenn piece is completely twisted and hateful. If Piper's book is anything like that, I wouldn't make it past the first chapter. The implication that Jews conspired with Nazis in order to create the momentum for Israel is one of the most offensive things I've ever read. Still it's worth reading this kind of propaganda in order to determine the reasons for its creation... This piece was clearly designed to appease Christians, and convince them they have more in common with Muslims than Jews. In order to do this, it seeks to turn history on its head, and depict the historical persecution of Jews by Christians, as justifiable, in that Jews have dared think they were the chosen people (when we all know it's the Christians, wink-wink) and are today, as ever, secretly running the world. (I love the way it implicates The Last Temptation of Christ, a movie made by an American Catholic, into this vast Jewish conspiracy--what rubbish!!) Goebbels would have been proud.

That's a good point, Mark, particularly as, according to Finck, the only wounds expert to inspect the wound, the wound was "transversal," heading right to left across the back of the skull. If this wound were created with Kennedy leaning sharply to his left, it would indicate the bullet traveled sharply downwards. I think Tom is absolutely correct in that the third loud sound heard by most was fired after 313, but I'm skeptical this shot hit anything.

John, the Tague strike almost certainly occurred. It was reported at the time. The FBI ignored it, the WC ignored it, and then Tague himself brought attention to it, and the WC had to take notice. He initially thought the shots came from the fence, so he wasn't pushing the lone-gunman from the TSBD angle. After the WC report came out, like most Americans, he believed it. Later, as he read more about it, and befriended Harold Weisberg, he came to believe there was a conspiracy. Tague was a successful businessman, and, until recent years, never sought to capitalize on his unique connection to history. If he and Walthers faked the strike for attention, it would be quite a coincidence that Tague just so happened to have been stuck in traffic and just so happened to have been in a direct line with the limousine and TSBD at 313. As a result I find him quite credible. As you said, the missing fragment could very well have been as large as a .22. A .22 traveling at 4-500 fps in a stiff breeze will be deflected quite a bit, the fragment even more so since it wasn't completely round. BUT the amount of this deflection would be in the order of yards. If I remember correctly the Tague location was several yards to the right of the 313 trajectory. As a result his location lines up perfectly if one assumes the fragment striking the curb came from the head shot bullet. If one tries to state the shot came at any other time, and was a miss, one is forced to submit that either the assassin/assassins were horrible shots, or something totally idiotic like Posner's "twig" theory occurred, in which a metal-jacketed bullet fired sharply downwards from above struck a twig and separated, with the bulk of its lead interior drastically changing course and striking the ground some 400 feet away.

John, the Tague fragment is not nearly the mystery it seems to be, once one realizes that it was a fragment from the head shot and not a sepaqate bullet strike. Sturdivan and Rahn have a whole section on this on Rahn's website. Sturdivan maintains that fragments exit skulls at hundreds of feet per second and that a large enough fragment--more than a third of the head shot bullet was never found--would have enough energy to travel to Tague and damage the curb. He performs a series of calculations demonstrating this. It made sense to me at the time. If you take a look and find something wrong with their thinking on this point please let me know.

Unfortunately, I understand where this is comng from... Some months ago, I sent an email to an historian letting him know of my recent research into the medical evidence. He sent me an email congratulating me on my outstanding work, etc, but when his book came out he repeated the same old crap, much of it debunked in the same work he'd just called "simply outstanding." It seems that there is a limit as to how many times the media will allow themselves to change their minds. For some it was "Oswald acted alone, wait Garrison said it was the CIA, wait there's nothing to Garrison's charges, wait the HSCA said it was a probable conspiracy, wait the Justice Department says there's nothing to it...that's it, then...Shut up Ollie Stone...Thank You, Gerald Posner!!! Now we can go to our graves feeling we did all we could to uncover the truth of the biggest stories of our lifetimes...but wait, you have evidence that proves that Posner is full of it....I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT. GO AWAY!"

Bill, I recently went through the eyewitness statements and examined them quite closely. The only close-by witnesses to hear three shots and not note that one of the shots was within a split second of the head shot were Nellie Connally and Gayle Newman. When one reads their statements closely one realizes they were both in rapid movement at the time and were not looking directly at the president after the head shot. I believe their rapid movements blurred the sound of the last two shots into the sound of one shot. They also were the only witnesses to hear two EARLY shots. This is not a coincidence. Gayle Newman was looking directly at the President and Connally when the first two shots struck. She saw responses to both shots. Nellie Connally was also aware of two separate shots. Both women seem to have matched the sounds they heard to match the responses they observed. The governor on the other hand acknowledged he did not hear the shot that struck him. While the WC and the mainstream media was quick to jump on the "he was in shock" excuse, they overlooked that NO ONE else, outside his wife and Gayle Newman, "heard" this shot. As a result, I feel 99.9% confident that the impacts on Kennedy and Connally at frame 224 were from a silenced weapon. LNers who cite the blurs on the Z-film after 160 and 224 fail to notice that the blur after 190 is much much greater, so much so that the HSCA's William Hartmann said that the only two blurs he felt sure were from gun shots was the one after 190 and the one after 313 (not having studied the eyewitness testimony he failed to realize there were two shots after Z-312, with separate and quite evident responses by Zapruder.)

While I have spent much of the last year reading Sturdivan's book, and catching mistakes, I think his and Ken Rahn's work on this fragment makes sense. They are so incredibly Rahng about the NAA one should hope they'd be right about something. (There is a whole section on this fragment in Rahn's book-length defense of the NAA, available on his site.) When I realized that the bullet at 313 did not travel through Kennedy's skull, but broke up on the outside (as proven by the x-rays) and when I realized that the trajectory for the Tague fragment passed within a foot or so of the trajectory for the fragment striking the windhshield, I became convinced that they were correct. The base of the bullet found by Kellerman's door was void of lead. The fragment striking the curb by Tague was made entirely of lead, as near as can be determined. A bit of a coincidence, to my thinking.

My two cents on Piper and his theory... While he has successfully demonstrated that it is a possible theory, his theory is nowhere near as probable as a theory with the mob and anti-Castro Cubans at center stage. The speculation that Israel felt JFK's opposition to their having a bomb was worthy of a death sentence is basically unsupported, to my knowledge. Are there tapes of Israeli leaders discussing how best to kill Kennedy? Did credible sources admit their involvement to their families or personal attorneys? It seems clear that Piper's own feelings about Israel crept into his theory. This doesn't make his book unworthy of our attention. Like the Warren Report and Case Closed, and most every assassination-related book, however, one should read it with the understanding that it is slanted to fit an agenda. I have yet to read it, but will do so when I stumble across a cheap copy.

Tom, is there anything explaining how the SS determined the location of the shots during their survey? It seems possible they just half-assed it, sayng well, Kennedy was shot when he came from behind the sign, and the head-shot was somewhere near the steps, so the second shot must have come somewhere in between... To my eye, the location of the car in their second shot is some distance closer to the camera than at 313.

An excellent summary, Tony. While the Badens, Lattmers and Posners of the world have focused on "is it possible?" those who have focused on "is it likely?" have come up with entirely different results. None of the three bullets you describe was "likely" to behave as purported in the "official" line of nonsense. As someone who calls it as he sees it, however, I must admit I believe there are rational, non-conspiratorial explanations for some of the mysteries. Much of the confusion revolving around the Tague fragment comes from his insistence that the fragment did not come from the final shot. People incorrectly take this to mean the head shot. But, as Tom has long insisted, and as I hope to soon demonstrate, the head shot was the second of the three shots heard by most in the Plaza. As a result it seems likely that the Tague fragment was the missing piece of the bullet striking Kennedy at 313. The other mystery which has a rational explanation is the "slice" of bullet purportedly on the back of Kennedy's head. I feel entirely confident that this "slice" was in fact the large fragment found during the autopsy above and behind Kennedy's right eye. In my online presentation, available at the link below, in the X-ray section, on the Believing is Seeing and The Fragment Fragment slides, I demonstrate the actual location of this fragment on the lateral x-ray, and explain the difficulties men have had in matching up the x-rays. I "debuted" this conclusion at JFK Lancer last year, and took my findings to an online radiology forum earlier this year, and have yet to receive any real disagreement on this point.

A friend of mine just gave me an old Bell and Howell Zoomatic camera. It was his family's camera and hasn't worked for decades. It is non-functioning. It appears to be the same model and make as zap's. Is there anything we can learn from this camera?

The Wikipedia entry is helpful on this issue. Ironically, people who quote Goebbels and Hitler on the use of the Big Lie are unwittingly quoting an OSS report! I have that report somewhere, and will have to find it and go back through it. Big Lie From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search The phrase Big Lie refers to a propaganda technique which entered mass consciousness with Adolf Hitler's 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf. In that book Hitler wrote that people came to believe that Germany lost World War I in the field due to a propaganda technique used by Jews who were influential in the German press. This technique, he believed, consisted of telling a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe anyone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". The first documented use of the phrase "big lie" is in the corresponding passage: "in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility".¹ Later, Joseph Goebbels put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the phrase big lie. In this theory, the English are attributed with using a propaganda technique wherein they had the mendacity to "lie big" and "stick to it".² There is an uncited rumor to the effect that Goebbels also offered up his version of the big lie technique without attributing it to either Jewish or Allied propaganda. That uncited quote is the most wide-spread attribution of the big lie, and it is usually given in a context where the implication is that the propaganda technique was invented by Goebbels, who was the propaganda minister for the Third Reich.³ The phrase was also used (on page 51) in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler's psychological profile [1] His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. - OSS report page 51 [2] [edit]

The question of "sectioning" the brain is a good one and one rarely discussed. Is it a coincidence that the brain ended up with Burkley, and that Burkley was the one who later raised the issue of two head wounds? While it is easy to attack the initial autopsy, particularly as so many doctors, including Helpern, Baden, and Wecht, have piled on, what few realize is how incompetent and/or biased were the subsequent examinations, supposedly by America's best and brightest. When one studies the medical evidence as intently as I have, it's difficult to come away with much respect for the AMA and the American medical establishment as a whole. I suspect there are thousands of doctors who know the single-bullet theory is bs, for example, but who will never publicly say as much because.... it would be bad for business.

John, are there no other factors involved, like how many hits the site receives daily? My girlflriend's web page shows up on google, and it has no attached links whatsover.

To set the record straight, Mark S, Tom is not the only single-assassin conspiracist. John Canal, the author of Silencing the Lone Assassin, who writes on the McAdams newsgroup, believes that Oswald did it, completely alone, but that the Johnson Administration thought there may have been others, and faked mucho evidence to convince the public Oswald acted alone. Recently, when discussing the case with him on the newsgroup, I was put in the position of defending the HSCA forensic pathology panel, by claiming they were merely blind and incompetent, not part of a conspiracy. I tried to point out the irony that a conspiracy theorist was the one arguing against conspiracy, but no one seemed to notice. In lone-nut land, if you think Oswald did it, no matter what else you think, you are one of them, a good guy. If you think there was a conspiracy to shoot Kennedy, on the other hand, you are a wacko, and your sanity and patriotism are immediately suspect.

Dr. Pierre Finck International Call: 011-41-22-342-8296 Switzerland. (many years back) However, rest assured that he will not discuss it with you. Tom The ARRB gave Finck the chance to set the record straight, and he claimed to not remember over and over again. Either he really doesn't remember, or he is determined not to recount some of the details. I believe he's told us quite a bit, albeit indirectly. For instance, his February 67 trip report tells us the January 67 "military review" of the autopsy materials in which the head wound was moved was written by the Justice Depart, and his 1965 letter to his superiors tells us the EOP entrance was transversal and that there was no beveling on the skull at the exit (the only beveling was on the large skull fragment). His words are central to a proper understanding of the "mystery photo."

I have Breach of Trust. What I was getting at is that there is nothing in the CIA files that says "we conclude there was more than one shooter," there is only McKnight's interpretation from the numbers on the NPIC sheets that there was more than one shooter. As the FBI were the ones to test the Carcano, and determine that it needed a minimum of 2.3 seconds between shots, and the SS and/or CIA were the ones to perform the NPIC analysis, there is no reason to assume the NPIC people knew about the 2.3 seconds, and no reason to assume the FBI knew about the NPIC analysis. If the Kennedy assassination shows us anything it's that the compartments of the government do not share information and do not cooperate with each. There is not one evil government; there is a multitude of incompetent and self-serving bureaucracies. The FBI didn't even look at the autopsy report for over a month after the assassination.