Pat Speer

There was an investigation into this. Nothing was missing. The only thing touched was the autopsy photos. As I recall these were copies and not the originals. No one familiar with the photos, moreover, such as Groden, noticed any changes in the photos after the Blahut incident. It appears, then, that someone left the safe open and Blahut was just curious. Now, he may have been asked by a superior to figure out what was shown in the pictures and if the CIA should be worried about any upcoming revelations. But he denied any such thing.

A couple of points. Gil is probably correct in that if the WC were an actual trial, the prosecutors would have been more diligent in establishing the chains of evidence. But, having read a number of books on evidence, etc, I have to point out that evidence prepared by the prosecution is almost always admitted into evidence, even if the FIRST person on the scene could not ID it later. What matters is that someone who was proven to be on the scene IDs it. Now, if, in fact, the first responders refuse to ID and even express doubts about the authenticity of a piece of evidence, this could be used to raise doubt about that piece of evidence. But I don't see it preventing the introduction of that evidence. (This applies to the medical evidence as well. While some claim the autopsy photos and x-rays would not be admitted into evidence for this reason or that they are flailing--the reality is that they would be admitted because the creators of these items IDed them as photos and x-rays they'd made of JFK. The only possible exception would be the brain photos--which Stringer failed to recognize while in his late 70's, but which he'd viewed a number of times previously without comment.)

Absolutely not. It would be like telling the NBA they need two Republican referees and two Democratic referees at every game. They are supposed to keep politics out of their decisions. If they make bad decisions then they are bad moderators, not bad Democrats or bad Republicans.

As a former moderator, who moderated the forum when it was much more argumentative than it is today, I can say that the moderators never asked nor knew each other's politics. There are certain kinds of behavior that are accepted and certain kinds that are not. Period. It has nothing to do with politics. People who yell and/or whine about others, who are madly in love with their opinions on this or that--whether it be Jews, the Deep State, this or that hoax, or this or that conspiracy, end up in the corner. It's pretty much like kindergarten.

The last claim is deceptive. While there is no proof it was an entry wound, there is eyewitness evidence supporting that it was small--too small to have been an exit for a high velocity bullet. It follows then that it was either an exit of a bullet or fragment traveling at a low velocity, or an entrance for a bullet whose exit or lack of exit remains a mystery.

From chapter 18c:

To my recollection, there were two nearly-identically-named segments of the CIA: Domestic Contacts Service and Domestic Operations Division. To my recollection, the first dealt primarily with American citizens who had traveled abroad, and the second kept tabs on foreign nationals residing within the U.S. I definitely recall thinking that whatever ops were aimed at Lechuga would have been handled by the DOD. I also seem to recall that McCord was involved with this as well. But maybe I'm just hallucinating after watching too many Watergate-related programs.

No, the point is that he may have been working for the D.O.D. Not that they would have been spying on him.

I don't really think we're that far apart. I just don't think it's appropriate to paint Trump as a victim of anything, when he would have gladly killed you and me and the kiddos down the street to hold onto power, and paint the White House gold. It should be pointed out, however, that the advisers surrounding LBJ and the Bushes were not Rumpelstilskin-like weirdos waltzing in from the closet but hand-picked advisers that they could and, often did, fire, when they wouldn't tell them what they wanted to hear. Witness McNamara--who was given the quick boot after seeing the pointlessness of the war in Vietnam, and urging LBJ to head in another direction.

I looked into this almost 20 years ago, and was able to document both Barnes' working as head of the D.O.D. and that Hunt worked under him. I was also able to document what the D.O.D. did. I supplied this info to Larry Hancock and as I recall he included it in an update to his book Someone Would Have Talked. The most interesting aspect to this, as I recall, is that the D.O.D. could not spy on U.S. citizens living in the U.S. but COULD spy on (and try to double) foreign nationals living in the United States. Well this led me to wonder if they were spying on and trying to double the Cuban Ambassador to the U.N., whose mistress just so happened to be Oswald's contact in Mexico City, Sylvia Duran. If so--if Oswald went to Mexico City as part of an operation designed to entangle the Cuban ambassador to the U.N.--well that could explain a lot, perhaps even his supposedly partying with Duran and his supposedly writing a Dear Mr Hunt letter.

Wait... So Trump being bad messes with your worldview where the REAL bad guys are unseen bureaucrats? I'm sorry to mess with your fantasy. But when you study human nature and American politics in tandem it's INCREDIBLY clear the largest threat to Democracy in the U.S. from day one, has been an Imperial Presidency--where a President feels he is a king, and can violate the law willy-nilly, and overturn elections, etc. Trump has been the founders' worst nightmare, not Allen Dulles, nor Richard Helms, nor J. Edgar Hoover. Those men could be fired, and the first two were, essentially. One of the key points about Watergate which is missed by those anxious to paint Nixon as a victim is that the Plumbers unit was formed because J. Edgar Hoover--freaklin' Hoover!!!--wasn't corrupt enough for Nixon's tastes. I mean, Mark Felt may have been a total tool in most every respect, but he was sickened by the FBI's being turned into a finger puppet of Nixon's--in the form of L. Pat Gray--and decided to do something about it. Long live Deep Throat! And if that is what you'd like us too fear (Deep Throat=Deep State or some such thing), Long live the Deep State!

I don't have the energy to read through all this stuff, but saw some discussion of the Office of Legal Counsel. I did a lot of research on it once upon a time. Its primary role differs from the AG. While the AG is responsible for enforcing the laws, the OLC is essentially a mob lawyer for the President, coming up with bs rationale for his breaking the law. When Bush wanted to torture people, for example, he "consulted" with the OLC, and they came up with some cock-a-mamie argument that torture was legal. When you look back through history you see this over and over. The President wants to engage in some questionable behavior, and the OLC comes up with a questionable claim it's legal. It is primarily a political position, and the heads of OLC have routinely been rewarded for their service to the President and disservice to the country...some even with seats on the Supreme Court.

Posner is full of it, as usual. No one said they saw the SS clean up the driver's seat. Here is what they said... An 11-22-63 UPI article, most likely reflecting the words of UPI’s man-on-the-scene Merriman Smith, reported on this clean-up, stating: “Outside the hospital, blood was cleaned from the limousine.” An 11-23-63 New York Times story by Tom Wicker similarly reported, “A bucket of water stood by the car, suggesting that the back seat had been scrubbed out.” (In the 1965 anthology John Fitzgerald Kennedy...As We Remember Him, and then again in his 1978 book On Press, Wicker explained just why this bucket suggested as much and specified that it wasn't just a bucket of water, but “a bucket of bloody water.”) An article on the assassination by Hugh Sidey in the 12-20-63 issue of Time Magazine confirmed these accounts, and claimed he'd witnessed: “A young man, I assume he was a Secret Service man, with a sponge and a bucket of red water, and he was trying to wipe up the blood and what looked like flakes of flesh and brains in the back seat.” (Sidey repeated this allegation in an 11-28-88 Time article. He wrote: "The presidential limousine rested at Parkland Hospital. A grim young man was washing away the blood and flesh that had splattered the leather upholstery...The young man in his neat dark suit, sleeves pushed up, swabbed the seats. They glistened in their miserable wetness. Beside the car was a bucket with brownish red water. If any doubt remained about this calamity, it was swept away in one glance at that bucket. So simple. so hideous." ) And as if that weren't enough, Newsweek’s Charles Roberts also confirmed these accounts. In his 1967 defense of the Warren Report, modestly entitled The Truth About The Assassination, Roberts said simply that on 11-22-63 he saw two Secret Service men "starting to put the fabric top" on the President's limo, and thought "Why now?" Now that was vague, but Roberts would later expand on this. In an interview conducted for Robert MacNeil's 1988 book The Way we Were, Roberts admitted that he'd actually seen these agents “mop up the back seat” before putting on the fabric top, and that he'd thought it “ironic” that one of the Secret Service agents waved him aside and told him “you can’t look,” when "this wall of protection...of course could do no good." And then, for good measure, there's Sid Davis, a reporter for Westinghouse Radio. On 11-9-13, in a taped interview with The Newseum, Davis shared that when he arrived at Parkland Hospital ”'I could see the Secret Service agents cleaning up the back of the limousine. I went to take a look and a friend of mine, Hugh Sidey of Time Magazine, said 'Don’t look, it’s too horrible.'"

To me it's quite clear what happened. Trump was trying to be the big man, and boasted about how he was gonna release everything in defiance of the deep state, etc. It was then pointed out to him that many of the redactions protected identities and relationships that could prove embarrassing to the government, or even get someone killed, should they be revealed. It was then pointed out to him that should this happen it would be on him, and he would look weak, like Jimmy Carter. So he was "Well then let's not release the stuff, we can't have that!" The problem, of course, is that he should have put out something on each withheld doc saying why it was being withheld. But that would have required effort., So he kicked the can down the road. And now Biden is pretty much doing the same. The number of withheld documents has shrunk dramatically, but we still don't know why those still being withheld are being withheld, and if there's anything in there that will ignite the interest of historians.

Even if Trump were telling the truth about what he thought he saw in the documents, we have no reason to believe his impressions were accurate. There are docs currently available which repeat rumors or theories presented in books. Trump, in his brilliance, may have thought the rumors or theories repeated in CIA docs were the theories of the CIA itself.

The record has long been obvious, IMO, that JFK was both trying to overthrow Castro and trying to make nice with Castro. This is how it is done, people. You work both ends. If you make headway on the one end then you might stop working the other. But until that time... It should be noted, moreover, that this wasn't from a lack of conviction on his part. He was a smart man. The current situation--a Russian puppet off the coast of Florida--was unacceptable. So he worked a number of options to change that situation. Should Castro have turned his back on Russia and sought a relationship with the U.S., It would have been fine. Should some exiles have overtaken Castro, that would have been fine as well. As far as "re-sinking the Maine", that is not a reference to a Northwoods like operation, where innocents would be killed. It's a reference to taking advantage of a propaganda opportunity, should one arise. Kinda like LBJ did with the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

I'm not sure if you're aware, Leslie, but the whole Prayer Man thing started right here, on this forum. Some relative newbies to the forum were trying out new ideas. I was actually intrigued by the idea PM was Oswald but was kind of alarmed at the enthusiasm they were showing to something I considered unlikely. When I admitted that I thought Prayer Man could be a woman, well, I was deemed a heretic, and some of the faithful ran off to worship in their own church where they wouldn't have to listen to heretics such as myself. So you're onto something, I think. The Prayer Man belief took shape at a time the body alteration/photo alteration/film alteration branch of Conspiracy research (in the form of James Fetzer) was driving people away. The recently intrigued needed something of their own, and VOILA!, up popped Prayer Man. And, yes, I'm serious. I used to be a regular attendee at the conferences, and got to know people like Lane, Wecht, Thompson, Marrs, Groden, and Aguilar. And when I asked them what they thought of Prayer Man, they would give me a blank stare. They hadn't heard of it, and/or didn't take it seriously. Not a one. To them, It was something the newbies played with on the internet. As a relative newbie myself, of course, I knew full well that even if there were no problems with Prayer Man, it would take awhile before the old guard caught on. But there were problems. Lots of 'em.

Nice post, Jeremy. I wish you'd had that at the ready a decade or so ago, when certain people were endlessly arguing that the photos were confiscated and faked via a CIA photo alteration lab set up in the parking lot next to the TSBD.

You just don't get it, Michael. it's junk science. It's an old tape with some crackles on it that don't even sound like gunshots, The evidence suggests, moreover, that It was not recorded in Dealey Plaza. The rest is smoke designed to impress people. We know Olivier, Sturdivan, Alvarez, Guinn, Canning, and Baden, et al, blew smoke. So why is it so hard to imagine that another couple of experts blew smoke? The best way to see something is to view it from a variety of angles. Let's assume that instead of a dictabelt, it's a blurry film which is purported to show Oswald firing upon Kennedy. Only... 1. It doesn't actually show Oswald in the sniper's nest window, but instead shows a blurry figure crouching down. 2. The cameraman credited with taking the footage says he didn't take the footage, and that he wasn't even looking at the sniper's nest at the time of the shooting. And yet some "experts" have concluded the blurry shape is in fact Lee Harvey Oswald, because they have concluded some combination of dots in the blurry image could only have been created if the camera was pointed at someone who looked exactly like Oswald. In such case, I think you would agree that these "experts" were agenda-driven, and blowing smoke.

Yes, but government agencies are usually scared of upsetting the President and treat his "statement" as law, when it is actually not law, and is frequently at odds with the law. Once upon a time, the President would send a law back to be tweaked if he disagreed with parts of it. Now Presidents just sign it, and add a statement saying they are gonna do whatever they want. Yet another example of an out-of-control executive branch.

We have every reason to suspect that there is embarrassing stuff that has been redacted, that (at least to the minds of those not entirely immersed in JFKA research) has nothing to do with the assassination itself. The security apparatus within the U.S. intelligence agencies has been embarrassed lately, first by a former President who sneaks off with some documents to show his friends (or worse), and second by a dumb kid who puts top secret documents up on a gamer website to impress some nerd boys. You gotta believe they don't want to release anything that could add to this embarrassment, and would rather error on the side of caution than make themselves look stupid...again.

The acoustics evidence is purported to reflect that he neither accelerated nor slammed on his brakes for more than 30 seconds after the shooting. The original experts said he maintained a constant speed throughout the shooting and then afterwards, like he was oblivious. This would have put him under the triple overpass at the time he was photographed in the Bond photo. So Thomas tried to correct their error, and claimed instead that he stopped accelerating two seconds before the first shot, maintained a speed of 11 mph as he turned onto Elm, and then slowed to a constant crawl--idling speed--for the next 30 seconds. The problem is that 1) McLain said he did not do this, 2) no one saw him do this, 3) he is not visible in the Wiegman film when Wiegman briefly turns his camera to where Thomas says he was, and 4) the "idling" speed suggested by Thomas is far slower than the actual idling speed for a Harley. We've seen this before. Someone puts together a theory that's supposed to answer the big questions. It is then pointed out that this theory has major holes. So someone else comes along and tweaks it a bit. Only this "tweak" is no better and only shows how questionable this theory was from day one. I am speaking of course of the single-bullet theory. But there's also NAA, which CTs claimed would answer the big questions, until Vincent Guinn testified before the HSCA that it supported the SBT. People then began to question his conclusions, and realized he was largely blowing smoke. Well, this then led to a number of articles by Rahn and Sturdivan in which they tried to resurrect Guinn's findings (much as Thomas has now tried to resurrect the findings of the HSCA acoustics experts). In any event, the scientific community eventually dismissed NAA for bullet lead as being unreliable, and sent it into the cornfield along with a lot other questionable science, like bite-mark analysis, and. to a lesser extent, handwriting analysis. Now, with the acoustics evidence, we have a tape which 1) has impulses, not shots, 2) has these impulses at a time which appears to have been after the event in question, 3) has these impulses in a pattern that has been corrected to make it fit a presumed scenario, 4) has impulses that are purported to match up perfectly with how shots would be recorded on a motorcycle microphone starting at a certain point while traveling at a specific speed, which fails to align with the known location of any motorcycle. Now, to add insult to injury, it turns out that the rider of the motorcycle presumed to have been where the recording started insisted 1) he wasn't where he was supposed to have been, 2) his microphone was not on the channel on which the impulses were recording, and 3) he knew of sounds that should have been recorded should the mic in question have been his mic, that were not, in fact, recorded. And, oh yeah, there's also the photographic evidence--ALL of which present the motorcycle far behind the location where it would need to have been to pick up the impulses as ID'ed by the acoustics experts. Now, our familiarity with the SBT tells us that the doctors said they found no passage from the back wound into the body, and that Specter "corrected" this by claiming that the trajectory of the bullet creating this wound led between two bruised strap muscles, and this suggested that it did indeed pass. Specter then stood by this bs for the rest of his life. Never mind that the strap muscles are on the front of the neck, etc. Well, I see a close parallel in the acoustics evidence. The acoustics faithful hit a wall, similar to the doctors' stating they found no entrance to the body. Only their wall was that they failed to find a motorcycle where they thought there ought to be one. So, much as Specter pretended there were some bruises on some back muscles, and continued to pretend this for the rest of his life, the acoustics faithful continue to pretend McLain rode the motorcycle whose microphone picked up the impulses. It's total crap. It amazes me, moreover, how the same people claiming the HSCA's pathology panel had a bias, and blew smoke, and the HSCA's trajectory expert had a bias, and blew smoke, and the HSCA's NAA expert had a bias, and blew smoke, refuse to accept the possibility the acoustics experts were also blowing smoke, only in a different direction.

But that's not what he said, Bill. He said he was a "patsy". A patsy is not someone wrongly dragged into a police station to be interviewed. A patsy is someone played for a fool, someone set up to take the blame for someone else's crime. Here is the definition: noun,plural pat·sies. Slang. a person who is easily swindled, deceived, coerced, persuaded, etc.; sucker. a person upon whom the blame for something falls; scapegoat; fall guy. While one may choose to believe he was lying, there is no doubt Oswald claimed he was a fall-guy, i.e someone set up to take the blame for someone else's crime. Essentially, then, he was admitting there was evidence against him, but was claiming this evidence was manufactured as part of a plot. This is in keeping moreover with what he told his wife and brother--that they could disregard the "so-called" evidence.

Of course, I've read Thomas' articles. Have you read (and understood) my article, where I went through all his musings about McLain's location, and showed that they were nonsense? I mean, I've met Thomas. I like him just fine. And I love Tink. But they are just wrong about this. As far as the specifics of how impulses are recorded etc, I was surprisingly impressed with Mantik's presentation at one of Gary's conferences. I don't remember the specifics but I remember that he found several instances where square pegs were cut to fit into round holes. As I recall, the impulses on the tape did not fit the shot sequence, so they made what they claimed was a reasonable adjustment, etc. In short, David Mantik--someone with whom I frequently disagree--made what was to me a compelling argument that the impulses on the tape were not related to the shooting and that the acoustics evidence was polluted by confirmation bias. Ironic as heck, I know.

Come on, Michael. Thomas admits it's McLain in Bond. And he recognizes that for McLain to be in Bond, he could not have been traveling at the speed the HSCA acoustics experts assumed he was. So he stands by their conclusions of the motorcycle's speed during the shot sequence and proposes that he slowed down dramatically just after. By doing so, it makes Wiegman's presence on the knoll seem possible. But it's nonsense. Here, see for yourself. Here's his exhibit showing McLain's movements across the plaza. Note that the triangles represent his location at each second. Note that he has him turn the corner without slowing, and then slow down dramatically and putt-putt across the plaza after the shooting. Note also that this should have put him right in front of Wiegman in the early frames of his film, but that he is nowhere to be seen in that film. (Because he wasn't there.)