Pat Speer

It was not a written dissent. It was a transcript of one of the final WC sessions. What you are probably thinking of is the transcript of a phone call between Russell and Johnson after the WC session, in which Russell said he didn't believe in the SBT and Johnson said he didn't either. This was not part of the Warren Commission's records and only became available in the 90's. P.S. I was wrong. Russell's dissent was subsequently found in his papers. A link is provided in a subsequent post.

Russell had an assistant, Alfreda Scobey as I recall, who attended hearings and kept him informed as to what was said. Russell was Johnson's mentor when he first came to the Senate. Johnson told Russell he was to be Johnson's eyes and ears on the commission, but there is reason to suspect Johnson was in no small part playing Russell, and that he really wanted Russell to be sidelined from the fight over civil rights. Russell didn't bite, however, and tried to both follow the WC hearings and spear-head the fight against civil rights legislation. He would later insist, moreover, that he disbelieved the SBT and wanted his dissent on this point included in the commission's report. Warren, however, wanted a unanimous report, and so (presumably) ordered the destruction of the transcript in which Russell's objections were raised. After being made aware of this fact by Weisberg, for that matter, Russell cut off contact with Johnson.

Walt Brown detailed all this in his book The Warren Omission. He re-read all the testimony, noted who was in attendance, noted who left mid-testimony, and noted how many questions were asked by each commissioner. As I recall, Dulles (who was retired) attended the most hearings, but even he was not totally into it. I am not aware of a link showing Brown's chart, but Jim D mentions in his recent book that Dulles (1/7 of the commission) ended up asking 31% of the questions asked by commissioners. That's twice what one would expect, but is not surprising in that he was actually in attendance roughly twice the average. (Russell, we should recall, only attended a few hearings.)

Geez. I am for the release of the freakin' records, but there are tons of legitimate reasons to redact sections of some of them. This becomes obvious when you see what has gradually been released, things like operations within Mexico of which the Mexican police were unaware, etc... I think the CIA et al are correct in that the withholding of this kind of info--if still secret--is justifiable. What we need, IMO, is a proper accounting by some sort of middleman--perhaps a team of researchers with some common sense--who can look through un-redacted copies of what is currently being withheld and release what people are really interested in, such as what Joannides was up to, etc...as opposed to revealing the names of every informant and the existence of every previously unknown operation. I mean, tons of damaging stuff has been released in the past, stuff like the Northwoods docs, the HSCA medical testimony, the CIA's Manual on Assassination, and hit lists provided by the CIA to Cuban rebels. So its clear stuff is not being withheld purely because it's embarrassing or runs contradictory to the single-assassin solution. It's time the rest of the stuff gets released...with the appropriate redactions.

I read the article, and found it informative. But Litwin's conclusion (holding that none of the remaining redactions are of any importance) is pure flapdoodle. Just as there is bad logic in conspiracy thinking, there is bad logic in no-conspiracy thinking. I mean John McAdams was a smart man, but in his book JFK Assassination Logic he pushed one of the dumbest, most drool on the floor stupid, arguments I've ever read. He pushed that when a lot of people confess to something, or a lot of eyewitnesses suggest an alternative scenario to what investigators have concluded, we can assume none of the people confessing are telling the truth, and none of the witness reports are accurate. Such self-serving crap would earn an F in a high school class, and yet here it was being pushed by a college professor in a book on logic. Embarrassing. Of course, there's crap on both sides of the divide. We should never forget that one of the most disruptive and erratic CTs over the recent decades was a professor of critical thinking. So there's that.

Well, I hope you have fun in Antarctica. There's this unwritten agreement in all societies, that a certain amount of liberty must be sacrificed for the greater good. Just as there are laws against speeding...because speeding leads to the deaths of innocent people, there are laws against certain drugs, because the widespread use of these drugs leads to the deaths of innocent people. Now it's obvious marijuana was wrongly included on this list of dangerous drugs, but I don't think anyone can make a similar case for heroin, meth, or crack, etc... I suppose you think felons should be allowed to own machine guns, too. I mean, purely theoretically, where do you draw the line between freedom and security? Or how about philosophically? Are people more "free" when they are in constant fear for their lives? Or are in constant fear of some person (or company) seducing their children for sex, or money, after getting them addicted. Now, there are harmful addictions that are not illegal, such as looking at porn, trolling on the internet, viewing TikTok, and eating at McDonald's, but even these addictions are controlled at times. You can't create or view porn involving children, for example, and the government cracked down on the sugar content in children's cereals. Not to get too personal, but in my experience, people who "subscribe to the principle of liberty" rarely have children. It's not that they hate children, IMO, it's that once they become a parent, they understand why the "principle of liberty" needs to be balanced by the public good. I suspect that this is because being a parent means controlling someone's liberty for their own good. I mean, I can't imagine any parent supporting the right of pornographers to recruit at high school pep rallies, or the right of anti-semites to show up at Hebrew School with their AK-47s.

I feel sorry for you.

FWIW, I met Plumlee once in Dealey Plaza. He was looking at the angles for a shooter from the South Knoll along with Sherry Fiester, as I recall. To my recollection, Plumlee was treated with respect by most everyone on this forum, outside Gerry Hemming, who routinely attacked him. I'm also fairly certain Plumlee left this forum not because people--including those with ties to the Mary Ferrell Foundation--disrespected him, but because he wanted to cut all ties with the "truthers' on this forum, who had taken to claiming 9/11 was a hoax, and that an airplane didn't hit the Pentagon.

FWIW, at one time I looked at the timing of Truman's statement regarding the CIA, and concluded he was not talking about the Kennedy assassination, but about the situation in Vietnam. It had been reported that the CIA was undermining Kennedy's (actually Lodge's) policies in Vietnam. As I recall, the chief of station Richardson was against the coup then in planning, and Lodge and others wanted him out. So they planted some stories in the press about the CIA being out of control, and forced Richardson's removal. I seem to recall as well that Richardson's son was on the forum at one point, and basically said the same thing, But it was a long time ago, and my memory is a bit foggy.

The CIA was almost dismantled in the 70's. Its bad behavior had been exposed and Jimmy Carter tried to push it from being the department of dirty tricks to being chiefly an intelligence-gathering organization. This trend was reversed during the Reagan years. Some at the time thought this was no coincidence, and that the crash of Carter's presidency along with the crash of an American rescue mission in Iran, was no accident.

FWIW, I find Lance's question fairly silly. We have no reason to believe ANY of these directors had an interest in what was in the JFK files, or even had the wherewithal to understand what they were looking at if they did look at them. Schlesinger is a dirty word within the CIA because he forced agents to cough up the "family jewels" I don't believe any director has followed in his footsteps. To go back to the McDonald's analogy, let's say there was a time when McDonald's had a rat problem--as in their burgers being 2% rat. Let's say then that this was exposed, and that a new CEO came aboard and had someone perform a detailed study that was supposed to remain top secret, in which the rat problem was identified. Suppose this CEO and the next two over a five year period publicly claimed they'd fixed the rat problem. And that the stock value of the company returned to its pre-rat crisis levels. Now, say, a new CEO comes aboard 25 years down the road. Does he ask for a new rat study? Hell no. Does he go back and dig through all the rat studies? No. Old news. Why bother? Now let's say he does dig a little and comes across a document in which the rat problem is described as 5%, not 2%. Does he release it? No. Why? His stock-holders would kill him. The country has moved on. Why destroy a company over something that happened decades ago? So, in short, there's almost no chance of a new director ordering the release of any skeleton from its closet...unless it's for PR purposes, when investors fear the worst. Now, it looks like investors are starting to fear the worst. So it could very well be that sometime in the near future...

Lance: This is why this forum is so tedious. Authoritative-sounding blather is the order of the day, but anyone who actually follows througvh - which no one but the Lone Nutters ever does - it all goes poof. When are you folks going to wake up? My response: If I am reading this correctly you are incredibly ill-informed. 90% of what we--collectively, CTs and LNs--have learned outside the WC and HSCA reports--we have learned through the hard work of CTs, not LNs, and not the mainstream media. Harold Weisberg obtained the release of more records than all the mainstream media put together. In fact, those LNs or lone-nut pushing institutions in a position to share valuable evidence or interviews, such as Gus Russo, Vincent Bugliosi, John Lattimer, Larry Sturdivan, NBC News, CBS News, and Howard Willens, have routinely failed to do so. In this case, we have an appendix that was supposed to be attached to a report, but was not. Instead, another report, apparently written by someone other than the original authors, is available. Now, could Lopez and Hardway be incorrect? Could this other report in fact be their report? Sure, could be... But none of those doing a victory dance on the LN side have been able to present any reason to believe Lopez and Hardway are incorrect about this. Blakey--their boss on the committee-has repeatedly claimed he was misled by the CIA. Could the CIA have misled him into changing Lopez and Hardway's report? Sure. I overheard Blakey talking to Lopez at the 2014 Bethesda conference, and Blakey sounded almost apologetic--he had come there to publicly accuse the CIA of lying to him and the committee. So... let's take a step back. Jim says an appendix is missing. It appears that one is. But even if it isn't and Lopez and Hardway are incorrect, it does little to change the fact numerous transcripts and testimony are missing. And yet, apparently, this doesn't bother the good folks on the LN side one bit. This seems to me short-sighted. Instead, of working towards a better understanding of what happened on 11-22-63, they seem content to play "gotcha!" with Jim D. IMO, we--collectively, CTs and LNs--can do better.

it's Joannides, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, the DMN ran a story citing Buddy Walthers, in which he described an unnamed person who'd been hit by some concrete, on 12-13-63. The FBI then tracked down Tague on the 14th. This report was then written up and forwarded to the commission on 12-23, if I'm not mistaken. But after that it was crickets. There is no mention of Tague in any WC memos or reports prior to Specter's writing a memo saying he should be interviewed. This was written after the numerous conferences in which the SBT was proposed and developed, after the 5-24-64 re-enactment which designed to test its plausibility, and after a 6-5 article on Tague in the Dallas Morning News, questioning why Tague hadn't been interviewed. So Tague's wounding didn't force or even influence the creation of the SBT, unless, of course, Specter knew he needed to account for Tague, but didn't want to mention him in any reports or meetings. What remains curious, however, is that Tague claimed he made a statement to the DPD on the 22nd. Well, assuming this is correct, it would appear this statement never made it out of Dallas, and was deliberately disappeared. Tague claimed he made the statement to Gus Rose, and that he was sitting with Rose when Oswald was brought in. I just checked the report attributed to Rose in the DPD's records and he says sure enough he was at his desk when Oswald was brought in, but he makes no mention of Tague there or elsewhere. Instead he says he talked to Oswald. So either Tague's memory was messed up or Rose was hiding that he talked to Tague and disappeared his report on the interview.

If Weisberg was suggesting Tague's wounding and the mark on the curb were widely discussed and known to the FBI prior to a 12-13-63 newspaper article in which Buddy Walthers described Tague's wounding, he was mistaken. (I just glimpsed through Tague's book, and he says he gave a statement to the DPD on the day of the shooting, but there is no record of this in the WC's files--or anywhere, from what I can tell. In any event, he also says a scar on the curb near where he'd been standing was photographed and published in the Dallas Morning News, but that it incorrectly placed the scar on Houston Street.) As a result, there was no acknowledgement of Tague in the FBI's 12-9-63 summary report or in the WC staff's discussion of the shooting scenario prior to their development of the SBT and writing of the WC's report. They were either ignorant of the early FBI report regarding Tague or were trying to ignore Tague entirely, and only interviewed him so they could claim they'd covered all the bases. To wit, the WC's file on Tague shows Specter first showed an interest in him on 6-11-64, 6 days after a story broke about Tague's wounding, and the WC's failure to acknowledge him. Tellingly, this was after Specter's chapter on the shooting, and the single-bullet theory, had been submitted. This chapter was later re-written to include references to Tague, but that was just window dressing.

Aha! I pulled you back! No, seriously, you may have missed it but there was a big brouhaha on this forum at one point between Lifton and Fetzer. Lifton said he'd been promised royalties on the book, seeing as he was a best-selling author and made the greatest contribution, and Fetzer responded by claiming his publisher refused to give him an accounting of the sales, and that, besides, he'd paid for Lifton's flight to and stay at a seminar, and was never repaid. It then got really ugly, as I recall, with Fetzer making some comments about Lifton's trying to skip out of paying the money after he, Fetzer, had started writing about a possible Jewish conspiracy behind 9/11. This put the moderators in a difficult spot. It was around this time that Fetzer started similar feuds with Jack White (over Fetzer's buddying up to Judyth) and John Costello (over Fetzer's promoting of Horne). I believe he was even still pushing Ralph Cinque's stuff. So his credibility was pretty much zero at the time. In any event, I sided with Lifton on this feud, and I think that's when he started emailing me on occasion and calling me on occasion. That's what I remember. I could be wrong.

Any discussion of Lifton's chapter Pig on a Leash should come with an asterisk pointing out that Lifton would later claim he'd never been paid for his contribution to The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, and that its editor James Fetzer insinuated on this forum that Lifton was greedy for wanting to get paid for his substantial contribution. P.S. In thinking back on my relationship with Lifton, I think this is when we became friendly. While I disagreed with David's conclusions re body alteration and Zapruder film fabrication, I defended him against those who attacked him personally, including some, like Fetzer, who'd previously been his supporters. So, I suppose, in short, we agreed to disagree without being disagreeable.

I hate to be negative about this, but I don't think the media gives a rat's ass who you were unless someone pays to make an official announcement. In Lane's case, he had family and presumably a publisher who could announce his death. In Lifton's case his next of kin is...? And his publisher is...? While I doubt any announcement is forthcoming in the mainstream press, I have to believe Wiki will eventually allow mention of David's death. Once someone like Posner announces it in an article...

Who is "they"? if the news services have not been alerted by a paid obit or a press release, and the family is reluctant to pay for an obit or a press release, there may never be an obit. In such case, Lifton's death would pass the way most of ours pass--in silence.

I think it is a mistake to actually attribute "thoughts" to most any politician regarding the JFK case. CBS et al told them it was Oswald and this was regurgitated by media-darlings like Posner and Bugliosi--and heck, even Stephen King said it was Oswald! So they think it was Oswald. And when they see the wild eyes in all too many of those who suspect conspiracy, they shy away. It's not something they can digest in 10 minutes, so they'd prefer just to ignore it. It was interesting, however, to see that for the fiftieth anniversary, a few of them dropped their masks. John Kerry, for one, said he thought there was some sort of a plot. At one point, I believe Hilary Clinton said so as well. So it wouldn't surprise me one bit if Biden is actually on the fence on this, but simply takes the easy way out when asked about it directly.

We should probably wait to see David Lifton's final work before we claim he had "proof" of anything. As stated, David was a creative thinker--he'd take something reported somewhere and say "Hmmm...maybe this means..." But a lot of what he came up with publicly and proposed privately was not supported by the bulk of the evidence.

As a relative newbie--in that I only started really researching the case in 2003--I felt self-conscious about my newbie status, and bought up many a DVD from old Lancer Conferences and COPA conferences. And I don't recall Marina speaking at any of them. It is my understanding, moreover, that she shied away from most everyone with an interest in the case outside David Lifton and Debra Conway. So I don't think Lance's implication she changed her impressions after going to conferences is fair, or accurate. I do think Lifton showed her some stuff that influenced her, but that's not the same as her going to conferences--which would suggest she was seeking attention and perhaps even the affection of the research community, when she was not.

My recollection is that it was written by the CIA and provided the soldiers recruited to overthrow Arbenz. The presumed authors (the soldiers doing the training) were Rip Robertson and David Morales. And the propaganda officer--who may or may not have been consulted on the bit about propaganda--was E. Howard Hunt. We know, moreover, that the segment on silenced weapons was observed. Among the papers for PB success was an invoice for some .22 caliber rifles--which would serve little military purpose beyond that they could more easily be silenced for the purposes of assassination.

I'll grant you that. But it's a two-way street. You should also add that many if not most LNs have incorrectly claimed Oswald smirked in self-satisfaction during the midnight press conference. It's not possible to determine his guilt/innocence by his behavior once in custody. Agreed?

He may have been influenced by my chapters on the witness statements...that strongly suggest the last sound or shot came from west of the building.