Pat Speer

Your desperation is showing. Why do you keep saying the Hosty notes written after his interview with Oswald said something it did not say?

LOL. Good one.

The "first-day statements, films, later-released documents, and other evidence" is the official record. The official conclusions in this case do not follow from the official record. That is what got Weisberg and Garrison, among others, to devote so much of their lives conducting further research. It wasn't that they had a hunch everything was fake. it's that they thought the witness statements and other evidence suggested a different scenario than that proposed by the WC.

Most of the "cover-up" per se was done by the WC's counsel, who pre-screened witnesses and avoided asking certain questions on the record. They also worked with the doctors to create misleading illustrations demonstrating the President's wounds. They then spun the filtered evidence to fit a pre-determined outcome. This wasn't done in a vacuum, moreover. This was as ordered by Warren, and, above him, Johnson. That the witness statements, photographic evidence, and medical evidence, when taken in total, suggest more than one shooter, of course, strongly suggests it is authentic. I mean, why fake stuff when you can just lie about it?

I believe I have proved there was a cover-up. But it wasn't done by changing witness statements. This makes little sense, seeing as the vast majority of early critics of the Warren Report were driven to become so because of...the witness statements...that largely contradicted the official "story". Frazier is a classic example. Thousands and perhaps even millions of people came to doubt the Warren Report when they realized he'd sworn from the get-go that the bag was too small to hold Oswald's rifle, and that he'd passed a lie detector test when denying the bag carried from the TSBD was the bag he saw Oswald carry into the TSBD. I suspect a lot of these early critics would be rolling over in their graves if they knew what has become of the research community, where people have long given up using the official record to prove the official conclusions are incorrect, and have instead taken to claiming that whatever they don't want to believe is fake, and was dummied up by the evil FBI, or evil CIA, etc... I stopped believing the FBI was the boogey-man a long time ago. Perhaps it's because I worked at a company that collapsed in a mound of criminality, and ended up having numerous meetings with FBI investigators. The takeaway is this... They... just...aren't...that...smart...

So...are you saying that the hand-written statements provided the Sheriff's Dept. on the afternoon of the shooting are fakes, scripted by a team of FBI agents, to conceal that Oswald was on the front steps? Well, who exactly was on this team? Saying a team of unidentified FBI agents supervised a cover-up within a few hours of the shooting is like saying a team of former football players supervised a cover-up within a few hours of the shooting... There's just not evidence for it...

Yes, in recent years, Frazier has added in that he saw Oswald walking down the street from the back of the building after the shooting. He's probably incorrect. That his story changed a bit is not the least bit surprising, moreover. As you know, I devote a lot of my website to witness statements. And just about every witness who told their story multiple times over multiple years changed their story a bit. Sometimes they were clarifying or adding on to something they'd previously alluded to, but sometimes they'd flat out changed it, from hearing two shots to hearing three shots, etc. It's not suspicious. It's just being human.

OR... Oswald was trying to point out that his being inside the building (at the time of the shooting) was no big deal, seeing as he worked there. This is like one million times more likely. Neither Oswald nor anyone in that hallway was wondering if Oswald was at work that day. They were wondering where he was when the shots were fired. So he told them.

I believe they are asking him "What about Connally?" to see if he would deny shooting Connally as well as the President.

On Frazier's part? Not likely. Consider... 1) The package Frazier claimed he saw in Oswald's possession was the exact same size as a package of curtain rods, and roughly half the size of the bag the DPD claimed had held the rifle... (This seems highly unlikely should he have invented the curtain rod story to incriminate Oswald.) 2) Oswald's rented room had a busted curtain rod...that the DPD and WC tried to conceal... 3) Ruth Paine could not find the package of curtain rods she thought was in her garage, and ultimately claimed, four months after the shooting, when the only curtain rods she could find in her garage were loose curtain rods, that she must have been mistaken. 4) A set of curtain rods was tested for fingerprints before the curtain rods found in Mrs. Paine's garage had been recovered. The DPD then faked up some paperwork to make it look like the curtain rods they'd tested were the ones recovered from her garage. In short, it seems quite likely the curtain rod "story" was not a story told by Frazier, but a story told by others to hide that 1) curtain rods were needed at Oswald's rented room, 2) curtain rods were missing from Mrs. Paine's garage, and 3) curtain rods were recovered at Oswald's place of work, or somewhere that could be linked back to him...

I don't remember everything that fed into my impression Dulles and RFK were friendly, but I do remember that during the WC investigation, Dulles was asked to take a break and report back on the conditions in the south, where some good ole boys with guns were trying to restart the "civil" war over civil rights. It is my recollection that Dulles, who was, like Warren, a pro-Civil rights Republican, reported back to RFK. I believe I've also read that Dulles worked with RFK on a report about the Bay of Pigs, and that their relationship was amicable. That doesn't necessarily mean anything, of course. Iago was Othello's best friend.

I have not focused as much on "who did it" as I have "what happened'. But I tend to believe whoever did it picked Oswald as a patsy because of his background as a commie, and not because they thought he was a nut. IOW, they wanted the trail to lead to Cuba, and Russia, and not stop at Oswald. So I would have to assume those involved were right-wing hawks, with access to the intelligence agencies. SO...if I had to pick I'd pick people like Harvey, Robertson, Morales and Phillips as suspects... using some anti-Castro Cuban shooters. But I don't think they would have made the call. No, I think the call would have to have been made by someone with lots of moolah and connections... Perhaps someone like H.L. Hunt... But I don't think we can ignore Harvey's connections to Roselli and thereby Giancana and thereby Marcello, and thereby Trafficante... So it may have been a mob hit, after all.. With LBJ's blessing, of course...

Perhaps I'm more cynical... I suspect those behind it wanted it to look like a commie did it, and LBJ et al covered it up to thwart their plans. I don't discount, however, that LBJ let them think he would play along, and that he basically double-crossed them by letting Oswald go down as a lone nut. He would, of course, then be in their debt. He may have paid that debt, moreover, with hundreds of thousands of lives in SE Asia, or by cutting back the FBI's mob investigations...or both... The government response over the first few weeks was largely chaos, so, no, the media was not aware of what was gonna happen or what they were supposed to say. Their involvement was not part of the plot. Once the FBI and WC etc got rolling, however, the media sucked up to them the way they usually do, and became what amounted to a propaganda arm of the Johnson Administration. As far as Dulles... Yes, he was a creep. But I think the assumption he hated JFK and JFK hated him is incorrect. There is reason to believe he and RFK were friendly. It's been purported, moreover, that RFK approved of his being on the WC. But I'm not aware of RFK ever saying as much... But I can say this... While it can not be disputed that Dulles was out to protect the CIA's interests, it is also incorrect to claim he was running the WC's investigation. At every turn, one man prevented the commission from going where it wasn't supposed to go. That man was Chief Justice Earl Warren... From Chapter 3c at patspeer.com: So, let's break this down. The Warren Commission's top staff (Rankin, Willens, Redlich, and Eisenberg) spent over 900 work-days supervising its investigation, co-ordinating its investigation with the commissioners, and editing and re-writing the commission's report. While, at the same time, the commission's investigators spent over 1,000 work-days investigating and writing about Oswald's life and death--separate from his role in the assassination. While, at the same time, the commission's investigators spent less than 400 work-days investigating what happened on the day of the shooting, and who pulled the trigger... Well, this seems a bit backwards, correct? When one looks at the timing of these man-hours, this ratio seems even more out-of-whack. The investigation lasted, basically, 8 months, from late January to late September. Adams, Specter, Ball, and Belin (the investigators for Areas 1 and 2) worked 378 days, 2 hours, between them. But only 73 days, 1 hour of this was in the last three months of the commission's investigation. Well, this suggests that the commission's investigation into what happened and who did it was essentially over by June, and not September. And that the rest was just putting lipstick on a pig. I mean, seriously, Burt Griffin worked 91 of the last 96 days trying to understand why and how mobster wannabe Jack Ruby came to kill the supposedly lone-nut Oswald, and David Slawson worked 83 of the last 96 days trying to understand what the supposedly lone-nut Oswald was doing in Mexico City, meeting with Cubans and Russians. And that's not even to mention that Albert Jenner and Wesley Liebeler worked 81 days and 90 days, respectively, of the last 96 days of the commission, while trying to understand why in the heck Oswald would kill a President he claimed to admire. All four of these men, individually, worked more days in the last three months of the commission's investigation than the four men who'd worked in areas 1 and 2, COMBINED. Well, this supports what seemed clear from the beginning of the commission's investigation--that the commission was ready to claim Oswald did it without doing much digging, but was concerned this wouldn't fly if they didn't offer the public a mountain of reasons to believe Oswald was nothing but a nut, who acted alone. But that's not all we learned from the release of Shenon's and Willens' books. When one read between the lines, one discovered an awful reality--that liberal icon Earl Warren was not the simple bumpkin many had presumed, and that he was instead a one-man wrecking crew, committed to making sure his commission went nowhere and learned nothing. Here, then, is a partial list of Warren "no-no"s, as we now know them. 1. Chief Justice Warren was determined from the outset that the commission investigating President Kennedy's death limit its scope to the investigations already performed by the Dallas Police, Secret Service and FBI. Yes, unbelievably, the transcript of the commission's first conference reflects that Warren wanted the commission to have no investigators of its own, no subpoena power, and no public hearings. 2. When the Attorney General of Texas, Waggoner Carr, persisted in his plan to convene a Texas Court of Inquiry, a public hearing at which much of the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald would be presented, Warren convinced him to cancel his plan by assuring him the commission would be "fair to Texas." No record was made of this meeting. 3. Not long thereafter, the commission became privy to the rumor Oswald had been an intelligence asset. Although commissioner and former CIA chief Allen Dulles assured Warren and his fellow commissioners the FBI and CIA would lie about this, he also told them the only way to get to the bottom of it was to ask President Johnson to personally tell the heads of the FBI and CIA not to lie. Warren did not do this. And the transcript of the hearing in which this rumor was first discussed was destroyed, undoubtedly at Warren's direction. 4. The commission's staff had questions about the medical evidence. They were particularly concerned about the location of Kennedy's back wound, which may have been too low to support the single-bullet theory deemed necessary to the commission's conclusion Oswald acted alone. Even so, Warren personally prevented Dr. James J. Humes from reviewing the autopsy photos he'd had taken, and wished to review. 5. The commission's staff had questions about Oswald's trip to Mexico. What did he say to those he spoke to? What did he do at night? Did he actually go to the Cuban consulate and Russian embassy on the days the CIA said he'd visited the consulate and embassy? And yet, despite the commission's staff's fervid desire they be allowed to interview Sylvia Duran, a Mexican woman employed by the Cuban consulate, who'd handled Oswald's request he be allowed to visit Cuba, (and who, it turns out, was rumored to have entertained Oswald at night), Chief Justice Warren personally prevented them from doing so, telling commission counsel David Slawson that "You just can't believe a Communist...We don't talk to Communists. You cannot trust a dedicated Communist to tell us the truth, so what's the point?" 6. The commission's staff had questions about Russia's involvement in the assassination. Oswald, of course, had lived in Russia. His wife was Russian. While in Mexico, he'd met with a KGB agent named Kostikov, who was believed to have been the KGB's point man on assassinations for the western hemisphere. Shortly after the assassination, a KGB officer named Yuri Nosenko defected to the west. Nosenko told his handlers he'd reviewed Oswald's file, and that Oswald was not a Russian agent. The timing of Nosenko's defection, however, convinced some within the CIA that Nosenko's defection was a set-up. The commission's staff hoped to talk to Nosenko, and judge for themselves if his word meant anything. The CIA (er, rather, The CIA's Assistant Director of Plans--its master of dirty tricks, Richard Helms), on the other hand, asked the commission to not only not talk to Nosenko, but to avoid any mention of him within their report. Chief Justice Earl Warren, acting alone, agreed to this request. He later admitted "I was adamant that we should not in any way base our findings on the testimony of a Russian defector." 7. The commission's staff had questions about Jack Ruby's motive in killing Oswald. Strangely, however, the commission's staff charged with investigating Ruby and his background were not allowed to interview him. Instead, the interview of Ruby was performed by, you guessed it, Chief Justice Earl Warren. Despite Ruby's telling Warren such things as "unless you get me to Washington, you can’t get a fair shake out of me...I want to tell the truth, and I can’t tell it here. I can’t tell it here…this isn’t the place for me to tell what I want to tell…” Warren refused to bring Ruby to Washington so he could provide the details he so clearly wanted to provide. 8. The commission's staff had even more questions about how Ruby came to kill Oswald. It was hard to believe he'd just walked down a ramp and shot Oswald, as claimed. As Ruby had many buddies within the Dallas Police, for that matter, it was reasonable to investigate the possibility one or more of the officers responsible for Oswald's protection had provided Ruby access to the basement. Commission counsel Burt Griffin even found a suspect: Sgt Patrick Dean. In the middle of Dean's testimony in Dallas, in which Dean said Ruby had told him he'd gained access to the garage by walking down the ramp, Griffin let Dean know he didn't believe him, and gave him a chance to change his testimony. Dean was outraged and called Dallas DA Henry Wade, who in turn called Warren Commission General Counsel J. Lee Rankin. Dean then asked that he be allowed to testify against Griffin in Washington. Not only was he allowed to do so, he received what amounted to an apology from, you guessed it, Chief Justice Earl Warren. Warren told Dean "No member of our staff has a right to tell any witness that he is lying or that he is testifying falsely. That is not his business. It is the business of this Commission to appraise the testimony of all the witnesses, and, at the time you are talking about, and up to the present time, this Commission has never appraised your testimony or fully appraised the testimony of any other witness, and furthermore, I want to say to you that no member of our staff has any power to help or injure any witness." It was later revealed that Dean had failed a lie detector test designed to test his truthfulness regarding Ruby, and that the Dallas Police had kept the results of this test from the Warren Commission. If Griffin had been allowed to pursue Dean, this could have all come out in 1964. But no, Warren made Griffin back down, and the probability Dean lied was swept under the rug. (None of this is mentioned in Willens' book, of course.) 9. Although Warren was purportedly all-concerned about transparency, and wanted all the evidence viewed by the commission to be made available to the public, he (along with commissioners McCloy and Dulles) came to a decision on April 30, 1964, that the testimony before the commission would not be published along with the commission's report. (This decision was over-turned after the other commissioners--the four elected officials on the commission, and thereby the only ones accountable to the public--objected.) 10. Although Warren was purportedly all-concerned about transparency, and wanted the public to trust the commission's decisions, he wanted to shred or incinerate all the commission's internal files, so no one would know how the commission came to its decisions. (This decision was over-turned after commission historian Alfred Goldberg sent word of Warren's intentions to Senator Richard Russell, and Russell intervened.) 11. Although Warren was purported to have worked himself day and night in order to give the President the most thorough report possible, he actually flew off on a fishing trip that lasted from July 6 to August 1, 1964, while testimony was still being taken, and the commission's report still being polished. 12. Although Warren was purportedly all-concerned about transparency, and felt the commission's work should speak for itself, he (according to Howard Willens' diary) asked the National Archives to hold up the release of assassination-related documents that were not used in the commission's hearings, so that said documents could not be used by critics to undermine the commission's findings. So let's review. The Chief Justice, who was, by his own admission, roped into serving as chairman of the commission by President Johnson through the prospect of nuclear war, refused to allow important evidence to be viewed, refused to allow important witnesses to be called, cut off investigations into controversial areas, demanded that testimony before the commission be done in secret, agreed to keep the testimony before the commission from the public, tried to keep the commission's internal files from the public, and ultimately asked the national archives to help hide some of the evidence available to the commission from the public until a decent interval had passed in which the commission and its friends in the media could sell the commission's conclusions. Now if that ain't a whitewash, then what the heck is?

Is this how conspiracies succeed? Leave a lot of loose strings and then go back and make them go away? OR...how about this? Avoid the loose strings to begin with? 1. Have Oswald's handler tell him someone will meet him at back of the building when the shooting takes place. 2. Kill him as he walks out the back of the building. Oh crap, he walked out the front. Well, okay then, how about we track him down and kill him? Oh crap, he made it to a public place. Hmmm...how we gonna kill him now? Let's get the mob in on it. Dirty the waters... Done. P.S. The cover-up post-assassination was clearly supervised by Johnson with the cooperation of others, including Warren and some members of the WC staff. There is no reason to believe this was part of the murder plot. In fact, the murder plot may have been designed to blame the commies and those covering up afterwards may have thought it was their patriotic duty to cover it up, as opposed to rolling the dice.

So it's what we've understood for decades. There is no added context. Oswald was asked if he was in the building at the time and said yes, that he worked in the building. His saying "naturally" suggested, moreover, that he felt there was nothing suspicious about his being in the building.There were no questions about whether or not he'd been at work that day, etc. He was asked "at the time"and said yes. This is plain English. There may have been some confusion on his part. But, as he would have had no reason to lie about this should he have been outside during the shooting, his actual words are a strong indication he was in the building at the time of the shooting.

Now, I'm even more confused. Isn't that what Bill was saying?

I remember reading about a doomsday cult in the fifties that kept changing the date of the end of the world as each date came to pass and the world didn't end. Now I've seen a cult develop around a blurry photograph, where people insisted the photograph showed a particular person, and then re-interpreted and re-arranged a large volume of evidence to support that it was that person... Only to come face to face with the possibility it wasn't that person... whereby some of the followers took to insisting their belief that person was in that picture had nothing to do with the picture, and rested entirely on the "evidence" that had been re-interpreted and re-arranged to support the ID of the blurry figure in the picture. To make an analogy... A man thinks he sees Jesus in a picture taken at Disneyland. He shows this picture to dozens of people, a number of whom say "Holy Smokes! That is Jesus at Disneyland!" The man then moves away. Those left behind proceed to create a whole narrative revolving around Jesus going to Disneyland. Over time, however, some start to have doubts that really is Jesus in the picture that started it all. But some of the followers say "Never mind, I never believed that was Jesus in the picture to begin with...it was the narrative constructed by those who believed that led me to believe." Yikes...If I am understanding this correctly...some of those believing that Oswald was Prayer Man are now saying they don't necessarily believe that Oswald was Prayer Man, and they mostly believe he was outside on the front steps at the time of the shooting--whether he was photographed there or not, whether he was observed there or not, whether he said he was there or not. This whole "believing" thing is weird to me...

My words were not as clear as I meant them to be. Our disagreement may not be as strong as it seems. I believe a President has the right to declassify documents, I believe, yes, even Trump had the right to declassify documents. By "arbitrarily declassify" documents I meant declassifying documents with a wave of a hand, without writing down what documents were declassified or alerting the agencies responsible. Trump's claim he could do this is ridiculous, IMO. And not just my opinion. I have yet to read anything by anyone with a brain cell arguing that a President (which is, after all, a temp job) could just declassify stuff because he felt like it, without telling anyone else about it. I hope you realize that a vast majority of classified records are not classified in isolation, and that reference to an incident or a contact determined to be classified might be repeated on hundreds of related documents. If Trump did in fact believe the documents he stole were no longer classified because he waved his hand and spoke some gibberish, he was as good as taking a dump on our entire intelligence apparatus. No one would know what was classified or not. No one would know what was top secret or not. People might start leaking secrets because they believed Trump had declassified them, when in fact he had simply burped on his way to dinner.

I was talking about the original thread started by Sean Murphy, Sandy, in which the Prayer Man theory was first developed. I supported it at first but when the other participants became more and more enthusiastic, it kind of a alarmed me. Here, they thought the key to the case revolved around a blurry image--which they desperately wanted to believe was Oswald. To me it never looked like Oswald--it could have been him--but it was far too blurry to say it looked like him. To me, moreover, it looked more like a woman. And from there things got even stranger. Within a few months, any part of the story that conflicted with PM's being Oswald had been questioned, and had been claimed to be a hoax. Unreliable snippets from newspaper accounts became the gospel truth. And suddenly, a new scenario had been presented as the truth...a scenario without any real support outside its proponents desperate desire for it to be true. Suddenly, Oswald was standing outside minding his own business when the shooting occurred. Suddenly, Buell Frazier and anyone claiming they saw Oswald inside the building after the shooting were part of the conspiracy--deliberate XXXXX--even though the bulk of their testimony suggested Oswald's innocence. It's just silly, IMO. I think you came here after it peaked, but there was a long stretch when this forum was dominated by the OIC--the Oswald Innocent Campaign. The members of this campaign, chiefly Ciinque and Fetzer, thought it was Oswald in the Altgens photo, and that Oswald was on the steps. They then built from this that the CIA had doctored the Altgens photo to make Oswald look more like Lovelady, and that all the witnesses (apparently including Oswald?) who'd failed to say he was outside at the time of the shooting were part of the plot. and that, furthermore, all the films and photos showing Lovelady wearing the shirt he wore in Altgens had been doctored, as he'd really been wearing a different shirt entirely. I think we can all agree that the Oswald is in Altgens theory was nonsense. And yet, to me, the Oswald is in Darnell theory is a nearly identical twin. People look at a blurry image. They see what they want to see. They then question everything that suggests they could be wrong, and assume it must be wrong, and part of the plot. They then find snippets of evidence (a photo of Lovelady wearing a different shirt than he wore on 11-22...or a vague handwritten draft of an FBI report...) that "confirms" their theory. They then attack anyone and everyone who fails to subscribe to their theory. I've seen it before. And I'll probably see it again. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that most "Prayer Man" believers will move on to something else in the near future, as its momentum seems to have stalled. As stated previously, a number of the richest and most media-friendly CTs viewed a much cleaner version of Darnell than is available online, and failed to buy it or pursue another version of the film. Well, this suggests to me that they knew, deep inside, it was a dead-end street.

I think I saw this on the JFK Assassination Forum some years ago. Wasn't this photo taken years later?

There are systems in place to declassify documents. A President can''t just say he "declassifies" documents without individually identifying them, and alerting the agencies involved and the archives that these documents have been declassified. You keep acting as though the U.S. has a monarchy, and that Trump was our king. He in fact did not come to power by the will of God, or the will of the people. If he legitimately won an election, it was through a quirk of fate and a long-outdated loophole created for slave-owners. He did not have the power to arbitrarily declassify documents, and the U.S. was safer for it. As has been pointed out ad nauseam, moreover, the existence of classified material at Mar-a-Lago is only part of the story. He took over 15,000 documents with him when he left office. These documents belonged to the U.S. Government, the people, and not him. It was a crime for him to take these documents. An investigation needs to be conducted on how he got these documents, and why he thought he could just take them. It seems obvious, moreover, that a number of people helped him in this theft, and that they should all be held accountable. Do you disagree?

No. I was involved in the original Prayer Man thread. At that time I raised the possibility it was Sarah Stanton, who Buell Frazier said was standing beside him at this time. This was rejected for silly reasons, as Stanton could not be identified in any other image. But the Stanton possibility--some would say probability--has never been refuted.

You have convinced yourself there is a significant difference between the two Darnells, when there is not. Neither of them is clearly male or female. As for your rejection the woman is "Prayer Man", you may be right, seeing as a significant amount of time had passed between the images. But your assertion the Prayer Man figure is 5'9' is not accurate. It was established some years back that the figure was much shorter than Oswald. As I recall you countered that the figure appeared shorter because he was standing with one leg on the step. So, no, your studies confirmed that the figure is not 5'9" and your rejecting that the woman in the later image could be the same person is just desperate. As far as what I wrote, it is true. If the woman in the color image can be identified, and she can not be found in any image taken during the shooting, then it follows like night from day that she might be "Prayer Person".

Yikes. The two Darnell images are the same image but of different quality and put through different filters. Neither one shows what is clearly a man or a woman. But the image in the colored film, taken a few minutes later, and showing someone standing in the same place as "Prayer Person", is of a woman. The question then becomes if we can identify this person, and determine if this person was somewhere else at the time of the shooting. If not, well, we may have our "Prayer Person".

I am confused. Has anything been added to this image? Or is there a woman standing in the Prayer Person location in this image who looks exactly like Prayer Person?