Stephen Roy

So attacking other researchers is "working toward a case conclusion"?

Sorry for misspelling your name, David!

It would be helpful to do something other than attack.

I don't think there is a deliberate effort at censorship by peer-review, government or otherwise. Just my opinion.

To bow to any corrupt system is to legitimize it and stunt your own thinking ability, especially when corruption in peer review is recurrent and proof of that is publicly available. When is this elitist charade going to be called out?

I won't be lead to ignore the human biases embedded in the peer review system that is deliberately used as a tool by dividers and conquerors of society from an intentionally academic vantage point to uphold authoritarianism and crush dissension with a pen. Not only has the internet made it easier for anyone to publish a non-peer-reviewed book, it has also made it easier for "the establishment's" peer review participants to exert their bias with no immediate repercussions for doing so (I only link proven examples, but there are thousands more proven examples if you seek them out).

Your constructs are very hard to follow. Do you really believe that all writings are of equal validity?

Of course not. That'd be as naïve as thinking that corporate state-controlled peer review is the answer to validation.

When you qualify it as "corporate state-controlled," one might regard it as naive, but I disagree with your world view that it is a deliberate state-controlled thing. It is a much less nefarious tool which publishers used to use for reasons most rational people would understand.

Mixup: I was not commenting on David Andrews' post 55. I was commenting on David Healey's post 56.

The latter is nothing more than a snotty attack on Tim Brennan. No comment about Beckham (who is not believable). His recent posts are often not directly on-point; rather, they are attempts at "us vs. them" sarcasm. There was a time, in the past, when that sort of thing was discouraged in the EdForum.

In Farewell to Justice, Mellen accepts Beckham's claim that it is he in that photo. I think Beckham misled Joan in many ways.

I don't think there is a deliberate effort at censorship by peer-review, government or otherwise. Just my opinion.

To bow to any corrupt system is to legitimize it and stunt your own thinking ability, especially when corruption in peer review is recurrent and proof of that is publicly available. When is this elitist charade going to be called out?

I won't be lead to ignore the human biases embedded in the peer review system that is deliberately used as a tool by dividers and conquerors of society from an intentionally academic vantage point to uphold authoritarianism and crush dissension with a pen. Not only has the internet made it easier for anyone to publish a non-peer-reviewed book, it has also made it easier for "the establishment's" peer review participants to exert their bias with no immediate repercussions for doing so (I only link proven examples, but there are thousands more proven examples if you seek them out).

Your constructs are very hard to follow. Do you really believe that all writings are of equal validity?

On the other hand, there are some people out there whose grasp of the realities, intricacies and nuances of life is markedly different from the way most people perceive things. You can see them across the internet now and, increasingly, publishing non-peer-reviewed books. Some of those people might fairly be regarded as crazy, and that craziness steals the thunder and gravitas of serious and responsible researchers. Just because there are crazies out there does not mean that there aren't conspiracies, but those whose first instinct is to chalk everything up to the wily machinations of a nefarious secret force sometimes walk the line.

The peer-review system has been bent (by design?) for a long time and deliberately excludes important peers who should be considered authorities on topics when those who should be able to be relied upon (e.g. NIST) completely lie and publish with no impartial peer-review system that can be validated as impartial. Were the WCR and 9/11 Omission Report peer-reviewed before release to the public? They should have been, but not within a corrupt peer-review environment. The idea of the peer review being the monopoly on credibility came out of the dumb down philos within academia, making students rely on EBSCOHost and other like aggregating tools of only peer-reviewed writings to be considered valid, never concerning themselves with the historical arc of why that is to be the only system to be considered as valid. Peer reviews these days are conducted by government funded and controlled "peers of the realm", but very few "in-context" peers of the writer. There is nothing impartial about the peer review - it operates in the form of statist censorship. It's BS:

“because of the ‘pre-disciplining’ of academicians, the simple requirement that manuscripts had to be reviewed by the whole academy or by a committee made it almost impossible that anything controversial would go to press” - Mario Biagioli, From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review

In the old days, if a publisher was considering taking the risk of investing money in an author's work with the hope of recouping their investment and making a profit, they needed to be sure of a few things: Is the factual information verifiable? Does the work put the publisher (or anyone else) in legal jeopardy? Can the author actually write? Is there a market for the book? To those ends, the publisher would often run the manuscript by someone with established credentials in the field. Imperfect as it was, it made perfect sense, and it helped to sort out the useful writings from the less worthy ones.

Self-publishing and the internet (Amazon) have changed all that. Almost anyone can (and does) publish a book, and there is almost no vetting process at all. In either print or electronic form. To the average reader, these look like any other book, but there is no way to tell if the material is factual and rationally presented or not. Maybe it's source-noted, but are those sources any good?

I mentioned above that there are a few crazies out there, and this change in the way books are vetted and published means that some craziness will make its way to readers.

I don't think there is a deliberate effort at censorship by peer-review, government or otherwise. Just my opinion.

On the other hand, there are some people out there whose grasp of the realities, intricacies and nuances of life is markedly different from the way most people perceive things. You can see them across the internet now and, increasingly, publishing non-peer-reviewed books. Some of those people might fairly be regarded as crazy, and that craziness steals the thunder and gravitas of serious and responsible researchers. Just because there are crazies out there does not mean that there aren't conspiracies, but those whose first instinct is to chalk everything up to the wily machinations of a nefarious secret force sometimes walk the line.

Can I just do a Devil's Advocate-type comment on your statement: "I like to use the fact that the money order was never cashed because it is such a simple things to see and understand." If we accept that 1) a cancel stamp was required, and 2) there is no such stamp on this money order, a more objective-less advocative reading of the evidence would not call it a "fact," and would state only that it does not appear to have been processed as a cashed money order would be processed.

Anybody can take any fact and find words to explain it away.

I invite you, as a devil's advocate, to provide a plausible explanation for the lack of stamps on the back of the money order. I'll be happy to consider and respond to that.

You're certain that there's no other possible interpretation: "fact...never cashed"?

Can I just do a Devil's Advocate-type comment on your statement: "I like to use the fact that the money order was never cashed because it is such a simple things to see and understand." If we accept that 1) a cancel stamp was required, and 2) there is no such stamp on this money order, a more objective-less advocative reading of the evidence would not call it a "fact," and would state only that it does not appear to have been processed as a cashed money order would be processed.

David, it would be more useful to contribute something other than smart-mouthing other researchers.

I've always thought the man in the Oswald leaflet photos looked a lot like Bill Shelley too. I keep going back and looking, like Tommy, to see if the guy in the photo looks younger than late 30's...sometimes I think he does, sometimes he could pass for late 30's--kinda looks like Sean Penn.

To Stephen's point, it is always highly speculative to make conclusions based on blurry old photos, and often times the observer is bias in that he wants to find a CIA agent on Daley Plaza, for instance. Such a find would have the ability to 'leap-frog' through decades of research and prove that there was almost undoubtedly a conspiracy. I still remain somewhat hopeful that facial recognition software might someday give us definitive answers. The problem might still be that the photos are too poor quality, though. For example, a while back I tried to use Facebook's facial recognition software (which is quite good) to see if it found a match between the man on the corner of Elm & Houston and known pictures of Rip Robertson. The problem was--presumably because part of his face was blocked and it was so low resolution--is that it didn't recognize the man at the corner of Elm & Houston's face as a face at all.

Every professional society - and. for better or worse, we are one - needs to have some level of self-criticism to prevent it from drifting into poor practices. As I said and still emphatically insist, this business of identifying specific people from old photos is highly imprecise and highly prone to a whole host of reasons for misidentification. As poor a practice as this is, the harm is exacerbated by, as was done at the outset of this thread, flatly stating that the specific person appears in an incriminating situation in an old photo.

I could accept: Doesn't this look like so-and-so, but flatly stating them to be in the photo is beyond professional standards. I've seen it happen too many times in the JFK field and it does nothing to enhance our gravitas with the outside world.

David Morales (CIA rogue) was affiliated with LHO in New Orleans?

This has been well-established now, by Jeff Caufield's new book, IMHO.

What page??

Devil's Advocate:

This business of identifying people from old photos is a highly imprecise, speculative, wishful thinking sort of thing.

Sorry to hear that. Thanks for the info, Chris.

Garrison thought he might be, but I think he changed his mind.

I tend not to think of Buznedo as involved in anything substantive. I'm pretty sure that, by the time Andrews is supposed to have been approached by Oswald (May63), Buznedo had long since been living in Colorado.

If I read your comments correctly, Don, I share your confusion about the Andrews story. On the face of it, it makes no sense at all. Why would the conspirators engage an attorney of Andrews' flamboyance/eccentricity, and one based in New Orleans, to boot? What made them think they could trust him as part of the plot? If he was part of the plot, why would he immediately contact FBI Special Agent Regis Leo Kennedy and tell him about it, blowing the whole thing? If Andrews was determined to tell Kennedy about it, why didn't he name Shaw? Why were his earlier descriptions of Bertrand so different from Shaw? Why, from time to time, did Andrews even suggest that he may have misunderstood or mischaracterized the call in the first place? Why didn't the conspirators find a way to shut Andrews up? Why, after Orleans Parish DA Jim Garrison started questioning him about it and speculated that it might be Shaw, did Andrews (by his own account) deny that it was Shaw, and stick with that position?

How about to make it look like Carlos Marcello was behind the assassination?

--Tommy

Oh, I see what you're saying: That the plotters called a lawyer who was known to be an associate of Marcello (Andrews). I've been over the New Orleans evidence in deep detail, and I think it's unlikely that Andrews was brought in in this way, for some of the reasons I stated in 2012.

I found this at MFF, which makes reference to it:

http://www.maryferre...ecurity agency"

Thanks Stephen! That's great. The document seems to say that they entirely discount the theory (that the information missing is related to espionage) but are sending it to NSA - just in case! It even states they thought the clipper was just saving "words and letters" in a printed format. That almost sounds like they are suggesting writing a "ransom note" type message. It's very strange.

Looking at the investigative traffic in sequence, to get a read on what they were thinking and how they were following their investigative theories, it appears that, even though they theorized that Oswald acted alone, they couldn't ignore the hints of tradecraft in his background: postal boxes, false documentation and the like. The missing letters raised the possibility of some form of secret messaging or code, so they decided to run it past the department with the most expertise in the field. In some ways, he seems pretty straightforward but in other ways, you just have to wonder.

Devil's Advocate:

Since Oswald had had interaction with several governments and was a suspect in the assassination, and since investigators had found books or papers among his possessions with letters cut-out from them, wouldn't it have made sense to at least check-out the possibility that he used such tradecraft?

Maybe, but making clippings from magazines is how people saved things they wanted to read for a century. Which letters were missing?

You had to ask... I have a memory of it, maybe some other reader can find it. I seem to recall that it was a book stored at the Paine house, with individual letters cut out, not the sort of article clippings a normal person would make. I think it was even turned over to NSA for their observations.

If I recall correctly, I can't imagine that kind of thing not making the investigators curious about any other such activity.

I found this at MFF, which makes reference to it:

http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=58985&relPageId=15&search=%22national_security%20agency%22

Devil's Advocate:

Since Oswald had had interaction with several governments and was a suspect in the assassination, and since investigators had found books or papers among his possessions with letters cut-out from them, wouldn't it have made sense to at least check-out the possibility that he used such tradecraft?

The audio is very hard to hear on this clip.

Warning: Science content ahead - I used to teach this in college. For prospective speakers: The objective is to maximize the signal to noise ratio, to maximize the direct sound (signal) and minimize the reflected sound (noise), by placing the active microphone ACAP - as close as possible to the sound source. A podium mic is good, but a wireless lavalier is even better, and any video production company/person should have access to one. The mic on the camera rarely produces acceptable audio for a one-shot archival recording, and once it's printed to tape, there is very little one can do to improve it. (A boost in level, a bit of compression and an EQ boost in the voice mids can help a bit.) Just sayin'...

Stephen Roy - have you published your bio of Ferrie?

Not yet, but I'm getting there. I was slowed a bit when an unscrupulous person swiped a bunch of my research and published it in garbled form, but I'm back on track. The surprising thing is that some of the prior research on Ferrie appears to be mistaken in certain ways.

Walton Moore??

This article shows what I've mentioned out here many times before. The alleged Ferrie-Sherman connection is so weak that it may not exist at all.

For many of us, when a book makes a striking claim, we go to the source notes to check for ourselves if the info is accurately reported. When Haslam's Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus came out in 1995, I looked carefully for source material for his most basic claim, that Ferrie even knew Dr. Sherman. A close reading shows that Haslam presented almost nothing to support this. Something his mother said. Something Garrison said in a men's magazine. I challenge readers to go through his current edition and find convincing evidence for any of his theories. I have fairly inquired of many of Ferrie's former associates and none recall Sherman in any way. Steve Tyler, mentioned in the article, has done far more research than Haslam and disagrees profoundly with his claims. Sherman was murdered in her apartment, not elsewhere; There was no linear particle accelerator in any New Orleans facility at that time; Sherman's murder was not connected with the Warren Commission. Haslam is not a good source of information on any of these questions.

Jim

A friend with a lot of expertise in FBI documents wrote to me.

1) Indeed, a T number is temporary, for that document only, and there may be many different T-2s in FBI documents.

2) He thinks the document you mention was not acquired in a mail cover, but by either a black bag job (burglary) or by a live agent in the NYC FPCC, either of which the FBI would be at pains to conceal and obscure.

3) Apparently Bill Simpich has written about this extensively. Try:

https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Featured_State_Secret_Conclusion.html

Jim Botelho? LHO's USMC roommate?