James DiEugenio

Paul: The indications are that they are lying. I have a CIA report from 11/23/63 on the phone communications at the Soviet Embassy. Not one mention of Oswald being at that embassy. Pretty incredible. My idea about all this KGB endorsing of CIA legends is that I agree with Amy Wright, the illustrious Russian scholar. She does not come out and say it, but she suggests that once the USSR started to crumble, and money got scarce, a lot of these guys decided, heck, there is no USSR anymore, Yeltsin is a drunken buffoon who is selling off the country anyway, so why not curry favor with the Brits and Americans and maybe make some money overtly and covertly. And the Anglo/Americans were all too eager to oblige. And boy did the former Russians do all they could to give the Americans what they wanted. There were literally hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table to be made. And that was just overtly.

TMZ picked up the story https://www.tmz.com/2019/01/19/jfk-rfk-mlk-malcolm-x-murders-assassinations-conspiracies-reopen-trc/

BTW, recall that Mark Lane wrote that at a debate at UCLA, Phillips said when the record was finally compiled, there would be no evidence that Oswald ever was at the Russian embassy in Mexico City. Has anyone ever located this tape? Or perhaps heard it? Where is it?

Joe, The whole Norman story was not kosher. Although Bugliosi used it at that phony London trial. It was BS probably coerced by that nutty SS guy Elmer Moore. Let me quote from my book, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today where i take Vince to the woodshed on this. (As I do throughout the book.) "If Spence had been up to speed, he should have walked over to the witness and said in a loud, clear voice, "Mr. Norman, forget about the rest of your life. You couldn't even remember that noise for four days!" Spence then should have read to the witness Norman's FBI Report from November 26th. It this first statement to the authorities, there is no mention at all of those three noises he just said he would never forget for the rest of his life. But further, there is nothing in the record that says Norman said anything like this to anyone prior to that time..... Norman's new and improved story did not surface until his Secret Service interview on December 2, 1963, twelve days after the assassination and eight days after the FBI interview. ...One of the Secret Service agents who helped Norman alter his story was Elmer Moore....In addition to massaging the Norman story, he was instrumental in getting Malcolm Perry to change his first day pronouncement about the direction for the shot which caused Kennedy's throat wound." (p. 55)

After Wecht, I think Helpern was the first pathologist to call out the complete mismatch of the gravity of the crime with the quality of the practitioners.

Nice one Steve. God Marina was so full of crap. No wonder the junior counsel did not want to use her.

Dr. Milton Helpern of New York City was the first coroner who made himself a national reputation. This was in the Coppolino case and the Joan Robinson Hill case. (If you want to read one of the best murder mystery books ever, pick up the late Tommy Thompson's Blood and Money. How that has not yet been made into a movie eludes me.) But prior to those two cases he was already known as one of the best pathologists in the country. He had nothing but scorn for the very idea of Humes, Boswell and Finck doing the examination, and the way they conducted that autopsy. There was a whole book written about his career called Where Death Delights by Marhsall Houts. He was called Sherlock Holmes with a microscope. His great line was: “There are no perfect crimes. There are only untrained and blundering investigators, and slipshod medical examiners.”

The stuff about Lemay is so important. Not only because he was a hawk on Vietnam and how he tried to compare the blockade to Munich with JFK, but also because of his close ties to the CIA through the whole SAC. That story about him coming in that day actually made the news. We even had Doug Brinkley talking about it. BTW, the question is: Why was it edited out, and how do we know there is not more missing?

Ron: The wedding ring thing might not be kosher. More to come later. JIM D BTW, that was nice post by Joe eh? Fritz was one heck of a subtle interrogator.

Derek: Yes The Thin Blue Line was set in the Dallas Police Department. Joe McBride refers to it often in his book on the Tippit case, Into the Nightmare. Larry S: As a result of the Innocence Project, we have learned that manufacturing of evidence is unfortunately common in our criminal justice system. If I recall correctly, that was the group Watkins worked with to uncover just how bad the DPD was. BTW, if you read my book, the so called gun sack was an excellent example of this double decker of malfeasance. As I argue, with help from Gil Jesus, the FBI found out what the DPD had done. See, the TSBD did not order its paper and tape from a manufacturer but from a supplier. Therefore, not every order was the same. It varied in thickness and hue. The FBI found this out when they tried to duplicate the so called gun sack themselves at the TSBD. This is one reason for the two FBI reports, one saying that the sack exhibited the same "observable characteristics" as the paper in use at the Depository while the other said it was "not identical". The FBI was using CYA tactics after they discovered the DPD perfidy. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 204)

Do you know how easy it would have been to say that he brought the rifle to work previously and stashed it? The important thing was constructing the phony Klein's transaction. Which the WC fell for hook, line and sinker . Let me address one other point here, as I do in my book. That is the whole idea of the corruption of the legal and judicial process. As we later discovered, the DPD was the most compromised, corrupt, and rogue police department in any major city in America. In fact, numerically speaking, Dallas outdid some states as far as framing innocent defendants. They had it down to an art form. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination, pgs. 196-99) If it had not been for the election of DA Craig Watkins, we might not have known just how bad it was. And the cases that are exposed were mostly under the Wade/Fritz regime. Now considering the make up of the DPD, many Klansmen etc, and considering the statements of people like Alexander and Leavelle, there was no reason to suspect that technique would be suspended in this case. And, as Pat Speer shows above, there is ample evidence it was not. Secondly, as I also discuss in my book, the antics of J. Edgar Hoover were also not exposed until too late. (ibid, pgs. 234-240) Need I add that Hoover did not have any great love for the Kennedys? He strongly suspected they would fire him in a second administration, which they were going to do. Therefore, as I show in my book--pages 240-70--the FBI was sometimes as bad as the DPD. To me the outstanding example being the falsification of Ruby's polygraph, which not only the WC bought but many years later, Von Pein's heroine Jean Davison, bought into. And this was years after the HSCA exposed it as a hoax. Now, if you pile up two law enforcement bodies that were riddled with malfeasance, and you place them in a position where there is no check on them--since the WC was pretty rudderless, I mean what do you expect from the likes of Dulles--what do you come up with? A forensic mess. And the WC accepted it. In fact, if you study Specter, he piled on. And you do not have to rely upon proving instances of the falsification of the record to prove this. The first generation of critics--Meagher, Thompson, Weisberg, Lane--did not rely upon that exposure at all. They just showed that the 26 volumes of evidence did not support the conclusions in the report. The late Margie Field wrote a whole book based upon a rigorous demonstration of that. The American system of justice relies upon the adversary system. Whether one likes or not, that is the case. When the defendant has no one to represent him, then the DA knows that the rules of evidence and testimony will not apply. This is how one gets rogue prosecutions and miscarriages of justice. The one commissioner who was on to this early was Richard Russell. That is why he did his own inquiry and stopped going to most of the executive session hearings. He realized it was a dog and pony show. He did his own inquiry and came to different conclusions. Dulles, McCloy, and Ford knew he would be a problem at the last meeting. They made sure his objections did not get into the record. There was a fake stenographer at the last meeting playing her crossword puzzle instead of taking notes. When Weisberg told Russell what happened, that was the beginning of the commissioners jumping ship. This ended with Boggs saying that Hoover lied about everything. Which he did.

BTW, again for newbies like Derek, the reason I quote Pat Speer on this is because, although I deal with this phony bag issue in my book, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, I would have to type in lots of sentences since I do not have the book in Kindle form. In the trade paper format I deal with this issue at length, from pages 199-206. And from more than one angle. But Pat's book is an online production. So its easy to cut and paste. But he does a good job on Stombaugh and the bag. Bottom line: that rifle was not at the Paine home.

Did Stombaugh bring up this point, again from Pat Speer: What's Goin ' On? No, scratch that, too. Before anyone convinced I am mistaken about the bag in the press photos' not looking like the one in the archives spends one precious second trying to prove me wrong, they should help straighten out some of the basic facts about the bag. Basic facts like...the actual location of the initials on the bag visible in Warren Commission Exhibit 632. You see, I've studied both the bag in the press photos and the bag in the archives photos, and I can't figure out where these initials could be on the bag. Although the palm print depicted in the exhibit was purportedly near the closed end of the bag, none of the press photos showing the closed end of the bag, and none of the archives photos showing the closed end of the bag, show these initials. My inability to figure out where these initials are on the bag, or even where the section of bag depicted in Exhibit 632 is on the bag, makes me wonder if the palm print depicted in Exhibit 632 was on either of these bags. Let's see how this can be... Perhaps the bag seen in the press photos was a bag found in the school book depository...that couldn't be linked to Oswald. Perhaps a second piece of paper was found, which could be linked to Oswald...perhaps this was a piece of paper pulled from one of the orders he'd pulled on 11-22. Or perhaps it was a piece of paper Oswald touched at the police station. Perhaps then Exhibit 632 is a close-up shot of this second piece of paper, and not of a bag. If so, well, then the bag currently in the archives was a bag created after the shooting, most probably from paper removed from the building on 11-22. Such a bag would not only be smaller than the bag shown Buell Frazier on 11-22, and therefore easier to pass off as the bag Oswald brought to work, but it would match the characteristics of the paper used in the depository, and thereby make its use by anyone other than Oswald seem unlikely. Or not. While I could be making a mountain out of a molehill, there's definitely some dirt here... I mean, just look at this mess... According to the report of the Dallas Detective who found the bag, L.D. Montgomery, the bag was initialed by Detectives Robert Studebaker, Marvin Johnson, and himself upon its discovery in the sniper's nest (24H314). All three of these men testified before the Warren Commission in Dallas on 4-6-64. So why weren't they shown the bag, and asked to verify their initials? Was it because the bag they'd signed had been switched with another bag? And that their initials had been forged onto a different piece of paper entirely?

And in Stombaugh's testimony are these points brought up? (From Pat Speer) The Tell-Tale Tape You see, there's also the FBI photo of the bag before they coated it with silver nitrate (a chemical used to bring out fingerprints, which forever stains paper). This photograph is Exhibit 14 in Warren Commission Document CD 1, the FBI's 12-9-63 Summary Report on the assassination. Although the proportions of the bag in this photograph have been distorted by the photographer's taking this picture while the bag was laying flat on the floor before him, it is still suggestive that the bag in evidence is not the bag pulled from the building. The bag in the photograph has numerous pieces of paper tape along its right side. NO paper tape is visible anywhere on the front side of the bag in the news photos. There is also a piece of tape in the middle of the open end of the bag. No such piece of tape is visible in the news photos. The press photos do, on the other hand, show the paper by the open end of the bag to be badly crinkled. No such crinkling is apparent on the bag in the FBI exhibit. The bags in the photos, in fact, bear little resemblance to one another. Unless the side of the bag seen in Exhibit 14 is the opposite side of the bag seen in the news photos, then, we have conclusive evidence the bags are not the same.

That is a mystery that has never been solved. Why was not someone like Helpern brought in to do the autopsy? In all the reading I have done on this subject I do not think I have ever see this problem addressed. I mean no one, like Galloway, at Bethesda realized this was a problem? Helpern sure did. He compared sending Humes to do JFK's autopsy to a 12 year old doing a Chopin violin concerto at Carnegie Hall.

If newbies like Derek do not know what I am talking about with the possible wrong shirt and Mary Bledsoe, please read this: https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/deeper-into-dave-perry Bledsoe has the credibility of Brennan.

The paper bag to the blanket. This makes your argument even worse. First, you ignore the evidence of the fibers the DPD most likely put in the butt plate because they did not have anything else.. But to resort to the the bag? HA HA HA HA ROTF http://www.patspeer.com/chapter4d%3Asackoflies

Davey now has to make like he does not understand that Stombaugh's failure to do anything at all to connect the rifle to the blanket was a big problem for the WC. Because, to any normal thinking person--automatically excluding Davey-- it indicated the rifle was not in the blanket. That is why they had Marina do what she did. Davey also ignores the fact that Speer also showed how they were so desperate to connect that rifle to LHO that it looks like the DPD stuffed some shirt fibers in the butt plate. But it is actually even worse than that. Why? Because it probably was the wrong shirt. This brings in the utterly risible testimony of none other than Mary Bledsoe, who may be worse than Marina.

Davey just doesn't know when to quit. He is having a very bad day today. I don't know if DVP has ever heard of a guy named Stombaugh. But he was the FBI agent who was called as an expert for hair and fiber evidence. His testimony is in volume 4, and it is the epitome of just how bad the WC really was. The WC desperately wanted him to link the blanket to the rifle in any possible way that he could. He could not. He had to resort to the shirt and that got rather sticky. I can do no better than link to Pat Speer's analysis of Stombaugh and what his testimony really meant: "I noted it had been dusted for latent prints. So I proceeded to pick off what fibers were left from the small crevices and small grease deposits which were left on the gun. At the point of the butt plate, the end of the stock…I found a tiny tuft of fibers which had caught on that jagged edge, and then when the individual who dusted this dusted them, he just folded them down very neatly into the little crevice there, and they stayed.” This duster would be Lt. J.C. Day, the same Dallas Crime Lab Detective who “found” Oswald's palm print on the rifle after giving it to the FBI and having them find no identifiable prints on the rifle. Day explained later that he'd lifted this palm print off the rifle on the night of the assassination before sending it to the FBI crime lab in Washington. He said he was surprised they'd found no trace of this print upon inspection. He admitted further that he had not protected this print, or marked its location, in any way. Nor had he sent a note along with with the rifle explaining the work he had performed, and that he'd lifted a palm print from the underside of the barrel on a part of the barrel only accessible when the rifle is disassembled. He'd also failed to photograph the print while it was on the rifle (which is pretty much standard procedure). From such mistakes reasonable doubts arise. Stombaugh, continued: “These I removed and put on a glass microscope slide…because this little group of fibers—little tuft of fibers, appeared to be fresh. The fibers on the rest of the gun were either adhering to a greasy, oily deposit or jammed into a crevice and were very dirty and apparently very old…the other fibers I cleaned up, removed the grease and examined them but they were of no value. They were pretty well fragmented…They all appeared old…in excess of a month or two months.” Returning to the “tuft,” Stombaugh explained: “this was just a small tuft. They were adhering to the gun on a small jagged edge. In other words the gun had caught on a piece of fabric and pulled the fibers loose. They were clean, they had good color to them, there was no grease on them and they were not fragmented. They looked as if they had just been picked up. They were folded very neatly down in the crevice…they were adhering to the edge rather tightly…it had the jagged edge sticking up and the fibers were folded around it and resting in the crevice…I believe when the fingerprint man dusted it he probably ran his brush along the metal portion here…Of the butt plate, and at the time the brush folded these down into the crevice...Because of the presence of fingerprint powder being down in and through the crevice here. It looked as if it had been dusted with a brush. You could make out the bristlemarks of the brush itself.” Stombaugh had thereby testified that the fibers found in the butt plate crevice did not end up there on their own, and were apparently folded down in there only AFTER Day had dusted the butt plate. When asked what it would take for someone to loosen the threads from the jagged edge, he responded “Well, I would imagine if one took a brush and started brushing pretty hard these would have worked loose and come out…They were adhering to the jagged edge...they were adhering pretty tightly to the gun. I believe through ordinary handling of the gun eventually they would have worked loose and fallen off...I had to take a pair of tweezers and work them out…And after I had the fibers lifted up which could have been the original position they were in, then I had to pull them off. They were wrapped around rather snugly to the sharp edge.” Later, when asked if the rifle should have had fibers from the blanket, he replied “No, because the gun was dusted for fingerprints and any fibers that were loosely adhering to it could have been dusted off. The only reason, I feel, that these fibers remained on the butt plate is because they were pulled from the fabric by the jagged edge and adhered to the gun and then the fingerprint examiner with his brush, I feel, when brushing and dusting this plate, stroked them down into that crevice where they couldn’t be knocked off. In time these fibers would undoubtedly have become dislodged and fallen off the gun” (4H56-88). If Oswald had been allowed an attorney, he (or she) would have just loved Stombaugh. Stombaugh pretty much admitted it's possible the fiber evidence was planted. He also gave an indication who did it, or at least knew about it. When asked if he was "unhappy" about being handed a rifle that had already been dusted for fingerprints, and asked to inspect it for trace evidence, Stombaugh replied: "I was; however, it is not uncommon for fingerprint processing to be given priority consideration. They wanted to know whether or not the gun contained any fibers to show that it had been stored in this blanket."He then explained who this "they" was: "Well, this is our Dallas office. They sent the gun in wanting to know this fact." In light of the above, we know why Marina said what she said. And we know why people like Ball did not want to use her at all. The woman is to be pitied, not used in any forensic way.

Oh puhlease. As attorney Larry Schnapf said, Marina Oswald would be utterly shredded upon any real cross examination. Even the junior lawyers on the WC did not want to use her as a witness, and in a real trial it is highly unlikely she would have been allowed to testify. But I would have preferred she would have since she would have been reduced to rubble.

On this week's Black Op Radio, I comment on this issue briefly since Len was at the private Gary Aguilar seminar in San Fran and he previously played the David Josephs presentation. I think I have said this before, but in a nutshell what I think David is ultimately going to do is redefine the whole Mexico City scenario. He is going to do it based upon the latest documents that the CIA did not want to declassify. I believe that in the end, these will be the new tenets of MC: 1. Oswald was not in Mexico City. 2. The short blonde guy did the charade. 3. Ochoa and Echeverria set up the phony transportation materials up and back. 4. Phillips worked on the tapes and transcripts at the embassies, with Goodpasture covering up for him. 5. Once Hoover finally did some work in this area, he understood that is was all a pile of paper mache. He admitted this in private but not in public.

There was never any rifle at the Paine household. Which would not mean they could not have framed Oswald through the Paines anyway. They could have just said that he picked it up previously and gone through with that whole blanket act.

Now, if these were all burned how do we know what was in them? Especially in relation to a part of McKnight's book, p. 162. Let me quote from my review: But with this established, Specter and Humes moved on to a second deception. Namely that Commission Exhibit 397 was the documentary record upon which the official autopsy report was based. This exhibit consisted of a set of notes, and the handwritten revision of the incinerated draft of the autopsy report. One of the note pages was the autopsy "face sheet" (body diagram with wounds marked), and the others were notes of Humes' talk with Dr. Malcolm Perry of Parkland Hospital about the tracheotomy he had performed on President Kennedy in Dallas. But this cannot be the entire record since the final, single-spaced, 6-page autopsy report contains many facts that are not contained in these documents. After a thorough analysis, McKnight concludes: There are, give or take, about eighty-eight autopsy "facts" in the official prosectors' report. About sixty-four of these "facts" or pieces of medicolegal information (almost 75%) cannot be found in either the published notes or CE 397. Some fifteen of these pieces of information involve measurements and numbers that are not found in the published record. (p. 162) So where did these other "facts" come from?

Please note this exchange: Q: Let me quote from two paragraphs of the affidavit and then I will ask you if that helps refresh your recollection to any events. Paragraph X states: "I clearly heard Dr. Finck, who was speaking sufficiently loudly for his words easily to be overheard, complain that he had been unable to locate the handwritten notes that he had taken during the autopsy on President Kennedy. Dr.Finck elaborated to his companions with considerable irritation that immediately after washing up following the autopsy, he looked for his notes and could not find them anywhere. He further recounted that others who were present at the autopsy also had helped him search for his notes to no avail.............Dr. Finck concluded his story by angrily stating that he had to reconstruct his notes from memory shortly after the autopsy." The question, Dr. Finck, is do these two paragraphs help refresh your recollection first on the question of whether you took notes during the autopsy? A: I don't know." "Q: Dr. Finck, would it have been your regular practice during the course of an autopsy in which you participated to take notes and measurements? A: Yes. Q: Would that be a standard practice and procedure that most prosectors would engage in during the course of an autopsy? A: Yes. Q: Dr. Finck, did you keep any kind of diary or written record of events that you were involved in? A: I don't know. Q: Dr. Finck, you have no idea at all whether you kept something like a diary in ? A: I don't remember. He does not remember if he kept a diary?

Doyle said that Stanton was wearing a wig that day? Why?