James DiEugenio

Somehwere in all this, I really see a good story about how the ARRB did not do a good job and then disguised that fact. If you read their report, they do not at all hint at the size of the cache they left behind. But if you read Rex Bradford's report, it was literally tens of thousands of documents. Perhaps into the hundreds of thousands. I don't think anyone had any idea it was that large of a remainder. But also, there were documents that they had designated for a timed release. That is they would be released say arbitrarily in 2005. That they were so agreeable to this caused one CIA staffer to say to another that the ARRB is not really a declassification body its really becoming a declassification deferral body. Now, the other things that gets me upset about this is that knowing they were leaving this huge pile of stuff behind, some of which they surely should not have, some of these board members then said, "Hey, there is nothing there that indicates a conspiracy." I mean Tunheim said this on TV and in a newspaper interview. First of all, does anyone really think that Tunheim read all five million pages the ARRB declassified in whole or in part? I sure do not. Secondly, these guys were not supposed to say things like this in public. They were not an investigatory body. Third, did Tunheim read the Jeremy Gunn inquiry into the medical evidence? I mean that proved conspiracy right there. This is all very discouraging. A reevaluation of the ARRB is now in order. I mean, really. This is something like 21 years after they closed down. And we still do not have it all yet.

That is true Ron. And its something that all these WC zealots ignore. As well as the fact that the CIA analysis said it was a conspiracy. So within about 10 weeks, you have three different verdicts on the Kennedy case. The CIA one was of course kept secret and the WC solved the FBI difference by ditching their report. It was not included in the volumes.

I think you guys missed my point. Trump has now delayed this a second time. Its not all going to be out until 2012, if then. Somewhere in all this, there is a very good story about the failure of the ARRB.

Well, they were all supposed to be out there near the end of last year. They were not and still are not. Maybe they are waiting for Ruth Paine to pass on? I mean Michael is gone, so is Finck. Pretty soon there will be no one to call before a grand jury. And Trump played along with this and delayed it now for three more years. What a travesty it has all become. https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/2017-2018-jfk-releases-progress-issues-recommendations

Pat: That is the photo I was looking for from behind. Nice catch. When Davey starts chattering about the "average angle" we can now see what he means. Take your pick Arlen.

It is, and its available on Kindle. I am preparing a major essay on this subject and I need to gather a bibliography. The stuff coming out of the archives on this is startling.

Is that book translated into English? I would like to get it if it is.

Another good point Mr. Gordon. For anyone to say that somehow Specter's pointer makes the Single Bullet Fantasy real, I mean

Since I went on Von Peinian R an R, I was waiting for someone to say this: "Aside that CE 903 takes no account of the trajectory from the Oswald window" Thanks Mr. Gordon. Any card sharp can do what Specter did here, (falsely) connecting two points. That is not what the Single Bullet Fantasy is though.

Very informative VInce. Only you can do something like this. Gives the rest of us the framework. Although I do disagree with you on Sorrells and Lawson. And didn't you once say Boring was in Dallas later that day? And its Rybka and Lawton being called back at Love Field?

Let me add one other point from the Soviet view. The Soviets were proud of their turning back of the Third Reich. They called it the Patriotic War. From their point of view they liberated the Baltics, parts of Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. They were not going to let the Germans invade them for the third time, which is why they wanted to hang on to Eastern Europe as a buffer zone. When Gorbachev took command and began dismantling all of this, his main problem was that the USA was giving him almost nothing in return. So many of the Soviet citizens did not understand why they had to give all of this and the Americans kept on asking for more. (Putin actually jokes about this in Stone's The Putin Interviews when Stone gives him a DVD package without the DVD inside.) This is a central reason why the hardliners attempted to overthrow Gorbachev. And when he was released, he was intensely unpopular. Its a real paradox: Gorbachev is very popular in the rest of the world. He is wildly unpopular at home. Many Russians thought he gave away what they had fought so hard to attain after World War II and on the way he reduced their status as a great power. This is one reason that Putin is popular. He has tried to make Russia a formidable power again and restore pride in the Russian nationality. IMO, both Reagan and Bush seriously mishandled this whole issue. And they left Gorbachev empty handed and weak at home. To this day i do not know why Reagan turned down the deal at Reykjavik. I have little doubt that Kennedy would have taken it.

I have to say, Newman's second volume, Countdown to Darkness is actually pretty good on this. The article under discussion mentions his book for many references. He also talks about O'Hoare.

Thanks so much Joe. We can argue pretty effectively that it was America--with some help from the British and Australians--that defeated the Japanese. (Although ho many people know that the Japanese struck five other bases in addition to pearl Harbor on that day? And they were not all American.) As I showed in my review, that is not the case in Europe. It was the Russians who deserve most of the credit for being the first to halt and then reverse the blitzkrieg. From 1937-40, Hitler had rolled over most of Europe with his new style fighting machine. Nobody had ever seen anything like a Panzer tank up to that time. And the thing is, for decades after the war, hardly anyone in America ever talked about Operation Barbarossa. You could hardly detect it in history high school textbooks. I never learned about it until I went to college and majored in history. So I found out about it in a 300 level class. That is how severely the Cold War had crippled historical understanding. And that is the mythology that people like Ambrose fed in his focus on Eisenhower and Europe and D-Day. And that is what Hanks and Spielberg reflexively present till this day, even when now, at least some of us know how important the Russians and Zhukov were to stopping Hitler. It was that cultural illusion about American omnipotence that helped fuel an American collective psyche that wanted to go out and kill those "commie gooks" in Indochina. And what Ambrose leaves out is that Eisenhower supported Johnson's escalation of the war. To the point that he was willing to endorse the use of atomic weapons in the jungle!! This is something he would use when, by 1966, Kennedy's advisors now wanted him to get out. LBJ would say something like, "Well Eisenhower is in favor to us staying and winning, even if we have to use the A bomb." This is what caused McGeorge Bundy and George Ball to leave. Poor McNamara stayed and, by all reports, had a nervous breakdown.

For those who wish to see the sordid details about Jean Davison's godawful cover up book, click here. https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/davison-jean-oswald-s-game If you want to see how she misrepresented the claims in her own book about Oswald's language acquisition, click through to Part 2. A cover up laid over a cover up. I will sign off from my exposure of DVP for awhile. This guy is so bad, no human should have to put up with him continually. You need R and R every once in awhile to rehab your senses back to the real world.

This is one of the worst aspects of the Krazy Kid Oswald Crowd. They refuse to acknowledge that a certain personage has been discredited. See, on our side, we do not blindly accept every book that comes down the pike because it advocates Oswald as innocent and Kennedy was killed in a plot. With their side, with few exceptions, that is usually the case. Jean Davison is a stellar example of this. This is a woman who wrote a pathetic biography of Oswald. It broke every rule that a biographer should follow. There is no new research in the book. In examining her footnotes, there is no evidence she ever went anywhere or even called anyone. I mean she makes Bugliosi look peripatetic. She began her book with a deception. She said that somehow, because Jack Ruby passed his lie detector test, Mark Lane was wrong to say that Ruby was hiding something. Its important to note that this was four years after the HSCA exposed the Warren Commission polygraph as deliberately rigged by the FBI. Let me repeat that: It was Four YEARS after it was exposed as being rigged. In other words, the truth is that the FBI covered up Ruby's lies! And anyone could see that if they read the volumes. I don't know what is worse. If she didn't read them or if she did and decided to ignore them to fool the reader. With Davison it could be either one. Why? Because she has an aversion to primary documents. Again, four years after the HSCA, she said that the witnesses in Clinton/Jackson confused Banister for Shaw and therefore they could not be trusted identifying Oswald. This was another misrepresentation of the facts. And all that Davison had to do was track down the investigators of the HSCA who did the work up there. None of the witnesses identified Banister. This was pure James Phelan BS. The witnesses all identified Shaw, mainly because of his height which they said was well over six feet. Shaw was 6' 4" and Banister was 5' 10". But this is the kind of phony research this woman does. When my review of her cruddy book appeared, she said that somehow I was not accurate about what she said about Oswald acquiring the Russian language. Not true. But obviously someone had gotten to her and told her she screwed up back then by implying that Oswald learned Russian in the service. That is in her book. But once she was alerted to this screw up, probably by McAdams, she now said that Oswald learned Russian through his Intourist Guides. Oh really Jean? Then if that was the case, why did he speak fluent Russian to Rosaleen Quinn before he left the USA? This is what happens when one is so steeped in disinfo that you actually forget what the facts are. In your denial of those facts, you trip over yourself and then have to be coached by your allies. Even though I took her book apart almost chapter by chapter, showing it had no credibility, Von Pein still uses her. What a disgrace. For them both.

Neither do I. Its not fun. But I figure someone has to alert at least part of his audience that this guy is pure amateur night as far as begin an historian goes. I still have a hard time buying that he and Spielberg admired Ambrose, a guy who was a plagiarist and fabricated interviews. Maybe one of these days, someone will point out my review to the guy. But then he would have to read it.

Tom Hanks never learns. I really wonder if he reads anything. The year of 1968 was simply a spectacular tsunami of surprises and reversals that ended up in the total neutralizing of the great spirit of hope and aspiration that the decade began with. The murders of King and RFK within two months killed off the decade. And the anti RFK, Nixon, wins. Hanks and his partner Goetzman reduce it all to the level of a water cooler talk. From the beginning, this special was doomed by the choice of so many MSM blowhards. Therefore, there was not going to be any sense of enlargement or empowerment that the really good documentaries give the viewer. And aesthetically speaking, Hank and Goetzman, through Mark Herzog, essentially just slap together archive footage with talking heads, all too easy. Like I wrote in my review here, its like Adam Curtis and The Power of Nightmares never happened. Like I said, a completely mediocre treatment of a potentially great subject. But this is Tom Hanks. What does one expect? https://kennedysandking.com/reviews/tom-hanks-and-1968

I always thought that Thompson's book was the best on the last point. He did interviews with Connally, Shaw and Gregory and they all said that Connally was hit somewhere around Z 231-236. I mean these are doctors and the actual victim. And then you have that great quote by Connally through Doug Thompson that is in McBride's book. When journalist Thompson asked Connally if he thought Oswald fired the gun that killed Kennedy, this was JBC's reply: "Absolutely not. I do not, for one second, believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission." (McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 418)

As Pat notes above, Specter was stuck with the WC verdict on the neck. Even though he himself says he saw the actual photo and it was not in the neck. The scary thing about Davey is he ignores all of this muddled and compromised thinking by Specter. Like it did not happen. Just like he ignores all the evidence at autopsy that the back wound did not transit. Or FInck's testimony about why the back wound was not tracked. Instead, he relies on that phony photo. But to show you just how bad he is, he already got knocked out of the box on this at another forum. So what he does is he reruns the whole thing, CUTTING OUT the part where he got knocked out. See, in that phony photo--of which DVP never shows the reverse angle--Specter did two things to make it work. He adjusted the pointer in both the horizontal and vertical planes. Then Davey says, well what did you want him to do, actually poke the guy through with the pointer. But Davey, in the Discovery Channel special, they actual did do it: they shot the model. The bullet exited out the chest. Which shows what? That Specter knew what he was doing with those adjustments. BTW, this is the part that Davey censored when he reproduced the debate. In other words, he left out the left hook to his head. Look, this fantasy never happened. The eyewitness testimony about the probes at autopsy, FInck's testimony about the depth of the hole in the back, the FBI report on that same subject, and the failure to dissect the back wound all demonstrate that this is just hocus pocus. It was a forensic invention, pure and simple. Done in order to pin the crime on Oswald. And as Pat has indicated elsewhere, it appears to have begun even earlier than we expected. In late January at an 8 hour meeting between the WC, the FBI and SS. Some people on the WC realized that early that they were going to have to go with one bullet through two victims. Even though that is not what the FBI decided. Which is one reason the FBI report got cut out of the volumes.

Paul: That is a different Robert Morrow.

JIm Lesar told me after I did a speech about JFK and the Congo that he found CIA documents which said that they had secretly hired Skorzeny to work with the Katanga leadership. These were Top Secret, the CIA did not want anyone to know about it. What Dulles and McCloy started with getting guys like Gehlen and Barbie out of Germany was sickening. And the results were simply awful.

The shirt he was killed in was made by Charles Dillon in NYC. At that time, their shirts went for as much as 75.00. Which would be about 675 bucks today. Now, how can anyone pay that much for a poorly tailored shirt that did not form fit?

I could barely listen to this, it was just so bad. That whole thing about somehow the public cannot accept that a nobody like Oswald shot the president is so pathetic.

Where is the logic Larry? Why would Bobby have to be briefed on the plots if he knew about them already? Bobby Kennedy Jr's book is good on this. Because today, due to the ARRB, we have the testimony on the co author of the IG Report. He gave a lot more details about this issue especially about the attitude of Richard Helms toward his report. Bill Davy did a very nice job summing up his testimony at that You Tube conference that is online from VMI. In fact, in the report he actually asks rhetorically if the CIA can use presidential approval as deniability and he wires not in this case. Lisa Pease will have even more info on this in her upocking RFK book. That should seal the deal.

Sometimes Davey sound like John McCloy. When the credibility of the WR was crumbling in 1967, CBS gave McCloy all kinds of face time to pile on further lies with the public about how these critics were poking holes in their Swiss Cheese case against Oswald. One of the pieces of BS he used was that the Warren Commission did not have the autopsy materials. That is the pics and x rays. This was false. They did. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 171) Now according to Davey, these would have been the salvation of the case, right? But Specter arranged the Rydberg drawings to be drawn up without those materials, and without even the pathologists' notes. Why? Maybe because Specter knew that the real pics showed the entrance in the back, and not the neck? And the face sheet was even worse in that regard? Therefore, this would create an "artistic" problem for Rydberg? Unlike what Davey insinuates above, the ultimate printing of some of the pics through the Ida Dox illustrations, and the eventual black market copies, did not at all rid the case of problems with the forensic pathology evidence. Far from it. I mean this was when books like High Treason and Best Evidence were published. Whatever one thinks of those books today, they declared that it was now open season on the medical evidence in this case. And with the birth of the ARRB and the visits to the Archives by people like Mantik and Aguilar, things just got worse and worse. To the point that today, as Martin Hay wrote in his critique of the Ayton/ Von Pein opus, these guys really don't even want to deal with this aspect because it is a veritable mine field, with detonations going off everywhere. The autopsy photos strongly suggest that there was a frontal head shot at the right temple just inside the hair line. And Don Thomas has shown this with very good photos at seminars. This coincides with what the attendant from Grawler's, Tom Robinson, said he saw when he went over to pick up the body. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 137) We also know through the ARRB testimony of Stringer that those are not his photos of the brain. (ibid, p. 164) Let us also not forget that Perry said three times on the day of the assassination that the anterior neck wound was one of entrance. And at the mock trial in Houston, Chesser certified that, privately, Perry never went back on that. Just use simple logic: the anterior neck wound was much smaller than the back wound. But again, we would not have these problems if the pathologists had done their jobs of 1.) Tracking the back wound and 2.) Dissecting the brain. They did not do either. Again, I quote Lowenstein. In his experience as a lawyer, people who have nothing to hide don't hide things. There was a lot of stuff to hide with the autopsy of John Kennedy. And Arlen Specter knew it.