James DiEugenio

DJ: This epitomizes what I refer to as "neo-con" belief. LOL I always thought the Hester testimony was inexplicably discounted. From Reclaiming Parkland, p. 197 ​"The pose struck by Brown did not recall the two photos originally removed from the Paine home. It was a different pose. HIs pose resembled a photo pilfered from the Dallas Police, which did not show up until the widow of Roscoe White returned it in 1975. Further, as Johnson notes, there were actually two of the ghost photos in the archives. The silhouette was the same but the backgrounds were slightly different. One has the two vertical lines visible, in the other they are removed. As Johnson notes, someone went to some trouble with an airbrush to do so."

What does this have to do with Davison? DId you give up?

Per Davey's snark above, I explained why I did not reply. My reply is irrelevant to his point. He doesn't even know what he is arguing most of the time. But to go further with the whole Davison nonsense: there is a part two to the saga. See, Davsion made a mistake when she wrote her cover up book. She left in evidence that Oswald was learning the Russian language while in America. That creates a problem. Because it leaves open the probability--as Jim Garrison so aptly perceived-- that Oswald was getting intel training. I mean why else learn Russian at the height of the Cold War? You sure weren't going to tour the Crimea. Well, see someone--probably McAdams, maybe Reitzes--noticed this and told her. You know, "Jean, you slipped up and let the cat out of the bag." So she then altered her stance on this. She now said something that was so nutty it approached science fiction. Please sit down before you have a stroke. She now said that Oswald learned the Russian language from the Intourist guides when he got to the USSR! Is that about the most bizarre thing you ever heard? These were the guides from the Soviet state run tourist bureau. I mean if you have ever been to Hawaii on a tour, they have these people running things. I never learned Polynesian from them. Further, when I talked to Ernest Titovets in Washington at the AARC conference, I asked him about this. Titovets was a friend of Oswald's in Minsk. I first asked him when he met Oswald. He said it was about 11 months after he got to the USSR. I asked him if he spoke good Russian at that time he met him. He said yes he did. Now, as the late illustrious Phil Melanson showed in his milestone book Spy Saga, Russian is a very hard language to learn. As opposed to a Romance language, it takes a very long period of formal study, plus professional tutoring. Melanson talked to a professional in the field and the guy said, minimum of 1.100 hours of rigorous study to do it. Now, go through the WR and see how long Oswald spent with his Intourist guides. Absolute hogwash by Davison. Further demonstrated by this link: http://www.ctka.net/2014/Davison%20update.html But this is the kind of work Davey accepts and encourages. And make no mistake. This is a key aspect of the case. Because if Oswald is not what the WC says he was, Pandora's Box is opened.

LOL ROTF LMAO I just wrote about two pages of stuff showing how wrong you were. You did not reply to almost all of it. And you accuse me of avoiding the question. HA HA HA

DJ: And if they only took the two photos and two negatives.... when does 133-C show up prior to Nov 29th when they put Det Brown in that exact position? This is intriguing I think. ​I also like the end of Part 2 of Jeff's series. With the likliehood that Ruth Paine took the New Orleans photos. And the WC ran from that.

Let me link to another example of DVP's logical fallacy: the life and true identity of Oswald. As I showed in another thread, by the early summer of 1964, the WC just about gave up on trying to make sense of Oswald. John Hart Ely was coming up with too many problems in the data. So Howard Willens then decided that he was too good a lawyer and he brought in a guy who had never seen the inside of the court room to do the whitewash. Which can be done of course. But here is the rub: you have to leave out a lot of crucial things in order to do it. And the stuff you leave out completely modifies the stuff you left in. One of Davey's favorite authors on this case--almost as high up in his canon as Bugliosi--is Jean Davison. Davison wrote a book about Oswald after the HSCA was completed. Now, if you don't know anything about Oswald, which many people do not, one might find her book convincing: Oswald killed Kennedy because he was a communist and liked Castro etc. The whole AP journalist Daniel Harker story--which, by the way, Bugliosi does not accept. But Davison tried to revive this since she thought the problem with the world not accepting the WC verdict was their failure to apply a motive. (What makes that funny is that the WC knew about the Harker story, like Bugliosi, they did not find it credible.) Now, you can make this work--if you apply rigorous censorship. But that is the only way it works. The minute you start to let too much information in, it shrivels up and dies. Which, of course, is the problem with the WR in general. For a demonstration click here: http://www.ctka.net/2014_reviews/Davison%20review.html But the problem is that as one famous Harvard professor once said, "facts are like sunshine, they allow us to see properly". Which is what Davey does not want us to do.

DVP: I haven't backpedaled on anything, Jimmy. Davey, you first made the implication that all the critics think all the evidence is phony. I then proved that false, let me reiterate: 1. Let me now list some critics who do not think there is wholesale fakery in the evidence (List of ten critics followed) 2. She (Marjorie Field) started with a set of large easels. She then blew up pages from the WR to show the central tenets of the report. She then blew up pages from the 26 volumes. She then glued the stuff in the volumes that contradicted the WR and put it right below the tenet, which was now proven to be questionable, if not false. This went on for about 200 pages. The WR was shredded by its own evidence. Would that have been a blockbuster book? 3. Now, let me go ahead and link to a fine critique of the Ayton-DVP book which attacks it without saying the evidence is faked. http://www.ctka.net/...ton Review.html You then revised your position to this: The CTers who think Oswald never fired a shot at either JFK or Tippit (which encompasses roughly 80% of Internet CTers, which is probably a conservative estimate) most certainly must believe that all of the evidence that points to Oswald is fraudulent. I have bolded and italicized the statement as amended.. Why did he amend it? Because in the statements I made I showed how a lot of critics, especially the early ones, have shown--with the WC's own evidence in the 26 volumes--that the WR did not prove its case against Oswald. I mean Salandria did this quite powerfully back in 1965. He wants to get around the fact that many critics shredded the WR by using the 26 volumes. So now its not just if the evidence is real or not, its if one thinks Oswald was involved by at least firing a shot at either JFK or TIppit. But this is a distinction without a difference. Because people like Meagher showed the WC case was a fraud against Oswald in every way, by using its own evidence. So did Field. Secondly, he now asks me what I personally think of the authenticity of the evidence. That is irrelevant to the argument as he propounded it. My point is that the evidence is so weak and dubious that one can use a variety of arguments against it to show its not probative. And all the arguments have value, if one accepts the evidence the WC used or not. Like I said Field used the 26 volumes -she just glued them in--to show the WC wildly overstated its own evidence. Salandria did the same to show that the Magic Bullet was a fantasy. He never went beyond that in his original essays. ​See, that is what lawyers are taught to do. If you can use the prosecution's own evidence to show his case is not credible, I mean what else do you need?

The above is pure Von Pein. "Geez, I just got proved wrong. Better backpedal and reposition myself before anyone notices"

MK: It's NOT that the CT'ers all claim it's faked; it's simply that provenance and chain-of-custody are not well documented enough for your average murder case involving your average citizen...much less the President of the United States. ​And let me add something else. From about 1965 to about 1975, the vast majority of the critics accepted most of the evidence. That takes in a lot of people: I mean from Salandria to Evica. ​The point was this: the evidence in the 26 volumes did not support the WR. So the critics just attacked the WR with its own evidence. Somehow Davey does not get that. Probably because he has not read the volumes. ​In fact, Marjorie Field assembled what would have been a wonderful book based on that precise thesis. It was called The Evidence. What she did was exceptionally unique. ​She did not type a manuscript. She started with a set of large easels. She then blew up pages from the WR to show the central tenets of the report. She then blew up pages from the 26 volumes. She then glued the stuff in the volumes that contradicted the WR and put it right below the tenet, which was now proven to be questionable, if not false. This went on for about 200 pages. The WR was shredded by its own evidence. Would that have been a blockbuster book? At the last minute the publisher pulled out saying it would be too expensive to reproduce the easels. Maggie had them in her basement until she died. Vital symbols of the perfidy of the Commission.

Gary: Where is your book? You were going to send it to me two years ago. Did I miss it? Are you competing with Lifton to see who can take the longest time to finish? If that is it, I think you will lose.

PS: In the past ten years I have witnessed so much infighting, and so much deception, among my fellow CTs that I no longer assume those pushing the Oswald-did-it theory in the media or the web are conscious of their deceptions. Can you elucidate this a bit more as to what you mean.

Davey is absolutely hysterical isn't he? He is an expert in CYA. First there is the CT label. When, in fact, no organization of government ever practiced a theory more than the WC. I mean, what do you call the Single Bullet Fantasy? The WC was so theory based on that that they had to lie to their own members to get it through i.e. Richard Russell. Neither Davey nor Vince liked to talk about that. VB actually tried to say he's not sure that happened. Well, maybe one of these years the transcript will show up eh Davey. Second, he then says that all of the critics think ALL OF THE EVIDENCE is faked. Which takes in a lot of space. And a lot of people. And its simply Von Peinian goofiness. Let me now list some critics who do not think there is wholesale fakery in the evidence; Randy Robertson. Tink Thompson. Cyril Wecht. The late Roger Feinman . Mark Lane. Jerry Policoff. Pat Speer. Martin Hay. Don Thomas. Sherry Fiester. But they all think Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. And about half of them wrote books about it. So, "all you critics think all the evidence is faked", this is just nonsense. Now, let me go ahead and link to a fine critique of the Ayton.DVP book which attacks it without saying the evidence is faked. http://www.ctka.net/2015/Ayton%20Review.html So Davey is provably wrong. (What else is new?)

By the way, at the gym today I thought of another program that I was part of growing up in the sixties. About two blocks from my house, there was an elementary school, which was the first public school i attended. During the late fall and winter months--which took up a lot of time in Pennsylvania--that school opened it first floor doors at night. If I recall it was about 2-3 nights per week. They had a recreation/sports program going. This included basketball leagues. Our team would play another team at a neutral court. Lots of kids participated. This was complemented in the summer by recreation activities in the park adjoining the school in which we had a soft ball team which also participated in a league. The summer program was really something. At its peak it took up almost two blocks, the school ground and the park across the street. I don't know who funded these programs. But they were run through the city parks department. I knew the guy who administered it, Teddy Amendola. Anyway, looking back, they were valuable. Not only were they fun for kids, but as I see now, they kept kids off the streets at night. I grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood and I can see now how important that was. Because back then we had little if any gang activity. As I recall, these programs were first cut back and then phased out. (BTW, Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to revive those for awhile in California before he became governor.) Let me add one more thing, even though it was a fairly decent sized park with benches and trees etc., I don't ever recall seeing any vagabond ever sleeping there. Today, you cannot go anywhere in LA, or any large to medium sized city, without seeing homeless people. They have become part of our culture. That is how much this country has changed.

Jon: Because I know the law's definition of "evidence" but I don't know DVP's definition. Easy, if the WC or Vince Bugliosi says it, then to DVP, its evidence. Don't worry about its authenticity, its origin or its chain of custody, or even a differing description.

Well, that would be a defensible position I think, perhaps even today. But Palamara's book brings up too many anomalies in this regard that it is kind of hard to buy all of them. If you look at pages 387-89, there are 30 such instances, of Murphy's law. Also, Vince settles the matter once and for all: the route was changed. Period. (See chapter 4) Finally, the experience of Abe Bolden is I think very indicative of the mentality of these guys. I mean, they were really unprofessional in their duties and racist in their attitudes. In sum, whether by design or by negligence, they have a good deal to cover up today. They ensured JFK would be killed.

Well Glenn: If you are for economic globalization, then Reagan and his crew of economists are your cup of tea. Kennedy was not for globalization. As Donald Gibson so ably instructs us in his fine book on the subject called Battling Wall Street. Kennedy was a nationalist. Both concerning our economy and those in the developing Third World. IMO, Kennedy was correct on this. Globalization has been a disaster for everyone except the upper classes. Trickle down turned out to be trickle up. https://consortiumnews.com/2012/02/29/the-winners-take-everything/

Ken: I don't agree that Wilson was dedicated to giving the US the same type of government as in Russia. WIlson, from my study, was a lot more conservative than history textbooks say he was. Wilson gave us the Federal Reserve, and he was determined to get us into World War I. A war which our entry into was very dubious. I don't understand how it was "a coup" to get FDR elected. FDR first got elected in a landslide because Hoover had completely mismanaged the Great Depression. Climaxed by the routing of the Bonus Army, which made the front pages. Almost any Democrat could have won that year.

See, back then, the states were flush with money for various reasons. For one, the federal government had not gone bankrupt yet and therefore had not passed back various unfunded mandates to them. So it was no big deal to pick up these kind of tuition bills. The great thing about it is that they picked up private colleges as well as state schools. This whole crisis about budgets began slowly under LBJ when he escalated the war and tried to hide its cost, which introduced stagflation. The Nixon years were an utter disaster for the US economy, with the continuing war, with his price controls and the Arab oil boycott. Carter then tried to squeeze out the stagflation, but it hurt him politically. Then came the crusher: Reagan and supply side economics. The American economy has not been the same since.

If anyone is interested in the above comparison between FDR and JFK, this is a good book to follow up with: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9524.html

DJ: There was never "the america we once had"... never existed Glenn. The evils we all accept today were much better hidden - but they were still there and running things.. I agree in general but I think this is overstated. ​What FDR put together during the New Deal and WW 2 was a pretty good progressive model that was actually even better compared to what came before it, that is Coolidge--Mellon--Hoover. Both domestically and in foreign policy. And if that had been left intact, I think a lot of progress would have been made on several fronts. Most significantly, the Cold War may have been prevented. ​Truman, to say the least, did not follow up on this. In fact, as several historians agree today, the hawks in FDR's cabinet saw Truman as their opportunity to reverse policies they thought were too dovish. Most notably Jimmy Byrnes, who Truman made Secretary of State. And boy did they reverse FDR. Then, Eisenhower and Foster Dulles exacerbated this, especially in the Third World, with the help of Allen Dulles and the CIA. The way I look at Kennedy is this: his administration is trying to get back to Roosevelt's model. And he is trying to do it fast. IMO, and I label this as such, Kennedy was going too fast for his own good. Or as a working colleague of Allen Dulles once said to an acquaintance of mine, "He [JFK] deserved to die. He was trying to change things too fast." I personally believe that the model of America under FDR and Kennedy made for a pretty good country. And those two guys did, and would have done, a lot of good things, both domestically and in foreign policy. I mean, just to give you one example: When I went to college for the first time, I never saw a tuition bill. Not one. That was all taken care of through state grants. I applied for them and the bills were rerouted through the college office so I never saw one. And I attended a private Catholic college for the first two years. Compare that to today. Kids graduate with literally tens of thousands of dollars in college debt. If you are a lawyer or doctor, its hundreds of thousands. And that is just one example among many.

The evidence for the Troika controlling things is simply overwhelming. As adduced by Walt Brown in his valuable book, The Warren Omission, the man who attend the most meetings of the Commission was Dulles. And the member who posed the most questions was Dulles. After putting together a matrix, Brown concluded that Dulles, Ford and McCloy asked nearly 70% of the questions. Which is astonishing considering its only three men, and recall, the questioning was incredibly pointless. Now, the Southern Wing attended only 63 full hearings, less than 25% of the total. They also asked less than 25% of the questions. (RP, pgs. 256-57) From those figures, its pretty obvious who controlled the WC. And why the Troika did not go along with Russell's excursion into questioning Marina as a hostile witness, and why they wanted no stenographic record of the last meeting. These are simply facts. Label them what you wish.

Krystinic was more than close friends with Mike Paine. He actually met Oswald at the ACLU meeting that Paine and Oswald went to in October of 1963. It was after Oswald made a speech. Oswald and Krystinic later got into an argument. Which became heated, and nearly violent. Although Oswald left the impression he was not impressed by the ACLU, he later joined the organization. (Melanson, Spy Saga, p. 56)

I have to comment on him calling the concept of the Troika of Dulles, McCloy and Ford as controlling the WC, "smelly garbage". See, if one goes through all the testimony in the 26 volumes and sees who was there as each witness testified before the actual commission, one will note that there were certain commissioners who are in attendance with frequency and others who are not so frequent. Sylvia Meagher first noticed this back in 1967. She noted that Richard Russell was not there very much at all. And therefore, we looked at that record with chagrin. And Bugliosi goes after him on this account. (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 257) We should not have. Russell actually figured out that the whole thing was a dog and pony show quite early. In fact, even Burt Griffin testified to the HSCA that Russell's ideas of an investigation were different than the WC--which was essentially a reliance on the FBI. (ibid) So what he did was essentially a boycott of the Commission. This was never more evident than when he, Boggs and Cooper--what I call the Southern Wing--decided to reinterview Marina Oswald--and the Troika did not show up: that is Ford, Dulles and McCloy. Why? Because as can be seen by the questioning, in large part, the Southern Wing did not buy Marina. Russell even composed a letter of resignation, which he did not send. In that letter, he complained that the Commission "has been scheduling holding, and canceling meetings without notifying him." (Ibid, p. 258) This important material is all absent from Bugliosi's book. And need I add what happened at the final Executive Session hearing? Knowing Russell, and likely Cooper and Boggs, were going to object to the SBT, the Troika, and Warren decided to trick him. They had a girl there posing as a stenographer, but she was not from the steno company, who's contract had expired a week before. So there is no stenographic record of this meeting or Russell's objection. (ibid) Let me add, the gymnastics that Bugliosi pulls to camouflage what happened here--he couldn't ignore it-- is truly a sight to behold. Nadia Comenici would have been proud of his balancing act performance. It was not until years later that Harold Weisberg alerted Russell to this bit of treachery. And this is what started Russell in expressing his objections in public. Smelly garbage? Yep that is what the Warren Commission was.

Glenn: You weren't aware that Davey runs a KFC in, I think its Mooresville, Indianna. That is what I was referring to.

BTW, VInce was caught between a rock and a hard place on Hoover. He did not want to admit all the awful things attributed to the man today. He knew that would seriously compromise the WC's performance. So what he does is soft-pedal--and that is being kind --his whole portrait of Hoover and what he did for the WC. In Reclaiming Parkland, I strongly criticize Vince for this. For example, Vince does not print what some of the Commissioners themselves said about Hoover e.g. Hale Boggs. Therefore, I had to correct this lack of candor. In my chapter on Vince's treatment of the FBI and Hoover I subhead one of the sections, "The Horrendous History of an Ogre"; and I go ahead and inform the reader of the godawful things Hoover did which, for political and polemical reasons, Vince did not want to tell his readers about. I interviewed former FBI agent Bill Turner on this issue. Let me quote what he said to me from RP (p. 219): "The thing that struck Turner as being so bad about Hoover's JFK investigation was that individual leads were not followed to their ultimate conclusion. As he described it, there were three main steps in any FBI inquiry: 1.) Collection of all pertinent leads 2.) the following out of all leads to their ultimate end 3.) Collating of all information garnered into a complete and accurate report. Turner said that without the second phase, the third phase was not really possible. And that is what he found so appalling about the FBI report on JFK. To him, it was so apparent that step two had been systematically and rigorously circumvented that there had to have been interference from above. FBI agents just did not proceed like that unless they were advised to do so." This was later certified by the late FBI agent Don Adams in his book. After watching the Zapruder film in Dallas, he told his fellow FBI agents: well its obvious he was hit from two directions. They told him, heck we know that but that is not what HQ wants us to write about.