Ashton Gray

Hi, Jon. Happy to make your acquaintance. Like many people, I do feel there is a connection between the two events, but Watergate and its consequences have long been the focus of my research. I am in awe of the many competent people who have done such magnificent work on the JFK assassination, and it was only by virtue of being an heir to their wealth of knowledge that I made this brief side-foray into the question of the front throat wound. The very obvious connection between the two events is the CIA. If we knew exactly how, these would no longer be controversial issues. As far as I'm concerned, my research has convinced me beyond any shred of doubt that it is the biggest and best-funded, best-protected criminal organization that ever has existed on Earth, hiding behind a self-created opaque veil of "national security." I don't know how the little record we have access to of their activities could leave any doubt about that in anyone's mind. Ashton

Hiya, Cliff. Thanks for the warm welcome, and it's great to see you still around these parts. The best information I've seen on the subject of MK/Naomi is in H.P. Albarelli, Jr.'s book, A Terrible Mistake, subtitled The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments. If you haven't read it I recommend it to your attention. He quotes Sidney Gottlieb in a number of places about it, e.g.: The Church Committee blurred the lines between all these programs, MKULTRA, ARTICHOKE, Bluebird, QKHILLTOP, Chemical Corps, NAOMI, SHADE, all of them became one and I was ... I didn’t have any problem with answering for them all, but I didn’t ... I didn’t oversee all these projects. Let’s leave it at that. I've found precious little about the program outside of that book. We all still suffer from Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb having destroyed so many CIA records of their atrocities. Some time ago a colleague sent me some PDFs of several logs of FOIA requests where MK/Naomi is mentioned, but only in titles of a few documents that are listed. I believe that one of the logs came from a place called The Government Attic, and the other was from The Black Vault website. Don't hold me to that; it's from recollection. I wish I could help more. Good luck with it. Ashton

Didn't both Hunt and Liddy later admit there had been a plot to kill Jack Anderson? Yes. That's what I just said in what you quoted. So what? If they had "admitted" that they met with Gunn because they wanted to kill a unicorn, it would have had just as much substance as their "admission" that they had wanted to kill Anderson. Here's just how asinine their "confession" about Anderson was: Tuesday, 15 February 1972 The CIA begins an illegal domestic spying operation, called Project Mudhen, with 16 CIA agents deployed to conduct surveillance on Jack Anderson and his staff. Project Mudhen is being run from the CIA's Office of Security. c. Wednesday, 1 March 1972 Douglas "Ragtop" Caddy begins doing "volunteer" work with G. Gordon Liddy—who has "special clearances" from the CIA. c. Friday, 17 March 1972 Douglas "Ragtop" Caddy meets with "former" CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, and with the General Counsel of the CIA, Lawrence Houston. Houston and Hunt have both been in the CIA since its inception. Houston was the very architect of the creation of the CIA, "a principal draftsman of the legislative proposal to abolish the CIG and establish the CIA." One former assistant general counsel of the CIA, A. John Radsan, has called Houston “the ultimate intelligence insider.” On or about the same day... Friday, 17 March 1972 CIA Director Richard Helms meets with Jack Anderson in the Montpelier Room restaurant at the Madison Hotel in the District of Columbia. Project Mudhen is continuing. Friday, 24 March 1972 "Former" CIA veteran E. Howard Hunt, and G. Gordon Liddy—who has "special clearances" from CIA—meet with "former" CIA scientist Dr. Edward Gunn to discuss methods of drugging or poisoning someone. At the time, Gunn is on the staff of "former" CIA Office of Security veteran James McCord, at McCord Associates in Rockville, Maryland. Project Mudhen is continuing. According to Gunn and Liddy, at no time was the name of the intended target of such operation discussed. [NOTE: Liddy claimed falsely in his autobiography that this took place in February. See Hougan et al. for reasons why it didn't, and why this is the most likely date for the meeting.] Wednesday, 12 April 1972 James McCord receives $65,000 ($375,348.91 in today's dollars) from G. Gordon Liddy, purportedly to purchase electronic eavesdropping equipment. On the same day the CIA discontinues Project Mudhen, ostensibly the surveillance of columnist Jack Anderson. [NOTE: Project Mudhen likely was serving a different purpose: illegal recordings by the CIA of telephone conversations that later would be used by G. Gordon Liddy to dictate phony "logs" that Sally Harmony would type up under the pretense that they had come from bugs in DNC headquarters—which bugs never were planted. That's why Mudhen ends on the same day as the transfer of money from Liddy to McCord.] So if you want to go right on believing Liddy's "admission" that he and Hunt were targeting Anderson with a drugging or poisoning operation, feel free. But it's football playoffs season, so: "C'mon, man!" Liddy and Hunt and their army of Miami goons also "admitted" that they had broken into DNC headquarters in the Watergate over Memorial Day weekend and planted two bugs there, which they claim later were "monitored" by Alfred Baldwin. But there was no "first break-in" at DNC headquarters over Memorial Day weekend 1972. There were no "bugs" planted in DNC headquarters at the Watergate at any relevant time. There were no "logs" of eavesdropping over any such "bugs," because there were no bugs. The logs were created strictly from Liddy's lying lips, dictated and given to Sally Harmony to type up. Their "confessions" all were lies, an elaborate vicious hoax, a scripted fiction of "talking points" that none of them can keep straight—and fiction doesn't leave a paper trail. If you want to discuss Watergate any further, join me in the Watergate forum. I only have responded to this point because of Edward Gunn's involvement, and his history of devising surreptitious poison delivery systems for the CIA, including times relevant to the Kennedy assassination. I will attempt to answer there valid questions going to pertinent facts, but I am not going to have a lot of time to devote to it in the coming months. Ashton Gray

You're absolutely correct, Jon, and I've never tried to convince anyone otherwise. I merely presented documented facts in the first two posts of this thread that seem, to me, to be prima facie evidence for any reasonably prudent person to see that it is physically impossible for there ever to have been a front shot that went into JFK's throat at the location indicated in the photos and the testimony. A bullet cannot pass through a tie and shirt and leave no evidence of penetration unless it truly was a "magic bullet" that could somehow defy all laws of physics. Yes, that is my opinion and I stand by it. What else that hole in the throat might have been is merely speculation. I was asked, and so I offered one possible explanation, that being the introduction of a poison through a large-bore needle. I didn't introduce that concept in a vacuum, though; there is ample evidence of CIA involvement in just such activities, the most likely engineer of any such artifice being the CIA's Dr. Edward Gunn. There's a bit about him in this research series article for my book, Watergate: The Hoax: http://www.chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=395 You'll have to search on that page for "Gunn." You can find much more about him if you care to search, and there's a good deal more about him in the book. He was the man behind the trickery in attempts to assassinate a number of world leaders, including Castro. He also met with G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt at a crucial time relative to Watergate to discuss various ways of poisoning or introducing drugs to someone to incapacitate such a target. (If you want to believe that the target was actually Jack Anderson, I hope you don't also believe in unicorns, but the point is that Liddy and Hunt had someone in their sights for that kind of operation. Who that actually might have been is addressed in the book.) But the larger point, which no other analysis of Watergate ever has turned up that I have found—and lord knows how many we've gone through in this research—is that when Gunn met with Hunt and Liddy on 24 March 1972, Gunn was on staff at James McCord's company, McCord Associates, in Rockville, Maryland. We found that information in an FBI report. None of the above is any claim that Dr. Gunn was involved in any way in the JFK assassination. Nor does it say that he wasn't involved in any way. Ashton Gray

In a word: No. Assuming, arguendo, that a large-bore needle was used to deliver the coup de grâce, it was applied in the exact location where an intentionally butchered tracheotomy would render the exact nature of the wound inscrutable. I actually already dealt with this in the second post in this thread: Out of 12 Parkland Hospital personnel who testified under oath about the throat wound—10 doctors and 2 nurses—9 were ambiguous about or flat out didn't know whether the wound was a bullet entrance wound or a bullet exit wound. There were only six who said they saw the would prior to the throat butchery by Dr. Perry. Of the six actual eyewitnesses, half said it could have been either an entrance or an exit wound, one said he thought it was an exit wound, and two people in the entire world who claim they saw the wound—including the ambivalent Jones—said they thought it was a bullet entrance wound. Ashton Gray I have to take issue with what you refer to as an "intentionally butchered tracheotomy", plus your assumption the tracheotomy would "render the exact nature of the wound inscrutable". Whoa, whoa, whoa, Robert. You're welcome to take issue with anything you want to, but you asked a specific question in a specific context, and I answered that question in that context. Why are you asking about the placement of a large bore needle to begin with if you're so enamored of the "Official Story"? But now you've gone all the way around the mulberry bush, because now you're completely ignoring the issue that started this thread, which is that there was no damage to JFK's tie or shirt that could have been caused by a bullet at that location. You don't address that at all. Instead you just insist there is "the semi-circular outlines of the bullet wound in JFK's throat." Really? Then was it an entrance wound or an exit wound? Do you know more than the people who say they were there in the room and saw it? I just gave you their testimony. I carefully laid it out in my second post. You still don't address any of that, just trot out Perry's testimony. I don't feel like turning into butter, so you run 'round and 'round the mulberry holding hands with Perry, okay? Ashton

I love the company you huddle with. How about instead of hiding behind Pat and the opaque generality of a statement as broad as "Ashton Gray's ideas," you step out into the dusty street and face me over in the Watergate forum. There you can identify which specific "ideas" you so haughtily dismiss. I think I can straighten you out about them. You can even bring Pat with you if it will make you feel braver. Ashton Gray

Ashton, Is Dawn reading you correctly vis a vis her "NO shot from the front" interpretation of your view? Charles, I am very chary of addressing this at all in this thread because it potentially could open the door to all manner of off-topic garbage. I am going to address it once to answer you briefly because I believe you're asking in good faith, but strictly speaking the question is not at all germane to this thread or to the very clear and inarguable evidence regarding the throat wound. It also is counterproductive to the entire reason I have focused narrowly on the throat wound in starting this thread, which is embodied in the following definition: ANALYSIS: the separating of any material or abstract entity into its constituent elements; the separation of an intellectual or material whole into its constituent parts for individual study. The throat wound is one, and only one, constituent part of a case that has been made by various parties for a front shot or shots. I have neither desire nor intention to leap from the specific case of the throat wound to a general supposition about the presence or absence of a sniper ever having been in some location forward of the motorcade. So in answer I'll say only this: 1. Dawn did not quote me; she assayed to speak for me, and despite her many sterling qualities, speaking for me is not one of them. 2. I have discussed the head shot vis a vis the likelihood of a front shot in other threads in this forum where the discussion was appropriate, including but not limited to this message et seq. in the thread "Who were the shooters?, as well as in this message et seq. in the thread "The Head Wound Explained, and even in a thread I started called "The Back Wound Considered, A Window of Opportunity". If anyone wants to discuss either the head shot or the back shot with me, I'll be happy to take such discussions further in those threads. 3. In another message in the thread "Who were the shooters, I provided a graphic and considerable evidence and discussion going to the question of the likelihood of any shooter ever having been behind the picket fence or in that vicinity. I also graphically explored, by request, many other proposed locations for an outdoor shooter in that thread, and found them all wanting in material ways. But my tests and views on that are memorialized in that thread and need no further discussion here. 4. I've said it before and I'll say it again in yet other terms: It seems highly unlikely to me (not to say bunghole-plug dumb) that sophisticated, highly-trained intelligence agents would plot for months, if not years, to set up an assassination of the President of the United States, to set up a Communist patsy to take the fall for it, to set up the location for the patsy behind and above the target at the time of the shooting—and then have the real sniper(s) shoot from in front of the target. Could one possibly conceive of anything more stupid in terms of a sophisticated frame-up of Oswald? I hope that answers your question, and now I hope that people responsibly will restrict discussion in this thread to discussion of matters related to the throat wound, which I believe deserves a great deal of attention all by itself. If the wound in John F. Kennedy's throat was not caused by a bullet or fragment, but by another device, it truly is proof beyond any doubt whatsoever that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a "lone nut assassin," and that there was, in fact, a sophisticated and far-reaching conspiracy to murder. Ashton Using this exact logic, wouldn't the agent at Parkland Hospital have inserted the large bore needle into the back of JFK's neck, if it was intended for all of the shots to have come from the rear? In a word: No. Assuming, arguendo, that a large-bore needle was used to deliver the coup de grâce, it was applied in the exact location where an intentionally butchered tracheotomy would render the exact nature of the wound inscrutable. I actually already dealt with this in the second post in this thread: Out of 12 Parkland Hospital personnel who testified under oath about the throat wound—10 doctors and 2 nurses—9 were ambiguous about or flat out didn't know whether the wound was a bullet entrance wound or a bullet exit wound. There were only six who said they saw the would prior to the throat butchery by Dr. Perry. Of the six actual eyewitnesses, half said it could have been either an entrance or an exit wound, one said he thought it was an exit wound, and two people in the entire world who claim they saw the wound—including the ambivalent Jones—said they thought it was a bullet entrance wound. Ashton Gray

Given that this is "the thread that would not die," and given that there seems to be continuing interest in The Amazing Mr. Baldwin—and especially given that Mr. Kaiser seems to be certain of "what Watergate was truly about"—I am posting here Chapter 2, "The Amazing Mr. Baldwin Warps Time and Space," from my upcoming book, Watergate: The Hoax, which currently is in editorial review for final additions and revisions. =========Begin excerpt from unpublished work, "Watergate: The Hoax"============ Senator Weicker. Did you believe at that time that your employer was the Committee To Re-Elect the President? Mr. Baldwin. Absolutely. Senator Weicker. Do you have any documents in your possession which you believe to be supportive of that opinion? Mr. Baldwin. No, I have documents in my possession that are contradictory of that position. Please do not laugh—any more than you have to. Senator Sam Ervin Part I: Hide a Secret In a Secret 2. The Amazing Mr. Baldwin Warps Time and Space When Georgianne Baldwin got a divorce from Alfred Carleton Baldwin III in the superior court of New Haven, Connecticut, on 5 February 1970—a little over two years before Alfred’s starring role in Watergate—it was for “intolerable cruelty.”1 One of Alfred Baldwin’s former employers at an insurance company refused to give him a favorable employment recommendation in November 1971—just months before Baldwin would become embroiled in Watergate—because the former employer felt that Baldwin was “a nut.” Another former employer gave a poor recommendation because he had suspected Baldwin in the disappearance of “numerous documents” at the firm, but never could prove conclusively that Baldwin had taken them.2 Yet another former employer, at Interstate Security Systems, withheld a favorable recommendation for Baldwin in January 1972 “due to a drinking problem,” saying that Baldwin was “considered a very heavy drinker.”3 Baldwin was described by a former Special Agent of the FBI as an “immature individual who never found himself following employment with FBI,” and another Special Agent characterized Baldwin as “a ne’er-do-well type of person.”4 An officer with the police department in Orange, Connecticut, told the FBI of an incident in which Baldwin, while Security Manager at the Adley Express Co. in Orange, had broken into a police automobile as a “demonstration to Adley employees.” Police in the town wanted to prosecute Baldwin, but the state attorney inexplicably requested that the charges be dropped. The officer, Sergeant Blackman, said Baldwin was “a wise-guy who thought he was much better than the average policemen.”5 A one-time neighbor said that Baldwin had built a dog pen that went partially over onto the neighbor’s property, built to contain Baldwin’s two German Shepherds after three neighborhood children had been bitten by them. When the neighbor complained and had the property lines surveyed, Baldwin moved the stakes—which the neighbor saw—then denied having moved them. The neighbor told the FBI that Baldwin had been described as “a habitual xxxx and one who claims to have done things that he has not actually done.”6 [Edit to add: I just noticed with some amusement that the forum has put "xxxx" where the FBI report has the word "l*i*a*r"—without the asterisks. I had no idea the place had gotten so hoity-toity that we can't quote the FBI. I wan't to assure everyone that I am holding my pinkies in the air while typing this. —Ashton] Out of uncounted thousands of former FBI agents, many of them right in Washington, D.C., this was the man James McCord selected for “security” purposes—first, ostensibly, as a bodyguard, then as a bumbling incompetent excuse for a secretary to monitor and take down records of illegal wiretaps. He was a very odd choice for that task, indeed, since Baldwin has publically demonstrated literacy skills that could be described as iffy, at best.7 Regardless of anything anyone might have thought of him, after the arrests of his co-conspirators inside DNC headquarters on 17 June 1972 Alfred Baldwin couldn’t seem to get enough of confessing about his role in Watergate. He confessed to his lawyer friends in Connecticut right after the arrests. He confessed to the Watergate grand jury. He confessed to the FBI. He confessed to reporters Jack Nelson and Ronald J. Ostrow of the Los Angeles Times. He confessed to the criminal court in U.S. vs. Liddy et al. He confessed to the Ervin committee in the Senate hearings on Watergate. If only his confessions made sense or weren’t so contradictory. The first problems in his confessions come in his claims about the very day he started working under the direction of James McCord. Both men acknowledge that McCord called Baldwin out of the blue on the night of 1 May 1972—the date when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had been found dead in his home early in the day. According to their stories, McCord called saying he had gotten Baldwin’s name from a list supplied by a society in New York of ex-FBI agents, and that he wanted Baldwin for some work in the nation’s capitol the next day. Baldwin agreed to get on a plane that night for Washington, D.C., on no more than McCord’s mere say-so. James McCord’s career in the CIA, including service in the notorious Office of Security, had once earned him an accolade from the then-Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, as “the best man we have.” McCord was no dummy when he picked out Alfred Baldwin; he knew exactly who and what he was getting. Both men have consistently claimed that the nighttime phone call from McCord was the their first contact, but in 2005 Alfred Baldwin made a statement in a public forum that was almost stupefying in its implications. When asked if he had known James McCord before McCord “recruited” him in 1972, Baldwin answered: “Prior to 1972 I did not know James McCord, but I was aware of the fact that he was a former Special Agent with the FBI.” There’s no reason or way that Alfred Baldwin would know about McCord’s pre-CIA employment with the FBI unless Baldwin had been briefed on it by someone who knew James McCord’s government history. Who that briefer might have been, or why Baldwin would have received such a briefing, has never been answered. The circumstances of Alfred Baldwin’s being “hired” by James McCord stands as one of the stranger exhibits in Watergate’s hall of bizarre exhibits. There is evidence in FBI reports of McCord having contacted and personally interviewed a small number of other former FBI agents before calling Baldwin late one night, and McCord had gone all the way to New York City to get a list. He went there on 24 April 1972, a little over a month before the purported “first break-in” at the Watergate. First he visited the Society of Former SAs, telling the secretary of the society, Francis Keogh, that he wanted to hire “several” former agents. It’s clear that this was not ordinary traffic for the society because Keogh sent McCord to see the Executive Chairman, Scudder D. Kelvie, at Kelvie’s office at the Franklin National Bank. Supposedly Kelvie supplied a list of 11 names that included the name of Alfred Baldwin. The event is odd on its face—obviously, McCord could have gotten such a list without traveling to New York City, so obviously his trip had other purposes—but what makes the event entirely odd is that 24 April 1972 is the same date as the purchase order from McCord Associates ordering four Kelcom III walkie-talkies that later will play such a major role in Watergate. To pile on the oddities, those walkie-talkies had to be assigned specific frequencies at the time of the order, which are written in pencil on the order form: the frequencies are specifically for use in Washington, D.C.. That’s “smoking-gun” proof that McCord already was planning for the walkie-talkies to be used in some kind of operation in the nation’s capitol, not for security purposes at the upcoming Republican National Convention.8 The face value of the purchase order was $3,883.20, but that’s $22,185.45 in 2015 dollars, so this was no minor commitment McCord was making. McCord subsequently interviewed a number of other former FBI agents from the list before calling Baldwin, but he arranged in-person interviews with them, and each one turned down whatever he was offering. Of course he interviewed them in person, given that his ostensible purpose was to hire a bodyguard for key Republican personnel. But nobody knows what these interviews consisted of, or what McCord was telling the “candidates.” For example, McCord had a former agent named Paul F. Dair come to McCord’s office to interview as part-time bodyguard for “highly placed member of the Republican party.” Dair told the FBI that following the meeting with McCord, Dair “met Republican party member at McCord’s office but declined offer.” The FBI report also says that Dair, when questioned about the interview, was “evasive and vague in certain areas and declined to identify Republican party member and answer some questions.” Indeed. Yet with Baldwin, McCord reportedly did nothing but pick up the phone—at night, no less—and “hire” him on the spot, with Baldwin agreeing to get on a plane that night to fly to D.C. and take the job. The story is absurd enough to make a rational person spit. It also suggests strongly that at least one of McCord’s real reasons for flying to New York City on the same day as he ordered the walkie-talkies was to meet Baldwin and brief him on what was coming up. And the sum of other evidence to come supports the conclusion that Baldwin had been hand-selected well in advance by CIA. So on the evening of 1 May 1972, McCord made his fateful phone call, and on 2 May 1972, within hours of Baldwin having arrived in D.C., McCord sent Baldwin on a trip to the Midwest and to New York as bodyguard for Martha Mitchell, wife of former Attorney General John Mitchell. By then, John Mitchell had resigned as Attorney General and was head of Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President. Baldwin told the FBI the story of his “hiring” on the day of his arrival this way, quoted from the FBI report: That day he [baldwin] traveled with Mr. McCord to the fourth floor of the building housing the Committee to Re-Elect the President and met Mr. LaRue in his office. Mr. McCord furnished Mr. LaRue with Baldwin’s resume. Mr. LaRue directed a few questions to Mr. Baldwin . . . Baldwin advised that this meeting with Mr. LaRue was quite brief and that he and Mr. McCord left Mr. LaRue’s office together. However, upon leaving Mr. LaRue’s office, Mr. McCord and Mr. LaRue exchanged some conversation which was inaudible to Baldwin. Upon leaving the office Mr. McCord advised Mr. Baldwin that everything looked good. Yes, invisible contracts created by inaudible conversations almost always “look good.” And, yes, that’s the same shadowy Fred LaRue who later would hand out massive wads of cash, constituting the very cover-up that ultimately would bring down Richard Nixon and all of his closest staff. However Baldwin came by it, his invisible contract was for one thing and one thing only: a six-day trip as a bodyguard for Martha Mitchell. Even in his temporary role as bodyguard, he was not hired as staff of the Committee to Re-Elect the President; he was “hired” as an independent contractor, only for that trip, later paid by check from the committee only for expenses from that trip. Baldwin told the FBI and Congress and the Los Angeles Times that McCord handed him a .38 revolver to take with him on the trip, and that LaRue later told Baldwin that it once had been his gun. McCord swore under oath in Congress that he had not given a revolver to Baldwin, saying that LaRue must have given it to Baldwin, but that the gun belonged to John Caulfield. LaRue denied having given it to Baldwin, and said McCord must have done it. The number of different stories told about that revolver are so convoluted that the gun has earned its own chapter, “McCord, Baldwin, LaRue, Caulfield, Arthur Bremer, and the Revolving .38 Revolver.” Baldwin departed D.C. that day by train with Martha Mitchell and her retinue. When Mrs. Mitchell returned to D.C. from the trip on Monday, 8 May 1972, she told her personal secretary, Kristin Forsberg, that she considered Baldwin “pushy, vocal, and someone who would not stay in the background.” She concluded, “That’s it, I’m not taking any more recommendations from McCord.”9 McCord likely couldn’t have cared less what Martha Mitchell thought about his bodyguard recommendations. While Baldwin had been away, McCord had rented room 419 at the Howard Johnson motel across from the Watergate, on Friday, 5 May 1972. When Baldwin returned on 8 May, McCord told him to stay in the room at the Howard Johnson, and there can be no question that Baldwin was there specifically to carry out the Watergate operations. Everything that ensued militates toward a conclusion that at all relevant times, Baldwin was “hired” by McCord, and was put up in accommodations paid for by McCord, and was handed wads of cash by McCord, primarily for Baldwin to play the exact role he played in the hoax of Watergate. That role effectively began on the date when Baldwin traveled from Washington, D.C., by plane to his home in Hamden, Connecticut—or, more accurately, to his mother’s home, because he had been living with her—for the express purpose of getting his car and driving it back to D.C. Trying to determine what that date was, though, runs immediately into Alfred Baldwin’s inability to get a story straight, even if it’s been scripted for him. He told the FBI that he had traveled to Connecticut by plane on “May 22 and 23.” Then he told the Senate Watergate Committee that it had been on 23 May 1972, but his story in the L. A. Times said that he had gone there on 24 May. Whatever date he traveled there on, Alfred Baldwin entered a warp of space and time that made Watergate a stranger fiction than any fantasy ever dreamed up by Rod Serling or Lewis Carroll. There’s nothing to do but turn it over to the claims of Baldwin himself, this quote from the L. A. Times: On May 24, after about two weeks of covering demonstrations, I visited my home in Hamden. When I returned to Washington the next day, I found Jim McCord in Room 419 surrounded by an array of electronic equipment. If Baldwin returned to D.C. “the next day” after going to Hamden on Wednesday, 24 May, then he returned on Thursday, 25 May, driving his car from Connecticut, about six hours away. That’s also what he told the FBI: that he “returned to Washington, D.C., on May 25, 1972,” and “parked his vehicle in the basement of the Howard Johnson’s motel.”10 According to Baldwin’s story to the L.A. Times, on that same night, the night of 25 May: From the balcony outside Room 419, I watched McCord walk across Virginia Ave. and enter the Watergate complex. Subsequently he appeared at a window of the Democratic offices and I could see at least one other person and perhaps two with him. McCord later returned to the motel room and said, “We’ve got the units over there.” He began adjusting the monitoring unit. This is all very exciting spooky spy Watergate break-in stuff—but there’s a major problem: According to interviews conducted by the FBI, Alfred Baldwin dropped his car off for servicing at Branhaven Chrysler-Plymouth, just outside of New Haven, Connecticut, “early in the morning of May 25.” The company’s vice president, John LaVallee, told the FBI that Baldwin didn’t pick the car up until “approximately 9:00 p.m.” on Thursday evening, 25 May.11 It therefore is categorically impossible for Alfred Baldwin to have seen or done any of the things he says he saw or did in Room 419 of the Howard Johnson motel on 25 May, because he was over 300 miles away, in Connecticut. It is categorically impossible for him to have been in D.C. at all that day. As if any more problems were needed with Baldwin’s fiction, E. Howard Hunt claims in his autobiography that on the night of 25 May, James McCord was with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and “the Miami men” at McGovern headquarters in D.C.12 Hunt doesn’t name the date, but he does say it was when Liddy shot out a street light (Liddy says four security lights, not a street light), and Liddy, in his autobiography, does name the date of that event as the night of 25 May.13[see chapter 6, “McGovern Headquarters and the Terrible Twosies.” —Ed.] By the time Baldwin got around to sworn testimony in Congress, perhaps he’d realized just how ludicrous his claims were to the L. A. Times and to the FBI of having returned to D.C. on 25 May, so in his Congressional testimony he changed the date of his return to 26 May 1972. Surely this will be better. He laid it on thick before the Ervin Committee, and nobody does it quite like Baldwin himself—especially with his fellow citizen of Connecticut, Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., giving him script prompts: SENATOR WEICKER: Now, Mr. Baldwin, to keep on giving the continuity here, you interrupt me or state if I am incorrect, you returned to Connecticut on May 23 and came back to Washington on May 26, is that correct? ALFRED BALDWIN: That is correct, Friday. SENATOR WEICKER: And you returned to room 419 of the Howard Johnsons on May 26. Now, when you entered room 419 on May 26, what did you see? ALFRED BALDWIN: When I entered the room, there were numerous items of electronic equipment in the room. When I entered the room, it was approximately 2 in the afternoon, I believe, about that hour. Mr. McCord was in the room and operating one of the receiver units. At that time, I did not know what it was. He explained it. SENATOR WEICKER: In other words, this was the first time that you had seen electronic equipment in room 419 of the Howard Johnsons? ALFRED BALDWIN: This particular piece of equipment that he was working on, that was the first time I had seen that. On the couch there was a piece of electronic equipment which was containing the briefcase that had been described to me, that I had previously seen at the Committee To Re-Elect the President headquarters. This was called the debugger, had a monitoring unit. SENATOR WEICKER: In other words, you had seen a portion of the equipment? ALFRED BALDWIN: A portion I had seen previous. SENATOR WEICKER: At the Committee To Re-Elect the President? ALFRED BALDWIN: That is correct. But the equipment he was working on when I entered the room, I had never seen that before. SENATOR WEICKER: And as you entered the room, Mr. McCord was in the process of what—experimenting with this equipment? What did he indicate to you at the time you entered the room? ALFRED BALDWIN: He was tuning this equipment. The unit was operating and he was working the tuning dials. There are several tuning dials on the piece of equipment. SENATOR WEICKER: Did you have any questions of him as to exactly what was going on at that time? ALFRED BALDWIN: No, I had just driven approximately six hours and he said, “As soon as you get unpacked and relaxed, I will explain this.” I said, “All right, I will take a shower and shave and join you.” . . . I was instructed to monitor all telephone conversations that were being received over these units that were in the Howard Johnson room and to make a log of all units. Now the spy story is really on a roll, and the whole problem of 25 May has gone away by Baldwin moving his return to D.C. to the next day, 26 May—except now there’s something odder still, also from FBI interviews that no other coverage of Watergate ever seems to have bothered with. To find the odd thing about all of this, it’s necessary to go back in time just a bit, to Saturday, 20 May 1972, the weekend before Baldwin left for Connecticut to get his car. Perhaps he was sitting around Room 419 of the Howard Johnson a little bored that day, and he was longing for a little companionship. On that Saturday, he placed a call to a woman named Veronica Walsh in New Jersey. The FBI found out about the call when they later traced all the calls that had been made from the room. According to Ms. Walsh’s interview with the FBI, Al Baldwin called her that day to invite her to an event “to be held in Connecticut during the Memorial Day weekend and the wedding photos were to be presented to the Dantschers at that time.”14 Wedding photos? What wedding photos? It seems that photography was a hobby of Baldwin’s, and on 29 April 1972—just five days after James McCord had ordered walkie-talkies and had flown to New York City, and just a few days before that nighttime call from James McCord to Alfred Baldwin—Baldwin had taken photos at the wedding in New York City of John and Donna Dantscher. Ms. Walsh told the FBI that she had declined Baldwin’s invitation. The FBI also interviewed the Dantschers. Here comes that Alfred Baldwin space and time warp again: John S. Dantscher . . . said on the evening of May 26, 1972, he and his wife attended a social gathering at the home of Walter Walsh, 126 Bedford Avenue, Hamden, Connecticut, which was also attended by Walsh’s mother, Alfred Baldwin and John Dantscher’s mother. During this social affair Baldwin presented Dantscher and his wife with photographs taken at their wedding. Dantscher said that he had had no contact with Baldwin from the time of their wedding on April 29, 1972, until the social affair on the evening of May 26, 1972. Dantscher said he was aware that Baldwin was residing In the Washington, D.C., area, however, did not know his exact address. He also recalled that during the social affair on May 26, 1972, Baldwin Indicated that he might be at the “Miami Convention.”15 To quote Art Bell: “Ohhhh, my.” It’s not like the Dantschers could be presumed to have had a sudden spasm of mistaken identity, right there in the hamlet of Hamden, where Baldwin lived with his mother. It was, after all, the Dantscher’s wedding photos that Baldwin was bringing to the event. According to the same FBI report, Baldwin had done a stint in real estate during his checkered career, and had been involved with the sale of the home of John Dantscher’s mother, who also was at the event. John Dantscher once had gone on a cruise with Baldwin and a mutual friend, Robert Mirto—who later would represent Baldwin in relation to Watergate. The Memorial Day weekend started on Friday, 26 May 1972, and less than a week earlier Baldwin had invited Veronica Walsh to an event on Memorial Day weekend. As if the identification of Baldwin there in Hamden that night needed any further confirmation, the event was held at the home of Walter Walsh, who had known Alfred Baldwin since childhood.16 (Here we have yet another infamous “twosie,” though, because Veronica Walsh was a friend of John Dantscher’s new wife, Donna, but was not related to Walter Walsh.) The evidence from the Connecticut witnesses interviewed by the FBI was conclusive and dispositive: On Thursday, 25 May 1972, Alfred Baldwin had dropped his car off at Branhaven Chrysler-Plymouth, just outside of New Haven, Connecticut, very early in the morning. He had picked it up late in the evening of 25 May. Therefore, what he told the FBI and the L.A. Times about 25 May was patently false. Then he showed up at a social gathering in nearby Hamden, Connecticut, the following evening, Friday, 26 May, so that would mean that what he told Congress under oath about 26 May was false, and that all the tales Baldwin told about a trip with McCord to McGovern headquarters on the night of Friday, 26 May were false [see chapter 6, “McGovern Headquarters and the Terrible Twosies” —Ed.]—except for yet another wrinkle in the fabric of time and space surrounding the Amazing Alfred Baldwin. Remember Robert Mirto, Baldwin’s friend who became his attorney throughout the Watergate saga? Well after the Watergate arrests, and well after Baldwin had told his tale to the FBI, somehow—and that “somehow” matters a great deal—Mirto got wind of what John Dantscher had told the FBI about Baldwin having been in Hamden on Friday, 26 May 1972, and began tampering with witnesses in ways that are so astonishing that to this day it stands as one of the greatest scandals in the whole affair, one that makes other spectacular failures of the FBI and federal prosecutors pale by comparison. That whole tale is spelled out in "Part V, The Break-In That Was and the Aftermath." Mirto’s meddling has no bearing on the real fun: considering the claims of Baldwin and some of his co-conspirators about the fabulous invisible logs he supposedly made while eavesdropping on private conversations. It’s impossible to consider Baldwin’s snooping logs, though, without at least attempting to figure out how many electronic “units” the man was supposed to be checking when doing his eavesdropping. Not one investigator or analyst of Watergate ever seems to have gotten around to even noticing the central importance of the question: How many units could a unit checker check if a unit checker could check units? 1 FBI Report of 29 June 1972 by SA William C. Hendricks, Jr., New Haven office 2 Ibid. 3 FBI Report of 18 July 1972 by SA Daniel F. Ryan, Baltimore office 4 FBI Report of 12 July 1972 by SA William C. Hendricks, Jr., New Haven office 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Baldwin’s public postings in The Education Forum, of all places, are fraught with tortured syntax and repetitive misspellings, even of common words, such as “trail” being typed uniformly for “trial.” See the thread at http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5670et seq., accessed February 2015. 8 At the time of the order the Republican National Convention was planned for San Diego. Within a few weeks of the order, on 5 May 1972, it was changed to Miami. It’s irrelevant because McCord specified D.C. as the location of use for the walkie-talkies. 9 FBI Report of 30 June 1972 by Robert E. Lill and Donald E. Stukey II, Washington, D.C. 10 FBI Report of 19 July 1972 by SA Angelo J. Lano, Washington, D.C., Field Office File No. 139-166, Bureau File #139-4089, Section A, “Alfred Carleton Baldwin, III.” 11 FBI Report of 22 June 1972 by SAs George S. Phillips and Stephen J. Slifka, at Branford, Connecticut, File # NH 139-74 12 Hunt, E. Howard. Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent. New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1974. 13 Liddy, G. Gordon. Will. New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1991. 14 FBI Teletype of 21 June 1972 15 FBI Report of 23 June 1972 by SA Emmett J. Michaels and SA Robert C. Puckett/RCP at Hamden, Connecticut, File # NH 139-74 16 FBI Report of 27 June 1972 by SA Edward P. O’Connor and Robert A. Willhide at Bridgeport, Connecticut, File # NH 139-74

With such a lofty mission statement, I thought it appropriate that I chronicle here my own experience with the "Deep Politics Forum" and two of its co-founders, including Mr. Drago. Below is an email I sent to Mr. Drago today on this public issue that is self-explanatory, followed by his response to me today: Here is Mr. Drago's response: I hope you all will sleep better at night knowing that such selfless guardians of personal privacy, truth, honor, and justice are vigilantly on the job, and I hope that you will join them in their tireless efforts. Ashton Gray

I think this might finally serve as proof that there is a just and loving God. Ashton Gray

With such a lofty mission statement, I thought it appropriate that I chronicle here my own experience with the "Deep Politics Forum" and two of its co-founders, including Mr. Drago. Below is an email I sent to Mr. Drago today on this public issue that is self-explanatory, followed by his response to me today: Here is Mr. Drago's response: I hope you all will sleep better at night knowing that such selfless guardians of personal privacy, truth, honor, and justice are vigilantly on the job, and I hope that you will join them in their tireless efforts. Ashton Gray

That is incorrect. He still has it on his signature: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6944 I rest my case. Ashton Gray

Hello, John. The insufferably insulting and denigrating post of yours regarding me, above, was brought to my attention and I let it go. It seems you couldn't let it go, though, because now you've had the lapse of judgment to post this: Now, I will be the first to admit that I am neither schooled nor sophisticated in the British brands of guile and artifice, so I don't know whether you actually believe such gaseous rot, or whether your rhetorical slaps to my face after I announced my departure from your forums are merely efforts to goad me into responding. If the latter, congratulations, because I'll be damned if I'll sit idly by while you use your self-described public information juggernaut forum as a bully pulpit to besmirch my honor and to attribute the basest venal personal motives to me in a complete reversal of the facts. Therefore, in keeping with the theme of an "Education Forum," I will school you now in the way that slaps in the face are handled where I come from. You'll have to determine for yourself whether your blind-side score was a Pyrrhic victory. Although there are many things extraordinary in your first message quoted above, what I find most extraordinary about it is that you raised the issue of my book when I specifically asked you back in August, in private e-mail, not to make it public in the forums—a request that I never have rescinded. Your remark about "Ashton's next book" can't possibly be referring to any other book, because there is one and only one book of mine that is relevant to any of these forums that I ever have posted in, and right up until my announcement that I was disassociating myself from these forums, you were the one and only person who posts or reads in any of these forums who had the unique specific knowledge I privately sent you about that particular book back in August, with the express request that you not make it public in the forums. The one other member here who knew anything about the book before I announced my disassociation with these forums also had been asked not to make it public in your forums. That stands in direct contradiction to your faithless attempted smear of me above. And why would that be? The reason—and the truth you don't bother mentioning—is that in these forums I never once have given even the title of that book—or of any other book I've written or am writing, for that matter. I never once have supplied in these forums a link to the publisher's web pages promoting or discussing that book—or any other book I've written or am writing, for that matter. But you didn't mention that when you were busy trying to ascribe personal-gain motives to me for the work I've labored over here in these fields, did you? And why would that be, John? Would it be because if you'd told the truth about that, you wouldn't have been able to gratuitously belittle me and call my motives into question? Even the dullest dumbbell can see in an instant that all the foregoing directly contradicts your disgraceful insult to my integrity. Even the most besotted, insensate dimwit can understand that if my motivation for my work in these forums ever had even the most gossamer connection to a desire to promote my own works, the single stupidest thing I possibly could have done is precisely what I did: to take a stand on principle and disassociate myself from the vast promotional value you impute to your forums, without even once having taken advantage of your giant public relations juggernaut by posting the title of my book and a link to it. But even that's not the worst of it: something you've never bothered to find out about concerning the book you brought up (against my express wishes) is that the major reason I finally reluctantly agreed to writing it at all—when I already had three other unrelated books in progress—was the inclusion of a plan for a trust fund to be set up where a significant portion of the proceeds will be irrevocably dedicated to funding a massive chronology project covering the JFK assassination, Watergate, and other relevant history going directly to much that is being addressed in the "Controversial" sections of your forums, something I have wanted to see accomplished long before I ever even heard of your forums, but have never had the wherewithal or resources to bring into being. So that, and the people associated with it, is what you're also slapping across the face with your unconscionable and unfounded insults to my integrity. Of course this entire discussion of the book couldn't be taking place at all if you hadn't unethically used your unique private knowledge of the book as a gauntlet, not for merely throwing down, but for slapping me across the face. The simple truth is that my time invested in researching for and posting in these forums has been a net liability to me on a personal basis, and not an insignificant one. It's the exact measure of your mendacity in claiming otherwise. As for the other parts of your first message quoted above that are extraordinary, I can't make the case that you were attributing such base traits specifically to me because, as is so often the case, you mask such statements behind generality and obliquity, and allow the possible association just to hang in uncertain suspension by tacking my name onto the end. Still, even in your broadstroked smear-by-association, there certainly are extraordinary statements deserving of attention: I don't know who these "someones" are, but I never once have "threatened to resign." I abruptly resigned. Period. I'm only posting here in this thread because of your gratuitous attempt to impugn my honor and my integrity by attributing completely false motives to my participation in these forums. So count me among the "rarely." I never once have asked or even suggested that you remove anyone. I have said that you should cut lines of abuse of the forums. There are many ways to accomplish that, some of which I've suggested to you and you rebuffed—including setting up a separate forum for threads that were started as ad hominem personal attacks on members, and funneling all such garbage into it. I suggested that to you last year when Speer and Caddy, et al., had mounted a personal smear campaign on me, going so far as to put my name in the subject titles of several threads (members can see my sig for some examples of their endearing smear campaign) and I asked you to do something about it. You categorically refused and said you thought it entirely appropriate for such off-topic garbage threads to be in your "Educational Forums" on Watergate and JFK. And that's the way you've kept it. You even contribute to such buffoonery, starting threads in the JFK forum on forum members. It's one part of why I finally had enough and elected to disassociate myself from it. It's a shame you don't know people of principle. Maybe you move in the wrong circles. Then again, you backed Speer and Caddy in their dirty smear-campaign propaganda ops against me, so I guess this shouldn't come as a complete surprise. I suppose it also might explain why you apparently can't even come close to understanding that I elected to stop participating here as a matter of principle and my own integrity. And as it currently stands, this forum is supplying that "significant audience" with a fine education of bald-faced lies, torturously constructed fictions parading as "fact," and irrelevant garbage, which is the primary reason why I have elected to end my association with it. I don't want my works associated with it as it currently stands. That has everything to do with principle and nothing whatsoever to do with "purely selfish reasons"—though if your statements herein are any yardstick, you don't have the haziest idea what I mean when I use the word "principle," so this sentence likely will be a blank spot in your memory. You not only protect but nurture liars, you absolutely forbid honest researchers from giving proven liars the label they deserve, and so you become a party to peddling an education of lies. I don't want to be a party to it, which is why I've made a decision not to continue contributing to it as long as you maintain such destructive policies. You allow liars and fablemakers free rein to post their garbage around the clock, and to present their fictions as "fact" under a big broad banner saying: "The Education Forum." I don't want my works lumped in with those fictions and lies. An education of lies is worse than no education at all. Tim Gratz posted two barefaced material lies in Bill Kelly's thread on Black Propaganda Ops recently, on 8 October and 17 October: one about the whereabouts of E. Howard Hunt at importantly relevant times (a whole-cloth fabrication by Gratz that he posted as though it were "fact"), the other about something Gratz claimed that Carlos Bringuier had said, which of course was proved to be nothing but another complete bare-faced lie fabricated out of thin air by Gratz. Of course you didn't call him on his lies, John, and neither did any of your so-called moderators. You know who invested his own time to document the fact that Gratz's lies were lies, so others wouldn't be snared by them, John? I did—to my own detriment on a purely personal basis. These lies by Gratz aren't innocent little "white lies" to get out of a lunch date. Un-unh. These are material lies that cloud and pervert the record and add layer upon layer of confusion and chaos to a record already made more confused and chaotic than an F5 tornado by the CIA scum (but I repeat myself) who created it—which is what some of us are (or were) here trying to put into order so there would be some chance to winnow the truth from the swirling debris of lies. But Gratz merrily sits at his keyboard—apparently 24/7—and idly, glibly makes up as many lies as he likes and posts them in your forum, John, without an ounce of responsibility, without the slightest consequence, pouring rivers of incendiary lies on a consummate conflagration of lies that responsible researchers are here trying to put out. And Gratz is by no means the only cog in the Lie Factory here masquerading as an "Education Forum." You have backed Pat Speer while he sits in these forums and regularly manufactures and spreads all over these pages the most jaw-dropping fictions, the most scandalous perversions of fact, utter fabrications that have no more truth or foundation in them than Henny Penny. Speer infested the thread I started called "The Purloined Projectile" and told the infamous, blatant lie that by the time Admiral Burkley got to Parkland Hospital, "Carrico had already administered the steroids for Kennedy's adrenal deficiency." Of course he didn't post a single word of evidence or testimony to support his damnable seditious lie, because he's not held to any such standard in this "Education Forum": he's allowed to blithely type any fiction he chooses and post it here as "fact." It's then up to honest and responsible researchers to spend their time going around behind him cleaning up the dung piles he's allowed to leave all over the house. No wonder Speer doesn't try to back up his fiction with fact: he can't. The record screams that Burkley was there at the outset. Burkley supplied 300 mg. of Solucortef; Kennedy was given 300 mg. of Solucortef. The Solucortef was administered "At the beginning of the resuscitation attempt" according to Carrico himself. Burkley was there at the beginning of the resuscitation attempt. The 300 mg. of Solucortef had already been administered when Perry did the tracheostomy, according to Perry himself. There could not be a more damaging lie about the sequence of events at Parkland Hospital than the one Speer spins—tag-teaming with his fellow febrile fabricator, Thomas Purvis. It goes directly to Burkley's complicity in covering up the facts about the throat wound during the autopsy. Yet here, in this "Education Forum," Pat Speer is propped up and empowered to sit and tippy-tap at his keyboard dumping just as much such garbage into this "Educational Forum" as he pleases. In the thread you started yourself called "Masters of Deceit: Propaganda, Disinformation and Corruption," Speer demonstrated just what a master of such deceit he is when he kept cawing the bald-faced CIA/Mockingbird-generated lie that Schlesinger created the CIA's "family jewels," and that it was done for Nixon's benefit. What did you do about Speer using your thread to spread lies in your "Education Forum," John? It's a rhetorical question, because I know very well that you didn't do anything at all about it. The reason I know so very well is because of the number of hours of my time that I had to invest in order to document just what a noxious river of lies it was in this message I wrote that dammed and damned it. But it wasn't good enough for you just to sit by and do nothing: oh, no. I've lost count of the number of times since I posted the facts proving conclusively that it was Colby, not Schlesinger, who was the source for the CIA limited-hangout op called "Family Jewels" that you, John, have dumped cut-and-paste garbage into this "Education Forum" forwarding the exact same CIA/Mockingbird disinformation that Speer was here peddling, without your ever having once mentioned the truth as a counterbalance or linking to my facts that prove the truth. So you don't just condone the propagation of lies and fiction and the dumping of garbage in these forums: you are an active contributor. Do you have any concept, John, of the scope of damage of that one vicious lie propagated by CIA, Mockingbird, Speer, and you? Do you even give a damn? Because it only stands as a giant, insurmountable, impassable barrier to any student of Watergate and the aftermath ever having any hope of getting to the truth. It completely hides the fact that Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb had only just completed shredding and burning every scrap of information that the CIA never wanted found out when Colby, with that green light, proposed the ridiculously whitewashed "confessions" of the so-called "Family Jewels." Of course they had the temporary paper doll, Schlesinger, sign off on it, precisely so they could point to him as a "Nixon loyalist" and float the fraud that it was for "Nixon's benefit," when Nixon never once even saw the fraud of the "Family Jewels". Yet you—that's you, John—continue to propagate the same old tired CIA fraud and fiction under the banner of "Education Forum," even after I apprised you of the inarguable facts. And you have the brazen arrogance to question my integrity? It doesn't take more than a minute for Speer and Gratz and those like them to dream up and post a lie, or copy and paste the boilerplate lies of CIA and Mockingbird already in the record, and state it just as though it's "fact." But how long does it then take an honest researcher to document the fact that it is a lie? Do you have any idea, John? Do you give a damn? It takes hours of digging and comparison of testimony and evidence. I know. I've done it too many times, bloody-eyed at 4:00 in the morning, with work deadlines and personal obligations staring me in the teeth, but determined to keep some damned lie from being further propagated—not so I could one day garner some fleeting lash-batting glance from that cheapest of whores, Fame, and not from any debased money-motivation—since I should have been doing my actual remunerative work anyway instead of chasing down lies—and not for any of your claimed "selfish motivations" <SPIT!>, but out of a sense of duty to the truth and what is right. Of course, given the kind of people you seem to fraternize with—at least from what you say about the nebulous "they"—perhaps that's a concept you can't grasp. That, I don't know. What I do know is that you protect and nurture and empower liars in these forums. You provide them a wide open pipeline for their lies, without any governance of those lies, and you call it an "Education Forum." You won't even allow anyone to bell the cat so the unwary aren't snared by the infamous lies of the liars. What does this do to honest and responsible researchers trying to get at the truth? If it takes one minute for the liars to dream up and post a lie, and two hours of hard work to research and document the fact that it is a lie (though it almost always takes far more time), then even with one xxxx busily at work, you've just handed the liars a 120-to-1 advantage. But how many people ever even bother to take the time to try and document the fact of the lies created daily by the liars you empower here? Who has time, especially when the liars—curiously—somehow seem to be able to create their malicious irresponsible fictions on a full-time basis with no apparent means of support? So the real advantage you hand them is probably more realistically in the 120,000-to-1 range. What chance is there for truth or reason to prevail in such an environment? What do you do about it, John? What do any one of your so-called "moderators" do about it? Nothing. Not a damn thing but stand there on Potty-Mouth Watch while the lies flow like a river of gasoline poured on a raging inferno of lies. You certainly don't seem to care one whit how many people wander this way believing they are in an "Educational Forum" when in fact they are wandering around wide-eyed in a Lie Factory that you manage. Oh, but thank God and Simkin that nobody publically labels Gratz or Speer for what they are. No, we want everyone to go on trusting and relying on their lies and perversions of facts—just as long as there is no name calling! Don Jeffries has commented in this thread on what a wonderful job Robert Charles-Dunne does dealing with Gratz, and I had to laugh out loud. Of course, Robert Charles-Dunne has every right to spend his time any way he wants, and there's no arguing with the fact that he does do a masterful job of dealing with Gratz's nonsense. But why the hell does someone of the stature and intellect of Robert Charles-Dunne need to to deal with an endless firehosing of such fetid sewage from Gratz? How much time does Robert Charles-Dunne end up having to spend at it? How much have all of us lost of Robert Charles-Dunne's unique knowledge of and insight into the record, and of his remarkable capabilities at analysis, as a direct result of his feeling a sense of responsibility to deal with Gratz's endless flow of crap? How much more ground could have been gained without Robert Charles-Dunne feeling the need to invest his time endlessly climbing that hopelessly slippery slope of firehosed sewage. Why is he relegated to trying to dig us all out of the infinite avalanche of lies from the liars who are busy filling the forum daily with more lies—liars that you bring here and support? I'll tell you why: because the lying scum prey on and suck off of the very responsibility of responsible researchers. They know that by flinging their irresponsible garbage all over the forum, the people who are most intelligent and informed and educated and responsible will be the ones caught up in the teeth of the Lie Factory trying to stop it, and will be ground into ineffectiveness in the attempt. Who has the time, then, ever to get to the real lies that need to be analyzed and exposed? Who has time to get to the relevant lies in the record when you empower liars to spend infinite time here creating more new lies in any given day than possibly can be dealt with? That's why I had to laugh out loud when I read the comment about Robert Charles-Dunne's ongoing battles trying to build sand levees around Gratz's infinitely overflowing cesspool. It was a humorless laugh. Because I'll bet money that next week Robert Charles-Dunne will have more gallons of overflow from the infinite Gratz cesspool than his sand levees will hold back, and then the week after that Robert Charles-Dunne will have double more gallons of overflow from the infinite Gratz cesspool than his sand levees will hold back, and so it will go while you stand by and watch this pointless exercise in futility eating away at the time and efforts and resources of honest researchers, all under the banner of an "Education Forum." Of course the tools of disinformation and deceit aren't limited by any means just to conscienceless bare-faced lies. The disinformation moguls that you have made these forums a breeding ground for have much more subtle and inisidious methods of poisoning the ground water of research and investigation. In fact they mainly operate covertly, like all systemic parasites do. In just the few days since I announced my departure, you and every so-called moderator here stood by idly and watched while Thomas Purvis went into Charles Drago's thread on the chest tubes and posted esoteric hearsay just as though it were "fact." Purvis didn't give one cite, he didn't quote one document, he didn't do anything to verify his claims about what Perry supposedly told Humes over a telephone. He's held to no such standard in these forums. When Charles Drago had the good sense to call him on it, Purvis finally had to post the cite to the ridiculous hearsay "evidence" in the autopsy report, a cite to a statement that in addition to being nothing but hearsay is so far out on the extremes of the bell curve of evidence about the chest tubes that you'd need a dog sled to get to it. It is so entirely overwhelmed by the enormous weight of evidence to the contrary that any researcher with a pennyweight of probity would shoot it from guns. Not Purvis. Oh, no. Purvis has this platform you provide him to maliciously delude readers into believing that his risible hearsay is the be-all and end-all of dispositive "proof" that the lying Parkland doctors who claimed to have put chest tubes in place in the chest cavity when they direly should have, but who in fact did not really ever put in chest tubes, were God's own angels of mercy, and have just been so badly misunderstood and maligned. <SPIT!> Now, even after Drago slammed the door on his wormy fingers by posting the irarguable truth, Purvis has slinked back into that thread—in tandem with his fellow thread sabotager, Gratz—and now they are doing nothing but adding stinking off-topic dung smeared all over the end of the thread to do anything they can to distract from the facts, and to demean and discredit Drago, Evica, and me—the only honest researchers who have made substantive and factual contributions to that thread. And what the hell are you and your so-called "moderators" <SPIT!> doing about their wholesale vandalism, John? NOTHING! You back, support, and empower it, and parade it around the world as an "Education Forum." And you have the brazen arrogance to question my integrity? This same disinformation magpie, Purvis, has utterly drowned this forum with a neverending deluge of the his repetative, monotonous, categorically nutty threads where he carries on long drawn-out conversations with himself that boil down to this: the wound in John F. Kennedy's throat was made with a piece of bullet fragment that doesn't exist. Anybody coming along here right now and reading what I just said will think I'm the one who's making things up—until they actually tiptoe through his miles-wide mine field of barking mad lunacy bombs that you give him a place to plant—as I have had to do—and then they'll find out I'm telling the exact truth, and have proved it conclusively. I've asked Purvis repeatedly about his training in CIA-developed techniques of coercive interrogation and propaganda. Of course he evades the question like a ring around the rosy. He has to. He can't answer the question. I know damned well that Purvis can't answer the question because I've been sitting here with a sworn, notarized affidavit concerning such training just waiting for him to demonstrate the bad judgment to deny such training of Special Forces in coercive interrogation techniques. He's been cagey enough not to deny it—which is all part of the training. But despite such training in the blackest of black arts directly related to this forum and what he uses this forum for, Purvis is protected and nurtured here, smirking in his green beret to lend the force and authority of the uniform of the armed forces of the United States to his seditious fictions and the dung he smears all over any thread getting close to the truth. And who do we find leaping to Purvis's defense? Well, here's a shock: it's Pat Speer—the same dear friend of yours who tag-teams with Purvis to keep the fictions afloat about Burkley and to sanctify the Parkland medical personnel. One of Speer's other favorite tools for making a mockery of the forum, besides posting whole-cloth lies, is malicious obstructionism. Who was it, John, who recently jumped in front of me and pretended to "answer" my question for Purvis in the most revolting display of obstructionism possible? Well, here's a shock: it was your buddy Pat Speer, starting an entire separate thread in your forums, John, and claiming the existence of some anonymous, unnamed "friend" from the Special Forces to speak on Purvis's behalf. That of course supplied Purvis the opportunity to chime in with another wormy evasion to make everyone think the matter has been settled, when he still hasn't done anything but further evade the question—now with Speer's accomodating, meddling, obstructionist help. And you, John, provide them with a wide-open dumping ground for just such endless garbage. Speer and Raymond Carroll tag-teamed on the exact same kind obstructionist operation when I attempted to get Douglas Caddy to answer perfectly on-topic, valid questions going to material fact, culminating in the thread in the Watergate forum called Who Was Douglas Caddy Representing and When? At every opportunity Speer and Carrol jumped in when I posed questions to Caddy, pretending to "answer" questions that they had absolutely no standing to answer and no possible knowledge with which to answer, simultaneously attacking and criticizing me, attacking and criticizing the questions, doing every thing they possibly could do except run into the forum with a Chinese parade dragon to distract, disrupt, and obstruct. And you stood by silently and watched their disgusting obstructionist tactics, John. You call such rampant, barbaric anarchy "free speech" and "debate." <SPIT!> Even if someone does do enough honest research to make any small gain here, it's almost the kiss of death. Last year I proved dispositively by actual experiment that Alfred Baldwin lied through his teeth when he sat before Congress and before the world, under oath and bright lights, and claimed that he typed "almost verbatim" logs of conversations from puported "bugs" (that never existed in DNC headquarters to begin with). It's one of the vital keys to the entire CIA hoax of Watergate. When I called him on the lie and he ran away with his tail tucked between his legs, who was the Black Hat, who was the bad guy here in your holy "Education Forum"? Was it Baldwin, who helped squander untold tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of tax dollars as a co-conspirator in a complete fraud and CIA hoax? Oh hell no! It was me, for having had the gall to prove and point out the lies and vicious fraud he and his fellow co-conspirators had perpetrated on the entire world. But he can't be given the name he so richly deserves, not in this forum. Heaven and Simkin forbid! That would be "name-calling," and here in kindergarten, lies and liars are protected and nurtured and empowered and mollycoddled and lionized, and their lies are sent out in neverending waves to pollute the groundwater of the world—but by God and Simkin, there's no name-calling! Harrumph! What was the supposedly "selfish" reward I reaped for all my work related to the provable lies of Douglas Caddy and Alfred Baldwin, John? Lets see if you remember this Hallmark moment: Well, I'm so deeply touched, and am inexpressibly happy that you and Pat Speer have such a wonderful friendship. I think you deserve each other. And just think of the opportunity you have now that I've left: you can get Caddy and Baldwin back now! Now you and Speer can hold hands with them, too, and Speer can go back to doing some more patty-cake "questioning" of them to help them cement their seditious lies here in your "Education Forum" without the inconvenience of me asking real questions that expose their lies for the lies they are! You and your buddy Pat should be rejoicing! Not only that: you now have so-called moderators now to monitor "behavior" and prevent "name calling"—while valiantly protecting the proven liars and obstructionists and wholesale garbage dumpers. Of course it's like patting down toddlers, a few of whom are running around waving loaded guns, to make sure the others aren't smuggling candy in their Huggies pull-ups. Your so-called moderators are barely-glorified nannies who stand by and watch, ever vigilant, for name-calling, while a tsunami of Bevilaqua's cut-and-paste off-topic sewage drowns the forum and flows through this giant pipeline you've built and out into the world as "education." Your so-called moderators don't even do the irreducible minimum of keeping topics on topic. They sit there like stumps letting topic after topic be hijacked and sabotaged and ruined by the same inveterate handful of vandals that you insist on protecting and allowing to ride roughshod all over the forums, no matter how blatant their lies, floods of garbage, or obstructionism. The so-called moderators aren't moderating in any functional sense of the word as it applies to moderated forums. They are set up as Potty-Mouth Watch Nannies—not forum moderators who get the job done of keeping forum topics on-topic, and insisting that people post responsibly instead of the chit-chatty useless nonsense that Gratz and Bevilaqua and their ilk work around the clock junking the place up with. Just last week, Paul Rigby made an embarrassing attempt to hijack the thread I'd started on the throat wound, so he could convert it to a vehicle for propagation of his own hopeless fable of a mythological "entrance wound to the head," which he keeps moving from the front to the left side and back to the front and back to the left side and back to the front, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, using completely discreditable third-hand "evidence" based on nothing at all. I don't put Rigby in the same class as the knowing, witting forum vandals like Speer, Bevilaqua, Gratz, and Purvis, because I think he actually believes in myths that he's bought into and is desperately trying to proselytize his religion, but I asked for a moderator to please move his petulant, childish hijacking attempt into his own existing thread on the Fabulous Fable of the Moving Head-Hole where it would be on-topic. I even did half of their job for them and supplied the link to the correct thread. They did nothing. You did nothing. Rigby's off-topic post is still sitting right there as a large pile of steaming irrelevant dung in the thread on the throat wound. Then there's Miller, who you also endorse and support, who has made an entire life—if anyone could call it that—out of doing nothing but finding hopelessly ambiguous details in photos, films, and testimony, then grinding out thousands of forum messages telling lie after lie about what he claims he "sees," keeping a travesty of "discussion" <SPIT!> going on subjects he absolutely knows cannot resolve, and when anybody does manage to prove one drop from his eternal fountain of lies as the nonsense it is, as I did earlier this year, he simply moves the goal posts and generates another hundred pages of worthless junk. And while this circus of anarchy goes on under your aegis, under your banner of "Education Forum," you have the brazen arrogance to question my integrity. The day I posted the first message in this thread announcing my disassociation with these forums, an associate who has been reading here for quite some time wrote me to express her personal sense of loss, but she said she completely understood, and wanted to send me an excerpt from an article called "An Essay on Management" that she felt described precisely the things I've cited as my reasons for leaving. Here is the first half of the excerpt she sent, listing the ways that communication lines are severed: Communication lines are severed in this fashion: ( a ) by permitting so much [false information and choppy communication] to flow on them that the group will close them or avoid them; ( b ) pervert the communication and so invalidate the line that afterwards none will pay attention to the line; ( c ) by glutting the line with too much volume of traffic (too much material too little meaning); and ( d ) chopping the line through carelessness or malice or to gain authority (the principle reason why lines get tampered with). I was astonished at the accuracy of its description of what is taking place in these forums—with your blessing. There couldn't be a more accurate description of precisely what you are condoning, promoting, and even endorsing with the off-topic, irrelevant garbage being dumped into these forums by the truckload, with the patent material destructive lies whose purveyors you protect and defend, with the trashy, malicious and malignant kind of ad hominem that I have memorialized in my sig and that right now is being flung at Charles Drago by Gratz and Purvis in the chest tubes thread. And then one of your so-called moderators, Kathy Beckett, bristles in your defense in this thread, in wide-eyed wonder why I would refer to this place now as having become a garbage dump—even while she stands by idly and waves the next truckload of garbage on in! The probative value of the convoy of garbage isn't just zero. That would be a promotion. It's probative value in the JFK assassination is a massive negative. It drowns out the decent, honest, intelligent research and analysis with a giant and rising tidal wave of sensationalistic and barely intelligible irrelevant jabberwocky, a vapid soap opera of off-topic garbage-flinging and falsehoods. Don't they, though. And you sponsor them and endorse them. Some people also treat it as a garbage dump. And you sponsor them and endorse them. Some people also treat it as a pipeline for disinformation and lies. And you sponsor them and endorse them. Well, it's your forum. I just don't have to contribute to it, and I won't any longer in the state it's currently in. I won't go on lending my good works to support and help draw people into this anarchistic Lie Factory while you and your so-called moderators stand by and do nothing about the lies newly created daily that you're pumping out into the world 'round the clock under the banner of "Education Forum," leaving it to responsible researchers to try to clean up the mess you let the vandals make of the place. It makes cleaning the Augean Stables look like flicking a fly speck. I didn't apply for the job. The day I announced that I was ending my association here, I e-mailed you—after the fact—that I regretted having had to make a decision to leave the forums, but that my decision to sever my association with the Education Forums was based on my own code of honor and integrity. Apparently you have no acquaintance with what "code of honor and integrity" mean, or you couldn't possibly have posted this tripe: Take whatever comfort you and Myra Bronstein find in that belief. I also said in that e-mail: "I wish you all the best, and my hope that you will come to grips with the realities of sane and reasonable forum management is genuine and sincere. Absent it, you are allowing one of the most treasured storehouses of truth on the planet to be defiled, and it will continue to be so defiled until it becomes a memory." That stands exactly as stated. Maybe some reading this can understand that I have no vindictive agenda toward you or this forum in my decision to leave it, or even in my most voluable criticisms. Maybe you can understand that, and maybe you can't. Nothing I've said anywhere in this thread arises from malice or ill will toward you or the forum itself or the moderators. On the contrary, it arises from the bitter, deep disappointment of seeing what has been made and is being made of this forum, and my own infinite frustration at your lack of action in the matters I've raised here in this thread, and have raised with you directly and indirectly over my time here. Some may see all this as nothing but criticism. Others can see the underlying causes, and can see this as pointers to actual effective steps that could be taken to improve your forums and invite more effective participation by responsible researchers who care deeply about the truth, and aren't required to waste their own precious time fending off the attacks of the disinformation scum you empower or cleaning up the lies of the daily liars. If you can't manage to figure out from the above what actual steps you could take for effective reform, I'll be glad to list them for you in detail. Until such time as an expressed interest by you in implementing such direly needed reforms, I leave you with this thought, which is the second half of the excerpt I posted above that was sent to me by my colleague about how communication lines are severed: He who holds the power of an organization is that person who holds its communication lines and who is a crossroad of the communications. Therefore, in a true group, communications and communication lines should be and are sacred. They have been considered so instinctively since the oldest ages of man. Messengers, heralds and riders have been the object of the greatest care even between combatants... . Priesthoods hold their power through posing or being communication relay points between gods and men. ...Communication lines are sacred and who would interrupt or pervert a communication line within a group is entitled to group death—exile. And that usually happens as a natural course of events. Communication lines are sacred and must not be used as channels of viciousness and [lies]. They must not be twisted or perverted. They must not be glutted with many words and little meaning. They must not be severed. You hold just such power, John. What are you going to do with it? Ashton Gray

This forum once was a place of rational discussion and relevant facts related to important issues in history. In recent months it has been turned over to disinformation scum who dump wholly irrelevant and unanalyzed garbage into it by the truckload—which not only is condoned by the administrators, but actually has been endorsed by John Simkin. I've recently posted two parody posts in just two of the insanely off-topic and irrelevant threads that John Bevilaqua started for no other purpose except to provide a stage where he and Tim Gratz can absolutely flood the forum with this wholesale useless trash and keep their phony Punch 'n' Judy show going to drown out as much rationality as possible with demented off-topic noise. Those parody posts of mine soon will be deleted as the first of my posts in this forum to be deleted. The rest of my contributions over the past year and a half to this forum have been graciously archived by several people, and also will incrementally be deleted over time as they are reposted elsewhere in locations where reasonable and rational people maintain order and provide a safe environment for dissemination and reasoned discussion of relevant facts and truth. While I have the greatest of admiration for what Simkin and Walker set out to do with the establishment of these forums, and while I owe a debt of gratitude to both for allowing me to present in these forums the evidence and work so hard won, I no longer wish to have my works associated with what this forum now has been converted to. I am deeply indebted to several members of this forum for their tireless dedication to getting at the truth and the rational discussion and analysis of facts, and it has been a supreme honor to have had a chance to meet you and correspond with you. I have learned much from you. I expect you will be apprised in some way when my works are reposted elsewhere. You will be welcomed there, and I always welcome personal communication from you, which you can access with PMs through this forum until and unless Simkin or Walker elect to cancel my membership here. Ashton Gray

This marks the place where I had posted a parody of the floods of garbage dumped into this forum by John Bevilaqua and Tim Gratz. The rest of my posts to this and the Watergate forum will be deleted incrementally over time and are being posted elsewhere. Ashton Gray

This marks the place where I had posted a parody of the floods of garbage dumped into this forum by John Bevilaqua and Tim Gratz. The rest of my posts to this and the Watergate forum will be deleted incrementally over time and are being posted elsewhere. Ashton Gray

This marks the place where I had posted a parody of the floods of garbage dumped into this forum by John Bevilaqua and Tim Gratz. The rest of my posts to this and the Watergate forum will be deleted incrementally over time and are being posted elsewhere. Ashton Gray

This marks the place where I had posted a parody of the floods of garbage dumped into this forum by John Bevilaqua and Tim Gratz. The rest of my posts to this and the Watergate forum will be deleted incrementally over time and are being posted elsewhere. Ashton Gray

For two years, from 1958 to 1960, Dr. Ronald Coy Jones—who worked on both Kennedy and Oswald—was in a general practice residency at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center in Oklahoma City. Also at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine was Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, who would murder an elephant with LSD in August 1962—after Jones had left to do a residency in surgery at Parkland Hospital that ended soon after the assassination, in 1964. "Jolly" West later was assigned as the psychiatrist to examine Jack Ruby. Jones arrived with Malcolm O. Perry in Trauma Room One on the day Kennedy was murdered. Jones assisted Perry with the tracheostomy that eradicated all evidence of the throat wound, as covered thoroughly in the thread There Was No Bullet Wound in John F. Kennedy's Throat, which should be studied thoroughly. Jones also pretended to insert a chest tube into John F. Kennedy's chest, as covered in this thread. Jones also told a material lie about the source and reason for the Solu Cortef (steroids) administered to Kennedy, which lie served to mask the presence of Admiral Burkley in Trauma Room One at relevant times. I'll mention here just briefly that on the weekend of 22-24 November 1963, when both Kennedy and Oswald died at Parkland hospital, the surgical staff at Parkland Hospital had been reduced. According to Dr. Paul Conrad Peters in a 1991 interview, "most of the guys" conveniently were in Galveston, Texas "because of a big surgical meeting down there." Ashton

For two years, from 1958 to 1960, Dr. Ronald Coy Jones—who worked on both Kennedy and Oswald—was in a general practice residency at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center in Oklahoma City. Also at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine was Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, who would murder an elephant with LSD in August 1962—after Jones had left to do a residency in surgery at Parkland Hospital that ended soon after the assassination, in 1964. "Jolly" West later was assigned as the psychiatrist to examine Jack Ruby. Jones arrived with Malcolm O. Perry in Trauma Room One on the day Kennedy was murdered. Jones assisted Perry with the tracheostomy that eradicated all evidence of the throat wound. Jones also pretended to insert a chest tube into John F. Kennedy's chest, as covered in another thread in this forum, Incisions for Chest Tubes: The "Cut Downs" at Parkland, which should be studied thoroughly. Jones also told a material lie about the source and reason for the Solu Cortef (steroids) administered to Kennedy, which lie served to mask the presence of Admiral Burkley in Trauma Room One at relevant times. I'll mention here just briefly that on the weekend of 22-24 November 1963, when both Kennedy and Oswald died at Parkland hospital, the surgical staff at Parkland Hospital had been reduced. According to Dr. Paul Conrad Peters in a 1991 interview, "most of the guys" conveniently were in Galveston, Texas "because of a big surgical meeting down there." Ashton

I'm reminded of a limerick that I believe I once heard in my misspent yout': There once was a huckster named Miller; a lunatic sniper-well driller. In Dealey, they say, he drills hundreds each day— but he still hasn't found one damned killer! Ah, well. I've since heard that "sniper-wells" are also called "rabbit-holes," and lord knows I don't want to interfere for a moment with the masterful rabbit-hole charting that is being done here by many of you fine scholarly fellows. I think it is a noble pursuit, and I'm sure that wascally wabbit is just around the next bend. Meanwhile, I just wanted to mention one little insignificant detail here in passing—now that this massive snipe® hunt has reached 54 forum pages and sucked over 15,000 souls down into the oblivion of 15,000 sniper-wells. Here is a very good approximation of what Bowers saw from his perch high up in his little tower: I covered this months ago. The two men Bowers saw near the overpass are the same two men who had been working on and around the grassy knoll earlier that morning, with their truck pulled up on the curb of Elm, then had moved their truck (very likely up into the TSBD parking lot) and taken up a position down by the overpass—where there only happened to have been two cops stationed all morning, plus a railroad crew working on the overpass—to watch the festivities. Very mysterious. Oo. Now, I know that images from this 3D model drive one bold-faced poster in this forum into screeching, heel-kicking fits, because the images from the model regularly expose what a fraud his nonsense is. But I've twit-filed this particular poster in the appropriate file, so, regrettably, I'm going to miss the spittle-flecked bold-face fit that this surely will elicit. Please resume the rabbit-hole charting. Ashton

I've made an opportunity (where none existed) to research some information on the subject of the chest tubes that I thought might be worth sharing here. In doing so, I'm first going to revisit what I posted earlier on this subject from Commander Humes, who conducted the autopsy, and I'm going to expand that with a bit of additional, corroborative information from Commander Boswell, who assisted Humes. I believe it's important to restate their positions and testimony before comparing it to the record from the Parkland doctors most directly involved. In his Warren Commission testimony, Commander Humes is unequivocal about the fact that no chest tubes had been inserted (my bold emphasis throughout): COMMANDER HUMES: [T]hese were knife wounds, these were incised wounds on either side of the chest... . Their intention was to incise through the President's chest to place tubes into his chest. We examined those wounds very carefully, and found that they, however, did not enter the chest cavity. They only went through the skin. I presume that as they were performing that procedure it was obvious that the President had died, and they didn't pursue this. He later goes on to say this about both the chest incisions and the cut-downs: COMMANDER HUMES: Those wounds [chest tube incisions and cut-downs] showed no evidence of bruising or contusion or physical violence, which made us reach the conclusion that they were performed during the agonal moments of the late president, and when the circulation was, in essence, very seriously embarrassed, if not nonfunctional. Commander Boswell, who assisted Humes in the autopsy, entirely endorsed Humes's characterization before the Warren Commission of the superficiality of the chest tube incisions: MR. SPECTER: Have you been present here today during the entire course of Doctor Humes testimony? COMMANDER BOSWELL: I have, sir; yes. MR. SPECTER: Do you have anything that you would like to add by way of elaboration or modification to that which Doctor Humes has testified? COMMANDER BOSWELL: None, I believe. Doctor Humes has stated essentially what is the culmination of our examination and our subsequent conference, and everything is exactly as we had determined our conclusions. Back to Commander Humes: in his deposition before the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), Humes revisits the same theme of no chest tube insertion having been done: COMMANDER HUMES: [T]here were a couple of small—you never heard much about this, either—a couple of small incised wounds on the chest, and I forget— I wrote down, wherever I wrote it down, that it looked to me like somebody was going to think of putting in a chest tube. But they never did, because all they did was go through the skin. They obviously— I imagine they decided the President was deceased before they were going to pursue it. But somebody started, apparently, to insert chest tubes, which would not be an unreasonable thing to do. They were, you know, maybe two centimeters long, something like that, and between the ribs, low in the anterior chest. Commander Boswell also was deposed by the ARRB, and also confirms the confusion by the autopsy personnel about the superficiality of the surgical chest wounds and the cut-downs: COMMANDER BOSWELL: [W]hen we first started doing the autopsy, there were marks on the body that we had difficulty— They had started to do cutdowns, and they made little incisions around the nipples, and there was no tubes or anything there. And we didn't know whether they were actually trying to get into vessels or going to get into the chest... . [O]n his chest there were—there was an attempt or the beginning of a surgery wound. I don't know to this day what— I think we did learn that they had been preparing to intubate him... . The consistency of the testimony of the autopsy personnel on this count seems dispositive: no chest tubes were inserted at Parkland Hospital, although superficial incisions were made just as though chest tubes were being inserted or were going to be. This testimony stands in stark contrast to the testimony, below, of certain Parkland doctors who were involved in the treatment of John F. Kennedy, because they state that chest tubes were inserted. Before presenting the relevant testimony by the Parkland personnel, though, I want to point out that there is no indication anywhere that any suturing or bandaging was performed to hold chest tubes in place—assuming that they ever actually had been inserted at all. Yet there is considerable testimony by observers in Trauma Room One that chest tubes had been inserted. Therefore, in the testimony that follows—from the medical personnel actually involved with the chest tubes, not mere observers—it only can be assumed that these relevant medical personnel were holding the chest tubes they refer to in place by hand. I point this out because it opens the door to the possibility that tubes were inserted only into the superficial incisions—but not actually into the chest cavity—and held by hand, giving the illusion to others in Trauma Room One that chest tubes had been properly inserted. Of course if that were the case, it would mean willful and witting deception on the part of relevant personnel. There is a good deal more testimony about the purported chest tubes than the excerpts I'm going to include below. In analyzing the testimony it became clear who merely was an observer—believing chest tubes had been inserted—and who actually was directly involved in activities with the purported chest tubes. The first question I want to address is who ordered the chest tube insertion. The record is entirely consistent: it was Malcolm O. Perry—the same person who obliterated the throat wound. Perry was in charge of the proceedings from the time that he and Dr. Ronald Coy Jones arrived, together, in Trauma Room One. Here is Perry before the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB): DR. PERRY: When I opened the neck, there was an injury to the trachea on the right lateral side. There was air and blood in that area... . That's when I asked that a chest tube be put in place because I didn't know how many times he'd been shot or from what direction. And, of course, the assumption was that he might have a chest wound as well... . [W]hen you start pressure-assisted respiration, if there's an injury to the lung you're liable to induce the tension pneumothorax [collapsed lung], which causes a catastrophic cardio pulmonary collapse [stay tuned —A.G.], so that's the reason I asked for chest tubes to be put in. Dr. Jones inserted one on the left and I guess Paul [Dr. Paul Conrad Peters] on the right side. It turned out those were unnecessary, but that was my request at that time. And the reason they were put in was because I asked for them. This quote above does double duty: it identifies the source of the order for the chest tubes, and identifies at least two medical personnel involved in the purported insertion of chest tubes: Dr. Paul Peters and Dr. Ronald Coy Jones. One of those, Jones, had arrived in Trauma Room One with Perry. Before getting to the testimony of Peters and Jones, though, Perry has more to say on this subject of the chest tubes, from his original deposition at Parkland Hospital by Specter. Here, Perry is telling Specter about a second phone call from Commander Humes on the day after the assassination and autopsy: DR. PERRY: Dr. Humes...called back and inquired about the chest tubes, and why they were placed and I replied in part as I have here. It was somewhat more detailed. After having talked to Drs. Baxter and Peters and— I identified them as having placed it in the second interspace, anteriorly, in the midclavicular line, in the right hemithorax. This is arresting on several counts: Perry speaks only of the right-side chest tube, and Dr. Charles Rufus Baxter has been added to personnel purportedly involved in the alleged placement of that right-side tube with Peters, in addition to Jones on the left-side tube. Here also is the apparently authoritative record being made—by Perry—that at least the right-side tube had indeed been placed in the medically appropriate location—noting, though, that Perry presents it only as hearsay from Baxter and Peters. Therefore, in addition to Malcolm O. Perry being the person who ordered the chest tube(s), and in addition to Perry being the person who put into the record that at least one of the tubes had been properly inserted, we have three medical personnel identified as having been actively involved in the purported placement of the chest tubes, in alphabetical order: Charles Rufus Baxter Ronald Coy Jones Paul Conrad Peters Baxter has almost nothing to say about the chest tubes in any of his testimony. In fact, the only thing found so far that he ever said about them is as follows, from his deposition at Parkland Hospital with Specter: MR. SPECTER: Would you have an opinion as to whether or not President Kennedy would have survived the gunshot wound which you observed in the neck? DR. BAXTER: We saw no evidence that it had struck anything in the neck that would not be well taken care of by simply—by the tracheotomy and chest tubes. There is no indication from Baxter about whether the tube he was involved with was properly inserted. Turning next to Ronald Coy Jones, who purportedly inserted the left-side chest tube, the record becomes rather strangely and carefully stated on the exact question of proper insertion (my bold emphasis): DR. JONES: Dr. Perry was performing the tracheotomy, and it was about this time that Dr. Baxter came in and went ahead to assist Dr. Perry with the tracheotomy, and as they made a deeper incision in the neck to isolate the trachea, they thought they saw some gush of air and the possibility of a pneumothorax [collapsed lung] on one side or the other was entertained, and since I was to the left of the President, I went ahead and put in the anterior chest tube in the second intercostal space. MR. SPECTER: Was that tube fully inserted, Doctor? DR. JONES: I felt that the tube was fully inserted, and this was immediately connected to underwater drainage. "Felt that" it was fully inserted? Considering the possible consequences if it weren't—a "a catastrophic cardio pulmonary collapse," according to Perry—this seems an extraordinary backpeddle and dodge when the exact question was asked whether the tube had been fully inserted. Jones goes on to describe what happened with the chest tube on the other side—the right side—of Kennedy: DR. JONES: [W]e decided to go ahead and put in a chest tube on the opposite side; since I could not reach the opposite side due to the number of people that were working on the President, Dr. Baxter was over there helping Dr. Perry on that side, as well as Dr. Paul Peters, the assistant head of urology here, and the three of us then inserted the chest tube on the right side, primarily done by Dr. Baxter and Dr. Peters on the right side. Jones told it this way in an interview with Larry King on CNN (with thanks to Gary Loughran for the link to the transcript): DR. JONES: [A]fter I put in a left chest tube and Dr. Baxter and Dr. Peters put in a right chest tube, I think that's when we hooked up the EKG machine. And all this was done within a matter of less than 10 minutes. ...I think the president's doctor [Admiral Burkley] was in there, as well as agents in there. Although Jones no longer claims there to have participated in the right chest tube, so far the testimony is consistent in identifying Baxter, Jones, and Peters as the chest tube personnel. And what does Peters have to say about the right-side chest tube that he purportedly worked on with Baxter? Paul Conrad Peters did not testify before the Warren Commission, only in deposition with Specter at Parkland Hospital. But his testimony has a certain chilling effect when the question of the full and proper insertion of the chest tube on his side is raised (my bold emphasis): DR. PETERS: Dr. Perry and Dr. Baxter were doing the tracheotomy and a set of tracheotomy tubes was obtained and the appropriate size was determined and I gave it to Baxter, who helped Perry put it into the wound, and Perry noted also that there appeared to be a bubbling sensation in the chest and recommended that chest tubes be put in. Dr. Ron Jones put a chest tube in on the left side and Dr. Baxter and I put it in on the right side. I made the incision in the President's chest, and I noted that there was no bleeding from the wound. MR. SPECTER: Did you put that chest tube all the way in on the right side? DR. PETERS: That's our presumption—yes. "Presumption?" And "Our presumption?" When the consequences of such tubes not being "all the way in" could be "a catastrophic cardio pulmonary collapse," the only two doctors who testified directly and with unique percipient knowledge on this matter—Jones and Peters—both used ambiguous qualifying language of "felt that" and "presumption." And the only other doctor who might have been able to testify with unique percipient knowledge on this issue—Baxter—remained mum. But Perry seeded the record with the illusion of both Baxter and Peters having definitively stated that the right-side tube had been properly placed—even though Baxter never made any such record of his own, and Peters, in his own testimony, hedged it as a vaguely collective "presumption." It is simply stupefying! It is beyond human ken that such a glaring, blatant, screamingly obvious fraud could have sat in plain sight for forty years, almost completely unnoticed and unremarked, except for a few researchers as keen as Evica. There simply is no conclusion possible other than the freezing realization that no chest tubes ever were properly and fully inserted. That's bad enough. But it is to shudder in further realization that a complete sham was staged to pretend that chest tubes had been properly and fully inserted! And it is beyond the ability to shudder in still further realization that these same personnel who perpetrated the chest tubes fraud also participated directly in the throat wound fraud (thoroughly covered in the thread There Was No Bullet Wound in John F. Kennedy's Throat), and were the same personnel who operated on Lee Harvey Oswald. And at this point, I have to take my infamously maligned hat off in a sweeping low bow of homage to CIA and its minions and its miserable miscreant puppets—no matter what was used as strings to make them dance. Because I know of no more brilliant scheme nor gag that could be dreamed up by the mind of man than to have the world spend forty years crawling all over the wrong crime scene. Now that, boys and girls, is a real knee-slapper. Ashton Gray

I'm posting yet another update the list of doctors at Parkland hospital who worked on both John F. Kennedy and on Lee Harvey Oswald to include, this time, Dr. Paul Conrad Peters. As before, I am listing the doctors in the order they arrived in Trauma Room One the day they worked on Kennedy. Jones arrived with Perry so those two are merely in alphabetical order: Dr. Marion Thomas Jenkins (anesthesiologist) Dr. Ronald Coy Jones Dr. Malcolm O. Perry Dr. Charles Rufus Baxter Dr. Paul Conrad Peters Dr. Gene Coleman Akin As before, this list is inclusive, not exclusive. Peters says the following in an interview that appeared in the January 1997 issue of JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly: DR. PAUL PETERS: [On Sunday, 24 November 1963] I was home, but I was coming out to the school (Medical Center), and so I turned the radio on in my home. About then Dr. Shires, who was professor of surgery, zoomed past my house. I then heard that Oswald had been shot, so I went out to the hospital. I went right into the operating room and stood behind Tom [shires] while he was operating on Oswald. Oswald had what we call a smorgasbord injury. The bullet that killed him hit all the major organs. While they worked on him, no anesthesia was given, but he was unconscious. Oswald started to come around and by then he had been given 14 or 15 units of blood. He begn to move his arm up towards his chest. Secret Service men, dressed in green surgical gowns to mix with the surgeons, were shouting in his ear, "Did you do it, did you do it?" hoping to get him to nod his head or something. But his blood pressure gave way and he died. ...I must have taken 15 or 20 pictures of Tom [shires] operating on Lee Harvey Oswald and a guy came up and identified himself and said, "I'll take the camera." I told him the camera was not mine, that it belonged to the Radiology Department. He said he was going to take it and he said he would give it back. ...I never got the camera back, or the film. Now, thee and me have no way of knowing whether or not Paul Peters actually spent his time there strolling around capturing Kodak moments, because of course the purported photos became a no-see-um, but I will say this: this list now has become downright spooky (take that any way you want) in relation to the who-and-what of the throat wound discussed in this thread and in relation to research now almost compiled on the who-and-what of the thread started by Charles Drago on the chest tubes and cut-downs, so I also am posting it there. I find it altogether fitting that this list of doctors who worked on both Kennedy and Oswald was begun on All Hallows Eve. Ashton

I'm posting yet another update the list of doctors at Parkland hospital who worked on both John F. Kennedy and on Lee Harvey Oswald to include, this time, Dr. Paul Conrad Peters. As before, I am listing the doctors in the order they arrived in Trauma Room One the day they worked on Kennedy. Jones arrived with Perry so those two are merely in alphabetical order: Dr. Marion Thomas Jenkins (anesthesiologist) Dr. Ronald Coy Jones Dr. Malcolm O. Perry Dr. Charles Rufus Baxter Dr. Paul Conrad Peters Dr. Gene Coleman Akin As before, this list is inclusive, not exclusive. Peters says the following in an interview that appeared 1n the January 1997 issue of JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly: DR. PAUL PETERS: [On Sunday, 24 November 1963] I was home, but I was coming out to the school (Medical Center), and so I turned the radio on in my home. About then Dr. Shires, who was professor of surgery, zoomed past my house. I then heard that Oswald had been shot, so I went out to the hospital. I went right into the operating room and stood behind Tom [shires] while he was operating on Oswald. Oswald had what we call a smorgasbord injury. The bullet that killed him hit all the major organs. While they worked on him, no anesthesia was given, but he was unconscious. Oswald started to come around and by then he had been given 14 or 15 units of blood. He begn to move his arm up towards his chest. Secret Service men, dressed in green surgical gowns to mix with the surgeons, were shouting in his ear, "Did you do it, did you do it?" hoping to get him to nod his head or something. But his blood pressure gave way and he died. ...I must have taken 15 or 20 pictures of Tom [shires] operating on Lee Harvey Oswald and a guy came up and identified himself and said, "I'll take the camera." I told him the camera was not mine, that it belonged to the Radiology Department. He said he was going to take it and he said he would give it back. ...I never got the camera back, or the film. Now, thee and me have no way of knowing whether or not Paul Peters actually spent his time there strolling around capturing Kodak moments, because of course the purported photos became a no-see-um, but I will say this: this list now has become downright spooky (take that any way you want) in relation to research now almost compiled on the who-and-what of the chest tube incisions discussed in this thread and in relation to the who-and-what of the thread There Was No Bullet Wound in John F. Kennedy's Throat, so I also am posting it there. I find it altogether fitting that this list of doctors who worked on both Kennedy and Oswald was begun on All Hallows Eve. Ashton

In researching this issue of the chest tube incisions, I have found an interesting correlation to a list that I started in the thread There Was No Bullet Wound in John F. Kennedy's Throat of doctors who worked on both John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. I am posting that list here in this thread because it is germane to the medical personnel who claim they inserted chest tubes into John F. Kennedy, despite autopsy findings that the chest tube incisions only were superficial. Here is the list, in the order they arrived in Trauma Room One the day they worked on Kennedy. Jones arrived with Perry so those two are merely in alphabetical order: Dr. Marion Thomas Jenkins (anesthesiologist) Dr. Ronald Coy Jones Dr. Malcolm O. Perry Dr. Charles Rufus Baxter Dr. Gene Coleman Akin This list is inclusive, not exclusive. I will be posting more in this thread referencing this list. Ashton