Paul Rigby

Like Tink “Cool” Thompson and his British equivalent, Austin “Groovy, baby” Powers, you’ve not really moved on much from, say, 1966/7, have you, Pat? Weisberg’s paean to the traitor and conspirator Kellerman was drivel in 1966/7, and it remains just that today. Based on pretty much the same evidence available to Weisberg nearly a decade before, Newcomb and Adams recognised his true role and exposed it: Notes: (1) Roy H. Kellerman, “Testimony of Roy H. Kellerman, Special Agent, Secret Service [dated March 9, 1964],” in Hearings, v. 2, pp. 63, 68. (2) Commission Document No. 7, p.283. (3) Kellerman, op. cit., pp.94, 95. (4) Jacqueline Kennedy, op. cit., v. 5, p. 180. (5) John B. Connally, Jr., op. cit., v. 4, p.134. (6) Nellie Connally, “Testimony of Mrs. John Bowden Connally, Jr., [date April 21, 1964],” in Hearings, v. 4, p.147. (7) Greer, op. cit, v. 2, p. 121. (8) Commission Document No. 7, p.287.

Pat Speer tonight released the findings of a forensic sniffathon organised under the aegis of Gary Mack and the Sixth Form Museum of Correction. “I can reveal that no, repeat no, aromas remotely suggestive of gunpowder have been detected emanating from the Zapruder original. This should clear the air definitively,” he announced, explaining that a random sample of anti-alterationists, led by Josiah Thompson and Jim DiEugenio, had produced no-takers for the outlandish suggestion that witnesses, both on Elm St and at Parkland Hospital, smelt gunpowder from within the presidential limousine (see below). “Eleven out of ten us independently concluded what we had agreed in advance - that the whole theory is far-out nonsense invented by those in the grip of conspiratorial phantosmia.” Most of these sinister individuals had been inserted into the plot on November 22, 1963, he went, but had now been entirely discredited by the expert panel of film-sniffers assembled 46 years later. “There is no credible evidence for the reek of gunpowder,” crowed panel member Craig Lamson, “and we have lots and lots of films and photographs to prove it. Who are you going to believe anyway, me or some guy who actually saw the assassination? It's a no-brainer." The press conference ended with a rousing chorus of the new American national anthem, “God Bless Halliburton,” followed by the ceremonial burning of an effigy of Jim Fetzer. (1) Billy J. Martin, “Testimony of B. J. Martin [dated April 3, 1964], “ in Hearings, v. 6, p.291. Marion L. Baker, op. cit., v. 3, p. 245. Mrs. Robert A. Reid, “Testimony of Mrs. Robert A. Reid [dated March 25, 1964],” in Hearings, v. 3, p. 273. Arnold L. Rowland, “Testimony of Arnold Lewis Rowland [dated March 10, 1964],” in Hearings, v. 2, p.181. Luke Mooney, “Testimony of Luke Mooney [dated March 25, 1964],” in Hearings, v. 3, p. 282. James F. Romack, “Testimony of James Filbert Romack [dated April 8, 1964],” in Hearings, v. 6., p. 280. A frame from the Muchmore film shows the coats of Ms. Hill and Ms. Moorman blowing in the wind (UPI, Four Days, p. 20). (2) Interview with Billy J. Martin. (3) Interview with Sen. Ralph W. Yarborough. (4) Charles Roberts, The Truth About the Assassination, p.17. The Texas Observer, Nov. 29, 1963, p. 5. Seth Kantor, “Kantor Exhibit No. 3. ‘Handwritten notes made by Seth Kantor concerning events surrounding the assassination,’” in Hearings, v. 20, p. 351. Manchester, op. cit., p. 177 (PB). (5) Ibid., v. 7, p. 487 (6) Ibid., v. 7, p. 487. (7) Tom C. Dillard, op. cit., v. 6, p. 165 (8) Vergie Rackley, Commission Document No. 5, pp. 66-67 (9) Joe M. Smith, “Testimony of Joe Marshall Smith [dated July 23, 1964],” in Hearings, v. 7, pp. 534-535. Note: When interviewed by the FBI on Dec. 9, 1963, Smith denied this and claimed he smelt gunpowder in the parking lot by the depository (Commission Document No. 205 (SSID, JT), p. 310). (10) Earle V. Brown, “Testimony of Earle V. Brown [dated April 7, 1964],” in Hearings, v. 6, p. 311.

What were Kellerman and Greer doing during the shooting? Not very much, according to the Z fake. Some very well-placed eyewitnesses said differently: Guns in the hands of Kellerman and Greer? One or both standing up? Shooting, er, "back"? Nah, never happened. It's not in the Z fake! And because it never happened, no witnesses claimed the presidential limo stank of gunpowder after the shooting. And if they did, they were wrong. Or mad, or bad, or merely confused.

Thanks for confirming my point, which bears repetition: In order to be an alterationist, one has to dismiss the testimony of the very people they allege took key films and photos. Bizarre, no? Well, perhaps no more than the logic which has it that Muchmore was so afraid of the FBI that she lied to its agents, without even greater fear of the consequences of her alleged "lie." And this after her film had supposedly appeared on US TV, and, according to you, been noted by the FBI, so well, indeed, that Shaneyfelt knew nothing about it. Goodness, your - the alterationist - line on this one is a mess. You really ought to get together with Tink and hammer out an agreed line on this one. Tink's still wandering round the forum insisting that the FBI knew about the film as a consequence of its appearance on TV on, presumably, anyone of the three different dates in November he's offered for its debut. It speaks volumes for your integrity on this, and other, questions, incidentally, that you've never once commented on Tink's meanderings on this question. I hereby afford you the opportunity...go on, seize it! Yup, I disagree with Jack. The FBI spent the greater portion of the investigation playing catch-up, and very much out of the Secret Service-CIA loop.

Another of those disturbing minor details – in his very first television interview, given on the afternoon of the assassination, Zapruder flat out stated he had filmed the presidential limousine turning from Houston onto Elm. There’s a generous donation to the charity of his/her choice for any reader who can produce a copy of the Z-fake were are familiar with today which includes this sequence, one confirmed, as evidenced above, by a number of the earliest observers of the first version of the Z fake: http://www.jfk-info.com/wfaa-tv.htm This transcript is from video tape of the live broadcast seen nationwide on the ABC network at about 2:10pm CST, November 22, 1963. The interviewer, seated on the left, is WFAA-TV program director Jay Watson. On the right, with his hat on the desk, is Abraham Zapruder. Muchmore denies filming the execution scene, Zapruder initially states he filmed a sequence that no longer exists in his "unaltered" film - whatever next, Nix insisting his film had been tampered with? Unthinkable. Or perhaps not.

I fear this could prove rather a long wait, as Pat contemplates his explanation for his omission of this fascinating piece of irrelevance: Muchmore denied taking any film of the assassination scene. For the benefit of those unfamiliar with her statement to the FBI, dated December 4, 1963, follow this link: http://www.history-matters.com/analysis/wi..._hsca_0080a.gif So, in order to swallow the anti-alterationist Kool-Aid on the question of which film was shown by WNEW-TV at 00:46hrs on the morning of Tuesday, November 26, 1963, you have to discount the testimony of the very woman to whom the anti-alterationists attribute it. It's laughable, but true; and anything but unusual when it comes to the alleged film-takers and their allegedly unadulterated films. Consider the case of the bald guy himself...which I will, in due course.

Herr Speer... Not more than I am at having to point out a teeny-weeny omission here, Pat - want to tell the readers of this thread what Muchmore told the FBI in early December? Or shall I? I'll give you this further opportunity because I wouldn't anyone to conclude that you're the kind of researcher who would withhold evidence embarrassing to your case. You really wouldn't, would you? But while we wait for you to admit that inconvenient fact, let's dismiss all together any suggestion that the Z film was shown on WNEW-TV in the first hour after midnight on the morning of Tuesday, 26 November: “Lane’s Defense Brief for Oswald,” published by the National Guardian, 19 December 1963: http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/The_critics/L...l_Guardian.html There, that's put that absurd rumour to bed once and for all.

The conspiracy expands apace. It now extends to the Z fraud’s support acts, and, most unforgivably of all, to the company which, according to the anti-alterationists, snapped up the Muchmore film. Here’s UPI describing what Mack, Thompson et al would have us believe is the Muchmore film. The latter has long been famous, of course, for the sequence which captured the motorcycle police turning from Houston onto Elm, followed by “the Kennedy motorcade.” Er, it has, hasn't it? Oh well, minor detail: Same despatch: 1. “Exclusive Films Show Shooting of Kennedy in Dallas,” Logansport Pharos-Tribune, (Logansport, Indiana), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 2 2. “UPI Newsfilm First On Air With Exclusive,” Great Bend Daily Tribune, (Great Bend, Kansas), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 9 3. “UPI Newsfilm Has Shooting On Film,” Humboldt Standard, (Eureka, California), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, p.2

Sylvia Meagher was the first major Warren critic to denounce Garrison. Was Sylvia a CIA asset also? And Harold Weisberg? and David Lifton? Really, Jay, this the best you could come up with? Have another 24 hours to do better. In the meantime, here's one for you. In the course of his preposterous anti-alterationist tirade, the great one insists not a single witness reported seeing guns in the hands of yer man Greer. True or false?

The list of the “confused” witnesses grows apace. And every man, Jack and Jill among them part of an immense conspiracy to throw suspicion on the bald guy’s film, in most instances, over a decade before its quasi-official release. It really is outrageous. The vanishing SS swarm upon the presidential limo, and up the grassy knoll: The false trail to the knoll:

Time to extend our list of conspirators away from Elm and into the rooms and studios where the first version of the Zapruder film was studied and described. Note how tightly knit and consistent these cunning coves were, describing a version of the Z film unknown to us today. Features in Zapruder public version 1 (Zpv1) absent from or different to Zapruder public version 2 (Zpv2): Elements of Zpv1 (1) to (5) described in following: 1) Presidential limousine filmed turning left from Houston onto Elm: 2) No street sign interposed between camera and President at moment of impact of first bullet: 3) Shooting took place further up Elm St towards Overpass, either opposite (or “abreast” of) Zapruder, or beginning at the steps leading up to the grassy knoll: 4) Connolly’s white shirt visibly covered in blood following impact of shot: 5) JFK’s head went forward in response to impact of head shot: Most of the newspaper articles cited above can be found in the thread Eleven early print descriptions of the Zapruder film: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=8953

As an ancient Russian proverb – that distilled essence of the accumulated peasant wisdom of the millennia, no less – has it: “Beware of White Russians bearing cinematic gifts.” How very true. Once we move beyond the fake film and its motley supporting acts, we are obliged to fall back on one of our deepest and most primitive instincts – the desire to read. Strange things happen when we revert to reading: we find patterns. Here’s another of them: Alternatively, it could just be that we really are confronted by a conspiracy so immense…that merely thinking about it could cause pain. Through laughter.

Forsooth, it’s an epidemic! A fourth lady, not to mention her husband,vanishes from the south curb of Elm! (Well, according to the Z fraud she does…) Surely they were all imagining they were on the south curb facing Zapruder's lens? Maybe it was problem with Z's lens? Or could it be - whisper it, it's an idea in embryo - there was a conspiracy to contradict the Z fraud and its supporting acts?

The ladies vanish! How did Zapruder's camera manage to miss three women, standing as a group, on the south curb of Elm, approximately fifty yards from the corner of Elm and Houston? Answers on postcards, please, for the attention of the Sixth Form Museum of Correction: Gloria Jeanne Holt, statement to FBI’s SAs Eugene P. Petrakis & A. Raymond Switzer, 18 March 1964: Left the TSBD “at approximately 12.10 p.m.” Stella Mae Jacob, statement to the FBI’s SAs Eugene P. Petrakis & A. Raymond Switzer, 18 March 1964: Left the TSBD “at approximately 12.00 p.m.” Sharon Nelson (nee Simmons), statement to the FBI’s SA E.J. Robertson, 18 March 1964: Left the TSBD “at about” 12.20 p.m. The presence of the three south Elmers, in a group, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, was confirmed by Deputy Sheriff C.L. “Lummie” Lewis: .

Quite right, Jay, it's a very sophiticated disinfo project, which I round off by insisting that Greer then proceeded to shot his President. That's some "distraction"! The real genius of the scheme lies in its utilisation of contemporaneous eyewitness accounts ignored or misrepresented by advocates of both grassy knoll and TSBD gunmen for the better part of half a century. Clever, no? Then again, it could just be the truth, and the campaign against it the work of two horses - the knollers and the OCT advocates - from the same stable. On the related subject of DiEugenio and his Black Op radio rant against the pro-alterationists, note the wretched hypocrisy of DiEugenio denouncing this forum, in language plainly designed to invite comparison with the McAdams "pig-pen," for carrying threads attacking Thompson as an agent of disinformation. The rant blithely ignored DiEugenio's own denunciation of various CIA penetrations of the research community, and the fact that Thompson was used by the CIA to denounce Garrison, of whom DiEugenio is supposed to be a keen supporter, in late 1967 and thereafter. DiEugenio would appear intent upon drawing a veil over this aspect of Thompson's promo campaign in support of SSID - why? Hypocrisy? Thy name is DiEugenio.

“Motorcade Cop Tells How It Happened,” Sunday News (New York), 24 November 1963, p.25:

http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2010.html Show #457 Original airdate: Jan 14th, 2010 Guests: Jim DiEugenio / Peter Philips Topic: Assassination Research /Project Censored Play Part One Interview - Jim DiEugenio A command performance of hypocrisy, contradiction, and rank disinformation. Take a bow, Jim, it was a performance worthy of, well, John McAdams. It gets funky approx 44 and a half minutes in, when DiEugenio introduces the subject by reference to, yes, William Cooper, whom he promptly denounces as a CIA asset bent on corrupting impressionable minds with a murky copy of the Z fake (version 2). The impression duly left with the uninformed listener that Cooper pioneered the theory, it’s off to the races with a melange of nonsense which repays close examination. But first up the choice of Cooper: In a posting on the DPF in July last year, I wrote as follows: Now, should DiEugenio wish to leave uncorrected the entirely false impression that Cooper the asset pioneered the idea of Secret Service responsibility for killing Kennedy, then we know exactly where DiEugenio is coming from.

Yeah, let's imagine the horror of a dedicated defender of the OCT ambushing an advocate of an alternative, conspiratorial interpretation by pointing out the latter's mis-use of testimony.... Actually, no need. There are a number of interesting examples of this already out there on the web. Here's "Von Pein" doing precisely that to Vincent Salandria in a review of False Mystery from March 2006: "Curious," indeed, though anything but an isolated example of the gross dishonesty of the handling of Miller's testimony by advocates of a grassy knoll gunman. Now imagine, if you will, the sheer awfulness of, say, Doug Horne representing the CT-ers in the kind of programme outlined by Pat in his post. Why, the watching audience might even be treated to an honest statement of Miller's belief that the shots came from inside the presidential limo - and that would never do, would it?

You mean McAdams is as dishonest on this issue as....Tink Thompson? Inconceivable.

Gosh, what a sinner Jack is - a genuine non-conformist who must be browbeaten into line. As opposed to good old Lee, who gives every indication of a fierce desire to gain brownie points by the zeal of his conformity: Harry Zitzler, “From Readers Letters: The Conforming Dissidents,” The Minority of One, May 1962, (Vol 4, No 5 [30]), p.15 Yeah, Jack, get honest like Lee - and omit all reference to the eyewitnesses who described Secret Servicemen swarming on the presidential limousine while it was stationary on Elm. Quick, some one hand him the pointy hat before he slinks off to the corner...to reconsider, if nothing else, the folly of uncritically regurgitating the Duke of Earl's micro-analysis of the witnesses to the limo stop. Mind you, isn't that always the problem with conformists?

Your problem here, Pat, is that you know, I know, and every one reading this knows, that you've never conducted any properly systematic survey of the eyewitnesses' responses to the Z fake - which renders your insistence that "zero" believe the film to be fake, well, at most generous, a nonsense. You don't know, and we know you don't. What we do know, and can prove, is that the WC: a) failed to call witnesses it considered inconvenient; sought to browbeat into submission those it considered malleable; and c) revealed to the attentive - or should that just be "honest"? - reader the existence of two versions of the Z fake: Mark Lane. Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966), p.66, footnote 2: And you ask us to discount eyewitness testimony which contradict the Z fakes and their supporting filmlets? Now why would you want to do that?

Thompson emerged from the same stable, and at much the same time, as Edward J. Epstein. An interesting assessment of Epstein’s role was offered by Marian Kester in a Third Decade essay of July 1985: "His role seems to be that of a neutralizing agent: his books are interjected as a kind of psychological counterstroke whenever the consensus seems dangerously close to crystallizing around the anti-Castro covert operations hypothesis"(1) Thompson’s interventions in the past decade or so leave little doubt that he, too, has been deployed as a neutralizing agent. His superficial objections and backslidings – the former faithfully echoed by his very own chorus, the latter assiduously ignored like so many inconvenient witnesses - are interjected as a propaganda counterstroke whenever the consensus seems dangerously close to crystallizing in favour of the wholesale fraudulence of the assassination’s photographic record. Not working any more, I'm pleased to say. (1) "Better Red than Ed: Reflections on "Who is Edward J. Epstein?", The Third Decade, Vol. 2 #5, (July 1985), p.11.

Scratch an anti-alterationist, and you tend to find a Warren Commission lawyer at work: Sylvia Meagher. Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities & The Report (NY: Vintage Books, June 1992 reprint), pp.4-5 Miss this leading of witnesses, did we, Pat? How very convenient.

In late November 1967, Max Lerner, long a zealous stenographer of the plotters’ shifting explanations for the Dallas coup, reviewed Thompson’s SSID, and pronounced himself a convert. The emergence of serious critics of the Warren Report – by serious Lerner meant academics, men like Epstein, Popkin, and now Thompson – had persuaded him that there was “some kind of collaborative shooting” and that “a trap had been set for the President” (1). At the end of his review, Lerner expressed the hope “That Thompson will leave Kierkegaard alone for a while, and turn to the big problem remaining in the assassination: who were the three men, where did they come from, what plot did they form, by what strange motives were they moved?” (2). Forty-years on, we know that Lerner pleaded in vain. Not merely did Thompson add nothing to the plot so fuzzily sketched in SSID, he now devotes his time to dismissing the very evidence he adduced for a plot. There is continuity in his work, though, and we overlook it at our peril: He continues to offer a politics-free analysis, whether of Time-Life, Kennedy’s relationship with the CIA, or the Warren Commission. (1) Max Lerner, “A New Book Shoots Big Holes in Warren Report,” L.A. Times, 26 November 1967, p.P7 (2) Ibid.

Bill Lord interview of James Chaney for WFAA-TV, 11/22/63, cited within Richard Trask. That Day in Dallas: The Photographers Capture on Film The Day President Kennedy Died (Danvers, Mass: Yeoman Press, expanded edition, 2000).