Paul Rigby
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No great mystery. At one time - circa 1989 - the accused appears to have worked for CIA-MI6; and at a time when so much CIA-MI6 effort is going into the Tibetan project, we really couldn't have an open trial which, potentially at least, threatened to expose the extent of CIA-MI6 support for protests and terrrorism in China...
Two excellent recent pieces from Global Research contributors on the CIA and Tibet. China, it would appear, is to be "Balkanized," just like Yugoslavia was; and the desire for energy is the primary motive:
Tibet, the 'great game' and the CIA
by Richard M Bennett
Global Research, March 25, 2008
Asia Times
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8442
Given the historical context of the unrest in Tibet, there is reason to believe Beijing was caught on the hop with the recent demonstrations for the simple reason that their planning took place outside of Tibet and that the direction of the protesters is similarly in the hands of anti-Chinese organizers safely out of reach in Nepal and northern India.Similarly, the funding and overall control of the unrest has also been linked to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, and by inference to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) because of his close cooperation with US intelligence for over 50 years.
Indeed, with the CIA's deep involvement with the Free Tibet Movement and its funding of the suspiciously well-informed Radio Free Asia, it would seem somewhat unlikely that any revolt could have been planned or occurred without the prior knowledge, and even perhaps the agreement, of the National Clandestine Service (formerly known as the Directorate of Operations) at CIA headquarters in Langley.
Respected columnist and former senior Indian Intelligence officer, B Raman, commented on March 21 that "on the basis of available evidence, it was possible to assess with a reasonable measure of conviction" that the initial uprising in Lhasa on March 14 "had been pre-planned and well orchestrated".
Could there be a factual basis to the suggestion that the main beneficiaries to the death and destruction sweeping Tibet are in Washington? History would suggest that this is a distinct possibility.
The CIA conducted a large scale covert action campaign against the communist Chinese in Tibet starting in 1956. This led to a disastrous bloody uprising in 1959, leaving tens of thousands of Tibetans dead, while the Dalai Lama and about 100,000 followers were forced to flee across the treacherous Himalayan passes to India and Nepal.
The CIA established a secret military training camp for the Dalai Lama's resistance fighters at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado, in the US. The Tibetan guerrillas were trained and equipped by the CIA for guerrilla warfare and sabotage operations against the communist Chinese.
The US-trained guerrillas regularly carried out raids into Tibet, on occasions led by CIA-contract mercenaries and supported by CIA planes. The initial training program ended in December 1961, though the camp in Colorado appears to have remained open until at least 1966.
The CIA Tibetan Task Force created by Roger E McCarthy, alongside the Tibetan guerrilla army, continued the operation codenamed "ST CIRCUS" to harass the Chinese occupation forces for another 15 years until 1974, when officially sanctioned involvement ceased.
McCarthy, who also served as head of the Tibet Task Force at the height of its activities from 1959 until 1961, later went on to run similar operations in Vietnam and Laos.
By the mid-1960s, the CIA had switched its strategy from parachuting guerrilla fighters and intelligence agents into Tibet to establishing the Chusi Gangdruk, a guerrilla army of some 2,000 ethnic Khamba fighters at bases such as Mustang in Nepal.
This base was only closed down in 1974 by the Nepalese government after being put under tremendous pressure by Beijing.
After the Indo-China War of 1962, the CIA developed a close relationship with the Indian intelligence services in both training and supplying agents in Tibet.
Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison in their book The CIA's Secret War in Tibet disclose that the CIA and the Indian intelligence services cooperated in the training and equipping of Tibetan agents and special forces troops and in forming joint aerial and intelligence units such as the Aviation Research Center and Special Center.
This collaboration continued well into the 1970s and some of the programs that it sponsored, especially the special forces unit of Tibetan refugees which would become an important part of the Indian Special Frontier Force, continue into the present.
Only the deterioration in relations with India which coincided with improvements in those with Beijing brought most of the joint CIA-Indian operations to an end.
Though Washington had been scaling back support for the Tibetan guerrillas since 1968, it is thought that the end of official US backing for the resistance only came during meetings between president Richard Nixon and the Chinese communist leadership in Beijing in February 1972.
Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer has described the outrage many field agents felt when Washington finally pulled the plug, adding that a number even "[turned] for solace to the Tibetan prayers which they had learned during their years with the Dalai Lama".
The former CIA Tibetan Task Force chief from 1958 to 1965, John Kenneth Knaus, has been quoted as saying, "This was not some CIA black-bag operation." He added, "The initiative was coming from ... the entire US government."
In his book Orphans of the Cold War, Knaus writes of the obligation Americans feel toward the cause of Tibetan independence from China. Significantly, he adds that its realization "would validate the more worthy motives of we who tried to help them achieve this goal over 40 years ago. It would also alleviate the guilt some of us feel over our participation in these efforts, which cost others their lives, but which were the prime adventure of our own."
Despite the lack of official support it is still widely rumored that the CIA were involved, if only by proxy, in another failed revolt in October 1987, the unrest that followed and the consequent Chinese repression continuing till May 1993.
The timing for another serious attempt to destabilize Chinese rule in Tibet would appear to be right for the CIA and Langley will undoubtedly keep all its options open.
China is faced with significant problems, with the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province; the activities of the Falun Gong among many other dissident groups and of course growing concern over the security of the Summer Olympic Games in August.
China is viewed by Washington as a major threat, both economic and military, not just in Asia, but in Africa and Latin America as well.
The CIA also views China as being "unhelpful" in the "war on terror", with little or no cooperation being offered and nothing positive being done to stop the flow of arms and men from Muslim areas of western China to support Islamic extremist movements in Afghanistan and Central Asian states.
To many in Washington, this may seem the ideal opportunity to knock the Beijing government off balance as Tibet is still seen as China's potential weak spot.
The CIA will undoubtedly ensure that its fingerprints are not discovered all over this growing revolt. Cut-outs and proxies will be used among the Tibetan exiles in Nepal and India's northern border areas.
Indeed, the CIA can expect a significant level of support from a number of security organizations in both India and Nepal and will have no trouble in providing the resistance movement with advice, money and above all, publicity.
However, not until the unrest shows any genuine signs of becoming an open revolt by the great mass of ethnic Tibetans against the Han Chinese and Hui Muslims will any weapons be allowed to appear.
Large quantities of former Eastern bloc small arms and explosives have been reportedly smuggled into Tibet over the past 30 years, but these are likely to remain safely hidden until the right opportunity presents itself.
The weapons have been acquired on the world markets or from stocks captured by US or Israeli forces. They have been sanitized and are deniable, untraceable back to the CIA.
Weapons of this nature also have the advantage of being interchangeable with those used by the Chinese armed forces and of course use the same ammunition, easing the problem of resupply during any future conflict.
Though official support for the Tibetan resistance ended 30 years ago, the CIA has kept open its lines of communications and still funds much of the Tibetan Freedom movement.
So is the CIA once again playing the "great game" in Tibet?
It certainly has the capability, with a significant intelligence and paramilitary presence in the region. Major bases exist in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and several Central Asian states.
It cannot be doubted that it has an interest in undermining China, as well as the more obvious target of Iran.
So the probable answer is yes, and indeed it would be rather surprising if the CIA was not taking more than just a passing interest in Tibet. That is after all what it is paid to do.
Since September 11, 2001, there has been a sea-change in US Intelligence attitudes, requirements and capabilities. Old operational plans have been dusted off and updated. Previous assets re-activated. Tibet and the perceived weakness of China's position there will probably have been fully reassessed.
For Washington and the CIA, this may seem a heaven-sent opportunity to create a significant lever against Beijing, with little risk to American interests; simply a win-win situation.
The Chinese government would be on the receiving end of worldwide condemnation for its continuing repression and violation of human rights and it will be young Tibetans dying on the streets of Lhasa rather than yet more uniformed American kids.
The consequences of any open revolt against Beijing, however, are that once again the fear of arrest, torture and even execution will pervade every corner of both Tibet and those neighboring provinces where large Tibetan populations exist, such as Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan.
And the Tibetan Freedom movement still has little likelihood of achieving any significant improvement in central Chinese policy in the long run and no chance whatever of removing its control of Lhasa and their homeland.
Once again it would appear that the Tibetan people will find themselves trapped between an oppressive Beijing and a manipulative Washington.
Beijing sends in the heavies The fear that the United States, Britain and other Western states may try to portray Tibet as another Kosovo may be part of the reason why the Chinese authorities reacted as if faced with a genuine mass revolt rather than their official portrayal of a short-lived outbreak of unrest by malcontents supporting the Dalai Lama.
Indeed, so seriously did Beijing view the situation that a special security coordination unit, the 110 Command Center, has been established in Lhasa with the primary objective of suppressing the disturbances and restoring full central government control.
The center appears to be under the direct control of Zhang Qingli, first secretary of the Tibet Party and a President Hu Jintao loyalist. Zhang is also the former Xinjiang deputy party secretary with considerable experience in counter-terrorism operations in that region.
Others holding important positions in Lhasa are Zhang Xinfeng, vice minister of the Central Public Security Ministry and Zhen Yi, deputy commander of the People's Armed Police Headquarters in Beijing.
The seriousness with which Beijing is treating the present unrest is further illustrated by the deployment of a large number of important army units from the Chengdu Military Region, including brigades from the 149th Mechanized Infantry Division, which acts as the region's rapid reaction force.
According to a United Press International report, elite ground force units of the People's Liberation Army were involved in Lhasa, and the new T-90 armored personnel carrier and T-92 wheeled armored vehicles were deployed. According to the report, China has denied the participation of the army in the crackdown, saying it was carried out by units of the armed police. "Such equipment as mentioned above has never been deployed by China's armed police, however."
Air support is provided by the 2nd Army Aviation Regiment, based at Fenghuangshan, Chengdu, in Sichuan province. It operates a mix of helicopters and STOL transports from a frontline base near Lhasa. Combat air support could be quickly made available from fighter ground attack squadrons based within the Chengdu region.
The Xizang Military District forms the Tibet garrison, which has two mountain infantry units; the 52nd Brigade based at Linzhi and the 53rd Brigade at Yaoxian Shannxi. These are supported by the 8th Motorized Infantry Division and an artillery brigade at Shawan, Xinjiang.
Tibet is also no longer quite as remote or difficult to resupply for the Chinese army. The construction of the first railway between 2001 and 2007 has significantly eased the problems of the movement of large numbers of troops and equipment from Qinghai onto the rugged Tibetan plateau.
Other precautions against a resumption of the long-term Tibetan revolts of previous years has led to a considerable degree of self-sufficiency in logistics and vehicle repair by the Tibetan garrison and an increasing number of small airfields have been built to allow rapid-reaction units to gain access to even the most remote areas.
The Chinese Security Ministry and intelligence services had been thought to have a suffocating presence in the province and indeed the ability to detect any serious protest movement and suppress resistance.
Richard M Bennett is an intelligence and security consultant, AFI Research.
The Tibet Card
by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich
Global Research, March 27, 2008
middle-east-online.com
It seems that the US government excels at propaganda for it continues to win over the very people it has betrayed and caused to be killed; buying their trust, it offers a friendship that is only self-serving. Oblivious to the past havoc wreaked by the CIA in Tibet, the innocent gather around the storm, stare into the eye, ready to be sucked into it, says Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich.
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8462
During the Vietnam era, the United States eagerly supported the brutal regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, a man who brutally oppressed the Buddhists; yet today our government has risen in defense of the Dalai Lama and Tibet. Has our sordid history finally led to compassion for the people of Tibet? One must wonder which people we want to protect for there are 41 races in Tibet, including Tibetan, Menpa, Luopa, Han Chinese, Hui, Sherpa, Deng, and so on; although by far, the majority are Tibetans. Perhaps the US is reaching out to the Dalai Lama - again?It seems that the US government excels at propaganda for it continues to win over the very people it has betrayed and caused to be killed; buying their trust, it offers a friendship that is only self-serving. Oblivious to the past havoc wreaked by the CIA in Tibet, the innocent gather around the storm, stare into the eye, ready to be sucked into it. Not too long ago, the Truman administration attempted to use the young Dalai Lama against China's new Communist regime. The CIA offered to provide him financial support as part of the deal. Its subsidies to the Dalai Lama lasted, at an unspecified level, until 1974. However, the CIA officials seem to have misled the Tibetans into thinking they had American support for the establishment of an independent Tibet. They did not.
Once again, the Tibetans are thinking they have the support of the United States. It should be mentioned that such names as Tom Lantos (a Holocaust survivor) endorsed the promotion of a free Tibet. He also promoted the International Campaign for Tibet, a campaign which receives grants from the National Endowment for Democracy – a State Department operation which engages non-suspecting NGOs to openly do what the CIA did/does. Neoconservative queen, Jean Kilpatrick was pushing The Committee of 100 for Tibet with artists such as Richard Gere as unsuspecting fronts[ii]
What is the reason behind America’s sudden interest in Tibet, the Buddhist ideology of 1649 Dalai Lama preserving animal and nature (we certainly could be preserving nature at home) or is it what is under nature? Tibet has the world’s largest reserve of uranium, and in addition to gold and copper, large quantities of oil and gas were discovered in Qiangtang Basin in western China's remote Tibet area[iii]. A friendly Dalai Lama would help reimburse the CIA subsidies, and much more.
There are other more important factors. Israel’s interest is undeniable. In fact, they have been helping this ancient green land with ‘agriculture techniques’ in recent years[iv]. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, is recruiting fellow Nobel winners to press China on Tibet. Other notables such as Spielberg have already cooperated, and Sarkozy is considering boycotting the Olympics. One has to ask why these humanitarians are not concerned with the well-being of 1.4 million Palestinians described by the UN and the ICRC as being subjected to worst possible human disaster witnessed.
China has always shown reluctance to impose sanctions on Iran. From an Israeli and American perspective, China became a veritable short-term liability (versus a long term power challenging the US) when Iran and China engaged in talks to allow for a military base for China in one of Iran’s Persian Gulf ports. This was in response to Sarkozy making an announcement that France and the UAE were negotiating a deal in which France would have a small base in that region. Such a cooperation between Iran and China would make Iran less vulnerable to an attack by Israel and/or the United States.
China has far surpassed the United States in Public Diplomacy. During the G.W. Bush presidency, while the world watched in dismay an do-it-alone America that made a blunder at every turn, China, in spite of human rights issues that remain to be resolved, has won ‘hearts and minds’ in South America, Middle East, and Africa. It is attempting to win over its regional neighbors by developing economic, political, and diplomatic relations, and exercising skillful diplomacy.
Engaging China in a Tibet uprising, threatening the public image it has worked so hard to build around the world would distract or dissuade it from building alliances with Iran. Iran must be kept isolated at all costs.
Tel-Aviv hopes that Cheney will push Bush to launch a military attack on Iran, just as he persuaded Bush to attack Iraq. Given that the Iraq tactics are old, new ones have to be sought. As such, many experts suspect that a false flag operation would be required to launch an all out war. In October 2006, when Anti-terrorism officials conducted a helicopter survey of New York City's radiation sources in preparation for a so-called "dirty bomb" attack, they came across an unexpected radiation hot spot which has been kept out of the media as it is a political hot spot – A strong radiation spike from the area of the Israeli Embassy. Officials would not comment on why they thought that particular area showed such a stunning peak in radiation[v].
Can America afford another war? Will the world withstand another assault on humanity?
In 1787, George Washington said: “The power under the Constitution will always be in the people. It is entrusted for certain defined purposes, and for a certain limited period, to representatives of their own choosing; and whenever it is executed contrary to their interest, or not agreeable to their wishes, their servants can, and undoubtedly will, be recalled.”
Let us recall our servants who do not represent us, who do not serve our interest, and who are killing in our name.
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an Iranian-American studying at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is a member of World Association of International Studies society, Stanford. Her research focus is US foreign policy towards Iran, Iran’s nuclear program, and influence of lobby groups. She is a peace activist, essayist, radio commentator and public speaker.
Notes:
Jim Mann, Los Angeles Times: Jun 16, 1999. p. 5).
[ii] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib...crs/RL30983.pdf
[iii] http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/nts44532.htm ).
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Report in the Guardian of how MI6 insisted that parts of the trial were held in secret:
...Parts of the two-month trial at the Old Bailey were held in secret for national security reasons, allegedly at the request of MI6, although no further explanation for such sensitivity of the trial was given.
No great mystery. At one time - circa 1989 - the accused appears to have worked for CIA-MI6; and at a time when so much CIA-MI6 effort is going into the Tibetan project, we really couldn't have an open trial which, potentially at least, threatened to expose the extent of CIA-MI6 support for protests and terrrorism in China:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/06/ukcrime.uknews4
Murder accused 'had fled China witch-hunt'
By Robert Booth
The Guardian, Wednesday, 6 February 2008, p.10
The man on trial for the murder of a reclusive 84-year-old writer was among the leaders of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in China that resulted in the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.Wang Yam, 46, is accused of bludgeoning Allan Chappelow with a blunt instrument at his north London home in May 2006, stealing his identity and defrauding his bank accounts.
George Robertson QC, for the defence, said Yam came to Britain, via Hong Kong, after he was forced to flee China in the wake of the massacre in 1989 in which 2,000 students were killed.
His grandfather had been one of Mao's "closest comrades" on the Long March and his father was an officer in the Chinese army, Robertson said.
"He studied physics at university successfully because by the age of 27 he had a position teaching at Beijing university and had a masters degree in electrical engineering. He became vice-president of the student body in 1989 ... He became an organiser of the movement for democracy."
"Afterwards there was a witch-hunt. A year or so later ... it was indicated he would have to go to a re-education camp, a coal mine ... He decided to flee as a refugee to Hong Kong. He was accepted in 1992 as an asylum seeker and was naturalised as a British citizen in 1998." For two hours yesterday, the trial was held in private. The judge gave no explanation.
Yam denies murder, breaking into the writer's home, stealing four blank cheques and £20, and the handling of the stolen cheques, a mobile phone and a quantity of mail. He also denies obtaining £20,000 by deception. The trial continues.
Further stories on the case:
http://browse.guardian.co.uk/search?search...;fr=cb-guardian
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“The first film showing the assassination of President Kennedy was telecast in New York on November 26. It was a UPI Newsfilm exclusive It was serviced to UPI Newsfilm subscribers the world over,”
UPI Newsfilm advertisement, Broadcasting: The Business Weekly of Television and Radio, December 2, 1963, p.69.
The circumstantial case for UPI Newsfilm’s possession of the first version of the Zapruder film is not without merit – in addition to it being a much more logical bidder for film rights, UPI representative Jack Klinge attended the Saturday, November 23 showing(s) of the film (1) – and would account for its appearance on Russian TV on the evening of November 25(2); and its distribution to US television stations belonging to such diverse, “independent” groups as Metropolitan Broadcasting Television (WNEW-TV, New York) (3) and Storer Broadcasting Co. (WITI-TV, Milwaukee) (4) by, at the latest, the following day. How so?
”UPI Newsfilm supplied coverage to 44 foreign countries as well as servicing 100 independent U.S. television stations and ABC,”“Television’s largest audience,” Broadcasting: The Business Weekly of Television and Radio, December 2, 1963, p.57.
On the previous page, readers learned that “ABC, CBS, NBC and UPI Newsfilm sent countless hours of film covering all aspects of the presidential assassination via jet transport to countries on all continents.”
In its edition of December 9, 1963, Broadcasting magazine, ordinarily so diligent and prompt in informing its readership of significant industry developments, belatedly reported the ending of a relationship of relevance to this thread:
“In October, Fox dropped its association with United Press International, under which Movietone produced Newsfilms for TV stations for distribution by UPI. UPI has established its own Newsfilm operation which sources TV stations,”“New Life in Old Film,” Broadcasting: The Business Weekly of Television and Radio, December 9, 1963, p.28.
Both the tardiness of the report, and the uncharacteristic vagueness of its dating of the severance of the UPI-Fox collaboration, owed something, one can’t feeling, to the following report on a much-neglected aspect of the Patman delvings into the mysterious foundations, that concerning their extensive behind-the-camera work in the television-film industry. Mr. Skouras and the Fox connection were of a sudden a potential liability to UPI, and, of course, anyone who had plans for UPI in the upcoming months:
Everyone dipped into Baird’s banks
Broadcasters were clients of tax-deductible foundations
Broadcasting: The Business Weekly of Television and Radio, 28 October 1963, pp.52-53.
A veteran pay TV promoter, some producers and distributors of television and theatre films and a few radio and television station owners were shown in a House of Representatives study released last week to have borrowed heavily from three tax-exempt foundations set up by a New York financier whose transactions have been under sub-committee scrutiny.In many cases, the subcommittee charges in a lengthy, detailed report, the debtors paid back the loans by making tax-deductible, “charitable” donations to the foundations.
Representative Wright Patman (D – Tex.), chairman of the House Small Business foundations subcommittee and scourge of foundation-controlled enterprises since the early 1930s, blames the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service for permitting this type of tax-free business to go on unchecked. Accusing the government agencies of “apathy…nonfeasance” and failure to perform audits of foundation tax returns, Representative Patman points to the activity of six foundations given special attention in his subcommittee report.
“Their tax-free business transactions include operations as: securities dealers…business brokers, finders of credit…lending services…[and] trading in mortgages,” Representative Patman says. This activity is not confined to the six foundations, he says: they are typical of similar activity “on a substantial scale.”
Directed by H.A. Olsher, the study has been underway since last year and with the release of this second instalment of a planned three-part report, is heading towards public hearings, probably this spring, subcommittee sources said last week. The 406-page section just released, although documented with pages of business correspondence among the foundations and their “debtors” and “contributors” between 195—1964, in many cases makes no effort to explain the dealings. It is expected that some of the mystery would be dispelled once some of the principals are called for sworn testimony.
A wide range of business transactions in the entertainment field, real estate, banking and stocks is covered in this instalment, but most of the fire is turned on three foundations controlled by David G. Baird of Montclair, N.J., head of Baird & Co., a stock brokerage firm that is a member of the New York Stock Exchange. In the past three decades he set up the David, Josephine and Winfield Baird Foundation, the Winfield Baird Foundation and the Lansing Foundation. The three had total assets of $28 million at the end of 1960, Mr. Baird reported to the subcommittee.
The type of control Mr. Baird exercised over his foundations “affords boundless opportunities for lavishing favors upon business associates and friends,” Representative Patman charges. In a list of “unusual operations” of the Baird foundations, he cites “usurious interest rates…’contributions’ for services rendered…huge accumulations of income [and] loans without adequate security.”
Baird as ‘Angel’
The Baird foundations “have never received a screen credit, but they have played top financial roles in numerous movie and television deals, involving millions of dollars,” and have held mortgages “on a not-inconsiderable number of films,” the report says.
A spokesman for the Baird foundations said that by the end of the this year they will have given a total of more than $36 million to over 2,000 charities since the first one was formed in 1936. This has been for the benefit of the charities, not for Mr. Baird personally, the spokesman said, and Baird & Co. has donated back to the charities far more than it ever took from them.
The Lansing Foundation was said to have been inactive since 1954, and the other two are to be dissolved by 1965.
In a partial list of Baird foundation dealings in the “movie-television industry,” these names came up:
• Matthew Fox, former president of many companies in motion picture distribution and pay TV, including Skiatron TV Corp., is an organizer and original stockholder in Subscription Television Inc., a new pay TV venture hoping to raise $23 million to send programs by wire into Los Angeles and San Francisco TV homes (Broadcasting, August 26, et seq).
• C & C Super Corp., an organization which during the early development of television, was active in the bartering of programs for credits in time that it sold to advertisers. The firm was listed as in debt to the Winfield Baird Foundation for $1 million at the end of 1955. Mr. Fox was also involved in this company at one time.
• Louis Chesler, Eliot Hyman and the late David B. Stillman, executives in Seven Arts Productions Ltd., and its distributing subsidiary, Seven Arts Associated Corp., have dealt with Baird foundations in sums ranging from millions of dollars, the report shows.
• Spyros Skouras (5), board chairman of Twentieth Century Fox, Walt Disney of his own company, Nicholas Reisini of Cinerama Inc. and Serge Semenenko (6), film financier, were shown to have had extensive dealings with Baird foundations.
And there were some broadcasters:
• Stanley Warner Corp., licensee of WAST (TV) Schenectady, N.Y., had transactions running into hundreds of thousands of dollars with the Lansing Foundation and Winfield Baird Foundations.
• Joseph Harris, a New York insurance man who owns half of KELP-AM-TV El Paso, Tex., also owned Essex Universal Corp., a film distributor, and dealt with the Baird foundations to the extent of several hundred thousand dollars.
• Mr. Baird himself is shown by FCC records to have been an investor in only one broadcasting property. His one recorded venture was a three-month holding of 49 of 100 common voting shares of KFWB-FM Los Angeles. The other 51 shares were held by Harry Maizlish, who also was slowly acquiring control of KFWB at the time. Mr. Baird got out of FM in 1952.
Notes:
(1) “Photographer Sells Pictures of Assassination for $25,000,” Dallas Morning News, November 24, 1963: “Saturday, Dick Strobel of the Associated Press, Los Angeles; Jack Klinge of United Press International, Dallas, and Dick Strolle [sic], Los Angeles representative of Life Magazine, negotiated with Zapruder for still picture rights to his film.”
For Klinge’s obituary: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-52755123.htm
(2) http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v1n2/worldreaction.html
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/history/wc_pe...lmson%20TV.html
(3) “Herridge to produce dramas for Metropolitan,” Broadcasting: The Business Weekly of Television and Radio, December 30, 1963, p.41: “Metropolitan owns and operates: WNEW-TV New York; KMBC-TV Kansas City, Mo.; KTTV (TV) Los Angeles; WTTG (TV) Washington; KOVR (TV) Sacramento-Stockton, Calif.; WTVH (TV) Peoria, Ill., and WTVP (TV) Decatur, Ill.” Metropolitan was a division of Metromedia.
(4) Thomas W. Baggerman, in Structurally Unsound: The Changing State of Local Television (Univ. of Pittsburgh, 2006), p.46, n32, citing Robert H. Howard’s Multiple Ownership in Television Broadcasting (Ayer Publishing Co., 1979), “lists Storer Broadcasting Company as the most prominent of the independents.” By independent is meant nothing more than “without a network affiliation” (Baggerman, p.38).
According to a full page ad in Broadcasting’s edition of November 11, 1963, Storer’s TV stations included: WITI-TV Milwaukee; WJW-TV Cleveland; WSPD-TV Toledo; and WJBK-TV Detroit (p.12). For WITI-TV’s possession of the film, see AP, "Movie Film Depicts Shooting of Kennedy,” Milwaukee Journal, November 26, 1963, part 1, p.3: "The film also was being distributed by United Press International Newsfilms to subscribing stations. WITI-TV in Milwaukee is a subscriber, but will reserve judgment on whether to show the film until after its officials have viewed it."
Just how “independent” independent was can perhaps be best gauged by Storer’s appointment of Linton Wells as Washington News Bureau man in 1962 (or 1963?). Wells has CIA written all over him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linton_Wells
(5) For more on “board chairman of Twentieth Century Fox,” Spyros Skouras, try these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyros_Skouras
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...11257-8,00.html
McClintick, David Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (Collins Business Essentials) ISBN 0060508
(6) On Serge Semenenko:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,841002,00.html
The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting by Mark Cotta Vaz, Craig Barron, George Lucas, Craig Barron, George Lucas (Chronicle Books, 2004), 288 pages, ISBN:081184515X
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Email that members might be interested in reading.
Dear Mr. Simkin, I am an admirer of your website and in the spirit of I.F. Stone, far be it for me to censor anything in it. However, I do take exception with the comment that was attached to the reproduced column by I.F. Stone concerning the Warren Commission. You are very correct that Stone was criticized for his support of the "lone gunman" Warren finding. However, the last comment in the Spartacus website on this is specious--hinting that Izzy might have been paid by the CIA which is why he wrote what he did!
In my biography of I.F. Stone, "All Governments Lie" I repeatedly emphasize Stone's life long attacks on such institutions as the FBI, CIA, NSA; he stated eloquently and often that such secret information gathering organizations were a dangerous force in a democracy. That he would have aligned himself in any way is ludicrous on its face.
Guilt-by-association, Stone-style, Nov 1960 v. guilt-by-association-is-shameful, Stone-style, October 1964.
CIA finance or bribery of Stone, Myra, is a perfectly plausible explanation for his extraordinary change of heart - actually, rank hypocrisy - on the subject of Dulles. Is there really a better explanation?
“Why Should the Heads of FBI and CIA Automatically Be Reappointed?,” I.F. Stone’s Weekly, November 21, 1960, p.3:
“There are even stronger reasons for regarding the head of the CIA as a political post to be changed by a new Administration. The head of the CIA plays a key role in many policy decisions. The presentation of intelligence findings is strongly colored by a man’s political outlook. Mr Dulles is a conservative Republican who spent most of his life as a top Wall Street corporation lawyer. There is as much reason for changing the head of the CIA as for changing the Secretary of State.”“The Left and the Warren Commission Report,” I.F. Stone’s Weekly, October 5, 1964, p.2:
“I have criticised Allen W. Dulles constantly over the years. But I would not impute to him or any other member of the Commission conduct so evil as to conspire with the secret services to protect the killers of a President…This is what I call demonology…It implies that Allen Dulles would be a party to killing Kennedy and hushing up the truth because he lost his job after the Bay of Pigs. Such charges are as sloppy was they are wild, are dishonorable and dissolve the fabric of society. They seek to destroy a man’s reputation on the basis of evil surmise and guilt by association.”Paul
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...ias-799887.html
Independent.co.uk
Johann Hari: Why is Britain allowing money and weapons to pass into the hands of right-wing militias?
Here are clues to why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have hit their current dead-ends
Monday, 24 March 2008, p.29
On the website of the British Foreign Office, a small photograph recently appeared. It shows Kim Howells, our Foreign Office minister, looking into the camera, smiling, as he is surrounded by gun-yielding men accused of murder. He had not been taken hostage. No: he was there to represent a government that gives these men money and military aid.By tracing the story of this photograph, we can trace the worst aspects of British foreign policy – and find clues to why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have crashed into their current bloody dead-end.
Howells was in Colombia, a country locked in one of the nastiest civil wars of the past century. It began more than 40 years ago, when some parts of the hungry, mixed-race majority began to fight against the fact that a tiny, white, land-owning elite held virtually all the country's wealth. Since then, it has hardened into a conflict between two gnarled human rights-abusing wings.
To the left, there are a slew of guerrilla groups – most prominently the FARC and the ELN – who fund themselves by kidnapping, extortion and "taxing" drug-producers.
To the right, there is the Colombian government and the right-wing paramilitary death-squads it has unleashed against any community of civilians suspected of leftish sympathies, or of challenging the elite. That's why to be a trade unionist in Colombia – organising for better wages and working conditions for your colleagues – is to carry a tombstone on your back: more are murdered there than in the rest of the world combined. Between them, these violent wings have killed more than 30,000 people and driven three million people from their homes.
Howells – our representative – was posing with some of those alleged to be the worst abusers. He was huddled with the High Mountain Brigades, who Amnesty International says have been involved in hunting down and murdering trade unionists.
Here's what our taxes help deliver to ordinary Colombians. On 10 January, at 10.30am, Colombian soldiers wearing balaclavas burst into the house of Rosa Maria Zapata, a 56-year-old indigenous woman. When the soldiers pointed their guns at her and barked that they wanted to know where the guerrillas were, she screamed back that she didn't know; she doesn't know any guerrillas. They told her she was hiding weapons for the FARC. They told her they knew. She howled and protested. So they started searching – and a moment later she heard gunfire. The police announced they had killed the guerrilla. She went running – and found her severely disabled 22-year-old son dead.
The British pro-peace group Justice for Colombia believes these soldiers received British training. They have documented 36 other civilians murdered by potentially British-trained forces in a six-month period, and they are asking the Foreign Office to outline exactly where our money goes.
How has Kim Howells responded? Easy. He says his critics "support FARC, a band of gangsters and drug smugglers", and that FARC is responsible for "most" of the murders in Colombia. In reality, Justice For Colombia is supported by more than half of all Labour MPs, and opposes all violence within Colombia. And the FARC – while unequivocally disgusting – is responsible for far fewer murders than the government and right-wing death squads, according to every major study.
So how did this happen? How did a minister in a Labour government end up parroting the propaganda of the Colombian hard-right? The British government says they have become the second biggest military donor to Colombia – after the US – because they want to promote human rights there. But if you had a few million pounds to support human rights in that country, the idea you would support the High Mountain Brigades is simply surreal.
No – the explanations for British backing lie elsewhere. The first is a desire to support the United States, because we project our power by being a loyal adjunct to American military might. If Britain wasn't offering these funds, the Bush administration would be alone in the world in backing the Colombian military.
We also do it to support the global "war on drugs". Since Bill Clinton's presidency, the US has been spraying hundreds of thousands of tonnes of chemical poisons onto the vast tracts of Colombia where the coca leaves essential for cocaine production are grown. All plants and trees die in their wake. Birth defects and cancer rates are rising. And the effect on drug production? It simply moves to another area. Drug production is so profitable and so popular that it cannot be fumigated off the face of the real world. Drug prohibition simply hands great swathes of the Colombian economy to armed criminal gangs, from the FARC to the right. It ensures they will always have enough money to buy enough guns to preserve their patches of territory.
There is another way. More and more Colombians believe it is only by bringing drugs into the legal economy – where they can be controlled and taxed by the state – that the guerrillas and paramilitaries can be stripped of their cash-flow. From the current Conservative Interior Minister, Carlos Holguin, to the former Attorney, General Gustavo de Greiff, to the country's most popular singer, Juan Esteban Aristizabal, it is being argued that an end to drug prohibition is the only long-term solution to the civil war. Yet Britain demands the opposite.
There is one more crucial reason why we are supporting the Colombian military. The British oil firm BP controls half of Columbia's petrol output. The historian Mark Curtis argues the UK is keen to ensure resources "remain in the correct hands" – that is, "our" hands. In a highly unequal country angry at seeing its resources siphoned off by foreigners, that means supporting an elite who are willing to keep the majority in their place.
These three factors can help us to understand why the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have gone so wrong. As in Colombia, we got in, in large part, out of loyalty to the US. As in Colombia, we are inflicting the "war on drugs" on Afghanistan. If we turned up in any country and announced that we were there to destroy 40 per cent of their economy, the people would fight back. This is why we are losing southern Afghanistan even to the hated Taliban.
And as in Colombia, the US-UK Coalition has misgoverned Iraq so catastrophically because it has been primarily driven by a desire to ensure that control of the country's resources went to the Right People. The protection of the Oil Ministry, while Baghdad's museums and hospitals and universities were looted and burned all around it, is only the most bleak symbol of this.
The image of Kim Howells squatting with a unit who are alleged to have tortured and butchered trade unionists can be seen as a Rosetta Stone for the dark side of our foreign policy. It is a reminder that, if we want to turn Britain into a force for human rights in the world, we have to campaign long and hard to turn much of it around. If we don't, it will end with more women like Rosa Maria Zapata, clutching her dead disabled son and asking why.
j.hari@independent.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/colombia
http://johnmcdsunionblog.blogspot.com/2008...s-disgrace.html
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On the publication of the The Warren Commission Report Stone led the attack on those people like Bertrand Russell, Thomas G. Buchanan, Joachim Joesten, Mark Lane and Carl Marzani, who had proposed that there had been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Stone wrote...
To which M.S. Arnoni, publisher and editor of The Minority of One, and then a reader of TMO, replied:
M.S. Arnoni, “A Commentator Fights a Reporter,” The Minority of One, November 1964 (Vol. VI, 11 [60]), p.5:
I.F. Stone, who puts out I.F. Stones’s Weekly, is Washington’s most honest reporter. But I.F. Stone, the reporter, is often at odds with I.F. Stone, the commentator, the latter possessing a distinct dislike of the former. The source of the conflict is the fact that the reporter keeps embarrassing the commentator, frequently digging up facts which no one but leftist dissenters want to hear anything about. That’s why the commentator about once a year comes up with something spectacular to restore the reporter’s good political graces with a few remaining lunch-time friends in various government offices.Last year, an opportunity was provided by a New York rally of students who had just returned from a trip to Cuba, unauthorized by the State Department. Mr. Stone promised to address the rally, but when next its organizers heard from him it was the good offices of the daily press to which he sent a cancellation of engagement plus a renunciation of his would-be hosts as “out-of-this-world-leftists.”
It is obviously time to place this year’s sacrificial lamb on Stone’s personal altar of an imaginary shred of respectability. The sacrifice-bearer ostentatiously announces the high cost of this choicest of lambs: Let it be known that I pay my gods dearly, that I put at their feet not just anybody, but “my dear and revered friend, Bertrand Russell.” And to impress the anti-Russell veterans who might not think too much of this-Johnny-come-lately act, the penitent Mr. Stone offers oozing and cloying derision of the American left, which, in a new application of the Equal Guilt Doctrine, is equated with the HUAC, the Eastland Committee and the late Joe from Wisconsin.
Since Stone too sets a limit on thoughts which may be considered about America, anyone who, unlike himself, does not accept the Warren Commission’s Report “as conclusive” need not be debated; that man’s facts, charges, thoughts, suspicions, considerations are “dishonourable” and he is himself “either unscrupulous or sick.” Indeed, the very Mr. Stone who spends half of his professional life on perfectly legitimate conjecture, speculation and deduction, believes any and all conjecture pertaining to The Assassination to be a virtual crime.
Having duly delivered his sacrifice and having also thrown in a few smaller lambs to boot, it is now time to bow to the priests of the temple. Thus, pious Mr. Stone comes to the defense of Senator Russell of Georgia and Congressman Boggs of Louisiana as “highly respected” men, whose racist views have nothing “to do with their probity.” Of the other members of the Warren Commission, John J. McCloy is purified through the reliable process of having been Stone’s acquaintance, and Allen W. Dulles emerges as a man so remote from the faintest suggestion of intrigue that it is inconceivable that he would ever conspire against anyone and anything, particularly “with the secret service.” The crescendo of his hymn is reached when Mr. Stone laughs off any suggestion that such organizations as the FBI, the CIA and the Secret Service would ever conspire to keep something secret. (Does Congress pay them for much else?)
Like many sacrificial rituals, Mr. Stone’s too has certain unmentionables. Therefore his quotes from Lord Russell’s “16 Questions on the Assassination” (Sept. TMO) are orphaned as far as source is concerned. Which is understandable, if one considers that Mr. Stone’s October 5th newsletter was his annual petition for political respectability.
No doubt, about one year from now commentator Stone will again try to exculpate reporter Stone by carrying another sacrifice to the gates of Washington’s official residences. It is all because commentator Stone is terribly afraid of reporter Stone; he is also very inferior t him in intelligence, integrity and perceptiveness.
Harry E. Beller, M.D., “From Readers’ Letters: Stone’s Days of Atonement,” The Minority of One, December 1964, (Vol. VI, 12 [61]), p.43:
Your shrewd dissection of I.F. Stones, the reporter, and I.F. Stone, the commentator, in the November 1964 issue deserves commendation and confirmation.I have regularly subscribed to Stone’s weekly, but just as ritualistically as Mr. Stone exhibits his “Al Chait Shechatanu [‘For the sins we have committed…,’a prayer on the Jewish High Holidays – Ed.] at least once a year, I have written him about his Day of Atonement.
I also subscribe to The Nation and have read and studied Professor Herbert L. Packer’s article on “The Warren Report” in the November 2nd issue. Both Stone and Packer, with their egos showing, use a discrediting technique. In effect they say, “We have studied this report, it is objective and reasonable. This who do not accept this gestational effort are personally or politically myopic.” Such predetermined conclusion dares one to read the report, for it is a covert threat challenging one to arrive at a dissenting opinion. With such disdain – book burning is not needed!
I shall continue to read Stone’s lucid, frequently revelatory Washington tidbits shunned by the daily press, and The Nation’s cleverly calmative analyses. For courage, decision, action I must pay homage to the likes and heirs of such as the Freedom Marchers.
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Witness number 34, p.256, in Josiah Thompson’s exceptionally reliable Master List of assassination witnesses is one James N. Crawford. Here’s Thompson’s summary of his details in the familiar format...
Thompson did not treat all inconvenient eyewitness testimony quite as crassly as that of James N. Crawford for the very good reason that he did not need to. Much of the work had been done for him long before, by fear, the desire to conform, and, in no small measure, the FBI. The latter’s lack of curiosity, to put it no stronger, in the face of some very interesting testimony, remains a thing of wonder.
Railway worker George A. Davis, witness number 37, p.257, in Thompson’s impeccable Master List of Assassination Witnesses illustrates both of these points. Here’s Thompson’s summary of Davis’ details in the usual format:
Location: RR overpass
No. of shots: ---
Bunching of shots: ---
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Total time of shots: ---
Date of report: 3/18/64
References: 22H837
Remarks: Sounded unlike rifle fire; shots were very close together
This was comparatively subtle stuff. Nothing outright dishonest, you understand, but not quite the full story. The giveaway is in the mislocation of the second observation in the “Remarks” column – “shots were very close together” – which should, by rights, have been placed under the column heading “Bunching of shots.” In shifting this observation into the wrong column, Thompson used up space that should properly have been afforded a more fitting and interesting observation made by Davis. The observation in question is in bold below.
The pith of Davis’ statement, as given to FBI SAs Thomas T Trettis & E J Robertson on 17 March 1964:
“Mr Davis stated that he was a signalman for the Union Terminal Company…and was so employed on November 22, 1963. On this date, he took up a position on the Elm Street viaduct overlooking the route taken by the Presidential motorcade. Shortly after the motorcycle escort and the Presidential car came into view and was at a point just east of the viaduct, Mr Davis head a sound which he described as similar to firecrackers exploding. He stated they did not sound like rifle fire because they were not loud enough. All shots were very close together and he stated it was impossible for him to determine the number of shots. He stated that his first impression was that someone had played a prank, but then he saw guns in the hands of the Secret Service Agents with President Kennedy, saw President Kennedy slump forward, and the police motorcycle escort maneuver swiftly about the area and he realised it was not a prank.Mr Davis stated that his attention was directed to the motorcycle escort and the car in which President Kennedy was riding, and he saw very little, if any, other activity in the area at that time…”
Did Davis really have the sequence in that order – first “guns in the hands of the Secret Service Agents with President Kennedy…” only then did he “slump forward” – or was that an FBI mistake?
In the absence of greater clarity, an honest summary would thus resemble this:
Location: North end of RR overpass
No. of shots: ---
Bunching of shots: Very close together
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Total time of shots: ---
Date of report: 3/18/64
References: 22H837
Remarks: Sounded unlike rifle fire; saw guns in the hands of Secret Service agents accompanying President
The second observation leads me to one of my own. The great film schism between pro- and anti-alterationists all too often obscures a related and equally profound division – between those who see Secret Service complicity as a given, and those who don’t. Thompson didn’t and still doesn’t; and has lots of films to prove it.
Paul
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You’ve been at this now for almost a week and your batting average is pretty low. You have discovered precisely two typos in a chart of witnesses that stretches over 17 pages and one of those typos was harmless because the witness was correctly quoted in the text. I said earlier that you had produced a mouse. That mouse is shrinking. So is my patience.
Meet yet another king-size rodent: Your attempt to claim James N. Crawford as a "KNOLL" witness. Enjoy!
Witness number 34, p.256, in Josiah Thompson’s exceptionally reliable Master List of assassination witnesses is one James N. Crawford. Here’s Thompson’s summary of his details in the familiar format:
Location: Corner, Elm/Houston
No. of shots: 3
Bunching of shots: 2 & 3
Direction of sound/shots: KNOLL: “From down the hill”
Total time of shots: ---
Date of report: 1/10/64; 4/1/64
References: Archives, CD 329, p.22; 6H171-174
Remarks: ---
This couldn’t be clearer, and was presumably intended to convince by the ever-so subtle deployment of capital letters: Crawford insisted the shots came from the “KNOLL.”
One very minor problem: Crawford didn’t, in either of the sources cited, have a word to say about the “KNOLL.” Here’s the proof:
Source 1:
The title of the first source, “Commission Document 329 – FBI Gemberling Report of 22 January 1964, re: Oswald/Russia/Cuba,” is, it should be noted, something of a misnomer. In fact, the document is dominated by an appended list entitled “Additional Assassination Witnesses,” among them, Crawford. The first part of his statement of Jan 1964 runs as follows:
“James N. Crawford, Deputy District Court Clerk, Dallas County District Court Clerk’s Office, Records Building, advised that approximately three minutes before the presidential parade approached the intersection of Elm and Houston Streets near the Texas School Book Depository, Mr Crawford along with a fellow employee, Mary Ann Mitchell, left the Dallas County District Court Clerk’s Office and went to the southeast corner of Elm and Houston Streets to await the approach of the presidential motorcade. As soon as he reached the southeast corner of Elm and Houston, Mr Crawford noted that the presidential motorcade was just rounding the corner at Houston and Main Street. Mr Crawford watched the President pass in the Presidential limousine turning west onto Elm Street toward the Elm Street Triple Underpass. Mr Crawford estimated that approximately four or five automobiles including the Presidential automobile, of the Presidential motorcade had turned down Elm when Mr Crawford heard the backfiring of an automobile. Mr Crawford believed these sounds came from one of the cars in the front of the Presidential motorcade which was approaching the Triple Underpass. Upon further evaluation of the sounds Crawford thought that the sounds might be fireworks. He looked around for signs of smoke.Mr Crawford stated that to his best recollection there was a definite pause of as much as 15 to 20 seconds between the first and the second sound, and the second and third sounds came very close together…
Oh dear: No “KNOLL”!
Source 2:
Now to the second of Thompson’s sources for Crawford as “KNOLL” exponent. There’s a bottle of champagne to anyone who can locate the word, or, indeed, find the merest hint of the “KNOLL,” from anything offered by Crawford before the Warren Commission three months later:
“The testimony of James N. Crawford was taken at 11:15 a.m., on April 1, 1964, in the office of the U.S. attorney, 301 Post Office Building, Bryan and Ervay Streets, Dallas, Tex., by Mr. Joseph A. Ball, assistant counsel of the President's Commission.”
http://www.jfk-assassination.com/warren/wch/vol6/page171.php
Mr. Ball: Did you see the President's car pass?Mr. Crawford: I did.
Mr. Ball: And just tell me in your own words what you observed after that?
Mr. Crawford: As I observed the parade, I believe there was a car leading the President's car, followed by the President's car and followed, I suppose, by the Vice President's car and, in turn, by the Secret Service in a yellow closed sedan. The doors of the sedan were open. It was after the Secret Service sedan had gone around the corner that I heard the first report and at that time I thought it was a backfire of a car but,in analyzing the situation, it could not have been a backfire of a car because it would have had to have been the President's car or some car in the cavalcade there. The second shot followed some seconds, a little time elapsed after the first one, and followed very quickly by the third one. I could not see the President's car---
Mr. Ball: At that time?
Mr. Crawford: That's right; I couldn't even see the Secret Service car, at least I wasn't looking for it. As the report from the third shot sounded, I looked up. I had previously looked around to see if there was somebody shooting firecrackers to see if I could see a puff of smoke, and after I decided it wasn't a backfire from an automobile and as the third report was sounded, I looked up and from the far east corner of the sixth floor I saw a movement in the only window that was open on that floor. It was an indistinct movement. It was just barely a glimpse.
Mr. Ball: Which window?
Mr. Crawford: That would be the far east window---
Mr. Ball: On the---
Mr. Crawford: On the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. I turned to Miss Mitchell and made the statement that if those were shots they came from that window. That was based mainly on the fact of the quick movement observed in the window right at the conclusion of the report.
Mr. Ball:[/b Could you give me any better description than just a movement? Could you use any other words to describe what you saw by way of color or size of what you saw moving?
Mr. Crawford: If I were asked to describe it, I would say that it was a profile, somewhat from the waist up, but it was a very quick movement and rather indistinct and it was very light colored. It was either light colored or it was reflection from the sun. When the gun was found, or when a gun was found, I asked the question if it was white, simply because if it was a gun I saw, then it was either white or it was reflecting the sun so it would appear white or light colored.
Mr. Ball: Did you see any boxes in that window?
Mr. Crawford: Yes, directly behind the window, oh possibly three feet or less, there were boxes stacked up behind the window and I believe it was the only place in the building that I observed where boxes were stacked just like that.
Mr. Ball: Did you see any boxes in the window?
Mr. Crawford: No, I didn't see any. There wasn't any boxes in the window.
Mr. Ball: Did you stay there at that point very long, the southeast corner?
Mr. Crawford: No; as I said, I couldn't observe the President's car and I had no actual knowledge that he had been shot, so realizing that we should get the information almost immediately from the radio which had been covering the motorcade--we had been listening to it prior to going on the street--I thought our best information would come from that, so we went, Miss Mitchell and I, went back into the office. I have no way of knowing the time. I would say it was a minute or---I would say a minute.
Mr. Ball:After you heard the shots, did you return to the office?
Mr. Crawford: Yes.
Mr. Ball:The movement that you saw that you describe as something light and perhaps a profile from the waist up, you mean it looked like a profile of a person?
Mr. Crawford: That was-I had a hard time describing that. When I saw it, I automatically in my mind came to the conclusion that it was a person having moved out of the window. Now, to say that it was a brown haired, light skinned individual, I could not do that.
Mr. Ball:Could you tell whether it was a man or woman?
Mr. Crawford: I could not.
Mr. Ball:You made a report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the 10th of January?
Mr. Crawford: Yes.
Mr. Ball:Before I ask you about your report, did you have any impression as to the source of the sound, from what direction the sound came, the sound of the explosions?
Mr. Crawford:. Yes; I do. As I mentioned before, the sound, I thought it was a backfire in the cavalcade from down the hill, down the hill toward the underpass.
Mr. Ball:You mean west on Elm ?
Mr. Crawford: Yes, and that was a little confusing and in analyzing it later, evidently the report that I heard, and probably a lot of other people, the officers or the FBI, it evidently was a sound that was reflected by the underpass and therefore came back. It did not sound to me, ever, as I remember, the high-powered rifle sounding. It was not the sharp crack.
Mr. Ball:What caused you to look up at the Texas School Book Depository Building?
Mr. Crawford: The sound had to be coming from somewhere; the noise was being made at some place, so I didn't see anyone shooting firecrackers or anything else and I thought "this idiot surely shouldn't do such a thing," but if they were, where were they, and if they were shots, where were they coming from, and that caused me to search the whole area on Houston Street and in front of the Texas Depository on Elm Street and then up and that's how I happened to be looking up at the time, rather than observing things in the street, probably.
Mr. Ball:Did you ever see any smoke?
Mr. Crawford: No, sir; I did not.
Mr. Ball:In your remark to Mary Ann Mitchell, did you say "if those were shots, they came from that window"?
Mr. Crawford: Yes.
Mr. Ball:That is what you reported to the FBI agent, also?
Mr. Crawford: Yes, I suppose; at that time, I was still not absolutely sure that they were shots and that's why I said if they were shots. I was basing that, I am sure I was basing that mainly on the fact of this quick movement that I observed. In other words, if I were firing the shots, I would have jumped back immediately at the conclusion of them.
Mr. Ball:Later on, did you go back in the street and talk to someone?
Mr. Crawford: Yes.
Mr. Ball:Did you talk to a deputy sheriff?
Mr. Crawford: Allen Swett.
Mr. Ball:What did you tell him?
Mr. Crawford: I told him to have the men search the boxes directly behind this window that was open on the sixth floor-the window in the far east corner.
Mr. Ball:Did you tell him anything of what you had seen?
Mr. Crawford: I don't think so. I think I was so amazed that I could walk across the street and walk up to this building that was supposedly under surveillance and the man had not been---I say "the man"---there had not been anyone apprehended.
Mr. Ball:How long was it after you heard the shots that you walked up to Allen Swett and talked to him?
Mr. Crawford: My guess is it could have been anywhere from 10-20 minutes. My guess would be around 15-20 minutes.
Mr. Ball:In the statement you made to the FBI agent, he reports you said you walked to the Texas School Book Depository where you contacted Deputy Sheriff Allen Swett and advised him of the movement you had seen in the sixth floor window?
Mr. Crawford: I must have said something about the movement. I did tell him to search those windows, I think.
Mr. Ball:Could you in your own words give us your memory of what you told Allen Swett?
Mr. Crawford: I would probably have said, as I remember it, that to have the men search--have someone search the boxes directly behind that window. I had seen some movement directly after the shots. That was, I think, all I said. I did not-there was no conversation and at the conclusion of my statement, he directed several men up there.
Mr. Ball:Did you ever go in the building yourself?
Mr. Crawford: I did not and I still have not been in there.
Mr. Ball:I think that's all, Mr. Crawford. Thanks very much.
Mr. Crawford: Thank you, Mr. Ball.
Mr. Ball:Incidentally, will you waive signature on this?
Mr. Crawford: Yes; I will.
Crawford’s initial response, then, was that the sounds had emanated from a vehicle at the head of the motorcade. He dismissed the notion because it was unthinkable to him that the Secret Service could be involved. He then looked around and his eye was caught by movement of what seemed to him a human figure at a sixth floor window of the TSBD.
And the “KNOLL”? Pure, 100% Thompsonian invention. But then, what's new?
Paul
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So much for Thompson’s summaries. In fact, the Franzens were on the south curb of Elm; and their accounts more interesting than Thompson would have his readers discover by reading them for themselves.
OK, while we’re on the subject of the Franzens, and Mr T’s apology for mislocating both parents and son – don’t forget the son: three mislocations for the price of one, now that’s what I call value for the reader’s money - on the wrong side of Elm, let’s jump a category in the thread, and move, for the moment, to the third category of my planned series...
3) Censored and misleading summaries of eyewitness testimony in Six Seconds in Dallas
“Underneath everything, I’d become weary of deception. I wanted to be done with it. But then I hadn’t dealt with my predilection for the dramatic, nor had I acknowledged the price of candor,”Josiah Thompson. Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye (London: Pan Books Ltd, 1988), p.75.
When is a Boone not a boon to a proponent of Z film authenticity?
Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone, witness 13 in Thompson’s “Master List of Assassination Witnesses,” Six Seconds in Dallas (Bernard Geis, 1967), p.255:
Location: Sheriff’s Office, Main St.
No. of shots: 3
Bunching of shots: 2 & 3
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Total time of shots: ---
Date of report: 3/25/64
References: 3H291-295
Remarks: ---
The testimony from Boone our intrepid truth-seeker would have us confine our attention begins here:
http://www.jfk-assassination.com/warren/wch/vol3/page291.php
Boone:“Some of the bystanders over there seemed to think the shots came from up over the railroad in the freight yards, from over the triple underpass,” 3H292
So Boone, on 25 March 1964, failed to express an opinion of his own as to the origins of the shots when testifying before the Presidential Commission. Thompson, it would appear, was telling the truth.
Or was he?
The problem is, of course, that Thompson omitted to mention that Boone had contributed three pages to what became Decker Exhibit No. 5323. ‘Supplementary Investigation Report [dated Nov. 22, 1963],’ within Dallas County Sheriff’s Office record…,’ as published in Hearings, v. 19. Here we find that Boone did have an opinion of his own, at least he did on 22 November 1963, before the indications of unnamed witnesses, who, as we have seen, suggested to him that the shots had come from the freight yards or the overpass:
"…I heard three shots coming [sic] from the vicinity of where the President's car was…,” 19H508.
Thus between 22 November 1963, and 25 March 1964, Boone had divested himself of his initial impression and purged himself of heresy. Sensible man.
In his major statement of 22 November, Boone reported that he had encountered, upon reaching Elm Street, a named witness, H. W. Betzner, who had taken “three pictures” - all of which Boone had retained and handed to “Officer Reynolds to be placed with Betzner’s statement”– “just seconds prior to the rifle shots” (19H508). Here’s Thompson’s Table summary of Betzner’s testimony:
Location: Elm St., S. side, short distance down from corner
No. of shots: “at least” 2
Bunching of shots: ---
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Total time of shots: ---
Date of report: 11/22/63
References: 19H467
Remarks: ---
Upon inspection, we find that on p.467 of volume 19, Betzner failed to express an opinion as to the origin of the shots in a manner remarkably similar to Mr and Mrs Franzen (see earlier posting in this thread). Nor can it be seriously argued that the same statement contains any observations sufficiently arresting to merit inclusion in Thompson’s table:
“I heard at least two shots fired and I saw what looked like a firecracker going off in the President’s car. My assumption for this was because I saw fragments going up in the air. I also saw a man in either the President’s car or in the car behind his and someone down in one of those cars pulled out what looked like a rifle. I also remember seeing what looked like a nickel revolver in someone’s hand in the President’s car or somewhere immediately around his car…I walked down toward where the President’s car had stopped. I saw a Police Officer and some men in plain clothes. I don’t know who they were. These Police Officers and the men in plain clothes were digging around in the dirt as if they were looking for a bullet.”An explosion inside the presidential limo; SS men, in the presidential limo and/or the follow-up car, drawing a rifle and a handgun; the presidential limo stopping by the south curb of Elm, where policeman and plain clothes men subsequently searched for a bullet…
Nah, I can’t see anything among that little lot worthy of inclusion in the column entitled “Remarks,” can you?
Paul
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In short, these fictional accounts may well be influencial, and informative; but are they informing for action. Is it possible that this type of genre-twister is only preserving the master narrative of Corporate Hegemony .... I mean the NYT?
Excellent post. And the answer to your question? Yes.
Paul
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So, Paul, I gather Josiah's making a few mistakes, while collating what was at that time hard to come by information for the public, offends you on some deep personal level?
A few random mistakes, Pat? How many misrepresented, omitted and/or mislocated witnesses do you need? Isolated mistakes occur, no question, and no one is to be hung for them. But clear patterns? Sorry, your defence just doesn't convince. Thompson, incidentally, savages William Manchester in Six Seconds for just one.
Then there is a broader issue. Thompson played a not insignificant role in constructing the dominant assassination paradigm, a model which continues to hold considerable sway to this day. If the foundations of this construct can be demonstrated to be rotten, as they have been, good things may yet follow.
This whole thread reminds me of Ashton Gray's attacks on Douglas Caddy. Hmmm, let's find someone with an actual hand in the history of which we write, find a few errors or inconsistencies in his writings and/or statements, and BLOW IT ALL UP to imply he's part of some vast conspiracy to deny us bench-sitters the God's honest truth. (Which is what? That the Zapruder film is fake, and that Josiah, alone among his contemporaries KNEW it was fake in 1967, and was trying to hide this from who exactly? Lifton? Groden?)There are too many for them to be accidental. End of. Did Thompson know the Z film version circa 1967 was a fake? I can't construct any alternative explanation that works better. In order to cover something up, after all, you have to have a pretty good idea what the truth is.
IMO, this kind of attack hurts the forum like no other.Oh, I don't mind - attack away. I'll survive. So, too, will the forum.
While John has tried heroically to bring authors, researchers and historians together, to take a fresh look at the evidence, and to try to find some sort of consensus, his efforts have been undermined by people nit-picking the more famous of our forum members into non-participation.So we give a free pass to any old nonsense as long as the figure responsible is famous? This isn't Hollywood; and genuine debate, as opposed to the sanitised simulacrum which passes for political discourse in the Anglosphere, is messy, intermittently nasty, occasionally uplifting etc.
I also observe that when all is said and done, criticism is nit-picking. If you want a one-party state, stick to the Lancer forum.
And why your silence when others of a very different opinion to you are attacked on much less rational grounds? The truth is you're engaged in special pleading, not defending a generalised moral position.
In short, I feel that pointing out that Josiah is human and made a number of mistakes in his book is fair game, particularly as we regularly criticize men like Posner, Bugliosi, and Baden for similar mistakes. But to color his mistakes as evidence of his misogyny, or evidence that he deliberately skewed a handful of the thousands of facts in his book supporting there was a conspiracy, so that people would conclude there was no conspiracy, is unfair, and, frankly, a bit bizarre.What really surprised me, rereading Gumshoe, was how consistent his attitude to women was. I can understand your desire to keep class and gender out of the discussion: You are, after all, a right-wing American male. So is he.
Paul
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Chapter Two – Neutral Hostility
Like most political utterances, the radio broadcast was ‘a blow on the dog whistle’ that could only be properly understood by a select few. Churchill’s target was the Anglo Irish - that vestigial imperial elite that had steered ‘the Dublin Government so much at variance…’ on its neutral course throughout the war. His (undeclared) wartime strategy to persuade De Valera’s administration to change tack - the prising away of Gael political functionaries from their Anglo overlords by blandishment (reunification) and threat (allied invasion) – had been consistently thwarted by unseen, immovable hands on the tiller of the Irish ship of state.
During ‘The Emergency’ ‘The Trinity Men’ had had in their grasp all the levers of power in the Republic. They had received their instructions from their Whitehall handlers via G-2, MI5’s sister service in Eire. At the faintest whiff of co-operation with the Allies, the Anglo’s had cowed the majority but politically impotent Gaels with hints of possible IRA (G-2’s ‘unofficial’ paramilitary wing) and Nazi operations in the 26 counties (‘Plan Kathleen’ a barely credible joint IRA/Nazi invasion of The North from the South is perhaps the best known of such operations – others go by the name of Lobster, Seagull, Whale, Dove, Osprey, Sea Eagle, Mainau, Innkeeper).
Fascinating. More, please.
Paul
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Theme the second: Mislocation of witnesses…
The PI who wasn't gallant...
“Reynold’s girlfriend…had described it to us…but her memory of the house and the rather solid post-Victorian structure partway down the lane didn’t match…Back in San Francisco, Sheila had described a house that was vaguely Colonial. This couldn’t be it. But it must be, for beyond it was the vacant lot and then the dark-brown, shingled guesthouse with the green shutters,”
Josiah Thompson. Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye (London: Pan Books Ltd, 1988), p.79.
Mrs Hester was not the only adult female on Elm to be dismissed by Thompson as a directionally-challenged amnesiac. Not content with refusing to credit her statement, he repeated the trick with no less than seven others. His serial contempt for the reliability of female eyewitness was presumably born of the highest motive – a Yale secret society member’s patriotic zeal or somesuch, one feels sure – and not something as everyday and tacky as misogyny.
Three of the women in question shared something important in common with Mrs Hester: They stated to the FBI that they had stood, as a group, on the south side of Elm St, approximately fifty yards along its length toward the underpass, during the shooting. None were to be seen on the second public version of the Zapruder film, obliging Thompson to exclude them from his main table of witnesses in Six Seconds, and dump them instead into its dustbin appendage, “Other witnesses Mentioned in Government Reports” (p.271). This was a bare list of unallocated witnesses, and the print source for their names, with no observations, or statements of location, permitted.
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.”
“I left the Depository building and walked down toward the Stemmons expressway underpass west of the building approximately fifty yards and took up a position on the curb on the south side of Elm Street to await the presidential procession. I was accompanied by Sharon Simmons, now Mrs Nelson, and Stella Jacob…I was still standing on the curb at the time the president was shot.” 22H652Stella 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.”
“I left the Depository building and walked down toward the Stemmons expressway underpass west of the building approximately fifty yards and took up a position on the curb on the south side of Elm Street...I was accompanied by Sharon Simmons, now Mrs Nelson, and Jeanne Holt…I was still standing on the curb at the time President John F. Kennedy was shot,” 22H655.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.
“At the time President Kennedy was shot I was standing on the sidewalk on Elm Street midway between the Texas School Book Depository Building and the underpass on Elm Street. I was with Jeannie Holt…and Stella Jacob…,” 22H665.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:
.“I ran around the corner and came across Houston Street to Elm Street to the Park. I saw some people there. I began to talk to them getting names and information. I talked to the following named people: 1) Simmons, 2) Holt, 3) Jacobs. See statements taken from all three named people,” 19H526-7Thompson was uninterested in the whereabouts of the statements taken by Lewis from Simmons, Holt and Jacobs. This was only to be expected.
“Sheila had said the can was square and that she’d left it unburied alongside the trunk of the first bush. Nothing. Had she been mistaken? Had they found it? Anyone who looked could have found it easily. But had anyone looked? That, I reminded myself was why I was here. The second bush also held nothing. And the third. And the fourth, fifth, and sixth. ‘They must have found it,” I told myself. ‘Sheila couldn’t be this far off.’But she had been. Under the eighth bush, well down into the middle of the yard, my hand brushed something metallic,”
Josiah Thompson. Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye (London: Pan Books Ltd, 1988), p.83.
Holt, Jacob and Simmons all worked within the TSBD. So, too, did four other women to fall foul of Thompson’s apparent contempt for female testimony.
According to their statements to the FBI, at about 11.30 a.m. on 22 November 1963, Karen Westbrook, Karan Hicks, Gloria Calvary and Carol Reed left the TSBD to view the presidential motorcade close-up. All four, as a group, occupied a position on the north curb of Elm approximately half way between Houston St and the underpass. Thompson’s main witness table, however, only included three of the four; and he directly reversed a crucial observation of one of these three. The fourth member of the group, Carol Reed, was consigned to the aforementioned dustbin, “Other witnesses Mentioned in Government Reports,” along with the three south Elmers, Simmons, Holt and Jacob.
The three women included in Thompson’s main table were Westbrook, Hicks and Calvary. Thompson, in the table column entitled “Remarks,” accurately summarised their shared belief that they heard the first “explosion” when the presidential limo “was almost directly in front” of them. Not so Calvery’s. Her “The car he was in was almost directly in front of me where I was standing when I heard the first shot” mysteriously became, in Thompson’s summary, “JFK directly in front of her on last shot.”
The statements of the four, together with Thompson’s witness table summaries, as contained within the column entitled, “Direction of Sound/Shots,” to follow:
Karen Westbrook, statement to FBI SA Alfred D. Neeley, 19 March 1964:
“I was with Mrs Gloria Calvery...Mrs Carol Reed...and Mrs Karan Hicks. We walked to Elm Street and stopped at a point on the north edge of Elm Street about halfway between Houston Street and the Triple Underpass. We were standing at this point when President John F. Kennedy was shot. The car he was in was almost directly in front of where I was standing when I heard the first explosion,” 22H679Westbrook, witness 159 in Thompson’s table: “Car ‘almost directly in front of where I was standing when I heard the first explosion,’” (p.267).
Karan Hicks, statement to FBI SA Alfred D. Neeley, 20 March 1964:
“On November 22, 1963 I left my office about 11:30 AM to see the Presidential Motorcade which was to pass along Elm Street in front of the building. I was with Mrs Gloria Calvery…Mrs Carol Reed …, and Miss Karen Westbrook…We walked to Elm Street and stopped at a point on the north edge of Elm Street about halfway between Houston Street and the Triple Underpass. We were standing at this point when President John F. Kennedy was shot. The car he was in was almost directly in front of where I was standing when I heard the first explosion,” 22H650/1Hicks was witness 67 in Thompson’s table:“1st shot, car directly in front of where she was standing,” (p.259).
Gloria Calvery, statement to FBI’s SA Alfred D. Neeley, 19 March 1964:
“On November 22, 1963 I left my office, South-Western Publishing Co, Room 203, Texas School Book Depository Building about 11:30 AM to see the Presidential Motorcade which was to pass along Elm Street in front of the building. I was with Mrs Carol Reed…Mrs Karan Hicks…, and Miss Karen Westbrook…We walked to Elm Street and stopped at a point on the north edge of Elm Street about halfway between Houston Street and the Triple Underpass. We were standing at this point when President John F. Kennedy was shot. The car he was in was almost directly in front of where I was standing when I heard the first explosion,” 22H638Calvery was witness 21 in Thompson’s table: “JFK directly in front of her on last shot,” (p.255).
Carol Reed, statement to FBI SA E.J. Robertson, 19 March 1964:
“At the time President Kennedy was shot I was standing on the curb of Elm Street about mid-way between the Texas School Book Depository Building and the Elm Street Railroad overpass. I was with Karan Hicks…, Miss Karen Westbrook…, and Mrs Gloria Calvery…at the time President Kennedy was shot,” 22H668.Reed, witness 244, was thrown unceremoniously into the unallocated witness dustbin, “Other witnesses Mentioned in Government Reports,” (p.271).
To summarise, then, we are now up to five of the closest female Elm St. eyewitnesses (Holt, Simmons, Jacob, Hester, and Reed) removed entirely or mislocated, and their testimonies either ignored and/or misrepresented; and an additional three (Westbrook, Hick, and Calvery) whose mutually reinforcing testimonies are similarly discounted. One shouldn’t need to be a feminist to find Thompson’s performance appalling, just an attentive reader with an honest keyboard. After all, how hard was it to plot honestly and with some precision the north curb eyewitnesses in particular?
”The third assassin, however, was in a very precarious position…His shot from the knoll had frightened the few people standing along the north curb of Elm Street,”
Josiah Thompson. Six Seconds in Dallas (Bernard Geis, 1967), p.193.
Paul
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Censored and misleading summaries of eyewitness testimony in Six Seconds in Dallas“How the hell can we use a witness who saw it happening a way it couldn’t have happened?”
Josiah Thompson. Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye (London: Pan Books Ltd, 1988), p.185.
Witness Austin Miller, witness 96, p.262:
Location: RR overpass
No. of shots: 3
Bunching of shots: 2 & 3
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Date of report: 11/22/63
Total time of shots: “few seconds”
References: 6H223-227; 19H485; 24H217; Archives CD 205, p.27
Remarks: Saw “smoke or steam” coming from a group of trees N. of Elm; saw shot hit street past car
Inspect the first testimony cited by Thompson and you find Miller not offering the following opinion on the origin of the shots on Elm St:
Mr. Belin: “Where did the shots sound like they came from?”Miller: “Well, the way it sounded like, it came from the, I would say right there in the car,”6WCH225
http://www.jfk-assassination.com/warren/wch/vol6/page225.php
Witness Royce Skelton, witness 137, p.265:
Location: RR overpass
No. of shots: 4
Bunching of shots: 1&2, then 3&4
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Date of report: 11/22/63; 12/18/63; 4/8/64
Total time of shots: ---
References: Archives CD 205, p.26; 6H236-238; 19H496
Remarks: “saw two shots or fragments hit the pavement”
Here is Royce Skelton failing to offer an opinion as to the origin of the shots:
Mr. Ball: Did you see the President's car turn on Elm Street?Mr. Skelton: Yes, sir; I saw the car carrying the Presidential flag turn.
Mr. Ball: And did you hear something soon after that?
Mr. Skelton: Just about the same time the car straightened up--got around the corner--I heard two shots, but I didn't know at that time they were shots.
Mr. Ball: Where did they seem to come from?
Mr. Skelton: Well, I couldn't tell then, they were still so far from where I was.
Mr. Ball: Did the shots sound like they came from where you were standing?
Mr. Skelton: No, sir; definitely not. It sounded like they were right there more or less like motorcycle backfire, but I thought that they were these dumbballs that they throw at the cement because I could see the smoke coming up off the cement.
Mr. Ball: You saw some smoke come off of the cement?
Mr. Skelton: Yes.
Mr. Ball: Where did it seem to you that the sound came from, what direction?
Mr. Skelton: Towards the President's car.
Mr. Ball: From the President's car?
Mr. Skelton: Right around the motorcycles and all that--I couldn't distinguish because it was too far away.
http://www.jfk-assassination.com/warren/wch/vol6/page237.php
The point is not whether we approve or disapprove of the verdicts offered by Miller and Skelton as to the origins of the shots, but the accuracy of Thompson’s summaries of their testimony. Yet again, he is found wanting.
Skelton’s brief statement in 19H496 contained another unwelcome observation that had to be hidden from the reader by Thompson. More on that in due course.
Paul
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In part 2 of this thrilling series, I examine the mislocation of witnesses in Thompson’s 1967 Six Seconds in Dallas.
Theme the second: Mislocation of witnesses…
Witness 66, p.259, in Thompson’s Six Seconds table is Mrs Charles Hester. Here is Thompson’s summary of her evidence in the, by now, familiar format:
Location: N. side of Elm St. on slope
No. of shots: 2
Bunching of shots: ---
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Date of report: 11/25/63
Total time of shots: ---
References: 24H523
Remarks: Thinks she and her husband were in the direct line of fire
Here is Mrs Hester’s full statement to the FBI, from the Hearings volume and page cited by Thompson, as made on 24 November 1963:
Mrs CHARLES HESTER, 2619 Keyhold Street, Irving, Texas, advised that sometime around 12:30 p.m., on November 22, 1963, she and her husband were standing along the street at a place immediately preceding the underpass on Elm Street, where President Kennedy was shot. Mrs HESTER advised she heard two loud noises which sounded like gunshots, and she saw President KENNEDY slump in the seat of the car he was riding in. Her husband grabbed then grabbed her and shoved her to the ground. Shortly thereafter they went across to the north side of the street on an embankment in an attempt to gain shelter. She stated that she believes she and her husband actually had been in the direct line of fire. She did not see anyone with a gun when the shots were fired and stated she could not furnish any information as to exactly where the shots came from. After the President’s car had pulled away from the scene, she and her husband proceeded to their car and left the area as she was very upset.”In other words, Thompson’s summary of Mrs Hester’s location and statement is “erroneous” in the extreme. An honest version would read:
Location: S. side of Elm St. close to underpass
No. of shots: 2
Bunching of shots: ---
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Date of report: 11/24/63
Total time of shots: ---
References: 24H523
Remarks: Accompanied by husband; thinks she and her husband were in the direct line of fire
Inevitably, in the case of this witness and her husband, there’s a lot more at stake than normal, for the Hesters feature on a pre-assassination Zapruder film sequence; and are central to an attempt to create an important post-assassination photographic verifier for the Zapruder-Sitzman presence on the concrete abutment. Read on.
Costella vindicated: Why Altgens didn’t remember the Hesters or his seventh photo
In John Costella’s “A Scientist’s Verdict: The Film is a Fabrication,” the second chapter of part II of The Great Zapruder Film Hoax: Deceit and deception in the death of JFK (Chicago: Catfeet Press, 2003), he devotes a section to the question of how many photographs AP’s James Altgens took of the motorcade, the assassination and its aftermath. The relevant extract runs as follows:
“But the second additional photograph (allegedly the seventh and last in the sequence overall) is even more problematical. This purports to show Abraham Zapruder and Marilyn Sitzman walking away from the ‘Zapruder pedestal,” with the Hesters crouched on the ground nearby. If genuine, it would be the clearest photographic evidence actually showing Abraham Zapruder in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination – albeit from behind.The problem with this additional photograph is that Altgens explicitly states what he did after taking this photo of Clint Hill on the back of the limousine: he crossed to the north side of Elm Street! Yet a detailed analysis reveals that this extra photograph was taken from the south side of Elm. Altgens also described in detail for Liebeler everything he observed after the assassination…Does he describe Zapruder and Sitzman, or the Hester couple crouched on the ground – a sight he apparently thought worthy enough to take a photograph of? Absolutely not…So where were Zapruder, Sitzman and the Hesters? Why don’t they rate a mention at all in the Altgens testimony?,” pp.204-205
The answers couldn’t be more straightforward: the Hesters weren’t there at the time Altgens crossed the road; and Altgens did not take the seventh photo attributed to him by Trask (1), Thompson (2) et al. The Hesters were instead, at best, en route; and someone else took the photo:
Mrs Charles Hester statement to the FBI, 24 November 1963, as recorded by J. Doyle Williams and Henry J. Oliver, 24H523:Mrs CHARLES HESTER, 2619 Keyhold Street, Irving, Texas, advised that sometime around 12:30 p.m., on November 22, 1963, she and her husband were standing along the street at a place immediately preceding the underpass on Elm Street, where President Kennedy was shot. Mrs HESTER advised she heard two loud noises which sounded like gunshots, and she saw President KENNEDY slump in the seat of the car he was riding in. Her husband grabbed then grabbed her and shoved her to the ground. Shortly thereafter they went across to the north side of the street on an embankment in an attempt to gain shelter. She stated that she believes she and her husband actually had been in the direct line of fire. She did not see anyone with a gun when the shots were fired and stated she could not furnish any information as to exactly where the shots came from. After the President’s car had pulled away from the scene, she and her husband proceeded to their car and left the area as she was very upset.”
Where are the Hesters on the Zapruder film, public version two? Why do we not see them on it when, according to Mrs Hester, at the time of the shooting, she and her husband were close to the underpass on the south side of Elm, allegedly facing Zapruder’s camera?
Notes(1) Richard B. Trask. Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the assassination of President Kennedy (Danvers, Ma: Yeoman Press, 1994), pp. 316-317: “With the presidential Lincoln disappearing into the underpass, Altgens made a picture of the activity across Elm Street showing amateur movie maker Abraham Zapruder and his secretary Marilyn Sitzman just after they had gotten down from the concrete wall from where he had filmed the assassination. In the middle of the frame are Mr and Mrs Charles Hester hunkered down in front of the colonnade area.”
(2) Josiah Thompson, Proof the Zapruder Film Is Authentic: “Marilyn then described how she and Abe got down off the pedestal, ran down the hill in front of the pedestal and then made their way back into the pergola structure. They were photographed there first by AP photographer James Altgens and then by Art Rickerby of Life magazine.”
http://home.earthlink.net/~joejd/jfk/zapho...pson-proof.html
Paul
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So much for Thompson’s summaries. In fact, the Franzens were on the south curb of Elm; and their accounts more interesting than Thompson would have his readers discover by reading them for themselves.
OK, while we’re on the subject of the Franzens, and Mr T’s apology for mislocating both parents and son – don’t forget the son: three mislocations for the price of one, now that’s what I call value for the reader’s money - on the wrong side of Elm, let’s jump a category in the thread, and move, for the moment, to the third category of my planned series:
Censored and misleading summaries of eyewitness testimony in Six Seconds in Dallas
For Thompson’s apology with respect to the Franzens to constitute meaningful contrition, it should have extended to his summaries of their testimony, for his mislocation was most definitely not his only “error” in his treatment of the family. First, a reminder of Thompson’s summaries of the parents’ statements:
Mrs. Franzen, witness 54, p.258:
Location: N. side of Elm
No. of shots: 3
Bunching of shots: ---
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Date of report: 11/25/63
Total time of shots: ---
References: 24H525
Remarks: After 1st shot, notice small fragments flying inside the car.
Mr. Franzen, witness 53, p.258:
Location: N. side of Elm
No. of shots: 3 or 4
Bunching of shots: ---
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Date of report: 11/24/63
Total time of shots: ---
References: Archives, CD 5, p.46; 22H840
Remarks: After 1st shot, notice small fragments flying inside the car.
Now for Mrs. Franzens’ testimony, edited for pith, from 24H525. She was interviewed on the day of the assassination by FBI men Ellington and Loeffler, who dictated their notes for transcription three days later, on November 25. Is Thompson’s summary remotely fair or adequate, even given its limitation of length?
“Shortly after the President’s automobile passed by…she heard a noise which sounded to her as if someone had thrown a firecracker into the President’s automobile…at approximately the same time she noticed dust or small pieces of debris flying from the President’s automobile…She advised she heard two other sounds which sounded like shots from a firearm and noticed blood appearing on the side of President Kennedy’s head.
She does not remember looking at the building housing the Texas School Book Depository…she observed police officers and plain-clothes men, whom she assumed were Secret Service Agents, searching an area adjacent to the TSBD Building, from which area she assumed the shots had come…
She advised her small son called her attention to the fact that some of the men in the automobile behind the President’s car were holding guns in their hands shortly after the shots…and stated she assumed these men were Secret Service Agents.”
It is perfectly clear that Mrs Franzen’s testimony was of no use to proponents of Zapruder film authenticity for at least three reasons:
1) The position of the Presidential limousine on Elm when the shooting began was too far down toward the underpass (“Shortly after the President’s automobile passed by…she heard a noise”);
2) The point of origin of that noise “which sounded as if someone had thrown a firecracker into the President’s automobile” (i.e. it originated within the presidential limousine);
3) More than one Secret Service agent in the follow-up car drew a weapon.
Thompson thus had, in composing Six Seconds in 1966/67, a direct, obvious interest in quashing, minimising or redirecting elsewhere reader interest in any and all testimony pointing to 1), 2), and 3) for no such actions and/or features featured in the revised Zapruder fake, the authenticity of which he was, unquestionably, selling.
Worse still, from the point of view of those determined to peddle the revised Z fake to the world, was Mrs Franzen’s husband’s testimony. It was offered to the same FBI duo, and on the same day, as his wife’s. And again, I’ve edited it for essence:
“He said he heard the sound of an explosion which appeared to him to come from the President's car and noticed small fragments flying inside the vehicle and immediately assumed someone had tossed a firecracker inside the automobile…He noticed men, who were presumed to be Secret Service agents, riding in the car directly behind the President’s car, unloading from the car, some with firearms in their hands, and noticed police officers and these plainclothesmen running up the grassy slope across Elm Street from his location – and toward a wooded and busy area located across the Elm Street from him…Because of this activity he presumed the shots…came from the shrubbery or bushes toward which these officers appeared to be running.”Touchingly, Franzen concluded:
Mr Franzen advised he is aware that the information which he has furnished may not be of any particular significance but advised in view of his close proximity to the President’s vehicle at the time of these shots…”Jack Franzen not merely confirmed his wife’s testimony concerning an explosion occurring inside the presidential limousine, but also described Secret Servicemen, some of them armed, leaving the follow-up vehicle, whereupon some of them ran up the knoll causing him to doubt his initial reaction as to the shot point of origin. An intellectually honest summary of the Franzens’ testimonies, therefore, would look something like this:
Mrs. Franzen:
Location: S. side of Elm, towards underpass
No. of shots: 3
Bunching of shots: ---
Origin of sound/shots: Initially, inside the car; revised to TSBD due to subsequent search activities of SS & uniformed police
Date of interview: 11/22/63
Total time of shots: ---
References: 24H525
Other salient observations: Shooting commenced after presidential limousine passed her; SS men in follow-up vehicle drew weapons (attrib. to son).
Mr. Franzen:
Location: S. side of Elm, towards underpass
No. of shots: 3 or 4
Bunching of shots: ---
Origin of sound/shots: Initially, inside the car; revised to knoll by subsequent search of SS and uniformed police
Date of report: 11/24/63
Total time of shots: ---
References: Archives, CD 5, p.46; 22H840
Other salient observations: Some SS men in follow-up vehicle, some of them armed, raced up knoll in immediate aftermath of shooting.
The Warren Commissioners never called the Franzens to testify, and the compilers of the Hearings volumes, as we have seen, split their largely congruent testimony, publishing hers in volume 24, and his in volume 22.
Incredibly, Thompson, that unprecedentedly attentive student of the film, and nominal opponent of the cover-up, was even more cavalier with their names (he misspelt the family surname with a “t” in his table), locations and testimony. He placed all three Franzens on the wrong side of Elm, which just happened to “lose” them in the more populous north side; then offered thoroughly misleading summaries of their testimonies; and, like the Warren Reports compilers, ignored their testimony in the main body of Six Seconds’ text.
This latter point is a profoundly significant one. The principle or principles of selection by which Thompson focused on the testimony of some eyewitnesses, while ignoring that emanating, in important cases, from the even better placed, are nowhere articulated and defended in Six Seconds, but can be inferred: If they matched the thesis advanced in his book, they were in. This will be become even clearer when we examine the extent to which the Franzens’ observations were corroborated by other witnesses and sources. They were anything but isolated or eccentric observers, as we shall see.
In Six Seconds, Thompson served as a classic establishment gate-keeper, masquerading as critic. He was not alone, of course.
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Mr. Rigby,
Thank you for your correction to the chart of witnesses at the end of Six Seconds. It is correct that Mr. and Mrs. Franzen were standing on the south side of Elm Street, not the north side.
A pleasure to have been of assistance. I fully intend to offer you more such opportunities.
Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake and not part of a dark plot.In isolation, perfectly plausible. But is it an isolated mistake?
And did you have something to say about the Chaney matter? Or did I misunderstand you?Only intentionally. But a little patience, Mr. Thompson, after all, your readers had to wait a mere 40+ years for you to get round to correcting the Franzens mistake.
Paul
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Paul - please tell this forum what Mack has told you directly in your efforts to find this article and why he has not taken the time to find it for you. I said a day or so ago that when I get time and back to the States - I'll find the article.
Bet you don't.
So what do you do - you post a new thread that is nothing more than someone blowing off as much as they can before any more can be done to show that you have been wrong all along. As Denis points out ... there are plenty of other articles that support what Gary has said.Mack's the ultimate source for Thompson, you, and all the others - if Mack can't substantiate his own claim, none of you can, and the claim should be withdrawn and an apology offered.
You have not posted anything detailing an exhaustive search.As is demonstrated in the recent thread on Muchmore and WNEW-TV, I've done more work on the subject than you or any your anti-alterationist chums. The fact that I've bothered is what irks you and Denis. Tough.
I had asked Mack if you have been corresponding with him in an effort to find the article and he said that he hadn't heard from you in over a year. Mack has read the article and cited various things to me from it that I cannot imagine him merely making it up. If you think that such an attempt as this to try and discredit Mack is somehow working, I can tell you that its not. It discredits you as far as your intentions as a true researcher IMO.Your opinion is perverse and illogical. Mack must either substantiate his claim or withdraw it. It couldn't be simpler, or more fair. He who asserts must prove. Mack can't.
I predict that in the end the article will be found and I hope that people will pay as much attention to your ridiculous modus-operandi than they do the article itself.You're the expert, Bill, on ridiculous MOs. You substitute blind faith and obedience for evidence and research.
Just the other day Mack said to me that he had been doing interviews the entire day for the Museum. I cannot recall the exact number that Gary did, 15 to 20 interviews and spent Friday afternoon and all day Saturday working with the Dallas Morning News on a recent story, while at the same time your arm-chair propaganda machine has been in full motion.Mack's been that busy for two years? Really?
Isn't it funny that you cannot sell not one of your outlandish claims to a tabloid and yet Josiah and Gary remain some of the most respected researchers on the JFK assassination.CIA owns the National Enquirer, Bill, not me. Though I am flattered, one-man band that I am, to be characterised as an "arm-chair propaganda machine." Jeesh, talk about paranoia.
Paul
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Paul with respect...
Denis, with respect, you intend none, so why employ the formulation?
...are you sure your not letting your animosity with Josiah Thompson and Gary Mack cloud your better judgement here?No, I'm just tired of reading a lot of inaccurate, unsourced nonsense masquerading as received wisdom. But I do wonder at the extent of your personal commitment to Thompson, and the concomitant hostility to Fetzer, Costella et al. Like, what gives?
It is a measure of the blindness induced in you by this hostility to the anti-alterationists that you fail to comment on Thompson's proven "errors" regarding how and when the FBI learned of the Muchmore film; his reliance on a Mack newspaper clipping that almost certainly doesn't exist; and his mislocation of the Franzens in Six Seconds.
Your "one-eyedness" is shocking. Are you a flat-earther?
There are literally hundreds of references and citations for the Muchmore film first being shown on WNEW TV on 26/Nov/63. To any reasonably minded person that amount of reference would stand as proof.List them. There aren't. And any reasonably minded person content to settle for "Thompson said Mack says" as proof of anything is a fool or a charlatan.
If there are hundreds of ref/citations for the Muchmore film, there are literally THOUSANDS for the Zapruder film first being shown on TV March 1975. Your suggestion that ALL these references are wrong and that it was the Zapruder film shown on WNEW is totally unreasonably. As is your demand that Gary Mack drop everything and search for a 45 year old newspaper clipping. This is starting to resemble a debate with a member of the Flat Earth Society! Your better than that Paul, give it up. Denis.That's a very compelling argument, Denis: The agreed lie must be true. It ain't.
Paul
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In part 2 of this thrilling series, I examine the mislocation of witnesses in Thompson’s 1967 Six Seconds in Dallas.
“We haven’t moved from illusion to truth. We haven’t seen Spade ‘crack the case.’ Rather, we’ve watched Spade participate in a series of events that break up the initial illusion only to replace it with another. There’s no truth anywhere in the story, only ambiguous half-truths, only a face seen darkly in the mirror, a figure disappearing round a corner,”
Josiah Thompson. Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye (London: Pan Books, 1988), p.113.
For advocates of a right frontal gunman, no less than the compilers of the Warren Report, unwelcome testimony is too often an enemy to be fought by any means necessary. In his 1967 book, Six Seconds in Dallas, Josiah Thompson ran the gamut. The omissions, distortions, and outright inversions he deployed were unusually easy to spot, however, thanks in no small measure to the very feature, Appendix A, which made his book so superficially impressive and persuasive. All page citations to follow are taken from the original hardback edition, published by Bernard Geis in late 1967.
Appendix A had two components. The first comprised a two-page “Dealey Plaza Chart: Location of Witnesses” (pp.252-253), which represented the first detailed attempt to plot who stood where, precisely the kind of basic detail the Warren Report should have, but did not, provide in readily accessible form. The second part was entitled “Master List of Assassination Witnesses.” Spread over eighteen pages (pp.254-271), it listed the eyewitnesses in alphabetical order by surname, assigning numbers to each of the witnesses in accord with that order. The table offered ten column headings, in addition to the number and witness name, as follows: “Location,” “No. of Shots,” “Bunching of Shots,” “Direction of Sound/Shots,” “Total time of Shots,” “Date of [Witness] Report,” “References,” and most salient “Remarks.” The format of the summary of each of the mis-located witnesses and their testimonies which follows was furnished by Michael Hogan, in the course of an exchange on the subject of Thompson’s veracity. I take this opportunity to state that Michael in no way shares my criticisms of Thompson.
The ostensible purpose of the Appendix A was to provide the reader with the most detailed and honest study yet of the witnesses, their locations, and observations (1). So much for the ostensible. Its real purpose was very different – to serve as an icebreaker for the soon-to-be-relaunched Zapruder dreadnought, together with its little flotilla of supporting filmlets. Any observation or witness held an impediment to the uncritical reception of the Zapruder film (public version 2) was given short shrift by Thompson, as we shall see.
First up, then, two among the closest to the shooting, Mr and Mrs Jack Franzen:
Mrs. Franzen, witness 54, p.258:
Location: N. side of Elm
No. of shots: 3
Bunching of shots: ---
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Date of report: 11/25/63
Total time of shots: ---
References: 24H525
Remarks: After 1st shot, notice small fragments flying inside the car.
Mr. Franzen, witness 53, p.258:
Location: N. side of Elm
No. of shots: 3 or 4
Bunching of shots: ---
Direction of sound/shots: ---
Date of report: 11/24/63
Total time of shots: ---
References: Archives, CD 5, p.46; 22H840
Remarks: After 1st shot, notice small fragments flying inside the car.
So much for Thompson’s summaries. In fact, the Franzens were on the south curb of Elm (2); and their accounts more interesting than Thompson would have his readers discover by reading them for themselves.
Notes:
(1) Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966), Appendix 1, pp.399- 402, produced a list of 266 names “present at the scene of the assassination who were known to the Commission,” plus “11 additional names…mentioned in newspaper dispatches on November 22 and 23, 1963.”
(2) Edward J. Epstein. Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth (NY: Viking Press, 1966), p.87: “Eight witnesses standing across the street from the knoll,” and proceeded to list them in the relevant note, 91, on p.213: Jean Hill, H. Betzner, J. Altgens, J. Tague, J. Franzen, M. Moorman, Mrs. Franzen, and C. Brehm.
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Time to bring together, on a single thread, the full, sorry tale.
Part 1: The Muchmore film
Thompson claims:
JFK Lancer: 2064, Why all the assassination films are authentic!Posted by Josiah Thompson, Wed Dec-31-69 06:00 PM
Wed Apr-30-03 08:37 AM
Richard Trask wrote about this in both his book, “Pictures of the Pain,” drawing on an earlier article by UPI’s Maurice Schonfeld in the “Columbia Journalism Review.” According to Trask, Marie Muchmore walked into the Dallas office of United Press International (UPI) and sold her film to them UNDEVELOPED for $1000 on Monday, November 25th. UPI immediately took it to Kodak for processing. UPI then shipped either the original 8mm film or a 16mm print to UPI's home office in New York City. Further research by Gary Mack, has shown that Muchmore's film first was shown in New York around midday Tuesday, November 26th on WNEW-TV.
The Truth:
Of course, further research has revealed nothing of the sort: Mack can’t substantiate his claim; and has singularly failed, after a mere two years-worth of opportunity, to find the newspaper report that is the alleged source for his certainty. For more on this topic, see the thread on this forum: Was Muchmore’s film shown on WNEW-TV, New York, on November 26, 1963? A cinematic shell game sketched
As for the timing of the film’s showing, here is the earliest newspaper clipping yet located on the subject:
Richard K. Doan, “Now the Task of Righting Upset Schedules,” New York Herald Tribune, 27 November 1963, section 1, p.21:“WNEW-TV (Channel 5) claimed it was the first TV station in the country to televise an amateur photographer’s film footage of President Kennedy’s assassination. The film was distributed by United Press International and aired by Channel 5 at 12:46 a.m. yesterday.”
Thompson claims:
Josiah Thompson, “Proof that the Zapruder Film is Authentic:“The FBI first learned of the Muchmore film, for example, when it was shown on the New York City station WNEW-TV just after midday on Tuesday, November 26th.”
http://home.earthlink.net/~joejd/jfk/zapho...pson-proof.html
The Truth:
5WCH140
Mr. Specter:How did you obtain a copy of that film?
Mr. Shaneyfelt:
Our first knowledge of this came as a result of a review of the book "Four Days" which covers the assassination period, in which representatives of the FBI noted a colored picture taken from a motion picture film that did not match either the Nix film or the Zapruder film.
Once we established that, then we investigated and learned that it was made by Mrs. Mary Muchmore, and was at that time in the possession of United Press International in New York, and made arrangements for them to furnish us with a copy of the Muchmore film. That is the copy that I used for examination.
In part 2 of this thrilling series, I examine the mislocation of witnesses in Thompson’s 1967 Six Seconds in Dallas.
Paul
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Paul, you appear to be taking a newspaper that is saying that using an amateur film, someone can reconstruct the progression of the limo. Please cite where someone specially said that they were viewing the Zapruder film and saw the limo making its turn from Houston onto Elm.
Thanks.
With pleasure, Bill:
Dan Rather, CBS Radio interview, 25 November 1963:
“I…have just returned from seeing a…a movie…the President’s open black automobile…made a turn, a left turn off of Houston Street in Dallas onto Elm Street…as the car completed the turn…,”Richard Trask. Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the assassination of President Kennedy (Danvers, Ma: Yeoman Press, 1994), pp.86-87.
Dan Rather, CBS Evening News interview, 25 November 1963:
“The films we saw were taken by an amateur photographer, who had a particularly good vantage point…The films show President Kennedy’s open, black limousine, making a left turn, off Houston Street on to Elm Street on the fringe of downtown Dallas…”Richard Trask. Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the assassination of President Kennedy (Danvers, Ma: Yeoman Press, 1994), p.89.
Paul
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Mr. Rigby,
It's all there on pages 106 through 108 of Six Seconds... all the witness citations, even a medical illustrator's sketch of what Dr. McClelland observed. It's been there for over forty years. Apparently, you have some problem with it. I don't.
"The pattern that emerges from this study of medical evidence is a dual one. From the Parkland doctors we get the picture of a bullet that struck the right front of the President's head...,"
Six Seconds in Dallas, Geis edition, p.111
Appalling. How you've got away with this for forty+ years is nothing less than a thing of wonder.
I'm delighted to let anyone who wants to look at the argument on those pages determine for themselves whether it is sound. Nothing you've said much touches it and your comments leave an aftertaste of unpleasantness. Hence, I'm not going to bother further with this. If you have something interesting to say about Officer Chaney, why not say it?Pity you're not going to stick around because I've only touched the tip of a very deep iceberg.
Paul
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What this is about is that the article mentioned this film being aired on TV. You think that somehow it was the Zapruder film, but the article talks about this film showing the turn off of Main and onto Houston (if I remember correctly).
Bill,
You're forgetting that early descriptions of the first version of the Zapruder film describe the film capturing what the current version does not - the presidential limo making the turn from Houston onto Elm. Here's one example:
Arthur J. Snider (Chicago Daily News Service), “Movies Reconstruct Tragedy,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, (Evening edition), November 27, 1963, section 2, p.1:Chicago, Nov. 27 – With the aid of movies taken by an amateur, it is possible to reconstruct to some extent the horrifying moments in the assassination of President Kennedy.
As the fateful car rounded the turn and moved into the curving parkway, the President rolled his head to the right, smiling and waving.
There's more where that came from, but you get the point.
It was a B&W film. But only one film had been seen on that TV station and I am sure you have even seen other newspapers mentioning the date and station, as well. So in the end and after all the asinine responses ... it will still boil down to it being the Muchmore film and once again you will be in error.Dictionary: as·i·nine (ăs'ə-nīn') pronunciation
adj.
1. Utterly stupid or silly: [/b]
And if my thesis is indeed "asinine," as you insist, then prove it to be so - the remedy really is the hands of the anti-alterationists! Simply produce the clipping you, Mack, Thompson et al persist in claiming exists. It couldn't be simpler.
Paul
I. F. Stone and the Assassination of JFK
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
Patsies and scapegoats in Greece, 1953, but not in 1963 America?
I.F. Stone’s Weekly, 25 April 1953, (Vol. 1, No. 15), p.3:
Ghost Walks in Greece