Paul Rigby

Joan Mellen, in the thread David Talbot : Walter Sheridan and Jim Garrison Yesterday, 06:26 AM Post #15

A very close friend of mine was a friend of John F. Kennedy's, and a Harvard classmate. (He is interviewed in many of the biographies of President Kennedy). He liked "Jack" and Kennedy appointed him to be Ambassador to Morocco, a position he ultimately rejected, on the (bad) advice of David K. E. Bruce. My friend, along with his friends, thought Bobby was ruthless (the cliche that was true) and untrustworthy, and this was before my friend became campaign manager for Eugene McCarthy. The year, yes, was 1968.

Ah, yes, good old Gene McCarthy and his children’s crusade. So pure it hurts:

“A Tale of Two Doves,” JFK Assassination Forum, No.7, (April 1975), p.2:

“…when a dove of more conservative cast, Gene McCarthy, decided to oppose Johnson for the nomination, the CIA promptly infiltrated his campaign.

Names to conjure with: Allard Lowenstein, Curtis Gans and Sam Brown. Ostensibly these men were concerned with ‘containing’ the student anti-war movement. The motto of McCarthy’s student supporters was ‘Keep clean for Gene’ – none of your Hoffmans or Rubins, please.

In early 1968, when McCarthy’s campaign seemed dangerously short of funds, help was forthcoming from West Coast industrialist Sam Kimball, chairman of Aerojet-General Corp. whose representative in Washington was Admiral Raborn, a former CIA chief.

When Robert Kennedy…entered the nomination stakes, two more ‘former’ CIA men, Thomas Finney and Thomas McCoy joined McCarthy’s campaign. (For fuller information, see Private Eye 169.)”

The full piece from Private Eye:

Footnotes (Paul Foot), “Blue Gene,” Private Eye, No. 169 (7 June 1968), p.15:

In the Democratic primary in Oregon it was being put about that Senator McCarthy’s campaign was being organised by the CIA. The facts behind these allegations are as follows:

The CIA has realised since 1966 that the politics of confrontation in S.E. Asia was potentially disastrous to its operations in the rest of the Free World. Bombing North Vietnam was a failure even then. Together with political instability in Saigon, the mixture was an explosive one for the CIA politics of cooptation. During the last 2 years CIA station chiefs throughout the Third World, and more recently in Western Europe, have reported that the political dynamics within their own countries were becoming increasingly polarised. The left, both old and new, formal and informal, could unite on the issue of Vietnam. Moreover, this left, through Vietnam and its demonstration of American control, has been able to win educated support from the amorphous and apolitical ‘liberals’. By last summer, the established governments of a dozen countries, Japan, West German, Italy, Holland, and the Philippines among them, were being prodded by young dissenters, using Vietnam as their main weapon.

On August 30, 1967, Allard Lowenstein and Curtis Gans set up the National Conference of Concerned Democrats in Washington. Their aim: to run, from within the Democratic party, a Peace candidate for the 1968 Presidential Election. During September they approached Senator Eugene McCarthy and by Dec. 1st had raised sufficient money for McCarthy to be endorsed as their candidate.

Allard Lowenstein was president of the National Students Association in 1952, one year before the CIA began funding the overseas operations of the NSA. Lowenstein was a key figure in these early negotiations with the agency. Since then he has become a lawyer in Manhattan, taught politics for a while at a University and twice run successfully for Congress. At the same time he has somehow managed to travel all over the world on ‘private business’. A ‘regular’ in S.E. Asia, he also visits Dar Es Salam and Lusaka frequently. Curtis Gans, 32, was a vice president of the NSA, and later became Director of Information for Americans for Democratic Action.

In the early stages of campaign planning, Gans and Lowenstein took on Sam Brown, who gladly dropped his theology studies at Harvard to join his NSA colleagues. In 1966, Sam Brown had been one of the NSA directors who was privy to CIA operations. These three CIA contacts began the student (‘National Student’) operation which was to roll forward the peace wagon through New Hampshire to the resignation of President Johnson. (And at the same time provide an outlet for ‘responsible’ student dissent: in the previous year, SDS, on the far and new left in the US, had alarmed both FBI and CIA by more than doubling its membership.)

In early April, when McCarthy’s campaign seemed to falter for lack of funds, the first West Coast industrialist to come forward was Dan Kimball. Kimball is chairman of Aerojet – General Corp. whose representative in Washington is Admiral Rayburn, ex-CIA Chief. The problem recently for the McCarthy cooperatives has been Kennedy’s entrance into the race, also, apparently, as a peace candidate. Lowenstein has left the McCarthy camp and is now floating. But, in the past two weeks, two former officials of the CIA have joined the McCarthy campaign to help Gans and Brown.

They are Thomas D. Finney, 43, and Thomas McCoy, 50. (It is obvious that no-one trusts Robert Kennedy, whereas from the CIA point of view, McCarthy has at least called for the resignation of J. Edgar Hoover.)

The CIA is naturally backing both sides, as they always do, and it may be that the early efforts with McCarthy have drawn Humphrey into becoming the ‘safest’ peace candidate of them all. In any case, Gans and Lowenstein have in 9 months successfully gestated a peace child to win them both medals in Langley, Virginia.

A quick and straightforward comparison of the respective coverage of The Grauniad and Novosti. One of the two pieces spends more or less its entire length misleading us. The other one introduces us to the George Soros of Tbilisi – and thus doesn’t.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331209788-103681,00.html

World briefing

Pinning blame on Russia

Simon Tisdall

Friday November 9, 2007

Guardian

It would be easy to buy into Mikhail Saakashvili's claims that Russian agents provoked the crisis in Georgia. Relations between the two are dire. The president's strong pro-American, pro-Nato stance intensely irritates Moscow. Russia routinely exploits separatist and border tensions. A key oil pipeline running from Azerbaijan to Turkey via Georgia undermines Kremlin efforts to monopolise Caspian basin energy supplies.

But leaders of Georgia's recently formed 10-party opposition coalition and this week's street demonstrators do not contest the country's pro-western orientation, which most Georgians, ever wary of Russia, support. They say their focus is domestic: jobs, wealth inequalities, corruption, a weak judicial system, rights abuses, and what is seen as the excitable authoritarianism of Mr Saakashvili himself.

The opposition's slogan, "Georgia without a president", refers to proposals to hold early elections, now rescheduled for January, and to change the constitution, possibly by restoring the monarchy. But it also represents a personal rejection of Mr Saakashvili, whose political hero is Margaret Thatcher. Four years after he helped lead the so-called Rose Revolution and initiated an era of breakneck social and economic change, many Georgians appear discomfited by the upheavals.

Officials had been arguing for days that the demonstrations were a function of a normal, healthy democracy. Then they changed their tune. Perhaps Wednesday's police violence shocked them. In any case, claims of a long-nurtured, Moscow-orchestrated coup plotted by "dark forces" were used to justify the ensuing state of emergency.

No evidence has been produced to back the charge and Russia predictably dismissed it. More important in the short term is whether the Bush administration, which views Georgia as a paradigm of reform in the post-Soviet sphere, accepts the government's claims. If it does, that may open up another dangerous front in the global Washington-Moscow confrontation.

The opposition coalition, the National Council of Unified Public Movement, now has a chance to test its strength against Mr Saakashvili. It was formed after a former minister, Irakli Okruashvili, made allegations of a murder plot and corruption against the president, was arrested, publicly recanted, then left the country in circumstances that are still disputed. The affair underscored concerns about abuse of power and the rule of law.

A coalition manifesto unveiled last month accused the president and his "corrupt team" of "usurping power", said the country's economic situation was "grave" and claimed "political terror reigns". It called for US-style separation of powers, the release of all political prisoners, increased welfare benefits, stronger property rights, and an investigation into the death of a former prime minister in 2005. Undeterred, Mr Saakashvili says that he can win again.

Whether or not Moscow's hand lies behind the current crisis, mutual hostility seems likely to deepen as long as the Mr Saakashvili remains in power and the Kremlin persists with its pressure tactics.

In a little-noticed move last week Georgia withdrew agreement for the continued deployment of Russian CIS "peacekeepers" in separatist-minded Abkhazia province. Moscow has long refused to withdraw its troops and Georgia cannot force them to go. But Tbilisi says they are the main destabilising factor in the conflict zone - and it may yet try. In a small country with big problems, the next bit of bother is never far away.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://en.rian.ru/world/20071109/87377366.html

Georgian prosecutors suspect businessman of plotting coup

09/11/2007

TBILISI, November 9 (RIA Novosti) - The Georgian Prosecutor General's Office said on Friday it suspects billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili, who supports the opposition, of plotting to overthrow the government by force.

"Patarkatsishvili has been recognized as a suspect in participating in a conspiracy against the state, aimed at overthrowing power by forceful means," Nikoloz Gvaramiya said in a TV broadcast.

Georgian state television reported that prosecutors intend to put the businessman, currently in London, on an international wanted list.

Gvaramiya also said criminal proceedings have been launched against Patarkatsishvili, who founded the Imedi independent TV company. The station's broadcasts have been halted by authorities as part of emergency measures imposed by President Mikheil Saakashvili following six days of mass anti-president protests in Tbilisi.

The main state TV channel said investigators were considering Patarkatsishvili's statements at a November 2 rally, as well as a statement distributed by his press service saying he would give all his money to overthrow the leadership.

The tycoon also told Russia's Ekho Moskvy radio station: "I will do my best to free Georgia from this fascist. Until yesterday I believed the government would not dare fight against its nation, but yesterday's developments drastically changed my opinion."

A Georgian opposition leader, David Zurabishvili, ruled out on Friday that the opposition would nominate Patarkatsishvili for president at early elections set for January.

On Wednesday, riot police with shields and batons broke up mass rallies in central Tbilsi, injuring hundreds of protesters. The opposition supporters were demanding President Saakashvili's resignation and early parliamentary elections.

The following day, President Saakashvili said early presidential elections would be held on January 5, 2008. "I am cutting short my presidential term of my own will for a second time, and I am doing it in the full belief that Georgia is a democratic country. I think the people will demonstrate their will on January 5," he said.

He also said a plebiscite on parliamentary elections should be held alongside the presidential elections. Simultaneous parliamentary and presidential elections had previously been scheduled for the fall of 2008.

Georgia's last presidential elections were held on January 4, 2004, with a presidential term of five years.

An obvious solution suggests itself...

Elsewhere, too.

Oct 24 2007, 09:00 PM Post #6: The history of the cover-up is, at one level, a series of sustained and inter-connected assaults upon certain key chains of causality. Fraudulent chronologies – filmic, text-narrative, and the tabular - are, like denied or decontextualised attributions, weapons to be wielded in the war against popular comprehension of what really happened and when.

There is, also, an answer staring us in the face as to the discrepancy between Clark’s recollection of when the press conference began, and Perry’s. First, to recap the difference:

Oct 21 2007, 03:55 PM Post #1: The transcript bore the commencement time, near the head of its first page, of “3:16 P.M. CST.” That timing should have attracted scepticism from the outset because, according to Clark’s testimony before the Presidential Commission, the same first press conference had actually begun at least 45 minutes earlier at “approximately 2.30” (3); while Perry made offered an even earlier starting point, telling Specter that it “must have been within the hour” of the President’s death (4).

Manchester provides the explanation: Perry began the press conference unaccompanied by Clark. Here’s the relevant extract:

Oct 24 2007, 09:00 PM Post #5: William Manchester. The Death of a President: November 20-November 25, 1963 (London: Pan Books Ltd., 1968), p.320: “Three other physicians later joined Perry in 101-102, but he bore the brunt of the briefing…

Useful, at this stage, to reacquaint ourselves with the transcript 1327C’s version of how the press conference began:

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/press.htm

Nor would it appear to be true, when one examines the above version of the press conference, that Perry bore a markedly greater burden of the questioning than Clark.

Paul

As Newcomb and Adams noted in Murder From Within’s fifth chapter, Parkland, citing among other sources, William Manchester’s Death of a President, the Associated Press was reporting Perry’s press conference remarks “just after two o’clock” (CST); and NBC, as confirmed in the company’s own log, no later than 2:36 (CST)

The obvious question: How did the Associated Press produce a report on the Perry-Clark press conference at “just after two o’clock” (CST) when said press conference didn’t begin until a) 3:16 pm (transcript 1327C); or, at earliest, at 2:18 pm (photographic section of Lifton’s Best Evidence*)?

An obvious solution suggests itself: The press conference began before 2 pm (CST), and was still going on – perhaps winding up - at 2:18 pm when the photo reproduced in Best Evidence was taken. So much for the hypothesis. Any evidence to support it?

So far, only one piece that I can find.

In the second section, p. 3, of the evening edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram of Saturday, 23 November, a similar or identical photograph of Perry and Clark to that found in Best Evidence is reproduced. The caption beneath it runs as follows:

“DOCTORS DESCRIBE DEATH: Drs. Kemp Clark, left, and Malcolm Perry, right, told newsmen at 1:45 pm Friday of what they and others at Parkland Hospital in Dallas did to try to save President Kennedy’s life. Man at center is White House aide.”

*Photographic evidence corroborates the earlier start time offered by the Parkland doctors before the Warren Commission. In the unpaginated photographic section at the heart of Lifton’s Best Evidence, we find snap 14, capturing Clark and Perry – together with White House staff members Wayne Hawkes and “Chick” Reynolds (stenographer) – in the course of the first press conference above a caption-commentary that concluded: “Watch on Perry’s left hand indicates 2:18 P.M.”

Have you read Rigby's thread?

Several times. I find it more richly rewarding by the visit. But to business.

In your classic disinformationist thread, There Was No Bullet Wound in John F. Kennedy's Throat, Heresy at High-Noon-Thirty: Ghosthunters' Bane, we witness a sustained attempt to shift suspicion from the Secret Service to the Parkland medical staff:

“I consider it highly unlikely that the throat wound was inflicted in the limo en route to Parkland hospital, and unless and until some evidence emerges to support such an unlikely event, I consider it eliminated. That leaves only a relatively small window of opportunity for the inflicting of such a wound: between the time Kennedy was removed from the limousine and the time that Perry made the tracheostomy incision” (Oct 30 2007, 09:25 PM Post #95).

Such good men, those SS types. “Eliminated.” Yes, their charge surely was. A long time before he reached Parkland.

Among the real perps, those terribly suspicious Parklanders, we find that very bad man Dr. Perry, who you do not accuse, perish the thought, of anything – you merely lay out “relevant incontrovertible facts about the statements and actions” about him “among others”(Oct 30 2007, 09:25 PM Post #95) and generously permit us reach our own conclusions - even as you insist in the same thread that he:

a) was “the man who destroyed all evidence of the throat wound” (Oct 22 2007, 03:18 PM Post #28) by making an “unusually large tracheostomy directly through the throat wound which electively-placed slice very thoroughly destroyed the evidence of the throat wound” (Oct 25 2007, 04:09 AM Post #80);

“lied about the source of the hydrocortisone, about the source of the information concerning the reason for its introduction, and about who determined that it should be administered” (Oct 25 2007, 04:09 AM Post #80);

c) and who was – wait for it, it’s the clinching absurdity – in San Francisco in 1962, the same year as George Hunter White, arch CIA mind-messer, was running there a “black operation called ‘Operation Midnight Climax’” (Nov 2 2007, 05:18 PM Post #132). Now that’s what I call evidence.

On the credit side, however, we find the man you are not accusing of anything is ruled out of the crime that no one saw and for which no evidence whatever exists: “Perry is very unlikely for having created the piercing wound and the evidence strongly suggests that he can be eliminated as having created the wound” (Oct 30 2007, 09:25 PM Post #95).” Nice. That’s a relief. But, no, you can’t quite absolve him entirely here, either. It’s back to the original baseless charge: “At the same time there is no question whatsoever that he is the one who destroyed all evidenciary [sic] value of the wound and thereby precluded any chance of anyone ever determining how it had been created (Ibid.).”

We now turn to this thread.

Here, a contributor calling himself Ashton Gray, a man who is neither inconsistent nor a dissembler, and does not attempt to hijack the thread – see post #3: “My rather comprehensive response to at least the throat-shot aspect of this is not a response, per se, but an article that I have just posted in a veritable miracle of synchronicity, There Was No Bullet Wound in John F. Kennedy's Throat” (Oct 21 2007, 06:09 PM) - but instead, much more constructively, introduces a paragon of evidentiary virtue called…er, Dr Perry, the man who would stoop, according to the original Ashton Gary, to destroying evidence of a throat entrance wound, but would never, Heaven forefend, dream of lying under oath: “What else was it again that Perry said under oath—which Rigby has carefully omitted from his entire screeching screed? ‘I did not see any other wounds.’”

Can’t think why I ever a) thought Perry shifted with the establishment wind (and who can blame him); or doubted the logic and veracity of Ashton Gray. Can you?

I cannot express my contempt for your jejune attempt to hijack this thread…

Dreadful diction: One hijacks planes or treasure, not sinking ships or dreck. And so wildly, characteristically, over-the-top. I simply exposed your claim for the obvious nonsense it was, and is.

…particularly after I've already decimated the bulk of the idiocy you've now spewed here by appropriately replying in the thread you started to peddle your favorite myth…

What a pity you don’t understand the meaning of the verb “to decimate” – then again, only one in ten do.

Or the meaning of hypocrisy.

—in an educational forum—as though it were "fact." <SPIT!>

Now this is a real curiosity, this obsession with expectoration – in an education forum, too. A primitive expression of the will to dominate and/or an expression of contempt, I suppose. It just goes to show, even here, spit happens.

(Oscar Wilde: “In America, life is one long expectoration.” So it would appear.)

I gently tried to bring you to your senses on this issue in that thread, where it was on-topic and appropriate, and I won't stoop to your miserable, pathetic, unprincipled hijacking tactics…

It’s called debate. Get used to it. You’re not in Congress. Or an echo chamber.

And we all know what an Ashton promise is worth…

…but know this: I'll soon be returning to that thread you started, and this time I'm going to finish the job.

Don’t forget your catapult, a decent dictionary, and, most pressingly of all, an adult. You’ll need all three.

Gird your loins, boy. I just took the gloves off.

Surgical or velvet?

P.S. If there's a moderator with integrity, I request that you appropriately move Rigby's grossly off-topic spew* out of this thread and into his thread, where it belongs. Of course I won't be holding my breath.

You don’t say.

*”Spew,” again. All very…oral. Is there a shrink in the house?

Wounds to the Left of JFK's Head?

Copyright © Russell Kent, April 15 1996

Bernice,

Thanks for reminding me of Kent’s very interesting piece. He couldn’t be more right:

When I first became interested in the JFK assassination, I thought that I would be able to fully understand at least one aspect of the case - the medical evidence. I now realise how naive that thought really was. There can't be many parts of the case that are more confusing, contentious or crucial.

Baffling it unquestionably appears to be. But there is a way out of the Wild Wood.

At the end of his thought-provoking essay, Kent refers to David Lifton. I was from the first, and remain to this day, a great admirer of Best Evidence, even though I have never been convinced by the validity the book’s conceptual denouement, the Clandestine Intermission Hypothesis (CIH). Why the rejection?

Because the CIH rests upon the mistaken belief that the Bethesda autopsy duo, Humes and Boswell, were as much the innocent dupes of external forces as their Parkland medical compatriots: Wound patterns 1 & 2, representing those observed at Parkland and Bethesda respectively, are not the geographically discrete entities he believes them to be. Pattern 1 – the real pattern 1, not the doctored version Lifton erroneously embraces, a mistake due in no small measure to his uncritical embrace of the fraudulent transcript that is the subject of this thread – is demonstrably present at Bethesda, too. And what we find is Humes and Boswell working on the classic counter-pattern, an aborted precursor to the final agreed lie.

To explain what I’m getting at, I can think of no better place to begin than Sylvia Meagher’s 1967 classic, Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities & The Report (NY, Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), pp.161-2:

“The autopsy documents also provide some cryptic indications of damage to the left side of the head. The notorious face-sheet on which Dr. J. Thornton Boswell committed his unfortunate 'diagram error' consists of front and back outlines of a male figure. On the front figure, the autopsy surgeons entered the tracheotomy incision (6.5 cm), the four cut-downs made in the Parkland emergency room for administration of infusions (2 cms. Each), and a small circle at the right eye, with the marginal notation '0.8 cm,' apparently representing damage produced by the two bullet fragments that lodged there. Dr. Humes testified that the fragments measured 7 by 2 mm and 3 by 1 mm respectively (2H354). Although he said nothing about the damage at the left eye, the diagram shows a small dot at that site, labeled '0.4 cm' (CE 397, Vol XVII, p.45). Neither Arlen Specter, who conducted the questioning of the autopsy surgeons, nor the Commission members and lawyers present asked any questions about this indication on the diagram of damage at the left eye.

Turning back to the male outline of the figure – the one Dr. Boswell did not realize would become a public document even though it had to be assumed at the time of the autopsy that findings would become evidence at the trial of the accused assassin – we find a small circle at the back of the head about equidistant from the ears and level with the top of the ears. Apparently this represents the small entrance wound which the autopsy surgeons and the Warren Commission say entered the back of the head and exploded out through the right side, carrying large segments of the skull. but an arrow at the wound on the diagram points to the front and left and not to the front and right.

A forensic pathologist who was asked to interpret this feature said that it signified that a missile had entered the back of the head traveling to the left and front. As if in confirmation, an autopsy diagram of the skull (CE 397, Vol XVII, p.46) shows a large rectangle marked '3 cm' at the site of the left eye, with a ragged lateral margin, seemingly to indicate fracture or missing bone.

The autopsy surgeons were not questioned about any of the three diagram indications of bullet damage at the left eye or left temple. Nevertheless, when Dr. Jenkins testified that he thought there was a wound in the left temporal area, Arlen Specter replied, 'The autopsy report disclosed no such developments.'”

Meagher was unquestionably alive to the possibility of body alteration – in a tantalising footnote, she refers readers to a December 1964 special issue of Ramparts detailing “the falsification of autopsy findings in the case of James Chaney”* - but insufficiently certain of the actual wounds and their locations to pursue the issue in the main body of her text. Had she been, I suspect the outcome would have been very interesting, for this was one very acute mind at work.

Had Meagher fixed upon the correct three wounds – a small, left temple entrance, with corresponding large, right-rear head exit; and a small entrance wound in the throat – she would assuredly have grasped the correct chronology of the left temple wound notations made by Humes and Boswell.

The order is deliberate. Humes’ “0.4 cm” represents the unaltered left temple entrance wound observed at Parkland. The second measurement offered, by Boswell, represents the early stage of that entrance wound’s subsequent expansion en route to becoming an exit wound. Hence the arrow described by Meagher.

In summary, then, at the time during the evening of 22 November when Boswell made that notation, there was work in progress to reverse the wound pairing. This was a logical response: The appointed patsy, after all, was alleged to have been firing from the right-rear of Kennedy.

* Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities & The Report (NY, Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), p.138, footnote 20: “Those who dismiss as preposterous, if not sacrilegious, the very notion that an autopsy report might be adjusted to serve police or political imperatives should consult David M. Spain’s article, ‘Mississippi Autopsy’ in Ramparts’ special issue ‘Mississippi Eyewitness’ (December 1964, pp.43-49). They will find incontrovertible proof of the falsification of autopsy findings in the case of James Chaney, who was murdered with Andrew Goodman and Michael Swerner in the summer of 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi.”

Jenkins is the sole source of the blatant falsehood of a bullet wound to Kennedy's left temple.

Silly claim:

Left temple entry:

1) Elm St eyewitness:

Norman Similas: “I could see a hole in the President's left temple...,” Jack Bell, “10 Feet from the President,” NYT, 23 November 1963, p.5, citing Toronto Star.

2) Parkland medical staff:

a) Dr. Robert McClelland: "The cause of death was due to a massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple," Commission Exhibit 392. [‘Admission Note,’ written 22 Nov 1963 at 4.45 pm, reproduced in WCR572, & 17WCH11-12: cited in Lifton’s Best Evidence, p.55; and Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact, pp.159-160.]

Dr. Marion Jenkins: "I don't know whether this is right or not, but I thought there was a wound on the left temporal area, right in the hairline and right above the zygomatic process," 6WH48. [Cited by Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After The Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities, & The Report (New York: Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), p. 40.]

c) Dr. Robert Shaw: "The third bullet struck the President on the left side of the head in the region of the left temporal region and made a large wound of exit on the right side of the head," Letter from Dr. Shaw to Larry Ross, "Did Two Gunmen Cut Down Kennedy?", Today (British magazine), 15 February 1964, p.4.

d) Dr. David Stewart: “This was the finding of all the physicians who were in attendance. There was a small wound in the left front of the President’s head and there was a quite massive wound of exit at the right back side of the head, and it was felt by all the physicians at the time to be a wound of entry which went in the front,” The Joe Dolan (Radio) Show, KNEW (Oakland, California), at 08:15hrs on 10 April 1967. (Cited by Harold Weisberg. Selections from Whitewash (NY: Carroll & Graf/Richard Gallen, 1994), pp.331-2.)

3) Parkland non-medical staff:

Father Oscar Huber: “terrible wound” over Kennedy's left eye [AP despatch, Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, 24 November 1963]

4) Bethesda: Drs. Humes & Boswell:

“The autopsy documents also provide some cryptic indications of damage to the left side of the head. The notorious face-sheet on which Dr. J. Thornton Boswell committed his unfortunate 'diagram error' consists of front and back outlines of a male figure. On the front figure, the autopsy surgeons entered the tracheotomy incision (6.5 cm), the four cut-downs made in the Parkland emergency room for administration of infusions (2 cms. Each), and a small circle at the right eye, with the marginal notation '0.8 cm,' apparently representing damage produced by the two bullet fragments that lodged there. Dr. Humes testified that the fragments measured 7 by 2 mm and 3 by 1 mm respectively (2H354). Although he said nothing about the damage at the left eye, the diagram shows a small dot at that site, labeled '0.4 cm' (CE 397, Vol XVII, p.45). Neither Arlen Specter, who conducted the questioning of the autopsy surgeons, nor the Commission members and lawyers present asked any questions about this indication on the diagram of damage at the left eye.

Turning back to the male outline of the figure – the one Dr. Boswell did not realize would become a public document even though it had to be assumed at the time of the autopsy that findings would become evidence at the trial of the accused assassin – we find a small circle at the back of the head about equidistant from the ears and level with the top of the ears. Apparently this represents the small entrance wound which the autopsy surgeons and the Warren Commission say entered the back of the head and exploded out through the right side, carrying large large segments of the skull. But an arrow at the wound on the diagram points to the front and left and not to the front and right.

A forensic pathologist who was asked to interpret this feature said that it signified that a missile had entered the back of the head traveling to the left and front. As if in confirmation, an autopsy diagram of the skull (CE 397, Vol XVII, p.46) shows a large rectangle marked '3 cm' at the site of the left eye, with a ragged lateral margin, seemingly to indicate fracture or missing bone.

The autopsy surgeons were not questioned about any of the three diagram indications of bullet damage at the left eye or left temple. Nevertheless, when Dr. Jenkins testified that he thought there was a wound in the left temporal area, Arlen Specter replied, 'The autopsy report disclosed no such developments,'” Sylvia Meagher. Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities & The Report (NY, Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), pp.161-2.

5) JFK shot in the face/front of the head/forehead:

a) Alan Smith: “The car was ten feet from me when a bullet hit the President in the forehead…the car went about five feet and stopped,” Jack Bell, “Eyewitnesses describe scene of assassination: Sounds of shooting brought car to a halt,” NYT, 23 November 1963, p.5.

James Chaney: “When the second shot came, I looked back in time to see the President struck in the face,” Anthony Summers’ The Kennedy Conspiracy (London: Sphere, 1992), p.23, citing, on p.543, an “unidentified film interview in police station and taped interview for KLIF, Dallas, on record ‘The Fateful Hours,’ Capitol Records.” See also: 22 November 1963, WFAA-TV, video packet, & Houston Chronicle, 24 November 1963.

c) Dr. Perry: “When asked to specify the nature of the wound, Dr. Perry said that the entrance wound was in the front of the head,” Post-Dispatch News Services, “Priest Who Gave Last Rites ‘Didn’t See Any Sign of Life,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 24 November 1963, p.23A; also Associated Press despatch, shortly after 2 pm, quoted by WOR Radio, New York, at 2:43 pm, CST (Fred Newcomb & Perry Adams. Murder from Within, p.154, n.58): ‘Dr. Perry said the entrance wound—which is the medical description—the entrance wound was in the front of the head’”

I don't raise this point here to invite dicussion of head wounds in this thread, and I will not respond to discussion of head wounds in this thread.

Very wise.

Paul

The moron at AP got it wrong, that's all.

Oh, I don't know:

Post-Dispatch News Services, “Priest Who Gave Last Rites ‘Didn’t See Any Sign of Life,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 24 November 1963, p.23A: “When asked to specify the nature of the wound, Dr. Perry said that the entrance wound was in the front of the head.”

And you forgot to mention the "moron" had other, equally heretical, form:

Jack Bell, “Eyewitnesses describe scene of assassination: Sounds of shooting brought car to a halt,” NYT, 23 November 1963, p.5:"Alan Smith...'The car was ten feet from me when a bullet hit the President in the forehead…the car went about five feet and stopped.”

Paul

From Perry's testimony before the Warren Commission, bold emphasis added:

DR. PERRY:

I made an incision

right through the wound

which was present in the neck... .I made a transverse incision

right through this wound

... .

From Perry's testimony to Jeremy Gunn of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), bold emphasis added:

DR. PERRY:

It was

bigger than I would make for an elective situation

. In a patient that's not in extremis where you're doing an elective tracheostomy you make a nice tiny skin line incision in order to minimize the subsequent scarring.

From Perry's initial interview with Specter, bold emphasis added:

DR. PERRY:

I...began the tracheotomy making a transverse incision

right through the wound in the neck

. ...Once the trachea had been exposed I took the knife and incised the windpipe

at the point of the...injury

. ...Since I had made the incision

directly through the wound in the neck

, it made it

difficult for them

[Humes and the autopsy personnel]

to ascertain the exact nature of this wound

.

Of course Perry is being inordinately modest when he says that it was "difficult...to ascertain the exact nature of this wound" as a result of his carving: the autopsy personnel didn't know there had been any throat wound at all until Humes called Perry the next morning!

That is incontrovertible fact, and if you feel an itch to argue it with me, it is a measure of my esteem that I adjure you to restudy the record with great care before succumbing to any such reckless urge.

Ashton

David Lifton's Best Evidence: Disguise & Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (NY: Signet, Nov 1992), p.325:

“In 1968, Where Death Delights was published, an authorized biography of Dr. Milton Halpern, the New York City Medical Examiner and a man known as the father of forensic medicine. Dr. Halpern said that Dr. Perry's tracheotomy incision should not have interfered with a proper determination of the wound, and took the Warren Commission to task for implying the bullet wound “was obliterated,” (46) that the tracheotomy had “completely eliminated that evidence” (47).

'The staff members who wrote that portion of the [Warren] Report simply did not understand their medical procedures.' said Halpern, who quoted the Bethesda autopsy that the wound was 'extended as a tracheotomy incision and thus its character is distorted at the time of autopsy' (48). 'The key word here is “extended,”' said Halpern (49). That bullet wound was not “eliminated” or “obliterated” at all. What Dr. Perry did was take his scalpel and cut a clean slit away from the wound. He didn't excise it, or cut away any huge amount of tissue, as the [Warren] Report writer would have you believe.”

(46) Marshal Houts. Where Death Delights (NY: Coward McCann, 1967), p.57.

(47) Warren Commission Report, edition unspecified, p.88.*

(48) Bethesda Autopsy Report, p.4.

(49) Marshal Houts. Where Death Delights (NY: Coward McCann, 1967), p.57.

*In the edition of this fabulous work of fiction I own:

”In the early stages of the autopsy, the surgeons…did not know that there had been a bullet hole in the front of the President’s neck when he arrived at Parkland Hospital because the tracheotomy incision had completely eliminated that evidence,”

The Warren Report: The Official Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Associated Press, 1964), p.36.

And Ashton Gray, of course, in this & other threads, 2007.

It is the last refuge of the Front Shot Faithful.

An outrage - it's the pub.

The moron at AP got it wrong, that's all. You solved it yourself in your first post when you reported correctly that after Perry pointed to his own throat and lied and said that the wound in the throat was an entrance bullet wound, a reporter asked, "Doctor, is it the assumption that it went through the head?" If only you had stopped there!

Bell ran off to his typewriter to describe what he understood from the press conference to be a single head wound with a single entrance hole (in the throat) with a single exit hole (that he understood to be a gaping hole in the back of the head on the right side), and so idiotically shorthanded his description of this purported bullet shot that exploded the head by saying "the entrance wound was in the front of the head." And it can go even further: for all you or I know, all Bell actually wrote was "the entrance wound was in the front," and an editor at AP added "of the head" thinking he was clarifying the report, when in fact he was confusing it all to hell.

Then some local-yokel papers picked the the AP garbage and propagated it, as always happens.

All of which explains, why, three years after the event, and with the AP despatch in question nowhere to be seen in the work of the first generation critics (Lane, Weisberg, et al), Manchester returned to it in the manner he did. Or perhaps not.

Our old friend Dulles had a nifty little quote for precisely this eventuality, one cannily picked up on by David Lifton in Best Evidence, p.809: "little slips or oversights which [can] give the game away" (The Craft of Intelligence. Harper & Row, 1963). Quite.

As recently as 27 August 1998—long after the transcript was available—Ronald Coy Jones, M.D., Robert M. Mcclelland, M.D., Malcolm O. Perry, M.D., and Paul C. Peters, M.D.—all doctors who were there in Trauma Room One that day—were gathered for questioning as a group by Jeremy Gunn, general counsel of the Assassination Records Review Board. During that questioning, Paul Peters summated the exact frame of mind that was the consensus view at the time of the press conference (based on the patently false idea that there had been a bullet wound to the throat):

DR. PETERS:

I think most of us thought at first that day in the first few minutes that, boy, it might have one in through the neck and out the back of the head, which would have been a big exit wound and a small entrance wound.

That was the consensus. That is what was stated at the press conference.

Was it?

i) Dr. Robert McClelland: "The cause of death was due to a massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple," Commission Exhibit 392. (‘Admission Note,’ written 22 Nov 1963 at 4.45 pm, reproduced in WCR572, & 17WCH11-12: cited in Lifton’s Best Evidence, p.55; and Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact, pp.159-160.)

ii) Dr. Marion Jenkins: "I don't know whether this is right or not, but I thought there was a wound on the left temporal area, right in the hairline and right above the zygomatic process," 6WH48. [Cited by Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After The Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities, & The Report (New York: Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), p. 40.]

iv) Dr. Robert Shaw: "The third bullet struck the President on the left side of the head in the region of the left temporal region and made a large wound of exit on the right side of the head" [Letter from Dr. Shaw to Larry Ross, "Did Two Gunmen Cut Down Kennedy?", Today (British magazine), 15 February 1964, p.4]

iii) Dr. David Stewart: “This was the finding of all the physicians who were in attendance. There was a small wound in the left front of the President’s head and there was a quite massive wound of exit at the right back side of the head, and it was felt by all the physicians at the time to be a wound of entry which went in the front,” The Joe Dolan (Radio) Show, KNEW (Oakland, California), at 08:15hrs on 10 April 1967 [Harold Weisberg. Selections from Whitewash (NY: Carroll & Graf/Richard Gallen, 1994), pp.331-2).

Paul

[set up an unresolvable dichotomy of diametrically opposing "scenarios"

You could not be more precisely on target.

Pun intended.

Such is the sine qua non for the perpetuation of needless uncertainty, debate, and internecine conflict -- the guarantors of security for the killers.

Argue though we might about frontal shots, we remain in profound agreement on the origins and purposes of the by-design cognitive dissonance that befuddles the vast majority of well-meaning researchers.

Charles

The Old Music Master by Hoagy Carmichael?

You seem (although I'll be the first to admit that it's difficult to tell) to be building a case that Perry and Burkley were the shining messengers of Truth, Justice, and the American Way…

Nope, nothing of the sort. And had your remote viewing been up to scratch, you’d have known as much from the scrawls in my notebook.

Still, and for the record, I agree with you (and many others) that Burkley was indeed a witting conspirator.

… that John F. Kennedy was, indeed, shot from the front…

That’s twice from the front, please…

…and that the Blue Meanies or the CIA or the Warren Commission (same difference) fiddle-faddled with the transcript of a press conference that was witnessed by Gawd knows how many press members and public (in the age of recording devices) in order to eradicate or diminish or twist one purported mention of a frontal wound—while leaving in another!

So let me see if I have your logic right: Perry, a CIA plant among the Parkland doctors, goes before the afternoon press conference primed with a rank piece of CIA disinformation - to the effect that Kennedy had an entrance wound in the front of the head – delivers said piece of rank disinfo, only for the CIA to suppress its own corker of a piece of disinformation from that day forth?

Er, why? Surely it was in the interest of the CIA to disseminate newsreel and tape recordings of that press conference as widely and frequently as possible? Instead, nada, for, what, 44 years?

I can't even figure out where you're going with it. What could be the point?

You said it.

But wait, I did have it right:

And Malcolm O. Perry is the very person who destroyed all evidence of the wound that was in Kennedy's throat..

Hyperbolic tosh. Perry did no such thing. He pragmatically utilised a small, existing wound in the throat – instead of puncturing an unnecessary duplicate – after slightly extending, by horizontal slits, the existing wound to facilitate the entrance of a tube. Here’s Humes, courtesy of Weisberg (Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report, p.320, citing 2H371) on Perry’s wholesale destruction of “all evidence of the wound that was in Kennedy’s throat”:

”To ascertain the point, I called on the telephone Dr. Malcolm Perry and discussed with him the situation of the President’s neck when he first examined the President and asked him had he in fact done a tracheotomy which was somewhat redundant because I was somewhat certain he had.” Perry confirmed that he had made the incision at the point of the wound.”

You conclude, with characteristic restraint:

…(which could not have been a wound made by a projectile of any description), then marched right out and told the world the grand lie that there had been a projectile wound in Kennedy's throat, and that it had been a projectile wound of entrance. It was, and is, and forever will be a lie.

You have it the entirely the wrong way round, diametrically speaking, naturally.

*I think it was Plutarch who it put it best: “Our minds are confused by the close proximity of opposites.”

And it's no surprise at all to me that Burkley and Perry would be the precise two people to deliver the "shot from the front" hypnotic implant at the height of confusion as the precise black CIA psy op it was, to set up an unresolvable dichotomy of diametrically opposing "scenarios". It's straight text-book.

A very useful concept, “an unresolvable dichotomy of diametrically opposing ‘scenarios,’”* but not, alas, in this instance: a true diametric opposition would have Burkley informing Kilduff that the entrance wound was in the back of the head ie at the other end of the diameter, as opposed to Perry’s insistence – suppressed by 1327C – that there was an entrance wound in the front of the head.

It is “straight text book,” agreed, but from a very different, and more subtle, manual: You don’t begin by butchering the truth, you shave it. This is precisely what Burkley did when he fed Kilduff that guff about an entrance wound in the right temple. The consensus among the Parkland doctors on the afternoon of 22 November was that there was a matching pair of head wounds – a small entry in the left temple, and a correspondingly large exit at the right rear.

I've thoroughly covered exactly why it's no surprise to me at all that the messengers of just such a fraud would be Burkley and Perry in the thread There Was No Bullet Wound in John F. Kennedy's Throat, particularly in this linked post in that thread.

“Thoroughly”? No, you haven’t. With regard to Perry, you’ve simply kept asserting he was a conspirator. Repeated assertion is just that, assertion.

But I've waited for you to get around to your major premise in this thread you've started, and after five rather lengthy messages you've posted, you still haven't gotten around to saying what your major premise is. What is it? Why is transcript 1327C a fraud, according to your model?

What you rather grandly call my “major premise” couldn’t be more obvious, and is contained in the thread’s opening piece: contemporaneous new reports v. a manuscript which surfaced publicly only in 1976. Your incomprehension is thus feigned, and born of an ulterior motive. To illustrate the perversity of your interpretation, let’s revisit that alleged failure of mine to venture my, yes, “major premise”:

According to 1327C, Perry and Clark described only two wounds, the entrance wound in the front of the throat (8), and “a large, gaping loss of tissue” (9) at “the back of his head” (10), “principally on his right side” (11). The questions attributed to the unnamed reporters present reinforces this two-wound scenario, for example, when one of them supposedly asked of Perry, following his pointing to this own throat to show where the bullet had entered, “Doctor, is it the assumption that it went through the head?” (12). So much for 1327C. Now let us turn to the contemporaneous news reports.

Here we find something very different. The Associated Press reported, shortly after 2 pm, CST, that ‘Dr. Perry said the entrance wound—which is the medical description—the entrance wound was in the front of the head’” (13); while WOR Radio, New York, quoted Perry to this effect at 2:43 pm, CST, (14). So, instead of just two wounds, the Parkland duo actually described three – there was, in addition to the entrance wound just below the Adam’s apple on the front of the throat, also an entrance wound “in the front of the head” (15). It is thus not merely a matter of altering a word or two, but, necessarily, considerable portions of transcript 1327C, including the questions attributed to the anonymous reporters.

Very opaque, I must say.

End of part 1.

In the main body of the text, Manchester first divides Perry from the entrance wound at the front of the head - and makes it disappear, temporarily, at least, down the memory hole - then resurrects it, sans attribution to Perry, in order to turn his guns on the AP reporter who faithfully and accurately reported that statement in the early part of the Perry-Clark press conference.

A paired example, a la Chomsky, but minus the CIA-serving spin, has long suggested itself.

There were of course two press conferences at Parkland in the two hours following the confirmation of Kennedy’s death shortly after 1300hrs, CST. (The time of 1300hrs was a convenient rounding back.) The first, that featuring Malcolm Kilduff, acting presidential press spokesman, began at just after 1330hrs. Here’s what Kilduff said according to Manchester's Death of a President:

Version 1:

p.318: “Quiet! Quiet!”; “Excuse me, let me catch my breath”;

p.319: “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately one o'clock Central Standard Time today here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot wound in the brain. I have no other details regarding the assassination of the President. Mrs. Kennedy was not hit. Governor Connally was hit. The Vice President was not hit.”

Version 2:

p.493: “An entirely inaccurate story of how the President's parents had learned of his death from a Hyannis Port workman scarcely mattered; neither did a description of 'the President...struck in the right temple by the bullet' or of the weapon as a 'German Mauser'.

Demonstrably, then, the same technique - of divide, censor, dismiss, and subsequently resurrect without attribution, as applied to Perry and the “entrance wound at the front of the head” - is utilised by Manchester on Kilduff’s brief official announcement of Kennedy’s death. For what Kilduff actually said included the following:

”The President was shot once, in the head…Dr. Burkley told me it is a simple matter of a bullet through the head…It is my understanding that it entered in the temple, the right temple.”

David Lifton adds: “As Kilduff spoke the last words, he raised his right hand and pointed with his index finger at his right temple,”

Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (NY: Signet, Nov 1992), p.387.

As Lifton notes in the above book, NBC broadcast a UPI despatch citing Burkley on the right temple entrance on the afternoon of 22 November (Ibid.).

This seems clear enough: Both Burkley (via Kilduff) and Perry, in the early afternoon of 22 November, uttered heresy to the pre-planned scenario of a lone gunman firing from high to the right rear. Their treatment, and that of their respective testimonies, therefore, first at the hands of the Presidential Commission, then at the hands of William Manchester, should have been similar, if not necessarily identical.

But it wasn't, as will be made clear. Why?

Rumsfeld flees France fearing arrest

Sat, 10/27/2007 - 08:45

Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of "ordering and authorizing" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US military's detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest.

US embassy officials whisked Rumsfeld away yesterday from a breakfast meeting in Paris organized by the Foreign Policy magazine after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint against the man who spearheaded President George W. Bush's "war on terror" for six years.

Under international law, authorities in France are obliged to open an investigation when a complaint is made while the alleged torturer is on French soil.

According to activists in France, who greeted Rumsfeld shouting "murderer" and "war criminal" at the breakfast meeting venue, US embassy officials remained tight-lipped about the former defense secretary's whereabouts citing "security reasons".

Anti-torture protesters in France believe that the defense secretary fled over the open border to Germany, where a war crimes case against Rumsfeld was dismissed by a federal court. But activist point out that under the Schengen agreement that ended border checkpoints across a large part of the European Union, French law enforcement agents are allowed to cross the border into Germany in pursuit of a fleeing fugitive.

"Rumsfeld must be feeling how Saddam Hussein felt when US forces were hunting him down," activist Tanguy Richard said. "He may never end up being hanged like his old friend, but he must learn that in the civilized world, war crime doesn't pay."

International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the French League for Human Rights (LDH) filed the complaint on Thursday after learning that Rumsfeld was scheduled to visit Paris.

http://wor.ldne.ws/node/8596

De Gaulle: “A wind blew through France…”

I don't know if I have a point Paul, other than the Frederick Frommer AP report of October 24, "FBI watched McCarthy anti-Hover effort" is certainly amusing in light of the CIA official support of McCarthy.

Don't you agree?

If you're placing both McCarthy's calls for Hoover's replacement/dismissal, and Hoover's reciprocal interest in McCarthy, within the context of the collapse of the relationship between CIA and the FBI in the late 1960s, sure.

And William Blum's opinionated piece is pretty much negated by the fact he didn't know what state McCarthy is from, hea?

The choice:

The error is intentional and represents an attempt, by conflating the identities of two famous right-wingers with the same surname, to make a serious point with humour.

Your interpretation, a mistake, is correct - though proceeding to claim, as you seem to be, that this invalidates Blum’s point about McCarthy’s real, as opposed to ostensible, motivations, smacks a little of desperation; and is perhaps unwise. Would the discovery of a similar error in the work of, say, Bill Kelly, invalidate everything else he wrote on the relevant topic? Of course not.

I'm having some McCarthy flashbacks that may change the picture.

I look forward to reading them.

Paul

[url=http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071024/ap_on_go_ot/eugene_mccarthy_fbi]http://news.FBI watched McCarthy anti-Hoover effort

Bill,

I'm not quite sure what your point is. Please clarify.

Paul

The following link takes you straight to the 1986 NYRB argument between Hertzberg and Cummings following the publication of the latter’s The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (Grove Press, 1985). Hertzberg’s attempt to preserve the façade of Lowenstein’s philanthropic sponsorship is a hoot.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5226

How to spot a CIA-er about to go public in support of an anti-war candidate – check those subscriptions!

“According to sources, Lowenstein was separated from the CIA sometime in 1967 (the sources say Lowenstein ‘was in the agency from 1962 to 1967’), a year when he neglected to pay his dues to both Spanish Refugee Aid and the American Committee on Africa,”

Richard Cummings. The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (NY: Grove Press Inc., 1985), p.168.

Just how many CIA men, one wonders, does it take to depose a sitting President? Has any one calculated the average figure from Kennedy to Carter?

Before taking a position on Burma, I’d urge readers to do some background reading. British and American motives for urging a change of regime in Burma are spurious, and their pretence at moral outrage just that, a pretence.

Recent speech by John Pilger on the subject: http://www.antiwar.com/pilger/?articleid=11822

The Hypocrites Who Say They Back Democracy in Burma

by John Pilger

This is John Pilger's address to a London meeting, 'Freedom Writ Large', organized by PEN and the Writers Network of Burma, on October 25.

Thank you PEN for asking me to speak at this very important meeting tonight. I join you in paying tribute to Burma's writers, whose struggle is almost beyond our imagination. They remind us, once again, of the sheer power of words. I think of the poets Aung Than and Zeya Aung. I think of U Win Tin, a journalist, who makes ink out of brick powder on the walls of his prison cell and writes with a pen made from a bamboo mat – at the age of 77. These are the bravest of the brave.

And what honor they bring to humanity with their struggle; and what shame they bring to those whose hypocrisy and silence helps to feed the monster that rules Burma.

I had planned tonight to read from my last interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, but I decided not to – because of something Suu Kyi said to me when I last spoke to her. "Be careful of media fashion," she said. "The media like this sentimental version of life that reduces everything down to personality. Too often this can be a distraction."

I thought about that, and how typically self effacing she was, and how right she was.

In my view, the greatest distraction is the hypocrisy of those political figures in the democratic West, who claim to support the Burmese liberation struggle. Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice come to mind.

"The United States," said Rice, "is determined to keep an international focus on the travesty that is taking place in Burma."

What she is less keen to keep a focus on is that the huge American company, Chevron, on whose board of directors she sat, is part of a consortium with the junta and the French company, Total, that operates in Burma's offshore oil fields. The gas from these fields is exported through a pipeline that was built with forced labor and whose construction involved Halliburton, of which Vice President Cheney was Chief Executive.

For many years, the Foreign Office in London promoted business as usual in Burma. When I interviewed Suu Kyi I read her a Foreign Office press release that said, "Through commercial contacts with democratic nations such as Britain, the Burmese people will gain experience of democratic principles."

She smiled sardonically and said, "Not a bit of it."

In Britain, the official public relations line has changed, but the substance of compliance and collusion has not. British tour firms – like Orient Express and Asean Explorer – are able to make a handsome profit on the suffering of the Burmese people. Aquatic – a sort of mini Halliburton – has its snout in the same trough, together with Rolls Royce and all those posh companies that make a nice earner from Burmese teak.

When the last month's uprising broke out, Gordon Brown referred to the sanctity of what he called "universal principles of human rights". He has said something similar a letter sent to this meeting tonight. It is his theme of distraction. I urge you not be distracted.

When did Brown or Blair ever use their close connections with business – their platforms at the CBI and in the City London – to name and shame these companies that make money on the back of the Burmese people? When did a British prime minister call for the European Union to plug the loopholes of arms supply to Burma, stopping, for example, the Italians from supplying military equipment? The reason no doubt is that the British government is itself one of the world's leading arms suppliers, especially to regimes at war. Tonight (October 25) the Brown government has approved the latest American prelude to its attack on Iran and the ensuing horror and bloodshed.

When did a British prime minister call on its ally and client, Israel, to end its long and sinister relationship with the Burmese junta. Or does Israel's immunity and impunity also cover its supply of weapons technology to Burma and its reported training of the junta's most feared internal security thugs? Of course, that is not unusual. The Australian government – so vocal lately in its condemnation of the junta – has not stopped the Australian Federal Police from training Burma's internal security forces in at the Australian-funded Center for Law Enforcement Cooperation in Indonesia.

There are many more of these grand, liberal hypocrites; and we who care for freedom in Burma should not be distracted by the posturing and weasel pronouncements of our leaders, who themselves should be called to account as accomplices – unless and until their fine words are matched by deeds that make a genuine difference and they themselves stop destroying lives. We owe that vigilance and that truth to Aung San Suu Kyi, to Burma's writers and to all the other bravest of the brave.

The doctors, it turns out, were right: The transcript commencement time is at best a mistake, and at worst the product of intentional deceit. The utility of such an “apparent error”(5) to the conspirators is self-evident: It created doubt about the direct correlation between the press conference and the contemporaneous media reports of it, accounts which contained Perry’s repeated insistence that the wound in the front of Kennedy’s throat was one of entrance.

The history of the cover-up is, at one level, a series of sustained and inter-connected assaults upon certain key chains of causality. Fraudulent chronologies – filmic, text-narrative, and the tabular - are, like denied or decontextualised attributions, weapons to be wielded in the war against popular comprehension of what really happened and when.

In the case of the entrance wound in the front of the head, as described by Perry early in the Parkland press conference, the locus classicus of the conspirators' attack is to be found in William Manchester’s monumental Death of a President: November 20-November 25, 1963, a work which enjoyed a considerable succes de scandale upon serialisation (1) and publication in 1967 (2), but which is today nothing more than a staple of the charity shop. Lack of attention to this vast undertaking is a mistake, for as we shall see, the book, rightly decoded, is of considerable utility in understanding how the cover-up functioned then, and proceeds to this day. All the quotations to follow are from the Pan Books Ltd., paperback edition published in London in 1968.

Manchester’s carefully crafted attack begins with the omission of the Parkland press conference from all three of the book's chronological pillars. The absence is excusable from the shortest and least substantial of these, that which appears nears the book's end and seeks to correlate the events of Kennedy’s funeral with Oswald’s last hours alive (3). The same can not be said of the other two, both of which are substantial constructions offering abundant scope for its incorporation.

The first of these - appropriately, near the book’s opening, sandwiched between the Glossary and the Prologue - offers a broad overview, in Eastern Standard Time, of supposedly key events over the course of 22-25 November. It finds room, by way of illustrating the point, for the AP report at 15:14hrs that a Secret Service man had been killed in Dallas (4); and the 14:25hrs announcement by the networks, on Sunday, 24 November, of Oswald’s expiration (5) – but not a word on the timing and content of the Perry-Clark press conference.

The second substantial chron appears near the book’s midpoint, and is dedicated to Oswald’s movements, in both Central and Eastern Standard Time. It also boasts a column given over to “Developments Elsewhere” (6). In the latter, there is room for both a 1:18 pm, CST, AP report which proclaimed “LBJ wounded” (7) and a 1:35pm, CST, UPI “flash confirming JFK’s death” (8) but, again, not the Perry-Clark press conference. This is no accident.

In the main body of the text, Manchester first divides Perry from the entrance wound at the front of the head - and makes it disappear, temporarily, at least, down the memory hole - then resurrects it, sans attribution to Perry, in order to turn his guns on the AP reporter who faithfully and accurately reported that statement in the early part of the Perry-Clark press conference. In the first extended extract, note how Manchester confines the wounds described by Perry purely to the entrance wound in the throat and dismisses it; and how, in both the first and second extracts, he utilises that old stand-by for dismissing inconvenient testimony, the fevered atmosphere. The possibility that the none of the Parkland doctors noticed a back wound because it did not yet exist is, of course, just too outré for consideration:

pp.320-321: “Three other physicians later joined Perry in 101-102, but he bore the brunt of the briefing, and it was harrowing. The scene was bedlam. Several correspondents were hysterical. A question would be asked, and the doctor would be half-way through his answer when another reporter broke in with an entirely different question. Misquotations were inevitable. Had the scene been calm and orderly, the results would still have been unfortunate, however, for none of the doctors, Perry included, had thoroughly examined the President. Because they had failed to turn him over – in Carrico's later words, 'Nobody really had the heart to do it' – they hadn't seen his back. To them the throat wound suggested that one of the shots had come from the front. Reporters who drew that conclusion weren't to blame. They hadn't seen the body, Perry, who had, was their source.

Under any circumstances the possibilities for muddle in gunshot cases are almost infinite. Abraham Lincoln, like John Kennedy, was shot in the posterior part of the head. Because Booth's nineteenth century weapon was low-powered his victim survived for nine hours and the .44 calibre derringer ball of Britannia metal did not shatter his head; a one-inch disc of bone was driven three inches into the brain, and the ball lodged in his skull. In other respects the fatal wounds of the two Presidents are similar though, and the medical reports of April 1865, like Perry's, were baffling. Lincoln's assassin had approached him from the right side, yet the derringer ball entered his head from the left. Perplexity and unfounded rumour persisted until the conspirators' trial, when one of the witnesses testified that the President, attracted by something in the pit of the theatre, had twisted his head sharply leftward and downward at the last moment. Medical briefings are supposed to quash such misunderstandings. The one at Parkland did exactly the opposite. Perry was asked whether one bullet could have struck the President from the front. He replied, 'Yes, it is conceivable.' Sidey, realizing the implications, cried, 'Doctor, do you realize what you're doing? You're confusing us.' It was too late. By the following morning millions were convinced that a rifleman had fired from the top of the underpass, and in many parts of the world the conviction is established truth today.”

Over one hundred and seventy pages later, the chain of cause and effect sundered - to his own satisfaction and, presumably, that of his masters – Manchester returns to the itch sensible only to the conspirators themselves. Yes, it’s that damn “entrance at the front of the head” described by Perry. With the latter out of the picture, the messenger gets both barrels:

pp.493-4: “A certain amount of distortion was inevitable. Erratic individuals are eager to credit the incredible. A century after Lincoln's death his assassination is still being laid at the door of a member of his Cabinet, and years after Kennedy's death there would be those who would reject any information which did not fit their preconceived theories about the crime. These people did not want facts; they merely wanted to feed their own ravaged emotions. But that Friday stable persons were being misled, too. The erratic performance of the Associated Press was responsible for much of the confusion. The AP was an American institution. Deservedly, it was regarded as a pillar of accuracy. When it followed its twelve-bell confirmation of the assassination with the report that an unnamed Secret Service man had been killed and added cryptically that 'no other information was immediately available', Bill Greer's wife, in suburban Washington, believed the worst. She knew that Bill always drove the Lincoln, and although a denial of the rumour from the Treasury Department was on the printer two hours later, she assumed throughout the flight that her husband was dead.

There were other lapses during the afternoon. Most were inconsequential. Over an hour after 26000's departure from Love Field, NCB [sic] was broadcasting that 'LBJ is remaining in Dallas'. The flash that a red-shirted man with black curly hair had been arrested 'in the Riverside section of Fort Worth in the shooting of a Dallas policeman' was quickly forgotten when the truth about Oswald began to pour in an hour later. An entirely inaccurate story of how the President's parents had learned of his death from a Hyannis Port workman scarcely mattered; neither did a description of 'the President...struck in the right temple by the bullet' or of the weapon as a 'German Mauser'. But one account was to cause real mischief later. The AP flatly declared that Kennedy had been shot 'in the front of the head'. It was this report, put out scarcely an hour after the President had been pronounced dead, which became the chief source for the conviction of millions that all subsequent investigations of the tragedy were fraudulent.”

The AP reporter responsible was almost certainly Jack Bell. Why Manchester's coyness about identifying him? After all, it was hardly as if he was unaware of Bell's presence at Parkland that afternoon (9). Partly, I suspect, because named men can answer back. But a more important reason was surely to preserve consistency: In stripping the entrance wound in the front of the head of both specific source and identified transmitter, Manchester sought to deny it legitimacy. It was, we were to be persuaded, just one more emanation, ephemeral and weightless, arising from the miasma of confusion that was Dallas on 22 November 1963 (10).

(1) In the USA, inLook magazine in four instalments, running from January to March 1967: 24 January, pp.36-50; 7 February, pp.40-56; 21 February, pp.42-58; 7 March, pp.50-66.

For background on the very public row between the Kennedys and Manchester, see:

Lawrence Van Gelder. The Untold Story: Why The Kennedys Lost the Book Battle (NY: Award Books, 1967).

Arnold Bennett. Jackie, Bobby, and Manchester (NY: Bee Line Books, 1967).

John Corry. The Manchester Affair (NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1967).

DeLloyd J. Guth and David R. Wrone offer a very useful section, entitled Manchester v. Kennedys Book, pp. 197-204, in The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical & Legal Bibliography, 1963-1979 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980).

(2) The Death of a President was first published in book form by Harper & Row, an old CIA friend.

(3) William Manchester. The Death of a President: November 20-November 25, 1963 (London: Pan Books Ltd., 1968), p.719.

(4) Ibid., p.20.

(5) Ibid., p.21.

(6) Ibid., p.397-402.

(7) Ibid., p.400.

(8) Ibid, p.401.

(9) Ibid., p.318-9.

(10) A good rejoinder to this nonsense is to be found in Mordecai Brienberg’s “The Riddle of Dallas,” The Spectator, 6 March 1964, pp.305-306: “It might be argued in defence of the investigating agencies that in the atmosphere of excitement that followed Kennedy’s assassination contradictions and imprecisions were due to ‘honest’ confusion. Granted that confusion existed, why then should the officials be continuously certain of one thing, Oswald’s guilt? Why is Oswald’s presumed guilt the constant in this sea of incomplete and conflicting evidence?”

Follow this link for the text of the whole article: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...mp;hl=Brienberg

The doctors, it turns out, were right: The transcript commencement time is at best a mistake, and at worst the product of intentional deceit. The utility of such an “apparent error”(5) to the conspirators is self-evident: It created doubt about the direct correlation between the press conference and the contemporaneous media reports of it, accounts which contained Perry’s repeated insistence that the wound in the front of Kennedy’s throat was one of entrance.

The history of the cover-up is, at one level, a series of sustained and inter-connected assaults upon certain key chains of causality. Fraudulent chronologies – filmic, text-narrative, and the tabular - are, like denied or decontextualised attributions, weapons to be wielded in the war against popular comprehension of what really happened and when.

In the case of the entrance wound in the front of the head, as described by Perry early in the Parkland press conference, the locus classicus of the conspirators' attack is to be found in William Manchester’s monumental Death of a President: November 20-November 25, 1963, a work which enjoyed a considerable succes de scandale upon serialisation (1) and publication in 1967 (2), but which is today nothing more than a staple of the charity shop. Lack of attention to this vast undertaking is a mistake, for as we shall see, the book, rightly decoded, is of considerable utility in understanding how the cover-up functioned then, and proceeds to this day. All the quotations to follow are from the Pan Books Ltd., paperback edition published in London in 1968.

Manchester’s carefully crafted attack begins with the omission of the Parkland press conference from all three of the book's chronological pillars. The absence is excusable from the shortest and least substantial of these, that which appears nears the book's end and seeks to correlate the events of Kennedy’s funeral with Oswald’s last hours alive (3). The same can not be said of the other two, both of which are substantial constructions offering abundant scope for its incorporation.

The first of these - appropriately, near the book’s opening, sandwiched between the Glossary and the Prologue - offers a broad overview, in Eastern Standard Time, of supposedly key events over the course of 22-25 November. It finds room, by way of illustrating the point, for the AP report at 15:14hrs that a Secret Service man had been killed in Dallas (4); and the 14:25hrs announcement by the networks, on Sunday, 24 November, of Oswald’s expiration (5) – but not a word on the timing and content of the Perry-Clark press conference.

The second substantial chron appears near the book’s midpoint, and is dedicated to Oswald’s movements, in both Central and Eastern Standard Time. It also boasts a column given over to “Developments Elsewhere” (6). In the latter, there is room for both a 1:18 pm, CST, AP report which proclaimed “LBJ wounded” (7) and a 1:35pm, CST, UPI “flash confirming JFK’s death” (8) but, again, not the Perry-Clark press conference. This is no accident.

In the main body of the text, Manchester first divides Perry from the entrance wound at the front of the head - and makes it disappear, temporarily, at least, down the memory hole - then resurrects it, sans attribution to Perry, in order to turn his guns on the AP reporter who faithfully and accurately reported that statement in the early part of the Perry-Clark press conference. In the first extended extract, note how Manchester confines the wounds described by Perry purely to the entrance wound in the throat and dismisses it; and how, in both the first and second extracts, he utilises that old stand-by for dismissing inconvenient testimony, the fevered atmosphere. The possibility that the none of the Parkland doctors noticed a back wound because it did not yet exist is, of course, just too outré for consideration:

pp.320-321: “Three other physicians later joined Perry in 101-102, but he bore the brunt of the briefing, and it was harrowing. The scene was bedlam. Several correspondents were hysterical. A question would be asked, and the doctor would be half-way through his answer when another reporter broke in with an entirely different question. Misquotations were inevitable. Had the scene been calm and orderly, the results would still have been unfortunate, however, for none of the doctors, Perry included, had thoroughly examined the President. Because they had failed to turn him over – in Carrico's later words, 'Nobody really had the heart to do it' – they hadn't seen his back. To them the throat wound suggested that one of the shots had come from the front. Reporters who drew that conclusion weren't to blame. They hadn't seen the body, Perry, who had, was their source.

Under any circumstances the possibilities for muddle in gunshot cases are almost infinite. Abraham Lincoln, like John Kennedy, was shot in the posterior part of the head. Because Booth's nineteenth century weapon was low-powered his victim survived for nine hours and the .44 calibre derringer ball of Britannia metal did not shatter his head; a one-inch disc of bone was driven three inches into the brain, and the ball lodged in his skull. In other respects the fatal wounds of the two Presidents are similar though, and the medical reports of April 1865, like Perry's, were baffling. Lincoln's assassin had approached him from the right side, yet the derringer ball entered his head from the left. Perplexity and unfounded rumour persisted until the conspirators' trial, when one of the witnesses testified that the President, attracted by something in the pit of the theatre, had twisted his head sharply leftward and downward at the last moment. Medical briefings are supposed to quash such misunderstandings. The one at Parkland did exactly the opposite. Perry was asked whether one bullet could have struck the President from the front. He replied, 'Yes, it is conceivable.' Sidey, realizing the implications, cried, 'Doctor, do you realize what you're doing? You're confusing us.' It was too late. By the following morning millions were convinced that a rifleman had fired from the top of the underpass, and in many parts of the world the conviction is established truth today.”

Over one hundred and seventy pages later, the chain of cause and effect sundered - to his own satisfaction and, presumably, that of his masters – Manchester returns to the itch sensible only to the conspirators themselves. Yes, it’s that damn “entrance at the front of the head” described by Perry. With the latter out of the picture, the messenger gets both barrels:

pp.493-4: “A certain amount of distortion was inevitable. Erratic individuals are eager to credit the incredible. A century after Lincoln's death his assassination is still being laid at the door of a member of his Cabinet, and years after Kennedy's death there would be those who would reject any information which did not fit their preconceived theories about the crime. These people did not want facts; they merely wanted to feed their own ravaged emotions. But that Friday stable persons were being misled, too. The erratic performance of the Associated Press was responsible for much of the confusion. The AP was an American institution. Deservedly, it was regarded as a pillar of accuracy. When it followed its twelve-bell confirmation of the assassination with the report that an unnamed Secret Service man had been killed and added cryptically that 'no other information was immediately available', Bill Greer's wife, in suburban Washington, believed the worst. She knew that Bill always drove the Lincoln, and although a denial of the rumour from the Treasury Department was on the printer two hours later, she assumed throughout the flight that her husband was dead.

There were other lapses during the afternoon. Most were inconsequential. Over an hour after 26000's departure from Love Field, NCB [sic] was broadcasting that 'LBJ is remaining in Dallas'. The flash that a red-shirted man with black curly hair had been arrested 'in the Riverside section of Fort Worth in the shooting of a Dallas policeman' was quickly forgotten when the truth about Oswald began to pour in an hour later. An entirely inaccurate story of how the President's parents had learned of his death from a Hyannis Port workman scarcely mattered; neither did a description of 'the President...struck in the right temple by the bullet' or of the weapon as a 'German Mauser'. But one account was to cause real mischief later. The AP flatly declared that Kennedy had been shot 'in the front of the head'. It was this report, put out scarcely an hour after the President had been pronounced dead, which became the chief source for the conviction of millions that all subsequent investigations of the tragedy were fraudulent.”

The AP reporter responsible was almost certainly Jack Bell. Why Manchester's coyness about identifying him? After all, it was hardly as if he was unaware of Bell's presence at Parkland that afternoon (9). Partly, I suspect, because named men can answer back. But a more important reason was surely to preserve consistency: In stripping the entrance wound in the front of the head of both specific source and identified transmitter, Manchester sought to deny it legitimacy. It was, we were to be persuaded, just one more emanation, ephemeral and weightless, arising from the miasma of confusion that was Dallas on 22 November 1963 (10).

(1) In the USA, inLook magazine in four instalments, running from January to March 1967: 24 January, pp.36-50; 7 February, pp.40-56; 21 February, pp.42-58; 7 March, pp.50-66.

For background on the very public row between the Kennedys and Manchester, see:

Lawrence Van Gelder. The Untold Story: Why The Kennedys Lost the Book Battle (NY: Award Books, 1967).

Arnold Bennett. Jackie, Bobby, and Manchester (NY: Bee Line Books, 1967).

John Corry. The Manchester Affair (NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1967).

DeLloyd J. Guth and David R. Wrone offer a very useful section, entitled Manchester v. Kennedys Book, pp. 197-204, in The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical & Legal Bibliography, 1963-1979 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980).

(2) The Death of a President was first published in book form by Harper & Row, an old CIA friend.

(3) William Manchester. The Death of a President: November 20-November 25, 1963 (London: Pan Books Ltd., 1968), p.719.

(4) Ibid., p.20.

(5) Ibid., p.21.

(6) Ibid., p.397-402.

(7) Ibid., p.400.

(8) Ibid, p.401.

(9) Ibid., p.318-9.

(10) A good rejoinder to this nonsense is to be found in Mordecai Brienberg’s “The Riddle of Dallas,” The Spectator, 6 March 1964, pp.305-306: “It might be argued in defence of the investigating agencies that in the atmosphere of excitement that followed Kennedy’s assassination contradictions and imprecisions were due to ‘honest’ confusion. Granted that confusion existed, why then should the officials be continuously certain of one thing, Oswald’s guilt? Why is Oswald’s presumed guilt the constant in this sea of incomplete and conflicting evidence?”

Follow this link for the text of the whole article: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...mp;hl=Brienberg

Amid the widespread conspiratorialist delight at finding confirmation of what much of the US electronic media had reported at the time...

With regard to the entrance wound “in the front of the head” described by Perry, the print media handling of the story was very different. Inspection reveals the fix to have gone in early. Consider the the report on the Perry-Clark press conference, attributed to Richard Dudman, which appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, City edition, on Saturday, 23 November.

Here we find all mention of the entrance wound “in the front of the head” obliterated. Note, however, the tell-tale opening line of the relevant paragraph. It begs the very obvious question, why, if neither Perry or Clark had made any reference to any such wound in the course of the press conference, was it necessary to deny they had done so? The question, happily, is rhetorical:

Two Wounds Mentioned

“Physicians who attended the President at Parkland hospital said nothing about injuries to the President’s face. They mentioned only two wounds – a bullet hole in the front, below the Adam’s apple, and a massive wound on the right side of the back of the head.

Richard Dudman, “Man Charged With Killing Kennedy,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Saturday, 23 November 1963, p.2.

This was no one-shot aberration for Dudman. His best-known piece on the assassination, “Commentary of an Eyewitness,” which appeared in the New Republic’s edition dated 21 December 1963 (p.18) also consigned the entrance wound "in the front of the head” to historical oblivion (1).

(1) Available on line from The New Republic’s archives: http://www.tnr.com/arch/hs/

“As the official solution to Dallas was being assembled over the first weekend after the assassination, one major snag required immediate attention. An inconvenient obstacle to Katzenbach’s November 24 imperative that the public be satisfied that Dallas was the act of a lone assassin was the fast-breaking news stories. The one that captured the most national attention was the televised news conference with Drs. Malcolm Perry and Kemp Clark at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital that took place several hours after Kennedy was pronounced dead,”

Gerald D. McKnight. Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why (University of Kansas Press, 2005), p.166.

It emerged, ostensibly, from the LBJ presidential library, in 1976 (1), and was received by pro-conspiratorialists like manna from heaven. It is not hard to see why. The hitherto elusive transcript, running to nine pages, of the first press conference conducted by Drs. Perry and Clark (2) – the former the attending surgeon responsible for the tracheotomy, the latter Parkland’s chief neurosurgeon - offered first-hand, expert evidence that the anterior, non-fatal throat wound was indeed a wound of entrance.

Question: Can you describe his neck wound?...

Perry: The neck wound, as visible on the patient, revealed a bullet hole almost in the mid-line (p.4).

Question: Which way was the bullet coming on the neck wound? At Him?

Perry: It appeared to be coming at him (p.5).

Question: Doctor, describe the entrance wound. You think from the front in the throat?

Perry: The wound appeared to be an entrance wound in the front of the throat; yes, that is correct (p.6).

Amid the widespread conspiratorialist delight at finding confirmation of what much of the US electronic media had reported at the time – and thus confirming their belief in one (or more) frontal shooter(s) - two inconvenient details were ignored and/or overlooked.

The first and least important of the pair concerned timing. The transcript bore the commencement time, near the head of its first page, of “3:16 P.M. CST.” That timing should have attracted scepticism from the outset because, according to Clark’s testimony before the Presidential Commission, the same first press conference had actually begun at least 45 minutes earlier at “approximately 2.30” (3); while Perry made offered an even earlier starting point, telling Specter that it “must have been within the hour” of the President’s death (4). The doctors, it turns out, were right: The transcript commencement time is at best a mistake, and at worst the product of intentional deceit. The utility of such an “apparent error”(5) to the conspirators is self-evident: It created doubt about the direct correlation between the press conference and the contemporaneous media reports of it, accounts which contained Perry’s repeated insistence that the wound in the front of Kennedy’s throat was one of entrance.

Photographic evidence corroborates the earlier start time offered by the Parkland doctors before the Warren Commission. In the unpaginated photographic section at the heart of Lifton’s Best Evidence, we find snap 14, capturing Clark and Perry – together with White House staff members Wayne Hawkes and “Chick” Reynolds (stenographer) – in the course of the first press conference above a caption-commentary that concluded: “Watch on Perry’s left hand indicates 2:18 P.M.” In the main body of Best Evidence’s text, though not in the Chronology at the book’s rear (6), Lifton was unable – or unwilling – to follow the logic of the evidence he had mustered. We need not be so timid.

The clincher, however, lies in the contemporaneous news reports. As Newcomb and Adams noted in Murder From Within’s fifth chapter, Parkland, citing among other sources, William Manchester’s Death of a President, the Associated Press was reporting Perry’s press conference remarks “just after two o’clock” (CST); and NBC, as confirmed in the company’s own log, no later than 2:36 (CST) (7).

So much, then, for the first, and least serious, of the pair of problems attending transcript 1327C. The second is much more fundamental in nature: It is not a true and accurate record of what Perry had to say. More specifically, it entirely misrepresents what Perry and Clark said at the press conference about the number and locations of the wounds.

According to 1327C, Perry and Clark described only two wounds, the entrance wound in the front of the throat (8), and “a large, gaping loss of tissue” (9) at “the back of his head” (10), “principally on his right side” (11). The questions attributed to the unnamed reporters present reinforces this two-wound scenario, for example, when one of them supposedly asked of Perry, following his pointing to this own throat to show where the bullet had entered, “Doctor, is it the assumption that it went through the head?” (12). So much for 1327C. Now let us turn to the contemporaneous news reports.

Here we find something very different. The Associated Press reported, shortly after 2 pm, CST, that ‘Dr. Perry said the entrance wound—which is the medical description—the entrance wound was in the front of the head’” (13); while WOR Radio, New York, quoted Perry to this effect at 2:43 pm, CST, (14). So, instead of just two wounds, the Parkland duo actually described three – there was, in addition to the entrance wound just below the Adam’s apple on the front of the throat, also an entrance wound “in the front of the head” (15). It is thus not merely a matter of altering a word or two, but, necessarily, considerable portions of transcript 1327C, including the questions attributed to the anonymous reporters.

The mistiming of the press conference’s commencement, together with the removal of the wound in the front of the head, are not the only examples of conspiratorial jiggery pokery with respect to 1327C. Visitors to Rex Bradford’s History Matters website may perhaps be surprised to find that the version of the transcript offered there comprises not nine pages, but ten. And what an interesting tenth page it is, too. It is blank except for an official-looking stamp purportedly representing the Office of the Chief of the U.S. Secret Service, and “1963 Nov 25 AM 11 40” (16). The addition of this tenth page and the stamp it bears is plainly intended to provide legitimacy to the fraudulent 1327C, by dating its production to near the time of the assassination.

An additional measure of the stamp’s legitimacy can be gauged from the failure of the Secret Service to furnish a copy to the Presidential Commission (17). The same organisation, of course, also failed to find a single newsreel or sound recording from among the many cameras and news organisations present in rooms 101-2 at the time of the press conference. This was particularly odd for according to one Dallas source, it was the Secret Service that rounded up as much of that footage as it could find (18).

(1) David Lifton. Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (NY: Signet, Nov 1992), pp.70-71: Cronkite’s narration in the CBS assassination four-parter, shown in June 1967, revealed the existence of a transcript. The script claimed the manuscript refuted claims that Perry had stated the throat wound was one of entry. For subsequent developments & further background on Lifton’s part in the emergence of 1327C, together with that of CBS researcher Roger Feinman, follow this link: http://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/the_critics/fei...Feinmanbio.html

(2) According to Perry’s comments to the Presidential Commission, another Parkland doctor, Baxter, entered the combined classrooms 101-2, the scene of the press conference, but did not participate (6WCH12).

(3) 6WCH20: 21 March 1964.

(4) 6WCH12: 25 March 1964.

(5) The phrase is from McAdam’s website, where the transcript of the press conference is offered with the correct timing, accompanied by the following explanation: “This transcript was typed by former JFK researcher Kathleen Cunningham and given to Barb Junkkarinen in late 1994. It is posted here courtesy of Barb Junkkarinen. An apparent error regarding the time of the news conference has been corrected in the version published above.” The new commencement time of the press conference is held to have been “2:16 P.M. CST.”

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/press.htm

(6) Lifton follows the erroneous official timing of 3:16 pm in the main text - see p.71 (“shortly after 3 pm”) in the Signet paperback, first edition, 1992 – but follows the evidence in the Chronology at the book’s rear (p.828: 2:20 approx).

(7) Fred T. Newcomb & Perry Adams. Murder From Within (Santa Barbara: Probe, 1974), p.153 n54, citing NBC Log, Nov. 22, 1963, p. 8, 2:36 p.m., CST.

Sylvia Meagher, by contrast, times the NBC report to 2:40 (CST) – see Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities and The Report (NY: Vintage Books, June 1992 reprint), pp.153-4: “…the edited transcript of television broadcasts from November 22 to 26, 1963, issued by NBC nearly two years after the Warren Report in the book Seventy Hours and Thirty Minutes*…contains a telephone report from NBC newsman Robert MacNeil at about 2:40pm Dallas time on November 22: ‘Dr. Malcolm Perry reported that the President arrived at Parkland Hospital in critical condition with neck and head injuries…A bullet struck him in the front as he faced the assailant…’” [*NBC News, Seventy Hours and Thirty Minutes (NY: Random House, 1966).]

(8) According to 1327C, Perry stated there were just two wounds on p.1.

(9) Ibid., Clark, p.5.

(10) Ibid., Clark, p.3.

(11) Ibid, Clark, p.4.

(12) Ibid., p.4.

(13) Fred T. Newcomb and Perry Adams, “Did Someone Alter the Medical Evidence?,” Skeptic, Issue No. 9, September/October 1975, pages 24 ff:

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/issues_and_ev...perry_text.html

See also Vince Palamara’s The Earliest Reports (The Medical Evidence), excepted from JFK: The Medical Evidence (1998), entry 2b:

http://www.jfk-assassination.net/palamara/excerpt_book2.html

(14) Fred T. Newcomb & Perry Adams. Murder From Within (Santa Barbara: Probe, 1974), p.154. WOR Radio: Predominantly talk station: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOR_(AM)

(15) This is very close to the location offered by James Chaney, the Dallas police motorcycle outrider, who insisted in interviews given to reporters immediately after the event, that Kennedy had been hit “in the face.” (See Anthony Summers’ The Kennedy Conspiracy (London: Sphere, 1992), p.23 – “when the second shot came, I looked back in time to see the President struck in the face by the second bullet” – citing, p.543, an “unidentified film interview in police station and taped interview for KLIF, Dallas, on record ‘The Fateful Hours,’ Capitol Records.”)

(16) http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk...et/contents.htm

(17) David Lifton. Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (NY: Signet, Nov 1992), p.70: “During the Warren Commission investigation, Arlen Specter requested the Secret Service to obtain videotapes and transcripts of the Parkland press conference. Secret Service Chief James Rowley reported back that after reviewing the material at all the Dallas radio and TV stations, as well as the records of NBC, ABC, and CBS in New York City, ‘no video tape or transcript could be found of a television interview with Doctor Malcolm Perry.” If only he had looked in his own in-tray.

(18) David Lifton. Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (NY: Signet, Nov 1992), p.72, footnote: “Although Secret Service Chief James Rowley claimed that he could locate no tape or transcript of the Parkland Memorial Hospital press conference, Marvin Garson, a researched assisting Mark Lane in preparing Rush to Judgment, was told Dallas television executive Joe Long, of radio station KLIF, that the original recordings had been seized by Secret Service agents.”

Goldwater's statement needs to be divided in two. "I never discussed nor advocated the use of nuclear weapons with Johnson or anyone else in authority." That is probably correct. Historians have not accused Goldwater of discussing the use of nuclear weapons with Johnson.

The second part of the statement "I supported a total conventional air, ground and sea war" is clearly false. You will find more information on Goldwater's views on the use of nuclear weapons in his Washington Post obituary:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/polit...goldwater30.htm

A germane contemporary account:

The Washington Daily News, 11 June 1964, p.39

GOP Lemming Season

By Richard Starnes

Barring an unexpected onset of sanity at San Francisco, the lemming wing of the GOP will prevail and the Republicans will nominate Sir Barry of Goldwater to lead them to disaster in November.

The mind reels at the desolate vistas thus laid open before it. Scrubbing up the image of Sir Barry will plainly be the order of business as soon as the final dirge is sung at the Cow Palace; and this is a task formidable enough to tax the skill of the most expert political resurrection men on earth.

Sir Barry’s intellect is not the most nimble of instruments, and one must anticipate that his retreats from previous positions will be accompanied by more pratfalls than have been witnessed since Sliding Billy Watson careened into his last bass drum.

Already, one can hear some wretched journalist from some left-wing blatt asking: “Please, sir, just what is your position on selling the TVA? On using atomic bombs as weed killers in Viet Nam? On repudiating the Louisiana Purchase? Abolishing the income tax? School prayer? UN? Civil Rights? Anything?”

Questions of this nature are more or less germane to the perpetuation of the Republic, and Sir Barry must contrive to answer them. His replies, moreover, will have to square with what he has uttered heretofore, no small task, and he must try to conduct his strategic retreats without prompting John Birchers and other such dismal filberts to arraign him as a commysmp. And, of course, the matter of rearranging the features of the candidate must not be so transparently cynical that enlightened Republicans gag at it.

Sir Barry’s appeal must be broadened beyond the spectrum of Republican philosophy dominated by the hirsute viragoes in ankle-high sneakers, and chinless old boys in leather puttees and overseas caps. Doing it without revealing the chameleon syndrome is a job to strain the powers of a more agile wit than is here being discussed.

What, for example, does he really think about using atomic weapons in Southeast Asia? He was, unfortunately, misquoted in early accounts of his recent television gaffe on the subject, but the fact remains that he did allude to the possible use of nuclear weapons, and it wasn’t the first time. If he didn’t mean to hold out a tantalizing bait to the hard-liners, why mention it at all? Sir Barry has a record of brandishing atomic weapons that is enough to make any thoughtful person blanch at the idea of giving him custody of the push-button for four years.

On Nov. 15, 1961, for example, the Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying that low-yield nuclear devices could have been used in Laos “to defoliate the rain forests.” On May 20, 1963, Newsweek had him saying: “I’d drop a low-yield atomic bomb on the Chinese supply lines in North Viet Nam, or maybe shell ‘em with the Seventh Fleet.”

He has also been quoted within the past 12 months as advocating that NATO commanders be authorized to use tactical nuclear weapons on their own initiative.

There is, indeed, scarcely a subject at issue in mid-century America that Sir Barry has not hip-shot to death with a drum-fire of glib solutions. Reading his record on the UN, for example, it is difficult to draw any conclusions but that deep down inside where the real Sen. Goldwater broods and where the problems are easy and solutions fall off the vines, he believes the UN to be “unworkable” and would like to get the United States out of it.

Similarly, on the recognition of Russia: “I have always favored withdrawing recognition from Russia” (Sept. 2, 1963) but (Jan. 5, 1964), “There would be some qualifications on that. I would use the effort as a bargaining effort with the Soviet Union to try to get some things accomplished…”