David Andrews

Even at close-quarters, a head shot is hard to make due to pistol recoil - plus in a crowd, it could miss and hit another head. Ruby also may not have fired a pistol to actually try to hit a person in years. We saw that, even with all the collusion available, Ruby could not get off more than one shot before being grabbed. It was easier to palm the gun until Oswald passed, then move in with the gun still held close to Ruby's torso, like a quarterback carrying a football. Is it really any harder David, if the gun was held directly at someones head? But even if correct Ruby could have shot Oswald in the heart or at least the chest. The point is that Ruby didn't shoot like a hitman or like someone being directed on how to carry out a "hit" from the mafia. Just a stray thought really. Ruby fully looks like a guy who knows his best chance to shoot a man that he can perhaps hit only once in a pressing crowd. Pistol shots to the head usually occur under more private circumstances. (Giancana.)

Even at close-quarters, a head shot is hard to make due to pistol recoil - plus in a crowd, it could miss and hit another head. Ruby also may not have fired a pistol to actually try to hit a person in years. We saw that, even with all the collusion available, Ruby could not get off more than one shot before being grabbed. It was easier to palm the gun until Oswald passed, then move in with the gun still held close to Ruby's torso, like a quarterback carrying a football.

John - Sure, and it's the Roosevelt-Taft years, the last of the Republican domination since the Civil War, that opened the Caribbean for corporate domination by United Fruit, big sugar, et al. Business-military imperialism is the legacy of the post-Civil War Republican-corporate cooperation. I was just trying to take the imperialist connections you make back a bit into the patterns that US government fell into in the rise of industry and the military after the Civil War, and their connections to the Republican domination.

A lot can be traced back to the Republican domination of the White House between Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction and the Wilson admin. Grant and Sheridan were on top even before Grant was Prez, and whenever there was a calamity that threatened capital - such as the Pullman strike of 1894, or the Black Hills gold rush/Custer's Last Stand and the following Indian persecution - their Joynny-on-the-spot enforcer was their old Civil War crony Gen. Phil Sheridan. Meanwhile, Southern voting cooperation was gained by throwing out de facto Reconstruction and abandoning Southern Blacks to the states' Jim Crow laws. Why should anything be different after this 30-odd years' start of a solid bloc of business and military? Creation of the Fed on Jekyll Island under Wilson, coupled with WW's secret committment and public lies about the US entering WW I, only strengthened the military-industry-banking nexus, as did weapons improvements. Note that Wilson was the first in a long Democratic Party tradition of plucking from obscurity some quasi-liberal quasi-intellectual, re-creating him as a savior figure, then letting his secret conservatism and business-friendly policies bloom. Throw Zbig B.'s anti-Soviet, Muslim-playing geopolitics into the mix, and you've got a certain former Illinois senator...

FPCC perhaps penetrated by KGB as well as CIA? Are there any connections between FPCC and other Oswald-like doublers, such as Richard Case Nagell?

People wanting more excellent background on Rockefeller missionary activities and the Unitarian church would do well to read "Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil" by Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett. If this harrowing book, which was very nearly suppressed and pulped, has already been mentioned here - then I second the nomination. Kennedy biographers have mentioned the lilting sneer that the mention of Nelson Rockefeller's elicited from JFK in the political arena of c. 1960 [which I must paraphrase]: "Where was Nels during the war? I saw the whole Pacific Theater, but not a sight of Nels..." Colby and Dennett record Nels's profiteering days in the Amazon for us.

For the same reasons that Bill Maher will host 9/11 critics on his HBO show, then ridicule them and encourage the audience to heckle them. The same is coming for the JFK people, no matter what the percentage polls on public opinon say for either issue.

Peter, I've made my way through the introduction, and caught a few ideas I've had and shared in conversation, plus a couple things I didn't know. But I'm dumbfounded at the optimistic tone used to address the Clintons.

On another page, Bill Kelly recently posted the lyrics to "I'm your Puppet," by Marvin Gaye with Tammi Terrell. If I may, I'd like to post these lyrics to Bob Dylan's song, "Dignity." They started running through my head while reading this thread; indeed, they remind me of all our research efforts. If this is out of line, please delete post. But everybody should hear this song once in their lives: Fat man lookin' in a blade of steel Thin man lookin' at his last meal Hollow man lookin' in a cottonfield For dignity Wise man lookin' in a blade of grass Young man lookin' in the shadows that pass Poor man lookin' through painted glass For dignity Somebody got murdered on New Year's Eve Somebody said dignity was the first to leave I went into the city, went into the town Went into the land of the midnight sun Searchin' high, searchin' low Searchin' everywhere I know Askin' the cops wherever I go Have you seen dignity? Blind man breakin' out of a trance Puts both his hands in the pockets of chance Hopin' to find one circumstance Of dignity I went to the wedding of Mary-lou She said I don't want nobody to see me talkin' to you Said she could get killed if she told me what she knew About dignity I went down where the vultures feed I would've got deeper, but there wasn't any need Heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men Wasn't any difference to me Chilly wind sharp as a razor blade House on fire, debts unpaid Gonna stand at the window, gonna ask the maid Have you seen dignity? Drinkin' man listens to the voice he hears In a crowded room full of covered up mirrors Lookin' into the lost forgotten years For dignity Met Prince Phillip at the home of the blues Said he'd give me information if his name wasn't used He wanted money up front, said he was abused By dignity Footprints runnin' cross the sliver sand Steps goin' down into tattoo land I met the sons of darkness and the sons of light In the bordertowns of despair Got no place to fade, got no coat I'm on the rollin' river in a jerkin' boat Tryin' to read a note somebody wrote About dignity Sick man lookin' for the doctor's cure Lookin' at his hands for the lines that were And into every masterpiece of literature for dignity Englishman stranded in the blackheart wind Combin' his hair back, his future looks thin Bites the bullet and he looks within For dignity Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed Dignity never been photographed I went into the red, went into the black Into the valley of dry bone dreams So many roads, so much at stake So many dead ends, I'm at the edge of the lake Sometimes I wonder what it's gonna take To find dignity.

For a cop unconnected to conspiracy, Tippitt did an awful lot of suspicious driving, parking, and telephone calling during a brief time coinciding with a presidential assassination. Or even for a cop with a mistress and her jealous husband on his mind. Was he doing a George C. Scott bit from "Dr. Strangelove" at the record store? "I can't talk now, baby - my president needs me!"

It seems doubtful there would be any impetus coming from the Kennedy family. In fact, they seem to have done everything possible to tow the party line in public, apparently to try to keep themselves in the game for another run at the White House. There would have to be some unique charge or reason for re-opening the case that nobody even at the highest levels could refute. Well, I put the Kennedys in to qualify the condition of "possibly." Really, there will have to be some unforseeable motivating event, and next time it won't be an award-winning director teaming up with a deep-pockets foreign producer and a liberal Hollywood star to produce a provocative docudrama. So that limits our possibilities, and I wanted to cover the few we have.

Well, there's a signature on the card, and that belongs to a person. BK There's a signature on an Alek Hidell card that Richard Case Nagell later suggested was made by him. Nagell insinuated that he used the Hidell alias along with Oswald at one time. (See Dick Russell.) So what if Shaw admitted, in a moment of weakness, to using a circulating alias, forgetting that it had been used by others?

I predict that any new government investigation will be brought on not by calls for truth, even from the presidential desk. There will have to be some prompting or motivating event coming from outside the research community, but possibly from the ranks of the conspirator community or the Kennedy family. The probability was indicated when Oliver Stone's "JFK" prompted the AARB.

Is Clem Bertrand one of those circulating aliases, like Maurice Bishop and Alek Hidell? Can it be traced to any person or incident other than Clay Shaw's police booking and the Dean Andrews call?

Shreveport, with its industrial port and expensive bridges, was "on the teat" (as the Bible puts it) of corrupt political organizations since the late 19th century, and in the 1930s housed a Standard Oil-friendly clique that sought to bring down the Huey Long gang that had supplanted them. Long referred to Louisiana's Standard Oil boosters as fascists. See Richard White, "Kingfish," 2006.

What you can expect from pursuing decency in this, our world.

Come back, Tosh!

Are people who insist that JFK was hit solely or chiefly due to national security concern over UFOs akin to people who maintain that organized crime did it alone, rather than Cuban exiles, intel ops...several allied groups with deep and earthly reasons?

Very useful set of pictures. and I really enjoyed the MacNeil interview - Thanks As MacNeil's recollection of NBC's Fort Worth film processing reminds us, the Z-film and the body were both spirited out of town.

Yes, clothing readily moves in amounts up to an inch due to casual body movement. The term of art in clothing design is "normal ease." But the SBT requires 3 INCHES of near tandem shirt/jacket movement, or "gross ease." One inch does not equal three inches. It just doesn't. That such a large segment of the "critical research community" insists on pretending that it does leaves me forever amazed. The Jefferies film was taken 90 seconds before the shooting. The jacket dropped in those 90 seconds... If you've worn a dress shirt, undergarment,* suit coat, and tie, you know in your heart that it takes a couple inches of fabric rise above the belt line to produce the 1" (aprx. - I was being conservative) creased uprise behind the suit collar that I described. So there is more than an inch of play in the fabric, and if you've dressed for the public you've fretted over this stuff the way women used to fret over stocking seams. JFK went through several earlier limo stops in which he made some more animated motions than we see in film shot closer to Dealey, and he's animated enough in the later footage to produce bunching as we see in the Jeffries film. I'm violating high rules of masculine stoicism to argue this, but this I do for truth. *"undergarment" also denotes the corset-like support JFK wore. The Ace bandages wrapped around hip and thigh can't have kept his shirt Hathaway-stable, either.

The holes in the clothes clearly show this. One does not have to look at a single photograph to figure out that the jacket was "bunched up" at the moment JFK was shot in the back. Bullet hole in the back of the shirt: 4" below the bottom of the shirt collar. Bullet hole in the back of the jacket: 4 & 1/8" below the bottom of the jacket collar. The jacket was "bunched up" 1/8" -- obviously. The SBT requires about 3" of JFK's shirt and jacket to have elevated in near-tandem. 1/8" does not equal 3". These obvious facts appear to have eluded a sizable segment of the "critical research community." The claim that JFK's shirt and jacket were elevated in a manner consistent with the SBT is debunked by the photographic evidence, which shows JFK's jacket dropping in Dealey Plaza. http://occamsrazorjfk.net/ Not forgetting that the back of a man's dress shirt is frequently bloused out above the belt line for comfort, or just through normal wear stress. The backs of men's dress shirts frequently adhere to suit coats after sitting with back to upholstery. Suit coats and sport coats frequently bunch up in ordinary sitting - try shooting a documentary film sometime, with a slate of interviewees to film. You'll be having them all sit on their pulled-down coattails, too - a la Albert Brooks in the 1980s film comedy "Broadcast News." The Jeffries film shows a very familiar inch-high (aprx.) creased "hump" of fabric immediately behind JFK's shoulder line. Get a friend to ride in a convertable with one elbow above the door and see how easily it happens.

Perhaps people should be looking at the non-Fetzer/Costella offerings at Rich Della Rossa's jfkassassinationforum for further questions raised against non-alteration.

Paul - No axe to grind, but what is the source for this? Thanks, David

Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:06:28 -0500 From: jfetzer@d.umn.edu David and David, Jack and John, I especially need your opinions on this issue. Am I right or wrong that the medical evidence, especially of the massive blow-out to the back of the head, is inconsistent with the Zapruder, which shows a massive blow-out to the right- front side of the head? < < Assuming that I'm one of the Davids cited, I believe you are right within the strict limits of the question quoted. The "flap" is inconsistent with the Parkland staff's testimonies. It is, though, consistent with disputed autopsy photos, and thus discrepancy makes it suspect. While the right rear of JFK's head is not exactly "mugging for the camera," as someone put it above, it is the part of JFK's head that, in the angling away of his face, is angled toward the camera. One would expect to see more than a lumpen "shadow" there, and also that the reported backspray onto the trunk and the motorcycle cop would be represented by more than a few of JFK's cowlick hairs out of place. Those few hairs that some researchers point to, however, do bolster medical testimony that the back of the head was "sprung open," with the rear skull in pieces under the hinging top rear scalp, as some readings of the available X-rays state. This may confuse the issue, or my reputation here, in several ways, but... Once while watching the stabilized Z-film on Youtube (I have also seen Z projected and on DVD), I paused the film to study the shadow on the right rear head. I decided that the image was best studied in other media, and clicked to exit and start a different clip. In the moment of darkness between clips in the small Youtube frame, I briefly saw an afterimage of the small shadow as a blotch on the screen just before the next clip started. I was not staring at the screen at this time - I had sat back briefly to sip my coffee between films. I'm wondering if some interface effect between the electronics and the eye produces an afterimage of an addition to the original image of the head. I'm wondering, too, if this effect can be repeated under technical study of the image on film or in digitization.

David, There are a dozen threads going on here discussing alterations, and refuting alteration allegations. I want to know, if the Zapruder film is what Tink Tompson and others say it is - an accuate portrayal of the murder - then what does it tell us? If it was altered, why was it altered? To hide something that it would have told us if it wasn't altered? This thread is working on the assumption that the film can be shown to be an accurate portrayal of the murder, and therefor, I want to know what it does show and tell? BK Sorry - To be more exact, the amount of "action" in the commonly seen Z-film tends to obscure answer to three of your questions: "Does it tell us which direction the bullet came from?" - Not with the rotoscopy and edits applied to the head wounds. "Does it tell us how many shots there were and what damage they did?" - Not with the abovenamed effects, nor with the freeway sign, or the car motion edit. "Does it tell us Moorman was not in the street when she took the photo, and that witness testimony is not always accurate?" - Not with the altered and non-reactive background figures. So - the film obscures more than it answers, and the answers to these three questions have to be No, though another film of the assassination might afford different answers. So David, you believe the film has been altered. Now when was this done and who did it? Was it done before the copies were made or after the copies were made? Thanks, BK Bill - I don't want to challenge a strictly established rubric. I see what you're doing and why it should be logically and rhetorically inviolate in order to produce useful results. When I made my first post I missed it, as I had limited internet time, and I was brief because I didn't want to revive the recent "Moorman in the street" debate within your topic. I have not worked out the conflicting accounts of Z-film handling and travel of the negs and prints on that weekend or after. Nor have I reconciled all of the alterations that different researchers have noted. I have just seen enough that differs from eyewitness accounts and from responsible critical perceptions among those of several researchers to believe that there has been alteration when i watch the film. You may recall a thread that I started on the direction of the frontal head shot, wherein I later deleted the main post and apologized for dragging readers through hypotheses gained by watching the headshot repeatedly and trying to gauge which part of the underpass JFK face was turned toward at the strike moment. That was a waste of a late night, and the conclusion I had next morning was that the rotoscopy and editing done on the head wound confused perception of the lateral placement of the shooter. So, yes, the amount of post-filming "action" I see in the common Z-film version has colored my logic in the case of your topic. But I don't think I'm wrong. I do think, emphatically, that yours is a great line of inquiry, and I'm looking forward to seeing it develop with researchers' contributions. I'll follow these, and if I can add something that I feel is a contribution within the rubric, I will. So David, you think you might be a subject of my thesis that the more you look at a photo or film the more anomalies you see? And if your suspicions are correct, you don't know whether the Z filim was altered before or after the three copies were made? As for Mooreman, did she misremember stepping into the street or when she stepped into the street, or did they fabricate the Z film in order to hide that fact and other aspects of conspiracy the film must have held before they altered it? Or do we have yet another shellshocked, unstable witness (a cop of that era would probably say 'dizzy broad') who was one of the closest people to unexpectedly see the president get his head blown off? If I have to chose between massive technical alteration of the film or dizzy broad, I'll go with the dizzy broad effect. BK I *believe* there is enough visible evidence of alteration, and that the viewer can see and perceptually sense some of the discontinuiies even before he reads others' postulations of individual incidents. Hill and Moorman are not the only witnesses suggesting alteration. The testimony and reports on the head wounds by the Parkland doctors carry a lot of weight when compared to what we see, such as absence of back splatter, the too-quick vanishing of the front blood "halo," and the "flap" suggesting a front exit wound. Jackie Kennedy's memories may be clouded by confusion and trauma, but I wouldn't call her descriptions of the wounds the reflections of a "dizzy broad." Her recollections contradict the commonly seen Z-film. And what of that commonly seen film? We didn't commonly see it until the mid-1970s. We don't know what the Warren Commission saw, or what versions were available to other researchers, and shown to other observers, before the Z-film hit network TV. I can only attest that I saw Mark Lane host a presentation at Niagara University c. 1974, and that the print his researcher showed and lectured on was not different from the one that we all came to know from TV in that decade. I can postulate that this was the only version Lane ever saw, or that he accepted this version as accurate, but would I be right? The Z-film might have existed in other versions for other audiences and other occasions, including the occasion of the WC investigation. I *know,* however, that you came up with a very useful logical approach that many here can contribute to. (Please read my final edit of the post you quote.) Your other posts and responses in this thread have been useful amplifications. Please don't distract yourself with me until I post something that can do similar good work within the rubric you've created. I bring up my own deleted thread to show how alterations obscure understanding of direction and trajectory - and can color understanding of other useful approaches to the film. Mea culpa. I'm not that benighted every day, so don't write a thesis on me till I'm dead. Better to be written off temporarily than continue as a sideshow. We're all trying to contribute useful work here, and we can do that best by following the narrow logical field of your proposition, which quite properly stands apart from alteration questions. Let's apply ourselves to that apartness. I'm all for dropping alteration from this thread for the sake of logical purity.