Jon G. Tidd

Ollie, Here are some of my reasons: -- blur errors obvious to any observer -- unnatural, unexplainable movements within the limo -- failure to show the limo's turn onto Elm Street -- serious inconsistencies with witness statements -- inconsistencies with the extant Nix film as to Jackie, Clint Hill, and limo motion -- witnesses standing motionless like statues on Elm Street -- impossibly fast dissipation of blood spray as between Z-313 and Z-314 -- failure to show Mary Moorman standing in the street

Robert, just a question. If you believe the extant Z-film is a fake, why all the discussion here about Z-313?

Please excuse my ignorance, but who was the first person to assert that Oswald shot at Walker? Paul Trejo, I believe the answer to the question "Who created the BYP fakes?" is best sought by seeking who had possession of the Imperial Reflex at various key times in 1963. IMO, Marina by her own W.C. testimony did not take the three BYP. Oswald obviously didn't take the BYP. If the BYP were taken by the Imperial Reflex, and that's an "if", someone other than Oswald or Marina took the BYP with the Imperial Reflex. I have to nominate Ruth Paine as the someone. I don't believe Ruth or Michael were culpable in the killing of JFK. I do believe they knew right away Oswald had been set up; that the official story was going to be that Oswald did it; and that for their own well-being they needed to bolster this fiction. Call Ruth Paine a good, charitable, Christian lady if you wish. I believe she knows far more than she's ever revealed.

No one here knows how many shots were fired in DP. No one here knows how many wounds of entrance there were on JFK's body. No one here knows hardly any verifiable fact about the events in DP. The only verifiable facts of note are that JFK traveled through DP and was declared dead by Parkland physicians at about 1:00 p.m., November 22, 1963. One does best working with verifiable facts. Truth is, I don't care about opinion or conclusion. I care only about verifiable facts.

Hornsberger's out to lunch, in my opinion. If I had to bet, I'd bet he's never worked in an intelligence organization. Human intelligence organizations have four basic categories of individuals: agents, agent handlers, counterintelligence operatives, analysts. Oswald only could have been an agent. What qualifies one to be recruited as an agent? Answer: access to valuable, hidden information that some intelligence organization wants. Really wants. Did Oswald have such access? Clearly not. Not in Russia or anywhere else. He was worthless to any intelligence organization, except as a patsy.

Robert, do you believe the extant Z-film is an accurate record of events?

Wow. Mars got screwed because it lost its magnetic field. Why, I don't know. When Mars lost its magnetic field, solar wind stripped Mars of its atmosphere. More or less.

Ramon @ post #6: Not sure I agree with "no forces...". JFK's head, arms, torso, etc. were subject to gravitational force at all times; so was any bullet fired at JFK. JFK's head, etc. were also subject to forces produced by his body muscles. The limo was constantly changing direction, so there was a force exerted on JFK's "body parts" due to the change in direction. FWIW, I believe it's impossible to get a precise physical description of the events in Dallas. There are too many variables (inputs), too many assumptions. But thanks for your quantitative approach.

Who is Evan Thomas? And why is he so out to lunch? Hasn't he read Noguchi's autopsy report? Hasn't he studied the audio tapes? Hasn't he...I give up. The most interesting thing to me here is what happened to the three Kennedy brothers to survive WWII. JFK's killing has gotten major coverage. RFK's killing has gotten minor coverage. Teddy's actions on the island have gotten minimal coverage; really minimal. John-John was murdered. I'm not a fan of the Kennedys. Excepting John-John, they were flawed individuals. OK, they were killed because they were flawed, so that the assassinations could be covered up. I buy this. How sad.

Many individuals had reason to want JFK out of the way. This fact is overlooked when focusing on one particular individual or group. It should not be overlooked. A skilled intelligence professional in 1963 would have seized upon this fact. This fact predictably has led to hundreds, if not thousands, of who-dun-it books. Books that in sum lead to zero. I think JFK researchers always have overlooked [a] how vulnerable a target JFK was, and how many wanted him dead. A skilled intelligence professional in 1963 would have seen all this clearly. Bottom line: Fine-grained analyses of the JFK assassination are interesting and valuable. But in toto, they lead nowhere. The important question is why do they lead nowhere. I believe both this question and its answer were obvious to the plotters in 1963. The plotters didn't want any trails leading back to them. That's why the CIA-did-it or LBJ-did-it are no more than a distraction. The plotters' whole plan, IMO, was to make LBJ and the CIA nervous and to give them a way out: Oswald. IMO, what's needed today is not small-scale analysis but big-scale analysis.

Paul Trejo, In your opinion, were Marina's husband and Ruth Paine on good terms? Did they get along? Did they have conversations? Did they respect one another? Shifting gears, I assume you believe Marina's husband bought a rifle from Klein's. If you do, do you dismiss all the facts that suggest he did not? In your opinion, was the shot fired at Walker intended to kill him? If so, how seriously, do you think, did the shooter want to kill Walker? If Marina's husband buried his rifle in the ground after shooting at Walker, where do you think he buried it? In addition, where, when, and how did Marina's husband clean the rifle (assuming he did clean the rifle) after the Walker shooting?

Fast forward to 2015. In City X, a big city in the U.S., there is a Muslim temple attended regularly by 200 believers in Islam. Many of the believers speak one or more dialects of Arabic. Truth is, if I were the FBI Chief, I'd want to recruit some member of the temple to provide me with information. If I were DCI, I'd like to do the same. Lee hangs around with some of the temple members and speaks a dialect of Arabic. Lee's wife, who is from Saudi Arabia, speaks the same dialect. Ruth befriends Lee's wife, claiming she wants to learn to speak Arabic. If I were the FBI chief, would I be interested in Lee, his wife, and Ruth? You betcha. If I were DCI, would I have the same interest? You betcha. The President of the United States travels to City X and is assassinated there. Lee is charged with the murder. His wife and Ruth are the main witnesses against him in a post-mortem investigation. Anything odd here?

David Andrews, I have no inside information or hearsay on that score. I do believe an intelligence service had a hand in planning and carrying out both the assassination and the cover-up. The assassination was a remarkable feat, given that JFK, a moving target from any perspective, was shot from a distance with relatively little collateral damage or wasted effort. The set-up of Oswald is apparent to many JFK researchers, but it too was a remarkable feat. How did the plotters know to get Oswald a job in the TSBD, as another commenter has observed. Maybe that was just serrendipitous good luck for the plotters. The cover -up, which continues to this day, is also remarkable. Who is still being protected by the cover-up? Answer that question, and you've solved the case. I see no reason why the U.S. Government today has any reason to cover up for actions taken in 1963 by any individual who is dead and buried.

I agree with Martin Blank. I especially agree with the characterization of those responsible for the murder as "cockroaches". The most interesting thing to me about the cockroaches is not that LBJ had a hand in the cover-up; he had reasons unconnected to the assassination not to want a full, sweeping investigation. So did the Kennedy family. The cockroaches, I believe, could foresee all of this falling naturally into place. Could foresee Bobby Kennedy playing his own worst enemy, etc. The most interesting thing to me about the cockroaches is that they got to the highest levels of the U.S. military. That took detailed doing. Not by persons who came across as lowly cockroaches, but as persons who had inside information, inside access, and sway.

The article to which you link, Douglas, is written by Philip Nelson, an LBJ-did-it-author. I believe Nelson is largely correct about LBJ's reason(s) for deciding not to run for president in 1968. LBJ was in a terrible position. The anti-war Left hated him. I can't imagine what would have gone down in Chicago if LBJ had been running for president. The pro-war citizens were fed up with him as well. That's why he almost lost New Hampshire to Gene McCarthy. Tet proved to the American people the war wasn't going to be won anytime soon. LBJ had no other cards to play. I believe Nelson is wrong about E. Howard Hunt's "deathbed confession." Hunt was a professional xxxx; that's how he made his living. Nothing a professional xxxx says is trustworthy. Edit: "xxxx" is short for a person who prevaricates.

I agree with Paul Brancato.

I think David Talbot would have better spent his time investigating and writing about the U.S. military's role in covering up the assassination facts. Allen Dulles's performance was pro forma for a former CIA director. Job 1 was protecting the CIA from criticism and scrutiny. Any former director, then or now, would do the same thing. As for Dulles's having a hand in JFK's murder, show me what you've got in terms of facts. Not innuendo, not supposition, hard facts. Here are some hard facts about the military. JFK's remains were in control of the military from the time they were delivered to AF-1 to the time they left the military's control. David Lifton has done a brilliant, if disputed, job describing the military's role in altering JFK's body. Those who criticize DSL's argument fall into three camps: [1] the body wasn't altered, [2] the body could not have been altered, [3] the body was altered. I adhere to [3], but I admit I could be wrong. As I've written elsewhere here, my view is that either there was no conspiracy or there was unbridled conspiracy. Anything in-between is wishy-washy.

DVP, Thanks. You write: "you'd have to believe that the conspirators/henchmen/assassins/plotters were able to do something quite remarkable --- They were able to make Lee Harvey Oswald HIMSELF (via his own actions and the lies he told on Nov. 21 and 22) act like a lone assassin." I agree, and many pro-conspirators here disagree. But you put your finger on it, IMO. I believe "Oswald" (Marina's husband) was a walking, talking patsy. I believe he set himself up unwittingly, as a Marxist sympathizer. Many CT-ers believe Oswald was set up by the CIA. Oswald IMO was self-actuated. He was his own person. You believe Oswald killed JFK. I believe an intelligence service spotted him (that's a key event) and saw it could make use of him. Let me know if you want to know about "spotting" and "assessing".

In my opinion, George DeM was not an agent handler; nor were the Paines. To become an army agent handler c. 1970, my vintage, one got filtered and trained. One was determined by background investigation to be utterly reliable. I won't talk here about myself but rather about a long-ago friend and colleague. "Joe", whom I met in the summer of 1970, was a graduate of an Ivy League university and a first-string player on its football team. Joe was a big guy with a good sense of humor. I played tennis doubles with him in the summer of 1970. He picked up tennis quickly. We were both 2LTs, army Military Intelligence. Assigned to Fort Meyer, Virginia, while attending DLIEC (language school), which for us began in September 1970. I studied a southeast Asian language; Joe studied a european language. Joe and I reconnected, with some other army officer friends, at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in the late spring-early summer of 1971. I was in the army counter-intelligence course. Joe had finished airborne training at Fort Benning and was just into the army agent handler's course. Joe was not my best friend, just an individual who was interesting; his dad had been a high-ranking naval officer; Joe was trained in classics. Long story short. I wind up in Viet Nam. Joe winds up in Europe, fighting the cold war. What's the point? It's this: to handle agents, which is what Joe and I did, and we were both well-educated individuals who passed background checks, one had to be reliable without question, able to learn anything, willing to do anything, face any enemy. The Paines never ever went through this screening; never ever had such training. Neither did GeoDm. Neither did Marina's husband.

David Von Pein, A question. Just a question. Assume arguendo there was a high-level conspiracy to kill JFK. I know you don't believe this, but you're a reasonable person, and I don't think it's unreasonable to ask you, for sake of argument only, to make an assumption you otherwise reject. If you're willing to make this assumption strictly for the purpose I'm asking you to make it, I ask for your opinion. Given the assumption, do you think the conspirators (or some subset thereof) would stop at anything to cover their tracks and obscure the facts of the assassination? I don't think they would, but I'd like to know what you think. I'm not a conspiracy-lite guy, BTW. For me, it was unbridled conspiracy or no conspiracy.

Paul Trejo, You are correct about the CIA, in my opinion. The CIA, I believe, had no role in JFK's murder. The CIA, I believe, has important information pertaining to the murder that it conceals to this day. IMO, few here want to know that information. I could be wrong. As for Ruth Paine, it's simple. Ruth steps forward today. Tells what she knows. The whole story. And consents to be questioned by knowledgable questioners such as DSL, James D., Greg Parker, DJ.

Robert Prudhomme, This diary of yours, about autopsy landmarks, goes to the heart of the matter. The photo you present is outrageous. It has been offered up many times. What does it tell a reasonable observer? Nothing. Yet it has been marched out out over 50 years as proving something. It proves nothing.

James Gordon, You assume the figure in the photo is that of JFK. On what do you base this assumption?

David Lifton, I'm inclined to believe the shooters deliberately shot JFK in the back in order to establish he was shot from behind. I admit that even if I'm correct about establishing there was a shot from behind, the back wound could have been caused post-mortem. I would not bet, however, the shooters' plan was to let the back wound be caused post-mortem. There was too much riding on a provable shot from behind. It's interesting to me that the back wound, however caused, is the only unambiguous wound of entrance.

Douglas Caddy, Your post here reminds me that the cold war, the prospect of world destruction through nuclear war, changed markedly with JFK's assassination. In the late1950s and early 1960s, "On the Beach" prevailed. High school for me (1959-1963) was dominated by hormones, great sock hop music, high school athletics, and fear of nuclear war. During high school in small town Illinois 1959-1963, nuclear war was the remote threat. Heat, perfume, music were the ingredients at gym sock hops. After 1963, things changed. Music changed. Everything changed. Maybe because I went to the university. Mostly because the cold war morphed into James Bond.