Stu Wexler

I am confused why someone could not simply have a change of heart from what they did decades before. Larry and I wrote about just such a person in our MLK assassination book: Tommy Tarrants. Went from self-described top terrorist for the White Knights of the KKK to an anti-racist evangelist.

A key question is did Veciana stike you as being evasive or mendacious re: his personal account of the JFK assassination (meeting Oswald)?

Stu

https://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Other-Means-Unfinished/dp/1541758544

His specialty is the Civil War which makes the comment that all of his named assassins--  including JOHN WILKES BOOTH-- that much more galling. Booth was part of a conspiracy with at least 7 other people that almost decapitated the executive branch. And there are some scholars who wonder if it was backed by the Confederate Secret Service. I never know how that one gets by--  all the way to Allen Dulles.

The thing that I have always wanted explicated vis a vis Jones Harris were reports, in more than one book I've read (I think TMWKTM was one), that he favored a theory where the Japanese were somehow involved on November 22nd. I have never heard that clarified, justified, etc. and have never heard anyone else subscribe to the same theory. Wonder if anyone else knows more?

I would point out my students that debates about the greatest presidents often revolve around how said president handled fundamental challenges, crises and emergencies. The more daunting the challenge met the more credit goes to the POTUS. But I would also point out that that type of analysis, when *comparing* presidents, often intrinsically involves the same counterfactual question: "would someone else have done X if they had been president instead of [fill in the blank with FDR or Lincoln or Washington, etc.]"  We can try and deep dive into the counterfactual but it is often, at the end of the day, impossible to answer. With one exception. JFK. Facing a existential crisis for the entire world, JFK performed in ways we can safely say almost no other person would have done at the time. How can we say it? Because several people in the same room with him not only ran for president, but served as president (or VP) or was floated as a presidential candidate. And with the exception of maybe Stevenson and RFK -- who at times was also too hawkish for comfort-- every darn one of them expressed support for a response that we know would have led to nuclear war. JFK saved the world when many others of his stature would have ended it.

Stu

The reason I desperately want to see Lifton's work is, beyond some of the wild assertions he has made and did make the last few years, researchers I respect quite a bit who were "in the know" said the information he had on Oswald and Oswald's associations was possibly game changing. Apparently he even found very important nuggets within the original WC material, which is hard to imagine this late in the game. I hope we get to see it soon.

Something that Tony Summers heard when he was doing his work for Not In Your Lifetime--  a possible reason for covering up the photos, even if they showed Oswald, were the *other people* in the same photos.

Ben. I think you did a nice summary. And I have long been on the side of C2. My guess (look who bought/gave Sirhan the gun) is that he was protecting family. But I would absolutely say-- tell us what you *really* know and we will commute.

I don't know if people appreciate the courage he showed. He was one of the premiere forensic pathologists of his age. When every other  pathologist-- including close friends and mentors-- fell in line, he risked his reputation to keep the case alive, often openly challenging them. This was rare even beyond forensic pathology--  almost every expert in every relevant field, especially at that level of prestige, avoided this case as taboo or reflexively supported the official version. A huge loss but a life well lived.

The point made by Wagner is, to me, the best argument why Oswald had to be closer to some element of the DP  plotting than many want to acknowledgr. A complete unwitting dupe scenario would raise all sorts of issues as a far as risks to conspirators. But I do not have the same type of personal commitment to insisting on his absolute innocence as some others do. I am more open to direct involvement than 95% of CTs, although I favor a fake plot  wherein he was told to wait for a call in the lunch area, etc., while a "message" was sent to JFK, only to find out later that the plot was not as fake as he thought. But I admit there is some speculation there. I do think, building on Wagner's point, that the absolute key for researchers is to find out who was in a position to influence Oswald's actions in the month of Nov, 1963, who among said individuals had motive, means and opportunity re JFK, and then develop any evidence on said person(s). So I agree, in some ways, with Wagner. In fact, my choice for our biggest problem is a combo of the Chris Matthews, Gerald Posner argument that echoes some of his: I think we have to posit a conspiracy theory that accounts for the motorcade dispute developing to go past the TSBD and Oswald getting the job in the TSBD. [I have my answers, and they do not involve Ruth P being any kind of even quasi-witting conspirator.]

But I am CT based on physical evidence, and based on Oswald's and Ruby's background. So I would just offer as the "problem for LNs" a very broad argument, one that Tink Thompson gave in 67 in SSID. Why does this case become more bewildering, with more questions, when we tug on any major thread the more we look? Why is it that in every major aspect of this case, from medical evidence to Oswald's background/file handling, the Oswald-alone theory coheres less rather the more we look? To believe the pure LN theory I have to believe a bunch of odd or unique developments (like a jet effect or a neuromusclar spasm or that Oswald dodged photo surveillance by sheer happenstance in Mexico City, etc.) that are not nearly as instrumental or odd as if I posit some sort of CT. So for example: if you dig into LHO, you find out from multiple sources that he kind of liked or admired JFK. It is not impossible that somehow he had a sudden change of heart. But if we dig even further we find out that, in places like New Orleans, there are people in his orbit who absolutely despised JFK. Etc.

I have taught classes on the history of major crimes. I co-wrote a book with Larry Hancock which I believe solves the MLK case (the only critic of which is someone who said he could completely counter the book months before we even published it, misrepresented our discussion of James Earl Ray's motivations, failed to address 98% of the evidence we offered to the point that the names of our top suspects and witnesses are all but entirely ignored--  Martin Hay, ironically.**)  Yet no case-- absolutely none-- presents the kind of fundamental questions about everything from the validity of the fundamental evidence to the life history of the key suspects, as JFK. 

** Much more can and would he said if Jim D. would allow for counter-reviews or comments on his reviews. His policy on this allows for one-sided hatchet jobs. **

19 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

The problem with supposing Castro or the Cuban government did the JFKA is it makes no sense strategically. There was no reason to think the successor, LBJ, would be any improvement, and the risks if it was found traced back to Castro would have been catastrophic for Cuba. There is no way any non-insane Castro conspiracy would employ Oswald either as gunman or as patsy (given his communist associations baggage). And no way USSR would approve of it if they were asked, and if they weren’t would likely be catastrophic in ending Soviet relations with Cuba. That is, there is no logic in Castro deciding to kill JFK, unlike the reverse, plots to kill Castro which had rational logic and foreseeable advantages in US interests in such succeeding. The only way to put Castro into killing JFK is to assume individual madman insane or mass suicide revenge psychology, and there is no other sign Castro was insane, save only the one time he said he wanted the Russians to use nukes in Cuba against the US in retaliation to a U.S. attack, no matter the consequences. He told that to McNamara in later years who was horrified. Castro told McNamara if the roles were reversed he, McNamara, would have done the same thing (think nuclear tripwire deterrence missiles in West Germany against threat of conventional force Soviet invasion. Would US leaders have really refused to fire if such an invasion triggered that tripwire?) 

But except for that lone instance of Castro’s endorsement of the aptly named MAD logic which was central to US policymakers thinking, Castro was not ROGUE insane. 

My father, a liberal JFK supporter his whole life, switched from a government to Castro-did-it theory once the Castro plots were detailed in the Church hearings and report. He especially was concerned with the timing of the Cubela plot and the famous exchange of the poison pen. He believed whether or not the Kennedy's ordered it, that Castro could have interpreted it that way and it as a betrayal (of the normalization talks) and, assassinating Castro as not only a response but as a hail mary to save his own life/regime.  It was almost the only thing topic that could consistently get us into sometimes heated arguments. He was very effective at making the case. Our assertion that Castro would never risk something so dangerous was met with two points. First, every group who has been accused of the assassination was taking a huge risk, possibly to their own survival or future, something we almost always underestimate when analyze motives in this case (risk-reward). Castro would have been more desperate, on the other hand, than the mafia/CIA etc. becausd the risk of not doing something would be to his life directly. Second, and more importantly, he would point out that, if one looked closely at the Cuban Missile Crisis, they would see that the only party more reckless than Castro were the Joint Chiefs. 

My main point in response to him was that Castro was nothing if not crafty. And he never would have touched or involved Oswald in any way. That is not risky-- that is *gratuitously* risky. He had double agents within the exile movement, for instance, who he could have blamed for the crime. My father's response would be to argue for a hardliner rogue type plot within Cuba. I voiced serious skepticism any G2 agent would take a risk like that without approval. 

But I think the thing that gave my father the most pause was the material presented by James Bamford. I think anyone who reads The Puzzle Palace's section on the NSA intercepts and surveilance of Castro post Nov 22nd would have a hard time sticking with the theory. 

Stu

Is he claiming Oswald was part of an RFK assassination plot vs Castro?  I think that goes too far in linking to RFK. But I absolutely think that Oswald may have gotten caught up in a Castro assassination plot and that helps explain some/most of what happened in Mexico City and parts of what happened in New Orleans. I think Garrison proposed that at one point. And I believe David Kaiser thinks it is a distinct possibility. That has been where I have been at for some time.

Has anyone in any of these legacy groups ever grappled with the very clear and alarming evidence that the CIA misled JFK about the prospects for the invasion fully knowing it would likely fail? Or, with that in mind, the fact that overtly committing air power after would be a clear violation of international law and norms?  I keep waiting for them to shift the blame to where it belongs as we have known this for at least 20 years now (the latter point since 1961).

Stu

https://emuseum.jfk.org/objects/21494/jack-davis-oral-history?ctx=e8763525cd7e0f4ac6afd77f9c0ca7ff1cdc9547&idx=0

You can also go to the 50m mark, so just a few minutes in, and he describes it quite clearly-- it being Oswald sitting down next to him (Davis.)

See description

Three questions:

1. What is your background/expertise?

2. What software did you use?

3. Have you had any other experts double check your work?

Stu

53 minutes ago, Greg Doudna said:

 

Yes. It was that chapter of Pat Speer which led me to look up a study he cited at one point: Ulery et al., "Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108/19 (2011): 7733-7738, which can be read in full here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093498 .

The study was an early landmark study attempting to quantify how accurate fingerprint identifications were by real-world examiners. Ever since the Brandon Mayfield case in Portland, Oregon of 2004 this has received more attention --I used to live in Portland, I remember that case well, in which a Muslim man was arrested on a serious international terrorism charge based on stated unequivocal, positive fingerprint identifications by the FBI nailing him as guilty, except it wasn't true, it was a mistake, some Spanish examiners said "hey these prints DON'T match, you're wrong!" to the FBI, and it WAS wrong, and Brandon Mayfield was innocent!  

Anyway, back to this 2011 landmark study. What I found of interest was the difference between false positives (mistakenly claiming a match, like in the Brandon Mayfield case), and false negatives (mistakenly finding no match between prints that actually do come from the same person). There are not the same error rates for both of these.

Surprisingly, the false positive error rate found in that study is only a tiny fraction of 1%--it hardly ever happens (except when it does, as with Brandon Mayfield). 

But the false negative rate is very common--about 7%, or about 1 in 13 negative findings or exclusions is wrong, average of all examiners.

I post the abstract to this study at the end below. But consider this, in light of this data: two, not just one, expert and experienced fingerprint examiners stated unequivocally that a fingerprint on a 6th floor TSBD carton was a match to one Mac Wallace, who had no known business being on the 6th floor of the TSBD on Nov 22, 1963.

Not one, but two. In the 2011 study, no false positive (of the tiny fraction of 1% that did happen) was done by two or more examiners on the same print--all false positives were all one-off errors by lone examiners.  

There were two experienced examiners who independently positively identified a print of Mac Wallace on the 6th floor TSBD in a blind analysis, before one of those examiners learned that his fingerprint ID involved the JFK assassination. He had not known that when he signed his unequivocal, professional positive identification. Learning that, he backtracked, did not say he was wrong, but suddenly decided he was no longer sure at all! 

But the other, Darby, stuck to saying, to the end of his life and with all the force in him, that it was clearly an identification, that he knew what he was doing, that there was no mistake, that he could not understand how an unsigned, unattributed response from the FBI after a delay of only a whole year was issued to the press saying the FBI lab did not agree with Darby's Mac Wallace positive print identification, because, Darby insisted to the end of his days, it just was a match, "no question about it".

And I know, I have read Joan Mellen's book and chapter, citing another expert who says unequivocally that Darby's identification was wrong, and to nearly everyone that has seemed to settle it: Darby was wrong, end of story. 

But in the light of this 2011 study though, consider:

Lots of false negatives, those happen all the time (which is what the Mellen cited expert claimed, a false negative--a conclusive finding of no match to Mac Wallace). 

False positives--such as Darby being mistaken--hardly ever happen.

And zero--zero--cases in that study involving 169 latent print examiners, of two examiners' false positives on the same prints in that study. Which is what happened with those Mac Wallace print identifications before one of the two examiners learned of the stakes and suddenly realized he was no longer as certain as he was when he signed saying he was willing to put someone into prison for a long time based on his finding.

All I can say is, either the Darby case is another case exhibit of the Brandon Mayfield case phenomenon, of the very rare but it happens incidence of positive-identification fingerprint examiner error, or...

Or, the question nobody asks: what if the degree of critical scrutiny, which was intense, applied to take down Darby's positive TSBD 6th floor fingerprint identification of somebody who "shouldn't" have been there, were applied to the Oswald print identifications? But to my knowledge, there never was any such serious review of those Oswald fingerprint identifications, in the same way there was for the Darby Mac Wallace ones. Even if most of the Oswald fingerprint identifications held up under review, what if one or two or three actually did not, by the same standards used to take down Darby's finding? How might that affect things? 

(And leave out here the ad hominem toward Darby's lapsed credentials--the only evidence for that, which is denied by Darby's family, is the rather credible oral testimony of the fingerprint examiner cited by Mellen who also was an official in the organization which issued the credentials. But that could be some misunderstanding on Darby's part, and in any case has no bearing or relevance on Darby's expertise itself, only whether the retired Darby was wilfully untruthful in representing his credentials as current in the paperwork. I am not aware of any other allegations of wilful misconduct levied against Darby in his long and respected career.) 

Anyway, here is the abstract of the study:

The interpretation of forensic fingerprint evidence relies on the expertise of latent print examiners. The National Research Council of the National Academies and the legal and forensic sciences communities have called for research to measure the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, a challenging and complex problem in need of systematic analysis. Our research is focused on the development of empirical approaches to studying this problem. Here, we report on the first large-scale study of the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, in which 169 latent print examiners each compared approximately 100 pairs of latent and exemplar fingerprints from a pool of 744 pairs. The fingerprints were selected to include a range of attributes and quality encountered in forensic casework, and to be comparable to searches of an automated fingerprint identification system containing more than 58 million subjects. This study evaluated examiners on key decision points in the fingerprint examination process; procedures used operationally include additional safeguards designed to minimize errors. Five examiners made false positive errors for an overall false positive rate of 0.1%. Eighty-five percent of examiners made at least one false negative error for an overall false negative rate of 7.5%. Independent examination of the same comparisons by different participants (analogous to blind verification) was found to detect all false positive errors and the majority of false negative errors in this study. Examiners frequently differed on whether fingerprints were suitable for reaching a conclusion.

Greg, I would have to go back and find the study, but the issue with  fingerprint analysis (and potential flaws) has less to do with the intrinsic ability of examiners to make a blind match (or mismatch) but with confirmation bias. In this study, they sent fingerprint examiners a set of two prints for comparison-- one lifted from a crime scene, one from a fingerprint card. The examiners were almost universally correct in their assessments, just as in the study you posted. There was one problem: these were not truly blind sets of fingerprints but prints the examiners in question had analyzed for police/the prosecution in past cases. And in some alarming percentage--  like 25% of them-- they offered a *different* opinion than the one they gave years before. The study's researchers argued that it was because in their earlier analysis, the examiners were given background information from the cops or prosecutors. Which was the actual problem in the Mayfield case as well. I was told about this by the lats Dr. Cliff Spiegleman a decade or more ago. Cliff had made it almost his life's work to make sure crime labs conducted almost every analysis completely blindly (not just fingeprints) because of confirmation bias issues.

I would also add that there was a refutation--  "no match to Wallace"-- not long after Darby's match. From one of the former heads of a national fingerprint professional association. If you want an amazing presentation on the fingerprint issue-- find James Olmstead's 2003 Wecht Conference presentation on Youtube.

Stu

Vince did you run down the Puerto Rican nationalists who were ID'd as the men arrested on the eve of the Chicago trip?  They are named in documents.  I have tried to see if there are any connections to usual JFK suspects and did not find any. 

Could they have been trying to find a mole in the get-Castro regime change/assassination efforts? Given how often said operations had failed? 

Stu

Good job on this, Jim. Re: fact checkers.  While folks like you a me would welcome a final episode that hashed out the debunking, I am not sure that is in the financial interest of Netflix to do so. Better to have the more sensationalist offering. If I gave them the benefit of the doubt, it is what I said earlier. People just do not understand the lengths some people will go to grift using or insert themselves into a famous crime or historical case. JFK is an extreme example. But it happened with the Black Dahlia case. I bet it happened with the Jack the Ripper case. And it can even involve multiple people.

Stu

Could new AI tech help?

Has anyone made another go at enhancing the tapes of the Buell Frazier HSCA interviews. Some other attempts were borderline bizarre. I asked him about it at a Lancer conference and he confidently denied the rendition.

Stu

I have the VHS somewhere for the original. Lol. Glad to know it is still good.

What is the best online version of the Z-film?  Not just frames but a fully moving film. 

Stu

I have had a few days where I have wondered about Hurt's materials. I have quoted his book here more than once. He had a huge investigative bduget from I think he had established contacts from prior books.  He may have deposited his materials at a university. The Easterling stuff really discredited him with people like Hoch (who I respect) and I think we maybe threw the baby out with the bathwater.