Benjamin Cole

Paul B- OK fair point, Reiner is not "fresh off the boat." But Tosh Plumlee? That's your lead? Then Reiner's discussions and friendly rapport with Brennan and other CIA'ers is unsettling. I suppose you could say, "Who is using who?," but between Reiner and people who careers have involved deception and smoke-screening...I would say Reiner is getting used. It looks like the CIA'ers got Reiner coopted, as they told Reiner, "Yeah, Trump is bad." And then, like all intel agencies all through history, they highlighted the threats they knew the audience most wanted to hear about. Reiner is swooning. If a basketball player suddenly shows up at Yankee Stadium, and plays shortstop...how well will he do? Reiner is like that. Smart guy...but maybe in the wrong league. Well, let's see what develops. Asserting there were four gunsels in Dealey Plaza, and then naming them? Is Reiner going to present this as fact, or "reasonable speculation"? Either way looks bad. So it goes....

I happen to agree, but I am uneasy when relative novices start making grand pronouncements about the JFKA, and in great detail. Rob Reiner may be a nice guy, but as an entertainer, he may have concluded that "another show that is inconclusive is not a good show." Or, Reiner may think the political need to frame a narrative supersedes the need for verifiable truth. That is, the political truth trumps historical truth. Reiner won't be the first to go down that road.

In this session, HSCA Chief Counsel Robert Blakey suggests Herminio Diaz and Eladio del Valle as the JFKA gunsels. I guess we can say by 2019 Blakey had dismissed the WC and even his own HSCA findings regarding the JFKA. Which, of course, makes Blakey yet another conspiracy nut. As I recall, the Fabian Escalante info influenced Blakey. Of course, this is hardly proof of anything, but it is interesting that both Diaz and Del Valle were soon dead---del Valle shot dead gangland style almost at the same time David Ferrie died or was eliminated in 1967, and Diaz in 1966 on a raid against Cuba. One might say Diaz, willing to go on raid against Cuba (long odds, no?) was of a certain temperament. In this news article below, it is suggested the CIA, or other intel agency has info that Diaz was in the US during the JFKA. Maybe some of you doc-hunters know how to confirm that. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2463291/Was-Cuban-Herminio-Diaz-second-Kennedy-assassin.html Not a bad article, btw. So, to sum up, if Diaz and del Valle were perps, who had tricked LHO into a purported false flag op, they were soon dead, along with LHO. Thus, it is possible that by 1967 there was no one with first-hand knowledge of the JFKA alive. I lean towards this explanation of JFKA. This does not exclude the possibility that a higher-up in the CIA food chain leaked info to Diaz and del Valle, or that the pair believed they has tacit agency approval for their actions. They could have been rogue also.

In the Lafitte datebook, does Pierre ever give a nom de guerre, so to speak, to an associate? Ruby=Emer'ld.

Nickel? From the Pugibet datebook: undated, but in the month of July, in the maginalia: "J'aurais aimé avoir un centime pour chaque nickel que j'avais" Also, a reference to "J Mr. Emer'ld". I think that is code for Jack Ruby. Emerald is a code word for Ruby.

Connally: "I was knocked over, just doubled over by the force of the bullet. It went in my back and came out my chest about 2 inches below and the left of my right nipple. The force of the bullet drove my body over almost double and when I looked, immediately I could see I was just drenched with blood. (1 HSCA 42)" That happens ~Z-295. According to your theory, after being shot through the chest, then Gov. Connally turns to look over his own right shoulder, nearly making a 180-degree turn in his seat, to check on JFK's condition. But unable to see JFK, and still unaware he has been shot through the chest, then JBC straightens up to face forward, in order to try to look over his own left shoulder---and only then is thrust forward, as if shot. Your version just does not hold water. I seriously doubt JBC, shot through the chest (let alone also through the wrist), would make a 180-degree turn in his seat to then check on JFK. JBC described his wound as immediately incapacitating, a very believable statement. In addition, he was alert and coherent even when he got to Parkland. In the Z-film, JBC is indisputably pushed forward around ~Z-295. In the past, you have erroneously stated a bullet passing through a body will not push a body. That is true for bullets that do not strike major bones. But the slug that hit JBC pushed through 4 inches to 5 inches of rib (tunneling along the rub) before exiting, thus meeting resistance nearly the whole way. You need to re-appraise your scenario.

LHO is obviously guilty according to Slate.com, and the real story is how easy it was for him to get guns. "But sometimes Americans fell for conspiracy theories because those theories offered mystery and uncertainty when the simple truth belied the world’s seeming complexity. Take the discovery that a disgruntled 24-year-old Communist sympathizer named Lee Harvey Oswald, trained in marksmanship by the United States Marines, could so easily buy a weapon of war and use it to murder a president."---Slate. So...the JFKA becomes a platform for a gun-control message from Slate, based on LHO's obvious guilt. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/11/oswald-weapons-rifle-pistol-kennedy-assassination.html The HSCA? The large body or work by serious researchers that raise questions about the official WC JFKA narrative? Especially about how many gunman there were in Dealy Plaza on 11/22? Not a breath about Paul Landis?

Excellent article. I do have reservations about declaring certain individuals guilty of the JFKA, even if based upon reasonable suspicions. The same standard we apply to LHO, or other suspects, should also be applied to a Dulles or LBJ. It might be such suspicions, aired as if fact, give ground to those who call JFKA researchers "conspiracy nuts." BTW, I totally agree that globalists wrested control of the US government foreign, military and trade policies in the postwar era, and now rule both political parties. Indeed, both commercial globalist interests, and the national security state--together the Deep State--are far, far more powerful than in JFK's time. That is not a suspicion, but a fact.

Excellent review of eye-ear witnesses. Curious that so many heard only two shots. That could suggest the second and third shots came from two separate locations. The speed of sound is 1,128 fps. So, if you are an ear-witness, and one shot is fired from a gun 282 feet away from you, and another gun is fired 141 feet away from you, but an eighth of a second later, you will hear only one shot. The sound from the two separate shots will reach your ears simultaneously.

Yes, I gave a somewhat botched presentation at Duquesne (technical difficulties). I have not seen the Newman presentation. No one else seems to have described LBJ as an alcoholic. I have been studying the LBJ Presidency since the 1970s. People drank and smoked in those days (watching a 1950-60s movie is like watching an ad for the booze and cigarette industries). I wonder about Newman. He has also said Bruce Solie and James McCord were Russian spies. McCord as a Moscow stooge sure puts a whole new spin on the Watergate caper. Well, interesting topic. I will keep to this principle: Innocent until proven guilty. The same standard and attitude that is applied to LHO should be applied to LBJ. If you sought out exonerating material on LBJ, how would you do that?

Daily Mail 11/24---- "Director Rob Reiner claims he's unearthed PROOF that JFK was killed by FOUR shooters not one - and says the reason the first shot missed president's motorcade is KEY to theory President John F Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas , on November 22, 1963 and he was pronounced dead after arriving at the Parkland Memorial Hospital Official investigations concluded that he was assassinated by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald from a sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. But Rob Reiner claims there were more people involved in the fatal shooting of Kennedy who he names in his 10-episode podcast titled 'Who Killed JFK?'" Reiner's intentions are probably good enough...but... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12785325/Rob-reiner-proof-jfk-killed-four-shooters.html

Well, as I recall, the authorities did get copies of the Z film. And since LHO was neatly disposed of, there was no defense counsel to ask to see a true copy of the Z-film (or, possibly the original). No no trial, no need to provide evidence. An under-commented side note: Zapruder said he filmed continuously from the corner of Elm through the underpass. My family had a Sears 8 mm movie camera, made by Bell & Howell, which might have been the same model as Zapruder's, but if not, very close. Those old-fashioned home movie cameras made whirring noises as they operated, and the camera-holder could feel a mild vibration through the handle. It would have been odd if Zapruder was unaware he had stopped filming and then re-started. If Z was unaware he had stopped filming...then why did the camera re-start? My guess is those frames have been cut from the original and lost. I wonder why.

Thanks for posting, and your interesting posts through the year on the JFKA.

RO-- I can't say you are wrong. But...Excellent JFKA researcher John Newman contends the "WWIII" virus was planted by the CIA. That is, the CIA had LHO visit KGB'er Kostikov in Mexico City, pre-JFKA. Then, LBJ was faced with dilemma. Go with the "Russian did it" version of the JFKA, with a Joint Chiefs of Staff that JFK had feared was uncontrollable. And, in fact, LBJ famously told Warren to sit on the WC to avoid 40 million dead Americans. The "Russia" angle was suffocated, as early as Nov. 23, and the "LHO as loner, leftie, loser" invented. In Newman's version, LBJ is all but cornered, and did not have advance knowledge of the JFKA. I lean to Newman's version, as I suspect a few people as possible were in on the JFKA. Like less than you can count on a woodworker's hand. But that's just IMHO....

Right===evidently we do not even know the names of the guys in Chicago. No records were kept...so we are told. Even if the four guys were not JFK assassins....when four guys heavily armed males travel to Chicago for no apparent purpose...should no their names and photos be taken?

Amen on Wecht. He was earnest, persistent and talented in a 60-year pursuit of the truth, and yet always civil and collegial. Class act.

NB- Like I say, you can be a Marxist, libertarian, Donk, 'Phant, independent, left, right, socialist---I don't care. This is about the JFKA, and what really happened. However, the aging "right" and "left" labels are getting tattered.

Sure seems like many re-enactments, animations have the same problem: The show the bullet from TSBD headed down into JFK's back....and then exiting at JFK's throat. True, bullets do not always follow a straight line through a human body, due to varying viscosities inside the body. That is, a bullet can change direction inside a human body. But, even if we accept that the slug changed direction inside JFK's body, then the slug should be headed upwards when it exited his throat---not into Gov. Connally. I am leaning towards the Landis explanation. The bullet never penetrated JFK, but popped out when a subsequent shot struck JFK. The Bethesda autopsists were not skilled, but they could not find the bullet's pathway through JFK's body. Another stumble: The JFKA research community has never endeavored to find out if probing bullet paths is always successful, or if, indeed, probes are sometimes blocked.

Thanks for posting.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/jfk-assassination-doctors-break-silence-dispute-key-government-claim-5533076?ea_src=frontpage&ea_med=lead-story-0-large-lead-story-title-0 Yes, The Epoch Times is considered an alt right-wing publication. All the greater shame on the NYT and TIME and other legacy publications. Why do readers have to turn to alt-r media to get a relatively balanced treatment of "JFK: What the Doctors Saw"?

PJ-- Of course, your are right. But what do I expect? I spent the bulk of my professional life as a small-time journalist (was also furniture-maker for a stretch, and now a farmer). I expect journalists to demand disclosure of public documents, and maximum transparency. We are not a democracy unless we know what our government is doing. I expect journalists to be fair, but skeptical regarding government (or corporate) proclamations. TIME is not even in the ballpark. Hell, they are not even in the parking lot of the ballpark.

PS-- You missed a key element here. LIFE magazine, which had possession of the Z-film, itself made the claim that, "The 8mm [Zapruder] film shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed to the sniper's nest [in the TSBD] just before he clutches it." So, LIFE is saying, "We watched the film, and it records JFK turning to face the TSBD, and that is when he was shot in the throat." Sure maybe government authority figures (aka the Deep State) told LIFE to print lies. But they had possession of the film, and they knew they were printing lies. Not merely repeating what they were told. I am puzzled that you think LIFE is somehow not responsible for, not mere omission, not mere government stenography, but active perfidy. Yes, I use the expression "Deep State" as shorthand. A book of nuances could be written, and have been, defining the "shadow government," the "Deep State," "the national security state," globalism and so on. I hope you grant me a little leeway, the use of shorthand expressions, in relatively brief comments.

The legacy media ossifies into coprolite. Again we are told (by TIME) the "definitive" account of the JFKA is the Warren Commission. The HSCA Report, that concluded there had likely been a conspiracy...is erased from history. Orwell, anyone? Passing thought is given to the Biden Administration snuff job on the JFKA Records Act. A curiosity, only. The Orwellian "Transparency Board" is also a non-entity. You can't make this stuff up. What We Know and Still Don’t Know About JFK’s Assassination--TIME U.S. President John F. Kennedy, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and others smile at the crowds lining their motorcade route on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas—just minutes before the President was assassinated as his car passed through Dealey Plaza.Bettmann Archive BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN NOVEMBER 21, 2023 2:39 PM EST This Wednesday marks 60 years since America’s youngest President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, at the age of 46 by Lee Harvey Oswald. He was shot while riding in a car with his wife First Lady Jackie Onassis and Texas Governor John Connally during a tour of the state. Two days later, local nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Oswald on Nov. 24, 1963. Sixty years after the JFK assassination, it’s still unclear why Oswald shot the president, fueling countless conspiracies—like whether his successor Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the assassination. (He was not.) The continued fascination over who killed JFK and why helps provide context for the conspiracy theories that continue to dominate American politics today. The definitive account of what happened the day of the assassination is the report produced by the Warren Commission. Just a week after JFK’s death, Johnson signed an executive order that created the commission, headed by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Earl Warren, to investigate the death of the President. Ten months later, its report confirmed that Oswald fired the shots that killed JFK and wounded Connally, and that there is “no evidence” that Oswald or Jack Ruby were part of a domestic conspiracy or that a foreign government was behind the assassination. The report did not determine why Oswald shot JFK; as TIME reported in 1964, “The explanation of Oswald's motive for killing President Kennedy was buried with him.” “I don't think we fully understood how many people just could not give up the idea that there was a conspiracy,” says Burt Griffin, assistant counsel on the Warren Commission, and author of JFK, Oswald and Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth. Read more: JFK's assassination and the conspiracy industry The killing of the President helped fuel a climate of mistrust in the 1960s that grew with the assassinations in 1968 of Martin Luther King, Jr. and JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy, says Larry Sabato, author of The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy. The ongoing Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s contributed to a culture of conspiracies. “As a society, we became addicted to conspiracy theories because of the Kennedy assassination,” Sabato says. Since the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the government has been declassifying documents related to JFK’s assassination. But according to experts on the JFK assassination that TIME talked to, no major revelations have been found in these document dumps in the 60 years since the President was killed. “No new information has been revealed or exposed that really alter the course of our understanding of what happened,” says Nicola Longford, CEO of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, a museum all about the JFK assassination located in the building where Oswald shot JFK. Some eyewitnesses to the JFK assassination are still alive. National Geographic’s new docuseries out Nov. 5 is told through archival footage from the Sixth Floor museum and eyewitnesses from the Associated Press reporter Peggy Simpson to Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent who tried to shield the Kennedys from bullets. “The 60th anniversary is the last round-year anniversary in which we’re going to have eyewitnesses to the assassination coming up with any news,” says Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. The most prominent eyewitness account that surfaced this year is from Paul Landis, 88, who was on Jackie Kennedy’s Secret Service detail and has opened up about his role on that fateful day in a new memoir that came out in October. Per a Sep. 9 New York Times article, Landis was riding in a convertible behind the presidential limousine and claims that he found an intact bullet in the seam of the limousine’s cushioning, slipped it into his coat pocket, and left it on Kennedy’s stretcher. The bullet then ended up on Connally’s empty stretcher, as a hospital staffer was moving them around. The Warren Commission did not locate the bullet on JFK’s stretcher. But the fact that Landis has not spoken up for 60 years has raised some questions about his account and how accurate his memory is, as well as the fact that the Warren Commission didn’t interview him. Even the 2023 Times article concluded that “A couple elements of his account contradict the official statements he filed with authorities immediately after the shooting, and some of the implications of his version cannot be easily reconciled to the existing record.” One big reason that JFK assassination conspiracy theories still persist is because not all of the files pertaining to that fateful day have been made available by the U.S. government. All of them were supposed to be released by 2017, but the release date has been postponed multiple times during the Trump and Biden administrations. Sabato, who does deep dives into the declassified JFK assassination files with his students at the University of Virginia, says there are thousands of pages that are classified and it’s unclear why. “We don't know what they cover and so that feeds the conspiracies even more,” as Sabato puts it. “What are they hiding?” Posner agrees, but given Oswald never went to trial, he argues, “You're never going to feel as though the case is really settled.”

Legacy media in general is in the toilet. The alt-left media has been coopted by the Deep State. The alt-r media is full of nuts. Not a promising situation....

This is written by Paul Gregory, who also wrote that he knew LHO had done the deed, and acted alone, on Nov. 22, as soon as he saw LHO on the news on his TV set, which he watched in Oklahoma. Thus Gregory was ahead of even the State Department, which on Nov. 23 issued a statement that there was no evidence LHO had acted in concert with foreign entities. Some people were experts on the JFKA even before it happened.