Michael Griffith

Did you not read any of the previous posts in this thread that point out some of the severe problems with Myers' flimsy arguments about the Tippit shooting? And, just for the record, J. D. Tippit was a lackluster policeman who cheated on his wife. To this day, no one can give a credible innocent explanation for why Tippit was in Oak Cliff, far out of his assigned area, and for his strange actions in the 30 minutes leading up to his death. I refer to his parking at the Gloco gas station and apparently watching Oswald's most likely route from Dallas, his sudden departure from the Gloco gas station, his stopping at Oswald's rooming house and tapping his horn, his strange and frantic use of the phone in the Top Ten Record Shop when he could have used one of the special phones available for police use in every fire station in Dallas, and his slow-speed recon on 10th Street just before he was shot.

Lone-gunman theorists overlook or ignore the severe problems posed for the SBT by the very irregular H-shaped hole in the front of Connally's shirt. I tried in vain for weeks in another major JFK forum to get lone-gunman theorists to explain how an exiting CE 399 could have made such a defect. The hole consisted of two very uneven vertical tears, one of which was over half an inch (1.7 cm) longer than the other, and a horizontal tear. The HSCA described it as follows: Clothing-Shirt (front). . . . The midpoint of the defect is 15.7 centimeters to the right of the midline and 27.9 centimeters below the shoulder seam. The long axis extends inferiorly and medially at an angle of approximately 60° from the vertical axis of the shirt. This joins medially a vertical linear tear measuring 3.1 by 0.1 to 0.2 centimeters and is paralleled by another vertical linear tear measuring 4.8 by 0.1 to 0.2 centimeters. (7 HSCA 145) The Warren Report describes it this way: A very irregular tear in the form of an "H" was observed on the front side of the Governor's shirt, approximately 1 1/2 inches high, with a crossbar tear approximately 1 inch wide, located 5 inches from the right side seam and 9 inches from the top of the right sleeve. (p. 94) How could a non-deformed bullet like CE 399 have created this irregular defect? This defect resembles tears formed by a severely deformed bullet or by one or more bullet fragments, just as Connally's chest surgeon, Dr. Robert Shaw, concluded. Given that the bullet shattered several inches of rib bone, it would be only natural that it fragmented or at least suffered marked deformity. It is hard to fathom how a bullet shaped like CE 399, i.e., a non-deformed bullet, could have made the uneven H-shaped defect.

This is from the summary in my article on the acoustical evidence: * At least four sets of gunshot impulse patterns with echo patterns unique to Dealey Plaza occur on the dictabelt recording. * Those echo patterns occur in the correct topographic order, which is an amazing correlation all by itself. * The dictabelt contains N-waves from supersonic rifle fire, and those N-waves occur only among the identified gunshot impulse patterns, and only in the two impulse patterns that were recorded when the motorcycle’s microphone was in position to record them. * The dictabelt not only contains N-waves but it also contains muzzle blasts and muzzle-blast echoes, and those N-waves, muzzle blasts, and muzzle-blast echoes occur in the correct order and interval. * Windshield distortions occur in the dictabelt's gunshot impulse patterns when they should and do not occur when they should not.

We need more JFKs today.

The misleading, distorted way that many American news outlets covered General Loan's execution of the Viet Cong assassin is just one of many troubling examples of how most of our news media covered the war. Veteran journalist, and genuine Asia scholar, Robert Elegant discussed the news media's coverage of the war in his famous article "How to Lose a War: The Press and Viet Nam." Here's a brief excerpt from this famous article: During the latter half of the fifteen-year American involvement in Viet Nam, the media became the primary battlefield. Illusory events reported by the press as well as real events within the press corps were more decisive than the clash of arms or the contention of ideologies. For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance. . . . Instructive on a larger scale is the contrast between the coverage of the American massacre at My Lai and the Viet Cong massacre at Hue. At My Lai, a junior American officer allowed his men to kill dozens of presumably uninvolved farmers in full violation of standing orders. At Hue, the former imperial capital, the Viet Cong killed several thousand community leaders, including a number of Europeans, in accordance with standing orders to "destroy the bourgeoisie." The U.S. military's attempt to suppress reports of the My Lai massacre, of course, made it even worse when the story was finally released by the Dispatch News Agency, a curious organization that came into existence in Viet Nam with unknown financial backing and vanished once its purpose of opposing the war had brought Hanoi victory. But the Hue massacre was, somehow, uninteresting. Few correspondents reported that clear signal of the real policies the North Vietnamese would pursue once they had conquered the South. (Robert Elegant: How to Lose A War (wellesley.edu)

The article's perspective is curious. Khrushchev got JFK to abandon his demand for U.S. onsite inspectors to verify the removal of the Soviet missiles, got JFK to agree to remove our Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy, and got JFK to pledge not to invade Cuba again. The Politburo should have viewed this as a win.

One of the things I find impressive about the acoustical evidence is the powerful locational correlations between the dictabelt gunshot impulses and the Dealey Plaza test-firing gunshots. Fig. 22 in the BBN report shows that the microphone locations that correspond to the locations of dictabelt impulses at the three times after the first impulse tend to progress uniformly forward along the motorcade route. The odds that these correlations are the result of chance are remote. The NRC panel dealt with this impressive evidence by arguing that the BBN scientists had erred, that the BBN value of P<0.01 (i.e., less than 1 percent) was actually P=0.07 (i.e., 7 percent), and that therefore the “significance of the layout” indicated by Figure 22 was “considerably reduced” (NRC report, p. 37). In other words, the panel said that the probability that chance caused the locational correlations was 7 percent instead of less than 1 percent. In saying this, of course, the panel was admitting that their own calculations showed that the probability that chance did not cause the correlations was 93 percent. The NRC panel made no effort to explain the significance of the fact that their own calculation found a 93-percent probability that the locational correlations occurred because the impulse patterns on the police tape were recorded by a motorcycle in Dealey Plaza during the assassination. In fact, they did not even specifically mention this. They simply noted that they determined the probability of chance was 7 percent and acted as though they had dealt a strong blow to the BBN report. Granted, 7 percent is more than "less than 1%," but it is still an extremely low probability of chance.

The lapel flip is irrelevant. The part of the lapel that flips is nowhere near the exit hole in Connally's jacket. I think Dr. David Wrone is correct when he says: Posner also holds that a bullet caused the flapping of the governor’s lapel. This occurs on just one frame, 224, which shows a slight disturbance in the cloth of the lapel only 1/18.3 seconds in duration. But he does not tell the reader that gusts of wind swept the plaza that day, fitfully blowing throughout the motorcade. Thus, he completely ignores a possible, even probable, cause for the flapping lapel. He further states that the lapel has a bullet hole at the place the bullet caused the flap. But there is no bullet hole in the lapel of Connally’s jacket. The actual hole in the jacket is about 12 inches from the lapel and 2 inches below the right nipple, and its passing through the cloth almost a foot away from the lapel could simply not have caused the lapel to flap. (The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination, University Press of Kansas, 2003, p. 118)

To follow up on my previous reply, I should mention that the Viet Cong soldier led an assassination squad and that he had just murdered a South Vietnamese family. Most American news outlets failed to mention these facts. Some news outlets presented the photo as evidence that "both sides committed atrocities." Yet, under the rules of war, the Viet Cong soldier forfeited his right to be treated as a POW by murdering civilians and by wearing civilian clothes while committing war crimes. But, rather than focus on the horrible crimes the Viet Cong soldier had committed, many American news outlets falsely portrayed his execution as a war crime.

We need to start by dealing with the fact that we now know that the back wound had no exit point and that the first two drafts of the autopsy report said nothing about a bullet exiting the throat. The HSCA suppressed evidence that the back wound had no exit point. We learned this when the ARRB released autopsy-related HSCA interview files and other evidence. So any discussion on JFK's non-fatal wounds needs to start by acknowledging this fact. The back wound was shallow and did not penetrate the chest cavity. The autopsy doctors firmly established this at the autopsy by probing the wound extensively. One of the medical technicians who witnessed the probing could see the end of the probe pushing against the lining of the chest cavity. After the prolonged probing, Dr. Finck turned to Sibert and O'Neill and informed them that the back wound had no exit point. Dr. Wecht was apparently unaware of any of this evidence, though I suspect that Baden was aware of it and that he was one of the ones who arranged for this evidence to be sealed.

The paper doesn’t mention a fragment trail directly but there are a few references to deposited fragments and the pig x-rays do show a visible trail that looks pretty similar to the JFK lateral x-rays. I don’t know if I’d call it a snowstorm but it seems like an FMJ bullet can leave a substantial fragment trail under certain conditions. One, doesn't the paper indicate that those fragments are bone fragments, not bullet fragments? Two, the fragment trails on the pig x-rays look nothing like the high fragment trail on the JFK skull x-rays. The second paper does show altered trajectories, but they used simulated skulls and only shot them in the front of the head. Is it a reasonable assumption that a bullet striking occipital bone and moving through actual tissue could deflect even more? I’m not really sure - but it seems to make sense. Not one of the bullets in the WC's own head-shot ballistics tests veered anywhere near the degree required by Sturdivan's theory. Not one of them. Also, just from poking myself in the back of the head above and to the right of the EOP and trying to mimic JFK’s sharp left and slight forward lean it seems like the trajectory change required for a right frontal/parietal exit would be <45 degrees, though this is hardly scientific. Again, a bullet from the sixth-floor sniper's nest would have struck the skull at a downward angle of at least 15 degrees. If someone can find a ballistics test where an FMJ bullet veered so markedly upward after striking skull bone, I'd like to see it. Similarly, if someone can find a ballistic test where an FMJ missile not only left dozens of tiny fragments but left them in a location well above and forward of the entry point, I'd like to see it. I totally agree that the autopsy report description of the fragment trail is bizarre and I have no idea in hell how Humes could have screwed that up so badly. Oh, I'm not at all sure that Humes erred in describing the fragment trail. The trail he described is entirely plausible if the bullet struck slightly above the EOP. The only problem with it comes if one insists that the bullet came from the alleged sniper's nest. A bullet fired from a lower elevation, say a lower floor of the Dal-Tex Building, could have produced a fragment trail that ran from the EOP to just above the right eye. Humes ignored the high fragment trail, I suspect because he knew it indicated a second head shot and knew he could not relate it to the EOP entry wound. I honestly feel the same way about Kemp Clark and the wound location. Pat has an entire chapter dedicated to showing that it’s theoretically possible for doctors to make mistakes, but the top brain surgeon in Dallas completely forgetting the location of a massive head wound less than an hour after looking at it seems like quite the stretch. I generally agree with Pat on the medical evidence and think that JFK was likely hit twice - once in the EOP and a tangential shot to the top of the head - but I still have a hard time with Clark. I recommend you read Dr. Mantik's and Doug Horne's research on the head wounds, especially Dr. Mantik's new book. We now know from ARRB disclosures that JFK had a small wound in his right temple (the mortician filled it with wax), and I think the massive and mutually supportive eyewitness accounts, some of which include drawings, of the right-rear head wound are compelling.

The police plainclothes detective could not have been the SS agent that Officer Smith encountered. Smith said the man identified himself as an SS agent. manwhowasntthere.pdf - Google Drive Often overlooked in discussions on phony SS agents in Dealey Plaza is the disturbing account of Sergeant D. V. Harkness, (Posner, for example, does not even mention it). Sergeant Harkness went to the rear of the Texas School Book Depository Building within a few minutes of the assassination. When he arrived there, he encountered several "well-armed" men dressed in suits. These "well-armed" men told Harkness they were SS agents (Hurt 110-111). It is not hard to understand why the presence of the armed, well-dressed men at the rear of the Book Depository did not make Harkness suspicious. Police officers were beginning to seal off the area, and just six minutes after the shooting Harkness himself identified the Depository over the radio as a possible source of gunfire. The problem, of course, is that the men encountered by Harkness could not have been legitimate SS agents, nor is it credible to suggest that Harkness somehow "misunderstood" what they said to him.

Gregory only knew Oswald for a few months, and some of his claims about Oswald are suspect, such as his assertion that Oswald spoke Russian poorly.

This interesting and useful paper does not argue that FMJ bullets can leave a lead snowstorm of small fragments in a skull after striking it. It does not make this claim. Remember that the nose and tail of the alleged single head shot were reportedly found in the limo, so any fragments that this alleged bullet deposited inside the skull would be from the lead interior of the bullet. Another fact worth noting is that the paper does not cite a single instance when any of the FMJ bullets had metal scraped off them and deposited on the outer table as they entered the pig skulls. Yes, FMJ bullets can veer inside a skull after they penetrate it, but not to the fantastic degree required by Sturdivan's theory. Indeed, the paper you cite indicates that the resulting wound tracts inside the pig skulls did not veer substantially. Sturdivan is asking us to believe that an FMJ bullet entered the skull at a 16-degree downward angle and then not only veered sharply upward but also veered sharply to the right in order to exit the upper-front part of the right parietal bone. He does this because he knows that to get a relatively straight trajectory from the EOP entry wound to the WC's exit wound, JFK would have had to be leaning about 60 degrees forward, which no film or photo shows him doing during the time frame in question. Sturdivan says nothing about the fact that the fragment trail described in the autopsy report is nowhere to be seen on the extant skull x-rays. The autopsy report says the fragment trail started at just above the EOP and extended to a point just above the right eye, and it makes no mention of any fragment trail near the top of the head. Yet, the only fragment trail on the extant skull x-rays is above the alleged cowlick entry site and nowhere near the EOP.

There is another crucial reason that Myers cannot accept the evidence that Tippit's killer was walking west, toward the patrol car, when Tippit encountered him: If the killer was Oswald, this would mean that Oswald had gone "way out of his way" and was walking back toward his rooming house, which obviously makes no sense. This is one of the reasons that the WC claimed, against the weight of the evidence, that the assailant was walking east and that Tippit therefore drove up behind him. Bugliosi admits, quoting Bowles, that "any route that would have him walking westbound on Tenth at the time Tippit pulled over would be way out of his way." And, as Henry Hurt noted, assuming that the killer was Oswald and admitting that he was walking west when Tippit encountered him would not only have Oswald walking back toward his rooming house but would wreck the WC's already dubious timeline of Oswald's alleged movements: One of the most glaring discrepancies of all is seen in the accounts of the direction in which Tippit's killer was walking just before Tippit stopped. William Scoggins, a cab driver who was an eyewitness, testified that the gunman was walking west toward Tippit's car prior to the shooting. Another witness [Jim Burt] reported similarly. Reports from the Dallas police as well as the first reports of the Secret Service reflect the same impression. Despite the preponderance of evidence that the killer and Tippit's car were moving toward each other, the Warren Report concluded the killer was walking in the opposite direction. The commission version held that Tippit's car overtook the pedestrian killer. This [claiming the killer was walking east] was necessary for the Warren Commission's tenuous version to work at all. If he was Oswald, the killer had to be walking east, in the same direction as the police car was moving when it overtook the killer. Otherwise, Oswald, on his exceedingly tight time schedule, would have had to move from the rooming house to a point beyond the scene of the shooting and then to have turned and been heading back to reach the location of the murder. Because of time considerations, that was preposterous even by commission standards, so the commission ignored the testimony (Reasonable Doubt, pp. 149-150, original emphasis)

Yes, this does suggest that these reviewers concluded that JFK was hit at Z226-228, when he is visibly knocked forward (Z226-232), since Connally shows no visible reactions until Z236-238, and since Shaw and Gregory both opined that Connally was hit between Z234 and Z238. So that makes sense, IF you ignore JFK's reactions in Z186-207. And that's the rub. The Z film clearly indicates that JFK was hit twice before his head was hit, the first hit occurring at around Z186 and the second hit occurring at around Z224. We see visible reactions to the Z186 hit in Z188-Z207 and visible reactions to the Z224 hit in Z226-232. The Z186 hit was the throat wound, and Z226 was the back wound. We also need to keep in mind that when WC staffer Melvin Eisenberg held a conference with the autopsy doctors on April 14, 1964, to view the Zapruder film and to determine the order of the bullet hits, all three doctors insisted that Connally was hit by two bullets because they said CE 399 could not have shattered Connally’s wrist bone without suffering significant deformity (a fact that the WC’s own ballistics tests later confirmed). And, as McKnight notes, In an aside to Inspector Thomas Kelley, the Secret Service’s liaison with the Commission, one of the staff lawyers offered as “an outside possibility” that the first shot might have gone through JFK with sufficient velocity “to penetrate Connally’s body, wrist, and leg.” Kelley later confided to the FBI’s L.T. Gauthier that the idea was “ridiculous”. . . . (Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 221)

That was a curious conclusion by the WC staff. The HSCA's photographic evidence panel correctly concluded that Kennedy was hit between Z188 and Z190. The panel noted JFK's cheeks puff at Z188, and that a fraction of a second later, at around Z200, his right hand abruptly stops in the middle of wave, and his head starts to rapidly turn from the right toward his wife on his left. Connally shows no sign of having been hit until Z233 at the earliest. Connally himself, after studying enlargements of Z frames for Life magazine, identified Z234 as the moment he was hit. Z188 to Z234 is 46 frames or 2.51 seconds apart. But, obviously, the WC staff did not realize how early JFK was hit and assumed he was hit at around Z226.

This is a good article. Under the Geneva Conventions, Loan had every right to execute the Viet Cong fighter. The fighter was not only a vicious murderer but was operating while in civilian clothes after ditching his uniform, so under the standard rules of war he could be executed on the spot when caught. When American and Allied soldiers caught German SS soldiers operating in Allied territory while not wearing their uniforms but posing as civilians, they would summarily execute them.

Exactly. If there's a reasonable, credible risk, just black out the name. As for revealing how operations are conducted, the bad guys already have a very good idea about how we do operations. This is a silly excuse to withhold a document.

Obviously, Humes and Boswell were lying. We now know that they both knew for an absolute observed fact that the back wound was a shallow wound with no exit point. They probed it extensively and could see the end of the probe pushing against the lining of the chest cavity (the pleura). Finck even turned to Sibert and O'Neill and informed them that the back wound had no exit point. We also now know that the first two drafts of the autopsy report said nothing about a bullet exiting the throat. Lone-gunman theorists can deny these inconvenient facts, but that won't make them go away. The SBT is a silly myth that was hastily cooked up after the WC could no longer deny that a bullet had missed and had landed near James Tague.

Let's start with some basic, well-known facts about FMJ bullets and basic physics: FMJ bullets do not deposit fragments via shearing on the outer table of a skull when they strike a skull, and if the rear-head-shot bullet was an FMJ bullet and somehow magically had metal fragments scraped off it as it entered the skull, the fragments would have been scraped off from the top of the bullet and would have been deposited above the wound, not below it, since the bullet would have been striking at a marked downward angle. Sturdivan's theory is absurd. A bullet fired from the sixth-floor sniper's nest would have struck the skull at a downward angle of 16 degrees. How would the bullet have magically made a sudden sharply upward turn in order to have any chance of causing the high fragment trail and of exiting above the right ear? Not one of the FMJ bullets in the WC's head-shot ballistics tests behaved in such an impossible manner. The HSCA FPP and the Clark Panel moved the rear head entry wound upward by nearly 4 inches because they knew there was no way a bullet striking at the EOP could have caused the high fragment trail. This is not to mention the well-known fact that FMJ missiles do not leave dozens of fragments in skulls. This is unheard behavior for an FMJ bullet (Forensic Science and President Kennedy's Head Wounds). And then there's the scientifically established fact that the 6.5 mm object on the A-P skull x-ray is a ghosted image that was placed over a smaller genuine fragment (about 2.5 mm) on the rear outer table of the skull. This is why there is no object on the lateral x-rays that corresponds to the 6.5 mm object, a physical impossibility if these x-rays are pristine. I discuss this historic evidence in detail in the following article: The Suspicious 6.5 mm "Fragment" Finally, how in the world do lone-gunman theorists explain the additional rear-outer-table fragment identified by Dr. G. M. McDonnel for the HSCA? This fragment is to the left of the 6.5 mm object and is embedded in a different layer (the galea) than the 6.5 mm object! How could it have gotten there after having been magically sheared off an FMJ missile that struck at a downward angle? The idea that this fragment came from any FMJ bullet, much less from one fired from the sniper's nest, is utterly preposterous. This fragment, like the fragment inside the 6.5 mm object, is clearly a ricochet fragment from a bullet that struck near the limo and sprayed fragments toward the limo--this is the only plausible explanation.

I don't see anything racist about noting that the murder rate in a given black ghetto is high. I don't see how merely identifying the demographic composition of the ghetto constitutes racism. That is no more racist than to make the factual observation that the vast majority of the white-collar crime in America is committed by whites. Now, if one were to say that Ghetto A has a high crime rate because it's a black ghetto, that would be racist, just as saying that Company A has a high white-collar crime rate because it's predominantly white would be racist. Both remarks would imply that the persons' race was the reason they engage in bad conduct.

Trump sold weapons to the Saudis as a counterweight to Iran. The Saudis loathe and fear Iran's radical mullah regime.

The plotters needed a higher rear head entry wound--in the cowlick--because of the high fragment trail, because of the small bullet fragments high on the rear outer table of the skull (over most of which the 6.5 mm object was ghosted), and because the photographic evidence rules out a trajectory from the sniper's nest to the EOP entry site (JFK would have had to be leaning some 60 degrees forward when the bullet struck for the bullet to exit at a point above and forward of the right ear). WC apologists have had little to say about the fact that all three of the ARRB's forensic pathologists--Dr. Fitzpatrick, Dr. Ubelaker, Dr. Kirschner--said that there is no entry wound in the cowlick on the autopsy skull x-rays, that there is no radiographic evidence of a wound in that location.

After reading Shenon's article, a few questions come to mind: -- How is it that names of agents and informants found their way into documents related to Oswald, an alleged unstable loner? How did that happen? -- How is it that names of agents and informants found their way into documents related to the assassination if the assassination was merely the act of one unstable loner? -- Why can't they redact the names (last name and/or first and last names) of those agents and informants? -- People who were agents or informants in the '60s and '70s would be at least in their late 70s now. An agent/informant who was 25 in 1962, for example, would be 85 today. An agent/informant who was 35 in 1965 would be 92 today. An agent/informant who was 30 in 1975 would be 77 today. Are we really to believe that these senior citizens would be at risk if their previous activities were revealed in a release of over 10,000 documents? Really? Would the Mafia send a team of researchers to the National Archives to comb through thousands of documents for the names of informants from the '60s and '70s? Really?