Steven Gaal

US Airstrike Kills Eight Civilians in Northern Syria

Attack Targeted Munitions Factory, Leveled Homes

=

Greg,

I've just found the perfect way to describe the Harvey and Lee syndrome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

"The Texas Sharpshooter" fallacy. How ironic is that?

"It is related to the clustering illusion, which refers to the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist."

LOL

--Tommy

Perfect!

Mr. PEFECT AKA GREG PARKER PLEASE SHOW

Department of Defense unit diaries, Dec. 5, 1978,

House Select Committee on Assassinations (JFK Document 013485).

=================================================================== thanks sg

Read volume 2 of my book when it comes out, Stevo.

But I'm glad to see you've tossed everything else overboard. Progress.

All facts are contextual. ,gaal

A optical densitometer is a scientific instrument not a fantasy. ,gaal (HSCA stated that the x-rays were good)

Google Books is now featuring a preview of Dr. Jeffrey Caufield's new book on resigned Major General Edwin Walker and the JFK assassination. Here's the URL:

https://books.google.com/books?id=M7JYCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA879&lpg=PA879&dq=dallas+morning+news++general+walker&source=bl&ots=UC4vRKVIkN&sig=rds63kRtt9FvGNpwTvrpE_pSTpM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDsQ6AEwBGoVChMI1N6Nse-oxwIVyheSCh0sBgf5#v=onepage&q=dallas%20morning%20news%20%20general%20walker&f=false

Best regards,

--Paul Trejo

Bumping this. Let me say that I'm finding Caulfield's research into the background of the southern segregationist right well worth considering, and his contention that only the right was involved in the assassination well worth contradicting. I haven't finished the excerpted material yet, but so far this seems a mixed bag worth emptying on the table. Put the onions aside - they're still good.

I'm sure that when all of us have the opportunity to read the entire book, we will find things that we disagree with.

1. Sometimes, one person interprets available evidence differently (such as by giving more emphasis or credence to a particular piece of data or perhaps less credence and weight to something said/written by somebody who supposedly knows something relevant about the matter under scrutiny).

2. Sometimes (including here in EF), statements are presented as indisputably factual when, in reality, they are not.

One of the most common problems that one confronts in historical narratives is that all of us come to a specific subject with different levels of understanding and our understanding sometimes can be based upon inferior or biased or questionable sources of information which we do not have the time or resources (or inclination) to verify.

One time I was engaged in a debate with someone online and when I challenged something presented by my critic, he told me to google the name of the person whom we were discussing because it produced "hundreds" of "hits" that would confirm what my critic was claiming. That methodology actually was what my critic believed was appropriately reliable in order to discover "the truth"!

One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon pertains to Jacob Schiff and the Russian Revolution.

In his 1971 book None Dare Call It Conspiracy (page 69), Gary Allen wrote:

“According to the New York Journal American of February 3, 1949:

‘Today it is estimated by Jacob’s grandson, John Schiff, that the old man sank about 20,000,000 dollars for the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.' "

W. Cleon Skousen presented a virtually identical Schiff "quotation" in his 1970 book, The Naked Capitalist, on pages 40-41, as follows:

"One American source gave Trotsky, Lenin and the other Communist leaders around twenty million dollars for the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia. This was Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb and Company. The figure of twenty million dollars is cited by his grandson, John Schiff, in the New York Journal-American for February 3, 1949."

And Skousen repeated this claim in his March 1971 article, entitled "Home Grown Subversion" published in Law and Order magazine.

This "quotation" was widely circulated in right-wing conspiracy literature for decades. For example:

1950: Robert H. Williams: Know Your Enemy, page 14 [self-published, Santa Ana CA and reprinted by Gerald L.K. Smith's Christian Nationalist Crusade in 1950; and by Conde McGinley's Christian Educational Association in the 1960's and by Edward R. Fields's Thunderbolt newspaper (National States Rights Party), Marietta GA in the 1970's]

1970: W. Cleon Skousen: The Naked Capitalist [The Reviewer, p40-41]

1971: Gary Allen: None Dare Call It Conspiracy [Concord Press, p69]

1974: Marvin J. Andleman: To Eliminate The Opiate [Zahavia, p26]

1988: James Perloff: Shadows of Power [Western Islands, p39]

1988: Larry Abraham: Call it Conspiracy [Double A Publications, p77-78]

1995: G. Edward Griffin: Creature From Jekyll Island [American Opinion, p265]

However, significantly, not one of these publications ever identified the page number of the NY Journal American where this statement was supposedly made and when the FBI fact-checked the Skousen article published in Law and Order magazine, it concluded:

"Review of microfilm records of the February 3, 1949 New York Journal American failed to locate any article about Jacob Schiff and possible financing of the Bolsheviks as Skousen alleges."

Obviously, what happened is that this "quotation" was passed down from one decade to the next and it was accepted as genuine without anybody actually researching the original source.

The reason why the FBI could not “locate any article about Jacob Schiff" in the 2/3/49 issue of the NY Journal American is because it was NOT an article!

In reality, the "quotation" appears in that paper's society gossip column ["Smart Set"] which was written by an unidentified society columnist under the pseudonym of "Cholly Knickerbocker"! The actual author was Hearst columnist Igor Cassini!

But this is what passed for high-quality "factual evidence" in some circles and this is the quality of "research" which people like Gary Allen and Cleon Skousen foisted upon gullible and ill-informed people. [Oh, BTW -- Gary Allen had a degree in U.S. history from Stanford University!]

For a moment I thought the author was LIZ SMITH but no it was White Russian Cassini. gaal

see http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=4555&p=221164

==============

It is via Cassini's "Cholly Knickerbocker" Hearst syndicated society columns that I found the most information on James K. Cogswell III's second wife, Joan Rice Farish. Here she is at a party at the home of Joseph F Dryer, with her husband, Parker S. Quillen, and her ex in attendance, Ralph Demers.

Igor Cassini's first wife, Austine, married William Randolph Hearst, Jr, and Cassini hired Liz Smith, late 1950's to early 1960's, to ghost write his Cholly Knickerbocker column.

===========================

Lots of good stuff this old thread noted above

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Posted 15 March 2011 - 04:26 PM JIM ROOT http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=4555&p=221400

Greg,

I've just found the perfect way to describe the Harvey and Lee syndrome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

"The Texas Sharpshooter" fallacy. How ironic is that?

"It is related to the clustering illusion, which refers to the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist."

LOL

--Tommy

Perfect!

Mr. PEFECT AKA GREG PARKER PLEASE SHOW

Department of Defense unit diaries, Dec. 5, 1978,

House Select Committee on Assassinations (JFK Document 013485).

=================================================================== thanks sg

"The single most important discovery, and one that establishes with absolute and irrefutable certainty that the autopsy photographs have not been altered, is the fact that many of the photographs, when combined in pairs, produce stereoscopic images. ....

The only way a forger can successfully alter a detailed stereoscopic image...without detection is to alter both images identically, which is, [photographic expert and HSCA panel member Frank] Scott said, "essentially impossible." ....

The entire photographic panel of the HSCA concluded that "the autopsy photographs and X-rays were taken of President Kennedy at the time of his autopsy and that they had not been altered in any manner." This fact alone demolishes the conspiracy theorists' allegations that photographic fakery was used to conceal the plot to kill the president.

It also destroys another prime conspiracy belief--that the eyewitness descriptions of the president's wounds that were offered by the Parkland Hospital doctors (and later by some eyewitnesses to the autopsy) are proof that the autopsy photographs had been altered.

Obviously, if the autopsy photographs are genuine and unaltered (which all the experts agree), then eyewitness descriptions of the president's wounds that contradict those photographs are not proof of alteration, as some critics claim, but nothing more than examples of understandable, mistaken recollections, or if not that, then deliberate and outright falsehoods."

-- Vince Bugliosi; Pages 223-224 of "Reclaiming History" Endnotes // DVP

=============================================================

SHOWS DOUBLE EXPOSURE OF X-RAYS // PHOTOS SMOTOS ,gaal

The science he used was optical densitometry, a technique not employed by the HSCA's "experts" because they didn't think outside the box." <<<
A optical densitometer is a scientific instrument not a fantasy. ,gaal

========================

* Dr. Mantik has concluded the x-rays are abnormal. Dr. Mantik reached this conclusion after studying the radiographs at the National Archives with sensitive light-measuring equipment. Dr. Mantik has noted that the measured light in the large white area on the right lateral x-rays is "a thousand times the maximum seen in any other x-rays" (in DATELINE: DALLAS, April 12, 1994, p. 13; see also Livingstone, KILLING KENNEDY, 79-87). (For the record, Dr. Mantik, B.S., M.S., Ph.D., M.D., is a board-certified radiation oncologist and the Director of Radiation Oncology at Eisenhower Memorial Hospital. He was formerly an Assistant Professor of Radiation Science at Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, California, and is the author or co-author of several scholarly publications in these fields. Dr. Mantik's Ph.D. is in physics.)

* The Select Committee's medical panel claimed that in the lateral skull x-ray fracture lines radiate outward from the proposed cowlick entry site and correspondingly from the 6.5 mm fragment that now appears in the skull radiographs. But Dr. Mantik points out that these lines do not actually radiate from this location:

On the AP [anterior-posterior] view, however, these lines do not actually extend to the proposed entry site; they stop short of it. Dr. David O. Davis [an HSCA consultant] was careful to choose his words: ". . . the linear fractures seem to MORE OR LESS emanate from the embedded metallic fragment." Unless they unequivocally extend to this 6.5 mm object they cannot represent fracture lines caused by a posterior skull bullet. On the contrary, based on the radiographs and on Boswell's diagram, several of these obvious fracture lines may lie in the inferior orbital rim and not on the posterior skull at all. The inferior orbital rim fractures were confirmed by radiologist Seaman [another HSCA consultant]: "Fractures were evident through the upper part of the right eye, including the top and bottom of the right orbit." If these fractures lie on the anterior skull surface they cannot, of course, represent fracture lines emanating from the proposed cowlick entry site, and therefore, they cannot be used as evidence of a cowlick entry. (Livingstone, KILLING THE TRUTH, 613)

Looks like Steven Gaal has fallen for just about every nonsensical JFK conspiracy theory that has ever been created since '63.

Do you have any limits as far as unsupportable conspiracy theories are concerned, Steven?

Or is it pretty much an Anything Goes mindset with you?

And do you also think "Prayer Man" is Lee Oswald?

The science he used was optical densitometry, a technique not employed by the HSCA's "experts" because they didn't think outside the box." <<<

A optical densitometer is a scientific instrument not a fantasy. ,gaal

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a26093/lbj-kennedy-conspiracy/

KOOK VS KOOK SO ??

WALLACE ?? He had very poor vision. Why would anyone pin his (LBJ theory) hopes on this man to shoot at a moving target ? TOOOOOOO KOOKY to believe.

Print Wallace ?? Have Wallace touch box and blackmail LBJ ,but have sharpshooters picked by Lansdale on his Summer 63 visit of special forces bases. ,gaal

==================

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=21367&p=289729

By February 1963 Lansdale had no position in Cuban policy and was focusing on Latin America. He was traveling to countries like Bolivia and elsewhere. The U.S. had a lot of personnel in South America under Kennedy. And a lot of them ended up going to Vietnam. According to Newman there is a blind spot as to exactly what they were doing and how many people the U.S. had in Latin America.82

"I can tell you," Newman said, "that in the collateral research that I did, names that I came across, I found a correlation between -- I don't say this is definitive but I got a lot of hits -- the same names of the guys that were running around in Latin America, particularly in Cuban policy, end up in the Far East Division. Very strange coincidence. There were three -- it wasn't just one -- there were several. A neat nexus between the Southeast Asian guys and Cuban guys."83

Lansdale was also spending a lot of time at air bases and other areas in the southern United States; in Florida and in Alabama. Newman recalled from Lansdale's travel records that one of these other areas was some sort of a Cuban-exile camp. The record for that trip included a cover note to the person coordinating it telling him to keep quiet. Lansdale apparently wanted to make sure that no one knew that he was going there.84

There was also an honorary graduation certificate from the sniping school that the U.S. had in Panama. He went there, Newman recalled, in May or April 1963. He was made an honorary graduate there. Lansdale was going to various clandestine and special forces places in the spring and summer of 1963.85

One more event that Newman remembered from the spring 1963 period was that Lansdale was due to retire. And he was extended by Le May, arbitrarily, for another six months or so to November 1, 1963; with no job; no real responsibilities. Fletcher Prouty claims Lansdale was just at a desk by himself.86

In the summer of 1963 there were two interesting events concerning Vietnam. The U.S. had a problem with Diem. The regime would not compromise at all. It went in the opposite direction. Buddhists were killed. They began immolating themselves. The regime still would not relent. The political bottom completely fell out in Saigon.87

Newman said he came across an intriguing article in a local, small magazine from this period. It had a picture of Lansdale and a typical title like, "America's Most Celebrated Spy." It was about a Lansdale trip to Saigon. His travel records, however, indicate that he was not supposed to be in Saigon. This was around July-August 1963.88

The article reported an assassination attempt on Lansdale. The assassins missed and somebody killed the alleged assassin. Then he went to a meeting with Ambassador Lodge. According to Newman, "This is clearly impossible from the record because Lansdale has no authority or position to be involved in Vietnam policy. It would make sense in terms of going back and pleading with Diem and getting Lansdale to do it. Maybe Diem would listen to Lansdale. But I did find a record. He might have been in Saigon." Newman found evidence of a six- or seven-day break in Lansdale's normal activities.89

Among Lansdale's contacts in the last three to four months of Kennedy's life, Newman found "a lot of Spanish names. I found names that were reminiscent of CIA type folks."90

In 1963, Lansdale was Fletcher Prouty's boss. Prouty insists that he was sent to the South Pole by Lansdale to get him out of the way so that he would not witness the events of November 22, 1963. Presumably this was done because if Prouty had been there he would have figured out what was going on. Prouty has claimed that in the photograph of the three tramps walking across Dealey Plaza, the man in a suit with what looks like a wire coming out of his ear and going into his suit coat is Edward Lansdale -- that he recognized the back of his head and his gate. Among Lansdale's letters, John Newman and David Lifton found a slip of paper that has "The Texas Hotel" on it and a phone number in Denton. Lansdale's letters also reveal that he was headed in the direction of Dallas in November 1963.91

Lansdale wrote to a number of friends and associates beginning in September 1963, of his intention to go to Texas in November. There are as many as ten letters, according to Newman, where he described this upcoming trip to two people. One was his son. The other one was General "Hangin' Sam" Williams, an old buddy and McGarr's predecessor in Vietnam. He lived in San Antonio.92

The last piece of paper that Newman found placing Lansdale physically in Washington is dated November 14, 1963. It concerns running errands for his wife. After that there is no record of his whereabouts except for a box of incidentals, which had this piece of paper in it. It has on it "Texas Hotel" and "Denton" and a name and phone number. As Newman said, "That might be from 1949 or it might be 1968 and again it might be November 1963. Because the Texas Hotel is where Kennedy stayed the night before he died, and Denton, Texas is just north here of Dallas, it all fits in. But it certainly is not conclusive."93

Lansdale dropped out of sight at this point. He resurfaced back in Washington in the Food for Peace Program and was soon given a job by Johnson back in Vietnam. He had contacts who got him interviews in the White House. In fact he would be on the ground in Vietnam when U.S. combat troops arrived.94

bumped

===============

see above post and this related link http://www.blacklistednews.com/Propaganda_Wars%3A_U.S._allocates_%24500%2C000_for_Baltic_journalism_programs_to_combat_Russian_propaganda/45676/0/38/38/Y/M.html

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

Donald is scheduled to be interviewed on Friday, August 21

The radio show is on 614 radio stations in the U.S. and Canada.

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/jeffries-donald/71725

Oh, goodie!

--Tommy

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2015/08/

Quite a line up, eh, Tommy?

I'll be sure to tune in for the interview with Bigfoot as he tells us his theory on crop circles.

You (Parker) will turn down any invitation to said program ,that's obvious., gaal NOTED

Um. Yes, Stevo. Not that an invite is ever likely, but you're quite right. If one was made, it would be turned down. Do you think it's suspicious or odd that I wouldn't want to appear on a program that interviews self-proclaimed vampires, gives air-time to Alex Jones as well as to every two-bit hustler and ex-crackhead warning about the coming apocalypse?

Jeffries fits right in. It's his target audience.

George Noory ?? former ONI ???. DON should make all ONI connection to ELM St.........gaal

=============================

The State Department couldn't do the TACA operation ,they would have tapped ONI. ,gaal

==

see http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=16815&p=300333

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

Donald is scheduled to be interviewed on Friday, August 21

The radio show is on 614 radio stations in the U.S. and Canada.

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/jeffries-donald/71725

Oh, goodie!

--Tommy

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2015/08/

Quite a line up, eh, Tommy?

I'll be sure to tune in for the interview with Bigfoot as he tells us his theory on crop circles.

You (Parker) will turn down any invitation to said program ,that's obvious., gaal NOTED (Per Parker Jim ghost channeler DiEugenio went on said program.)

=======================================================================

What is abundantly clear is this: you, David Von Pein, have never, ever debated anyone face to face concerning any topic regarding JFK's assassination...

You're hot air son, period!

And that ain't fantasy!

The science he used was optical densitometry, a technique not employed by the HSCA's "experts" because they didn't think outside the box." <<<

A optical densitometer is a scientific instrument not a fantasy. ,gaal

Like I said:

food riots - did not happen

Jade Helm takeover - did not happen

Good to see you are maintaining your average.

The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East http://arxiv.org/PS_...08...2455v1.pdf

Evan you are very impolite putting words in my mouth.

Never said Jade Helm takeover. As I posted to you in other threads such a thing as super repression happens after Russian takeover by West. (after)

FOOD SHORTAGES MIDDLE EAST ?? Golly Evan you don't even know about threads in this section...ever heard of seen thread on Yemen ?? really no ? ....,gaal

=====================

Refugees Face Huge Food Shortage in Iraq and Syria ...

Foodbank Australia, and other welfare support groups, are struggling to meet rising demand from the nation’s underemployed and struggling families

jfk-archives.blogspot.com/2010/06/doug-horne's-silliness-part-1.html

jfk-archives.blogspot.com/2013/07/david-von-pein-vs-david-lifton.html

Doug Horne rebuts John McAdams Doug Horne

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⦁ I began writing this opinion piece in response to one specific John McAdams comment in the thread following Peter Voskamp’s interview of Richard Stolley of LIFE magazine, about his involvement with the Zapruder film the weekend of JFK’s assassination.

⦁ The response I was writing evolved and morphed into something bigger as I was composing it. It is really about much more than just the one specific comment I am rebutting; it is about a much bigger issue — namely, the negative tone and apparent intent to disrupt, and ridicule, that John McAdams too often brings to the JFKFACTS site, and to other JFK chat rooms.

⦁ If John McAdams had truly read any of my work on the Zapruder film — such as the 200-page Z film chapter, number 14 in my book “Inside the ARRB;” or my 19,000-word, footnoted research paper on the 2 NPIC events (posted at LewRockwell.com) — he would know that I have completely discredited David Wrone’s book on the Zapruder film, and have done so with great specificity, quoting Wrone’s incorrect conclusions verbatim, and citing exactly why his major conclusions (that the USG had no interest in the film and did not have the capability to alter it) are incorrect, in light of new evidence. David Wrone’s book misrepresented/failed to report properly on the 2 NPIC events, as I reported in my chapter 14, and that obfuscation, I believe, was intentional. Wrone’s book, when it was published, was widely considered the best defense to date, at that time, of the Z film’s authenticity. But it now reads like a “flat earth” document, following Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe. Citing David Wrone’s book at this point in the Z film debate is about as useful as citing the Warren Report when discussing the medical evidence.

No one who has watched Dino Brugioni’s interview in the Shane O’Sullivan piece titled “The Zapruder Film Mystery” has expressed anything but respect for his excellent memory and his integrity, and this includes the moderator on this site, Jefferson Morley. Dino’s memories, when recorded on video in 2011, were 47 years old, and yet were more truthful, and useful, and reliable, than much of the testimony taken by the Warren Commission just months after JFK’s assassination. The best example of this is Dr. James J. Humes, who perjured himself on many occasions before the Warren Commission (and later before the ARRB). Humes’ testimony in 1964 was not “valid” just because it was “fresh.” And Dino Brugioni’s recollections (and those of Homer McMahon of NPIC in 1997) are not “invalid” just because they were not recorded in 1964. Each witnesses’ testimony and recollections must be evaluated independently, within the context of all known evidence and what they have said previously. Every oral historian and jurist knows this.

On those occasions when he discusses my work, McAdams keeps trotting out his favorite old shibboleth about how no one can trust 30+ year old memories; he attempts to use this rather lame, simplistic dismissal — a standard lawyer’s trick used in adversarial proceedings — whenever he cannot counter any of my specific assertions or conclusions by discussing specific evidence, or by discussing the pattern revealed by a large body of facts (and what those facts mean). On the rare occasions when he does discuss facts, he attempts to use a “reductionist” approach — which entails ignoring the “big picture” and selectively picking out one statement among many made by someone else, in an attempt to destroy a larger argument by nitpicking to death, and casting doubt upon, one small item in a large body of evidence. I find this approach to the JFK assassination counterproductive, for in adopting these methods, Mr. McAdams contributes nothing positive to the JFK debate; his sole object seems to be to cast the maximum doubt possible upon any facts contrary to the Warren Commission’s findings, and to debunk the serious work of dedicated JFK researchers, whose sole goal is to determine what really happened in our country in 1963.

But for the sake of this response, let me on this one occasion, counter his tired old argument that we cannot trust 30+ year old memories — which is demonstrably not true (Dennis David and Dino Brugioni are two good examples of “old” recollections that are rock-solid) — by stating that most of the evidence that causes us to mistrust the Warren Commission’s medical conclusions are NOT 30+ year old memories, but rather, are contemporaneous documents created at or near the time of the assassination, to wit:

(1) The Boyajian Report dated 11/26/63, which records the arrival of JFK’s body at the Bethesda morgue 20 minutes prior to the Andrews AFB motorcade;

(2)The Sibert and O’Neill FBI FD-302 report dated 11/26/63, which quotes Dr. Humes’ statement at the autopsy (when describing the condition of JFK’s body) that there had been “surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull.” The significance of this statement is that there was no cranial surgery in Dallas.

(3) The receipt trail for the JFK autopsy report (from both 1965 and from 1967) which proves that the Secret Service TWICE relinquished “original autopsy reports” on JFK to others. The point here is that you cannot give away an “original” twice, if there was only one original. And we know the first draft of the autopsy report was burned by Dr. Humes in his fireplace after it was revised, because this is what Humes testified to in 1964 before Arlen Specter of the Warren Commission. That was not a 30+ year old memory — it was only about 4 months after the assassination. So we can have no confidence today in the extant autopsy report.

(4) National Archives personnel recorded in a written report on 10/31/66 that all of the paragraph nine materials (see the APR ’65 inventory) given to RFK in 1965 (including the brain and an “original autopsy report”) were not returned to the govt by the Kennedy family; and we have a 1969 memo written by Assistant S.S. Director Tom Kelley which records that the group of USG officials he was meeting with discussed the missing autopsy report, and the incendiary nature of that fact, and decided to do nothing about it.

(5) The Joint Casket Bearer Team’s official report written in 1963 lists the time that the honor guard took the Dallas casket into the morgue as “2000 hours,” or 8:00 PM. This contemporaneous document records the final casket entry (of three) that night at the Bethesda morgue; and when married with the Boyajian report (documenting the first casket entry at 18:35 hours, or 6:35 PM) proves that there was a shell game underway at Bethesda Naval Hospital on 11/22/63 with JFK’s body, and that its chain of custody from Dallas to Bethesda was broken — seriously compromised.

(6) The Gawler’s Funeral Home “first call sheet” prepared on 11/22/63 records that JFK’s body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital in a metal shipping casket, a term which had a specific meaning within the funeral trade. A shipping casket is used for the public transportation of corpses, and is not ornamental in any way. (Three Navy men at Bethesda Naval Hospital — Dennis David, Floyd Riebe, and Paul O’Connor — all recalled that the shipping casket was light gray in color, and was very simple and unadorned. It had no siderails, no viewing lid, and Riebe recalled that it sported ugly turnbuckles. Their testimony years later is to be believed because it is consistent with the Gawler’s document, which they never saw.) But JFK’s body did not leave Dallas in a cheap, lightweight gray aluminum shipping casket; rather, it left Dallas in a heavy, dark brown, bronze ceremonial viewing coffin. The break in the chain of custody of JFK’s body already established by the Boyajian report, and the report of the Casket Bearer Team, is further substantiated by this written record created on 11/22/63 by the Gawler’s funeral home embalming team.

(7) The contemporaneous treatment notes and reports of the Parkland treating physicians written on 11/22/63 — they are certainly not 30+ year old memories — all record a large head wound in the rear, or right rear, of President Kennedy’s head. None of them describe any damage to the top of the head or to the right side. Those are NOT simply my interpretations of what they wrote (as McAdams has claimed in an earlier posting), for if one consults a medical anatomy atlas, there is only ONE possible interpretation to what they wrote: JFK had a large defect in the back of his head, devoid of scalp and skull, extruding cerebral AND CEREBELLAR tissue. Those key observations speak to a fatal shot from the front, and dramatically disagree with the later autopsy conclusions (and the controversial autopsy photos of the back of the head). If one reads the treatment notes of the Parkland physicians, you will note a great uniformity and consistency in their descriptions of JFK’s wounds. If error was at play here, there should be a wide range of responses in their notes — but there is not. Dr. Clark stated that day that the treatment of JFK went on for 40 minutes (implying that the time of death was backdated to 1:00 PM after treatment was concluded). So the Dallas doctors and nurses had plenty of time to observe his wounds, both during treatment and after death; and they were all well trained professionals, so when they used words like “occipital” or “occipital-parietal” in their notes, we can have great confidence that they were making reasonably precise descriptions of what they had plenty of time to observe.

I could go on and on, but by now the readers of this thread surely get the point: you cannot dismiss serious evidence, and the conclusions derived from studying the patterns in that evidence, by refusing to discuss the facts, and by resorting to simplistic techniques to attempt to discount “wholesale” everything someone says. That is an intellectually dishonest approach. END

comments

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Preston Newe November 10, 2014 at 4:19 pm

Doug Horne has a lot of global attention on him & his startling analysis at present. Those who haven’t read his books are certainly aware of his video presentations posted online. He’s been able to get his message out globally without the assistance or blessings from the MSM. The closer he brings the truth to the public, the more intense his detractors will try to pull his audience to their side. It’s the old good vs. evil, Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader thing we’ve seen all our lives. Doug needn’t worry; those convinced he’s got it right won’t jump ship.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Douglas Horne November 11, 2014 at 6:37 am

Preston,

This is exactly how I see it. I wasn’t worth mentioning in McAdams’ book, in which he trashed the independent JFK research community, but suddenly someone has decided that it is important to attack me now, and to do so vigorously. It seems to me to be a sort of “back-and-to-the-left-handed compliment,” if you get my drift. Only people perceived as a threat are attacked; others are ignored.

A parallel to your wonderful analogy above is that I sometimes feel like one of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s LENSMEN, engaged in mortal combat with the evil forces of Boskone. (Readers of the old classics of science fiction will appreciate this analogy.)

Thanks for your appreciation.

[[[[[[[[[[[===========o0o0o0o=============]]]]]]]]]]]

THE EVER POLITE DVP (?) ,gaal

=

http://alt.conspiracy.jfk.narkive.com/LBEE0zce/for-david-von-pain

David Von Pein

"Doug Horne was a Professional Hired & Paid by the HSCA. Da Bug is an Ambulance Chasing Lawyer. Not too tough to figure which has credibility." <<<

To you kooks, anybody who has that "ABO" (Anybody But Oswald) bumper

sticker on their car will always have far greater credibility than

anyone else.

A kook named Rossley probably would pick Garrison's and Fetzer's

"credibility" over that of Vince Bugliosi's or Dale K. Myers'.

Right, Mega-Kook?

The obvious questions, in view of “Nighthawk One’s” departure without President Kennedy’s body onboard, are: (1) Who changed the plan? How did this happen? and (2) How did JFK’s body get to Bethesda Naval Hospital, if “Nighthawk One” did not take it there?

The original plan was, indeed, to transport JFK's casket to Bethesda via helicopter, as we can hear on the Air Force One tapes (below). But the plan was changed prior to AF1 landing at Andrews, due (no doubt) to the fact that somebody realized the difficulty there would be if they tried to jam JFK's very heavy and cumbersome casket onto a helicopter. So an ambulance/hearse was used instead.

There's certainly nothing conspiratorial or sinister about that change in plans whatsoever. In fact, it was a very sensible and prudent change that almost certainly had to be made.

And the answer to the #2 question above is quite simple --- President Kennedy's body got to Bethesda by way of the gray Navy ambulance. Millions of people watching television saw the casket being placed into that ambulance. (Why was that second question even asked?) ~shrug~

Below are excerpts from the AF1 radio transmissions concerning the "chopper" and the later realization by members of the Kennedy party aboard Air Force One that ground transportation would be needed to replace the chopper:

Air Force One Radio Excerpts (November 22, 1963)

More....

jfk-archives.blogspot.com/2011/12/aircraft-radio-transmissions-11-22-63.html

DVP facts are here for you to see. you eems not to want them.,gaal

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-af1-tapes-and-subsequent-events-at-andrews-afb-on-november-22-1963-what-was-supposed-to-happen-vs-what-did-happen/

The AF1 tapes reveal unambiguously that Gerald Behn in the White House situation room wanted to separate Mrs. Kennedy (hereafter referred to by her initials, JBK) and all other VIP passengers who were not Secret Service agents from the Dallas casket. Although JFK’s Military Aide, General Ted Clifton (code name “Watchman”), initially insisted on an autopsy at Walter Reed Hospital and the use of a mortuary-type ambulance for transportation, he eventually fell into line with “Crown’s” demands and then actively supported Behn’s orders. Here are some telling quotes from the Clifton tapes:

Digest: Walter Reed ambulance for body that will go to Walter Reed, over?

Duplex: Say again, say again.

Digest (Kellerman): …[we need] an ambulance from Walter Reed to transport body, over?

Duplex (Behn): Arrangements have been made for a helicopter for the Bethesda Naval Medical Center, over.

Digest: Standby, jerry—ah, I’ll have to get Burkley here.

A short time later Behn clarified his intentions:

Duplex: The, everybody aboard Air Force One, everybody aboard Air Force One, with the exception of the body, will be choppered into the South Grounds [of the White House]. The body will be choppered to the Navy Medical Center at Bethesda, over.

Burkley: The body will be choppered or will go by ambulance to the Navy Medical Center?

Duplex: Will be choppered, will be choppered.

Somewhat later, General Clifton on AF1 (apparently unaware that the Secret Service is running the show in Washington) “reads the riot act” to General Heaton, the Surgeon General of the Army:

Clifton: [material appears to be missing here from both the LBJ Library and Clifton version of the AF1 tapes — there is no “point one” on the tape “…two: we do not want a helicopter for Bethesda Naval Medical Center. We do want a [sic] ambulance and a ground return from Andrews to Walter Reed, and we want the regular, ah, post mortem that has to be done by law, under guard, performed at Walter Reed. Is that clear, over?

Heaton: That is clear, General Clifton. You want an ambulance, and another, ah, limousine, at Andrews, and you want the, ah, regular post mortem by law done at Walter Reed.

Clifton: That is correct.

These instructions, given to the Army Surgeon General (who was at Walter Reed, and not at “Crown”), were undoubtedly why the Gawler’s Hearse was originally ordered to go to Andrews AFB by Colonel Miller of the Army’s Military District of Washington. This conversation, apparently, also stimulated Dr. Dick Davis, the acting Head of Neurosurgery at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (the AFIP was co-located with Walter Reed in Washington D.C.), to assemble a team and set up to perform a craniotomy (the surgical skull cap removal performed at autopsies) at Walter Reed. He told me, when I interviewed him in 1997 while on the ARRB staff, that his team was set up and ready to go, but President Kennedy’s body never arrived at Walter Reed.

Then, after the “black Cadillac” conversations overheard at Crown on the Clifton tapes, General Clifton (who now began using his code name, “Watchman”) begins to defer to Behn’s plans for a Bethesda autopsy:

Watchman: Ah, Duplex, this is Watchman. I understand that [you] have arranged [fadeout] … [mor]tuary-type of ambulance [garbled] take President Kennedy to Bethesda. Is this correct, over?

Duplex: Watchman, ah, there’s been [sic] arranged to helicopter, helicopter, the body to Bethesda, over.

After some discussion about whether it is safe to use a helicopter, this ensued:

Watchman: This is Watchman. Ah, don’t take a chance on that. Also, have a mortuary-type ambulance stand by in case the helicopter doesn’t work.

Duplex: That’s affirmative [garbled] That’s affirmative, I received.

Watchman: Now, some other instructions. Listen carefully. Ah, we need a ramp, a normal ramp put at, put at the front of the aircraft, on the right-hand side, just behind the pilot’s cabin, in the galley. We are going to take the First Lady off by that route, over. Do you understand?

Duplex: I receive, affirmative.

Clifton then asked for a large forklift for the casket at the port side rear door, and a normal ramp for passengers at the port forward door. He then summarized:

Watchman: Duplex, this is Watchman, I say again: at the right front, a ramp for Mrs. Ken[nedy]; at the left rear, if possible, a forklift for the casket; and on the left front, near the pilot, [a] normal ramp, [a] normal press arrangement [garbled], over?

Clearly, at this point General Clifton was implementing Jerry Behn’s stated intention to separate JBK from the Dallas casket. Behn had earlier said all passengers were to be choppered to the South Grounds of the White House; and now Ted Clifton was attempting to ensure that this would happen by arranging for her to exit the aircraft secretly, in the darkness, using the forward starboard galley door — a different door than was going to be used for the Dallas casket.

The question is, WHY? I have inferred that among the many conversations that must have been deleted from the AF1 tapes, were undoubtedly conversations between Kellerman and Behn about the body switch — about the removal of JFK’s body from the bronze Dallas casket prior to takeoff, as a “security measure” to keep it out of the hands of the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Earl Rose. This is the context in which the “black Cadillac” discussions overheard at “Crown,” and the blatant attempts by Behn and Clifton to separate JBK from the Dallas casket, best make sense.

Now, just because “Nighthawk One” took off from Andrews AFB without JFK’s body onboard, that does not mean that there weren’t other helicopters available. Please read below this crucial exchange between Kellerman (Digest) and Behn (Duplex), which occurred between time 3:52 and time 6:05 on side 2 of the Clifton tapes (after the Clifton plan to remove JBK from the aircraft in secret was discussed):

Duplex: [after many communications problems]…Go ahead Digest, this is Duplex.

Digest: Again, I repeat, three helicopters [to] transport people to the White House lawn, OK?

Duplex: That is affirmative.

Digest: Roger, OK, White House 102 and 405-X for transportation to, ah, Navy Hospital, OK?

Duplex: That is affirmative.

This is significant. Kellerman is confirming that three helicopters at Andrews were assigned to take AF1’s passengers (largely, the Kennedy entourage, including JBK) to the White House, and that two additional helicopters were assigned to transport JFK’s body to Bethesda. These are designated by Kellerman as White House assets, and are therefore not HMX “hot team” assets. Getting the body of JFK to Bethesda was so important that redundancy was laid in: both “Nighthawk One” had been arranged to perform that function, as well as two other assets controlled by the Secret Service (White House 102 and 405-X). Presumably, one of these two White House assets would be used to take the heavy, ceremonial bronze Dallas casket to Bethesda — an event which was highly likely (indeed, almost certain) to be televised on live TV. The second helicopter mentioned by Kellerman would have been needed to surreptitiously transport the actual body of JFK from the luggage compartment on AF1 where it had been hidden during the flight, to Bethesda, where it could have been reunited with the bronze Dallas casket. If this had taken place as planned — a two helicopter rendezvous on the grounds of Bethesda in the darkness — JFK’s body could have been placed back into the Dallas casket and no one at the morgue would have known otherwise. Once the very public loading of the Dallas casket onto helo # 1 had taken place, the klieg lights would have been turned off, and the Andrews TV coverage would have ceased. (This is exactly what happened once LBJ’s helo, “Army 1,” departed. The TV coverage abruptly ended.) Then, in the ensuing darkness, it would have been easy to offload JFK’s body from its hiding place in an AF1 luggage compartment and place it on helo # 2.

The most significant quote on the Clifton tapes then takes place almost immediately after Kellerman tells Behn about the two helicopters to be used for the Navy Hospital.

Duplex: Digest, this is Duplex. You accompany the body aboard the helicopter.

Digest: Roger…

After all that had gone before in the AF1 conversations, the reader will understand that this is the proof that the light gray Navy Pontiac ambulance was never intended to take JFK’s Dallas casket to Bethesda. In fact, William Manchester makes clear, in two places in his book The Death of a President, that this was a cardiac ambulance (not a hearse), and that it was sent to Andrews by Captain Canada, the commanding officer of the treatment hospital at Bethesda, in case LBJ had experienced any heart trouble. [Rear Admiral Galloway commanded the entire complex; Captain Stover was the C.O. of the medical school at Bethesda; and Captain Canada was the C.O. of the treatment hospital.]

On page 381, Manchester writes:

Captain R.O. Canada, Jr., Bethesda’s commanding officer, wasn’t informed of the role his hospital would play. And Godfrey McHugh’s tart order for an ambulance had been ignored. Captain Canada did send one to Andrews, but that was sheer chance. Because Lyndon Johnson had served in the Navy, he had been Canada’s patient after his massive heart attack on July 2, 1955; the ambulance was dispatched against the possibility that the new President might be stricken again during the flight.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, on impulse, changes the Secret Service/Military plan to separate her from the Dallas casket:

We know from Manchester’s book that Robert F. Kennedy, the slain President’s brother and the U.S. Attorney General, was the first person to board AF1 after touchdown. In fact, he appears to have done so in the darkness, just when the bright television klieg lights were briefly switched off as the aircraft approached its designated parking spot. Air Force One had touched down at 6:00 PM local time, and had been taxiing toward its normal waiting area for about three minutes. Manchester writes on page 387:

The crowd waiting by the chain fence had realized that arrival was imminent because they heard the whining jets. They couldn’t see its silhouette, however; the klieg lights blinded them. At 6:03 PM these were abruptly cut off. The reason was commonplace. The pilot had to see his way… Closer and closer the huge ghost crawled until Swindal [the pilot], looking down, could identify two of the waiting men. Robert McNamara was facing him, looking peculiarly tall. Robert Kennedy had just left the sanctuary of his [pickup] truck [where he had secreted himself] and was posed in a tense half-crouch, ready to spring aboard. Swindal paused momentarily for the croucher. [Did AF1 actually pause momentarily in the darkness to let RFK onboard before any others? The meaning of Manchester’s writing here is unclear.] The eyes of the crowd were on the rear hatch, the President’s. A ramp had been readied for the front entrance, and the Attorney General vaulted on it, unseen; he was pumping up the steps while it was still being rolled into place … the aircraft glided forward once again and parked.” The time “on the blocks” was reported by AF1 as 6:04 PM.

RFK raced to the rear of the aircraft to be with JBK. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy had already displayed a gritty, stubborn frame of mind during the flight back. On page 348, Manchester writes that when Rear Admiral Burkley, JFK’s Military Physician, asked her if she wanted to change her blood-spattered pink Chanel suit:

“No,” she whispered fiercely. “Let them see what they’ve done.”

A similar exchange took place with Malcolm Kilduff, the acting Press Secretary for JFK’s trip to Texas. Manchester, who did not have access to the AF1 tapes, and therefore did not understand the true intent of taking JBK out the forward starboard door, continued on page 348:

The last man to realize that she really meant it was Kilduff. He thought long about how they could offload the coffin at Andrews without pictures being taken. His solution was to open the galley door on the starboard side, opposite the usual exit. That way the great mass of the fuselage would mask both the coffin and the widow; photographers and television cameramen would see nothing. He proposed the plan. She vetoed it. “We’ll go out the regular way [using the Presidential exit on the port aft side of the aircraft],” she said. “I want them to see what they have done.”

Ask yourself what was more likely: was General Clifton taking orders from an assistant Press Secretary, or was the assistant Press Secretary taking orders from the Commander-in-Chief’s Military Aide? It seems obvious to me that Clifton tried to use Kilduff to get Jackie to leave the aircraft in the darkness, via the secret exit ramp previously arranged by Clifton, on the radio circuit to “Crown.” And it was naive for Manchester to fall for this specious after-the-fact explanation for a purported plan to remove both the casket and Jackie Kennedy from the forward starboard galley door, since there was no forklift at the forward starboard galley door to take the casket off. The forklift was at the Presidential door, on the aft port side. Air Force One itself (Clifton) had initiated that arrangement.

On page 390, Manchester writes:

Bob Kennedy explained the transportation choices to his sister-in-law. “There’s a helicopter here to take you to the White House. Don’t you want to do that?”

“No, no, I just want to go to Bethesda.” She saw the gray ambulance, assumed it was the one she had requested, and said, “We’ll go in that.”

And thus, were all the devious plans of the coup plotters to separate the widow (and all other witnesses) from the Dallas casket torn asunder, and rendered moot. In this instant, while looking out the Presidential exit door at the left rear of the aircraft, the determination of President Kennedy’s widow to remain with her husband — she had no idea the Dallas casket was empty, and therefore equated staying with the casket to staying with JFK’s body — threw a giant monkey-wrench into the plans of the Secret Service to surreptitiously reunite his body with the Dallas casket. The failure of this plan led directly to the absurd “French Farce” of the three casket entries discussed earlier, and through this discovery of the body’s broken chain-of-custody — by investigating what it meant — we have uncovered the clandestine post-mortem surgery that was performed on JFK’s body, at Bethesda Naval Hospital, to remove all evidence of frontal shots from his cadaver before the autopsy officially began. No coup plotter in his right mind would have planned the three Bethesda casket entries that actually occurred that night, for the different entries left undeniable evidence of a serious break in the body’s chain-of-custody, and of “missing time” prior to the beginning of the autopsy at 8:00 PM. The investigation of what transpired during that “missing time” (between 6:35 PM and 8:00 PM), and of what the three casket entries implied, has led to a true understanding of why the Parkland Hospital wound observations and the Bethesda Naval Hospital wound observations are so markedly different. (See Chapter 13 of Inside the ARRB, pages 998-1013.)

Manchester’s confirmation that RFK and JBK, with an ad hoc decision, commandeered a cardiac ambulance sent to provide aid to LBJ (and that that vehicle was not the intended mode of transportation for the body) is found on page 391 of The Death of a President, where he writes: “Beside the driver, gaping, were the heart specialist and nurse who had been sent to attend Lyndon Johnson. At Roy Kellerman’s request all three slid out wordlessly and Greer, Kellerman, Landis, and Burkley scrambled in, Burkley on Landis’ lap. The Attorney General entered the back, sitting opposite his sister-in-law; Godfrey perched beside her.”

This is the precise moment when the pilot of “Nighthawk One” took off, without the Dallas Casket, and flew to Quantico to put his bird to bed. Kellerman and Greer had no choice but to modify their plan immediately, and to stay with the Dallas casket, which Kellerman surely knew was empty. (He was in charge of all security for the Dallas trip, and as the reader will recall, blurted out a revealing oral utterance on the radio to Gerald Behn prior to takeoff from Love Field, about something happening with “the, ah, body.”) As soon as the AF1 personnel failed to separate Jackie Kennedy from the Dallas casket, Kellerman’s main task changed from “going with the body on the helicopter” to preventing anyone from opening it while it was still empty. It was for this reason that he stayed with JBK, RFK, and the empty Dallas casket.

Was there enough time to fly JFK’s body to Bethesda to support a 6:35 PM arrival at the morgue loading dock? Do the facts fit the hypothesis?

The answer is YES.

I closely studied the events on the ground at Andrews by watching my DVD of the A&E network’s rebroadcast of the NBC live TV coverage on November 22, 1963, called “As It Happened.”

Using that broadcast and a stopwatch; and the AF1 tapes; and the Chuck Holmes logbook of Andrews AFB activity on 11/22/63; and Manchester’s book, I was able to construct the following timeline:

6:00 PM AF1 Touchdown. [From the AF1 tapes and the Chuck Holmes Andrews AFB logbook]

6:04 PM: AF1 “on the blocks.” [From the AF1 tapes]

6:14 PM: LBJ makes brief televised remarks before microphones. [From the DVD of TV coverage, and Manchester’s book] The Navy ambulance has already departed with the Dallas casket, with RFK and JBK onboard.

6:20 PM: LBJ’s helo, “Army 1,” takes off and the television lights are turned off and the coverage abruptly ends. [From the DVD of TV coverage]

6:26 PM: LBJ and “Army 1” arrives at the South Lawn of the White House [from Manchester’s book]

6:30 PM: Air Force Two (more correctly, SAM 86970, since there was no Vice President onboard) lands at Andrews. It would have taxied for three to four minutes before parking, based on the time required for AF1 to taxi to its resting spot. [from the Chuck Holmes special Andrews logbook for 11/22/63]

The time required for a helicopter flight from Andrews to the White House (6:20 to 6:26 PM) was just 6 minutes, and you can be sure that the pilot of “Army 1” was being very careful that night, and was not trying to set any speed records.

In order for JFK’s body to show up at the Bethesda morgue loading dock at 6:35 PM (per the seminal Boyajian report) I stipulate that it would have had to arrive by helicopter on the grounds of Bethesda five minutes prior to that, by 6:30 PM.

Was there enough time to fly JFK’s body from Air Force One’s parking spot at Andrews to the grounds of Bethesda, and arrive by 6:30 PM? YES. If JFK’s body (wrapped in the two sheets in which it left Parkland) had been loaded onto a helicopter by 6:23 PM — three minutes after LBJ’s helo departed and the TV broadcast was discontinued—it would have had seven minutes to get to Bethesda Naval Hospital. If JFK’s body had been put on a helicopter at 6:21 instead of 6:23, then nine minutes would have been available for the flight to Bethesda. Washington D.C. is a small town, not very large in land area, and Bethesda is immediately northwest of the city limits, not that far from the White House.

My estimated “necessary” arrival time for the helicopter surreptitiously transporting JFK’s body to the Bethesda Naval Hospital complex Officer’s Club parking lot — 6:30 PM — is indirectly corroborated by an entry in an Army log from MDW’s funeral operations center. In a footnote on page 689 of Best Evidence (cloth edition), Lifton wrote that the log indicates that at 5:30 PM word was passed that Kennedy’s body was going to Bethesda. A log entry then notes that one Army official notified Admiral Galloway “advising them to provide a security cordon around the heliport at the Bethesda Naval Center, expecting arrival of the remains at approximately 1830 hours [6:30 PM].” This confirms my own estimate of the possible arrival time of the surreptitious flight with the body from Andrews calculated above, and proves my own calculations of the feasibility of getting there on time (to support a 6:35 PM offload at the morgue loading dock) were “spot on.”

Is there evidence of a helicopter landing on the Bethesda grounds near the morgue?

The answer is YES. On page 35 of William Law’s 2005 book In the Eye of History, from his interview of Paul K. O’Connor (a Navy corpsman who assisted the Navy pathologists with the autopsy on JFK), he quotes O’Connor as follows:

Right after we heard the helicopters come over, I distinctly heard one land in the back of the hospital, which was the Officer’s Club parking lot. There was a big parking lot. I heard one helicopter land there. I heard another helicopter land at the north side of the hospital where there was a normal helicopter-landing pad. Several minutes later, I can’t give you a definite time — maybe five minutes — the back of the morgue opened up and a crew of hospital corpsmen and a higher ranking corpsman brought in a plain, pinkish-gray, what I call a shipping casket. It was not ornate. It was not damaged…. They brought it up front where we were. At that time we opened up the coffin. Inside was the body bag.

Dennis David had first told his story about delivering a plain gray metal casket (from a black Cadillac) to a small town midwestern newspaper in May of 1975. Paul O’Connor corroborated this story about a “pinkish gray” casket to the HSCA staff in 1977, and also told the HSCA staff that the President’s body had been removed nude, from inside a zippered body bag, with a sheet wrapped only around the head. (JFK did not leave Parkland Hospital in a body bag; and his body, when it departed Parkland, was not nude — it was wrapped in a sheet. His head was wrapped in a separate sheet, also.) A third witness to the shipping casket was Navy corpsman Floyd Riebe, who assisted the official photographer at the autopsy that night; he has recalled that the crude shipping casket had ugly turnbuckles on it to seal the lid, and had no prominent side rails for the pallbearers, like the bronze Dallas casket.

Paul O’Connor was interviewed extensively by David Lifton on film in 1980 for his short documentary Best Evidence, and subsequently again by Lifton, a few years later, on video for a TV journalism news show. He was also interviewed extensively by Nigel Turner for his multi-part documentary, The Men Who Killed Kennedy. Although he is now deceased, the reader has ample opportunities to assess Paul O’Connor’s credibility. I find him very credible. His story about the shipping casket never wavered, and his account of a group of Navy corpsmen bringing in the shipping casket dovetails perfectly with Dennis David’s account. His memory of one helicopter landing on the north side of the Bethesda Hospital, at the helipad, concurs with Manchester, who records in his book that the H-21 helicopter carrying the Joint Service Casket Team from Andrews landed at that site, out in front of the main building. His account of a second helo landing at the Officer’s Club parking lot, behind the morgue, is indirectly corroborated by Dennis David. David told Lifton in 1979 that he believed the black Cadillac ambulance (the Hearse) that delivered the shipping casket to the morgue loading dock had come in through “the back gate.” When Lifton asked David to explain why he said that, he explained that the road which brought the black Cadillac to the morgue loading dock wound its way from the back gate, past the Officer’s Club, to the morgue entrance. (See page 573 of Best Evidence, cloth edition.) So the route used by the black Cadillac ambulance met by Dennis David passed directly by the Officer’s Club parking lot, where O’Connor was certain a helicopter had landed, only about five minutes before the shipping casket was delivered to the morgue where O’Connor worked that night, by a working party of Navy corpsmen.

Everything fits.

Including the Hearse. Dennis David has consistently recalled that the two people in the front of the black Cadillac were wearing white operating room smocks, and that it was definitely not a military vehicle. It had to have been the Gawler’s funeral home Hearse that was originally assigned to go to Andrews AFB, but which was recalled by Colonel Miller “at the last minute.” Apparently it was sent to Bethesda instead. Tom Robinson, who in 1963 was a twenty-year-old Gawler’s embalming assistant (whose specialty was applying restorative art to cadavers to prepare them for open-casket funerals), said he was present all night long inside the morgue and had a “50-yardline seat” in the gallery. He witnessed things that were NOT WITNESSED by the large audience to the official autopsy that began at 8:00 PM. [Two examples were: (1) him witnessing JFK’s skull sawed open to remove the brain — something Humes did not have to do before his large audience at 8:00 PM; and (2) he saw about ten metal fragments removed from JFK’s cranium and placed in a vial—this contradicts the official account that there were only two small metal fragments removed from the cranium.] In order to see these events, Robinson must have arrived early, with the body. Therefore, I conclude that he was one of the occupants of the black Cadillac’s front seat (wearing a white smock as one would expect an embalmer to wear), and that the black Cadillac met by Dennis David and his working party at 6:35 PM was the Gawler’s Hearse.

One big loose end

On page 690 of Best Evidence (cloth edition), David Lifton writes that in her handwritten notes, recorded two minutes prior to Air Force One’s touchdown at 6:00 PM, LBJ’s secretary, Marie Fehmer, recorded the following entry: “5:58 Arr Andrews — Body w/Mrs. K to Walter Reed.”

What is of extreme interest to me is that she made this entry just prior to landing, not one hour or more earlier, when the selection of the autopsy site was apparently undecided, and in fact was a subject of controversy between AF1 and “Crown.”

Furthermore, author Craig Roberts, in his book Kill Zone, quoted an official Andrews AFB history that stated JFK’s autopsy had been preformed at Walter Reed Hospital after the body’s arrival at Andrews AFB.

Of course we certainly know today that JFK’s autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and that his body first arrived there at the morgue loading dock at 6:35 PM (per Dennis David and the Boyajian report). We also know that while there was sufficient time to get JFK’s body to Bethesda by 6:30 PM, using a helicopter, there was no time to spare, either — no time for a diversion.

But in view of all the early talk on AF1 about an autopsy at Walter Reed (begun by Roy Kellerman, and continued for a time by both Dr. Burkley and General Clifton), and in view of the fact that Dr. Dick Davis (the acting head of Neuropathology at AFIP) was set up at Walter Reed and ready to perform a craniotomy on JFK’s cranium, I have to wonder whether at some point that day, there might have been a plan to alter and sanitize JFK’s head wounds surreptitiously at Walter Reed, and then take the altered body to Bethesda, where the damage seen at Bethesda would then be [falsely] represented as “damage done by the assassin’s bullet?”

We might never know that answer to this question. All we know today is that the timeline shows that as events actually unfolded, there was no diversion enroute Bethesda from Andrews — in fact, there was “just enough time” to land at the Officer’s Club parking lot at about 6:30 PM and to get the body to the morgue in the black Cadillac (the Gawler’s Hearse) by 6:35 PM.

Another possibility is proved impossible

Various researchers, at one time or another, have speculated that JFK’s body might really have come back to Washington on Air Force Two. This can now be definitively ruled out, because of the firm time of arrival of JFK’s body provided by the Boyajian report, dated November 26, 1963. Sergeant Boyajian wrote that the casket arrived at the Bethesda morgue at 1835 hours, which equates to 6:35 PM, civilian time. (He was surely talking about the President’s body; no other reasonable interpretation is possible. And of course Dr. Boswell, who was present on the loading dock when the shipping casket arrived, confirmed to Dennis David later that night, that it had indeed been President Kennedy in the shipping casket.) We know from a transmission on the new Clifton tapes that SAM 86970 (otherwise known as AF2) took off from Dallas at 3:15 PM CST (thus confirming the takeoff time listed in the reports of two Secret Service agents), and we know from the Chuck Holmes logbook provided to the ARRB (the special operations log for 11/22/63 made by the 1254^th ATW [Air Transport Wing] Command Post), that SAM 86970 landed at precisely 1830 hours, or 6:30 PM civilian time.

Presumably, the taxi time for AF2 to get to its designated spot on the Andrews tarmac would be similar or identical to that for AF1 — namely, three or four minutes. This would have AF2 rolling to a complete stop and “on the blocks” at about 6:33 PM at the earliest. Secret Service agent Emory Roberts wrote in his after action report that the landing time for AF2 was 6:35 PM — this was probably the actual time “on the blocks.” This allows insufficient time for a helicopter trip from Andrews AFB to Bethesda Naval Hospital. And that’s an understatement; in fact, the landing time recorded by Emory Roberts allows no time at all for a trip from Andrews AFB to Bethesda Naval Hospital. The numbers don’t lie.

So, not only did the pilot and flight engineer on AF2 deny to David Lifton that they ever had JFK’s body (or any other body) onboard their aircraft (as reported in the cloth edition of Best Evidence on page 679), but more importantly, the facts on the ground (the landing time of 86970 — 6:30 PM), combined with the known time for a helicopter flight from Andrews to Bethesda (7 to 9 minutes), make it impossible for Air Force Two (86970) to have delivered JFK’s body to Andrews in time for it to arrive at the Bethesda morgue loading dock at 6:35 PM.

Consider these additional facts. The actual flight time for AF1 from Love Field to Andrews was 2 hours and 13 minutes. The actual flight time for AF2 from Love Field to Andrews was 2 hours and 15 minutes. The “Great Circle Mapper” software which I consulted when writing my book revealed that, at the cruising speed of 535 mph for the military version of the Boeing 707 aircraft reported by William Manchester (who after all, did interview the pilot of AF1), the trip from Love Field to Andrews should have taken 2 hours and 14 minutes. This is only one minute off of the actual flight times for AF1 and AF2! Everything fits, and is consistent with the arrival time for SAM 86970 in the Chuck Holmes logbook—6:30 PM—being accurate. (See pages 1790-1792 of Inside the ARRB for a thorough discussion of the capabilities of the two aircraft.) Therefore, there is every reason to have full confidence in the Chuck Holmes logbook.

In the world of great uncertainty that characterizes much of the JFK assassination evidence, it is comforting and satisfying to be able to rule out one distracting possibility, for this allows us to focus with confidence on what really happened, instead of wasting our time on idle and unfounded speculation.

Summation

This essay, I believe, provides a good lesson in historiography. When one studies a problem, one needs to use as many sources of evidence as are available, and take a holistic approach to the problem; that is, to study it with an open mind, and without making any assumptions or preconceptions, while keeping the “big picture” in mind at all times. In this case the problem was defined by this series of questions: “What can the Air Force One tapes tell us about the autopsy planning while AF1 was enroute Washington, D.C. from Dallas? Was there anything amiss? Did the plans evolve? Was the final plan executed as planned? If not, why not?”

We now know that there was a vehement disagreement within the Federal bureaucracy over whether the autopsy would be at the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed Hospital, or the Navy’s Bethesda National Naval Medical Center. The Secret Service won the argument. We know that the AF1 personnel (especially General Clifton) wanted initially to use a mortuary-type ambulance to move the body, whereas the Secret Service at the White House Situation Room wanted to use a helicopter. The Secret Service won the argument: while the empty Dallas casket was moved in a light gray Navy cardiac ambulance, the actual body of JFK was transported to the grounds of Bethesda Naval Hospital in a White House VIP helicopter. We now know that this helicopter from Andrews (with unnamed escorts onboard — presumably Secret Service agents) arrived at about 6:30 PM in the Officer’s Club parking lot, and that the body of the assassinated Commander-in-Chief was then encased inside a body bag, and that the body bag was then placed inside a plain, unadorned, lightweight aluminum shipping casket, and taken to the morgue loading dock, where it arrived at 6:35 PM and was offloaded by HM1 Dennis David’s working party. The Hearse (the black Cadillac mortuary ambulance) and the shipping casket were undoubtedly provided by the Gawler’s Funeral Home. [something not mentioned above was how “radioactive” any and all questions about the President’s casket, or the time of his arrival at Bethesda, seemed to Joseph Hagan of Gawler’s when he was interviewed by the ARRB in 1996. He would not speak to us voluntarily without a subpoena, and so he received one. He was evasive and non-credible about all questions related to the Gawler’s hearse, his arrival time that night at Bethesda, and the types of caskets he saw at the morgue. However, he did verify that it was his handwriting on the Gawler’s business document called the “First Call Sheet,” in which he wrote the following words: “Body removed from metal shipping casket at USNH at Bethesda.”]

We now know, from the new evidence revealed in Inside the ARRB, that two witnesses, Tom Robinson of Gawler’s funeral home, and Navy enlisted x-ray technologist Ed Reed, both witnessed the illicit, clandestine, post-mortem surgery to President Kennedy’s cranium — surgery whose goal was to “sanitize the crime scene” by removing all evidence of frontal shots from the body — well before the official autopsy began at 8:00 PM. We now know that the series of skull x-rays and photographs taken of President Kennedy’s cranium prior to 8:00 PM (when the autopsy began) represent damage caused by this post-mortem surgery, not by any assassin’s bullet. Based on what we know about the autopsy report today, it would not be admitted in evidence at a trial (since the first two written versions, as well as original autopsy notes, have been destroyed), and each individual autopsy photograph and skull x-ray would be subjected to significant challenges before they could be admitted into evidence. The three surviving skull x-rays would not be admitted into evidence at any trial today, for we now know (thanks to the pioneering work of Dr. David Mantik, MD, PhD) that the three skull x-rays in the Archives are not originals, but are altered copy films. We know today that the brain photographs in the National Archives that reside with the JFK autopsy photographs cannot be photographs of President Kennedy’s brain: they have been disowned by the official photographer, John Stringer (because they are recorded on the wrong types of film), and by one of the FBI agents present at the autopsy, Francis O’Neill (because there is too much mass present, and in the wrong locations). Furthermore, the large amount of mass present in these brain photos is grossly inconsistent not only with the skull x-rays (which show much brain tissue missing in the forebrain, and in the right cerebral hemisphere), but also with the amount of missing mass noted at Parkland Hospital (at least one third of the brain was observed to be missing by Dr. McClelland), where President Kennedy received emergency treatment in an attempt to save his life.

For all these reasons, it is important to study the Air Force One tapes, and how (and when) President Kennedy’s body really arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital — for this is when the medical cover-up began: on the trip back to Washington onboard Air Force One, and on the ground at Andrews AFB.

As libertarian scholar and activist Jacob Hornberger has recently pointed out, there are two general types of people that one observes when studying how Americans react to the JFK assassination evidence. One category is those who have open and inquiring and even critical minds — people who demand logical and rational answers when they encounter things in the evidence, and in the “official explanation,” that do not make sense. Another category of people one encounters are what he calls deferentials, those who tend to blindly defer to authority when they encounter things that don’t make sense. These are the people who want simplistic explanations to mysteries and conflicting evidence, so that they can sleep well at night. These are the people who don’t want to believe that a coup happened in America in 1963, or that there was a massive cover-up by the U.S. government of the medical and forensic evidence in JFK’s assassination. These deferentials include the minority of the U.S. population who still profess to believe in the Warren Report. It is to the first category of people — at least 80 per cent of all Americans today — those who are “empiricists,” who follow evidence wherever it leads them, and who have open and inquiring minds, that this essay is dedicated.

Douglas Horne served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board and is the author of Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.

A video DVP should see. ,gaal

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-af1-tapes-and-subsequent-events-at-andrews-afb-on-november-22-1963-what-was-supposed-to-happen-vs-what-did-happen/

================

A helicopter was definitely sent to Andrews AFB to pick up President Kennedy’s body:
In November of 1996, David Lifton gave a remarkable presentation at the JFK Lancer conference in Dallas, in which he played a video interview he had just conducted with the former Marine Corps pilot of a military helicopter sent to Andrews AFB to pick up President Kennedy’s body and transport it to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Anyone interested can watch and listen to the video of this interview by obtaining the DVD disc from the 1996 Lancer conference titled: “Medical Evidence.”
Summarizing, the former Marine pilot was a member of the “HMX” helicopter squadron based in Quantico, VA and Anacostia, Maryland. This squadron provided 24-hour, seven days per week “hot team” standby service for the President and high level, VIP Federal officials. Normally they were on duty for 48 hours at a time, and then off duty for the next 48 hours. Lifton’s witness (whose identity he protected) stated in the videotaped interview that he was about to go home and enjoy a rare day off on November 22, 1963 when he was called into a special, surreptitious briefing at the Anacostia base where he was working that day. He was ordered to take a helicopter to Andrews AFB, and to be as unobtrusive as possible (including not using the lights on his helo), to await the arrival of Air Force One, and to take President Kennedy’s body to Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was ordered to use a VIP helicopter, and was told that others would load the body onto his helicopter. His call sign for this mission was to be “Nighthawk One.” He was told to stay out of public view; to taxi up to the tail of Air Force One after it had landed; and to stay out of the lights as much as possible.
The pilot of “Nighthawk One” landed on the west taxiway at Andrews just prior to sunset (he remembered the orange sky) and parked his helicopter behind some trees near the passenger terminal. He kept the engines running, but turned the rotors off. As soon as he saw Air Force One land, he spun his rotors up again.
He then taxied out to Air Force One in the darkness, and stopped about 100 feet from AF1 on the right rear side of SAM 26000—on the starboard aft quarter of the airplane. He could see “Army 1” (the helicopter LBJ used that night to go to the White House) parked in the lighted area of the tarmac “where the action was,” and noted that the entire port side of Air Force One was illuminated by the television lights. He saw a large casket coming down on the scissors lift from the port aft door, then saw the casket loaded into the Navy ambulance and saw Jackie Kennedy get into the ambulance. At this point he realized that either the plans had changed since he was given his mission, or he had merely been a backup, and no one had told him about the ambulance. As soon as he saw the Dallas casket put into the Navy ambulance, he taxied away into the darkness, requested clearance, and flew his helicopter to Quantico, Virginia.
Undoubtedly, “Nighthawk One’s” mission had been requested by Gerald Behn at “Crown,” the one official who had insisted throughout the Air Force One conversations on the Clifton tapes that JFK’s autopsy be conducted at Bethesda, and that his body be moved by helicopter.
The obvious questions, in view of “Nighthawk One’s” departure without President Kennedy’s body onboard, are: (1) Who changed the plan? How did this happen? and (2) How did JFK’s body get to Bethesda Naval Hospital, if “Nighthawk One” did not take it there?
Orders were given by “Crown” to separate Jacqueline Kennedy from the Dallas casket, and to send the casket to Bethesda by helicopter:

Sorry to spoil your party, Stevo, but all of this is old news. Discussed years ago on other forums.

Yes I know its old info. I forgot to put in the Dulles did it thread. I never really thought much about it re H & L data. Said Murret data NEW to this thread I believe. ,gaal

I guess you are all concerned about credit this and credit that, its part of your ego makeup, not my bag. gaal

Scott stated that he had in-

formation that indicated Murret was linked with the "communist apparatus" of Pro-

fessor Harold Isaacs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ^{39 // Hargrove quoting} H & L

========================================

Forgive me if I don't remember correctly, but I recall researcher Bruce Adamson had a Dulles letter to Isaacs asking him if this then unknown man Henry Kissinger could use some of his vault safe for Mr. Kissinger's papers. ,gaal

Since it has been reported Murret an Isaacs operative and thus LHO only two degrees of separation from Allen Dulles suspect # 1 (per gaal). , gaal

==================================================

Coincidence or Conspiracy? pp. 217-218, in a description of Professor Harold Isaacs; this connection with the CIA was confirmed by Mrs. Isaacs.

==--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------==

The MIT Center for International Studies was one of several academic research centers founded in the United States after World War II.^[3] Its creation was originally funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in order to provide expert analysis on issues pertaining to the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.^[4] (Isaacs workplace)

========

Among the earliest and the most important of international studies centers was MIT's Center for International Studies, or CENIS. In its early years in the 1950s, the CIA underwrote this center almost as a subsidiary enterprise; CENIS grew out of "Project Troy," begun by the State Department in 1950 "to explore international information and communication patterns." It later broadened its agenda to "social science inquiry on international affairs,"⁵⁷ but narrowed its sponsorship mostly to the CIA. This is evident in the transcript of a visiting committee meeting at MIT in May 1959, attended by MIT faculty like W. W. Rostow, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Max Millikan, and James Killian (president of MIT for several years); the visitors included Robert Lovett, McGeorge Bundy, and several unidentified participants.⁵⁸

Queried as to whether the center served just the CIA or a larger group of government departments, Millikan remarked that over the five years of the center's relationship with the CIA, "there has been some continuing ambiguity as to whether we were creatures of [the] CIA or whether [the] CIA was acting as an administrative office for other agencies." He also admitted that the center had "taken on projects under pressure" to have work done that the CIA wanted done (these were among "the least successful projects" from MIT's standpoint, he thought). At one point in the transcript Millikan also says that "[Allen] Dulles allowed us to hire three senior people,"* suggesting that the CIA director had a hand in CENIS's hiring policies. The center provided an important go-between or holding area for the CIA, since "top notch social scientists" and "area experts" had no patience for extended periods of residence at CIA headquarters: "A center like ours provides a way of getting men in academic work to give them [sic] a close relationship with concrete problems faced by people in government."

_____________

*Dulles in charge of Isaacs workplace

Scott stated that he had in-

formation that indicated Murret was linked with the "communist apparatus" of Pro-

fessor Harold Isaacs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ^{39 // Hargrove quoting} H & L

========================================

Forgive me if I don't remember correctly, but I recall researcher Bruce Adamson had a Dulles letter to Isaacs asking him if this then unknown man Henry Kissinger could use some of his vault safe for Mr. Kissinger's papers. ,gaal (golly if this is right , then this could go in the Dulles Did it thread)

Gaal, here's a tip. The usual expectation is that replies are made via a new post - not editing an old one.

So micro edit to major data is unresponsive re post #1234,. ,gaal

(here is a tip ,don't complain about micro edit and you don't answer material)

===========================================================

Thanks. Lesson learned. Everything must be checked, even stuff written by John Newman.

--Tommy

GOLLY PER GREG PARKER NEWMAN SAYS MILITARY RECORDS DONT SHOW 2 OSWALDS. IF MR PARKER IS CORRECT RE two LHOs/MILITARY RECORDS and NEWMAN'S INTERPRETATION ,this might be an additional error. gaal

====================================================================================

EDITED POST DAVID JOSEPH JULY 18th 2015

=========================================

Thanks Tom... With so many WC Docs I appreciate being led to different ones with specific info buried under anonymous headings...

One of the things that most bother me about the USMC records is the conflict between "Aircraft Control and Warning Operator" school (Radar operator) and the recommendation as well as preference of duty in his records as a "Aircraft Maintenance and Repair"...

With as poor hearing as he had, I fail to see how he gets into a Air Traffic Control. Felde tells us that his Oswald did not go to Biloxi but was in Florida thru July when they go to "Aviation Electronics School" in Memphis TN which as I understand it would be for Aircraft Maintenance nad Repair, not Air traffic controller...

http://www.marines.c...lement/avionics

Marines in the Avionics field install, remove, inspect, test, maintain and repair all aviation weapons and electrical systems. They also support communications, radar and navigation systems.

http://maryferrell.o...geId=2&tab=page

On the next page in that WCD with the Landes info WCD131, we are told yet another little white lie by the FBI who, when necessary, couldn't find their a$$ with two hands and a flashlight...

"The records fail to name any personnel assigned or attending above school with Oswald"

When in reality the records could not be more clear... and later on, Powers produces the orders for these six men at his testimony..

Mr. POWERS. I have the travel orders, and if you want them-----

Mr. JENNER. Fine. If you have anything from which you may refresh your recollection so that we can have the exact date, I appreciate it.

Mr. POWERS. This would be, 2 May 1957 is on the date of these orders.

Mr. POWERS. Yes.

"Effective 3 May 1957, the below listed marines are directed to report to the 3380th Technical Training Group, 3383d Student Squadron, Block 21, Building 17, Shipping and Receiving Section, Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Miss., for duty under instruction, USNAC&W Operators Course No. AB27037, Class 08057, for a period of about 6 weeks. Upon arrival thereat, they will report to the Commanding Officer for duty."

And then it lists six marines with Lee H. Oswald as one of these marines.

Mr. POWERS. (1Pfc. Edward J. Bandoni.) 551427. Pfc. James N. Brereton, 1644586; Pfc. Donald P. Camarata, 1632342.

Mr. JENNER. Excuse me. Would you check that number again as against mine? I had 1653230, am I in error?

Mr. POWERS. You're in error, sir. It's 1632342. The next name that appears is Lee H. Oswald, private, first class, 1653230. And the next name is my name, Powers, Daniel P., 1497089. And the next name that appears is Schrand, Martin E., private, first class, 1639694

Mr. POWERS. Up to--you could say that's true to a certain extent. We did attend school there. Then from Mississippi we were assigned orders to go overseas, and report to El Toro, Calif. Here, while we were at Mississippi, it was parallel. We attended the same classes, and in the same particular group as far as the initial starting of training and graduation, if you would like to call it that.

Mr. JENNER Yes.

Mr. POWERS. And then once we got to California, they changed somewhat because some of the people reported in early to California and some of them reported later, so this getting into an overseas draft meant that some were leaving out of California earlier than others, of course, which would mean their assignments as far as orders, were different.

I would say that four of the names mentioned previously, Camarata, Oswald, Powers, and Schrand, went to the Far East; Bandoni and Brereton, I'm not sure where they went. I think they went to the east coast, as I recall

Mr. JENNER. Did he ever express any sympathy toward the Communist Party?

Mr. POWERS. None that I recall.

Mr. JENNER. Toward Communist principles?

Mr. POWERS. None that I recall.

Mr. JENNER. Or Marxist doctrines?

Mr. POWERS. None that I recall; no, sir.

This is NOT Harvey Mr. Powers here is talking about... but LEE and helps to illustrate the existence of these two separate men. The list of men HARVEY is known to is completely different and NEVER includes these other 5 names....

Have at it boys

7 hrs ago the Guardian

=============

A forensic study of JFK’s death debunked the conspiracies and taught me that tiny details can be critical

Mark Lawson

In my case, the answer to the question “do you remember what you were doing when JFK was shot?” is: probably sleeping or being sick. Eighteen months old at the time of the first Kennedy slaying, I was old enough to ask why my mother started crying when, in a Yorkshire shop in June 1968, a transistor radio confirmed that the second Kennedy had died.

Robert Francis Kennedy is a powerful presence – and John Fitzgerald Kennedy an overwhelming absence – in The Death of a President, a book by William Manchester that I have thought about immeasurable times since first reading it in 1975.

By then I was 13 and we had moved south to Hertfordshire, where I attended a Catholic school run by an American religious teaching order. Our teachers would speak (sometimes tearfully) of having voted for JFK or signed up for his peace corps. As the first (and still only) Catholic to reach the White House, his framed photograph was on the wall of the entrance hall. We played sport against another local school that was actually called John Kennedy, a measure of the impact his death had made in England.

My dad, a history graduate and obsessive consumer of the news, had a library of books about politics and it was there that I discovered The Death of a President. William Manchester was a newspaper reporter who became a history professor, and in this account of Kennedy’s assassination he combines the highest standards of both professions.

Jacqueline Kennedy had commissioned the book 10 weeks after the murder, although she subsequently delayed its appearance, apparently concerned by private details about family relationships. This pre-publication stumble has led the suspicious to question the independence and authority of the account.

For me, though, any worries about what might not be in the book are over-powered by what is. Its 700 pages cover just five days, from preparations for the flight to Dallas to the burial of the 35th president. Interviewees included all the major players – President Lyndon Johnson, the senior Kennedys and the relatives of the presumed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald – but also hundreds of minor ones: aides, caterers, undertakers, tourists, hospital orderlies, priests. From these transcripts, Manchester constructs an astonishing multi-viewpoint narrative in sections named after the Secret Service code-words in use on the days in question, including “Lancer” (the president) and “Castle” (the White House).

Manchester seems to have found out everything: not just what people said, thought, ate, and wore, but what was in JFK’s wallet (including the number of his driving licence) and how his widow planned to distract their young son during the funeral.

A teenager who read a lot of thrillers, I remember realising that this book was more gripping than any of them. Subsequent re-readings confirmed my view that this was how the stories of contemporary events – whether in journalism, history or fiction – should ideally be told.

At a direct level of influence, I wrote a novel, Idlewild, and a radio play, London, This is Washington, in which JFK was a character. One of Manchester’s minor but most striking interviewees, Father Oscar Huber, the priest who gave the president the last rites, is a character in my book.

Manchester’s working principle – if someone mentions curtains, ask which colour and, if they were chewing gum, which flavour – disfigured magazine journalism in the US and UK for a while, in pieces that told us more about the soft furnishings than the subject. But the general instinct is correct: tiny gestures and decisions can have massive significance. Interviews are a crucial tool for capturing history and the pursuit of detail should be exhaustive and pedantic.

Although the best American non-fiction writers who came after Manchester – Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Michael Lewis – tended to be brighter stylists, they carried on the understanding that the strength of contemporary history is the availability of primary oral accounts and that the reporter’s major job is to orchestrate and counterpoint these verbal sources. Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, his magnificent account of the life and judicial killing of criminal Gary Gilmore, is formally divided into sections called Eastern Voices and Western Voices, but the importance of the burning spoken memory equally informs Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and Lewis’s Moneyball and Flash Boys.

Those other great American factual narratives are as much part of Manchester’s legacy as his contribution to our understanding of Kennedy, which, because his aim was to capture the way it was then, has not been devalued by subsequent revelations.

For those who are convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy – or that Lyndon Johnson did – Manchester’s book is a travesty and a main supporting column of the establishment cover-up. For more open-minded readers – and any writer aspiring to tell the story of their times in any form – it is one of the few works of history that itself deserves to be described as historic.

SORRY DOUBT DVP..gaal
++++++++++++++++++++

More on Michael Jelisavcic

Hit 1 of 2

              AGENCY : HSCA      RECORD NUMBER : 180-10110-10163     RECORDS SERIES : SECURITY CLASSIFIED FILES AGENCY FILE NUMBER : HDQ-65-69127-4

          ORIGINATOR : FBI               FROM : [No From]                 TO : [No To]              TITLE : [No Title]               DATE : 01/08/1965              PAGES : 3      DOCUMENT TYPE : PAPER, TEXTUAL DOCUMENT           SUBJECTS : OSWALD, LEE, RUSSIAN PERIOD, ASSOCIATES AND RELATIVES;                      JELISAVCIC, MICHAEL     CLASSIFICATION : CONFIDENTIAL       RESTRICTIONS : REFERRED     CURRENT STATUS : POSTPONED IN FULLDATE OF LAST REVIEW : 08/16/1993           COMMENTS : Box 2.

Hit 2 of 2

              AGENCY : ]SCA      RECORD NUMBER : 180-10110-10187     RECORDS SERIES : SECURITY CLASSIFIED FILES AGENCY FILE NUMBER : 65-69127-13DOCUMENT INFORMATION         ORIGINATOR : FBI               FROM : [No From]                 TO : [No To]              TITLE : [No Title]               DATE : 12/17/1968              PAGES : 2      DOCUMENT TYPE : PAPER, TEXTUAL DOCUMENT           SUBJECTS : JELISAVCIC, MICHAEL     CLASSIFICATION : SECRET       RESTRICTIONS : REFERRED     CURRENT STATUS : POSTPONED IN FULLDATE OF LAST REVIEW : 08/16/1993           COMMENTS : Box 2.

Interesting stuff, Steven.

Have the Ed Forum admins left up **ANY** of your old posts without follow-ups, or are they all gone? Please follow-up here with any interesting links still active.

Political Conspiracies SIDE

=================================

12 threads were closed : Fukushima cover up,Japan Secret Nuclear weapon program,European Austerity vs Worker, Poverty UK, proplems NHS, History Feee Speech UK, Depopulation,Free Energy & Alternative Energy (Navy Has Done What ?) ,drone strike methodology & problems, conspiracies hogpog (tin foil hat), and cover up of bad economy USA.

==============

BURTON

. Steven,

You are more than welcome to post those articles in the news thread; that's what it is for.

What this Forum is NOT is to be your personal blog on subjects close to your heart. When 95% of a long thread is made up of just your posts, and those posts are just article after article, then it is not what this Forum is about.

If you think an article will start a discussion, then create a thread. If no discussion ensues please do NOT continue to post article after article. If you do, the thread will be closed.

I strongly suggest you use the news thread for the large majority of your articles.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

EVAN BURTON THUS CONCEDES WE LIVE IN A CONSPIRATORIAL WORLD SINCE SAID ABOVE TOPICS ARE SUPPRESSED AND CONSPIRACY RELATED. ,gaal

I PRE hear an idiotic response about the problems NHS not suppressed. The peoples great respect and need of the NHS is not ,repeat not represented in the MSM. , gaal

=======================================

100,000 March in London - Media Covers It Up

Here’s how the media works: as thousands march against austerity, the BBC focuses instead on new-age rituals

“Cut war not welfare”

The BBC were in even more trouble – the march had been cannily planned to go right past television centre. There was even a tweet about it from a BBC employee…which was soon removed. Their official “report” came out the next day. It was a paragraph long. People that complained were treated to a form letter full of corporate double-talk and nonsense.

The New Statesman delivered a delightful piece, deciding to defend the media en-masse by declaring the march “not important”. Which is disingenuous to the point of madness – 24 hour news channels and feeds and the ever increasing need for non-stories simply to host advertising space has made it so EVERYTHING is interesting. A glance over the New Statesman front page today shows me headlines like “Why we buy shoes we’re never going to wear” and “What porn actors don’t talk about”. Both of which, I assume, are considered more important than whether or not pensioners can afford to heat their houses.

Travelling back through time to last June, the BBC front page hosted a story about thousands of Druids meeting at Stonehenge for the summer solstice – but didn’t cover twice that many chanting right outside television centre. Because it wasn’t important.

The Guardian is trigger happy when it comes to BIG RED LETTERS and LIVE FEEDS and BREAKING NEWS. They love to have rolling comment and minute by minute updates. 20,000 people protesting government spying in Macedonia makes the front page (the larger, pro-government march a few days later was never even mentioned, but that’s another issue). 7000 people attending Boris Nemstov’s funeral in Moscow got a live feed. Smaller marches, in foreign countries, more important and more interesting than people – including Russel Brand, Caroline Lucas MP and Owen Jones, their employee – giving speeches in Parliament Square.

The MSM are trying to control what we see and hear. Trying to dictate to the masses the very nature of their reality. It is not working, and it will never work as long as people have eyes that see and ears that hear and thumbs that text. The shameful backwards step the news-sources took last June demonstrates this perfectly. The Media, and the army of people it employs, need to realise just how impossible their chosen task is, and just how out of touch they are with their own obsolescence – and obsolescence is surely what it is.

It has never, in human history, been so easy to communicate. Cell-phones and e-mail have effectively, in huge stretches of the world, made it more difficult to be out of touch than in contact. Cheap web-space and blog templates mean that, if no one will print what you’re saying, you can just say it yourself. The very web-site you’re reading is proof of this.

=========

There’s a reason RT is listed along side terrorist organisations and dissenting comments are moderated to oblivion on the Guardian. There’s a war being fought. A war between the MSM and the “reality based communities” that people like Karl Rove deride. And, right now, the MSM are losing. You might not hear about it on the news, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

Yeah, right, we must have all missed that press release where the Navy announced it was training a spy for a false defection program. 'Cause, you know, when it comes to "Lee Harvey Oswald," we can all trust the U.S. Government to give us the straight poop, eh mate?

The only poop in this case come from the whack jobs who imagine they see all sorts of things in the records.

So I take it then, that there are no USMC records mentioning anyone named "Harvey Oswald"? That being the case, please cease and desist claiming that there is. The records can't be trusted - unless you're "interpreting" them? ROFL

And yes - he had been doing heavy lifting.

• No one has every made the claim that there is a Harvey Oswald. You just argue to argue and it seems it gives you pleasure.
• CLAIM > FROM THE USMC records it shows that TWO PEOPLE IN DIFFERENT PLACES AT THE SAME TIME USING THE NAME OF LHO. Thats always been the claim.
• You have never been able to refute the above claim. H & L researchers use the name "HARVEY" and "LEE" to differentiate between the two people using that same LHO name.
• whack jobs // Parker quote
• This is a education forum so please refute the military records CLAIM and stop the insults. ,gaal