Warren Report

[Carly Spreadborough]

hello everyone

I am just about to start my final year of a history degree, and i am going to do a critique of the Warren Report for my dissertation.

I have three main headings that i am looking at they are:

Context

Content

Consequeques

I am finding the first and last one fairly easy to do, but the second one i am finding a bit harder to do, as the report is so big ( i have jsut finished reading all 888pages). If anyone has any ideas on how best to tackle this one i would appericate any help.

Many thanks

Carly (carls)

"life live to the full as you only have one life"

Edited July 31, 2004 by Carls

[Jim Root]

hello everyone

I am just about to start my final year of a history degree, and i am going to do a critique of the Warren Report for my dissertation.

I have three main headings that i am looking at they are:

Context

Content

Consequeques

I am finding the first and last one fairly easy to do, but the second one i am finding a bit harder to do, as the report is so big ( i have jsut finished reading all 888pages). If anyone has any ideas on how best to tackle this one i would appericate any help.

Many thanks

Carly (carls)

"life live to the full as you only have one life"

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[Jim Root]

Carley

Sorry about the double print:

If you are doing a paper on the Warren Report start from the beginning.

Look at the charter that LBJ gave the commission (and people of the United States) when he created the commission. While it is EASY to find fault with the Warren Report I believe the scope of the commissions activities was so limited that the conclusions were inevitible. Was there a reason for this? The English language is easy to use as a tool of deciept and manipulation. With attorneys Dulles and McCloy as the members most in attendance at commission meetings and most responsible for the final documents review before publication, the words presented must be carfully scrutinized.

Jim Root

[John Simkin]

It is important to read the LBJ tapes to discover why the Warren Commission was set up. These also show why LBJ was so keen on the lone gunman theory. In the early days the FBI and the CIA favoured the idea of a pro-Castro conspiracy. They knew this would result in an invasion of Cuba and the overthrow of Castro (bit like WMD in Iraq).

The problem was that LBJ would not go along with this and insisted on the “lone gunman theory”. I have attempted to explain why LBJ overruled Hoover and CIA on this here:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=1909

I also plan to go into this problem in more detail in my online seminar: LBJ and the Assassination of JFK

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=1891

[Larry Hancock]

Carly, in evaluating the content of the report, a very useful approach would be to look at the internal dialogs that went on among the commissioners. That sort of information has not been available for view until the records releases of the 90's however now it is easy to find evidence that the Commissioners themselves realized how "controlled" their content was..

Examples:

1) The Commissioners can be seen to complain that they have no real investigators of their own and that they are totally dependent on the FBI for field work. They were well aware that the FBI had already concluded their own investigation and published their own findings so it was very unlikely that Hoover would be enthusiastic about his agency turning up something during the tenure of the WC that would show his own work to be at fault.

The FBI had already found for "no conspiracy", the WC was expected by LBJ to simply endorse that finding (as confirmed in released Johnson tapes) so essentially WC was constrained by both LBJ and the FBI report (which had been issued with only a few weeks of investigation; eseentially compled within two weeks at the most).

2) When presented with indications that Lee Oswald was an FBI informant the WC members can be seen discussing the fact that they know Hoover would never admit such a thing and they have no leverage to pursue the issue.

3) The FBI itself can be shown to have manipulated evidence given to the WC, examples include the Hosty note and sanitizing of Oswald's notebook. They can also be shown to have witheld information (Secret Service Agent Patterson's report of a dialog with Hosty about Oswald meeting with subversives).

4) When pressured over specific issues by the WC and asked for further investigationt the FBI can be shown to have obfuscated - examples are the Sylvia Odio incident and the unidentified box fingerprints from the sixth floor.

My point would be that when addressing the content of the WC work you have to evaluate the investigative resources that were avilable to them, the management of the data provided them and the fact that their staff were not trained criminal investigators or even criminal attorney's (perhaps explaining many of the rather pitiful witness interviews). A good DA with an experienced crime task force might have had a chance....equipped with the power to plea bargain...which of course the WC did not have either. Unfortunately the WC was a committee, not a criminal investigation.

...hope that helps a bit Larry

[Jim Root]

John

Great read on the LBJ tapes. I tend to lean toward the belief that Oswald had been used by intellegence sources and if this info became general knowledge at the time of the assassination the international political situation could be compromised, perhaps to the extent that LBJ implies in the tapes. Hence a need to "cover-up" aspects of the assassination or of Oswald's life, especially his travel to Russia that was already public before the Commission was established.

"J. Edgar Hoover: I'm not as enthusiastic about McCloy... I'm not so certain as to the matter of the publicity that he might seek on it."

McCloy is an interesting character that is under researched in this whole mess. You bring up Warren's involvement in the relocation of the Japanese on the West Coast during WWII and after scratching the surface you find McCloy there as well. Hoover, as shown in the LBJ tapes, was not a supporter of McCloy. This seems to be an animosity (or competition) that went back, perhaps more than a quarter of a century, to the Black Tom investigation days and McCloys success on that case where the FBI and its predessors had failed. McCloy was involved in the discussions on dropping the atomic bombs over Japan near the end of WWII which shows that he, at least at one time, was privy to the most secrete of secrets. How much he remained in the "loop" intrigues me.

I tend to agree that these particular members of the Commission were brought together with a great deal of thought and purpose in mind.

"EXECUTIVE ORDER NO. 11130

APPOINTING A COMMISSION TO REPORT UPON THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY

Pursuant to the authority vested in me as President of the United States, I herby appoint a commission to ascertain, evaluate and report upon the facts relating to the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent violent death of the man charged with the assassination. The Commission shall consist of...."

....is there already a predetermined direction and conclusion laid out for the commission?

Order No. 1130 continues after naming the commissioners,

"The purposes of the Commission are to examine the evidence developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and any additional evidence that may hereafter come to light or be uncovered by federal or state authorities; to evaluate all the facts and circumstances surrounding such assassination, including the subsequent violent death of the man carged with the assassination, and to report to me its findings and conclusions."

The commissioners were not tasked with developing leads on their own. Nor would they be challenged to examine leads that could or might have been developed by the CIA or the various organizations within the military intellegence community. "THE PURPOSES OF THE COMMISSION ARE TO EXAMINE THE EVIDENCE DEVELOPED BY THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION..."

Dec. 5, 1963 (first closed session of the Warren Commission, transcribed by Dyer, Reporter for the Office of the US Attorney, Washington D.C.)

Chairman Earl Warren:

"Now I think our job here is essentially one for the evaluation of evidence as distinguished from being one of gathering evidence, and I believe that at the outset at least we can start with the premise that we can rely upon the reports of the various agencies that have been engaged in investigating the matter, the FBI, the Secret Service, and others that I may not know about at the present time."

"Additional investigative requests, where apropriate, were handled by Internal Revenue Service, Department of State, and the military intelligence agencies with comparable skill." (Warren Report forward page xii)

Because the WC was scoped to only deal with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the death of Oswald could they have "legally" avoided dealing with such issues as Cuba, the Mafia or Oswald's connection to intellegence activities?

Jim Root

[Wim Dankbaar]

Carly,

This might be of use to you:

http://jfkmurdersolved.com/warren.htm

[Shanet Clark]

Carly

Jim Root's post is a good use of a primary document, and we all know that

primary government documents can be dense and misleading, very difficult.

You should probably be familiar with Mark Lane's "Rush to Judgement"

which laid out the most glaring faults of the Warren Commission, and it was the first book to come from us "conspiracy" people. Later, there was a book many of us are familiar with, "Best Evidence" (Groden?) and "High Treason" along the same lines, lots of people have poked holes in the W.C. Thats JFK 11/22/63 101.

If you want to get into Oswald's actual true biography read "Legend, the secret world of Lee Harvey Oswald" (E.J.Epstein) which is very 'legitimate'...most of all remember the Warren Commission was totally unconstitutional, the President shouldn't form a special board and force the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a few congressmen, a few Senators and fired CIA personnel (alan dulles) to write up a report under intense "national security" intimidation and pressure...

its all very fishy.

Have you ever read the 25th amendment? It was written in 1965, and ratified in 1967, and I think it tells the story, in another way ....

Good Luck, but don't make it a 'career' like us .............there's more to life.

Shanet Clark

Woodruff Fellow in History, Hearst / Senate Scholar, GSU atlanta.

(((((Context: The Cold War, Bay of Pigs, organized crime, covert CIA operations,

the biography of Dulles, McCloy and Ford....

Content: Faulty FBI conclusions, outrageous staff legal conclusions (arlen specter), failure to properly interview Jack Ruby and follow up on myriad discrepancies....

Consequences: Maybe take a cultural approach, loss of faith in US government,

riots, radicalism, the Church Committee, Watergate, RFK MLK and the fact of all the witnessess murdered during the re-opening of the case in the House 1975-1977.))))))

Edited October 29, 2004 by Shanet Clark

[Dawn Meredith]

Carly

Jim Root's post is a good use of a primary document, and we all know that

primary government documents can be dense and misleading, very difficult.

You should probably be familiar with Mark Lane's "Rush to Judgement"

which laid out the most glaring faults of the Warren Commission, and it was the first book to come from us "conspiracy" people.  Later, there was a book many of us are familiar with, "Best Evidence" (Groden?) and "High Treason" along the same lines, lots of people have poked holes in the W.C.  Thats JFK 11/22/63 101.

  If you want to get into Oswald's actual true biography read "Legend, the secret world of Lee Harvey Oswald" (E.J.Epstein) which is very 'legitimate'...most of all remember the Warren Commission was totally unconstitutional, the President shouldn't form a special board and force the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a few congressmen, a few Senators and fired CIA personnel (alan dulles) to write up a report under intense "national security" intimidation and pressure...

its all very fishy.

Have you ever read the 25th amendment? It was written in 1965, and ratified in 1967, and I think it tells the story, in another way ....

Good Luck, but don't make it a 'career' like us .............there's more to life.

Shanet Clark

Woodruff Fellow in History, Hearst / Senate Scholar, GSU atlanta.

(((((Context: The Cold War, Bay of Pigs, organized crime, covert CIA operations,

the biography of Dulles, McCloy and Ford....

Content: Faulty FBI conclusions, outrageous staff legal conclusions (arlen specter), failure to properly interview Jack Ruby and follow up on myriad discrepancies....

Consequences: Maybe take a cultural approach, loss of faith in US government,

riots, radicalism, the Church Committee, Watergate, RFK MLK and the fact of all the witnessess murdered during the re-opening of the case in the House 1975-1977.))))))

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

On Oswald a better book than Epstein's, I believe, is Phil Melanson's "Spy Saga".

"Best Evidence" is David Lifton's. It's a very long book to plow thru, someone needs to condense it to about 200 very relevent pages of evidence of foul play with the body and switched coffins.

The WC never once asked the question of "who killed JFK? " Their mandate was to make the case for LHO. Garrison's "On the trail of the Assassins" may be useful to you, the parts where he writes about his own discoveries in the WC. As he said "the only way you can believe the WC is not to read it" (paraphrased).

I am so thrilled to see historians taking this case on. May we see true history books one day in our lifetime. (Anyone read Dallek's "An Unfinished Life" ?. He gives the assassination about one LN paragraph. Very well written book tho.)

Dawn (Meredith)