Joseph Backes Posted January 3, 2010 Share Posted January 3, 2010 Hello, I made a transcript of Doug Horne's appearance on Black Op Radio from Dec 10, 2009. It's available on my blog www.justiceforkennedy.blogspot.com While you're there you can order a copy of his 5 volumes through the Amazon.com link on the top left side. Joe Backes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted January 3, 2010 Share Posted January 3, 2010 Hello,I made a transcript of Doug Horne's appearance on Black Op Radio from Dec 10, 2009. It's available on my blog www.justiceforkennedy.blogspot.com While you're there you can order a copy of his 5 volumes through the Amazon.com link on the top left side. Joe Backes Hey Joe, That's terriffic. That's an important addition. Now we can respond to Pat Spears assertion that Doug Horne ensorses questionable witnesses, like Spencer, who developed autopsy photos and didn't recognzie any. Thanks for all you do. And that reminds me to get you my response to your statement that one Congressional Oversight hearing would be sufficient. I think not. Bill Kelly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bernice Moore Posted January 3, 2010 Share Posted January 3, 2010 MANY THANKS JOE...TAKE CARE...B Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joseph Backes Posted January 3, 2010 Author Share Posted January 3, 2010 "...your statement that one Congressional Oversight hearing would be sufficient. I think not. " Bill Kelly That is not what I said, and I'm getting tired of you. I want to get a congressional hearing on the JFK Act and how poorly it is being implemented since the sunsetting of the ARRB. If, we can get one it would be a very positive start. But, NOOOOO, You are hell bent on doing everything you possibly can do to prevent anything of the kind from happening. You want everything, multiple hearings from multiple committees, you want a grand jury in Dallas, you want the body exhumed, and lots of other things, you want all of it immediately, right now, and even if you did get all of that you would still want everyone to believe what you believe in the case, you will use your beliefs as a litmus test, as a bludgeon, before you will support any movement by anyone towards anything. And you do all of this as though you are an advocate for a congressional hearing, when nothing could be further from the truth. You didn't even notice that you spelled the congressman's name wrong! I had to tell you how to correctly spell Rep. Edolphus Towns name over and over again. And after correcting it, you're still insulting to him! You have on your blog, "...and will happen as soon as someone convinces Edolphus Towns (D. N.Y.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, to do his job and hold them." That is insulting to Rep. Edolphus Towns. I can't get it into your head that insulting the man accomplishes nothing. You are self-defeating. You are ridiculous. So, Goodbye, Bill Kelly. Goodbye. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted January 3, 2010 Share Posted January 3, 2010 (edited) "...your statement that one Congressional Oversight hearing would be sufficient. I think not. " Bill Kelly That is not what I said, and I'm getting tired of you. I want to get a congressional hearing on the JFK Act and how poorly it is being implemented since the sunsetting of the ARRB. If, we can get one it would be a very positive start. But, NOOOOO, You are hell bent on doing everything you possibly can do to prevent anything of the kind from happening. You want everything, multiple hearings from multiple committees, you want a grand jury in Dallas, you want the body exhumed, and lots of other things, you want all of it immediately, right now, and even if you did get all of that you would still want everyone to believe what you believe in the case, you will use your beliefs as a litmus test, as a bludgeon, before you will support any movement by anyone towards anything. And you do all of this as though you are an advocate for a congressional hearing, when nothing could be further from the truth. You didn't even notice that you spelled the congressman's name wrong! I had to tell you how to correctly spell Rep. Edolphus Towns name over and over again. And after correcting it, you're still insulting to him! You have on your blog, "...and will happen as soon as someone convinces Edolphus Towns (D. N.Y.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, to do his job and hold them." That is insulting to Rep. Edolphus Towns. I can't get it into your head that insulting the man accomplishes nothing. You are self-defeating. You are ridiculous. So, Goodbye, Bill Kelly. Goodbye. Hey Joe, Now I know a lot more than how to spell Edolphus, like how you earned your nickname. Ridiculous is about the nicest thing anyone has ever called me. And I will be sure to respectfully ask Ed Towns to do his job and hold the responsible JFK Act oversight hearings that haven't been held in the past ten years because if he doesn't do it it won't happen. And I will congraduate you if you get what you want, a one day superficial hearing, you will get the usual suspects - Max Holland, Posner, Mark Zaid and maybe Lesar, and then everything will go back to normal. What is necessary is a permenant, responsible oversight and investigation into the destruction, theft and wrongfully with held records, and those responsible for the destruction and thefts to be held accountable for their actions. And if you knew me, or read anything I've written about the case, it is rediculous to say that I require people to believe what I believe, as I encourge everyone, like John Judge and Doug Horne also do, to make up their own minds and judge for themselves. It is certainly rediculous for me to believe that, after ten years of fruitlessly trying we can now convince Congress to actually take the JFK Act seriously and enforce the laws. It's even more rediculous to think that a grand jury should investigate the unsolved murder of the President, and insanely rediculious to think that the president of a great nation should have a proper forensic autopsy. In other words, it is rediculous to even try get the Constitution to work as it should. It is certainly rediculous for me to entertain such notions, but really rediculous to think that there are others out there who also believe in these things and will try to help me make happen. And for some reason I don't think your "goodbye" is sincere, and that I will be hearing from you again, and again,... Bill Kelly Edited January 3, 2010 by William Kelly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Simkin Posted January 4, 2010 Share Posted January 4, 2010 You are self-defeating. You are ridiculous. So, Goodbye, Bill Kelly. Goodbye. There is no need for this kind of abuse. You will be placed on moderation unless you upload a photograph as avatar. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted January 4, 2010 Share Posted January 4, 2010 (edited) Thanks much for doing the transcript! Sorry to see the two of you going at each other's throats - for whatever past reasons - those who'd like to divide and conquer the research community must be high-fiving each other. IMO there is all too much of this in the research community and where possible suggest [if you must] send the nasty notes as private emails and keep the enmity off the Forum - unless it is germain to the subject matter - and even then in small doses and for very short periods of time, if at all. Thanks. Peace. Victory. Peter, Here's my private email to Joe Backes that I wrote and sent before I read his public response. Where's the enmity? Re: What to do now Sun, January 3, 2010 1:28:10 PM Hey Joe, Thanks for teaching me how to spell Edolphus. I'll just call him Ed, respectfully, but I will also remind him of his responsibility to oversee the JFK Act. I understand Debra's pessimism about even getting a hearing, and your acceptance of getting one being a great victory, and I agree, we are fighting an uphill battle. But one hearing is not enough, unless it establishes a sub-committee to investigate the destroyed, missing and wrongfully withheld records. IF there is only one hearing, it will be the usual suspects - Max Holland, Posner, Mark Zaid and maybe Lesar. We need and are requesting serious, responsible and permenant oversight until the last record is released. If there ever is a hearing, we should be prepared with lists and examples of destroyed and missing records and those wrongfully withheld and redacted. Get everyone to put such lists together and then we can compare them and make them more complete. You must be really familiar with the wrongfully withheld and redacted ones, and anything you can add to any lists of items that we want to call to the attention of the congressional subcommittee would be greatly appreciated. Since traditional lobby techniques have not yet worked, I have recruited a small group of like minded researchers to plan a series of events early this year that will lead to a build up in interest and momentium that it will lead to a congressional briefing, possibly over Sunshine Week in March, and official hearings before their summer recess. Bill Kelly Of course that's my unbridled, unfounded optomism. Edited January 4, 2010 by William Kelly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted January 4, 2010 Share Posted January 4, 2010 Who wants to talk about what Doug Horne has to say? Thanks to Len for having Doug and Joe for transcribing it. Black OP Radio December 10th, 2009 Guest - Doug Horne Transcribed by Joe Backes ......... ......... Horne - Congress was painfully aware that its investigation in the late ‘70’s had pleased no one. And let’s remember they concluded that there was probably a conspiracy to kill the president, but couldn’t define it, and then shut down. Osanic - Yes, but if I can interrupt, really this is about people and people’s interest in their idea of the government, not congress, congress was probably dragged kicking and screaming to re-open this again, so what I’m saying is that interested concerned citizens had lobbied to have something done- Horne - Yes. Osanic - And this almost is the bare minimum that could be done. (laughs) It’s like saying- Horne - You know, you’re right. It was the bare minimum, officially. Osanic - Yeah. Horne - But, thank god Jeremy Gunn and I, we did more than the bare minimum, and you’ve given me a great segue here to explain that. Osanic - Okay, sure go ahead. Horne - Before we get into areas of fraud in the evidence, Congressman [Louis] Stokes, who was the second Chairman of the House Assassinations Committee in the late 70’s, Congressman Stokes met with the Review Board, with the five VIPs, before I was hired, he met them early in the game and told them, that he encouraged them to look into the medical evidence and see if they could make more sense out of it than the House Select Committee had. That was done in private, but it was a defacto admission that he was aware that the country and the research community was not satisfied necessarily with the work of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in trying to figure out where the wounds were and how many times the president was shot and from what directions. He was aware that there was still serious problems there. Because he encouraged them to try to clarify that area of evidence that is what gave Jeremy Gunn and I a foot in the door to do something besides just collect old records. So, what went on for three years and what, really what my book is about is the extra credit work, okay? My book is about the extra credit work, namely the fact that we took ten depositions of people associated with the autopsy and one group deposition of some of the treating physicians from Dallas, and numerous, numerous, numerous unsworn interviews of medical witnesses, morticians, and people involved with autopsy photography. So, that attempt to “clarify the record,” provided the basis for this book I’ve just written and I’m really grateful that we were permitted to do those things. Osanic - Okay, so let’s get to maybe the first topic you have then, of the six areas you want to get to. Horne - Sure. I have decided that it’s an unalterable, irrefutable fact that there was a medical cover-up at the highest levels of [the government in] President Kennedy’s death, of the true facts in his death. I don’t think that is subject to dispute anymore. One can still argue about who killed the president or why and that will probably go on forever, but I don’t think it can be denied anymore that there was a medical coverup and the reason I feel so confident in that assertion is that there are six areas where I found fraud in the evidence. Before we launch into the first one I would say to the listeners imagine that the Kennedy assassination puzzle, it’s like a 500 piece picture puzzle that you buy at the store, and imagine that in 1963 someone took half of the pieces 250 of the pieces and just threw them away and then put in 250 pieces that really didn’t belong in that puzzle just to confuse everyone and to present a false picture. And unfortunately, what I think researchers did for decades was to try to assemble this puzzle where half the pieces were missing and half the pieces they had to deal with were of the wrong picture. Osanic - Well, you make a good point and the only criticism of the research community is if they are following a red herring it is because someone has planted this evidence- Horne - Precisely. Osanic - And it’s hard to fault somebody if they think they’ve discovered something and it doesn’t lead to where it should, because this is like misleading and phony evidence then, X-rays and photographs, and they are not the real thing. Horne - Right, So, yes, everyone probably fell into the trap initially, of believing for decades, of believing that well if the government had the evidence its sacrosanct, it’s sacred, and we should trust it, and it’s just a matter of connecting the dots properly. I don’t think that’s the case. And the reason there has been no consensus on the wounds is, or what happened to the president is because half the puzzle pieces are wrong. So, you know, an awful lot of old guard researchers have resisted this notion that there is fraud in the evidence now for about the last 10 or 15 years. And they have resisted it because in their minds to acknowledge this would make the crime unlovable and parenthetically it would also make some of their work irrelevant. So, we are dealing with turf here, people are defending turf, and things they have written in the past. And I would say to these people if you made errors it’s not your fault, it’s because someone else monkeyed with the evidence and let’s just move forward. So, the first area I’d like to talk about as we move forward is are the autopsy photographs and X-rays; there were many autopsy photos that have been destroyed, and I can tell you that it’s a firm fact that two skull X-rays have been destroyed. Now, how do I know this? I know this because during the course of our ten depositions of autopsy witnesses at the Review Board we were asking them questions based on their previous testimony to the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee, and in some cases about statements they have made to magazines, like for example the three pathologists were interviewed by the Journal of the AMA in 1992. So, we were asking people well informed and appropriate questions about the autopsy photos and X-rays, and to make a long story short as I analyze the testimony by all the witnesses to the autopsy taken over the years I now conclude that if all of their recollections are correct there are as many as, now this is a maximum, there were 18 different views of the body that were taken that are not in the collection at the archives. And that’s not the archives fault, that is because they were culled from the collection, removed, by the people controlling this cover-up before those photos were put in the archives. But, that’s a lot of pictures that are not there. What are some of those? Well, some of those are a close-up of the entry wound in the skull with the scalp reflected back so it should show a hole in the bone; a close-up of the entry wound in the skull from the outside, those are missing; a close-up of the entry wound in the skull from the inside with the brain removed, taken from the inside, missing; photographs of the bruise on top of the pleural dome, that’s the cavity in which your lung sits, missing; photographs of probes in the body which were seen as they were taken by Dr. [Robert Frederick] Karnei, the second or third year resident that night, he was a Navy lieutenant and a resident, he worked in and out of the morgue all night long, who recalled probes in the body, metal probes in the body which is normal procedure in a death by gunshot a probe would go in where the entrance wound was and come out where the exit wound was in the body and the angle at which the probe is photographed is going to indicate the angle of a bullet tract, so he remember probes in the body and seeing strobe lights go off, that’s a flash, if you will, when those pictures were taken. And he was just astounded when we interviewed him and told him there are no photographs in the collection of probes in the body. He actually, his face turned beet red, he was just astounded that they were not in the collection because he saw them being taken. There is another witness who developed autopsy photography, who developed pictures, Chief [Robert] Knudsen, Navy chief photographers mate, who told the House Committee in a deposition that he developed pictures and he knew darn well that at least one of them showed probes in the body because he remembers examining the negative after he developed it. So, that’s another type of photo that is missing. And as far as the head X-rays, the skull X-rays go, Jerold Custer, one of the two X-ray technicians was very, very consistent over the years about one thing, he was inconsistent about many other things but he was very consistent about one thing, and that is that five skull X-rays were taken. Well, right now there are only three skull X-rays in the National Archives. And for those who may not aware we should explain I guess that the autopsy photographs and X-rays were held by the Secret Service in a safe in the old Executive Office Building that is across the street from the White House. They were held by them until April of 1965. And then Senator Robert Kennedy, the deceased president’s brother, Senator Kennedy wrote a letter to the military physician for President Johnson, Admiral, actually by this time Vice-Admiral Burkley, Burkley was the military physician for JFK and for Johnson, after JFK was killed he got promoted from Rear-Admiral to Vice-Admiral, so Burkley was still around controlling access to these things Senator Kennedy, RFK, wrote him a letter and said I want those materials transferred to Mrs. Lincoln at the Archives, that was, she was JFK’s secretary and had some office space over there, and was working for Bobby at this time. So, Admiral Burkley conducted an inventory of what was in the safe. He had Secret Service people sign the inventory. He signed it. So, all the materials that are in the archives today were transferred by Burkley from the Secret Service to Robert Kennedy. And then about a year and a half later from Robert Kennedy to the archives. So, that is the provenance of those items. So, anyway, I think now that we’ve started to talk about X-rays it’s probably time to move onto area two of fraud in the evidence. So, the first area that we just discussed was destruction of evidence, I mean pictures that we know were taken that are not in the collection. Oh, and I would add one thing to that category, the most credible witness that we interviewed of the ten deponents was Sandra Spencer. Sandra Spencer was a Navy photographers mate who was not at the autopsy but who did develop post mortem photographs the weekend of the assassination. She developed color negatives. She is absolutely certain. She even remembered the name of the chemical process, you know, required to process color negatives. She developed color negatives that weekend and there are no color negatives in the collection, there are only color positive transparencies, slides if you will, 4 by 5 inch slides which are really called transparencies because they are not mounted they are just large pieces of film and black and white negatives. That is what is in the archives today, black and white negatives and color positive transparencies, they are all four inches by five inches, they are large format. She developed large format color negatives and not only that but when we deposed her and showed her the existing collection in the archives she shook her head and said these are not the pictures I developed. She said the president looks much worse here. He looks really beat up. There is a lot of blood in the photographs. And she said no, the photographs that she developed the president had been cleaned up. He looked much better, Apparently they were after a post mortem reconstruction, probably after the morticians were finished. So, those were other additional photographs which were made and are not in the collection. And probably the most significant one that she discussed is, and remember now she is talking about photos taken after the reconstruction by the morticians was completed, a photograph that still had a blow out in the back of the head, a big hole in the back of the head, about two inches wide, where the scalp could not be closed and where there was no bone. So, that recollection of hers, under oath, alone made her trip to Washington worthwhile because what it said was that the observations made by the Dallas treating physicians were surely correct, that there was an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head because she remembered this photo, after reconstruction, after the autopsy showing the exact same thing. So, area two though, area two of fraud in the evidence, let’s talk about the three skull X-rays that survive. Now, this isn’t new information but what I think I’ve done in my book is explain Dr. David Mantik’s work with the three skull X-rays which prove to me and to many others that while yes, these images are of President Kennedy’s skull, I mean, they are his teeth, they are his sinuses, and they are [of] his body, [but] these images are not original skull X-rays. They are copy films. They are altered copy films, Len. They are forged, composite, copy film. And two of the skull X-rays that are in the collection at the archives are lateral images, they are taken from the side, one is a right lateral and one is a left lateral. They look almost identical to each other. And Dr. Mantik is absolutely convinced in these two lateral X-rays, the blow out in the back of the head which the Dallas doctors observed has been obscured by, basically, by light blasting, by a light batch, so that that area of the X-ray looks like solid bone. It looks very, very white in the X-ray image, but that what you’re looking at really isn’t bone, it’s an artifact of alteration. And the third skull X-ray that he is convinced it has been altered is the AP, the anterior posterior skull X-ray, which in layman’s terms means the X-ray was taken with the X-ray beam shooting from the front towards the rear of his head, from the front to the rear. Now that is the X-ray which shows an apparently large metallic, metallic fragment, reportedly a bullet fragment, and it just happens to be 6.5mm wide, which is the width of the ammunition, ammunition reportedly used by the assassin on the back of the skull. Just as in the lateral X-rays he believes that this bullet fragment really is not a fragment, that it’s just an artifact caused by light blasting that area of the X-ray. Now these are extraordinary claims, and the question would be if Carl Sagan was here with us tonight he would say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Well, I agree with that. Dr. Mantik has visited the archives on nine different occasions, most of those were in the 1990’s, I think one was in the year 2000, probably, and he was permitted by the Kennedy family to study the autopsy materials. He took with him his optical densitometer, a machine which measures the intensity of light coming through the X-rays. This man took meticulous measurements, every tenth of a millimeter of these skull X-rays in the critical areas. And he collected a mass of empirical data. I am talking about scientific, numerical data, which, number one, could be replicated by anyone else if they wanted to challenge his work or see if they could come up with the same results or different results they could replicate this if they wanted to. So, he not only took optical densitometery readings of these three areas on the X-rays but he conducted controlled experiments using real X-rays from deceased persons and also using skulls filled with biological material, or material simulating brain tissue. And what I have done for the reader, hopefully, is [to] explain this, this research of Dr. Mantik’s in a way that anyone can understand it. I have provided all the numerical data. I’ve tried to explain it so that a layman can understand how he came up with his conclusions, and it’s in a rather long chapter about the X-rays, chapter five which is about 200 pages long. It’s all explained in the book. By the way, the chapter on the autopsy photographs is about 260 pages long. So, I’ve got arrows in my quiver. When I say that evidence is missing, or evidence is tainted, or evidence is forged, I provide the evidence. I don’t just state a conclusions and then tell the reader to trust me. So, Dr. Mantik, by the way is a radiologist, he is a radiation oncologist, he also has a Ph.D. is physics, so this man knew what he was doing. No one to this date, and he first started giving lectures about this back in the 1990’s at symposia. And then he would give a follow up lecture each year providing additional results of his research. All I can tell you is that no one to my knowledge, not only has no one successfully challenged his work, no one has even attempted to because I don’t think it can be challenged. This bullet fragment that is supposedly on the AP X-ray, he measured the density of this object based on the light coming through the X-ray and if this were a real object in the real physical world, I mean it registered a density which was thicker than all of the president’s fillings in all of his teeth combined and yet it was represented by the House Committee to be just a sliver of metal, very, very thin and yet how could it be thicker than all of the dental amalgams in the president’s mouth? I mean that’s impossible. So, when you look at the lateral X-rays what you see is, you do indeed see a very, very, tiny metallic fragment on the back of the head, very, very tiny, very tiny. And then when you look at the frontal X-ray, the AP, that object is much, much, much denser. So, that’s where the forgery took place, it’s on the AP X-ray, in the same location where there already was a metal fragment. So, that’s area number two, the three surviving skull X-rays are forged composite copy films and I would encourage anyone who wants to learn more about that to read chapter five of my book. Osanic - Great, and I guess we should bring that up right now, what’s the name of your book? Horne - (laughs) Yeah, right, we didn’t do that yet did we? The name of my book, I will give you the long title and then the short title, the long title is “Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK,” the short title is “Inside the ARRB,” or “Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.” And for people who are interested in learning more about it, or purchasing it, just go on Amazon, and click on the book section- Osanic - (cross talk) I’ll make a link too. Horne - and put in my name, Douglas P Horne, or the book title. Osanic - Right. Do you have a website at all? Horne - I do have a website, a blog, thank you Len, the blog explains quite a bit about the book, it’s www.insidethearrb.livejournal.com, so that’s the blog. Osanic - Good, we’ll will make a link to that too. Horne - Great. Let’s talk about what the autopsy photographs that are in the collection depict. You know, I have talked already about photographs and X-rays that are missing, and about skull X-rays that appear to be, well, that are forgeries, but let’s talk about what the photos in the collection really depict. The first thing I’d like to do with the listening audience is remind them that none of the autopsy photographs in the collection today show the wounds described by the treating staff at Parkland hospital, and that’s a serious problem. The House Select Committee was aware that it was a serious problem and they tried to deal with it. You know they, they had a decision to make, I mean, they, they, here’s the problem they were faced with, they called in a group of photographic experts nd they took a look at the autopsy photos, and they decided these photographic experts decided they did not see any evidence of tampering in the photographs. Osanic - And can I interrupt you there, so what you are also illuminating is these are people who are kind of Warren Commission supporters, and they are calling in “experts,” to maybe support their view? Horne - One wonders, you know, we’ll never know, we weren’t there. At any rate, I’ll get back to that in a minute. You bring up a good point there it’s possible that that’s what happened, the experts for the House Committee decided that they did not see evidence of forgery in the autopsy photos. So, based on that “expert opinion” the House Select Committee decided that all of the Dallas doctors were wrong. And that all of those doctors and nurses that saw an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head must have been mistaken, and they said they were troubled by that, but that that was their final conclusion. Now their X-ray experts did not detect any evidence of forgery in the X-rays either, but this technology that Dr. Mantik used is a new technique that was not used by those experts and no one even considered that the X-rays might have been the type of forgery that he later uncovered. So, they just- Osanic - Right, right. Horne - They didn’t catch it because they hadn’t considered that technique. Osanic - I bring that up though because of the reputation of Blakey, clinging to the Mafia did it, you know- Horne - Right. Osanic - At least back then. Horne - Yeah, I’d like to talk about Mr. Blakey later tonight. Osanic - Sure. Horne - I have some strong opinions there, I might as well just say it now, I am convinced after completing my book that G. Robert Blakey’s principle goal was to support faith in the institutions of government. That was his principle objective. And that what he was doing was, for the most part, reselling us the old wine of the Warren Commission in a new bottle, and the only thing new about the bottle was that they did an acoustic study, and the acoustic study showed a shot from the front, and the House Committee decided that that shot missed, and that Oswald still did all the shooting of people in the car. So, what we had when the House Committee was done, with the finding that there was probably a conspiracy, that they couldn’t define it, that Oswald still did all the shooting, and yet when Blakey met with reporters to give them his personal opinions on what all this met that’s when he spun the Mafia did it story. You know, you won’t find that in the House Committee report. And Gaeton Fonzi makes this clear in his book, his book, “The Last Investigation,” makes it very clear that that is not in the House Select Committee Final Report, that “the Mafia killed the President,” that is Blakey’s personal spin, which he gave to the media and ensured [it] got in the headlines concurrent with the publication of the House Select Committee report. Osanic - Oh yeah, I think I recall one headline, one headline (laughs) said “So there was someone else shooting at Kennedy at the same time, so what?” Horne - Yeah, that was the cynical remark of The New York Times which said well maybe there were two lone nuts, which was really shameful. Osanic - Oh, it’s beyond shameful, right? Horne - Yes, it is Osanic - someone’s got to take them to task, and I guess it’s, I just hesitate to use stronger language to reveal how I really feel. Horne - There may be young people listening Osanic - It doesn’t matter. Horne - Well, let me explain how I have analyzed the existing autopsy photographs because I think this is a paradigm busting analysis. You know, David Lifton’s book in 1981 laid forth the following assertions, he was a paradigm buster, what he said was, he said I think the Dallas doctors were correct in what they saw, and he said I think the autopsy physicians were correct in what they described, and he said the reason they described totally different wounds is because, he believed, that the skull wounds were altered by post mortem surgery before the autopsy proper began, okay? And that in his view both groups of witnesses were probably correct, the Dallas treating physicians who only saw an exit wound in the back of the head and who did not see any damage to the top or right side of the head and then he believed that the Bethesda autopsy pathologists were also correct when they described a large skull defect which extended from the rear of the head all the way through the top of the skull and the right side of the skull, he believed they were also correct, and that they were describing the results of surgery. The difference between David Lifton and I, which is, it’s a significant one to me, is that David believed that the surgery was illicit, clandestine, illegal, clandestine, illegal surgery took place before the body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy. I do not believe that. My analysis forced me to conclude that this surgery took place all right, it took place at Bethesda Naval Hospital by the autopsy pathologists, it just took place in secret before the autopsy started. So, what does that mean? Here’s what it means to me. Len, 2/3rds of the autopsy photos I think were taken within 10 minutes. The were taken very early that evening. 2/3rds of the autopsy photos show the president lying supine on his back and his head is lying in a metal stirrup or brace, and so you cannot see the back of his head. I believe that was intentional. And what you can see in these photographs is this enormous defect, this huge defect where the whole top of his head is gone on the right side, and even beyond the midline at the top, the entire top of his head is gone from just behind his hairline, all the way back down it’s missing, the scalp has opened up, the bone is gone, and the bone is flapped out on the right side forward of the ear there is all this damage to the bone. Now the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the autopsy pathologists, both groups, represented this as damage caused by the assassin’s “bullet.” I don’t believe that’s what it is! I believe that this gross damage in these photographs, which is really two thirds of the collection, is really damage from this illicit, clandestine post mortem surgery performed at Bethesda and its a con job. It’s represented to us as something that an assassin’s bullet did. And I’ll tell you why I feel confident in saying it, I mean I feel very confident, there were three physicians in the record who saw the president’s head wound right after the body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital, for the autopsy. And all three of these people have described the same damage seen by the Dallas treating physicians. They are, Dr. Ebersole, who was the radiologist that night, Dr. Ebersole; and Rear Admiral Burkley, the president’s military physician, and Captain Canada, who was one of the senior officials at the Naval hospital. Now Ebersole testified to this to the House Committee under oath and he talked about the back of the head missing, and then when he was shown the autopsy photographs he actually said under oath, he says, “Well, you know, that’s not what I remember seeing,” he says, “this wound in the autopsy photograph, “ he said “it’s far more lateral and superior than I remember.” Well, that’s a pretty damning statement. What he’s saying is that the wounds in the pictures are too far on the top of the head and too far over on the side. It’s not what he remembered. And so the second witness who saw the same wound that they saw in Dallas is Dr. Burkley, and he admitted this to researcher Henry Hurt, and its in Henry Hurt’s book. And then the third witness, Dr. Canada said this to researcher Michael Kurtz, apparently in 1968, and then demanded that Michael Kurtz not reveal this fact, that there was an exit wound in the back of the head for 25, until he had been dead for 25 years. So, Michael Kurtz sat on this information and didn’t reveal it, this critical observation of Captain Canada, didn’t reveal it until his book was published in 2006, his second book. I’m both frustrated by that and I’m also grateful that he finally did reveal it because what we have here, summarizing, three physicians, these are not non-medically qualified witnesses, these are three physicians who saw an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head right after the body arrived. And the Review Board found the two witnesses that witnessed the surgery inside the Naval hospital, and that’s the big part of this story. Tom Robinson, who many researchers will be familiar with his name, Tom Robinson was one of the young morticians working for The Gawler’s Funeral Home, and he was, he and his boss showed up very, very early that night, in fact, Tom Robinson said he was there the whole night he had a fifty yard line seat in the gallery, in the morgue, because it was a teaching, the Naval hospital was a teaching hospital, training Naval personnel, so he is sitting up there in the gallery, kind of an indoor bleachers, and he saw the whole thing, apparently including the post-mortem surgery before the autopsy started. And he gave an interview to the House Select Committee, it’s one of the few that they tape recorded, and so there’s a so called transcript of the tape recording that was released in 1993 thanks to the JFK Records Act. Blakey had sealed it for 50 years but then the congress had to release all of these medical witness interviews that the House Committee did in 1993 and they did. So, Robinson talked to the House Committee about seeing the brain removed but they didn’t pursue it with him. But, we sure did. We found Tom Robinson and we called him into the Review Board offices, and we ahd a lot of people in the room, I was afraid he might be a little bit intimidated, but he wasn’t, he was just himself, straight forward and honest. And he told us he saw the doctors saw the skull open to get the brain out, and I looked at Jeremy Gunn, and he looked at me, and that was really interesting to us because Dr. Humes, the chief pathologist, had always stated that we never had to do a craniotomy, we never had to saw the skull open to remove the brain because the damage was just so great, we just took the brain out, we, you know, we made a little incision here and there in the scalp, maybe cut one small piece of bone and just took the brain out, which is really, really, a strange story. So here is Tom Robinson who we asked to draw, let me explain the context in which he made that remark, we asked him to draw diagrams on anatomical templates from anatomy textbooks, so we had our anatomy pictures, diagrams, you know, medical illustrated diagrams of what the back of the skull looked like, and [what] the inside of the skull looks like from Grant’s anatomy, from one of the two primary references for medical students. So, he drew a big giant hole in the back of the head, not the top of the head, not the right side of the head, the back of the head, he drew a big round hole, just like he had for the House Committee but the sketch he made for them was just hand drawn and there were no landmarks on it, you know, we gave him a medical atlas diagram with sutures on it and all kinds of land marks so that there could be no mistake about what he was drawing on. He drew a hole in the back of the head and then he drew two gigantic dotted lines across the back of that picture one dotted line was horizontal, like below the ears, and the other dotted line was at the top of the picture and then the round holes in the middle of it, and we said what are those dotted lines and he says oh that’s where the doctors had to saw the skull open to get the brain out. That was an epiphany for me. Because that’s when I realized that for a fact that post mortem surgery took place and that Dr. Humes had lied when he said he did not have to cut skull bone away to remove the brain. This is the witness that saw him do it. We then showed Mr. Robinson the famous Fox set of autopsy photographs, now this in our office, okay, this is in our office in E street in Washington, D.C. We were not allowed to have the original autopsy photos in our office, they are in the National Archives, but we had the, the so called bootleg set made by Secret Service agent Fox, and, you know, Jeremy Gunn and I had seen the original photos several times and we knew that the bootleg photos depicted exactly the same thing they are just a little bit darker, there is a little bit of contrast build up, but they depict exactly the same thing that is in the photos that are in the archives. We showed him the famous and disturbing photograph of the top of President Kennedy’s head taken at the autopsy, which is in many assassination books now, it has been in Dr. Crenshaw’s book, and David Lifton’s book, and some of Harry Livingston’s books, and I think one of Robert Groden’s books and it shows the entire top of the head missing. It’s really a horrible picture. And Tom Robinson looked at that picture and he said, “That makes it look like the bullet did that! He said, “The bullet didn’t do that damage,” he said, “the doctors did that!” So that’s the explanation for that photograph. That photograph and the others associated with it do not represent damage from an assassin’s bullet they represent the results of post mortem surgery. Now, the second witness that we found who observed the surgery being conducted was Ed Reed. Ed Reed was one of the two X-ray technicians, the other one was Jerold Custer. Ed Reed told us, under oath, that he recalled seeing Dr. Humes taking a scalpel and cut open the scalp above the forehead just behind the President’s hairline and he actually made a gesture with his hands during the deposition so that we knew what he was talking about, and he said after that, this is an incision right above your forehead and just behind where your hairline would start, you know, from left to right, so he described that incision with his hands, and then he said after that Dr. Humes got out a circular bone saw and started cutting open the bone under that incision just above the forehead, and he said, he and Custer were summarily ordered to leave the room, get out of here! You know the people performing this cover-up that night are really the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. You know, they let a mortician come in and let him see things that if they had been good coverup artists they wouldn’t have let him be there. But they probably thought that, well, he’s a nobody so he doesn’t matter. And then if they had really done a professional job of covering this thing up they wouldn’t have let the X-ray technicians witness the beginning of the post mortem surgery, but they did. If members of the audience are wondering well why would this be done, the answer is pretty simple, if you study the eyewtiness and earwitness testimony from Dealey Plaza it is very clear that President Kennedy was driven into a crossfire, you know, there were shots coming from the front, there were shots coming from the rear. That’s the one thing about this case that is clear. And it’s my conclusion that the reason this post mortem surgery was conducted before the autopsy is, number one, to remove any evidence in the body of shots from the front, number two to expand the skull defect so you can get access to the brain and remove bullet fragments from the brain before the autopsy, and number three if you expand the wound which in the back of the head, if you expand it tremendously in the process of getting access to the brain, if you expand it then you can misrepresent it later as an exit wound in the right side of the head, and the top of the head, which is what they did. So, these photographs of the top of the president’s head, and the right side of the president’s head, and for that mater the left side with his head in this metal stirrup with the back of the head obscured, I think they were all taken within about ten minutes, at the same time, right after this surgery was completed. Before the autopsy proper started at 8:15. So, then that leaves us to what is wrong with the rest of the autopsy photos? And most of your audience will know this already that the other third of the autopsy photo collection shows the back of the head apparently intact, it’s apparently intact and there’s no hole in the back of the head. So, the question is how can this be if all the Dallas doctors saw an exit wound in the back of the president’s head? And how can this be if Sandra Spencer saw post mortem photos after reconstruction that still showed a hole there? How can this be that the autopsy photos show the scalp apparently intact in the back? Well, I’ve decided how it can be. If you look at those photographs, and I’ve seen the collection now I think, yeah, it was a total of 16 times I saw the original photographs, this is over the course of the ten depositions, and a staff viewing that we had and then some unpaid consultants that we called in, 16 times, in everyone of those photographs you’ve got, of the back of the head that appears to be intact you’ve got human hands holding the scalp in place, two or three sets of hands. It is not just one person. There are some pictures where you have, you know, two right hands, or two left hands, or whatever, but I remember its anatomically impossible for all of the hands in some of these photos to have come from one person because of where the thumb is. You have gloved hands holding a big piece of scalp that it’s reported to be the intact back of the scalp. I think they are just relocating loose scalp to cover up an exit wound and fool the camera. And I think this was done after the FBI agents left the morgue. This is the time to explain what do I mean by that. There were two FBI witnesses to the autopsy. FBI agents Sibert and O’Neil. I believe Jim Sibert is still alive. He’s quite elderly [now], I think he’s still alive, I know Frank O’Neil died earlier this year. Those two gentlemen could not wait to give us their depositions. They were overjoyed that I called them. they had been interviewed by Arlen Specter in March of 1964. They didn’t get along well. He then buried their report, of what they saw at the autopsy, the Sibert and O’Neil report, he buried that in the archives, he did not publish that in the Warren Commission in all of its 26 volumes of supporting evidence that was not published, and he did not ask them to testify under oath. The House Committee staff spoke with them and then prepared affidavits for them to sign based on their interviews, but they did not take their depositions. So, they were very happy that we called them and asked them to come testify under oath as to what they had observed. And both of those men, now they were trained observers, trained observers, they were professional law enforcement officials, and for what it’s worth they were both still J. Edgar Hoover loyalists. So, these men had no incentive to fabricate a story or tell a tall tale, these were J. Edgar Hoover loyalists. And yet these men under oath both looked at these photographs of the back of the president’s head that are in the archives, apparently intact, and they both said, no, no, no, that’s not the way it looked at the autopsy. And we showed Frank O’Neil the drawing he made for the House Committee staff of a big hole in the back of the head, and he said yes, I verify that drawing, I remember making it and this photograph, he said, these photographs, he said, are not the way it looked, and he said, “it looks to me like it has been doctored.” Now that’s an explosive word, and then he clarified later in his deposition, he said, “ I don’t think the photo has been doctored, I think the head, the head has been doctored in this picture to make it look intact.” Well, his partner, Sibert, said to us “no, that’s not what it looked like,” he said, “I think that the head’s been reconstructed.” He said, “This looks like a reconstruction,” he said because there was a hole in the right rear of the head, and he said it’s not in the picture. And we asked him to authenticate the drawing he made for the House Committee and he couldn’t remember making it even when we showed it to him. So we said, well, can you remember today what you saw, and he said yes. So, we said, okay make a drawing for us today. So, he made a drawing of a hole in the right rear of the head. And so O’Neil thought the body had been doctored before the photo had been taken. His partner Sibert thought the head had been reconstructed, those are just two different ways of saying the same thing. So, we now the testimony of Dr. Humes before the Warren Commission that the autopsy ended at eleven o’clock. He said that twice, under oath, in 1964. So, it’s my conclusion that after the FBI agents left the morgue at eleven after the formal conclusion of the autopsy that this final round of pictures was taken to deceive history. And we know from Jerold Custer and other witnesses who were there, and Paul O’Connor, Paul O’Connor was one of the two autopsy technicians assisting the pathologists, it was Paul O’Connor and James Jenkins. O’Connor and Custer have both talked about how badly shattered President Kennedy’s head was and the fact that it was completely malleable, everything could be moved around, and then of course, once you conclude an autopsy and you remove the brain all the scalp, you know, the skull had been cut away, the scalp has been reflected so this scalp late in the evening would have been very malleable and subject to being moved. Now many people in the research community have chosen to believe for years that these photos of President Kennedy’s head in which it looks intact when viewed from behind, they chose to assume for years that the photographs have been altered. But, the House Committee photographic panel said they didn't see any evidence of that, and they said they did stereoscopic viewing. Now unfortunately, the Review Board didn’t. Jeremy Gunn and I did our best, but we are not photo experts so we never did stereoscopic viewing but the House Committee panel said they didn’t see any evidence of alteration of the photos themselves and then I spent a week in Rochester, New York at KODAK. KODAK did some pro bono work for us. They digitized all of the autopsy transparencies and negatives for us, for history because you know film eventually disintegrates over time and then it’s just gone. So, they digitized all of the images. And so I spent a week in a lab up in KODAK in November 1997 looking at high resolution digital scan blow ups and even enhanced images of the back of the head photos on big 17 inch computer monitors, big high resolution monitors and I did not see any evidence of matte insertion lines, or photographic tampering. I didn’t see any hairs that did not line up. I didn’t see any areas that were suddenly out of focus around the edges. I didn't go to film school, but, you know, I’ve seen the old Star Trek shows and I know what a matte insertion is, I knew, in a general way what to look for and I didn’t, I not only didn’t see any photographic anomalies in the back of the head photos I saw extreme these close-ups of real human skin and hair, and I didn’t see any discontinuities between the hairs. So because of my own subjective experiences at Rochester and because of the House Committee's conclusion that there was no tampering with the autopsy photos it’s my conclusion that the scalp was rearranged after the FBI agents left just temporarily to take this set of pictures and I even have a candidate for who probably took the pictures and that candidate is Navy Chief Robert Knudsen. Chief Knudsen is a real mystery figure in this story. He was the social photographer at the White House for five different presidents. He was a very honorable man. He was a very good photographer of social photographs. It was his job to take portraits. In fact, the portrait of President Kennedy in the Warren Report was taken by Chief Knudsen. We know that Chief Knudsen was involved in developing post mortem pictures because the House Select Committee deposed him in August of 1978 and they grilled him about that. And he told them things that they didn’t find very pleasant. That he had developed pictures of probes in the body, and types of film that were not in the collection, types of film, a black and white press pack, you know, that type of film is not in the collection. We have black and white duplex film, but he developed a different type of black and white film, a different format that is not in the collection. They were so unhappy with some of his answers that they never revealed in their report that he had even been deposed. And Blakey buried his deposition for fifty years. But, thanks to Oliver Stone and his film Blakey didn’t get away with this. In 1993 congressional record keepers had to open up all of their interview reports, all the medical witnesses, the deposition of Ebersole, the deposition of Chief Knudsen, and they were deposited in ‘93 in the National Archives. And we have all been poring over them ever since. So, Chief Knudsen, the mystery thickens here. Chief Knudsen always told his family, Len, that I photographed the president’s autopsy and it was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. He not only told his family that but he told a photography magazine, and we got hold of the article from 1977, I mention the name of the magazine in my book but, and he told them the same thing, and he told them as an oh by the way, almost a throw away comment they were asking him about his career, you know, working for five presidents and in the middle of the story he just mentioned that in passing that oh and I also photographed the president’s autopsy which is the hardest thing I ever did. Now, the official photographers of record for the autopsy are John Stringer and his assistant Floyd Riebe. And they don’t recall anyone named Knudsen ever taking pictures. It’s also pretty clear that they left as soon as the autopsy was declared over that night. That they went home about 11:00 or 11:30 p.m. or midnight at the latest. And so we have Chief Knudsen telling his family that I met the president’s airplane at Andrews Air Force Base, I went out to Bethesda in the motorcade, and I was there all night, I was there when they started and I was there when they finished. Well, I think Chief Knudsen probably took the set of photos taken right after the surgery which present a dishonest picture of the head wounds and I think he probably took the set of pictures after the FBI agents left. And its my conclusion today that none, none of the pictures taken by Stringer and Riebe are in the collection at the National Archives. I don’t think one of the photos they took are there. I think that’s why there’s up to 18 views of the body missing. All the photos they took are gone. I think the only photos in the collection were taken by a social photographer who was not accustomed to macro photography, to doing close-up work, and I think that’s why they are out of focus in some areas, that’s why there are no tags in the photos explaining you know, what, what, showing the autopsy number, or, there is no progression of wide shot, medium shot, extreme close up, like you would normally find in an autopsy collection. That’s why we have a set of really substandard autopsy photos in terms of the photography because the guy taking them wasn’t used to doing that kind of picture taking. So, we have a why and we have a who. So, that was a long explanation, but that’s my conclusions about what’s wrong with the autopsy photos in the National Archives today. Osanic - Right, very illuminating and very interesting, so we are going to have to encourage people to go get your book and go through all the fine tune points that you have. Horne - Right, and that’s covered in two chapters chapter four and chapter twelve. Now the next area won’t take nearly as long to talk about but it is perhaps even more important to talk about. And the next area of fraud, what I call area four is the autopsy report. In any normal death case, or murder case the autopsy report is the medical legal record of what happened and normally it trumps all other evidence, normally it is the best evidence. Normally it trumps any eyewitness observations that would be in conflict with the autopsy report or what anyone says they recalled seeing, even trauma room physicians who are occasionally noted to have made errors in observation because they were more concerned with saving someone’s life rather than recording exactly how they had been killed. Normally their observations are trumped by an autopsy report. In this case we can’t do that and I’ll tell you why. It’s clear that the version of the autopsy report that is in the National Archives today Commission Exhibit 387 is the third written version of that report. We know for a fact, it’s incontrovertible, Len, that the first written version, a type written draft was burned by Dr. Humes in his fireplace on Sunday morning at his home on the weekend of the assassination, two days later. He had, he was essentially hoisted on his own petard during his deposition by Jeremy Gunn, who did a great job of questioning him in this area. Dr. Humes had told Arlen Specter under oath in 1964 when he testified before the Warren Commission, he had told Specter that he burned the first draft of the autopsy report. He told the House Committee that he burned notes, that he burned blood stained notes, and he no longer was saying that he had burned a draft. And so we wanted to get to the bottom of that and after an extensive series of questions Humes finally admitted under oath in 1996 to Jeremy Gunn that during his deposition that, well, yes, I did both, I burned the first draft and blood stained notes. So, that’s the first autopsy report that is destroyed. We also know that a second version was destroyed, what I call the first signed version, was destroyed because we know that it existed in 1965 and we know that it had disappeared a year and a half later. So, let me explain what that means. I mentioned earlier in the interview that Robert Kennedy wanted the autopsy materials transferred to his custody in 1965, April ‘65. Those autopsy materials included “gross biological material in a container,” that was I think 7 by 8 inches in size, which was the remains of a brain, biological tissue slides, blood slides and memos pertaining to autopsy photography, and, one of the other items on this inventory that was prepared was signed original of the autopsy report, and not only were autopsy photos and X-rays and the brain turned over to Robert Kennedy in ‘65 but also an original autopsy report. Now a year and a half later the Justice Department and the Archives had gotten very nervous because congress had passed a law saying that all assassination materials needed to be turned over to the National Archives that they shouldn’t be in the hands of private individuals. So, this applied not only to the purported weapon and things like that but also to these pictures of the autopsy and the X-rays. So, the Justice Department approached Robert Kennedy, who never should have received these materials in the first place, I mean its remarkable that the government gave them to a private individual like that, it’s remarkable that it even happened but it did. So, the Justice Department engaged in negotiations and the Kennedy family, meaning Robert Kennedy agreed to return these materials to the government provided that he could control, that the family could control who had access to them. So, a deed of gift was drawn up, and the deed of gift was signed and prepared by Burke Marshal, who was the Kennedy family attorney for years, and who was the guardian of the autopsy materials for years, for years, if you wanted to see these things if you were Cyril Wecht, or David Mantik, or anyone else, you wanted to see the materials you needed Burke Marshall’s permission. Well, Burke Marshall, a year and a half later in October 1966 returns “the autopsy materials,” to the archives but something was missing, the one thing that was on the original inventory in ‘65, turned over to Robert Kennedy that is not on the list of materials given back to the government is everything in paragraph nine. And the materials in paragraph nine were a brain, tissue slides, a memo about autopsy photography, and the original autopsy report. And it’s not returned. And the archives noticed this a day later when they opened, I take that back they opened it the same day they received the footlocker. As soon as the footlocker was opened the Kennedy family representatives beat feet and left the room, they got out of there. So, the archives people were standing there doing their own inventory on October 31st, 1966 and they are looking at the 1965 inventory of what Burkley gave up and they are looking at what’s being turned back into the government and paragraph nine, all of the materials are missing. Well, that’s really interesting because in 1967 a year later the Secret Service turns over another autopsy report to the National Archives. Now, let me back up a minute and explain what I am getting at here. In 1965 Admiral Burkley and the Secret Service turned over an autopsy report to Robert Kennedy. He did something with it to make it disappear, because it wasn’t given back to the government in ‘66. And yet in 1967 the Secret Service, with receipts and everything, signed and countersigned turns over the original autopsy report to the National Archives and the Archives signs for it in ‘67. You can’t turn something over twice. If there’s only one report. If you turn an autopsy report, if you relinquish a report twice it means there were two autopsy reports. Now there is an indication that the missing report that RFK received in ‘65 had a different content than the one in the archives today and that indication is from formerly Top Secret transcripts of a Warren Commission executive session in late January 1964 in which J. Lee Rankin, the chief counsel for the Warren Commission staff says to the assembled group, he says you know we’ve got to get to the bottom of these wounds, it’s confusing, and he says, for example here in the autopsy, he doesn’t say the word report but it’s clear he means autopsy report, here in the autopsy it says that a bullet fragment came out the front of the throat and its clear from the context of that transcript that he’s talking about a fragment from the head shot came out the front of the throat and, of course, that is not, that is not what is in the autopsy report today. What is in the autopsy report today, the one in the archives today is that a bullet transited from high in the president’s back, supposedly through his neck and came out his throat and went on to hit Governor Connally, the so called magic bullet theory. But, the context of Rankin’s conversation implies a content change in the autopsy report. So, if the autopsy report in the archives today is the third written version which it certainly appears to be, there is no way we can have any confidence in what it says whatsoever. And in fact, it’s even worse than that, there is a witness to what was probably in the first draft that Dr. Humes burned and the content changes are even greater from that to what we have today. The witness was Richard Lipsey. Richard Lipsey was the military aide to General Wehle. General Wehle was the Commandant of the Military District of Washington, MDW, the Military District of Washington is the Army outfit that conducts all the ceremonial functions be people in uniform in the nation’s capital, and he and his junior office Lt. [samuel A.] Bird were in charge of the joint service casket team that night, people from different branches of the Armed service showed up at Andrews Air Force to meet the plane from Texas and Lt. Bird took people from each service, there were too many people there to help, and they formed a joint service casket team, people from all the different armed services, and so General Wehle was in charge of those people, and his aide was Richard Lipsey. Now Richard Lipsey told the House Committee in 1978 that he recalled the autopsy pathologist discussing not two bullets hitting the president, which is what’s in the autopsy report today, he recalled them specifically stating that three bullets hit the president. He was absolutely certain about that and even drew a diagram. Now this is all in my book, and this would have been buried for 50 years also, this is one of those interview reports that Robert Blakey decided to bury for 50 years and which was forced open by the JFK Records Act in 1993. So, Lipsey recalls a conclusion of three hits that the FBI agents never heard. The FBI agents who left at 11 o’clock heard a two hit scenario, Richard Lipsey hears a three hit scenario and I conclude that that happened later that night as the conclusions were evolving after the FBI agents left. And I also concluded that that was abandoned a day later and that’s why Humes had to burn the autopsy report in his fireplace. Because what I think happened was the people in charge of this cover up found out Saturday that a shot had missed and that it hit a curb on Main Street and that it ricocheted up and hit James Tague in the face, and they knew if they had a missed shot and a purported murder weapon, what I call the stage prop in the book depository, and they had three shell casings in evidence, by then they had three, originally they had two, but by Saturday they had three shell casings in evidence, and there was a missed shot they couldn’t have a three shot scenario. So, Richard Lipsey heard the pathologist conclude three hits on the president after the FBI agents left. And I think that’s what was in the first draft. And I think that’s why Humes had to burn it Sunday morning because that became untenable on Saturday when the world found out that a shot had missed. So, there’s no reason to have any confidence in the autopsy report in the archives today. I think it’s useless as a medical legal document and all it really serves now is as proof of a cover up. So, that’s my fourth area of fraud in the evidence. Osanic - Okay, very interesting, let’s keep going. Horne - Okay, let’s keep going. Let’s talk about the brain exam. Len, when you’re killed by a gunshot to the brain, or by blunt trauma to the brain, at the autopsy they are going to remove your brain and then preserve it, and examine it later, after the autopsy on the body is over because when the brain is removed, you know, when it is in its live state, and when it’s basically very soft it’s the consistency of bread pudding I’ve been told, so before the brain can be examined it has to be fixed in preservative, which you know most of us call formaldehyde, the medical community calls it formalin solution, it’s formaldehyde mixed with water, usually about a 10% solution, in water. So, we know that President Kennedy’s brain was placed in a bucket at the autopsy, what was left of his brain was. And it was preserved by a combined technique of both soaking and injection, okay? So, it was soaking in formalin solution, it hangs in a net inside the bucket, but it also is placed in there upside down so that one of the technicians, James Jenkins in this case, used needles and injected a drip into the arteries of the brain and then they use a gravity feed, they use a gravity feed to inject a formaldehyde solution into the brain’s arterial system while its soaking so that combined technique is, I was told, is called profusion. The person who explained all of this to me was Dr. Richard Davis, who was the number two guy, the number two pathologist at the AFIP in 1963, that is the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology located at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, a joint service institution at the Army Hospital, AFIP. He explained that this was the normal way for the people at Bethesda to preserve brains. And if you study the interview given out by james Jenkins over the years to different researchers it’s clear that that was the technique used, that is was both soaked and injected with formaldehyde. So, normally the brain is examined once, after the autopsy on the body and normally at that examination the brain is sectioned, serially sectioned, which means that there is a cut made horizontally from left to right every inch or so. They are called bread loaf incisions by some people and by doing so one can determine the pattern of damage. Is there a bullet tract? And where did it go in? And where did it come out? And the way you would preserve that evidence is to photograph the sections that are taken, just photograph the serial sections of tissue as the are laid on top of a light box and illuminated from both above and below. We have evidence and this is something I am very proud of that the Review Board staff, namely myself and Jeremy Gunn came up with during our examination of the evidence, we had discovered that there had been two rain examinations, not one, two. There was timeline evidence in support of this, and eyewitness evidence in support of this, and photographic evidence. So, the timeline evidence goes as follows, we’ve got two witnesses to a very early brain exam, actually two and a half if you want to count Dr. Humes who later changed his mind, the two strongest witnesses to an early brain exam on Monday, this is on Monday, the day of the funeral Len, on November 25th, ‘63, just three days after the autopsy, really two and a half days later, the two witnesses to an early brain exam are Dr. Boswell, who is Dr. Humes’ colleague, he was the other Navy pathologist and John Stringer, the photographer, the autopsy photographer who photographed the autopsy on the body, and [who] photographed a brain exam. They both insisted it was Monday. It was very clear in their minds, both when they were interviewed by the House committee, and when they were interviewed by us under oath, you know, years later in 1996. Dr. Humes when interviewed by the Journal of the AMA in 1992 Dr. Humes implied that it was an early brain exam when he told JAMA, the magazine, when he told JAMA that well, you know, we wanted to examine it, we wanted to examine the brain but I had to give it up because Dr. Burkley wanted to bury it with the body. Well, that’s a cop out, but, that statement that Dr. Burkley wanted to bury it with the body makes it very clear that the exam was on Monday morning, which is exactly when Boswell and Stringer said it was. So, later, under oath, with us, [Dr.] Humes tried to deny that a brain exam had been conducted that early but he gave away the store during the JAMA article. [End Part One] Horne - We have evidence in the record for a later brain exam, a week later, a week after the autopsy on the body, not Monday, but a week later. And that one occurred sometime between November 29th and December 2nd, and the reason we know that is [are] two reasons, Dr. [Pierre] Finck, the third military pathologist, Finck was from the Army, he was an outsider in a Navy setting, Dr. Finck took meticulous notes about everything, he was very anally retentive, and he wrote in his notes and later produced in a report for his Army superiors, he wrote in his notes, his personal notes that Dr. Humes called me on November 29th and said there would be an examination of the brain, now Finck didn’t say when the examination was but he does give us the earliest possible date, “Humes called me the 29th of November.” Well, we have a Navy corpsman, Chief [Chester H.] Boyers who told the House Committee in two different interview in 1978 that he processed President Kennedy’s brain, well, let me put it this way, brain tissue on December 2, 1963. So, that brain tissue could have been from a brain examination on November 29th the one Finck was told to attend on the telephone, or it could mean that Finck was notified on the 29th and then the brain exam was conducted one or two days later. So, we have a window there for the second event. Not only that but the brain photographs in the archives today do not show any serially sections of the brain. They show an intact organ, okay? Now, John Stringer the autopsy photographer who also photographed a brain exam insisted under oath to the Review Board that he photographed a brain that had been serially sectioned in front of him. He photographed each section of tissue as it was laid on a light box, illuminated from below and from above. And of course, there are no such pictures of a sectioned brain in the archives collection. Stringer also told us under oath in 1996 that he did not shoot basilar views of the brain, basilar means from the underneath, from the bottom side. He only shot superior views from the top. Well, the brain photos in the National Archives today half of the pictures are taken from above, they are superior, but half of them are basilar. And as if that isn’t bad enough, Stringer recalled that he used Ektachrome color transparency film, and he used, I believe it was Portrait Pan Black and White Duplex negatives, in other words these were individual sheets of film, these black and white negatives, they were not on a roll, okay? When Stringer examined the brain photos in the national archives he noted that they were from a press pack, they were from a continuous roll of black and white film, which were numbered and of course after it was developed they are cut so that they form individual sections of negatives, individual images. But he noticed that it was very, very thin film, it wasn’t thick like duplex film, and they each had a number on them, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 et cetera. And he says I did not use a press pack, I did not use this kind of film to photograph the brain. So, the brain photos in the archives are inconsistent with what Stringer did, in the sense that they are on the wrong kind of film and they do not show the brain to be sectioned. So, they also don’t show any damage to the right cerebellum. Now the major portion of someone’s brain, the top part of your brain, the thinking part of your brain is called the cerebrum and the portion of the back of your head, down low on the back of your head which controls your coordination and other functions is called the cerebellum. And it’s a very different type of tissue, than the cerebrum, it looks very different and its a very localized part of the brain, it’s only in the back of the head, down low. The Dallas doctors, four of them, recalled severe damage to the cerebellum when they examined the head wound in Dallas, and that part of the cerebellum was missing, and part of it was macerated and torn and actually hanging out of the wound. In the brain photos in the archives the cerebellum is undamaged, the right cerebellum is undamaged. We asked Mr. Stringer under oath do you recall damage to the right cerebellum and he said yes. The brain photos in the archives don’t show any damage to the right cerebellum. We asked FBI agent Frank O’Neil where was the damage; we said do you recall seeing the president’s brain at the autopsy, his partner Sibert didn’t have any recollection of seeing the brain, he just didn’t remember, either it wasn’t important to him or he had forgotten. O’Neil had a definite recollection. He said yes I remember seeing the brain after it was removed. He said, first of all it was over half gone, over half of it was missing, and he said, then he put his hand on the back of his head, took his right hand put it on the back of his head, behind his right ear and he said this was where most of it was, that most of the severe damage was, it was blown, it was gone, behind the right ear, and of course that would be where the cerebellum is, and also the occipital lobe of the cerebrum, the right cerebral hemisphere. That is where he put his hand on his head. Well, the cerebellum is intact in these photos. So, they have been impugned, you know, summarizing, the brain photos in the archives have been impugned for the following reasons. Number one, they don’t show sections of the brain, which Stringer recalls photographing. Number two they are on the wrong kind of film. They are not only on film from a press pack which is numbered, but the brand name of the film is ANSCO and the brand name that Stringer recalled using was EKTACHROME. So, that’s it. And, of course the damage depicted is in the wrong part of the head. And the damage depicted in the brain photographs is in the top and right side of the brain, and it doesn’t appear to be so much missing as just, it’s a disruption in the tissue, as if there were a very large furrow- Osanic - Now what comes to my mind is just these points that you’re elaborating on, is reason to re-open the case. Horne - Absolutely. Absolutely. Osanic - I mean a, you know a farcical comment could be, you could say well, how the hell could Lee Oswald do all of this, you know? So, I mean, wrong kind of film, wounds not in the right place, guys know what they were doing, and what they saw- Horne - Right. Osanic - and, this is just from, you know, that Sunday, Monday on, you were saying, evidence of massive fraud. Horne - Right. And I’m glad you jogged my memory there because there is one other thing i failed to cover earlier, Dr. Boswell made a diagram at the autopsy of the damage to the skull, that’s what you would expect, that’s what a good pathologist would do, but in this case he only sketched the damage to the top of the skull, now this is the diagram that many of your audience will have seen in books already, he drew it on the back of a body chart, there was a body chart called an autopsy descriptive sheet, it was a Navy home made form, so on the front of this sheet is the front and back of the body, where you can depict where bullet holes might have been, and on the back is a blank sheet of paper, and he drew a sketch damage to the skull, well he drew a sketch of the top of the head. It doesn’t show the back of the head, it’s only the top of the head, and this is the famous sketch which has the big dotted line circled almost the entire top of the head is surrounded by a dotted line, and he made the notation, 10 x 17 missing, and, of course he explained to the House Committee on Assassination to their forensic pathology panel,a nd also to us, that yes. what I meant was the bone was missing in this area, 10 by 17 centimeters, which is huge. And so the intent of this diagram, that was apparently to shows, “damage by the bullet,” and everybody accepted it at face value for decades. Well, I had an inspiration before we deposed Dr. Boswell, and I said to Jeremy Gunn, let us take a skull model, an anatomically correct model of the human skull and ask Dr. Boswell to draw on the skull model the extent of the damage to President Kennedy’s skull because his diagram doesn’t show the back of the head, it’s just not part of the picture, it only shows the top so we asked him to do that, and he did, and in the diagram he made on this skull model, not only is the entire top and right side of the head missing, and this is the bone he is talking about, but the entire right rear of the head is missing too. And no one really understood this until we asked him to draw a sketch on this skull model. And so Boswell, there he is under oath, in 1996 telling us that not only is the top of the head and right side gone, but the right rear of the head is gone too, the bone. And that’s when the lightbulb came on for me, and that’s when I really knew, deep down inside, you know between what Tom Robinson had told us, and between what Boswell had told us, there was post mortem surgery on this body before the autopsy. Because Boswell was describing not only the right rear of the head missing which is consistent with Dallas but the top and the right side too. And it’s my conclusion, and I don’t derive any pleasure from saying this but it’s my conclusion that Boswell’s sketch is a con job, it’s designed to fool history, and it did for three decades. Boswell’s sketch shows the top of the president’s skull missing and it has blood stains on it, and yet Humes didn’t burn it, you see? And when Jeremy Gunn asked Dr. Humes you said you burned all the notes that were blood stained why didn’t you burn this document, and Humes had no answer, no answer whatsoever, he just gave us a flippant, “oh, I don’t know,” response and just clammed up on us. I think the reason Humes didn’t destroy that diagram is because it’s a con job. Humes performed the post mortem surgery because he was ordered to by his superiors. Boswell observed it and drew a sketch and then represented the sketch of post mortem surgery as damage done by the bullet. So, it’s part of a cover up, and it tells us that the cover up was in place the minute the body arrived at Bethesda. So, yes, there is medical, legal evidence, there are medical, legal reasons, all this fraud in the evidence to re-open the case....... .......... For full interview see Justice for Kennedy blogspot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted January 8, 2010 Share Posted January 8, 2010 (edited) Who wants to talk about what Doug Horne has to say? Apparently nobody. Where's Pat Speer? Didn't he say that he heard this program and disputes Doug Horne's endorsement of the women Navy tech who developed the autopsy photos? Well here's your chance Pat. What about this women who you don't believe is a reliable witness? Thanks, Bill Kelly Thanks to Len for having Doug and Joe for transcribing it. Black OP Radio December 10th, 2009 Guest - Doug Horne Transcribed by Joe Backes ......... ......... Horne - Congress was painfully aware that its investigation in the late '70's had pleased no one. And let's remember they concluded that there was probably a conspiracy to kill the president, but couldn't define it, and then shut down. Osanic - Yes, but if I can interrupt, really this is about people and people's interest in their idea of the government, not congress, congress was probably dragged kicking and screaming to re-open this again, so what I'm saying is that interested concerned citizens had lobbied to have something done- Horne - Yes. Osanic - And this almost is the bare minimum that could be done. (laughs) It's like saying- Horne - You know, you're right. It was the bare minimum, officially. Osanic - Yeah. Horne - But, thank god Jeremy Gunn and I, we did more than the bare minimum, and you've given me a great segue here to explain that. Osanic - Okay, sure go ahead. Horne - Before we get into areas of fraud in the evidence, Congressman [Louis] Stokes, who was the second Chairman of the House Assassinations Committee in the late 70's, Congressman Stokes met with the Review Board, with the five VIPs, before I was hired, he met them early in the game and told them, that he encouraged them to look into the medical evidence and see if they could make more sense out of it than the House Select Committee had. That was done in private, but it was a defacto admission that he was aware that the country and the research community was not satisfied necessarily with the work of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in trying to figure out where the wounds were and how many times the president was shot and from what directions. He was aware that there was still serious problems there. Because he encouraged them to try to clarify that area of evidence that is what gave Jeremy Gunn and I a foot in the door to do something besides just collect old records. So, what went on for three years and what, really what my book is about is the extra credit work, okay? My book is about the extra credit work, namely the fact that we took ten depositions of people associated with the autopsy and one group deposition of some of the treating physicians from Dallas, and numerous, numerous, numerous unsworn interviews of medical witnesses, morticians, and people involved with autopsy photography. So, that attempt to "clarify the record," provided the basis for this book I've just written and I'm really grateful that we were permitted to do those things. Osanic - Okay, so let's get to maybe the first topic you have then, of the six areas you want to get to. Horne - Sure. I have decided that it's an unalterable, irrefutable fact that there was a medical cover-up at the highest levels of [the government in] President Kennedy's death, of the true facts in his death. I don't think that is subject to dispute anymore. One can still argue about who killed the president or why and that will probably go on forever, but I don't think it can be denied anymore that there was a medical coverup and the reason I feel so confident in that assertion is that there are six areas where I found fraud in the evidence. Before we launch into the first one I would say to the listeners imagine that the Kennedy assassination puzzle, it's like a 500 piece picture puzzle that you buy at the store, and imagine that in 1963 someone took half of the pieces 250 of the pieces and just threw them away and then put in 250 pieces that really didn't belong in that puzzle just to confuse everyone and to present a false picture. And unfortunately, what I think researchers did for decades was to try to assemble this puzzle where half the pieces were missing and half the pieces they had to deal with were of the wrong picture. Osanic - Well, you make a good point and the only criticism of the research community is if they are following a red herring it is because someone has planted this evidence- Horne - Precisely. Osanic - And it's hard to fault somebody if they think they've discovered something and it doesn't lead to where it should, because this is like misleading and phony evidence then, X-rays and photographs, and they are not the real thing. Horne - Right, So, yes, everyone probably fell into the trap initially, of believing for decades, of believing that well if the government had the evidence its sacrosanct, it's sacred, and we should trust it, and it's just a matter of connecting the dots properly. I don't think that's the case. And the reason there has been no consensus on the wounds is, or what happened to the president is because half the puzzle pieces are wrong. So, you know, an awful lot of old guard researchers have resisted this notion that there is fraud in the evidence now for about the last 10 or 15 years. And they have resisted it because in their minds to acknowledge this would make the crime unlovable and parenthetically it would also make some of their work irrelevant. So, we are dealing with turf here, people are defending turf, and things they have written in the past. And I would say to these people if you made errors it's not your fault, it's because someone else monkeyed with the evidence and let's just move forward. So, the first area I'd like to talk about as we move forward is are the autopsy photographs and X-rays; there were many autopsy photos that have been destroyed, and I can tell you that it's a firm fact that two skull X-rays have been destroyed. Now, how do I know this? I know this because during the course of our ten depositions of autopsy witnesses at the Review Board we were asking them questions based on their previous testimony to the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee, and in some cases about statements they have made to magazines, like for example the three pathologists were interviewed by the Journal of the AMA in 1992. So, we were asking people well informed and appropriate questions about the autopsy photos and X-rays, and to make a long story short as I analyze the testimony by all the witnesses to the autopsy taken over the years I now conclude that if all of their recollections are correct there are as many as, now this is a maximum, there were 18 different views of the body that were taken that are not in the collection at the archives. And that's not the archives fault, that is because they were culled from the collection, removed, by the people controlling this cover-up before those photos were put in the archives. But, that's a lot of pictures that are not there. What are some of those? Well, some of those are a close-up of the entry wound in the skull with the scalp reflected back so it should show a hole in the bone; a close-up of the entry wound in the skull from the outside, those are missing; a close-up of the entry wound in the skull from the inside with the brain removed, taken from the inside, missing; photographs of the bruise on top of the pleural dome, that's the cavity in which your lung sits, missing; photographs of probes in the body which were seen as they were taken by Dr. [Robert Frederick] Karnei, the second or third year resident that night, he was a Navy lieutenant and a resident, he worked in and out of the morgue all night long, who recalled probes in the body, metal probes in the body which is normal procedure in a death by gunshot a probe would go in where the entrance wound was and come out where the exit wound was in the body and the angle at which the probe is photographed is going to indicate the angle of a bullet tract, so he remember probes in the body and seeing strobe lights go off, that's a flash, if you will, when those pictures were taken. And he was just astounded when we interviewed him and told him there are no photographs in the collection of probes in the body. He actually, his face turned beet red, he was just astounded that they were not in the collection because he saw them being taken. There is another witness who developed autopsy photography, who developed pictures, Chief [Robert] Knudsen, Navy chief photographers mate, who told the House Committee in a deposition that he developed pictures and he knew darn well that at least one of them showed probes in the body because he remembers examining the negative after he developed it. So, that's another type of photo that is missing. And as far as the head X-rays, the skull X-rays go, Jerold Custer, one of the two X-ray technicians was very, very consistent over the years about one thing, he was inconsistent about many other things but he was very consistent about one thing, and that is that five skull X-rays were taken. Well, right now there are only three skull X-rays in the National Archives. And for those who may not aware we should explain I guess that the autopsy photographs and X-rays were held by the Secret Service in a safe in the old Executive Office Building that is across the street from the White House. They were held by them until April of 1965. And then Senator Robert Kennedy, the deceased president's brother, Senator Kennedy wrote a letter to the military physician for President Johnson, Admiral, actually by this time Vice-Admiral Burkley, Burkley was the military physician for JFK and for Johnson, after JFK was killed he got promoted from Rear-Admiral to Vice-Admiral, so Burkley was still around controlling access to these things Senator Kennedy, RFK, wrote him a letter and said I want those materials transferred to Mrs. Lincoln at the Archives, that was, she was JFK's secretary and had some office space over there, and was working for Bobby at this time. So, Admiral Burkley conducted an inventory of what was in the safe. He had Secret Service people sign the inventory. He signed it. So, all the materials that are in the archives today were transferred by Burkley from the Secret Service to Robert Kennedy. And then about a year and a half later from Robert Kennedy to the archives. So, that is the provenance of those items. So, anyway, I think now that we've started to talk about X-rays it's probably time to move onto area two of fraud in the evidence. So, the first area that we just discussed was destruction of evidence, I mean pictures that we know were taken that are not in the collection. Oh, and I would add one thing to that category, the most credible witness that we interviewed of the ten deponents was Sandra Spencer. Sandra Spencer was a Navy photographers mate who was not at the autopsy but who did develop post mortem photographs the weekend of the assassination. She developed color negatives. She is absolutely certain. She even remembered the name of the chemical process, you know, required to process color negatives. She developed color negatives that weekend and there are no color negatives in the collection, there are only color positive transparencies, slides if you will, 4 by 5 inch slides which are really called transparencies because they are not mounted they are just large pieces of film and black and white negatives. That is what is in the archives today, black and white negatives and color positive transparencies, they are all four inches by five inches, they are large format. She developed large format color negatives and not only that but when we deposed her and showed her the existing collection in the archives she shook her head and said these are not the pictures I developed. She said the president looks much worse here. He looks really beat up. There is a lot of blood in the photographs. And she said no, the photographs that she developed the president had been cleaned up. He looked much better, Apparently they were after a post mortem reconstruction, probably after the morticians were finished. So, those were other additional photographs which were made and are not in the collection. And probably the most significant one that she discussed is, and remember now she is talking about photos taken after the reconstruction by the morticians was completed, a photograph that still had a blow out in the back of the head, a big hole in the back of the head, about two inches wide, where the scalp could not be closed and where there was no bone. So, that recollection of hers, under oath, alone made her trip to Washington worthwhile because what it said was that the observations made by the Dallas treating physicians were surely correct, that there was an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy's head because she remembered this photo, after reconstruction, after the autopsy showing the exact same thing. So, area two though, area two of fraud in the evidence, let's talk about the three skull X-rays that survive. Now, this isn't new information but what I think I've done in my book is explain Dr. David Mantik's work with the three skull X-rays which prove to me and to many others that while yes, these images are of President Kennedy's skull, I mean, they are his teeth, they are his sinuses, and they are [of] his body, [but] these images are not original skull X-rays. They are copy films. They are altered copy films, Len. They are forged, composite, copy film. And two of the skull X-rays that are in the collection at the archives are lateral images, they are taken from the side, one is a right lateral and one is a left lateral. They look almost identical to each other. And Dr. Mantik is absolutely convinced in these two lateral X-rays, the blow out in the back of the head which the Dallas doctors observed has been obscured by, basically, by light blasting, by a light batch, so that that area of the X-ray looks like solid bone. It looks very, very white in the X-ray image, but that what you're looking at really isn't bone, it's an artifact of alteration. And the third skull X-ray that he is convinced it has been altered is the AP, the anterior posterior skull X-ray, which in layman's terms means the X-ray was taken with the X-ray beam shooting from the front towards the rear of his head, from the front to the rear. Now that is the X-ray which shows an apparently large metallic, metallic fragment, reportedly a bullet fragment, and it just happens to be 6.5mm wide, which is the width of the ammunition, ammunition reportedly used by the assassin on the back of the skull. Just as in the lateral X-rays he believes that this bullet fragment really is not a fragment, that it's just an artifact caused by light blasting that area of the X-ray. Now these are extraordinary claims, and the question would be if Carl Sagan was here with us tonight he would say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Well, I agree with that. Dr. Mantik has visited the archives on nine different occasions, most of those were in the 1990's, I think one was in the year 2000, probably, and he was permitted by the Kennedy family to study the autopsy materials. He took with him his optical densitometer, a machine which measures the intensity of light coming through the X-rays. This man took meticulous measurements, every tenth of a millimeter of these skull X-rays in the critical areas. And he collected a mass of empirical data. I am talking about scientific, numerical data, which, number one, could be replicated by anyone else if they wanted to challenge his work or see if they could come up with the same results or different results they could replicate this if they wanted to. So, he not only took optical densitometery readings of these three areas on the X-rays but he conducted controlled experiments using real X-rays from deceased persons and also using skulls filled with biological material, or material simulating brain tissue. And what I have done for the reader, hopefully, is [to] explain this, this research of Dr. Mantik's in a way that anyone can understand it. I have provided all the numerical data. I've tried to explain it so that a layman can understand how he came up with his conclusions, and it's in a rather long chapter about the X-rays, chapter five which is about 200 pages long. It's all explained in the book. By the way, the chapter on the autopsy photographs is about 260 pages long. So, I've got arrows in my quiver. When I say that evidence is missing, or evidence is tainted, or evidence is forged, I provide the evidence. I don't just state a conclusions and then tell the reader to trust me. So, Dr. Mantik, by the way is a radiologist, he is a radiation oncologist, he also has a Ph.D. is physics, so this man knew what he was doing. No one to this date, and he first started giving lectures about this back in the 1990's at symposia. And then he would give a follow up lecture each year providing additional results of his research. All I can tell you is that no one to my knowledge, not only has no one successfully challenged his work, no one has even attempted to because I don't think it can be challenged. This bullet fragment that is supposedly on the AP X-ray, he measured the density of this object based on the light coming through the X-ray and if this were a real object in the real physical world, I mean it registered a density which was thicker than all of the president's fillings in all of his teeth combined and yet it was represented by the House Committee to be just a sliver of metal, very, very thin and yet how could it be thicker than all of the dental amalgams in the president's mouth? I mean that's impossible. So, when you look at the lateral X-rays what you see is, you do indeed see a very, very, tiny metallic fragment on the back of the head, very, very tiny, very tiny. And then when you look at the frontal X-ray, the AP, that object is much, much, much denser. So, that's where the forgery took place, it's on the AP X-ray, in the same location where there already was a metal fragment. So, that's area number two, the three surviving skull X-rays are forged composite copy films and I would encourage anyone who wants to learn more about that to read chapter five of my book. Osanic - Great, and I guess we should bring that up right now, what's the name of your book? Horne - (laughs) Yeah, right, we didn't do that yet did we? The name of my book, I will give you the long title and then the short title, the long title is "Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government's Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK," the short title is "Inside the ARRB," or "Inside the Assassination Records Review Board." And for people who are interested in learning more about it, or purchasing it, just go on Amazon, and click on the book section- Osanic - (cross talk) I'll make a link too. Horne - and put in my name, Douglas P Horne, or the book title. Osanic - Right. Do you have a website at all? Horne - I do have a website, a blog, thank you Len, the blog explains quite a bit about the book, it's www.insidethearrb.livejournal.com, so that's the blog. Osanic - Good, we'll will make a link to that too. Horne - Great. Let's talk about what the autopsy photographs that are in the collection depict. You know, I have talked already about photographs and X-rays that are missing, and about skull X-rays that appear to be, well, that are forgeries, but let's talk about what the photos in the collection really depict. The first thing I'd like to do with the listening audience is remind them that none of the autopsy photographs in the collection today show the wounds described by the treating staff at Parkland hospital, and that's a serious problem. The House Select Committee was aware that it was a serious problem and they tried to deal with it. You know they, they had a decision to make, I mean, they, they, here's the problem they were faced with, they called in a group of photographic experts nd they took a look at the autopsy photos, and they decided these photographic experts decided they did not see any evidence of tampering in the photographs. Osanic - And can I interrupt you there, so what you are also illuminating is these are people who are kind of Warren Commission supporters, and they are calling in "experts," to maybe support their view? Horne - One wonders, you know, we'll never know, we weren't there. At any rate, I'll get back to that in a minute. You bring up a good point there it's possible that that's what happened, the experts for the House Committee decided that they did not see evidence of forgery in the autopsy photos. So, based on that "expert opinion" the House Select Committee decided that all of the Dallas doctors were wrong. And that all of those doctors and nurses that saw an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy's head must have been mistaken, and they said they were troubled by that, but that that was their final conclusion. Now their X-ray experts did not detect any evidence of forgery in the X-rays either, but this technology that Dr. Mantik used is a new technique that was not used by those experts and no one even considered that the X-rays might have been the type of forgery that he later uncovered. So, they just- Osanic - Right, right. Horne - They didn't catch it because they hadn't considered that technique. Osanic - I bring that up though because of the reputation of Blakey, clinging to the Mafia did it, you know- Horne - Right. Osanic - At least back then. Horne - Yeah, I'd like to talk about Mr. Blakey later tonight. Osanic - Sure. Horne - I have some strong opinions there, I might as well just say it now, I am convinced after completing my book that G. Robert Blakey's principle goal was to support faith in the institutions of government. That was his principle objective. And that what he was doing was, for the most part, reselling us the old wine of the Warren Commission in a new bottle, and the only thing new about the bottle was that they did an acoustic study, and the acoustic study showed a shot from the front, and the House Committee decided that that shot missed, and that Oswald still did all the shooting of people in the car. So, what we had when the House Committee was done, with the finding that there was probably a conspiracy, that they couldn't define it, that Oswald still did all the shooting, and yet when Blakey met with reporters to give them his personal opinions on what all this met that's when he spun the Mafia did it story. You know, you won't find that in the House Committee report. And Gaeton Fonzi makes this clear in his book, his book, "The Last Investigation," makes it very clear that that is not in the House Select Committee Final Report, that "the Mafia killed the President," that is Blakey's personal spin, which he gave to the media and ensured [it] got in the headlines concurrent with the publication of the House Select Committee report. Osanic - Oh yeah, I think I recall one headline, one headline (laughs) said "So there was someone else shooting at Kennedy at the same time, so what?" Horne - Yeah, that was the cynical remark of The New York Times which said well maybe there were two lone nuts, which was really shameful. Osanic - Oh, it's beyond shameful, right? Horne - Yes, it is Osanic - someone's got to take them to task, and I guess it's, I just hesitate to use stronger language to reveal how I really feel. Horne - There may be young people listening Osanic - It doesn't matter. Horne - Well, let me explain how I have analyzed the existing autopsy photographs because I think this is a paradigm busting analysis. You know, David Lifton's book in 1981 laid forth the following assertions, he was a paradigm buster, what he said was, he said I think the Dallas doctors were correct in what they saw, and he said I think the autopsy physicians were correct in what they described, and he said the reason they described totally different wounds is because, he believed, that the skull wounds were altered by post mortem surgery before the autopsy proper began, okay? And that in his view both groups of witnesses were probably correct, the Dallas treating physicians who only saw an exit wound in the back of the head and who did not see any damage to the top or right side of the head and then he believed that the Bethesda autopsy pathologists were also correct when they described a large skull defect which extended from the rear of the head all the way through the top of the skull and the right side of the skull, he believed they were also correct, and that they were describing the results of surgery. The difference between David Lifton and I, which is, it's a significant one to me, is that David believed that the surgery was illicit, clandestine, illegal, clandestine, illegal surgery took place before the body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy. I do not believe that. My analysis forced me to conclude that this surgery took place all right, it took place at Bethesda Naval Hospital by the autopsy pathologists, it just took place in secret before the autopsy started. So, what does that mean? Here's what it means to me. Len, 2/3rds of the autopsy photos I think were taken within 10 minutes. The were taken very early that evening. 2/3rds of the autopsy photos show the president lying supine on his back and his head is lying in a metal stirrup or brace, and so you cannot see the back of his head. I believe that was intentional. And what you can see in these photographs is this enormous defect, this huge defect where the whole top of his head is gone on the right side, and even beyond the midline at the top, the entire top of his head is gone from just behind his hairline, all the way back down it's missing, the scalp has opened up, the bone is gone, and the bone is flapped out on the right side forward of the ear there is all this damage to the bone. Now the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the autopsy pathologists, both groups, represented this as damage caused by the assassin's "bullet." I don't believe that's what it is! I believe that this gross damage in these photographs, which is really two thirds of the collection, is really damage from this illicit, clandestine post mortem surgery performed at Bethesda and its a con job. It's represented to us as something that an assassin's bullet did. And I'll tell you why I feel confident in saying it, I mean I feel very confident, there were three physicians in the record who saw the president's head wound right after the body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital, for the autopsy. And all three of these people have described the same damage seen by the Dallas treating physicians. They are, Dr. Ebersole, who was the radiologist that night, Dr. Ebersole; and Rear Admiral Burkley, the president's military physician, and Captain Canada, who was one of the senior officials at the Naval hospital. Now Ebersole testified to this to the House Committee under oath and he talked about the back of the head missing, and then when he was shown the autopsy photographs he actually said under oath, he says, "Well, you know, that's not what I remember seeing," he says, "this wound in the autopsy photograph, " he said "it's far more lateral and superior than I remember." Well, that's a pretty damning statement. What he's saying is that the wounds in the pictures are too far on the top of the head and too far over on the side. It's not what he remembered. And so the second witness who saw the same wound that they saw in Dallas is Dr. Burkley, and he admitted this to researcher Henry Hurt, and its in Henry Hurt's book. And then the third witness, Dr. Canada said this to researcher Michael Kurtz, apparently in 1968, and then demanded that Michael Kurtz not reveal this fact, that there was an exit wound in the back of the head for 25, until he had been dead for 25 years. So, Michael Kurtz sat on this information and didn't reveal it, this critical observation of Captain Canada, didn't reveal it until his book was published in 2006, his second book. I'm both frustrated by that and I'm also grateful that he finally did reveal it because what we have here, summarizing, three physicians, these are not non-medically qualified witnesses, these are three physicians who saw an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy's head right after the body arrived. And the Review Board found the two witnesses that witnessed the surgery inside the Naval hospital, and that's the big part of this story. Tom Robinson, who many researchers will be familiar with his name, Tom Robinson was one of the young morticians working for The Gawler's Funeral Home, and he was, he and his boss showed up very, very early that night, in fact, Tom Robinson said he was there the whole night he had a fifty yard line seat in the gallery, in the morgue, because it was a teaching, the Naval hospital was a teaching hospital, training Naval personnel, so he is sitting up there in the gallery, kind of an indoor bleachers, and he saw the whole thing, apparently including the post-mortem surgery before the autopsy started. And he gave an interview to the House Select Committee, it's one of the few that they tape recorded, and so there's a so called transcript of the tape recording that was released in 1993 thanks to the JFK Records Act. Blakey had sealed it for 50 years but then the congress had to release all of these medical witness interviews that the House Committee did in 1993 and they did. So, Robinson talked to the House Committee about seeing the brain removed but they didn't pursue it with him. But, we sure did. We found Tom Robinson and we called him into the Review Board offices, and we ahd a lot of people in the room, I was afraid he might be a little bit intimidated, but he wasn't, he was just himself, straight forward and honest. And he told us he saw the doctors saw the skull open to get the brain out, and I looked at Jeremy Gunn, and he looked at me, and that was really interesting to us because Dr. Humes, the chief pathologist, had always stated that we never had to do a craniotomy, we never had to saw the skull open to remove the brain because the damage was just so great, we just took the brain out, we, you know, we made a little incision here and there in the scalp, maybe cut one small piece of bone and just took the brain out, which is really, really, a strange story. So here is Tom Robinson who we asked to draw, let me explain the context in which he made that remark, we asked him to draw diagrams on anatomical templates from anatomy textbooks, so we had our anatomy pictures, diagrams, you know, medical illustrated diagrams of what the back of the skull looked like, and [what] the inside of the skull looks like from Grant's anatomy, from one of the two primary references for medical students. So, he drew a big giant hole in the back of the head, not the top of the head, not the right side of the head, the back of the head, he drew a big round hole, just like he had for the House Committee but the sketch he made for them was just hand drawn and there were no landmarks on it, you know, we gave him a medical atlas diagram with sutures on it and all kinds of land marks so that there could be no mistake about what he was drawing on. He drew a hole in the back of the head and then he drew two gigantic dotted lines across the back of that picture one dotted line was horizontal, like below the ears, and the other dotted line was at the top of the picture and then the round holes in the middle of it, and we said what are those dotted lines and he says oh that's where the doctors had to saw the skull open to get the brain out. That was an epiphany for me. Because that's when I realized that for a fact that post mortem surgery took place and that Dr. Humes had lied when he said he did not have to cut skull bone away to remove the brain. This is the witness that saw him do it. We then showed Mr. Robinson the famous Fox set of autopsy photographs, now this in our office, okay, this is in our office in E street in Washington, D.C. We were not allowed to have the original autopsy photos in our office, they are in the National Archives, but we had the, the so called bootleg set made by Secret Service agent Fox, and, you know, Jeremy Gunn and I had seen the original photos several times and we knew that the bootleg photos depicted exactly the same thing they are just a little bit darker, there is a little bit of contrast build up, but they depict exactly the same thing that is in the photos that are in the archives. We showed him the famous and disturbing photograph of the top of President Kennedy's head taken at the autopsy, which is in many assassination books now, it has been in Dr. Crenshaw's book, and David Lifton's book, and some of Harry Livingston's books, and I think one of Robert Groden's books and it shows the entire top of the head missing. It's really a horrible picture. And Tom Robinson looked at that picture and he said, "That makes it look like the bullet did that! He said, "The bullet didn't do that damage," he said, "the doctors did that!" So that's the explanation for that photograph. That photograph and the others associated with it do not represent damage from an assassin's bullet they represent the results of post mortem surgery. Now, the second witness that we found who observed the surgery being conducted was Ed Reed. Ed Reed was one of the two X-ray technicians, the other one was Jerold Custer. Ed Reed told us, under oath, that he recalled seeing Dr. Humes taking a scalpel and cut open the scalp above the forehead just behind the President's hairline and he actually made a gesture with his hands during the deposition so that we knew what he was talking about, and he said after that, this is an incision right above your forehead and just behind where your hairline would start, you know, from left to right, so he described that incision with his hands, and then he said after that Dr. Humes got out a circular bone saw and started cutting open the bone under that incision just above the forehead, and he said, he and Custer were summarily ordered to leave the room, get out of here! You know the people performing this cover-up that night are really the gang that couldn't shoot straight. You know, they let a mortician come in and let him see things that if they had been good coverup artists they wouldn't have let him be there. But they probably thought that, well, he's a nobody so he doesn't matter. And then if they had really done a professional job of covering this thing up they wouldn't have let the X-ray technicians witness the beginning of the post mortem surgery, but they did. If members of the audience are wondering well why would this be done, the answer is pretty simple, if you study the eyewtiness and earwitness testimony from Dealey Plaza it is very clear that President Kennedy was driven into a crossfire, you know, there were shots coming from the front, there were shots coming from the rear. That's the one thing about this case that is clear. And it's my conclusion that the reason this post mortem surgery was conducted before the autopsy is, number one, to remove any evidence in the body of shots from the front, number two to expand the skull defect so you can get access to the brain and remove bullet fragments from the brain before the autopsy, and number three if you expand the wound which in the back of the head, if you expand it tremendously in the process of getting access to the brain, if you expand it then you can misrepresent it later as an exit wound in the right side of the head, and the top of the head, which is what they did. So, these photographs of the top of the president's head, and the right side of the president's head, and for that mater the left side with his head in this metal stirrup with the back of the head obscured, I think they were all taken within about ten minutes, at the same time, right after this surgery was completed. Before the autopsy proper started at 8:15. So, then that leaves us to what is wrong with the rest of the autopsy photos? And most of your audience will know this already that the other third of the autopsy photo collection shows the back of the head apparently intact, it's apparently intact and there's no hole in the back of the head. So, the question is how can this be if all the Dallas doctors saw an exit wound in the back of the president's head? And how can this be if Sandra Spencer saw post mortem photos after reconstruction that still showed a hole there? How can this be that the autopsy photos show the scalp apparently intact in the back? Well, I've decided how it can be. If you look at those photographs, and I've seen the collection now I think, yeah, it was a total of 16 times I saw the original photographs, this is over the course of the ten depositions, and a staff viewing that we had and then some unpaid consultants that we called in, 16 times, in everyone of those photographs you've got, of the back of the head that appears to be intact you've got human hands holding the scalp in place, two or three sets of hands. It is not just one person. There are some pictures where you have, you know, two right hands, or two left hands, or whatever, but I remember its anatomically impossible for all of the hands in some of these photos to have come from one person because of where the thumb is. You have gloved hands holding a big piece of scalp that it's reported to be the intact back of the scalp. I think they are just relocating loose scalp to cover up an exit wound and fool the camera. And I think this was done after the FBI agents left the morgue. This is the time to explain what do I mean by that. There were two FBI witnesses to the autopsy. FBI agents Sibert and O'Neil. I believe Jim Sibert is still alive. He's quite elderly [now], I think he's still alive, I know Frank O'Neil died earlier this year. Those two gentlemen could not wait to give us their depositions. They were overjoyed that I called them. they had been interviewed by Arlen Specter in March of 1964. They didn't get along well. He then buried their report, of what they saw at the autopsy, the Sibert and O'Neil report, he buried that in the archives, he did not publish that in the Warren Commission in all of its 26 volumes of supporting evidence that was not published, and he did not ask them to testify under oath. The House Committee staff spoke with them and then prepared affidavits for them to sign based on their interviews, but they did not take their depositions. So, they were very happy that we called them and asked them to come testify under oath as to what they had observed. And both of those men, now they were trained observers, trained observers, they were professional law enforcement officials, and for what it's worth they were both still J. Edgar Hoover loyalists. So, these men had no incentive to fabricate a story or tell a tall tale, these were J. Edgar Hoover loyalists. And yet these men under oath both looked at these photographs of the back of the president's head that are in the archives, apparently intact, and they both said, no, no, no, that's not the way it looked at the autopsy. And we showed Frank O'Neil the drawing he made for the House Committee staff of a big hole in the back of the head, and he said yes, I verify that drawing, I remember making it and this photograph, he said, these photographs, he said, are not the way it looked, and he said, "it looks to me like it has been doctored." Now that's an explosive word, and then he clarified later in his deposition, he said, " I don't think the photo has been doctored, I think the head, the head has been doctored in this picture to make it look intact." Well, his partner, Sibert, said to us "no, that's not what it looked like," he said, "I think that the head's been reconstructed." He said, "This looks like a reconstruction," he said because there was a hole in the right rear of the head, and he said it's not in the picture. And we asked him to authenticate the drawing he made for the House Committee and he couldn't remember making it even when we showed it to him. So we said, well, can you remember today what you saw, and he said yes. So, we said, okay make a drawing for us today. So, he made a drawing of a hole in the right rear of the head. And so O'Neil thought the body had been doctored before the photo had been taken. His partner Sibert thought the head had been reconstructed, those are just two different ways of saying the same thing. So, we now the testimony of Dr. Humes before the Warren Commission that the autopsy ended at eleven o'clock. He said that twice, under oath, in 1964. So, it's my conclusion that after the FBI agents left the morgue at eleven after the formal conclusion of the autopsy that this final round of pictures was taken to deceive history. And we know from Jerold Custer and other witnesses who were there, and Paul O'Connor, Paul O'Connor was one of the two autopsy technicians assisting the pathologists, it was Paul O'Connor and James Jenkins. O'Connor and Custer have both talked about how badly shattered President Kennedy's head was and the fact that it was completely malleable, everything could be moved around, and then of course, once you conclude an autopsy and you remove the brain all the scalp, you know, the skull had been cut away, the scalp has been reflected so this scalp late in the evening would have been very malleable and subject to being moved. Now many people in the research community have chosen to believe for years that these photos of President Kennedy's head in which it looks intact when viewed from behind, they chose to assume for years that the photographs have been altered. But, the House Committee photographic panel said they didn't see any evidence of that, and they said they did stereoscopic viewing. Now unfortunately, the Review Board didn't. Jeremy Gunn and I did our best, but we are not photo experts so we never did stereoscopic viewing but the House Committee panel said they didn't see any evidence of alteration of the photos themselves and then I spent a week in Rochester, New York at KODAK. KODAK did some pro bono work for us. They digitized all of the autopsy transparencies and negatives for us, for history because you know film eventually disintegrates over time and then it's just gone. So, they digitized all of the images. And so I spent a week in a lab up in KODAK in November 1997 looking at high resolution digital scan blow ups and even enhanced images of the back of the head photos on big 17 inch computer monitors, big high resolution monitors and I did not see any evidence of matte insertion lines, or photographic tampering. I didn't see any hairs that did not line up. I didn't see any areas that were suddenly out of focus around the edges. I didn't go to film school, but, you know, I've seen the old Star Trek shows and I know what a matte insertion is, I knew, in a general way what to look for and I didn't, I not only didn't see any photographic anomalies in the back of the head photos I saw extreme these close-ups of real human skin and hair, and I didn't see any discontinuities between the hairs. So because of my own subjective experiences at Rochester and because of the House Committee's conclusion that there was no tampering with the autopsy photos it's my conclusion that the scalp was rearranged after the FBI agents left just temporarily to take this set of pictures and I even have a candidate for who probably took the pictures and that candidate is Navy Chief Robert Knudsen. Chief Knudsen is a real mystery figure in this story. He was the social photographer at the White House for five different presidents. He was a very honorable man. He was a very good photographer of social photographs. It was his job to take portraits. In fact, the portrait of President Kennedy in the Warren Report was taken by Chief Knudsen. We know that Chief Knudsen was involved in developing post mortem pictures because the House Select Committee deposed him in August of 1978 and they grilled him about that. And he told them things that they didn't find very pleasant. That he had developed pictures of probes in the body, and types of film that were not in the collection, types of film, a black and white press pack, you know, that type of film is not in the collection. We have black and white duplex film, but he developed a different type of black and white film, a different format that is not in the collection. They were so unhappy with some of his answers that they never revealed in their report that he had even been deposed. And Blakey buried his deposition for fifty years. But, thanks to Oliver Stone and his film Blakey didn't get away with this. In 1993 congressional record keepers had to open up all of their interview reports, all the medical witnesses, the deposition of Ebersole, the deposition of Chief Knudsen, and they were deposited in '93 in the National Archives. And we have all been poring over them ever since. So, Chief Knudsen, the mystery thickens here. Chief Knudsen always told his family, Len, that I photographed the president's autopsy and it was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. He not only told his family that but he told a photography magazine, and we got hold of the article from 1977, I mention the name of the magazine in my book but, and he told them the same thing, and he told them as an oh by the way, almost a throw away comment they were asking him about his career, you know, working for five presidents and in the middle of the story he just mentioned that in passing that oh and I also photographed the president's autopsy which is the hardest thing I ever did. Now, the official photographers of record for the autopsy are John Stringer and his assistant Floyd Riebe. And they don't recall anyone named Knudsen ever taking pictures. It's also pretty clear that they left as soon as the autopsy was declared over that night. That they went home about 11:00 or 11:30 p.m. or midnight at the latest. And so we have Chief Knudsen telling his family that I met the president's airplane at Andrews Air Force Base, I went out to Bethesda in the motorcade, and I was there all night, I was there when they started and I was there when they finished. Well, I think Chief Knudsen probably took the set of photos taken right after the surgery which present a dishonest picture of the head wounds and I think he probably took the set of pictures after the FBI agents left. And its my conclusion today that none, none of the pictures taken by Stringer and Riebe are in the collection at the National Archives. I don't think one of the photos they took are there. I think that's why there's up to 18 views of the body missing. All the photos they took are gone. I think the only photos in the collection were taken by a social photographer who was not accustomed to macro photography, to doing close-up work, and I think that's why they are out of focus in some areas, that's why there are no tags in the photos explaining you know, what, what, showing the autopsy number, or, there is no progression of wide shot, medium shot, extreme close up, like you would normally find in an autopsy collection. That's why we have a set of really substandard autopsy photos in terms of the photography because the guy taking them wasn't used to doing that kind of picture taking. So, we have a why and we have a who. So, that was a long explanation, but that's my conclusions about what's wrong with the autopsy photos in the National Archives today. Osanic - Right, very illuminating and very interesting, so we are going to have to encourage people to go get your book and go through all the fine tune points that you have. Horne - Right, and that's covered in two chapters chapter four and chapter twelve. Now the next area won't take nearly as long to talk about but it is perhaps even more important to talk about. And the next area of fraud, what I call area four is the autopsy report. In any normal death case, or murder case the autopsy report is the medical legal record of what happened and normally it trumps all other evidence, normally it is the best evidence. Normally it trumps any eyewitness observations that would be in conflict with the autopsy report or what anyone says they recalled seeing, even trauma room physicians who are occasionally noted to have made errors in observation because they were more concerned with saving someone's life rather than recording exactly how they had been killed. Normally their observations are trumped by an autopsy report. In this case we can't do that and I'll tell you why. It's clear that the version of the autopsy report that is in the National Archives today Commission Exhibit 387 is the third written version of that report. We know for a fact, it's incontrovertible, Len, that the first written version, a type written draft was burned by Dr. Humes in his fireplace on Sunday morning at his home on the weekend of the assassination, two days later. He had, he was essentially hoisted on his own petard during his deposition by Jeremy Gunn, who did a great job of questioning him in this area. Dr. Humes had told Arlen Specter under oath in 1964 when he testified before the Warren Commission, he had told Specter that he burned the first draft of the autopsy report. He told the House Committee that he burned notes, that he burned blood stained notes, and he no longer was saying that he had burned a draft. And so we wanted to get to the bottom of that and after an extensive series of questions Humes finally admitted under oath in 1996 to Jeremy Gunn that during his deposition that, well, yes, I did both, I burned the first draft and blood stained notes. So, that's the first autopsy report that is destroyed. We also know that a second version was destroyed, what I call the first signed version, was destroyed because we know that it existed in 1965 and we know that it had disappeared a year and a half later. So, let me explain what that means. I mentioned earlier in the interview that Robert Kennedy wanted the autopsy materials transferred to his custody in 1965, April '65. Those autopsy materials included "gross biological material in a container," that was I think 7 by 8 inches in size, which was the remains of a brain, biological tissue slides, blood slides and memos pertaining to autopsy photography, and, one of the other items on this inventory that was prepared was signed original of the autopsy report, and not only were autopsy photos and X-rays and the brain turned over to Robert Kennedy in '65 but also an original autopsy report. Now a year and a half later the Justice Department and the Archives had gotten very nervous because congress had passed a law saying that all assassination materials needed to be turned over to the National Archives that they shouldn't be in the hands of private individuals. So, this applied not only to the purported weapon and things like that but also to these pictures of the autopsy and the X-rays. So, the Justice Department approached Robert Kennedy, who never should have received these materials in the first place, I mean its remarkable that the government gave them to a private individual like that, it's remarkable that it even happened but it did. So, the Justice Department engaged in negotiations and the Kennedy family, meaning Robert Kennedy agreed to return these materials to the government provided that he could control, that the family could control who had access to them. So, a deed of gift was drawn up, and the deed of gift was signed and prepared by Burke Marshal, who was the Kennedy family attorney for years, and who was the guardian of the autopsy materials for years, for years, if you wanted to see these things if you were Cyril Wecht, or David Mantik, or anyone else, you wanted to see the materials you needed Burke Marshall's permission. Well, Burke Marshall, a year and a half later in October 1966 returns "the autopsy materials," to the archives but something was missing, the one thing that was on the original inventory in '65, turned over to Robert Kennedy that is not on the list of materials given back to the government is everything in paragraph nine. And the materials in paragraph nine were a brain, tissue slides, a memo about autopsy photography, and the original autopsy report. And it's not returned. And the archives noticed this a day later when they opened, I take that back they opened it the same day they received the footlocker. As soon as the footlocker was opened the Kennedy family representatives beat feet and left the room, they got out of there. So, the archives people were standing there doing their own inventory on October 31st, 1966 and they are looking at the 1965 inventory of what Burkley gave up and they are looking at what's being turned back into the government and paragraph nine, all of the materials are missing. Well, that's really interesting because in 1967 a year later the Secret Service turns over another autopsy report to the National Archives. Now, let me back up a minute and explain what I am getting at here. In 1965 Admiral Burkley and the Secret Service turned over an autopsy report to Robert Kennedy. He did something with it to make it disappear, because it wasn't given back to the government in '66. And yet in 1967 the Secret Service, with receipts and everything, signed and countersigned turns over the original autopsy report to the National Archives and the Archives signs for it in '67. You can't turn something over twice. If there's only one report. If you turn an autopsy report, if you relinquish a report twice it means there were two autopsy reports. Now there is an indication that the missing report that RFK received in '65 had a different content than the one in the archives today and that indication is from formerly Top Secret transcripts of a Warren Commission executive session in late January 1964 in which J. Lee Rankin, the chief counsel for the Warren Commission staff says to the assembled group, he says you know we've got to get to the bottom of these wounds, it's confusing, and he says, for example here in the autopsy, he doesn't say the word report but it's clear he means autopsy report, here in the autopsy it says that a bullet fragment came out the front of the throat and its clear from the context of that transcript that he's talking about a fragment from the head shot came out the front of the throat and, of course, that is not, that is not what is in the autopsy report today. What is in the autopsy report today, the one in the archives today is that a bullet transited from high in the president's back, supposedly through his neck and came out his throat and went on to hit Governor Connally, the so called magic bullet theory. But, the context of Rankin's conversation implies a content change in the autopsy report. So, if the autopsy report in the archives today is the third written version which it certainly appears to be, there is no way we can have any confidence in what it says whatsoever. And in fact, it's even worse than that, there is a witness to what was probably in the first draft that Dr. Humes burned and the content changes are even greater from that to what we have today. The witness was Richard Lipsey. Richard Lipsey was the military aide to General Wehle. General Wehle was the Commandant of the Military District of Washington, MDW, the Military District of Washington is the Army outfit that conducts all the ceremonial functions be people in uniform in the nation's capital, and he and his junior office Lt. [samuel A.] Bird were in charge of the joint service casket team that night, people from different branches of the Armed service showed up at Andrews Air Force to meet the plane from Texas and Lt. Bird took people from each service, there were too many people there to help, and they formed a joint service casket team, people from all the different armed services, and so General Wehle was in charge of those people, and his aide was Richard Lipsey. Now Richard Lipsey told the House Committee in 1978 that he recalled the autopsy pathologist discussing not two bullets hitting the president, which is what's in the autopsy report today, he recalled them specifically stating that three bullets hit the president. He was absolutely certain about that and even drew a diagram. Now this is all in my book, and this would have been buried for 50 years also, this is one of those interview reports that Robert Blakey decided to bury for 50 years and which was forced open by the JFK Records Act in 1993. So, Lipsey recalls a conclusion of three hits that the FBI agents never heard. The FBI agents who left at 11 o'clock heard a two hit scenario, Richard Lipsey hears a three hit scenario and I conclude that that happened later that night as the conclusions were evolving after the FBI agents left. And I also concluded that that was abandoned a day later and that's why Humes had to burn the autopsy report in his fireplace. Because what I think happened was the people in charge of this cover up found out Saturday that a shot had missed and that it hit a curb on Main Street and that it ricocheted up and hit James Tague in the face, and they knew if they had a missed shot and a purported murder weapon, what I call the stage prop in the book depository, and they had three shell casings in evidence, by then they had three, originally they had two, but by Saturday they had three shell casings in evidence, and there was a missed shot they couldn't have a three shot scenario. So, Richard Lipsey heard the pathologist conclude three hits on the president after the FBI agents left. And I think that's what was in the first draft. And I think that's why Humes had to burn it Sunday morning because that became untenable on Saturday when the world found out that a shot had missed. So, there's no reason to have any confidence in the autopsy report in the archives today. I think it's useless as a medical legal document and all it really serves now is as proof of a cover up. So, that's my fourth area of fraud in the evidence. Osanic - Okay, very interesting, let's keep going. Horne - Okay, let's keep going. Let's talk about the brain exam. Len, when you're killed by a gunshot to the brain, or by blunt trauma to the brain, at the autopsy they are going to remove your brain and then preserve it, and examine it later, after the autopsy on the body is over because when the brain is removed, you know, when it is in its live state, and when it's basically very soft it's the consistency of bread pudding I've been told, so before the brain can be examined it has to be fixed in preservative, which you know most of us call formaldehyde, the medical community calls it formalin solution, it's formaldehyde mixed with water, usually about a 10% solution, in water. So, we know that President Kennedy's brain was placed in a bucket at the autopsy, what was left of his brain was. And it was preserved by a combined technique of both soaking and injection, okay? So, it was soaking in formalin solution, it hangs in a net inside the bucket, but it also is placed in there upside down so that one of the technicians, James Jenkins in this case, used needles and injected a drip into the arteries of the brain and then they use a gravity feed, they use a gravity feed to inject a formaldehyde solution into the brain's arterial system while its soaking so that combined technique is, I was told, is called profusion. The person who explained all of this to me was Dr. Richard Davis, who was the number two guy, the number two pathologist at the AFIP in 1963, that is the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology located at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, a joint service institution at the Army Hospital, AFIP. He explained that this was the normal way for the people at Bethesda to preserve brains. And if you study the interview given out by james Jenkins over the years to different researchers it's clear that that was the technique used, that is was both soaked and injected with formaldehyde. So, normally the brain is examined once, after the autopsy on the body and normally at that examination the brain is sectioned, serially sectioned, which means that there is a cut made horizontally from left to right every inch or so. They are called bread loaf incisions by some people and by doing so one can determine the pattern of damage. Is there a bullet tract? And where did it go in? And where did it come out? And the way you would preserve that evidence is to photograph the sections that are taken, just photograph the serial sections of tissue as the are laid on top of a light box and illuminated from both above and below. We have evidence and this is something I am very proud of that the Review Board staff, namely myself and Jeremy Gunn came up with during our examination of the evidence, we had discovered that there had been two rain examinations, not one, two. There was timeline evidence in support of this, and eyewitness evidence in support of this, and photographic evidence. So, the timeline evidence goes as follows, we've got two witnesses to a very early brain exam, actually two and a half if you want to count Dr. Humes who later changed his mind, the two strongest witnesses to an early brain exam on Monday, this is on Monday, the day of the funeral Len, on November 25th, '63, just three days after the autopsy, really two and a half days later, the two witnesses to an early brain exam are Dr. Boswell, who is Dr. Humes' colleague, he was the other Navy pathologist and John Stringer, the photographer, the autopsy photographer who photographed the autopsy on the body, and [who] photographed a brain exam. They both insisted it was Monday. It was very clear in their minds, both when they were interviewed by the House committee, and when they were interviewed by us under oath, you know, years later in 1996. Dr. Humes when interviewed by the Journal of the AMA in 1992 Dr. Humes implied that it was an early brain exam when he told JAMA, the magazine, when he told JAMA that well, you know, we wanted to examine it, we wanted to examine the brain but I had to give it up because Dr. Burkley wanted to bury it with the body. Well, that's a cop out, but, that statement that Dr. Burkley wanted to bury it with the body makes it very clear that the exam was on Monday morning, which is exactly when Boswell and Stringer said it was. So, later, under oath, with us, [Dr.] Humes tried to deny that a brain exam had been conducted that early but he gave away the store during the JAMA article. [End Part One] Horne - We have evidence in the record for a later brain exam, a week later, a week after the autopsy on the body, not Monday, but a week later. And that one occurred sometime between November 29th and December 2nd, and the reason we know that is [are] two reasons, Dr. [Pierre] Finck, the third military pathologist, Finck was from the Army, he was an outsider in a Navy setting, Dr. Finck took meticulous notes about everything, he was very anally retentive, and he wrote in his notes and later produced in a report for his Army superiors, he wrote in his notes, his personal notes that Dr. Humes called me on November 29th and said there would be an examination of the brain, now Finck didn't say when the examination was but he does give us the earliest possible date, "Humes called me the 29th of November." Well, we have a Navy corpsman, Chief [Chester H.] Boyers who told the House Committee in two different interview in 1978 that he processed President Kennedy's brain, well, let me put it this way, brain tissue on December 2, 1963. So, that brain tissue could have been from a brain examination on November 29th the one Finck was told to attend on the telephone, or it could mean that Finck was notified on the 29th and then the brain exam was conducted one or two days later. So, we have a window there for the second event. Not only that but the brain photographs in the archives today do not show any serially sections of the brain. They show an intact organ, okay? Now, John Stringer the autopsy photographer who also photographed a brain exam insisted under oath to the Review Board that he photographed a brain that had been serially sectioned in front of him. He photographed each section of tissue as it was laid on a light box, illuminated from below and from above. And of course, there are no such pictures of a sectioned brain in the archives collection. Stringer also told us under oath in 1996 that he did not shoot basilar views of the brain, basilar means from the underneath, from the bottom side. He only shot superior views from the top. Well, the brain photos in the National Archives today half of the pictures are taken from above, they are superior, but half of them are basilar. And as if that isn't bad enough, Stringer recalled that he used Ektachrome color transparency film, and he used, I believe it was Portrait Pan Black and White Duplex negatives, in other words these were individual sheets of film, these black and white negatives, they were not on a roll, okay? When Stringer examined the brain photos in the national archives he noted that they were from a press pack, they were from a continuous roll of black and white film, which were numbered and of course after it was developed they are cut so that they form individual sections of negatives, individual images. But he noticed that it was very, very thin film, it wasn't thick like duplex film, and they each had a number on them, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 et cetera. And he says I did not use a press pack, I did not use this kind of film to photograph the brain. So, the brain photos in the archives are inconsistent with what Stringer did, in the sense that they are on the wrong kind of film and they do not show the brain to be sectioned. So, they also don't show any damage to the right cerebellum. Now the major portion of someone's brain, the top part of your brain, the thinking part of your brain is called the cerebrum and the portion of the back of your head, down low on the back of your head which controls your coordination and other functions is called the cerebellum. And it's a very different type of tissue, than the cerebrum, it looks very different and its a very localized part of the brain, it's only in the back of the head, down low. The Dallas doctors, four of them, recalled severe damage to the cerebellum when they examined the head wound in Dallas, and that part of the cerebellum was missing, and part of it was macerated and torn and actually hanging out of the wound. In the brain photos in the archives the cerebellum is undamaged, the right cerebellum is undamaged. We asked Mr. Stringer under oath do you recall damage to the right cerebellum and he said yes. The brain photos in the archives don't show any damage to the right cerebellum. We asked FBI agent Frank O'Neil where was the damage; we said do you recall seeing the president's brain at the autopsy, his partner Sibert didn't have any recollection of seeing the brain, he just didn't remember, either it wasn't important to him or he had forgotten. O'Neil had a definite recollection. He said yes I remember seeing the brain after it was removed. He said, first of all it was over half gone, over half of it was missing, and he said, then he put his hand on the back of his head, took his right hand put it on the back of his head, behind his right ear and he said this was where most of it was, that most of the severe damage was, it was blown, it was gone, behind the right ear, and of course that would be where the cerebellum is, and also the occipital lobe of the cerebrum, the right cerebral hemisphere. That is where he put his hand on his head. Well, the cerebellum is intact in these photos. So, they have been impugned, you know, summarizing, the brain photos in the archives have been impugned for the following reasons. Number one, they don't show sections of the brain, which Stringer recalls photographing. Number two they are on the wrong kind of film. They are not only on film from a press pack which is numbered, but the brand name of the film is ANSCO and the brand name that Stringer recalled using was EKTACHROME. So, that's it. And, of course the damage depicted is in the wrong part of the head. And the damage depicted in the brain photographs is in the top and right side of the brain, and it doesn't appear to be so much missing as just, it's a disruption in the tissue, as if there were a very large furrow- Osanic - Now what comes to my mind is just these points that you're elaborating on, is reason to re-open the case. Horne - Absolutely. Absolutely. Osanic - I mean a, you know a farcical comment could be, you could say well, how the hell could Lee Oswald do all of this, you know? So, I mean, wrong kind of film, wounds not in the right place, guys know what they were doing, and what they saw- Horne - Right. Osanic - and, this is just from, you know, that Sunday, Monday on, you were saying, evidence of massive fraud. Horne - Right. And I'm glad you jogged my memory there because there is one other thing i failed to cover earlier, Dr. Boswell made a diagram at the autopsy of the damage to the skull, that's what you would expect, that's what a good pathologist would do, but in this case he only sketched the damage to the top of the skull, now this is the diagram that many of your audience will have seen in books already, he drew it on the back of a body chart, there was a body chart called an autopsy descriptive sheet, it was a Navy home made form, so on the front of this sheet is the front and back of the body, where you can depict where bullet holes might have been, and on the back is a blank sheet of paper, and he drew a sketch damage to the skull, well he drew a sketch of the top of the head. It doesn't show the back of the head, it's only the top of the head, and this is the famous sketch which has the big dotted line circled almost the entire top of the head is surrounded by a dotted line, and he made the notation, 10 x 17 missing, and, of course he explained to the House Committee on Assassination to their forensic pathology panel,a nd also to us, that yes. what I meant was the bone was missing in this area, 10 by 17 centimeters, which is huge. And so the intent of this diagram, that was apparently to shows, "damage by the bullet," and everybody accepted it at face value for decades. Well, I had an inspiration before we deposed Dr. Boswell, and I said to Jeremy Gunn, let us take a skull model, an anatomically correct model of the human skull and ask Dr. Boswell to draw on the skull model the extent of the damage to President Kennedy's skull because his diagram doesn't show the back of the head, it's just not part of the picture, it only shows the top so we asked him to do that, and he did, and in the diagram he made on this skull model, not only is the entire top and right side of the head missing, and this is the bone he is talking about, but the entire right rear of the head is missing too. And no one really understood this until we asked him to draw a sketch on this skull model. And so Boswell, there he is under oath, in 1996 telling us that not only is the top of the head and right side gone, but the right rear of the head is gone too, the bone. And that's when the lightbulb came on for me, and that's when I really knew, deep down inside, you know between what Tom Robinson had told us, and between what Boswell had told us, there was post mortem surgery on this body before the autopsy. Because Boswell was describing not only the right rear of the head missing which is consistent with Dallas but the top and the right side too. And it's my conclusion, and I don't derive any pleasure from saying this but it's my conclusion that Boswell's sketch is a con job, it's designed to fool history, and it did for three decades. Boswell's sketch shows the top of the president's skull missing and it has blood stains on it, and yet Humes didn't burn it, you see? And when Jeremy Gunn asked Dr. Humes you said you burned all the notes that were blood stained why didn't you burn this document, and Humes had no answer, no answer whatsoever, he just gave us a flippant, "oh, I don't know," response and just clammed up on us. I think the reason Humes didn't destroy that diagram is because it's a con job. Humes performed the post mortem surgery because he was ordered to by his superiors. Boswell observed it and drew a sketch and then represented the sketch of post mortem surgery as damage done by the bullet. So, it's part of a cover up, and it tells us that the cover up was in place the minute the body arrived at Bethesda. So, yes, there is medical, legal evidence, there are medical, legal reasons, all this fraud in the evidence to re-open the case....... .......... For full interview see Justice for Kennedy blogspot Edited January 8, 2010 by William Kelly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted January 9, 2010 Share Posted January 9, 2010 Thanks to Joseph Backes for his transcription of Doug Horne's interview:http://justiceforkennedy.blogspot.com/ Condensed excerpts that seem most relevant: Horne - .... I was almost in a state of shock, initially. Here I was, I had come almost 5,000 miles, moved myself at my own expense, had to pay for my own plane ticket. The Review Board didn't pay for people to relocate, and didn't pay for their moves. It was a temporary agency. They didn't have a lot of money. And found myself on a staff, first of all, with a lot of people with advanced degrees -- people had Masters degrees or law degrees, or both, a couple of people had Ph.D.'s and law degrees, and I found out that about 2/3rds of the staff were either Warren Commission supporters or leaned in that direction, and about 1/3rd of the staff thought there might have been a conspiracy or had an open mind, you know, genuinely had an open mind and were curious about the conflicts in the medical evidence. So, I didn't find the same proportion of beliefs, I'm not sure if belief is the right word, but I didn't find the same proportion of opinions on the staff that we find in the general public. And later I came to understand the reasons for that. I was told by my boss Jeremy Gunn on three different occasions that none of the five board members believed there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. So, you would have to ask yourself, you know, what motivated them? I think what motivated them was the desire to restore trust in American institutions, to restore trust to the government, that the government could conduct a citizen review, and search for and locate classified records on this subject and get them released to the maximum extent allowed by the JFK Act. And so that's what was motivating them, to do a good deed, and release records, and as they said many times let the chips fall where they may, but they did not expect any records that were released to reveal that there was a conspiracy. They wanted to do their duty as they saw it. But, because these five people, nominated by, basically by the establishment, one by the A.B.A., two by historical societies, one by a society of archivists, and one by the White House staff, and these five people determine who is going to be hired. So, they hired David Marwell as Executive Director. And David Marwell was officially an agnostic about the assassination but in reality he thought the Warren Commission basically got it right. So, that's how the dominoes were falling. So, in retrospect I was very lucky to get a job on this staff. I was completely up front with these people when I was interviewed; I said I thought there was probably a domestic conspiracy to kill the president but that I could not define it. I was just concerned with all the conflicts in the evidence and that I wanted to learn all I could about it and in the process get all the records released that we could get released. And I think ultimately the main reason I got hired was because Jeremy Gunn -- one of the six people that interviewed me -- he had a like interest. He and I were both fascinated by the conflicts within the medical evidence. So he, he -- number one, he needed a guy on the military records team, he needed another person; and number two, he had an agenda that he wanted to pursue, if permitted later, which was to try to clarify the record as to how President Kennedy was killed, and to study the autopsy. That's how I got my job. And then as I was there I found out that how hard one worked and how motivated one was, was much more important than what degree one has. There were people on that staff who had advanced degrees who didn't do much work because they just weren't that interested in the subject. Or viewed it as an exercise of resume building, and left, you know, after a year. And then there were other people who didn't have as many degrees who probably got a lot more work done because they were much more interested in the subject. So, I learned a lot working there.... Horne - Before we get into areas of fraud in the evidence, Congressman [Louis] Stokes, who was the second Chairman of the House Assassinations Committee in the late 70's, Congressman Stokes met with the Review Board, with the five VIPs, before I was hired, he met them early in the game and told them, that he encouraged them to look into the medical evidence and see if they could make more sense out of it than the House Select Committee had. That was done in private, but it was a de facto admission that he was aware that the country and the research community was not satisfied necessarily with the work of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in trying to figure out where the wounds were and how many times the president was shot and from what directions. He was aware that there was still serious problems there. Because he encouraged them to try to clarify that area of evidence; that is what gave Jeremy Gunn and I a foot in the door to do something besides just collect old records. So, what went on for three years and what, really what my book is about is the extra credit work, okay? My book is about the extra credit work, namely the fact that we took ten depositions of people associated with the autopsy and one group deposition of some of the treating physicians from Dallas, and numerous, numerous, numerous unsworn interviews of medical witnesses, morticians, and people involved with autopsy photography. So, that attempt to "clarify the record," provided the basis for this book I've just written and I'm really grateful that we were permitted to do those things.... Horne - ... I have decided that it's an unalterable, irrefutable fact that there was a medical cover-up at the highest levels of [the government in] President Kennedy's death, of the true facts in his death. I don't think that is subject to dispute anymore. One can still argue about who killed the president or why and that will probably go on forever, but I don't think it can be denied anymore that there was a medical coverup and the reason I feel so confident in that assertion is that there are six areas where I found fraud in the evidence. Before we launch into the first one I would say to the listeners imagine that the Kennedy assassination puzzle, it's like a 500 piece picture puzzle that you buy at the store, and imagine that in 1963 someone took half of the pieces 250 of the pieces and just threw them away and then put in 250 pieces that really didn't belong in that puzzle just to confuse everyone and to present a false picture. And unfortunately, what I think researchers did for decades was to try to assemble this puzzle where half the pieces were missing and half the pieces they had to deal with were of the wrong picture. Osanic - Well, you make a good point and the only criticism of the research community is if they are following a red herring it is because someone has planted this evidence- Horne - Precisely.... Horne - ... So, yes, everyone probably fell into the trap initially, of believing for decades, of believing that well if the government had the evidence it's sacrosanct, it's sacred, and we should trust it, and it's just a matter of connecting the dots properly. I don't think that's the case. And the reason there has been no consensus on the wounds is -- or what happened to the president is -- because half the puzzle pieces are wrong. So, you know, an awful lot of old guard researchers have resisted this notion that there is fraud in the evidence now for about the last 10 or 15 years. And they have resisted it because in their minds to acknowledge this would make the crime [unsolvable] and parenthetically it would also make some of their work irrelevant. So, we are dealing with turf here, people are defending turf, and things they have written in the past. And I would say to these people if you made errors it's not your fault, it's because someone else monkeyed with the evidence and let's just move forward. Horne - ...So, the first area I'd like to talk about as we move forward is...the autopsy photographs and X-rays; there were many autopsy photos that have been destroyed, and I can tell you that it's a firm fact that two skull X-rays have been destroyed. Now, how do I know this? ... during the course of our ten depositions of autopsy witnesses at the Review Board, we were asking them questions based on their previous testimony to the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee, and in some cases about statements they have made to magazines -- like for example the three pathologists were interviewed by the Journal of the AMA in 1992. So, we were asking people well-informed and appropriate questions about the autopsy photos and X-rays, and to make a long story short, as I analyze the testimony by all the witnesses to the autopsy taken over the years I now conclude that if all of their recollections are correct, there are as many as -- now this is a maximum -- there were 18 different views of the body that were taken that are not in the collection at the archives. And that's not the archives' fault; that is because they were culled from the collection -- removed, by the people controlling this cover-up before those photos were put in the archives. But, that's a lot of pictures that are not there. What are some of those? Well, some of those are a close-up of the entry wound in the skull with the scalp reflected back so it should show a hole in the bone -- a close-up of the entry wound in the skull from the outside -- those are missing; a close-up of the entry wound in the skull from the inside with the brain removed, taken from the inside -- missing; photographs of the bruise on top of the pleural dome -- that's the cavity in which your lung sits -- missing; photographs of probes in the body which were seen as they were taken by Dr. [Robert Frederick] Karnei, the second or third year resident that night. He was a Navy lieutenant and a resident, he worked in and out of the morgue all night long, who recalled probes in the body, metal probes in the body which is normal procedure in a death by gunshot; a probe would go in where the entrance wound was and come out where the exit wound was in the body, and the angle at which the probe is photographed is going to indicate the angle of a bullet tract; so he remembers probes in the body and seeing strobe lights go off -- that's a flash, if you will, when those pictures were taken. And he was just astounded when we interviewed him and told him there are no photographs in the collection of probes in the body. He actually -- his face turned beet red, he was just astounded that they were not in the collection because he saw them being taken. There is another witness who developed autopsy photography, who developed pictures -- Chief [Robert] Knudsen, Navy chief photographers mate -- who told the House Committee in a deposition that he developed pictures and he knew darn well that at least one of them showed probes in the body because he remembers examining the negative after he developed it. So, that's another type of photo that is missing. And as far as the head X-rays, the skull X-rays go, Jerold Custer, one of the two X-ray technicians was very, very consistent over the years about one thing -- he was inconsistent about many other things, but he was very consistent about one thing -- and that is that five skull X-rays were taken. Well, right now there are only three skull X-rays in the National Archives. And for those who may not be aware, we should explain I guess that the autopsy photographs and X-rays were held by the Secret Service in a safe in the old Executive Office Building that is across the street from the White House. They were held by them until April of 1965. And then Senator Robert Kennedy ... wrote a letter to the military physician for President Johnson, Admiral -- actually, by this time Vice-Admiral -- Burkley; Burkley was the military physician for JFK and for Johnson -- after JFK was killed he got promoted from Rear-Admiral to Vice-Admiral, so Burkley was still around controlling access to these things. Senator Kennedy...wrote him a letter and said I want those materials transferred to Mrs. Lincoln at the Archives, ... she was JFK's secretary and had some office space over there, and was working for Bobby at this time. So Admiral Burkley conducted an inventory of what was in the safe. He had Secret Service people sign the inventory. He signed it. So, all the materials that are in the archives today were transferred by Burkley from the Secret Service to Robert Kennedy. And then about a year and a half later from Robert Kennedy to the archives. So, that is the provenance of those items. So, anyway, I think now that we've started to talk about X-rays it's probably time to move onto area two of fraud in the evidence. So, the first area that we just discussed was destruction of evidence, I mean pictures that we know were taken that are not in the collection. Oh, and I would add one thing to that category: the most credible witness that we interviewed of the ten deponents was Sandra Spencer. Sandra Spencer was a Navy photographers mate who was not at the autopsy but who did develop post mortem photographs the weekend of the assassination. She developed color negatives. She is absolutely certain. She even remembered the name of the chemical process, you know, required to process color negatives. She developed color negatives that weekend and there are no color negatives in the collection; there are only color positive transparencies -- slides if you will -- 4 by 5 inch slides which are really called transparencies because they are not mounted, they are just large pieces of film and black and white negatives. That is what is in the archives today: black and white negatives and color positive transparencies; they are all four inches by five inches, they are large format. She developed large format color negatives and not only that but when we deposed her and showed her the existing collection in the archives, she shook her head and said these are not the pictures I developed. She said the president looks much worse here. He looks really beat up. There is a lot of blood in the photographs. And she said, No, [in] the photographs that she developed the president had been cleaned up. He looked much better. Apparently they were after a post mortem reconstruction, probably after the morticians were finished. So, those were other additional photographs which were made and are not in the collection. And probably the most significant one that she discussed is -- and remember now she is talking about photos taken after the reconstruction by the morticians was completed -- a photograph that still had a blow out in the back of the head, a big hole in the back of the head, about two inches wide, where the scalp could not be closed and where there was no bone. So that recollection of hers, under oath, alone made her trip to Washington worthwhile because what it said was that the observations made by the Dallas treating physicians were surely correct -- that there was an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy's head because she remembered this photo, after reconstruction, after the autopsy showing the exact same thing. Well Dan, I found this last part a bit confusing or even contradictory. It seems Spencer talked about color negatives she processed which were taken after morticians cleaned up and prepared the body (presumably for funeral viewing). I assume the argument would be that this cleaned-up and "mortician-reconstructed" body (and/or photos of same) could've been used to convince people that Oswald was the lone gunman; but her testimony about a missing photograph corroborates the observations made at Parkland -- "that there was an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy's head"? I don't see how that adds up, other than that these alleged color negatives are also missing along with much other material evidence. It would make sense that anything tending to corroborate a gunshot coming from anywhere other than above and behind would be suppressed or destroyed, but if morticians left fairly clear evidence on the body itself that the head wound came from a shot from in front ........? All the rest of it is fascinating and is sufficient evidence (as if more were needed) about how much evidence is missing, destroyed, suppressed, etc. I suppose one or two pertinent questions would be whether or not the original of Burkley's inventory of the safe's contents exists, and if it does whether it matches up with what is in the Archives; I assume it doesn't match up or doesn't exist, but more information is needed as to what was in Burkley's inventory, signed off on by the Secret Service and then turned over to Robert Kennedy, then to the Archives. Thanks for all your contributions, Dan (well, somebody had to say it -- might as well be me) Yea, Dan, thanks for that, And Pat Speer also had something negative to say about Spencer. Where's he now that the stage has been set for him? BK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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