Oswald and the Issue of Neutron Activation Analyses

[Douglas Caddy]

Michael Ward posted this on Facebook today:

Harold Weisberg, perhaps the most dogged of the early researchers, sued under the Freedom of Information Act for the records of the various neutron activation analyses. The case dragged on for 17 years, with the Department of Justice claiming that public knowledge of the data was not in the interests of ‘national security’.

Eventually, nearly twenty years after the assassination, some of the results of the NAA tests were made available to Weisberg. He concluded that there had in fact been seven controlled tests:

The tests given me show that in seven ‘control’ cases where others had fired a rifle this evidence was left on the cheeks.

(Harold Weisberg, Post Mortem: JFK Assassination Cover–Up Smashed, Weisberg, 1975, p.437)

As might be expected, given the authorities’ unwillingness to release the documents, the control tests appear to prove that neutron activation analysis can be expected to show substantial quantities of barium and antimony on the cheek of anyone who had fired a rifle of the same type as that found on the sixth floor of the TSBD. The absence of such quantities on Oswald’s cheek implies that he almost certainly did not fire a rifle on the day of the assassination.

The court case is Weisberg v. ERDA and the Department of Justice, Civil Action 75–226. The documents, which still await expert appraisal, are available in the Harold Weisberg Archive, Hood College, Frederick, Maryland.

Framing an innocent man is what they did.

[Paul Brancato]

Surely. Amazing how often you read, without reference to this test, that this kind of evidence is not conclusive. No wonder. And still no independent verification of the test results? 

[Cliff Varnell]

The mystery to me is why this subject is of any interest whatsoever.

More false mystery rabbit-holery.

[Pat Speer]

7 hours ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Michael Ward posted this on Facebook today:

Harold Weisberg, perhaps the most dogged of the early researchers, sued under the Freedom of Information Act for the records of the various neutron activation analyses. The case dragged on for 17 years, with the Department of Justice claiming that public knowledge of the data was not in the interests of ‘national security’.

Eventually, nearly twenty years after the assassination, some of the results of the NAA tests were made available to Weisberg. He concluded that there had in fact been seven controlled tests:

The tests given me show that in seven ‘control’ cases where others had fired a rifle this evidence was left on the cheeks.

(Harold Weisberg, Post Mortem: JFK Assassination Cover–Up Smashed, Weisberg, 1975, p.437)

As might be expected, given the authorities’ unwillingness to release the documents, the control tests appear to prove that neutron activation analysis can be expected to show substantial quantities of barium and antimony on the cheek of anyone who had fired a rifle of the same type as that found on the sixth floor of the TSBD. The absence of such quantities on Oswald’s cheek implies that he almost certainly did not fire a rifle on the day of the assassination.

The court case is Weisberg v. ERDA and the Department of Justice, Civil Action 75–226. The documents, which still await expert appraisal, are available in the Harold Weisberg Archive, Hood College, Frederick, Maryland.

Framing an innocent man is what they did.

Greetings, Doug. I purchased digitized copies of the papers sent to Weisberg years before any of this stuff was available online. I present my take on these and other pertinent materials, some of which I had to purchase from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, in Chapter 4f of my website, available here https://www.patspeer.com/chapter4fcastsofcontention

Now, this is essentially a short book. So at one point a scientist from Europe--whose name has slipped through the cracks--shortened and simplified this material and my discussion of this material and tried to create a page for this on wikipedia. But the McAdams devotees then in charge of all stuff JFK on wikipedia wouldn't allow it because...because...essentially two reasons. The first was that these test results were not discussed by (what they called) a credible source, namely Bugliosi. And the second was that the materials sent Weisberg had no NARA numbers because...because...these materials were never sent to NARA. In short, these cowards refused to allow any mention of these results on wikipedia, even when I offered to put them in contact with the Hood Library which could confirm these were materials provided Weisberg as a result of a lawsuit. 

[Pat Speer]

7 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Surely. Amazing how often you read, without reference to this test, that this kind of evidence is not conclusive. No wonder. And still no independent verification of the test results? 

As discussed in chapter 4f on my website, the paraffin tests for nitrate performed by the DPD were unreliable and were shortly thereafter discontinued. But the tests for gun shot residue using a nuclear reactor--NAA--are still considered reliable, even though they are no longer performed because a similar cheaper alternative has become available.

Now, the use of NAA for comparative bullet lead analysis-the test that supposedly linked the magic bullet to the Connally wrist fragment (but really did not)--well, that has been disavowed by the FBI and is no longer performed. But the problem wasn't that the tests were inconclusive--they worked perfectly. No, the problem was that the assumptions behind the interpretation of the results was dog doo-doo, junk science. Essentially, the assumption was that each lot of bullets contained a unique blend of elements. But this turned out to be false. The elements within each lot are not equally dispersed, meaning two bullets from the same lot could have a different amount of any given element. But it was worse than that. This lack of consistency also occurs within each bullet, whereby two fragments taken from the same bullet could have vastly different proportions of any given element. And that's not even to mention that the way bullets are manufactured and distributed could lead to a situation where two nearly identical bullets from the same melt would end up in different boxes shipped across the county from one another. So, knowing this, what was the FBI to tell a jury if two bullets or two bullet fragments matched? That they MAY have come from the same bullet, or MAY have come from the same box, but that they really couldn't be sure?

So they just dropped it. 

Edited March 14 by Pat Speer

[Douglas Caddy]

Thank you, Pat, for your detailed clarification of this subject. Paul and Cliff think my posting is irrelevant because it is old history, and the world has moved on. They apparently fail to recognize that the topic may be a new one to members of the Forum who have joined in recent times and to non-members who frequently come to the Forum for information. Your two discourses above are truly an education on the subject. Ever since I joined the Forum 18 years ago, I have been in awe of the extent of your credible knowledge of the assassination of JFK. You are a treasured asset to all.

[Cliff Varnell]

38 minutes ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Thank you, Pat, for your detailed clarification of this subject. Paul and Cliff think my posting is irrelevant because it is old history, and the world has moved on. They apparently fail to recognize that the topic may be a new one to members of the Forum who have joined in recent times and to non-members who frequently come to the Forum for information. Your two discourses above are truly an education on the subject. Ever since I joined the Forum 18 years ago, I have been in awe of the extent of your credible knowledge of the assassination of JFK. You are a treasured asset to all.

No Douglas, I never thought the subject was relevant and I'm appalled that new members of the Forum will be lead down yet another meaningless rabbit hole.

Any discussion of anything in regard to the SBT is an abject waste of time, a distraction from the fact that 6.5mm FMJ don't leave shallow wounds in soft tissue.

[Stu Wexler]

Pat: I believe you have one aspect of the bullet story confused, inter-bullet heterogeneity.  It is actually and quite deliberately the case that multiple bullets in a production lot-- we are talking thousands--  will have almost precisely the same amount of key elements from bullet to bullet. This is done deliberately by metallurgists--  to ensure a brand of bullets shares the same flight characteristics. A box of bullet may all be the same or, based on production lots, there might be say, 3 sets of chemical profiles constituting a bullet box. And hundreds of boxes just like that will be put into pallets and sent to the same geographic region. The end result is: you can never tell if a bullet came from a box, or a pallet of boxes, or a freight of pallets sent to the same part of the U.S. This is well known to metallurgists and chemists who are part of the bullet fabrication and shipment process. It was scandalously "left out" of analyses by forensic chemists at the FBI and state crime labs--  until the entire comparative bullet lead field was taken down by the likes of Spiegelman, Tobin, Grant and Randich, all of whom specifically used the JFK case to help promote the problem. I helped both groups, and am the historian for the Spiegelman paper.  Our key contribution to the JFK field was to show that the supposed rainbow crayon box theory of the MCC ammo was bogus--  contrary to LN theorists and consistent with common sense, MC bullets were fabricated and distributed like other bullet boxes.  This means, again, that multiple bullets in the same box, gun store, city will share a chemical profile. You can not say, with any confidence, that a fragment came from a specific box much less a specific bullet. Moreover-- and this always gets lost-- you cannot count bullet profiles and say "only and exactly X bullets contributed to this suite of fragments" found at a crime scene. You can only say-- at LEAST x bullets are in this suite of fragments/bullets, based on chemical profiles. 

Randich and Grant contributed three other key insights. First-- they showed that the mysterious intra-bullet heterogeneity one sees with MC rounds is not unusual. It is a function of poor sampling from the rounds--  if one hits micro sections that have elemental spikes.  For that reason they confirmed Wallace Milam, who pointed out that based on intrabullet variation, you cannot even say the wrist fragments are from one MC bullet grouping (to CE399) rather than another. Finally, they pointed out, as experienced metallurgists and chemists dealing with bullet fabrication, that the supposedly low range of Antimony that Rahn and Guinn highlighted as being unique to MC rounds is not unique. Many other brands of bullets, especially softnosed, share that low range of Sb.

Pat, you made a great contribution with your analysis of the cheek cast NAA.  I only wish it could be duplicated with a much larger sample size.

Stu

[Robert Morrow]

12 hours ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Michael Ward posted this on Facebook today:

Harold Weisberg, perhaps the most dogged of the early researchers, sued under the Freedom of Information Act for the records of the various neutron activation analyses. The case dragged on for 17 years, with the Department of Justice claiming that public knowledge of the data was not in the interests of ‘national security’.

Eventually, nearly twenty years after the assassination, some of the results of the NAA tests were made available to Weisberg. He concluded that there had in fact been seven controlled tests:

The tests given me show that in seven ‘control’ cases where others had fired a rifle this evidence was left on the cheeks.

(Harold Weisberg, Post Mortem: JFK Assassination Cover–Up Smashed, Weisberg, 1975, p.437)

As might be expected, given the authorities’ unwillingness to release the documents, the control tests appear to prove that neutron activation analysis can be expected to show substantial quantities of barium and antimony on the cheek of anyone who had fired a rifle of the same type as that found on the sixth floor of the TSBD. The absence of such quantities on Oswald’s cheek implies that he almost certainly did not fire a rifle on the day of the assassination.

The court case is Weisberg v. ERDA and the Department of Justice, Civil Action 75–226. The documents, which still await expert appraisal, are available in the Harold Weisberg Archive, Hood College, Frederick, Maryland.

Framing an innocent man is what they did.

That happens to be an extremely important fact. Oswald negative for paraffin on his face and in the control study, all seven who fired a rifle all tested positive for paraffin on their faces.

Absolute Proof Lee Harvey Oswald was a *pre-selected patsy* for the JFK assassination: “5 feet 10 inches, 165 pounds” https://robertmorrowpoliticalresearchblog.blogspot.com/2023/01/5-feet-10-inches-165-pounds-is-absolute.html  Dallas Police Dispatcher was immediately using Marguerite Oswald’s description of Lee given to Dallas FBI in May, 1960

[Cliff Varnell]

Sheep in wolves' clothing don't run in packs -- they move in flocks.

Neutron Activation Analysis of CE399?

Get flocked.

[Pat Speer]

4 hours ago, Stu Wexler said:

Pat: I believe you have one aspect of the bullet story confused, inter-bullet heterogeneity.  It is actually and quite deliberately the case that multiple bullets in a production lot-- we are talking thousands--  will have almost precisely the same amount of key elements from bullet to bullet. This is done deliberately by metallurgists--  to ensure a brand of bullets shares the same flight characteristics. A box of bullet may all be the same or, based on production lots, there might be say, 3 sets of chemical profiles constituting a bullet box. And hundreds of boxes just like that will be put into pallets and sent to the same geographic region. The end result is: you can never tell if a bullet came from a box, or a pallet of boxes, or a freight of pallets sent to the same part of the U.S. This is well known to metallurgists and chemists who are part of the bullet fabrication and shipment process. It was scandalously "left out" of analyses by forensic chemists at the FBI and state crime labs--  until the entire comparative bullet lead field was taken down by the likes of Spiegelman, Tobin, Grant and Randich, all of whom specifically used the JFK case to help promote the problem. I helped both groups, and am the historian for the Spiegelman paper.  Our key contribution to the JFK field was to show that the supposed rainbow crayon box theory of the MCC ammo was bogus--  contrary to LN theorists and consistent with common sense, MC bullets were fabricated and distributed like other bullet boxes.  This means, again, that multiple bullets in the same box, gun store, city will share a chemical profile. You can not say, with any confidence, that a fragment came from a specific box much less a specific bullet. Moreover-- and this always gets lost-- you cannot count bullet profiles and say "only and exactly X bullets contributed to this suite of fragments" found at a crime scene. You can only say-- at LEAST x bullets are in this suite of fragments/bullets, based on chemical profiles. 

Randich and Grant contributed three other key insights. First-- they showed that the mysterious intra-bullet heterogeneity one sees with MC rounds is not unusual. It is a function of poor sampling from the rounds--  if one hits micro sections that have elemental spikes.  For that reason they confirmed Wallace Milam, who pointed out that based on intrabullet variation, you cannot even say the wrist fragments are from one MC bullet grouping (to CE399) rather than another. Finally, they pointed out, as experienced metallurgists and chemists dealing with bullet fabrication, that the supposedly low range of Antimony that Rahn and Guinn highlighted as being unique to MC rounds is not unique. Many other brands of bullets, especially softnosed, share that low range of Sb.

Pat, you made a great contribution with your analysis of the cheek cast NAA.  I only wish it could be duplicated with a much larger sample size.

Stu

Thanks, Stu. I was hoping you'd weigh in. And yes, you are correct, the elements within specific types of bullets are not random. But the larger point I was trying to make was that two samples from the same bullet can have enough variation where one can not say they came from the same bullet, and two bullets from the same box can have enough variation where one can't say they came from the same box. So the use of NAA to support that the wrist fragment matched the magic bullet was smoke, and its subsequent denouncement as junk science is proper.

What gets lost in the process, however, is that the protocols established by Guinn prior to his testimony were that a bullet would need to match on three key elements before you could claim it was a match. And it only matched on one, really--antimony. The wrist fragment matched roughly half the other fragments on silver, and failed to match at all on copper. Now, Guinn claimed the sample was tainted by the copper jacket so he threw that one out. But his papers reveal that arsenic was to be used as a back-up in such circumstances, and no results for arsenic were revealed. 

So the fragment and magic bullet did not match...according to Guinn's science papers. And it follows that his testimony was a deliberate deception. 

[Stu Wexler]

Yes, I explored the issue of elemental discriminants in some depth for my work. Guinn argued for 3:  copper, antimony and silver. Copper could not work possibly because of the copper jacket. Silver actually suggesting a grouping of fragments inconsistent with the official scenario. That left only Antimony. The problem is that forensic chemists, since Guinn, were arguing for more and more, not fewer, elemental discriminants. Guinn gets a bit of pass because of when he did the HSCA analysis but not much--  using one element was never satisfactory. But Rahn and Sturdivan do not get any pass. They went all in on the magic of antimony-- but only for MC rounds. Poor Oswald picked the only brand of bullets that are fabricated like rainbow crayon boxes and the only one that can tell us everything about a shooting using just one element. I had independent forensic chemists, one of whom worked on MC rounds, outright ridicule that assertion. But Grant and Randich took it further by pointing out, from their extensive background with bullet fabrication, that low levels of antimony in bullets is far from rare. There are like 10 levels on which the Guinn/Rahn material fail.

 

[Charles Blackmon]

Thinking Americans (I would think) all have come to accept that science has proven Oswald did not fire the rifle that day.

[Pat Speer]

3 hours ago, Charles Blackmon said:

Thinking Americans (I would think) all have come to accept that science has proven Oswald did not fire the rifle that day.

Unfortunately, Charles, there are circles, in academia, in law enforcement, and the media, for example, where the belief Oswald was the sole shooter, and all this talk of conspiracy paranoid nonsense, is worn like a badge of honor. 

A lot of these people never studied the case beyond reading a few news articles, and maybe watching a TV program or two, but they are convinced (and want others to be convinced) that Oswald was guilty because they look at the LN side and see the Warren Commission, Arlen Specter, J. Edgar Hoover, Walter Cronkite, and Vincent Bugliosi, and then look at the CT side and see Mark Lane, Jim Garrison, Robert Groden, David Lifton, Oliver Stone, and James Fetzer. The one side seems reasonable and the other side not so much. 

 

[Pat Speer]

16 hours ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Thank you, Pat, for your detailed clarification of this subject. Paul and Cliff think my posting is irrelevant because it is old history, and the world has moved on. They apparently fail to recognize that the topic may be a new one to members of the Forum who have joined in recent times and to non-members who frequently come to the Forum for information. Your two discourses above are truly an education on the subject. Ever since I joined the Forum 18 years ago, I have been in awe of the extent of your credible knowledge of the assassination of JFK. You are a treasured asset to all.

Thanks, Doug. Much appreciated.