Pat Speer Chats with Francois Carlier

[Tom Gram]

5 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

Thanks Gil for this additional. I see the clear “Scott, Foresman, and Company” labelings on the cartons there. 

My only thought in looking at the photos is in reconstructing how the hands would have worked in moving the cartons. I am not sure two hands on the bottom of a carton, then flipping it over on its back such that the hands and prints end up on top, sounds quite right to me. 

I would think if a carton on top of another was to be lifted to move it out of the way, such as CE 641 lifted off the top of CE 648, it would be done by using two full hands on opposite corners of the three-dimensional carton (one on the bottom for lifting and the other on the opposite corner on top for balancing), lift, pivot, then set it back down nearby, same side up. 

That would exactly account for the full left palm print location on CE 641 as one of the two corners held in that way to move the box (the hand on top for balancing). The other hand, his right hand, would be a full right hand cupped under the bottom of the carton at the opposite corner, even though no print was lifted from there. Not everywhere touched would necessarily leave usable prints. The additional right index fingerprint on the top of CE 641 would have been left in the course of moving or adjusting that carton but would not represent a full hand used in lifting the carton, which requires one full hand under the bottom of the carton. 

Then with CE 641 lifted and moved from off the top of CE 648, that right palm print on the top of CE 648 could represent a lifting up just a little of only that end of that carton for a moment, maybe in order to see if anything was written on the side of that end of the carton. That temporary lift of that end of the carton would be done with two hands, the left hand on the other end of the carton at the top holding it from moving, and the right end by pressure pivoting that end up a little as the lifter (Oswald) might peer down to check if maybe a label was there, then release that end back down to the floor again as before. Again, in this reconstruction of CE 648 both hands would have been used to lift that one end only of that carton a few inches up off the floor before setting it back down on the floor, even though a usable print was lifted from only one of those hand contacts.

Since there is no mention in the reports or visible sign of those cartons being opened, I assume the way this reconstruction would work is there must have been labelings (or maybe penciled information?—something) on the outside identifying contents inside, and Oswald would be checking or looking for that, looking for the right carton which would have what was needed for an order, which in this case the CE 648 carton was not (which would be why it was not opened).

Whether or not my proposed slight modification of how the hand movements would work in moving the cartons, as you bring out there is this alternative explanation for those carton prints of Oswald in which those prints, in themselves, do not strongly indicate Oswald was there to fire the rifle, as long assumed, even though those prints establish he was there. Thanks for bringing out your research on this. 

Seeing as Pat wrote a whole chapter on the box fingerprints, I think it’s worth a link: 

https://www.patspeer.com/chapter-4d-the-myth-of-fingerprints-and-the-fingerprints-of-myth

[François Carlier]

On 3/28/2024 at 11:13 PM, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Francois,

That claim in and of itself doesn't matter much to me because it is just the memory of one witness and has no corroboration.

I happen to believe that Oswald told the truth in his interrogation about buying a coke on the second floor, then taking it down and drinking it with his lunch. All before the shooting, of course.

So if Oswald got change from Geraldine Reid for the coke, that would have been around 12:15 PM.

 

Thank you for answering. I wonder what other members think about what Robert Groden claims.

I mean, it is very important : a well-known JFK researcher claims that the suspect had a perfect alibi (Oswald was with a woman and talking to her while the shooting occured). That's pretty darn important ! So either Groden has exonarated Lee Oswald for good and for ever, or he is wrong.

I happen to believe that Groden is wrong, but I think that it is an important issue and I wonder what conspiracy-oriented members think about that (I'm surrprised that nobody is using that Groden argument).

Edited March 30 by François Carlier

[François Carlier]

On 3/28/2024 at 11:28 PM, Sandy Larsen said:

Francois,

I have a question for you.

Does it bother you at all that the HSCA moved the entrance wound that  Humes saw near the external occipital protuberance up by 4 inches, to the cowlick area of the head?

Don't you think that was an astonishing thing to do?

Most CTers know the reason the HSCA did that. Do you?

 

Hello again.
That topic requires a thread altogether.
The medical evidence in the Kennedy-assassination case is definitely an astounding matter ! Mistakes, misunderstandings, failures, conflicting accounts, debates, burned notes, what have you...
I am not a physician so I have no real authority in this field (although I know that a lot of physicians have conflicting opinions and have reached conflicting conclusions).
What do I think of the fact that the wound was "moved" ?
"Astonishing" ? Yes.
"Meant to deceive ?" I don't think so.
Maybe they had time to reconsider their position after calm and collected re-appraisal of the evidence.

[Pat Speer]

20 minutes ago, François Carlier said:

Hello again.
That topic requires a thread altogether.
The medical evidence in the Kennedy-assassination case is definitely an astounding matter ! Mistakes, misunderstandings, failures, conflicting accounts, debates, burned notes, what have you...
I am not a physician so I have no real authority in this field (although I know that a lot of physicians have conflicting opinions and have reached conflicting conclusions).
What do I think of the fact that the wound was "moved" ?
"Astonishing" ? Yes.
"Meant to deceive ?" I don't think so.
Maybe they had time to reconsider their position after calm and collected re-appraisal of the evidence.

Only nobody viewing the body and observing the small entrance wound ever changed their opinion as to the location of the wound. They all said it was low on the back of the head. The only one to pretend he'd changed his opinion was Humes. And it turned out that he'd been threatened into pretending he'd changed his mind when he had not.

So the question remains as to why the "government" would conduct a secret panel to second guess the doctors, and give the illusion the doctors had re-appraised their position, when they had not.

What were they afraid of? 

[Greg Doudna]

 

6 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

Seeing as Pat wrote a whole chapter on the box fingerprints, I think it’s worth a link: 

https://www.patspeer.com/chapter-4d-the-myth-of-fingerprints-and-the-fingerprints-of-myth

Yes. It was that chapter of Pat Speer which led me to look up a study he cited at one point: Ulery et al., "Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108/19 (2011): 7733-7738, which can be read in full here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093498 .

The study was an early landmark study attempting to quantify how accurate fingerprint identifications were by real-world examiners. Ever since the Brandon Mayfield case in Portland, Oregon of 2004 this has received more attention --I used to live in Portland, I remember that case well, in which a Muslim man was arrested on a serious international terrorism charge based on stated unequivocal, positive fingerprint identifications by the FBI nailing him as guilty, except it wasn't true, it was a mistake, some Spanish examiners said "hey these prints DON'T match, you're wrong!" to the FBI, and it WAS wrong, and Brandon Mayfield was innocent!  

Anyway, back to this 2011 landmark study. What I found of interest was the difference between false positives (mistakenly claiming a match, like in the Brandon Mayfield case), and false negatives (mistakenly finding no match between prints that actually do come from the same person). There are not the same error rates for both of these.

Surprisingly, the false positive error rate found in that study is only a tiny fraction of 1%--it hardly ever happens (except when it does, as with Brandon Mayfield). 

But the false negative rate is very common--about 7%, or about 1 in 13 negative findings or exclusions is wrong, average of all examiners.

I post the abstract to this study at the end below. But consider this, in light of this data: two, not just one, expert and experienced fingerprint examiners stated unequivocally that a fingerprint on a 6th floor TSBD carton was a match to one Mac Wallace, who had no known business being on the 6th floor of the TSBD on Nov 22, 1963.

Not one, but two. In the 2011 study, no false positive (of the tiny fraction of 1% that did happen) was done by two or more examiners on the same print--all false positives were all one-off errors by lone examiners.  

There were two experienced examiners who independently positively identified a print of Mac Wallace on the 6th floor TSBD in a blind analysis, before one of those examiners learned that his fingerprint ID involved the JFK assassination. He had not known that when he signed his unequivocal, professional positive identification. Learning that, he backtracked, did not say he was wrong, but suddenly decided he was no longer sure at all! 

But the other, Darby, stuck to saying, to the end of his life and with all the force in him, that it was clearly an identification, that he knew what he was doing, that there was no mistake, that he could not understand how an unsigned, unattributed response from the FBI after a delay of only a whole year was issued to the press saying the FBI lab did not agree with Darby's Mac Wallace positive print identification, because, Darby insisted to the end of his days, it just was a match, "no question about it".

And I know, I have read Joan Mellen's book and chapter, citing another expert who says unequivocally that Darby's identification was wrong, and to nearly everyone that has seemed to settle it: Darby was wrong, end of story. 

But in the light of this 2011 study though, consider:

Lots of false negatives, those happen all the time (which is what the Mellen cited expert claimed, a false negative--a conclusive finding of no match to Mac Wallace). 

False positives--such as Darby being mistaken--hardly ever happen.

And zero--zero--cases in that study involving 169 latent print examiners, of two examiners' false positives on the same prints in that study. Which is what happened with those Mac Wallace print identifications before one of the two examiners learned of the stakes and suddenly realized he was no longer as certain as he was when he signed saying he was willing to put someone into prison for a long time based on his finding.

All I can say is, either the Darby case is another case exhibit of the Brandon Mayfield case phenomenon, of the very rare but it happens incidence of positive-identification fingerprint examiner error, or...

Or, the question nobody asks: what if the degree of critical scrutiny, which was intense, applied to take down Darby's positive TSBD 6th floor fingerprint identification of somebody who "shouldn't" have been there, were applied to the Oswald print identifications? But to my knowledge, there never was any such serious review of those Oswald fingerprint identifications, in the same way there was for the Darby Mac Wallace ones. Even if most of the Oswald fingerprint identifications held up under review, what if one or two or three actually did not, by the same standards used to take down Darby's finding? How might that affect things? 

(And leave out here the ad hominem toward Darby's lapsed credentials--the only evidence for that, which is denied by Darby's family, is the rather credible oral testimony of the fingerprint examiner cited by Mellen who also was an official in the organization which issued the credentials. But that could be some misunderstanding on Darby's part, and in any case has no bearing or relevance on Darby's expertise itself, only whether the retired Darby was wilfully untruthful in representing his credentials as current in the paperwork. I am not aware of any other allegations of wilful misconduct levied against Darby in his long and respected career.) 

Anyway, here is the abstract of the study:

The interpretation of forensic fingerprint evidence relies on the expertise of latent print examiners. The National Research Council of the National Academies and the legal and forensic sciences communities have called for research to measure the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, a challenging and complex problem in need of systematic analysis. Our research is focused on the development of empirical approaches to studying this problem. Here, we report on the first large-scale study of the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, in which 169 latent print examiners each compared approximately 100 pairs of latent and exemplar fingerprints from a pool of 744 pairs. The fingerprints were selected to include a range of attributes and quality encountered in forensic casework, and to be comparable to searches of an automated fingerprint identification system containing more than 58 million subjects. This study evaluated examiners on key decision points in the fingerprint examination process; procedures used operationally include additional safeguards designed to minimize errors. Five examiners made false positive errors for an overall false positive rate of 0.1%. Eighty-five percent of examiners made at least one false negative error for an overall false negative rate of 7.5%. Independent examination of the same comparisons by different participants (analogous to blind verification) was found to detect all false positive errors and the majority of false negative errors in this study. Examiners frequently differed on whether fingerprints were suitable for reaching a conclusion.

[Greg Doudna]

On 3/28/2024 at 3:13 PM, Sandy Larsen said:

Francois,

That claim in and of itself doesn't matter much to me because it is just the memory of one witness and has no corroboration.

Before something gets started on this, no, no witness ever said or remembered that. Someone hoaxed Grodon.

Greg Parker's old site: https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t559-geraldean-reid.

DiEugenio at the link Carlier gave: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/groden-robert-absolute-proof

Someone faked that and Grodon bought it. No verification, no tape of the alleged interview whose only evidence is Grodon's claim to have interviewed her with no recording, and published in Grodon's book of 2014. Here is the obituary of TSBD clerical supervisor Mrs. Geraldean Reid who worked on the 2nd floor and died in 1973: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/145566340/jeraldean-reid. This was decades before Grodon's first claim to have interviewed TSBD employee "Geraldine Reid" of the 2nd floor TSBD, which Grodon was told and believed and tried to say was a second TSBD employee of the same-sounding name working on the same 2nd floor with no other TSBD employees ever noticing there were two Mrs. Reid's working on TSBD's 2nd floor with the same name. 

To my knowledge no one has persisted with the Geraldine Reid doppelganger claim of Grodon after the Parker forum and DiEugenio debunkings, so it really has nothing to do with anything at this point, except as one more item, if anyone is listing, of intentional attempts designed to tempt CTs on the JFK case to go down rabbit holes and become even more confused than CT's self-inflict without assistance.

Francois Carlier, I am sure you mean well, but perhaps be more careful about your wording or raising a question like this at all, as if you are purporting to be asking about a real witness claim for Oswald in a way that some persons will read and repeat it as if it is a real witness claim (such as just seen, even one of the moderators of this site).

[Greg Doudna]

(duplicate)

Edited April 7 by Greg Doudna

[Pat Speer]

1 hour ago, François Carlier said:

Thank you for answering. I wonder what other members think about what Robert Groden claims.

I mean, it is very important : a well-known JFK researcher claims that the suspect had a perfect alibi (Oswald was with a woman and talking to her while the shooting occured). That's pretty darn important ! So either Groden has exonarated Lee Oswald for good and for ever, or he is wrong.

I happen to believe that Groden is wrong, but I think that it is an important issue and I wonder what conspiracy-oriented members think about that (I'm surrprised that nobody is using that Groden argument).

While I was at first tempted to believe Groden had made up his story about Oswald/s alibi, I saw an interview with Mike Brownlow where he makes a similar claim about Reid--that she was with Oswald when the shots were fired. So I believe she told them what they claimed she told them. 

But I think her claim is a fantasy. From compiling thousands of witness statements, I found that many witnesses came to claim things that were grossly at odds with their earliest claims, and that the trajectory was almost always in a consistent direction. That is, to say, people who originally said they didn't know where the shots came from might eventually claim they knew they came from the building, and then proceed to claim they thought they saw Oswald in the window, while other people originally claiming they didn't know where the shots came from might eventually claim they felt positive they came from knoll, and then. proceed to claim they saw someone behind the fence at the time of the head shot. 

In the case of Reid, I would bet she started out small, and first started saying she saw Oswald just a few minutes before the shooting and then shrunk this time over the years until it became an alibi. But we don't have enough statements from her over the years to know for sure. 

[Stu Wexler]

53 minutes ago, Greg Doudna said:

 

Yes. It was that chapter of Pat Speer which led me to look up a study he cited at one point: Ulery et al., "Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108/19 (2011): 7733-7738, which can be read in full here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093498 .

The study was an early landmark study attempting to quantify how accurate fingerprint identifications were by real-world examiners. Ever since the Brandon Mayfield case in Portland, Oregon of 2004 this has received more attention --I used to live in Portland, I remember that case well, in which a Muslim man was arrested on a serious international terrorism charge based on stated unequivocal, positive fingerprint identifications by the FBI nailing him as guilty, except it wasn't true, it was a mistake, some Spanish examiners said "hey these prints DON'T match, you're wrong!" to the FBI, and it WAS wrong, and Brandon Mayfield was innocent!  

Anyway, back to this 2011 landmark study. What I found of interest was the difference between false positives (mistakenly claiming a match, like in the Brandon Mayfield case), and false negatives (mistakenly finding no match between prints that actually do come from the same person). There are not the same error rates for both of these.

Surprisingly, the false positive error rate found in that study is only a tiny fraction of 1%--it hardly ever happens (except when it does, as with Brandon Mayfield). 

But the false negative rate is very common--about 7%, or about 1 in 13 negative findings or exclusions is wrong, average of all examiners.

I post the abstract to this study at the end below. But consider this, in light of this data: two, not just one, expert and experienced fingerprint examiners stated unequivocally that a fingerprint on a 6th floor TSBD carton was a match to one Mac Wallace, who had no known business being on the 6th floor of the TSBD on Nov 22, 1963.

Not one, but two. In the 2011 study, no false positive (of the tiny fraction of 1% that did happen) was done by two or more examiners on the same print--all false positives were all one-off errors by lone examiners.  

There were two experienced examiners who independently positively identified a print of Mac Wallace on the 6th floor TSBD in a blind analysis, before one of those examiners learned that his fingerprint ID involved the JFK assassination. He had not known that when he signed his unequivocal, professional positive identification. Learning that, he backtracked, did not say he was wrong, but suddenly decided he was no longer sure at all! 

But the other, Darby, stuck to saying, to the end of his life and with all the force in him, that it was clearly an identification, that he knew what he was doing, that there was no mistake, that he could not understand how an unsigned, unattributed response from the FBI after a delay of only a whole year was issued to the press saying the FBI lab did not agree with Darby's Mac Wallace positive print identification, because, Darby insisted to the end of his days, it just was a match, "no question about it".

And I know, I have read Joan Mellen's book and chapter, citing another expert who says unequivocally that Darby's identification was wrong, and to nearly everyone that has seemed to settle it: Darby was wrong, end of story. 

But in the light of this 2011 study though, consider:

Lots of false negatives, those happen all the time (which is what the Mellen cited expert claimed, a false negative--a conclusive finding of no match to Mac Wallace). 

False positives--such as Darby being mistaken--hardly ever happen.

And zero--zero--cases in that study involving 169 latent print examiners, of two examiners' false positives on the same prints in that study. Which is what happened with those Mac Wallace print identifications before one of the two examiners learned of the stakes and suddenly realized he was no longer as certain as he was when he signed saying he was willing to put someone into prison for a long time based on his finding.

All I can say is, either the Darby case is another case exhibit of the Brandon Mayfield case phenomenon, of the very rare but it happens incidence of positive-identification fingerprint examiner error, or...

Or, the question nobody asks: what if the degree of critical scrutiny, which was intense, applied to take down Darby's positive TSBD 6th floor fingerprint identification of somebody who "shouldn't" have been there, were applied to the Oswald print identifications? But to my knowledge, there never was any such serious review of those Oswald fingerprint identifications, in the same way there was for the Darby Mac Wallace ones. Even if most of the Oswald fingerprint identifications held up under review, what if one or two or three actually did not, by the same standards used to take down Darby's finding? How might that affect things? 

(And leave out here the ad hominem toward Darby's lapsed credentials--the only evidence for that, which is denied by Darby's family, is the rather credible oral testimony of the fingerprint examiner cited by Mellen who also was an official in the organization which issued the credentials. But that could be some misunderstanding on Darby's part, and in any case has no bearing or relevance on Darby's expertise itself, only whether the retired Darby was wilfully untruthful in representing his credentials as current in the paperwork. I am not aware of any other allegations of wilful misconduct levied against Darby in his long and respected career.) 

Anyway, here is the abstract of the study:

The interpretation of forensic fingerprint evidence relies on the expertise of latent print examiners. The National Research Council of the National Academies and the legal and forensic sciences communities have called for research to measure the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, a challenging and complex problem in need of systematic analysis. Our research is focused on the development of empirical approaches to studying this problem. Here, we report on the first large-scale study of the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, in which 169 latent print examiners each compared approximately 100 pairs of latent and exemplar fingerprints from a pool of 744 pairs. The fingerprints were selected to include a range of attributes and quality encountered in forensic casework, and to be comparable to searches of an automated fingerprint identification system containing more than 58 million subjects. This study evaluated examiners on key decision points in the fingerprint examination process; procedures used operationally include additional safeguards designed to minimize errors. Five examiners made false positive errors for an overall false positive rate of 0.1%. Eighty-five percent of examiners made at least one false negative error for an overall false negative rate of 7.5%. Independent examination of the same comparisons by different participants (analogous to blind verification) was found to detect all false positive errors and the majority of false negative errors in this study. Examiners frequently differed on whether fingerprints were suitable for reaching a conclusion.

Greg, I would have to go back and find the study, but the issue with  fingerprint analysis (and potential flaws) has less to do with the intrinsic ability of examiners to make a blind match (or mismatch) but with confirmation bias. In this study, they sent fingerprint examiners a set of two prints for comparison-- one lifted from a crime scene, one from a fingerprint card. The examiners were almost universally correct in their assessments, just as in the study you posted. There was one problem: these were not truly blind sets of fingerprints but prints the examiners in question had analyzed for police/the prosecution in past cases. And in some alarming percentage--  like 25% of them-- they offered a *different* opinion than the one they gave years before. The study's researchers argued that it was because in their earlier analysis, the examiners were given background information from the cops or prosecutors. Which was the actual problem in the Mayfield case as well. I was told about this by the lats Dr. Cliff Spiegleman a decade or more ago. Cliff had made it almost his life's work to make sure crime labs conducted almost every analysis completely blindly (not just fingeprints) because of confirmation bias issues.

I would also add that there was a refutation--  "no match to Wallace"-- not long after Darby's match. From one of the former heads of a national fingerprint professional association. If you want an amazing presentation on the fingerprint issue-- find James Olmstead's 2003 Wecht Conference presentation on Youtube.

Stu

Edited March 30 by Stu Wexler

[Greg Doudna]

1 hour ago, Stu Wexler said:

Greg, I would have to go back and find the study, but the issue with  fingerprint analysis (and potential flaws) has less to do with the intrinsic ability of examiners to make a blind match (or mismatch) but with confirmation bias. In this study, they sent fingerprint examiners a set of two prints for comparison-- one lifted from a crime scene, one from a fingerprint card. The examiners were almost universally correct in their assessments, just as in the study you posted. There was one problem: these were not truly blind sets of fingerprints but prints the examiners in question had analyzed for police/the prosecution in past cases. And in some alarming percentage--  like 25% of them-- they offered a *different* opinion than the one they gave years before. The study's researchers argued that it was because in their earlier analysis, the examiners were given background information from the cops or prosecutors. Which was the actual problem in the Mayfield case as well. I was told about this by the lats Dr. Cliff Spiegleman a decade or more ago. Cliff had made it almost his life's work to make sure crime labs conducted almost every analysis completely blindly (not just fingeprints) because of confirmation bias issues.

I would also add that there was a refutation--  "no match to Wallace"-- not long after Darby's match. From one of the former heads of a national fingerprint professional association. If you want an amazing presentation on the fingerprint issue-- find James Olmstead's 2003 Wecht Conference presentation on Youtube.

Stu

Thanks Stu, good points for sure. Do you think confirmation bias could possibly have played a role in all those Oswald print analyses? (Rhetorical question.)

One other thing about that study was how they determined whether an examiner got it right or wrong on a given match to a person. The definition of “correct match” was what other examiners said as consensus, not external objective independent knowledge. The study disclosed this so this is not anything the study itself did not say. But technically the study was actually testing for consistency or replicability of examiner findings, not actual truth of them, if, hypothetically, for some reason 100% of examiners were agreed on an identification of a fingerprint to a person that was however actually not correct. 

I recall two conclusions everyone seemed agreed on from these studies were the importance of blindness, and review of individual examiners’ findings, to reduce incidence of errors. But there was resistance to implementing these two things because it cost more money to do so. 

Edited March 30 by Greg Doudna

[Sandy Larsen]

5 hours ago, François Carlier said:

That topic requires a thread altogether.

 

No, it really doesn't need it's own thread. It's very simple.

Three autopsists who held Kennedy's head in their hands all saw a beveled entrance wound near the EOP (the bump that is low on the back of the head). And that is what was entered in the autopsy report.

Then twelve or thirteen years later, a group of so-called experts for the HSCA claimed the hole was 4 inches higher, in the cowlick area. These guys didn't even have Kennedy's head... only drawings of photographs of it. And yet they had the nerve to say that the autopsists were all wrong.

Funny thing though... the movement of that hole to the cowlick area magically solved the problem the WC had had with the trajectory of the bullet -- which didn't work at all for them. What amazing luck!  <end sarcasm>

 

5 hours ago, François Carlier said:

The medical evidence in the Kennedy-assassination case is definitely an astounding matter ! Mistakes, misunderstandings, failures, conflicting accounts, debates, burned notes, what have you...

 

You're skirting the issue, Francois. (Though I know you must. You have no answer.)

 

5 hours ago, François Carlier said:

I am not a physician so I have no real authority in this field (although I know that a lot of physicians have conflicting opinions and have reached conflicting conclusions).

 

EOP location or cowlick. Don't need to be an expert to understand.

Holding head in hands, or looking at drawings. Don't need to be an expert to understand.

Problem with trajectory. Problem with trajectory fixed. Don't need to be an expert to understand.

 

5 hours ago, François Carlier said:

What do I think of the fact that the wound was "moved" ?
"Astonishing" ? Yes.

"Meant to deceive ?" I don't think so.

 

Of course it was meant to deceive, Francois!

It was meant to explain how a bullet from the 6th floor of the TSBD could enter the head down low at the EOP, and then change direction and exit from the top of the head!

Just like when Arlen Specter moved the back wound up to make the Magic Bullet Theory work, the HSCA moved the EOP wound up to make that trajectory work.

How anybody can be fooled by something so simple is beyond me. Maybe that's what happens when a person reads Case Closed... their thinking gets all mushy.

 

[Pat Speer]

3 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

No, it really doesn't need it's own thread. It's very simple.

Three autopsists who held Kennedy's head in their hands all saw a beveled entrance wound near the EOP (the bump that is low on the back of the head). And that is what was entered in the autopsy report.

Then twelve or thirteen years later, a group of so-called experts for the HSCA claimed the hole was 4 inches higher, in the cowlick area. These guys didn't even have Kennedy's head... only drawings of photographs of it. And yet they had the nerve to say that the autopsists were all wrong.

Funny thing though... the movement of that hole to the cowlick area magically solved the problem the WC had had with the trajectory of the bullet -- which didn't work at all for them. What amazing luck!  <end sarcasm>

 

 

You're skirting the issue, Francois. (Though I know you must. You have no answer.)

 

 

EOP location or cowlick. Don't need to be an expert to understand.

Holding head in hands, or looking at drawings. Don't need to be an expert to understand.

Problem with trajectory. Problem with trajectory fixed. Don't need to be an expert to understand.

 

 

Of course it was meant to deceive, Francois!

It was meant to explain how a bullet from the 6th floor of the TSBD could enter the head down low at the EOP, and then change direction and exit from the top of the head!

Just like when Arlen Specter moved the back wound up to make the Magic Bullet Theory work, the HSCA moved the EOP wound up to make that trajectory work.

How anybody can be fooled by something so simple is beyond me. Maybe that's what happens when a person reads Case Closed... their thinking gets all mushy.

 

Well, we're largely agreed on this, Sandy. But it should be noted that in 1968 the Justice Dept. convened a secret panel to address the trajectory problem, and this panel relocated the entrance wound after looking at the photos, but without talking to the doctors, or even being shown the 1966 inventory of the photos written by the doctors. This was the Clark Panel. The HSCA Panel, which was put together nine years later, and was comprised of close colleagues and/or former students of the Clark Panel's de facto leader, Russell Fisher, merely confirmed the Clark Panel's findings re the cowlick entrance. 

But that's not to let them off the hook. The HSCA Panel had access to both the doctors' original inventory of the photos, and the doctors themselves, but nevertheless spent much of their time trying to convince the doctors they were wrong, as opposed to trying to understand why their pal Russell Fisher would move a wound to a location where no one saw a wound. 

Now, Dr. Wecht was a member of this panel, and I have asked him about this. And he has insisted that these men, including his good friend Dr. Baden, were not lying, but were blinded by...confirmation bias. It was unthinkable to them that 1) Russell Fisher could be wrong and Dr. Humes right, 2) there were in fact two bullet entries on the skull and thus a conspiracy, and 3) a bullet could enter low and exit high without leaving a noticeable path through the brain. So the only way to make this work was to claim the autopsy doctors (along with a number of other witnesses) were incorrect, and had misidentified an entrance hole high on the skull with an entrance hole four inches lower, and not only that, but that a photo originally described as showing a bullet entrance on the back of the skull actually showed a bullet exit on the front of the skull.

It boggles the mind. It's cognitive dissonance on parade. 

Of course, we see similar parades on this forum every day. 

[Sandy Larsen]

On 3/30/2024 at 10:19 AM, Pat Speer said:

Well, we're largely agreed on this, Sandy. But it should be noted that in 1968 the Justice Dept. convened a secret panel to address the trajectory problem, and this panel relocated the entrance wound after looking at the photos, but without talking to the doctors, or even being shown the 1966 inventory of the photos written by the doctors. This was the Clark Panel. The HSCA Panel, which was put together nine years later, and was comprised of close colleagues and/or former students of the Clark Panel's de facto leader, Russell Fisher, merely confirmed the Clark Panel's findings re the cowlick entrance. 

But that's not to let them off the hook. The HSCA Panel had access to both the doctors' original inventory of the photos, and the doctors themselves, but nevertheless spent much of their time trying to convince the doctors they were wrong, as opposed to trying to understand why their pal Russell Fisher would move a wound to a location where no one saw a wound. 

Now, Dr. Wecht was a member of this panel, and I have asked him about this. And he has insisted that these men, including his good friend Dr. Baden, were not lying, but were blinded by...confirmation bias. It was unthinkable to them that 1) Russell Fisher could be wrong and Dr. Humes right, 2) there were in fact two bullet entries on the skull and thus a conspiracy, and 3) a bullet could enter low and exit high without leaving a noticeable path through the brain. So the only way to make this work was to claim the autopsy doctors (along with a number of other witnesses) were incorrect, and had misidentified an entrance hole high on the skull with an entrance hole four inches lower, and not only that, but that a photo originally described as showing a bullet entrance on the back of the skull actually showed a bullet exit on the front of the skull.

It boggles the mind. It's cognitive dissonance on parade. 

Of course, we see similar parades on this forum every day. 

 

Thanks for the details, Pat.

 

 

[Mark Ulrik]

I didn't notice at the time that I was being spanked, or even tickled, but they're doing quite the victory dance over at the old newsgroup. I do have a few additional thoughts on the matter, but currently not the time or inclination to express them properly. Maybe in a few days.

[Mark Ulrik]

On 3/26/2024 at 11:55 AM, Gil Jesus said:

Oswald had his lunch on the first floor as he always did and remained on the first floor where he was seen by Carolyn Arnold, "between the front doors and the double doors on the FIRST floor" ( CD 5, pg. 41 ) when she left the building, "at about 12:25 PM".  ( CD 706, pg. 7 )

If Oswald was on the first floor at 12:25, he could NOT have been the shooter on the sixth floor at 12:30.

Oh my! Arnold told the FBI on 11/26/63 that she thought she saw a fleeting glimpse of Oswald through the front door when she was standing outside to view the motorcade. This was a few minutes before 12:15 per her estimate. She told the FBI a few months later that she left the building about 12:25 (without mentioning a possible Oswald sighting).

That's one heck of a solid 12:25 sighting you've got there!