What's wrong with Dr. Michael Baden?

[Sandy Larsen]

22 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

... it would have been a lot better for history, IMO, if someone like Thompson had gained access to the FPP report in 1979, and had went through it point by point, and then exposed its numerous problems within a year or two. This, IMO, could have prevented a schism within the research community, that sadly persists to this day.

 

What is that schism, Pat? What do the different sides believe, in a nutshell?

 

[Sandy Larsen]

8 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

This [Jim D's post] relates to Sandy's original thread on the subject.  Why a new one is needed I'm not sure.

 

I had originally titled this thread as "What is wrong with Dr. Michael Baden?" Now the title is "Michael Baden's Silliest Mistake." The change occurred due to my and Jim DiEugenio's threads being merged.

Jim, I'd like to change the title to something that better describes the thread. Are you okay with that?

 

Edited Saturday at 03:10 PM by Sandy Larsen

[W. Niederhut]

44 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

I had originally titled this thread as "What is wrong with Dr. Michael Baden?" Now the title is "Michael Baden's Silliest Mistake." The change occurred due to my and Jim DiEugenio's threads being merged.

Jim, I'd like to change the title to something that better describes the thread. Are you okay with that?

 

Sandy,

     You started the original Michael Baden thread this week entitled, "What's Wrong With Michael Baden?"

     Then Benjamin Cole started a duplicate/copycat thread-- less than 24 hours after your original thread-- entitled, "Michael Baden's Silliest Mistake."

     IMO, this merged thread should be entitled, "What's Wrong With Michael Baden?" -- the title of the forum's original thread on the subject.

[Sandy Larsen]

57 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

IMO, this merged thread should be entitled, "What's Wrong With Michael Baden?" -- the title of the forum's original thread on the subject.

 

Thanks for the correction, W.

I'll make the change now, and Ben can let me know if he objects.

 

[Pat Speer]

Since Jim raised the question as to why Baden became a believer in the SBT, I think the following is relevant. 

From chapter 11:

Guinn-sanity!

Let us first consider that, among the 14 charter members of the Physical Anthropology Section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 1972, were: 

• • Dr. Michael Baden, a Forensic Pathologist, who led the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel, and helped pick its consultants..

  • Dr. Lowell Levine, a Forensic Odontologist, who worked as a consultant to the HSCA and verified the authenticity of Kennedy’s autopsy x-rays by comparing them to earlier x-rays.

  • Dr. Ellis Kerley and

  • Dr. Clyde Snow, Forensic Anthropologists, who worked as consultants to the HSCA and verified the authenticity of the autopsy photos and x-rays by comparing them to each other

  • Dr. Vincent Guinn, a nuclear chemist, who studied the bullets and bullet fragments involved in the assassination, using neutron activation analysis, and claimed they showed the wrist fragment to have been a fragment from CE 399, the magic bullet

Well, that's quite a coincidence, wouldn't you say? 5 of the 14 ended up working for the HSCA. One might presume, then, that Dr. Guinn was well-known and well-regarded within this small network of  experts. And that they would be inclined to go along with his conclusions...

Now, let's look at a timeline...Robert Blakey took over as HSCA Chief Counsel on 6-20-77.

•  

  • Blakey had a strong bias towards forensic evidence. On 10-29-18, he told a packed house at The Sixth Floor Museum: "The forensics gives you a framework through which you can assess the witness testimony."

  • In 1995, Robert Tanenbaum, HSCA Deputy Chief Counsel, published Corruption of Blood, a novel based on his experience working with the committee. In this book, one of the characters, Claude Wilkey, who is clearly based upon HSCA Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, gets excited upon his being asked to run the investigation of the murder of a president, and announces: “We’re going to settle the scientific issues, the forensics, the autopsy once and for all. That’s what the congress expects and that’s what we intend to do.”

  • Dr. Guinn published an article in the April 1979 article in Analytical Chemistry in which he claimed he was first contacted by an HSCA staff member in the “early summer of 1977.”

  • Memos and letters found in the Weisberg Archives reflect that HSCA Chief Counsel Blakey wrote a 7-29-77 letter to the National Archives to inform them that the comparative bullet lead tests to be performed by Dr. Guinn were already in preparation.

  • The HSCA report of Dr. Guinn indicates that he performed these tests on 9-12—9-14, 1977.

  • The report of the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel indicates that Group A, which included Dr. Baden, got together on 9-15-77, and that they met Dr.s Humes and Boswell at the archives on 9-16-77. These were the first meetings of the medical panel. Strangely, they began the day after Guinn's tests were completed.

    • Now, did Baden tell the other members of the medical panel of Guinn's findings re the wrist fragment and magic bullet--and therefore the single-bullet theory--before or after this meeting? One might well assume before, and that Blakey and Baden had decided to confirm Guinn's findings...even before the medical panel had been given a chance to review the autopsy photos.

    • In any event, in 1998, HSCA investigator Ed Lopez told writer Jim DiEugenio that it was around this time that Chief Counsel Robert Blakey and medical panel chief Michael Baden called chief medical investigator Andy Purdy into a meeting...and that, upon leaving this meeting, Purdy announced: “We’re going with the single-bullet theory.”

    • Guinn testified before the HSCA on 9-8-78.

  • On 1-25-79, HSCA Chief Counsel Blakey made a speech at Cornell University. He told his audience: "Ballistics tests show that the bullet found on the stretcher...came from Oswald's rifle. Neutron Activation Analysis established that that bullet, in fact, hit Governor Connally's wrist...The single-bullet theory is correct."  

  • Still, from this it seems likely that word of Guinn's findings had promptly spread like wildfire, and had helped set the course for the HSCA's investigation, and the books and articles to follow.

  • The Final Report of the HSCA Medical Panel, published that summer, confirmed: "The medical evidence alone does not provide the panel with sufficient information to state with absolute certainty that the bullet that struck Governor Connally was the same one which had previously struck President Kennedy in the upper right back, exiting through his neck. The majority believes, however, that the medical evidence is consistent with this hypothesis and much less consistent with other hypotheses. Further, the panel considered other nonmedical evidence that strongly indicates that a single bullet injured both men. This evidence includes: the position of the two men, as shown in the Zapruder film; the fact that the two men can be alined consistent with the trajectory of one bullet; photographs of the seat locations in the limousine; the actual distortion of the so-called "pristine bullet"; the failure to recover any other bullet from the limousine or body; ballistics studies of the ammunition involved; and the results of neutron activation analysis of the bullet fragments conducted by Vincent P .Guinn, Ph.D."

  • On 9-10-81, Blakey made an appearance on William F. Buckley's show Firing Line. He asserted: “The single-bullet theory is absolutely correct. We established it with the photographs and with the ballistics testimony and the neutron activation analysis testimony...The first bullet misses everybody. The second bullet hits both Kennedy and Connally, several frames in the Zapruder film earlier than what you people looked at. And when you look at 157, where we looked, you can see Connally turning around as he always testified, and a little girl freezing in the back of that frame. And then when you look a little further, to about 187, Kennedy and Connally are perfect in alignment, in the film---this is where the acoustics says it occurred—and that’s the point at which the bullet goes through both of them. And the neutron activation analysis establishes that the bullet fragments in Connally’s wrist are from the bullet fired from Oswald’s rifle, the so-called CE-399. The irony is that much of our scientific work confirmed, and I think put beyond a reasonable doubt, things like the single-bullet thesis that had been an underpinning of the critics’ analysis before.”

    • In an article by Ron Rosenbaum in the November, 1983 Texas Monthly, Rosenbaum claimed that early assassination researcher Josiah Thompson was now convinced of the single-bullet theory, as a "recent neutron activation analysis of the bullet and the tiny fragments left in Connally's wrist make it almost a scientific certainty that they came from the same bullet." 

    • And Thompson was just one in a long line to claim Guinn's findings propped up the single-bullet theory. In 1988, David Belin published Final Disclosure, supposedly his last word on the Kennedy assassination. There, he rejoiced “since 1963, a new test known as ‘neutron-activation analysis’ has been performed on the bullet fragments from Connally’s wrist and the nearly whole bullet that fell off his stretcher…The neutron-analysis test corroborated that, indeed, all of Connally’s wounds had been caused by the single bullet.” (ugh… no it didn’t.) He continued “The arguments of the Warren Commission critics that Exhibit 399 could not be the single bullet did not depend on whether the bullet had passed through Kennedy’s neck (ugh..what about Nichols?) but really on the argument that two different bullets struck Connally. His physicians disputed this (no, they did not), the wound ballistics’ tests on the wrists of cadavers disputed this (no, they did not!) and all of the neutron analysis tests refuted these claims (no, they did not).The record is clear: One shot did indeed strike the back of President Kennedy’s neck (no, one did not), exited in the front, and hit Connally, causing all of his wounds.” (This is propaganda with a capital P. List reasons to believe that are lies, and then defy anyone to contradict your logic.)

  • And the beat goes on. In 1989, Dr. Michael Baden published Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner. On p. 18, he claimed: “A tiny fragment of bullet was removed from Connally’s wrist in Parkland Hospital and put into the archive. We took it, together with the bullet from the stretcher, and sent it to a special laboratory in California. The lab does neutron activation analysis, a technique for finding trace amounts of heavy metals that is so sensitive it can distinguish between two bullets on an assembly line. The trace metal content in the bullet found on the stretcher and the fragment from Connally’s wrist matched perfectly.” 

    • And let's not forget Posner. In 1993's Case Closed, Gerald Posner similarly gushed: "Guinn concluded that all the fragments were Western Cartridge Co. bullets manufactured for the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. He found they came from only two bullets...His most important finding was that CE 399, the stretcher bullet, was indistinguishable, both in antimony and silver, from the fragments recovered from the Governor's wrist. Guinn's findings ended the speculation that CE 399 had been planted on the stretcher, since there was now indisputable evidence that it had traveled through Connally's body, leaving behind fragments...He considered the test results as definite as any he had seen in two decades of testing."

  • Now this shouldn't come as a shock. Dr. John Lattimer, single-bullet theorist extraordinaire, reported in the Spring 1995 issue of Wound Ballistics Review that the lead cores of Mannlicher-Carcano bullets "had enough chemical differences to permit Prof. Vincent P. Guinn to distinguish lead fragments from one bullet from those of the other, with certainty, using neutron activation analysis" and that this had led Guinn "to determine that there were no lead fragments representing a third bullet."  

  • Nor should this come as a shock. Here's Larry Sturdivan in his 2005 book, The JFK Myths: "How do we know that CE 399, or any other bullet from a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, was the bullet that injured Connally? The proof comes from the fragment of lead core that was recovered during the surgical repair of his wrist...Dr. Guinn's NAA, along with the earlier FBI test, unequivocally connects the fragments recovered from the two men to WCC/MC bullets that were fired from Oswald's rifle."

    • And, finally, here's Vincent Bugliosi. in what was intended to be the last word on the case, Reclaiming History (2007): "Guinn concluded that the large fragment found in the limousine, the smaller fragments found on the rug of the limousine, and the fragments recovered from Kennedy's brain were all from one bullet. His most important conclusion by far, however, scientifically defeating the notion that the bullet found on Connally's stretcher had been planted, was that the elemental composition and concentration of trace elements of the three bullet fragments removed from Governor Connally's wrist matched those of a second bullet, the stretcher bullet. The stretcher bullet, then, had to be the one that struck Connally." (Bugliosi was fibbing, of course. Only one of the wrist fragments was tested.)

[James DiEugenio]

2 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

I had originally titled this thread as "What is wrong with Dr. Michael Baden?" Now the title is "Michael Baden's Silliest Mistake." The change occurred due to my and Jim DiEugenio's threads being merged.

Jim, I'd like to change the title to something that better describes the thread. Are you okay with that?

 

Fine Sandy.

BTW, let me add, that whole charade about Ida Dox changing the drop of blood to look like a wound, well Andy Purdy was in on that.

To give credit to where its due, Randy Robertson discovered all this.

[James DiEugenio]

BTW, to also give credit to where its due, the late Wallace Milam began to seriously question the NAA evidence around 1996.

At a conference in Washington, he said that the more he delved into what Guinn had done, the more of a mess it looked like to him.

He then added that for someone coming from the medical evidence that was quite a statement.  Art Snyder also did some early work on this.

It has always troubled me that Paul Hoch simply accepted Guinn's BS, yet he was by education a scientist.

But alas, he also seemed to abide by Thomas Canning, which is kind of incredible.

Edited Saturday at 06:22 PM by James DiEugenio

[Pat Speer]

6 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

BTW, to also give credit to where its due, the late Wallace Milam began to seriously question the NAA evidence around 1996.

At a conference in Washington, he said that the more he delved into what Guinn had done, the more of a mess it looked like to him.

He then added that for someone coming from the medical evidence that was quite a statement.  Art Snyder also did some early work on this.

It has always troubled me that Paul Hoch simply accepted Guinn's BS, yet he was by education a scientist.

But alas, he also seemed to abide by Thomas Canning, which is kind of incredible.

When people see letters after someone's name, they tend to defer to their claims. This happens on both sides of the CT/LN argument. As we well know, some of the silliest, stupidest, and most flat-out wrong statements and theories have come from people with letters after their names. 

[Sandy Larsen]

36 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

BTW, let me add, that whole charade about Ida Dox changing the drop of blood to look like a wound, well Andy Purdy was in on that.

To give credit to where its due, Randy Robertson discovered all this.

 

Oh really? I just assumed that the reason Baden is blamed for the disinformation (e.g. the Ida Dox drawing) is because he was chairman of the medical forensics  group.

Did Randy Robertson find a document proving that Baden and Purdy were responsible for that disinformation?

 

[David Von Pein]

2 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

Bugliosi was fibbing, of course. Only one of the wrist fragments was tested.

That's incorrect, Pat. Dr. Guinn tested three wrist fragments, not just one.

From Guinn's HSCA testimony (emphasis added by DVP)...

Mr. WOLF -- "Addressing the five evidence fragments which you examined in which you called group 1, all of which were allegedly found in or near the occupants of the President's limousine, could you give their Commission exhibit numbers and state where they were found, please?"

Dr. GUINN -- "The first of the five was CE-399. That is the so-called pristine bullet reportedly found on a stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. The second was Commission exhibit 567. That was a mashed large bullet fragment still in its jacket reportedly recovered from the front seat of the Dallas limousine. The third one, CE-843, consisted of one larger fragment and one smaller fragment reportedly recovered from President Kennedy's brain at autopsy. The fourth one was CE-842, one larger fragment and two smaller ones reportedly recovered from Governor Connally's wrist during surgery. And the fifth one was CE-840, fragments reportedly recovered from the rear floor of the Dallas limousine."

http://jfk-archives.blogspot.com/2010/06/vincent-guinn-and-naa.html

 

Edited Saturday at 07:45 PM by David Von Pein

[James DiEugenio]

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Oh really? I just assumed that the reason Baden is blamed for the disinformation (e.g. the Ida Dox drawing) is because he was chairman of the medical forensics  group.

Did Randy Robertson find a document proving that Baden and Purdy were responsible for that disinformation?

 

Yes that was the case.  It got around pretty fast once he did so.

[Pat Speer]

54 minutes ago, David Von Pein said:

That's incorrect, Pat. Dr. Guinn tested three wrist fragments, not just one.

From Guinn's HSCA testimony (emphasis added by DVP)...

Mr. WOLF -- "Addressing the five evidence fragments which you examined in which you called group 1, all of which were allegedly found in or near the occupants of the President's limousine, could you give their Commission exhibit numbers and state where they were found, please?"

Dr. GUINN -- "The first of the five was CE-399. That is the so-called pristine bullet reportedly found on a stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. The second was Commission exhibit 567. That was a mashed large bullet fragment still in its jacket reportedly recovered from the front seat of the Dallas limousine. The third one, CE-843, consisted of one larger fragment and one smaller fragment reportedly recovered from President Kennedy's brain at autopsy. The fourth one was CE-842, one larger fragment and two smaller ones reportedly recovered from Governor Connally's wrist during surgery. And the fifth one was CE-840, fragments reportedly recovered from the rear floor of the Dallas limousine."

http://jfk-archives.blogspot.com/2010/06/vincent-guinn-and-naa.html

 

There were three fragments in CE 842 but I am nearly certain he did not test all three. I read all his reports and testimony and subsequent articles and testimony, and found but one set of results for CE 842, which we can assume to be the results of the largest fragment. If you, however, can show us his results for the three individual fragments I will admit my mistake.

[Pat Speer]

21 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Yes that was the case.  It got around pretty fast once he did so.

Yes, you are correct. Robertson confronted Baden on this at the 2003 Wecht conference. Heck, it might even be in the video in the first post of this thread. 

[Keven Hofeling]

15 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

[Baden] went so far as to instruct Ida Dox to alter a photograph of the rear of Kennedy's head to make the spot of blood at the top of the skull look more like a bullet puncture. he even sent her pictures as a model.

And she did illustrations to make that drop of blood look like it was cratered. People who have seen the original and compared it to the Dox drawing have said the original does not have those ridges on it.

That is how far Baden turned in order to stay on as the HSCA's Kennedy medical expert and advance his career. 

A GIF I generated to demonstrate this blatant fraud perpetrated by Dr. Michael Baden and Ida Dox, showing Dox's addition of the bullet hole:

 

And a revealing article on the subject by Tim Smith on Kennedys & King:

"...What follows after this paragraph is a copy of the Dox drawing of Fox-3 and the actual Fox-3 autopsy photo and then a few pages of documents I received from the National Archives, both of which were sent to Ida Dox by the HSCA, including “you can do much better, Ida,” from Michael Baden. How can you do “much better” than the autopsy photos you are directly looking at and tracing. Or, is “much better” referring to placing a bullet wound where there isn’t one in the cowlick area? Ida Dox lied to me on the phone, when she said she wasn’t given any pictures to use to enhance what wasn’t there. Here are some of the documents I got from the Archives, after I requested every document they had concerning Ida Dox. Unlike the Ida Dox drawing, the actual wound is not visible in Fox-3 and no other photographs show it either...."

 

Sunday, 19 September 2021 21:41

 

'THE MYSTERIES AROUND IDA DOX'

 

Written by Tim Smith | https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-mysteries-around-ida-dox

 

"Tim Smith examines the mysterious work medical illustrator Ida Dox performed on behalf of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) utilizing her drawings, testimony, interviews with the author, and evidence contained in the National Archives as chapter 4 of his upcoming book on the witnesses appearing before the HSCA in public testimony."

 

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks Kevin. Man what a difference.

And IIRC Pat is correct about Randy revealing that document at a Wecht Conference.

Can you imagine how desperate they were to raise the rear skull wound in order to do something as illicit as that?

And without the ARRB declassifying the HSCA documents we would have not known about it, maybe forever.

Edited Saturday at 10:00 PM by James DiEugenio