By James Fetzer | Press TV | December 2, 2013
William Colby, the former director of the CIA, told us that the agency owns everyone of significance in the mass media. The onslaught of false and misleading reports during the 50th observance of the assassination of JFK provided stunning confirmation that he was correct. none of the national news anchors addressed the evidence.
As someone who has done extensive research on the death of the 35th president of the United States, including chairing or co-chairing (now) five national conferences, and having published three collections of studies by experts on different aspects of the case, it was painfully apparent. The alleged assassin did not even fire a single shot.
Here I want to summarize some of the most egregious examples of abuse of the media by major players, including CBS, which endorsed the “magic bullet” theory, and by Bob Schieffer, who is the host of “Face the Nation,” who may be the most blatant purveyor of false information of them all. Even interviewing a witness who personally observed two wounds to JFK, Schieffer simply ignores him.
The “Magic Bullet” Theory
CBS, for example, featured a father/son combination who claimed to have vindicated the “magic bullet” theory by modeling the neck with a block of soap. Blocks of soap, however, are a poor substitute for a human neck, because they do not include the vertebrae of the neck. As long as JFK had a backbone, it cannot possibly be correct.
The “magic bullet” is crucial to the official account because, as Michael Baden, M.D., the head of the HSCA medical panel has observed, if there was no “magic bullet” then there had to have been at least six shots from three directions and hence multiple shooters and a conspiracy. It was the crux of the Warren Commission’s “lone assassin” scenario.
But we have the shirt and the jacket he was wearing, which have holes about 5.5″ below the collar to the right of the spinal column. The autopsy diagram shows a wound at the same location. So does the President’s personal physician’s death certificate and the mortician’s description. We know that the “magic bullet” theory is false.
Reenactment Photographs
Even the Warren Commission’s own staff located a wound there during its reenactments. There is a small patch on the stand-in for JFK and a much larger patch for the wound to his back. There are multiple reenactment photos that show the staff’s presumptions of wounds at those locations.
One shows a young Arlene Specter holding a pointer showing the trajectory that the “magic bullet” had to have taken if the theory were true. Below his hand by several inches, you can see the patch, which means that a photo intended to illustrate the “magic bullet” theory actually refutes it instead.
We also know that Gerald Ford (R-MI), then a junior member of the Warren Commission, had the description of the wound altered from “his uppermost back” to the “back of the neck” in order to make the “magic bullet” theory more plausible. But it is not only provably false but anatomically impossible.
The Mantik CAT Scan
David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., created a CAT scan of a patient with similar check and neck dimensions and plotted the trajectory the “magic bullet” is supposed to have taken. So it turns out to be an anatomical impossibility, because cervical vertebrae intervene. Hence, the use of a block of soap!
I presented a lecture at Cambridge on the “magic bullet” theory, which was subsequently published in an international, peer-reviewed journal under the title, “Reasoning about Assassinations”. Anyone can download it on-line. I find it embarrassing that so many in the media appear to be so massively ignorant of the most basic evidence in this case.
But of course it is more feigned than real. I also published an article about the CBS appearance on Veterans Today under the title, “The JFK War: CBS endorses the ‘magic bullet’ absurdity”, which is typical of the quality of coverage by the media. When CBS stands by a provably false and anatomically impossible account, something is very wrong.
The “Face the Nation” Scandal
Among the egregious remarks coming from Bob Schieffer, host of “Face the Nation”, a prominent Sunday morning news discussion show on CBS, was that “It was an easy shot!”, referring to the shots that Lee Oswald is alleged to have taken from the 6th floor of the School Book Depository. But the fact of the matter is they were anything but.
No one has been able to replicate the shots attributed to Oswald, who, I can confirm, was a mediocre shot, having supervised recruit training at the USMC Recruit Depot in San Diego and marksmanship training in Edson Range in Camp Pendleton. He barely qualified on the rifle range in 1959 and there is no indication that he continued shooting.
The best sniper in the US Marine Corps, Gunny Carlos Hathcock, made repeated attempts at Quantico to replicate his shooting without success. And Jesse Ventura, an expert shot, tried to do it with a far superior Mannlicher-Carcan and scored one hit in three replications of 3-shots firing at stationary targets. Check out his “Conspiracy Theory” program on JFK.
No “Convincing” Evidence
During a conversation with Larry Sabato, a prominent political commentator from the University of Virginia, he said “as yet no one has shown me (Schieffer) evidence to convince me that he–that there was anybody else connected.” And he asks Sabato why that is, and Sabato dutifully replies that it is difficult to accept the minor cause of the major effect.
“They tried to invest it with meaning by saying, it’s the CIA, it’s the anti-Castro Cubans, it’s LBJ. It’s this one, it’s that one. But as you say, you have to go by the evidence and we’re still waiting for evidence beyond that of Lee Harvey Oswald, who was clearly guilty”. But I have confronted Sabato with proof that the situation is completely different.
Since I taught twice at UVA, I submitted a response to the student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, which was published with the title, “JFK: Truth or Conspiracy?”, featuring a three part panel showing the fist-sized wound that was observed at Parkland, the enormous missing 1/3 of the skull at Bethesda, and the tiny wound from the HSCA, which I challenged him to explain. He has not replied.
Two wounds widely broadcast
In fact, two wounds were widely broadcast over radio and television following the assassination: a small puncture wound to the throat and a blow-out to the back of the head, both of which were fired from in front. If you go to “See it now” for the NBC coverage, for example, you can confirm this for yourself. Chet Huntley was reporting about them both.
Astonishing, Bob Schieffer had one of the Parkland physicians who had treated JFK at Parkland on his show, Dr. Ronald Jones. And Jones told Schieffer that, when he entered Trauma Room #1, he “noticed a small hole in the front of the neck that I estimated to be a quarter of an inch. And I knew he had a large wound to the back of his head”.
Instead of jumping on this first-person report of those two wounds, both of which had been fired from in front, Schieffer simply ignores them and says, “And he was alive at that point but just barely”. This coming from a prominent newsman who claims that he has never seen any evidence Oswald did not do it alone–even when it is presented on his own show!
Oswald was framed for the crime
The weapon was known as “the humanitarian rifle” in World War II for never harming anyone on purpose. This weapon had a misaligned sight and had to be rebuilt before any experts would even attempt to fire it. And its bolt action was so difficult it took the scope off the target each time it was fired, which meant it consumed additional time to reacquire the target.
We also know from Marina, his wife, that Lee admired President Kennedy and bore him no malice. More recent research, moreover, has confirmed that a man whose image was captured in a famous photograph taken during the shooting standing in the doorway of the Book Depository was Lee Oswald. He had neither motive nor means nor opportunity.
Students as long ago as Harold Weisberg, WHITEWASH II (1966), have maintained that Lee was in the doorway. Vince Salandria, Mark Lane, Gerald McKnight and many other experts have agreed. Evidence that is archived at the “Oswald Innocence Campaign” establishes his location. Since he was in the doorway, he was not also on the 6th floor.
The Backyard Photographs
Jim Marrs, the author of CROSSFIRE (1987) and I have proven that the backyard photographs that were used to frame Oswald were fabrications with his face pasted on someone else’s body. The chin is a block chin and not Lee’s more tapered chin, with an insert line between chin and lower lip. And the finger tips of his right hand are cut off.
Jack White, the legendary photo and film analyst, observed that the newspapers he is holding have dimensions that are known and therefore can serve as an internal yardstick. Using that measure, it turns out that the man in those photos is only 5’6″ tall, too short to be Oswald, who was 5’10″. They either used a stand-in who was too short or else made the papers too large when they faked the photos.
Anyone can review our proof at “Framing the Patsy: The Case of Lee Harvey Oswald”. And see “JFK believe it or not: Oswald wasn’t even a shooter!” by Richard Hooke or “Part 1: A National Security Event – Oswald didn’t do it” and “JFK Part 2: A National Security Event – How it was done”, for further proof of how they framed an innocent man.
Other examples abound
Tom Brokow on NBC cut off Robert Groden discussing the shooting of Officer J.D. Tippit, when Groden began to explain that the four cartridges found at the scene had been ejected from one or more automatics, while Oswald had a revolver. It is absurd to image Lee could shoot a policeman four times and then remove the incriminating casings.
The first officer on the scene initialed them. There were two of one make (Western) and two of another (Remington). Later, as happened in this case, those casings were replaced by four casings from a revolver, but now there were three of one make and one of the other. And none of them had the officer’s initials. It was that blatant a frame.
A woman across the street, Acquilla Clemons, who had observed the shooting, reported that two men had shot Tippit and that neither of them looked like Oswald. So they simply did not call her as a witness. The best report about the Tippit shooting may be found in Groden (1995)’s “The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald,” if you can track it down.
Michael Shermer and the LA Times
Yet another example comes from The LA Times, where Michael Shermer authored an Op/Ed piece maintaining that conspiracy theories derive from a psychological need to explain how a comparative unknown could have murdered JFK. I replied that perhaps we do not believe a lone gunman took him out with three lucky shots because it is not true.
The evidence of conspiracy is overwhelming. The man in Mexico City looks nothing like Lee Oswald, for example. J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to his Agents-in-Charge informing them that someone was there impersonating Lee Oswald. If that is all you know of the assassination, you know enough to conclude it was a conspiracy.
And Waggoner Carr, the Attorney General of Texas, discovered that Lee was working as an informant for the FBI, that he had informant #179 and that he was being paid $200 right up to the day of the assassination, which may explain why the American government claims it cannot find the W-2 (tax) forms for the alleged assassin of our 35th president.
For those who want more, see “What happened to JFK–and why it matters today” (2011) and the videos from the Santa Barbara conference. The public skepticism about Oswald as the lone shooters is not explicable on the basis of psychology but by logic and evidence, which appears to be unknown to Shermer, The LA Times, and our national media.