JFK #6: Challenges to "Lone Gunman" Theory

first couple things i want to do is i want to first i want to re-emphasize the the correction that i made last week that the last thursday that tippett jd tippett tippet was was shot all the official reports are that he was shot and killed at 1 12 p.m which would which would make that 42 minutes after president kennedy was killed and it's uh it's they say it's uh 40 42 minutes after the president was killed not 142 which i had said earlier on tuesday so it's 112 that he was shot okay i don't i don't keep repeating when it wasn't but you know he was shot at 112 which is only 42 minutes after the president was killed it is 44 miles away from the site uh and a second a second uh correction i'd like to make is that i pointed out last week i said that there were two two of the seven members of the warren commission who had specifically stated that they could not accept the conclusion of the commission that that president kennedy and governor conley had been shot with the same bullet and i pointed out that one of them was richard russell the senator from georgia and i'd say that the other one was real war it wasn't it was in fact as uh as greg had pointed out it was in fact senator john sherman cooper uh who was the republican senator from kentucky so so while it's true that there were two of the seven that dissented from the single bullet theory uh and one of them was richard russell the other was uh john sherman cooper not uh not earl warren i just wanna because it's important for us to stay as accurate as possible on all of these pieces of information that we know for certain because it's it's moving from those those facts of certainty that one can be able to most easily identify the variables of where there are some questions that are subject to serious a challenging question where we can focus our attention and what i want to do again at the beginning of today is i want to again re-emphasize the the extraordinarily persuasive nature of the evidence that has been set forth by the commission and by the fbi and by the department the police department in dallas uh demonstrating that the that oswald more probably than not actually is the one who shot and killed the president because as i said it's important for us to understand what the corpus of that information is in order to evaluate the the rational qualities of any of the criticisms and the potential efficacy of any of the alternative theories that we have here so remember the first and i think the most significant information is that information that i reviewed for you on page 806 to 818 of burglary's book where he reviews the ballistics where he points out that there were two bullet fragments found in the front seat of the limousine of the lincoln warren commission exhibit 567 which was one of the one of the two fragments it was 44.6 grains uh and the second one was exhibit 569 of 21 greens both of which they determined had adequate structure to the fragment it was an adequate size to perform ballistic tests on it to prove that in fact that the each of those fragments have been fired through the rifle the man licker cacano using the tongue and grooves inside the the the barrel and the other unique striation marks that are uh characteristic of the barrel of that manlicker kacano rifle and so that both of those fragments were determined by the fbi laboratory and by the uh and by the laboratory of the illinois state criminal investigation division the chief of their division both of them determined that each of those fragments had been fired through the manlaker carcano rifle and thirdly they had determined that the bullet the pristine bullet the so-called magic bullet that had been found on the stretcher in the hospital at parkland hospital had also been fired through the manlicker rifle okay and now that that is one body of information which is extremely challenging that magic bullet being warren commission exhibit 399. so then the second extremely challenging uh set of tests that were done were the uh the uh naa tests by dr guin uh these were the radiation tests where they radiated the various particles and then measured the radioactive signatures that were being given off by them to be able to determine the isotropic make isotropic makeup of the the ingredients that were in the bullet and they were and dr guin was able according to the commission to determine that uh that both of those particles warrant commission 567 and warrant commission 569 both confirmed to have come through the rifle the manicure rifle were made up of the exact same uh lead content that was in the bullet that was taken from jfk's brain that is exhibit 843 and then very importantly they were able to run the radio radiation tests on fragments that were taken from the right wrist of governor conley they were exhibit 842 and they determined that they were exactly identical to the magic bullet so so the so you you take all of those things together and they they triangulate in on a very incriminating set of of evidence and so then you ask the question is what was how strongly did they prove the connection of oswald to that man liquor carcano rifle and they list out the fact that they have the the verified unanimously verified handwriting on the application that was sent in for the mann liquor rifle the mail order rifle uh was verified by every uh handwriting expert called by the commission and by and by the uh the later house committee on assassinations confirmed that the handwriting was oswald's on the order form and they confirmed that the handwriting was the same on the receipt that was signed at the post office in receipt of that particular rifle and they they have the photograph of oswald in the backyard of their previous home uh with the mann liquor coconut rifle and a 38 special pistol on his hip and then then you go on to point out that there in addition to that they had oswald's palm print on the on the rifle and his fingerprints on the trigger guard of the man liquor rifle and they found oswald's pawn print on one of the boxes immediately under the window on the sixth floor and they had all three shell casings that were found uh and photographed on the floor beneath the window uh all of them were verified have been fired from the oswald's rifle the man liquor from the strike marks on the from the firing pin onto the back of those on the back of those casings then they had oswald uh with the the 38 pistol that they found uh was shown to by the strike marks again on the casings that were found in the immediate crime area of the killing of tippet at 1 12 p.m they found the the four shell casings and they all had been fired from the 38 pistol that oswald had on his person and pulled on the officers in the texas theater and they showed that of those cartridges that were the shell casings that were found in the scene they were made up of two different uh brands uh winchester and remington and in the pistol that they took from oswald he had in the pistol billets from two different brands that were winchester and remington okay and also they performed a paraffin test on the right hand of oswald and it proved positive now you have an additional thing the seventh thing that they had going was that marina oswald testified under oath that oswald had confirmed to her that on april 10 of 1963 he had in fact attempted to assassinate general edwin walker had fired oswald's rifle at him through a window of walker's house and had missed him and oswald had confessed that to her then you have the shock characteristics number eight that uh are allegedly confirmed from the autopsy and that is that the uh the bullet uh one of the the second shot of the three was to is said to have hit the president just at the at the base of the neck and he'd come out his throat and had gone into connolly's right rear shoulder and out beneath the right nipple and hit him in the right wrist fracturing the wrist bone and then having lodged in his left thigh and that they uh the the that that uh the angle of that wound going into the president was reported in the autopsy of being between a 45 and 60 degree angle uh therefore tracking it back up toward the book depository uh and you have the uh then you have uh oswald being placed in the book depository uh just within seconds actually according to the testimony of the police officer some 15 to 20 seconds following the final shot he actually ran up into the book depository and found oswald there the only one in the building that all the rest of the people who were employees of the building had understandably come out to watch the president driving by in the caravan and they found oswald there and then finally of course you have oswald's uh strong pro-castro statements uh being videoed handing out procastro literature uh in his self-uh confessed position that he was a marxist that strongly disagreed with the policies of the government toward cuba so you ask yourself in light of this in light of this how is it possible for any defense attorney to actually uh defend oswald against this kind of corpus of evidence uh what what happened what we want to do is we want to today we want to review what i refer to as the readily apparent information that would seem to contradict or undermine the otherwise seemingly dispositive case against oswald that i've outlined in the the above 10 basic sets of facts okay and so this this is for all of you trainees who are studying to be defense attorneys uh in the future uh or investigative journalists or scholars who are going to be applying sound logic to evidence of events in history because i want to review for you now things that were left completely out of the warren commission report were left out of the fbi reports that were left out of the dallas police department reports the three of which together seemed to angle in on the conviction of oswald now as i pointed out only briefly last thursday how important this single bullet theory was to the warren commission because it became essential for them to because they they now they had very clear evidence that one of the shots that was fired at the limousine missed entirely and actually hit the sidewalk on the southern side of elm street and ricocheted off the sidewalk and actually hit with a piece of flying debris james t and there was a police officer right there at the scene that saw that happen uh i didn't go into the details of it but they actually i actually took a chunk of that uh of that sidewalk and that kerbstone away and tested it and found that in fact there were uh there were sediment in the in the chip where the chips occurred in the sidewalk of lead and uh and the other i think is an ammonium something that were part of the lead in bullets and so therefore they they run tests on the man licker kind of rifle and all the witnesses said that the all of the shots that have been fired were all fired uh within about five to six seconds and they actually were able to confirm that in their judgment the the at least the second two shots the second two shots were all fired within 5.6 seconds and that the previous shot came some three seconds before that and so that their challenge was is that all of the experts that they called the uh the warren commission and others had called all the experts found it impossible to shoot fire more than three shots within that period of time uh and and so that they had to come to the conclusion that if only three shots were fired and one of them had missed that in fact uh one of the bullets had to have hit both the president and governor connolly or else there would have had to have been a fourth shot because they had the shot that missed they had the shot that entered the president's back they had the shot that had hurt that injured connolly and then they had of course the final shot that exploded the president's head so they wanted to have three shots so it was it was really critical that they that they insisted that the second shot that was fired had gone into the very nape of bret the president's neck had come out his throat had gone into the right rear shoulder connolly had come out below his right nipple had hit him in the right wrist and broken his right wrist and then gone into his left leg uh and that they maintained that this was the magic bullet this was the pristine bullet this was the bullet that weighed 589.5 grains out of the original 161 grains of a man liquor bullet a copper jacketed bullet that had done all of this damage now the the first major problem that arose after the release of this seemingly damning report from the warren commission was dick billings who was a investigative journalist for life magazine uh who had shown up on the scene uh right that afternoon blew in from miami uh and uh was part of the team of people that had uh sequestered marina oswald and gotten her up into a hotel room and were questioning her uh also the ones who secured some of the footage it also got this recruiter film that billings dick billings took it upon himself to go and question governor connell and governor connolly connelly gave a very careful description of what it is that had happened he he described that at 12 30 as they were driving past the dallas book depository he had heard a shot and one of the important things to remember you might not know this because it's mainly military people that know this is you never hear the shot that hits you it's important to remember that that the bullets the bullets go faster than the speed of sound and if you get hit with a bullet you don't ever hear that all of a sudden you just get knocked flat and uh and the sound comes afterwards and you're usually in such a traumatic state you don't hear it governor conley said he heard the first shot and that he actually turned around to his right to look to see the president because he could see the president struggling in the back seat and uh and the president at that time had both of his hands up to his neck like this grabbing at his throat and governor conley could see him on the corner of his eye and he turned around started turning around back to his left to turn around to see what was happening with the president when he was struck in the right shoulder and so you've got a period in there of approximately a second to a second and a half at least between the president being hit with the first shot and governor connolly getting hit so and and then you need to remember you need and and very importantly when when they look at the zapruder film when they looked at the zapruder film they could see that when the president came out from behind this the sign the overpass sign there was a sign beside the road on the right-hand side of the north side of the of the street that when he came out from behind the sign in the supreme film picked him back up again you saw him coming in behind the sign and he was fine and then when he came out from behind the sign he was grabbing at his throat like this and they could see connolly you see conley just as clear as day turning around to look to see the president over his right shoulder and starting to turn around to his left before he suddenly lurched forward like that and very importantly extremely importantly you could see that he was holding his white stetson cowboy hat in his right hand and he had the he had the stetson in his right hand after the warrant commission is saying that he'd had his right wrist shattered by being shot in the wrist by the magic bullet and it had penetrated through his wrist and come out and lodged in his leg and yet in his computer film you can see it as plain as day him holding his stetson hat while he's turning to look at the president and turns to the left and then he gets hit and then the stetson hat flies out of his hand okay so this particular piece of evidence was extraordinarily important for richard billings richard billings went back to life magazine and started uh telling them that it was extremely important uh that they that they tell everybody about this because they have this recruiter film they they could see the the frames of the picture so they could see that conley was correct when connie said that he'd not been hit by that first bullet and so billings began lobbying inside life magazine to try to get them to come out with a publication uh revealing this information to the public uh so so this is one of the very first pieces of evidence that occurs that that dramatically undermines at least the the one bullet shot the magic bullet theory and the problem is that once the magic bullet theory falls down the entire theory that the cut that the commission had uh that the that there have been only three shots fired and that uh obviously one of the shots uh hit both the president and governor conley because as i said if in fact there were more than three shots they themselves acknowledged that it was physically impossible for the shooter to have shot four shots uh between the time that the the second shot that obviously hit the president when he was grabbing his throat in the final shot that obviously hit him in the head exploded his head that they wouldn't have had time to fire four shots in that sequence and which would automatically mean that there was some other gunman in addition to according to them lee harvey oswald firing from the window of the sixth floor of the depository so the the warren commission stayed with that stayed with that uh that theory even in the face of connolly's testimony uh so the the the next piece of evidence that that came out from these recruiters again because richard billings could see it and the life magazine people had it is they could see very plainly that when the fourth when the when the final shot hit the president that the president's head exploded and he slumped back backwards into the left and fell uh uh over toward the the lap of of uh mrs kennedy mrs kennedy got up immediately and jumped out on the back of the trunk of the limousine and started crawling desperately across the back of the trunk chasing something flying off the back of the trunk of the car which turned out to be the right quadrant of the president's head that had been blown off and was blowing was moving out through across the back of the trunk uh and so that the all of the attempts they made to show what type of uh event would cause that type of motion of the president's body to which the the war commission rejoined her saying that well the president the president uh had his uh had his back brace on and so he would have been held completely erect and if you shoot someone in the back of the head it'll cause your head to snap backwards instead of getting shot in the back of the head and making your head go forward and so therefore the fact that his head snapped backwards did not convince them that in fact he'd been hit from the front they said it was not inconsistent with being shot in the back of the head and the problem was that they asserted then that there was a small entrance wound in the back left side of the president's skull and it had exited over his right eye and had blown out a large chunk of his skull over his right eye the problem is that all of the doctors at parkland hospital uh first the the first nurse that saw the president uh who testified that she was instructed by the doctor to put a compress against the president's head put it against the back of his head and she said there was no back of his head to try to put the compress on and then uh dr roy kellerman uh or the doctors the roy kellerman the secret service agent uh who was immediately next to the driver when the when the shooting took place turned around and saw the president and said that the whole left rear of his head had been shot off and that his brains were hanging out of the back of his head and uh the same thing was said by by clint hill clint hill who was the man who climbed up on the back of the limousine and pushed mrs kennedy back into the back seat he said that uh and they were they were through him threw himself over the president's body to protect him against any further shots he said that the back of his head was all blown off not the front right side of his head now these are all these are all immediate reactions immediate information it turns out that was available to the warrant commission all of all of that testimony the rest of the testimony of the the doctors at parkland hospital who were who were rushing to try to save the president uh they they said over and over again that they thought that it would not be possible to save him because of the massive wound in the back of his head and this that approximately one-third of his brain had been had been liquefied and sprayed out of his head when he got hit with the bullet uh and so they said look at this is not going to work to try to save him but they they all of them uniformly stated that when he came in they saw that he had an entrance wound in his throat just just below the knot in his tie it was a neat little simple kind of pencil sized bullet entrance wound right in the front of his throat and they were they were concerned because they couldn't figure out where it had come out they couldn't find where it had come out at first but they were all convinced it was an injury wound it was in fact written up in the uh the emergency notes that there was an entrance wound in his throat and they all uniformly concluded that he had been hit in the front right forehead just above the right eye with what they were they were sure could not have been a full metal jacketed military round because of the way that it exploded inside his head and that it gave off shrapnel inside his head a virtual snow storm of shrapnel they said and it had blown out the whole back side of his head in the death certificate that was signed by dr george berkey jfk's doctor identified the wounds as being exactly that and very importantly uh the uh the the doctors at the parkland hospital and dr george berkey uh the president's the president's doctor uh specifically stated that the wound that they found in the president's back was not just below the the base of the skull in his neck but it was in fact almost six inches below the collar of his jacket and it was six inches below and it was to the lower side of his right shoulder about an inch and one eighth from his on the right-hand side of his spine so he had the bullet here that hit him in the back and the warren commission was saying that it was it came out his throat and yet that had been fired from a 45 to 60 degree angle allegedly from the sixth floor of the book depository so they basically got the bullet coming down at a 45 to 60 degree angle hitting the president six inches below the collar uh allegedly coming out his throat and then going through connolly and breaking is going through his shoulder coming out his chest breaking his his wrist going into his left leg and then falling out on the stretcher and in that whole process having lost uh only approximately two grains of its 161 grain weight yes so where does the the part in the back come in so it shot him in the throat you say well what i'm saying is that the the the doctors said that at the parkland hospital that he clearly he very clearly had an entrance wound in his throat number one number two they said that there was a a wound in his back uh another entrance wound that was six inches below his collar to the lower that on the lower inside of his right shoulder in an inch in one eighth from his spine and it entered there and they couldn't find the bullet they didn't know where that bullet was and it confused them and that they actually the the head doctor put his finger into that wound and actually hit the bottom of it he said that it was only it was only as deep as his finger and he'd hit the bottom of the wound and they couldn't find the bullet in there uh yes does that mean that it would have been taken out before you got to the hospital or that um like it wasn't a bullet at all it's interesting so that that's that's the right question uh is that how does one explain that uh and the doctors when they when they were notified they were still trying to they were still in the emergency room in emergency room one at parkland hospital when someone came into the emergency room and said that a bullet had been found on the gurney a gurney at the hospital and so all of the doctors at parkland said oh that must explain it that must be this bullet that had gone into the president and it hadn't gone in that far and it had fallen out so they all immediately assumed that that bullet was the one that hit the president in the back and it had fallen out but they still didn't account for the bullet entrance wound in the throat because they had a bullet entranced in the throat and there was no bullet in his body so they were they were perplexed by this and they they found out that the shirt that the the coat that the president had on actually had a bullet hole in it six inches five and three eighths inches below the collar just below his right shoulder and that the suit that the tailored shirt that he had on also had a bullet hole five inch five and three eighths inches below the collar and one and one eighth of an inch to the right of the spine and so that the shirt and the and the bullet wound uh put in at the emergency room all confirmed that the president had an entrance wound in his back approximately five and three eighths inches below the level of the collar below his right shoulder and one and eight to one and 2 8 inches from his spine and yet the warren commission asserted that he had been shot at the lower base of the neck and therefore the wound that was in his throat was an exit wound so again that you have a third a third issue here that presents a very serious challenge to the to the warren commission findings how did they account for the exploding of his head like if it didn't go to his head at all no no this was another shot what they said is that it was their judgment that the president had been hit in the right forehead by a by a bullet that that splintered and shattered and blew out the back mission pardon no i mean the warren commission how did they account for it they said they said that the bullet came in through a small hole in the back of his head which none of the parkland hospital people said was there and that it then exited out the right front side blowing out the right front side of his head and his skull which none of the doctors confirmed and none of the secret service people confirmed they all said that the gaping wound was in the back of his head not in the front of his head and they had it right in front of them uh and so the so the the question that arises is well what about didn't anybody take any photographs of this yeah that's right and it turns out that these photos were not available the photos that you saw had the the the warren commission refused to make the photos available they had said that it would have been poor taste and it would have offended the family and so they wouldn't allow the pictures to be made available and they were later recovered through through various efforts of investigators mainly private people who obtained these now so that you you uh then also there's another uh a fifth issue that comes up that is very important and that is that this uh james t the the fellow who had gotten hit with either a fragment of the bullet or the chips of the concrete flying when the bullet hit the curb it turns out that the theory of the warren commission was that that had to be the first shot because they had the other ones the second shot going through the president's neck and coming out is through in his back and coming out his neck and hitting him both and then the third shot killing the president blowing up his head so that the first shot had to be the one that completely missed the problem is is that the first shot was the one where the limousine was the closest going directly underneath the book depository and it's the is the shot at which the the shooter if there was a shooter in the sixth floor window would have had the longest time to draw a bead on the president and the other two were snapped off shots both within 5.6 seconds both of which the commission says hit the president you know right just basically in the head and the first shot not only missed the president missed connelly missed the car missed the car by 270 feet the single shot that they would have had the longest time to draw down on them missed the limousine entirely by 270 feet and the limousine was only 140 feet away at that time and yet the commission says that's what happened well didn't you say that connolly said he heard the first thought and turned around and looked at the president and he was hit yes and that's right also claiming that the first shot is the one that missed that's right is it is it possible that the the one that missed them was like some sort of retaliation shot or by somebody else there's there's there's no that all they've never revealed uh they never performed or at least they say they never did performed any kind of radiation tests on the lead fragments that were found in the piece of the sidewalk that was actually cut out and taken away by the fbi so they have not provided any type of information or evidence all they said is that they were able to confirm that it was lead in this ammonium stuff that were in bullets it was a bullet they but that was all they said and so that what you've got here is an additional factor is that the very first shot that is asserted by the warren commission who have been fired at the president missed the president missed the governor missed the limousine missed everything by 270 feet and it's a 140 foot range shot in the long the one that got the longest time to take the aim so do people think then that it was a later shot that missed because the car would have been closer to where the bullet was well there's there's there's actually several theories which we'll cover that's exactly the right question there are a number of different theories that can account for what it is that's happening here now because what we see is that the affirmative theory that has been set forth by the warren commission which basically confirmed the findings of the fbi that were submitted to them by the 29th of december and or the 9th of december right and the police report that was prepared within 12 hours that this warrant commission report starts to have fundamental problems um how was there no test on that first bullet that it occurred like how did they not just require that to be tested well what they said is they never recovered any bullet that all they had was the remnants on the uh on the curb and that they were able to that all we know is that we found affirmation of the fact that it was led in this ammonium stuff uh but they're in bullets but they never gave any additional information about it they never said they ran any tests on it other than that they just found out that's what it was and so now the advantage is that that that section of the thing still exists you see and that's one of the important things about this whole class that we're having here is that much of this evidence still exists so that the the new technology that is available for example one of the one of the folks came up and asked me after the class last time has anybody done a dna test on the magic bullet to determine whether or not it has any dna on it of the president because what they what they're asserting is that they've run some tests on it they've confirmed that the the the fragments that were in uh connolly's right wrist which was warren commission exhibit 842 that it is exactly identical to the tests that were run on a piece of the magic bullet but they've never said anything about running any dna tests on it to confirm that the governor's blood is on it or that the president's blood is on it and you know if dna tests are capable of doing anything if a bullet is shot right straight through your whole body they ought to be able to figure out with dna tests whether or not uh if it went through your body or not um governor conway's testimony did he say that it felt like he was getting shot once or twice just once he said that he's positive that that with that when he turned around he could tell that the president had been hit you could see him out of the corner of his eye and he turned around and started looking like this and he knew he was him and i said there wasn't any doubt about that and that that one bullet went through his wrist to his leg that bullet went through his wrist he went through his body and hit him in the wrist and his stuck in his leg yeah that's that one's that one he's sure of yeah okay so but so you've got this peculiar fact that uh the t uh got hit by this bullet 270 feet away from the president's car and the peculiar thing is is that if anyone were shooting from the grassy knoll at the president and missed the president right the spot where the bullet hit the curb on the south side of the street is exactly where it would have hit but under no circumstances could the bullet have come from the book depository if it was anywhere near the president or the whole vehicle because as i said it missed by 270 feet now another another factor uh another problem that arose was that both senator yarborough and mrs cabell who was the wife of the mayor that was in one of the cars that was right behind the president's vehicle when they got up even with the grassy knoll just behind the present as the president's car pulled away as they got to the grassy knoll both of them testified that they could definitely smell gun smoke and the the reality is that you're not going to be able to smell gun smoke from way up in the book depository in a spot like that and there were numerous witnesses asserting that they saw gun smoke come from the grassy knoll there are some six different witnesses who assert that they that they saw that moreover moreover congressman roberts and donald baker both of them in an additional follow-up car said that when their car pulled up parallel to the grassy knoll within a matter of a couple seconds they too smelled gun smoke so you've got four different witnesses saying that is it realistic to think like after a bunch of people see shots fired or like know that shots were fired then all of a sudden they start smelling guns most because they just saw the shots well they none of those said they saw the shots or i mean like they heard the shot fires well they didn't they didn't smell it immediately what they did is they smelled it when their car got up parallel with the grassy knoll which is right by where the president had been when he when he got hit okay so so then there's an additional factor here uh that of the of the 30 of the 30 uh deputy sheriffs that were there uh 32 of them known as of the 30 of the 30 deputy sheriffs i'll get the statistics here of the 30 of the 30 deputies the vast majority of the police and deputies at the immediate scene all turned and rushed to the grassy knoll immediately after the fire the shots were fired the final shot was fired they turned and rushed up the police all pushed their motorcycles up there the deputy sheriffs went rushing up there and and the chief of police who was in the lead car sent out a command over the radio for the police to go up by the grassy knoll and search the rail yard which is immediately behind the grassy knoll that was his initial command now uh now the official logs uh of the of the call that came from the the chief of police uh said they had it right on tape and the logs show that he ordered the people to go to the rail yard behind the grassy knoll okay now uh now this now this is another extremely important point and that is is that uh a dallas motorcycle police officer who was immediately adjacent to the to the uh book depository an officer marion baker said that i mentioned it just in passing early within 15 to 20 seconds after the firing of the final shot he jumped off his motorcycle and ran into the book depository and went up to the the second floor of the book depository and there was lee harvey oswald standing in the lunchroom and he just began to ask him a question when the supervisor uh the supervisor of the book depository came in uh truly and said no no he's okay he's one of the employees here and truly and uh and officer baker then rushed upstairs to go upstairs looking upstairs in the higher off higher rooms in the building to see if there was anyone there okay uh and so the the bottom line is that within 15 to 20 seconds of the firing the last shot according to baker the police officer that he saw oswald standing on the second floor that's four full floors below where the final shot was allegedly fired at just 15 to 20 seconds earlier uh and and he later testified that he didn't that that oswald didn't appear to be out of breath didn't appear to be excited he was just standing there in the lunchroom where he'd been eating drinking drinking your coke the things i was going to give the free coke ad to them but uh and uh so it was there was so so the bot the bottom line is is now in the one of the most important pieces of information uh that raised serious doubts about this is the following you remember how how frighteningly devastating the information was from dr gwyn about the particles about these uh warren commission exhibits 567 and 569 the two the two fragments of bullets that have been confirmed by the ballistic test who've been fired from from oswald's rifle he he confirmed that both of those both of those were identical in the in the radiation tests to the the fragment that was taken from the president's brain so that you have a direct confirmation according to this evidence of the bullet in the president's brain being having been fired from the manlicker rifle austin i had a question about the um lunchroom thing yeah yeah yeah but um the there are people in the lunchroom here other than the officer in oslo right or was it just no oswald was there oswald said that he was having lunch with another fellow but the other fellow had left the building before the before the shooting took place and before the officer arrived so he was just standing there by himself in the lunchroom and there's there's no other witnesses to corroborate how long he had been in the lunchroom no they had various witnesses who had said that they had seen him there before before they turned and went out to go watch the president come by he said that he was there and he testified that he was there having lunch with this other man uh and the other guys confirmed that he was there having lunch with him so they've gotten pieces of confirmation the the question that question that gets posed is it reasonable to believe that oswald had gotten all the way down from the sixth floor had gone all the way over and hidden the rifle underneath a whole set of boxes and underneath the boxes stacked back up on top of it and gotten all the way down four floors and gotten the coca-cola and been standing there drinking it calmly when the cop came in the door that's one of the questions um how would they know that he was not going to go outside with like everyone else to see the president the other dude it's not it's not it's not clear it's one of those questions i guess the question devolves to why didn't oswald go out to watch him go by like everybody else that's it that's an interesting question in fact at 12 25 the executive assistant to the forgot her name where was the building some on the first floor and he said he was going to decide he was going to get some food yeah okay so so again we circle back on i've gone through you know 10 different questions that got raised by by what the information was we had but we we come to this issue of dr gwyn dr gwyn having testified uh according to the commission that the both of the fragments 567 and 569 uh were absolutely identical to fragment exhibit 843 the fragment that was taken from the president's brain but when you when you read in detail it says uh that and this is from the records of the of the when you look into the actual volumes uh of the the 26 volumes of evidence actually here's what it said it said dr vincent gwynne stated that the fragments he was given to conduct neuron activation analysis tests on did not in fact correspond to those recorded by the warren commission neither can they possibly correspond to those seen and handled at the parkland hospital by the medical personnel who drew pictures and described them as much larger than those whose photographs the warren commission published the photographs of those published by the warren commission show a fragments that could not possibly have come from from exhibit 399 the magic bullet mainly because they're bigger than the total amount of grains that were lost from the magic bullet it says mr fithian this is one of the council one of the war on commission counsel ask dr gwin now then did you test exactly the same particles that the fbi tested in 1964 that would be the particles that were taken from the front seat and the particles that were found in the wrist of governor connolly and dr gwin says well actually it turns out i did not he said for reasons that i've never known uh they did they did not give me those samples so the then the question the the particular little pieces that you analyzed uh oh no he said the little pieces that i am that they analyzed i could very well have analyzed again but the pieces that were brought out from the archives and according to mr greer were the only bullet-led fragments from this case still present in the archives did not include any of the specific pieces that the fbi had analyzed in 1964. presumably those are in existence somewhere uh and i i i'm sure that nobody threw them out but where they are i personally had no idea okay so as it turns out the the uh the assertion that the pieces that he was given actually matched each other could be entirely true but what he's saying is they were not the pieces that had been analyzed by the fbi back in 1964 which they say two of which have been proven to have been fired from the gun from the weapon of oswald so so the question the question arises uh immediately uh then wait a second uh if what you're saying is true why then that would require that we not believe not only the war and commission but that we not believe the fbi ballistics people and that we not believe the other experts that the warren commission called to try to provide this overwhelming scientific evidence that proved dispositively that oswald killed the president and so what you get is a the beginning of a series of books and articles began to come out shortly after the publication of the warren commission report as you remember the assassination took place on november 22 1963 on november 29th of 1963 lyndon johnson now sworn in as new president ordered the convening of a commission and appointed warren the head of the commission and then appointed dallas to be on the commission and john mccloy and these other republican democratic political people put them on the committee and they ended up publishing their report in 1964. and uh in 1966 the first major book came out raising fundamental and systematic questions about the conclusions of the warren commission report and here it is here this is mark lane's book called rush to judgment this this uh more than any other probably single piece of literature began the fundamental challenge to the warren commission that actually disenthroned the warren commission as the dispositive uh test that it purported to be that was praised by time magazine and the new york times and the wall street journal and all the other major uh major news media as a definitive inconclusive report revealing that oswald killed the president all by himself this book almost single-handedly disentroned the warren commission and this this is written by the lawyer the young lawyer who was hired by lee harvey oswald's mother to basically defend lee harvey oswald but of course he never got a chance to defend lee harvey oswald because oswald was murdered within 48 hours by jack ruby and so what happened is mark lane continued to prepare his defense of lee harvey oswald just you might point out he first went to marina but she doesn't want anything to do yes marina was very well in hand by that time and uh and so so the bottom line is is that that he spent basically a year and a half a year almost 18 months together he spent uh preparing this brief basically of what what type of cross-examination should have been performed uh on the various witnesses what type of challenge ought to have been presented to the so-called experts that were putting forth this evidence what what he they basically concluded is that what the warren commission report was was in fact an advocates summary of an advocate advocating the case that lee harvey oswald killed the president and did so alone that it was not an honest and objective evaluation of the of the honest evidence and they began he began in here to give particular examples uh it wasn't he wasn't just making these blind assertions he for example pointed out that uh there's a series of very interesting things that started to happen for example a sergeant dean patrick patrick dean sergeant patrick dean who was the the dallas police officer that was in charge of security in the basement on the morning of the 24th of november when lee harvey oswald was being transferred from the from the dallas county jail uh our dallas city jail to the to the county jail he told the warren commission attorney his uh he told the war commission attorney mr griffin he told him that he had in fact assigned an officer r e vaughn to be in charge of security at the main street uh the main street entrance uh the there's an incline where they had the armored car pulled up that he would that uh oswald was going to be loaded onto this ramp and that that officer griff officer dean appointed officer vaughn to be the security guy at the door there and when when after ruby shot oswald on the 24th this officer dean questioned him he questioned ruby and ruby said that he had come in through the main street entrance at the ramp and he also said that he had decided two days earlier on the night of the 22nd that he was going to kill oswald and when when sergeant dean presented this information to attorney griffin of the warren commission report which the transcripts are bought at volume five of the warren commission reported page 254 griffin stopped the stopped the deposition ordered the stenographer to leave the room to go get coffee or something and then he began to challenge dean saying look it you can't say that you cannot say that he came in through the main street entrance and you can't say that he uh told me to that he had planned this out two days earlier you can't do that uh if you do that you're going to get charged with perjury now i'm here only to try to help you i want to make it clear to you that you're having said that prior to this time and you're changing your testimony to say that that isn't true isn't going to have any kind of negative impact upon you it's not going to interfere with your job or anything but i want you to come back on the record and say that none of that is true and dean refused to do it uh in fact he went to rankin the legal legal counsel for the commission and insisted upon going in front of the commission and telling them that this guy griffin had done this was trying to intimidate him threatening him with perjury trying to make him change his testimony and that he wasn't going to do it so they so they they took that a testimony from him and also there was a he he also pointed out that there had been a man who had called him from victoria canada uh the night of the killing on the night of the 22nd uh and said that he couldn't remember the name of the person but he called him from victoria canada uh and he said that he had an attorney by the name of batter b-a-t-t-e-r there in victoria and that he had a film of the president being shot and that he was uh directly on the other side of the president's vehicle and that he had a picture of the of the president and that he was sure that the school book depository was in the film that the entire building was visible in the film on the other side of the vehicle so that if in fact anybody had been shooting from the book depository that he would have been in the video would have been in the film uh and that uh he he told uh attorney griffin this uh and that he was trying to get griffin to do something about this and the griffin would not contact the attorney batter wouldn't find out who the person was and wouldn't confirm to him that they were even going to investigate that and so he went on the record saying that and so that that then another book came out uh right the very next year 1967 sylvia meeker uh put out a book called accessories after the fact a basic fundamental critique of the warren commission and she actually constructed a major index uh that had not been put out with the commission's report the commission had these 26 volumes of of depositions and testimony and documents and all that then they have this little summary and one of the things that mark lane had noted in his book in 1966 is that if you read the summary it sounded completely convincing uh that oswald had done this as we'd indicated on thursday but when you actually looked at the evidence that was in the 26 volumes they they basically repeatedly contradicted what the conclusions were so the the warrant commission had actually gone to the lengths of disguising uh the reality in their summary but had not gone to the point of doctoring and editing out the information from the record that disprove it and so that uh what she did is she went through all the 26 volumes and prepared an index so people could use the actual uh records and the evidence to do research so she is viewed as one of the great uh contributors to all of the people who have been doing research on the kennedy assassination since uh 1967 when she when she wrote that book and then there there began to be a drum beat of other books uh that challenged challenged the warren commission and uh in in his book rush to judgment mark lane sets forth uh a half a dozen specific questions that he says that the when you when you put these questions and you go to the record of the 26 volumes and look at what the evidence is that the assertions are being made by the warren commission completely disintegrate and he said the first one is where did the shots come from and he goes into great detail to point out that all of the evidence indicated that the wound below the president's tie in his throat was clearly an entrance wound and that all of the people at the parkland hospital said so and they went into great detail of describing why it was so clearly distinct from an exit one the exit wound having ragged uh edges in much three times the size of an entrance wound and how clearly this was an entrance wound and in fact the the warren commission and the fbi and everybody were so convinced that it was an entrance movement due to the reports of the doctors department hospital that they actually tried to figure out how to reconstruct the entire shooting to be able to support that and then they actually went so far as to say that the president uh had turned all the way around and was looking backwards when he got shot in the throat except that the life magazine people had the zapruder film which showed that that wasn't true that he was looking right straight he just turned and looked over by the grassy knoll just like that when that shot happened just as he was going behind the sign on the zapruder film uh and then you have the he went into great detail about how how clear the evidence was that the assertion on the part of the warren commission that the president's whole right front side of his head had been blown out was completely untrue and that it was the whole back side of his head that had been blown out and that there was no evidence of any kind of there being a an entrance wound in the back of the head and the the difficulty was that a series of photographs were later made available which we'll talk about on thursday in which the because the photographs as i told you the photographs of the autopsy were kept away completely they were they were locked up and they were said that no one is going to be able to see these that they were all classified the photos actually came out i think with the presidential the release of presidential innovation is is that right greg the the the jfk document release legislation the photographs come out well there was a number of things that came out during the 90s the act went through in 1992 but george w bush was president and he categorically refused to appoint any members to do any research so they had to wait 18 months till clinton got in he appointed the people they started releasing the stuff over a period of time and they eventually got to the point where there's still about 10 is left for 2017. that's right and most of the autopsy photos did not come out until the 1990s that's right and a lot of them have came with eyes wide open that's right they were shut in parkway what happened is when is when the photographs when people finally got access to the photographs what they had is they had a whole set of photographs that seemed to confirm the warren commission report they actually had a photograph of a body bent over like this with a bullet hole at the base of the neck they had pictures of the of the president lying there like this with the uh the wound in his throat that had been opened up by a trick on me with his eyes wide open they had butt but uh livingston uh and i got let me see yeah livingston i think livingston and the and the fellow who wrote a high treason who's that the was it livingston real high treason harden yeah but i think it's livingston wrote them all uh that that high treason this is it harold edward livingston he wrote a book called high treason and he wrote this book killing the truth and in this he actually published a whole set of photographs uh which which show the the president uh and shows the massive wound in the back of his head with his brains hanging out uh and he's got a whole series of photographs uh that i have never found out where he got them uh but the but the but they're very clearly of the president you can see the president's features in them uh but the but they're they're a whole set of photographs that were released under pressure after almost 30 years uh by the by the federal government that uh seem to support the warren commission except that they're completely contradictory to the evidence of all the particle hospital doctors and you get to the autopsy that was held at the bethesda when when the president's body was returned to uh to washington dc that night of the 22nd of november they brought his body to bethesda naval hospital and there was an autopsy that was performed there and uh and they took x-rays and they took photographs and they prepared reports written reports of what what was uh was happening and they were starting to complain the doctors that were there that there were military officials that were present at the autopsy that we're giving them orders uh as to what to do and what not to do and what to say and what not to say in their report uh and the uh and the head doctor uh there the the head pathologist that was performing the autopsy ended up burning all of his notes took all of his notes uh home and burped them and so that that brings us to the to 5 15. uh and uh so i i want to i want to have the discussion with you now that i promise it will have that i won't drone on and on past my deadline here so we can have some more discussion about these things i've pointed out to you and uh and then what we'll do on thursday is i will be addressing later disclosed facts uh later than these these all came out like immediately uh after the war and commission report as of late 1966 the the the uh within within a year or two of the of the commission just pointing out obvious things that happened all contemporaneously uh to the warren commission study but what i want to do is i want to deal with what we have in front of us now because next week next week when we come back on tuesday is when your first paper is going to be due so i want us to be able to concentrate today and on thursday when i present additional information to you that has come out subsequent to this immediate aftermath of the war and commission report to be able to get all the information in front of you as to what the affirmative evidence is the support the loan government theory and what the evidence is that's been set forth subsequently both immediately thereafter and then some time thereafter so you can uh evaluate that so basically in your first paper uh your first two to three page paper that we do a week from today you can let me know what your thinking is so far about the lone gunman theory because you have to come to some kind of operational conclusions about that in order to determine whether or not you are prepared to entertain alternative uh theories of this um if we think that like it could have possibly known the cia or the fbi we don't have enough facts right now to say that we have to say like from the fact that we know now which if you've done a lot of extra reading which i assume you all have uh because you've got that great big list remember when i keep flipping out here i didn't play with you this time i should have just but there's the the big 150 page uh syllabus that you've got has got all kinds of additional readings that you can be doing on any one of the theories that you want to be able to explore okay or any other theory that you have that may not be one of those that's set forth there uh but no you're but but what i do want you to do as part of your two to three page first paper at least communicate to me what your thoughts are about the lone gunman theory how uh whether whether you're more persuaded by information that's been raised by mark lane or by any other reading that's in there or whether you in fact believe that the evidence that you really in fact let me do one thing there there's this interesting passage the fellow that the fellow that wrote the introduction to mark lane's book uh he has uh his name is roper the the big uh people that do all of the do all of the was that the the uh it wasn't future ever broker wasn't it yes was the one who churchill fell to make sure when he came back from germany that they had an adequate explanation they never committed suicide outside that bunker trevor well here he is and what what he said what he said is uh after reviewing some of this initial information to set forth the book he said thus we come to the crux of the matter it is a question of confidence we have to admit that we lack confidence in the evidence that was submitted to the commission and in the commission itself and its handling of it this is undoubtedly a serious matter if we think that the commission may have been deceived or may have intentionally deceived us how might we explain such a deception and then he goes on into saying that look the bottom line is here if one is inclined to believe the federal government and law enforcement officials in the fbi uh you smile because you've come through all these things since this time but at the time at the time virtually everybody presumed that the fbi was an honest organization and they believed that the central intelligence agency was just doing what it had to do outside of the country to protect us against spies and russians attacking us across the polar ice caps and that uh so that at this point in time this was quite a a position to take was that they actually had become persuaded that the fbi and the central intelligence agency and the agencies that were doing the ballistic tests and the the radiation test were not to be trusted and he sets forth evidence that this mark lanes book rush to judgment which you can get at amazon for a few bucks uh is uh well worth reading because it basically is one of the first places where the world war ii the post-world war ii baby boomer generation digs in its heels and says look we just don't trust you and we're gonna we're gonna cross-examine you like we would anybody else and under cross-examination you just don't hold up okay so yes um so i wasn't aware that lane was counsel to jim jeffries how would you go about trying to persuade someone that mark wayne isn't just a crazy nut job who makes stuff up well what you have to do is you have to you have to look at the evidence and look at the the records for example where he points out that that this uh uh deputy patrick uh what's his name here that uh what i say is you know where he's saying look here's the transcript here's where he testifies what the what the legal counsel was doing trying to talk him out of saying these things uh here's the information that the the commission was given he's quite thorough here in putting everything up on the record for you to look at but it's an important question because the the if if you're going to distrust the government lawyers you have to equally hold back judgment about just blindly trusting even the defense lawyers you have to look for yourself to look and say well what kind of footnote does he have here what kind of evidence is he providing and is he marshall even though you know that he's marshaling the evidence toward a certain end how well does the evidence hold up and does the evidence hold up that the warren commission has has uh set forth in the but the warren commission was asserting that it was completely objective and wasn't an adversary or an advocate of anything and uh and yet you can tell they are he acknowledges that he is it says as a defense counsel this is the evidence that i'm putting forth is the is the opposing evidence but that's that's a good question um yeah i have a couple questions so we have a summary um due on the first theory that we learned um just about like the harvey oswald being the um the lone gunman yeah the lone gunman so that's we have to write like a two to three page summary on that do you next two no no what i'm saying is that you can you if you've begun to develop your own affirmative theory of what happened or you agree with the lone gunman theory and you think that it's pretty persuasive uh you can do you can say either one of those things but if in fact you're going to start laying out what you think an alternative theory of the of the crime is i do want you to at least address what your opinion is of the lone gunman theory why it is that you somehow weren't persuaded by it what did you find to be persuasive about a countervailing argument about it so that you can do both things so the length should be like two to three pages yes pardon we'll have a handout on thursday forward with more oh okay there'll be more particular guidance that you can get from a little handout that we'll have there for you okay okay but but as i say that that i've i've not been used to two or three pages i've never thought how anybody could say anything at two or three pages but the tas have prevailed upon me saying look if you if you tell people that they should write maybe a five to eight page paper they're going to feel overwhelmed by it and uh that's gonna be a big huge task and they're not gonna enjoy it and we want you to enjoy this course so i've given you the two or three pages if in fact you have something to say that you think requires more than two or three pages is perfectly okay because i i'll enjoy reading it and also i had one more question um i was reading online that um lee harvey oswald's body was esteemed in 1981 and i was just wondering why they chose the daughter to dig out his body but why did they do that i don't know i'm not sure what they were trying to prove i've given up my father yeah there wasn't there wasn't i mean there wasn't much doubt about him having been shot i mean somebody may have made an assertion that they didn't think that him being shot in the stomach you know by by uh ruby would automatically cause him to die maybe they thought something wasn't him did they think it wasn't him that they buried or well you're raising an interesting question because once you start to distrust the authorities and once you come to see what it is the central intelligence agency is not only capable of but have in fact done in the past to intentionally deceive people then people begin to entertain different ideas of to what lengths they might have gone to try to conceal this stuff uh and that they could you know very convenient to have you know while they're bringing the harvey ozil out in front of everybody they know everybody in the country is watching on television and have one of his people that he's associated with and you'll see a lot of that come out and go bang bang and he falls down they go oh gee he's dead and he's gone you know so i mean you can see where people might begin to be suspicious right okay so on the essay for our examples of whether we agree or don't agree with the gunman do we need like citations of where we got that information or can we just kind of use our notes or do we need to go into the readings well it depends on how good a mark you want to get if in fact you say okay i have come to the conclusion that this and this is true and here let me point out that i've looked in the uh in the syllabus and i've gone on to a couple of the active points and i've gone and read some of those things and here's a footnote or two on what it is that has caused me to be so persuaded by this that's one thing or you could say that i remember you saying this this and this and therefore i believe you because you're so persuasive and uh and so therefore i've concluded this uh you can say that uh and that's worth a c uh but it's it's this is a a perfectly logical assignment is that the the more seriously you take the subject uh and the more specific you are about why you believe what you believe and more specific about what it is you do believe or how far you've come in your belief and what you're thinking at this point the better it'll be that's all i was just wondering do we need uh to cite all of our where we got it from if if you've got if you got it from somewhere it would be better to cite it yes footnotes are always better than not so say we're referencing something that you said in lecture yes you just write like like the date you said it and i'll remember saying if you if you just drop a footnote and say you know in lecture such and such uh that'd be fine and then you go in all the rest of the way uh but you can do any of those things did i say i i would i would i want to i want you guys to be growingly inspired as we as we move into the as we move into the different alternative theories i want you to be inspired to actually you know do some of the additional reading that you see available for you when you start to focus in on a particular theory and you might you might want to go a little deeper than than we do just in the class okay so that may come later in your other papers what was the name of the woman and the book that you were talking about earlier she published a bunch of facts oh sylvia meeker so as it's m-e-a-g-h-e-r sylvia meager uh is accessories after the fact and i think that i think that she's uh a lot of her index i think is available on the large uh the large syllabus it's one of the active links i think that uh well what's the lady the mary apparel that's it absorb the index yes that she provides that's right so the mary farrell uh you know sometimes here pronounced uh sylvia mayer you know okay it looks like me here okay but yeah but but the amer the mary farrell live uh links that we've got in the the large syllabus the 150 page syllabus will pull up that index for you and it'll pull up most of the really major writings in this area that's why i wanted to make it available for you as a resource i mean that's that's a great lifetime resource to have that 150 page syllabus with the with the life and you can thank greg for it i mean because he spent a lot of time hooking up all those live sites to it so you can get right down into thousands of pages literally thousands of pages of information about this through that that small 150 page syllabus so but there were a few other folks i yes um is one theory for why there isn't an exit wound on the throat that like the gunman on the grassy knoll may have had like well it's an interesting question one of the one of the weaknesses of a lot of the alternative fears is very similar to the weaknesses that you see in the warren commission is that they say things and if you go deeper into their analysis if you follow out to the complete logic of what it is they're saying it's completely inconsistent with something else they're saying and they're figuring that nobody will notice it or else they didn't notice it you know remember i tell you about the decision tree analysis thing and if you get to a particular spot and you say this happened and this didn't then there's certain things that can happen out here but only out there and you don't get things happening there over here and you have to pick something out of here because it happens to be supports their general idea and they just throw it in and you need to point out that well that's not consistent so that that this thing about saying oh look the bullet the bullet was way down here uh and it the that when they cite the fact that the doctor at the parkland put his finger in and there was no bullet in there and where did will it go uh or do you acknowledge that it was the bullet that fell out on the gurney and if it fall out on the gurney you know isn't that a little bizarre to have a pristine bullet followed and why would it only go that far into the president if they shot him you know like so close what is that and so that that when you start looking toward these other theories you know you don't want to latch on to any one of them just because it makes you feel good or because it happens to be consistent with your worldview you know because then then you're guilty of the same kind of things that they accuse the war commission people of being guilty of because they just said it because it made them feel better and not only that but they had the added advantage of trying to make the whole country feel better that the whole thing was solved and they didn't have to worry about this anymore you know and and that's that's not i guess with without any value you know i mean that's that's some some value but it doesn't seem to be justified he said it was like from 45 to 60 degrees descending okay i was thinking it could have gone through the window and slowed down and that's why it did not go through the president if it if it if it had hit into the seat you try to figure out if it could have hit into the back of the seat and gone all the way through and then gone into his back that's that's one theory and then it would have fallen out somewhere or was in the car or something and uh and so you raised the question well how thoroughly was the car searched before it started to be disassembled you know and they they are at least asserting pursuant to their theory that at least it was thorough enough to find two of the fragments in the front seat you know uh so that the the key is is to have a consistent coherent theory and that basically what they're saying what what mark lane is saying at least is that well the job that the commission has done is not that good a job they aren't they aren't consistent they have shaved they have shaved reality they've they've ignored witnesses they've misquoted witnesses it's absolutely clear that they're twisting and pushing and shaping trying to get to a particular conclusion okay and so you say to him is what is your conclusion and what he's saying is like a lot of defense counsel saying i don't have to have any conclusion the pr you're the prosecutor and you're the one that has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this person did it and i'm just showing that what you're saying doesn't make any sense at all and so this person would have to be acquitted and if you equip this person you know i don't have an obligation to tell you what happened now that's not how i do it i mean in all the trials i've ever done i always say look not only is it not true what the government is saying let me tell you what really happened here and then you lay it out like this and they go right okay and so so that's what these other alternative theories are trying to do they're trying to say okay mark lane you know punched these guys out and their theory doesn't hold up so basically you don't get to convict oswald but here's what we think actually did happen and then they try to convict someone that they're just as angry at as these people were angry at communists or marxists the problem with coming up with a consistent coherent theory is you're always seeing whatever you read that's a snapshot in time right then of the evidence that was exposed so you're almost always better off going with the most recent books and then sort of checking back with some of the other ones there are things that did not change and there are things that are brought out in some of those early books by sylvia there's a pen jones there's a number of these authors that bring out things that have just been lost some somehow it's not gotten to the new books it is real critical yes but and these things are out of frame it'll cost you 200 300 bucks to get them just to give you an idea unless you want to come over to our office of course where we got all these things these are big huge things that we've got but you go you try to go with later information because you got to remember the 1990s is when they released the most information about this that happened and a lot of the researchers did not get around to rewriting their stuff until just the last five years or so so you know those are a lot of the books that you want to take right okay so keep going i don't want to i don't want to quell your enthusiasm here or before i move to any of the uh long-term learners okay we're all right so far okay oh yes i just really quickly wanted to confirm so the uh the bullet or the shot that uh hit james uh fatigue yes uh so uh what you were saying during lecture is that that appears to have had to have come from not the book depository the angle wasn't right well no what i'm what i'm saying literally is that if in fact it came from the depository window it it is it missed by 270 feet the vehicle and that the the affirmative theory that's being set forth by the commission is that that shot which could have it could have lined up they said that the the limousine came out from behind the elm tree that was blocking the view from the window at about frame 210 of the zapruder film and that that he therefore would have had anywhere from six to eight seconds to spend his entire time drawing down on the president with the scope telescope at 140 feet and yet they're asserting that that first shot missed by 270 feet and then the next two shots he got off within 5.6 seconds the two shots together both of them hit it and they hit him like from within an area like this okay and so what you have to do is all i'm saying is that the place where the bullet hit the curb on the south side of the of the street as because it's the north curve where the where the the uh where the grassy knoll was and then there was the south strip that hit the south curb and it it ricocheted out they don't know where it ricocheted too and they haven't given us any data about what the groove looked like as to what direction it was going in which raises some questions as to why that would be true but what i am saying is that you have to be able to make your own evaluation since that it is in line with a trajectory if it had been fired from the grassy knoll it's consistent with that and if you're shooting at the president from the side and you miss him you can see where you've missed the entire vehicle whereas if you're shooting from above 60 feet above 140 feet away and you shoot down into the limousine it's hard to see how you miss it by 270 feet that's all uh i just a connection that i make is that it seems like that kind of ludicrous miss is a bit in line with how bad oswald's reputation as a shooter was 270 feet that's not even hitting maggie's girards that's missing that's missing the whole other side of the range you know it's just the bullet doesn't show up you know sort of but it's it's there so um just contrary to what he said about his maggie's george thing on your chronology you have a screen that uh sylvia odios encounter with two cubans and potentially oswald yes that those cubans said that he was like an excellent marksman yes is that something that you can like take value even though it's like not confirmed it was awesome like it's like a starting point because like it's just very it's very interesting it's very interesting you know what it really the full information is that uh not only did the guy say that uh that that oh by the way the guy that was there uh was a former marine an expert marksman but he also said he was willing to try to kill other people for us you know so that there's a lot of people look at that and say this is very extraordinarily interesting information why would the guy say that to her you know because he wasn't coming offering to have him kill somebody for him it seems a little gratuitous and yet extremely incriminating and so why did that why did that happen if you credit her testimony um do you think that maybe the chief of police sent the officers to search the rail yard first was because maybe he thought that the shot came from that area yes yeah that is clearly what he thought you know i mean because if you're the chief if you're the chief of police well assuming the chief of police is an innocent you know it's the chief of police here's the shots happen and gets on the the radio and it tells the people to go up to the rail yard behind the grassy knoll you assume he's doing that because he figures that's where it came from and then you got these other 30 guys and they they've actually there's an actual uh interesting statistic that i've that i've got in here somewhere uh that it gives you the the details of the uh of the data about uh the the number of officers there was something there was something like uh where are they here oh here they are of the of all the witnesses uh that that offered that they were interviewed about where the shots came from there are 51 uh well there's 38 people said they had no clear opinion about exactly where the shots came from 32 people said that they thought the shots came from the school book depository and 51 said they thought it came from the grassy knoll so you got basically 51 people to 32 people saying that it came from the the grassy knoll and of the of the 20 deputy sheriffs 16 of them that were there the 20 deputy sheriffs that were there guarding the the caravan 16 of them said the shots came from the grassy knoll three of them had no opinion as to where they came from and only one of them said that it came from the book depository but then again it's important remember that that isn't convincing evidence you know it's just that you've got different people who got different opinions but if in fact you present that information to a jury you know that you that you've got 20 you know trained law enforcement officers and 16 of them say it came from the grassy knoll and only one of them says that it came from the book depository the jury is allowed to draw certain inferences from that as to what they think the probabilities are and that's what that's what we know from statistics did any avenues turn up or anything or was it like those futile there's nothing there where in the in the little yard or by the grass well they they went up they went up to they went up to the grassy knoll and they found all of these people who said they smelled gunsmoke up there and there were some eight different witnesses who asserted that they saw uh a flash of a gun gunfire in smoke uh that they they saw a commotion that they thought would look like somebody shooting again there were eight different witnesses there there are other interesting things that happened they there are a number of people who said they encountered a person who showed them secret service credentials and said that they had this area secured and that they could all leave the police officers and turns out that the secret service says that they didn't have anybody up there uh there there are people there's there's other information about these three hobos that are arrested in a boxcar in the right behind the grassy knoll in the rail yard and they pull them out and uh lo and behold uh the three of them there's a substantial number of people who believe that they they have a striking resemblance to e howard hunt and to frank sturgis and to charles harrelson yeah whom i've interviewed any number of times actually represented so there's a so there's a lot of uh a lot of things that happened up behind the grassy knoll they found they found a a uh there's some photographs that they've blown up and enhanced etc or they think it looks like someone is standing on the the running board of a truck leaning over the top of the truck with something that looks like a rifle and they found muddy footprints and stuff on the side of the running board of a vehicle up there there's a lot of data michael so that you might check that out you know what is the what is what kind of real evidence do they have what is the the corpus of evidence of there having been shots fired from the grassy knoll what is what is the overall evidence of that because it's crucial it's a crucial piece of the of all the evidence here that list that is the next photo yes it's in the larger zones yeah you'll see there's a whole section in the in the larger syllabus uh of the grassy knoll the evidence surrounding the grassy knoll you'll find a lot of that there okay so that okay so we're beginning now to move into we've moved again to questions about the conclusions of the warren commission and the fbi and the dallas police and we're going to we're going to go over some more of those on thursday the we did the readily apparent evidence today and we're going to be doing the uh the other evidence that has come out over the years that further question the reliability of the warren commission report yes um uh high treason uh which is livingston's other book uh oh yes here's here's a uh yeah i guess i should have done this to begin with they're losing people here but pass these things out and take them with you and that this is just a release because we're videotaping we're videotaping here because some of some of the people uh want to be able to get access later on in the course to different parts of the lecture so we're videotaping it and we're trying to determine whether it's going to be okay with you to put it up on e-commerce or something and make it available to all the rest of the students okay if you want to just take those home and read through it if you want to sign it to release it uh and if you if you don't want to have yourself be allowed to make a video what we'll do is we'll put those little wiggly things over your face one of those black things you pass your eyes okay so before before we go to the uh long-term learners are there any other questions from from the millennials okay all right tommy you have a great question okay all right so this is good so i would just take your take your copy of that release form and if you if you feel supposed to do it sign it so that you can uh make the videos available up on e-commerce for everybody to review some of the notes and stuff if you want okay that's it

Channel: Romero Institute

Views: 53,140

Keywords:

Id: ejndd6goLdI

Length: 105min 50sec (6350 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 22 2014