Whowhatwhy has published a series on Oliver Stone's documentary JFK Revisited. The far-left publication maintains that, "Cleaning up the tangle of underbrush from our murky history can go a long way to establishing the primacy of carefully documented facts over lies, innuendo, and cover-up by all parties." Unfortunately, whowhatwhy is using disinformation in their attempt to "clean up" the verdict of history that Oswald was a lone gunman. Whowhatwhy's assertions are in block quotes followed by my rebuttal. Credit also goes to John McAdams, David Von Pein, Fred Litwin, Nick Nalli and Steve Roe whose work I have relied on.
… the Warren Commission report, with its urgency to rubber stamp J. Edgar Hoover’s non-investigation “investigation” that laid the tragedy solely at the feet of Lee Harvey Oswald, the “disgruntled loner seeking attention,” who bafflingly told police he did not do it. In fact, he declared himself “just a patsy.”
Whowhatwhy apparently does not realize that the prisons are full of "innocent" people. More importantly, Oswald lied throughout his life when it suited his needs. Including when he claimed he was a patsy.
Skeptics who accept the official account should consider the chain of custody surrounding the so-called “magic bullet” said to have passed through both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally as they cruised in the presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza.
Here is a report by David Von Pein on the chain of custody for bullet 399.
The civilian doctors who first examined the president at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital all saw an entrance wound in the throat — indicating that Kennedy was shot from the front, from the direction of the grassy knoll — that then “disappeared” from the military autopsy conducted at Bethesda Naval Hospital after Air Force One returned to Washington that night.
No wound "disappeared." The Dallas doctors, who were engaged in life-saving procedures and not trying to determine the nature of the President's wounds, indeed originally though the throat wound was an entrance. However, Malcolm Perry later admitted that was "just a guess" on his part based on the the relatively small size of the wound. The exact nature of the wound was never documented because the Dallas doctors performed a tracheotomy over the incision. However, both the HSCA and Clark Panel experts were able to discern remnants of the original exit wound despite the tracheotomy.
The president’s autopsy was Navy doctor J.J. Humes’s first-ever gunshot-wound postmortem. Though he had 40 observers on hand, Humes made sure to burn all his notes, a long-known fact to which JFK Revisited adds context.
Although he was an experienced and competent forensic pathologist, Humes admitted that he was not an expert on gunshot wounds. That is why he called in Pierre Finck to assist him. Regarding the autopsy notes, Humes explained, “The original notes which were stained with the blood of our late president, I felt, were inappropriate to retain to turn in to anyone in that condition. I felt that people with some peculiar ideas about the value of that type of material, they might fall into their hands."
One of the key primary witnesses supporting a conspiracy is John Stringer, the official autopsy photographer. He claims the photos of Kennedy’s blown-out head are fake, or at least altered. The type of film and camera used for these images are not the same camera and film as what he used that night. If Stringer didn’t take those pictures, who did? And why did they have to take another set?
This is a misrepresentation by whowhatwhy. Stringer never said any photos were faked or altered. When he was asked if anything about the photos caused him to question their authenticity. Stringer replied, "no." What he did say was he believed the photos of the brain were taken on a different film stock. But his memory of the events of 1963 was shaky since he was testifying over thirty years after the fact. Read Fred Litwin's report for more information.
As for Oswald, the accused assassin who was murdered two days later in a Dallas police station by mobbed-up nightclub owner Jack Ruby, three female witnesses who worked in the Texas School Book Depository independently claimed that he was not on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting (as Oswald maintained before his death).
Read Steve Roe's report on the matter.
And the gun found on the scene may not have been Oswald’s: The Mannlicher-Carcano rifle allegedly found in the sniper’s nest was 4.2 inches longer than the rifle Oswald purchased from a mail-order catalogue nine months earlier.
As David Von Pein explains:
"The likely explanation for why Oswald received a 40-inch rifle instead of the 36-inch model that he ordered via the Klein's mail-order coupon is pretty simple and logical, and it is this: Klein's very likely ran out of the 36-inch model shortly before receiving Oswald's order, and hence shipped a very similar (but slightly lengthier) gun instead."
Why was the street address of Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans scrubbed from post-assassination reports? Perhaps because the same office was a locus of anti-Castro activity — not Communist sympathizers, as Oswald was made out to be?Oswald's FPCC chapter had no "street address" because it consisted of only Oswald himself. Oswald probably stamped "544 Camp" on a few pamplets to lend an air of authenticity to his fake group. See Fred Litwin's report on Guy Banister for more on 544 Camp.
Why was a “flash warning” removed from Oswald’s file at the FBI, just as Oswald returned from his alleged trips to the Cuban Consulate and Russian Embassy in Mexico City which otherwise would have alerted the Secret Service to consider him a security threat to the president?
As I noted here, there is no evidence of a connection between Oswald’s visit to the embassies in Mexico City and his removal from the watch list. FBI agent Marvin Gheesling told a superior that he removed Oswald’s name from the list after learning Oswald had been arrested in New Orleans. Gheesling went on to explain that he had previously forgotten to remove Oswald from the list but should have done so upon his return to the US in 1962 since the purpose of the “stop” on Oswald was to alert the FBI “in the event [Oswald] returned to the U.S. under [an] assumed name.” Gheesling was disciplined for his actions and he was not the only FBI agent whose foul-ups elicited punishment by the bureau. In a perfect world, the FBI would have monitored Oswald more closely and the tragedy in Dallas might have been averted.
Shortly before JFK’s scheduled arrival in Chicago on November 2, an ex-Marine sharpshooter named Thomas Vallee found himself arrested on the pretext of a minor driving offense. The FBI had placed Vallee under constant surveillance after receiving a tip from an informant identified only as “Lee” that Vallee was planning to assassinate the president.
Fred Litwin debunks the non-existent Chicago JFK plot in this article.
[JFK] prepared to withdraw a then-limited number of American troops from Vietnam, intentions reversed by Lyndon B. Johnson
One of the major problems that the media and historians have with Stone and DiEugenio is their insistence that JFK would have withdrawn from Vietnam to the exclusion of all other possibilities. But of course, no one can say for sure what JFK would have done.
[Ann] Hornaday cites “compelling evidence … that Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw was abetted and manipulated by intelligence agents in Moscow” and then she characterizes Oliver Stone’s filmic depiction of Shaw’s trial as “one of the most stunning successes of Soviet disinformation of the late 20th century.”
But it is a fact that Garrison was influenced by a series of articles in a communist-controlled newspaper called Paese Sera. Fred Litwin writes:
“The impact of the allegations leveled by Paese Sera on the New Orleans district attorney is beyond dispute. Garrison was in receipt of this scoop by no later than mid-March 1967. We know this via several contemporaneous sources, including the diary of Richard Billings …”
Litwin continues, “Insofar as Garrison was concerned, Shaw was now directly linked to the CIA, although the DA’s sole source was a newspaper clipping. In combination with the beliefs of conspiracy buffs, Garrison pivoted away from his initial theory of a locally-based, homosexual/sadism & masochism conspiracy and began talking in public about something much much bigger.”
... Clay Shaw lied throughout his trial, saying that he never in his life had ever worked for the CIA.
Fred Litwin, who has studied Clay Shaw extensively, makes the case that he was not a CIA operative in this article.
I [Peter Janney] submit that this debate [regarding Shaw's alleged CIA employment] ended in 1979 when CIA Director Richard Helms admitted under oath in a subsequent deposition (that involved E. Howard Hunt’s lawsuit with Liberty Lobby) the following:
The only recollection I [Richard Helms] have of Clay Shaw and the Agency is that I believe that at one time as a businessman he was one of the part-time contacts of the [CIA’s] domestic contact division, the people that talked to businessmen, professors, and so forth, and who traveled in and out of the country.
Janney is correct in this instance. Helms' description of Shaw as a domestic contact for the CIA is accurate. These were people who traveled extensively and provided information to the agency on a volunteer unpaid basis. They were loyal Americans not "CIA agents." Janney's use of Victor Marchetti, one of the most rabid of all CIA critics, is less convincing. Marchetti "believed" that Shaw was more than a "part-time contact" but provided no evidence to back up his claim. In any case, Marchetti was certainly not an unbiased source.
While the AP dutifully notes that the Warren Commission “concluded that Oswald had been the lone gunman,” the wire service ignores the conclusion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that there was a probable conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.
But the HSCA agreed with the WC that Oswald had fired the shots that killed JFK. The HSCA conclusion of conspiracy was based on the so-called acoustics evidence. But that evidence has been debunked.
The theory that Oswald was a KGB asset has persisted for decades, despite a lack of evidence.
Any number of theories regarding the assassination have persisted for years despite a lack of credible evidence. But this installment of the whowhatwhy series is partly corrrect. Oswald was not a KGB asset. But neither was he a CIA agent or asset as whowhatwhy tries to show. Nor is there any credible evidence that the media is currently pushing a KGB-Oswald connection to cover up a CIA plot to kill JFK.
[The KBG theory] ignores the many signs that suggest Oswald may indeed have been an intelligence asset — but the CIA’s, an agency whose very existence was threatened by John F. Kennedy.
The notion that JFK wanted to destroy the CIA is one of the most poorly supported ideas in the long history of JFK theorizing. The concept is based on one unverified quote from the New York Times. But as Fred Litwin reports, instead of moving to destroy the CIA, Kennedy started using the agency to further his anti-Castro agenda after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
Circumstantial evidence suggests Oswald was recruited into the US intelligence community while in the Marines. Through this lens, everything Oswald did, including learning Russian while a teenaged Marine and “defecting” to the Soviet Union at 19 in 1959, was carefully choreographed.
The "circumstancial evidence" reffered to is weak at best. It consists of things such as Oswald owned a Minox "spy camera" and had written "microdots" in his notebook. Also mentioned in the link used by whowhatwhy to support their assertions is the "special training" Oswald must have had to learn the Russian language. But Oswald learned to speak Russian by neccessity since he had to use it in order to communicate with just about anyone including his wife Marina.
Infuriated, Oswald left [Mexico] for Texas on October 2 to plot the crime of the century.
The liklihood is that Oswald never developed a plan to shoot JFK before November 19. That is the date that the motorcade route was first published in newspapers.
The purpose of his visit, we are told, was to obtain transit visas from the Cuban Embassy in order to return to the USSR, where Oswald lived from October 1959 to June 1962. There he was, hoping to go back, even though he had gladly fled the totalitarian state and publicly expressed how happy he was to be living in the US again.
But there are indications that Oswald wanted to get to Cuba. JFK expert Gerald Posner told author Steven Gillon that following the assassination Oswald, “was on his way back to Mexico City and the Cuban consulate.” Posner went on to say that Oswald "only wanted to get to Cuba, where he thought the real revolution was happening. Cuban bureaucrats in Mexico City had refused him a visa to Havana only a month earlier. He intended to show up and say, ‘This is what I’ve done,’ and they would have no choice but to enthusiastically embrace him.”
There are some indications that Oswald did travel to Mexico City ...
The evidence is overwhelming that Oswald was in Mexico City and includes his photo and signature on documents, statements of witnesses, CIA surveillance and Oswald's own admissions that he was in the Mexican capital.
Speaking in broken Russian — which Oswald spoke nearly fluently — a caller identifying himself as Oswald to the Soviet official on the other end of the line sought more information about his visa request.
The possibility exists that Oswald could have been impersonated by the CIA. The reason for such an impersonation would be an attempt by the agency to see what Oswald was doing or where he was. It is known that such a technique was used by the CIA in Mexico City previously. If the agency were using such a gambit it would indicate a lack of knowledge on their part about Oswald rather than point to their use of him as an asset.
CIA surveillance cameras photographed everyone entering or leaving the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico. Why have they never produced one single photo of Oswald even though he reportedly made several visits between the two buildings? The only photos to appear are of this “Mexico City Mystery Man,” as he has been dubbed. Was he the mystery man pretending to be Oswald on the phone?
This is another "mystery" that has been explained to theorists for years that they simply refuse to accept. The cameras were somewhat prone to breaking down and did not provide continous coverage. The ARRB studied the issue and found in regards to the Cuban embassy that a “Robot Star” camera with a trigger device as well as a K-100 camera were installed on the very day that Oswald arrived in Mexico—September 27th. The Robot Star was to be tested for four days and the K-100 for an additional four days. But no photographic take from these cameras was produced. The ARRB noted that one explanation for this lack of coverage was that a camera was focused on a shaded area instead of the door of the consulate. Additionally, the ARRB said that the mere presense of dark clothing could fool the system.
The CIA knew Kostikov as a spy, thought to be involved in all the craft’s darkest arts. A notorious foreign intelligence agent meeting with a former defector to Russia should have set off alarm bells. Yet the CIA chose to keep this information to itself.
As I noted here, Kostikov was working in the Soviet embassy under the cover of a consular officer. The fact is anyone who had business of any sort at the embassy might come into contact with him.
In conclusion, whowhatwhy claims that "There have been no good answers to such troubling questions." But the answers have been there for many years in most instances. For reasons known only to them, whowhatwhy and others simply do not want to accept those answers.
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