3. Every single piece of evidence used to indict Oswald is problematic. I'm not exaggerating. Every major and minor bit of evidence has a puzzle or flaw in it. We expect all criminal cases to have some evidentiary blemish, some i not dotted or t not crossed, and certainly eye-witnesses get details wrong. But cut into the Swiss-cheese case against Oswald (which includes the murder of Police Officer J.D. Tippit), and every slice is riddled with holes:
Witnesses described men on the sixth floor who did not match Oswald's description, as well as different men at Tippit's shooting--balding, dark-complected, stocky suspects wearing different colored clothes than Oswald. Oswald was near the scenes of both crimes (necessary for framing a patsy), yet the timing doesn't work right for Oswald to be at either location at the exact time. Within two minutes of each crime, he was seen by credible witnesses, standing calmly: a) five floors down in the Book Depository, near the Coke machine, and later, b) at a bus stop a mile away from the Tippit shooting.
For every witness saying shots were fired from the sixth floor, we have an equal or greater number saying shots were fired from the Grassy Knoll. Not a single line-up "I.D." of Oswald would have stood up in court. Witnesses heard Oswald loudly complaining, while being herded into the police line-up, that of course the witnesses would point to him, dressed in a shabby T-shirt with a black-eye and unkempt appearance. He stood out like a sore thumb. Howard Brennan, the only witness to claim he could identify Oswald as the sniper, claims he saw Oswald in the shadows, through a window pane, six floors up, and from across the street. Brennan wrongly described the sniper as standing at the window (when the shooter had to be kneeling to clear the closed window). So not surprisingly, Brennan failed to I.D. him in the first line-up--despite seeing the efforts by law enforcement to "sore thumb" Oswald.
The problematic evidence continues with every detail: the bag that Oswald allegedly used to smuggle the rifle into the building was not large enough to envelop the rifle --even disassembled-- nor would it have fit under his armpit, as a witness described Lee carrying it that morning. No prints of any kind were found on the rifle until it had been spirited away to Washington by a complicit FBI, and no one explained why only one print (Oswald's palm) was found later (remember, no gloves were found on Oswald or anywhere he'd been... it is impossible to assemble that rifle without putting fingerprints all over it). Tests failed to show any gunfire residue on Oswald's cheek, another impossibility if he had fired the telescopic rifle. There were serious problems with identification and provenance of the bullet/shell casings at both crime scenes. There are problems with the records: no police tapes or transcripts (just a few notes) were kept of Oswald's hours of interrogation; records for the Post Office box where the guns were shipped were "lost"; autopsy notes were burned; a note from Oswald to FBI days before the assassination was destroyed by FBI Agent James Hosty; thousands of CIA documents were hidden or heavily redacted, and CIA tapes (allegedly) of Oswald in Mexico were erased.
A long list of highly-suspect actions (and inactions) by the Secret Service before and during the crime also continued after the crime: illegal removal of JFK's body from Texas; cleaning the limo (a crime scene) before it was forensically examined; dry-cleaning Governor Connally's clothes before they were examined, etc. Evidence and film from the autopsy (JFK's brain, skull fragments and photos) are missing.
Back to the rifle: the scope was misaligned and the gun could not be fired fast enough to allow for the separate shots that hit JFK, Connally, and bystander James Tague. To work around that case-destroying problem, the Commission invented (without any evidence to warrant it) the so-called Single Bullet Theory. We call it the Magic Bullet, because none of the angles work without magical turns.* Dr. Cyril Wecht, past President of the American Academy of Forensic Science and a top forensic expert, deemed the Single Bullet Theory "impossible." No wonder that then-Commissioner Gerald Ford fudged the wording in the WC's report about the location of the bullet's entry into JFK's back. Correct placement of the back wound and front throat wound prove the shot could not have come angling down from the sixth floor.
Given space, I could continue to list a thousand highly-questionable aspects of this case. In any murder trial, we can expect some mistaken eye-witnesses, some unanswered questions, and even some botched or incomplete evidence gathering... but not in every single aspect of the case.
It took author Vincent Bugliosi 1,500 pages to try to explain away the hundreds of problems with the case against Oswald. He failed. Half of his case is based on opinion and exaggeration, and the other half presumes a false "straw man" argument: that conspiracy buffs claim Oswald was a shooter, or that he was completely uninvolved. Neither is the case; what we are claiming is that Oswald was involved, but only as a framed patsy who thought he had a future as an undercover agent. That is the only scenario that explains his history and actions. Overwhelming evidence shows Oswald had ties to the FBI and CIA and yearned to be, like Jethro Bodine, a "double-naught spy." Oswald's ties to Guy Bannister (FBI and Naval Intelligence) and David Ferrie (CIA) have now been proven. In addition to a photo showing David Ferrie and Oswald together, I have new, never-published testimony from the son of an Eastern Airlines pilot from New Orleans who worked with Ferrie and saw him with Oswald. Oswald's adult life intersected the intelligence community at every point.
4. The eyes and ears closest to the incident almost all agree that the final, fatal shot came from in front. Many "ear-witnesses" in Dealey Plaza heard shots from the Texas School Book Depository behind JFK--not surprising, since much larger crowds had gathered nearer the building than at the tail end of the route, where the final shot made impact. But a large number heard shots from the Grassy Knoll in front of the President (or from both directions). Some even saw gun-smoke and smelled gunpowder at that location. Fresh footprints were found behind the fence where the witnesses saw smoke and a "flash of light."
The Warren Commission's explanation of "echoes" does not explain away the strong testimonies of eyes, ears and noses. Scores of people followed a half-dozen policemen up the knoll to chase a suspected gunman behind the fence, leading to the railway yard" this is on film. I've been to Dallas, and the Grassy Knoll is a far superior "sniper's nest" than the one on the sixth floor of the Depository: hidden behind a fence and the shadow of trees, the "second gunman" had a perfect angle slightly above the roadway, three times closer and a less obtuse angle than from where Oswald was purported to be crouched. The fenced area allowed for an instant getaway by car or through the rail-yard--and that area had been cleared of bystanders by a man with a badge, an agent or officer that we now know was an impostor. To recap over fifty witnesses heard a shot(s) from the Grassy Knoll area, half of whom were well-experienced with gunfire... so this is the first and only murder case to dismiss fifty witnesses as "unreliable" or "not credible."
5. Several investigations --huge efforts by the government-- not only failed to explain the many inconsistencies in evidence, they also abetted the cover-up. When journalists or debunkers claim, "the government had three investigations and found nothing," they are either ignorant of the full story... or they lie. Let's remember that the first investigations were by the Dallas law enforcement and the FBI (not the Warren Commission). The result? Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry concluded there was a conspiracy, and stated, "We don't have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody's yet been able to put him in the building with a gun in his hand." His initial order--the first law enforcement response to the shooting--was a radio command to send officers up the hill at the Triple Underpass/Grassy Knoll. Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig was convinced there was a conspiracy. Two FBI agents, James Sibert and Frank O'Neil, who attended the autopsy, are on record saying the (altered) autopsy photos do not match the wounds they saw in person. Sibert has publicly condemned the Warren Commission and insists there was a conspiracy. Even FBI Director Hoover, an ally to LBJ, is on record speaking of the Oswald impostor (which, by definition, indicates another conspirator). As for the Warren Commission, whole books have been written exposing it as error-ridden propaganda. Congressman Hale Boggs, one of the Commissioners, reluctantly signed off on the final report under pressure from LBJ, but later told people privately he could not accept the "Magic Bullet Theory." Boggs told friends that "Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission," but then Boggs' plane mysteriously disappeared in Alaska, silencing his dissent.7 Likewise, another Commissioner, Senator Richard Russell, later denounced the Commission's no-conspiracy conclusion, saying, "we have not been told the truth about Oswald."
The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was also a politically-manipulated cover-up. Several high-level attorney-staffers, and its Chairman, resigned from the HSCA, in protest of yet another government whitewash. Robert K. Tanenbaum, an early Deputy Chief Counsel for the HSCA, stated, "They played politics with our investigation and subverted it." Then came the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which was not a new investigation but a thorough review of records by an independent board (with the aid of the National Archives). If you read their report, you will find repeatedly words like "mystery" and "vexing" to describe inconsistencies in the record and their frustration with the CIA's refusal to produce non-redacted documents. One ARRB board member, Douglas Horne, released his own five-volume report on what he learned from the experience. He became absolutely convinced JFK was killed by a conspiracy involving LBJ, Hoover, and the CIA. Horne concluded in his book, (Inside the AARB, p. 1467) that "the intelligence community... actually planned and carried out the assassination...." So, contrary to the debunkers' claims: all the government investigations, beneath the veneer of their propagandized conclusions, found evidence of conspiracy.
Why this is still relevant: The fact that no one has ever gone to prison for the assassination is a product of a continued CIA cover-up and propaganda campaign. The Senate "Church Committee" investigated the CIA in the mid-seventies and learned that the spy agency had indeed been involved in political assassinations (of Latin American leaders). The Church Committee also discovered that the CIA regularly spent hundreds of millions of dollars on propaganda, mainly by infiltrating media outlets, releasing disinformation, or bribing journalists. Foreign and domestic. This practice continues unabated. In 1999, William Schapp testified that, "About a third of the whole CIA budget went to media propaganda operations... close to a billion dollars are being spent every year... on propaganda." Carl Bernstein, Jack Anderson, and other award-winning journalists have reported how the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME/Life, Newsweek and others have been in league with the CIA. Some of the failure of mainstream media to lift the veil from the JFK assassination is a function of ego, of being unwilling to admit their own failures at investigative journalism. But, without a doubt, part of the cover-up is the product of CIA influence and intimidation. That means we are no longer a true democracy. There was a coup d'état in 1963, and now there continues to be a massive cover-up in the media. But it is less scary to just dismiss me and my "ilk" (ilk meaning attorneys, doctors, law enforcement experts, and PhD's and ministers) as kooks; it's far safer to put on a pair of emerald-colored glasses and keep ignoring the Wizard behind the curtain.
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