JFK at the Fringe of Reason
Pseudoscience and Pseudohistory in the John F.
Kennedy Assassination
by David Reitzes
The November 22, 1963, assassination of President
John F. Kennedy occupies an almost absurdly controversial place in American
culture. The vast majority of criminal investigators and forensics experts who
investigated the case and have studied it in the decades since agree that the
evidence points conclusively to a lone assassin.
BK:
Totally untrue. The vast majority of independent criminal investigators who
have investigated the case – Bill Turner, Sylvia Meagher, Mary Ferrell, Mae
Brussell, Joshia Thompson, Harold Weisberg, Bud Festerwald, Jim Lesar and many
others- certainly the vast majority of those who have studied the case in
detail have concluded Oswald didn’t do it or didn’t do it alone. Most of the
forensic experts won’t touch the case or when they begin to look at the
forensics determine that the chain of evidence has been broken in almost every
case. Only well funded shyster lawyers like Posner the Plagerist and the Bug
fall for the patsy, as they are paid to do.
The President was struck by two bullets fired from
above and behind him; the bullets were identified as having been fired from the
rifle owned by Lee Harvey Oswald, to the exclusion of all other weapons. Three
spent cartridges found inside a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository,
overlooking the assassination site, were proved to have been fired from
Oswald's rifle. Oswald was employed in the building as a laborer, and was
inside without an alibi when the shots were fired.(1)
BK:
Yes, he was in the building but not on the Sixth Floor when the shots were
fired. The above facts would be incriminating if you ignore other questions
that you can’t answer – why did Oswald order the rifle through the mail under an
alias traced only to him when he could have bought a better rifle two blocks
for Dealey Plaza without any record of the sale? How did the rifle get in the
building? Where did the bullets come from? Did Oswald practice with that rifle
and scope as his brother said he would have had to? How come every eyeball
witness said the Sixth Floor sniper wore a white shirt when Oswald wore a brown
one? Who was the other man in a brown sports coat that witnesses saw on the
Sixth Floor before the shooting and what happened to him? If Oswald was the
Sixth Floor sniper how did he get past four people on the stairs without them
seeing him? How come Roy Truly didn’t see Oswald go through the lunchroom door as
he came up the stairs to the second floor landing when Baker behind him saw
Oswald through the closed door window? Who was the man in the Sixth Floor
window moving boxes around four minutes after the shooting when Oswald was
positively on the second floor?
Criminal investigators, scientists, historians, and
journalists commonly dismiss JFK conspiracy theories as no more worthy of
consideration than, say, "9/11 Truth" theories alleging U.S.
government complicity in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
BK:
Absolutly not true – that is an attempt to marginalize the vast majority of
those who seriously study the assassination with the True Believers of the 911
Truth movement, who I don’t agree with.
In professional and academic circles, many equate Kennedy
conspiracy theories with such pseudoscientific or paranormal beliefs as
extraterrestrial visitations, alien abductions, hauntings, and extrasensory
perception (ESP). From this point of view, JFK conspiracy theories are at best
a distraction, and at worst, potentially misleading and corrosive.(2)
BK:
In real professional and academic circles they keep an open mind to all new
knowledge about the assassination, only in small minds like David Reitzes do
they try to equate a serious CSI murder case with UFOs and the paranormal. Dave
should hang around in professional and academic circles more often and he might
learn something. JFK conspiracy theories may be a distraction, but not an
excuse not to conduct a serious CSI investigation of the murder, one that
recognizes Oswald was set up as a patsy and whatever you believe happened at
Dealey Plaza was a covert intelligence operation and not the actions of a
deranged lone nut.
Yet polls consistently show that the vast majority
of Americans believe the assassination of JFK was the work of a conspiracy. A
2003 ABC News poll found that only 32 percent of American adults believe Lee
Harvey Oswald acted alone in Kennedy's murder, 51 percent believe there was a
second shooter, and more than two-thirds believe there was a government
cover-up.(3) A
2004 FOX News poll determined that 74 percent of Americans believe there was a
cover-up, and a 2006 Scripps poll found that 40 percent of American adults
consider it either "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that
U.S. officials were directly involved in the President's death.(4) A
2003 Gallup poll found that 34 percent of the population believes that our own
Central Intelligence Agency was involved in Kennedy's demise.(5)
Which side is right?
BK:
Why do you only present two sides? When there are many more possibilities?
How can we be so certain that there is no validity
to the idea that John Kennedy was overthrown by what filmmaker Oliver Stone
termed, in his blockbuster 1991 film JFK, a coup d'etat?(6)
BK:
Because there is validity to it. Read Ed Lutwak’s book “Coup d’etat – A
Practical Handbook” to see how they did it.
After all, conspiracies do happen, sometimes even at
the highest levels of our government, the Watergate scandal being an obvious
and uncontested example — albeit "a rather pitiful botched
conspiracy," in the words of one commentator.(7)
The common denominator between the coup d'etat
paradigm of the JFK assassination and the realm of pseudohistory,
pseudoscience, and the paranormal is methodology.
BK:
No its not, the common denominator between the coup paradigm of the JFK
assassination and the realm of pseudohistory et al., is to ignore the realm of
pseudohyistory et al., and conduct a real criminal intelligence investigation
of the assassination.
Michael Shermer, prolific author and publisher
of Skeptic magazine, defines pseudohistory as historical claims advanced
"without supporting evidence and plausibility and presented primarily for
political or ideological purposes."(8) (Holocaust
denial, for example, is a widely accepted example of pseudohistory.)(9)
BK:
The Real Skeptics are those who are critical of the official Warren Commission
theory that the assassination was the work of one person, which the vast
majority of people consider what Shermer calls “pseudohistory.”
How do we judge what is history and what is not?
"The key," Shermer observes, "is the ability to test one's
hypothesis."(10)
BK:
So why not test your hypothesis? Recreate the assassination so it can be shown
how one man alone accomplished it? Where did the bullets come from? How did the
rifle get into the building? How did Oswald get past four people on the stairs
without them seeing him? How did he get past Truly on the second floor, but not
Baker? How did he get out of the building without Brenner seeing him? How did
Oswald kill JFK alone? That’s one hypothesis that has yet to be tested.
Unfortunately, in the case of the conspiracy
theorists, the axiom known as Occam's Razor or the law of parsimony — the
principle that the theory that involves the least number of assumptions is
probably the correct one — seems to have been supplanted by what we might call
Garrison's Dictum, after onetime New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison,
who led a tragically misguided farce of an investigation into the JFK
assassination in the late 1960s, and (ironically) became the inspiration for
Oliver Stone's movie. Garrison told the world, "The key to the whole case
is through the looking glass. Black is white and white is black. I don't want
to be cryptic, but that's the way it is."(11)
BK:
Unfortunately it wasn’t Garrison that made it black and cryptic, it was Oswald,
the primary suspect who fits the Covert Operational Personality (COP) profile
of one who is trained in the black arts of intelligence and utilizes them in
the course of secret operations, as Allen Dulles details in his book “The
Crafts of Intelligence.”
Shermer notes that scientists strive for objectivity
("basing conclusions on external validation") and avoid mysticism
("basing conclusions on personal insights that elude external
validation").(12) That's
not the way conspiracy theorists seem to think. A statement Jim Garrison made
in 1969 offers some insight into the conspiracy-oriented mindset:
You see, most people don't realize we're living in a
totalitarian state. Most citizens of this country live — we live — in the world
thatappears to be, while those in power live in the world
that is. . . . Especially those hiding behind the intangibles of
power in the government and the military complex and the CIA. When you
recognize and deal with the intelligence apparatus in this country, you're
encountering the world that is.(13)
BK:
When Garrison spoke those words we had yet to hear of Watergate or the National
Security State that now exists. Garrison may not have been right about Clay
Shaw, but he was a prophet on the rise of state security.
Many of the Kennedy conspiracy theories seem to flow
from this premise. When inevitable anomalies arise in the evidence, the
simplest solution (human fallibility) is brushed aside in favor of sinister,
more complex scenarios involving shadowy government agents and operations.
For example, contradictory descriptions of the
President's wounds lead to theories of forged autopsy reports, forged
photographs and X-rays, and even the wounds themselves being altered or another
body substituted for autopsy.(14)
BK:
Autopsy photographers didn’t recognize their own photos and took more than are
now on record. What are we to make of that fact?
Disparate recollections of the official examination
of the President's brain lead to a theory of two separate examinations of two
separate brains.(15)
BK:
The autopsy doctors wrote reports on two separate brain exams, one that
included a photo of a brain in a formula that a forensic doctor said was the
color of a brain that had been in the formula for weeks before the
assassination and therefore couldn’t have been JFK’s brain. Explain that.
Divergent descriptions of Lee Harvey Oswald
throughout his life lead to scenarios concerning CIA Oswald imposters.(16)
BK:
Yes. Look closely at the more than a dozen times someone intentionally
impersonated Oswald. What was that all about if Oswald wasn’t framed as the
patsy? They are not all cases of mistaken identity, and in some cases the
impersonator has been positively identified (as either Michael Paine or Larry
Crafard).
In his book, Why People Believe Weird
Things, Michael Shermer has isolated some of the most common problems with
pseudoscientific thinking. With some qualification, these problems apply to
pseudohistory in general and Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories in
particular. Let's examine some cases in point.
"Anecdotes Do Not Make a Science"(17)
BK;
So is that how you get into Skeptic magazine, quote the editor? Why do people
believe weird things such as one person alone killed the president?
Eyewitness accounts can enrich the historical record
and fill in gaps where hard evidence is inadequate or inapplicable, but they
cannot, in and of themselves, supplant or invalidate hard evidence.
Conspiracy theorists commonly express the opposite
view. For example, author Harrison Edward Livingstone (High
Treason) writes that "if a group of doctors all say that they saw a
certain type of wound, and there is no credible evidence to controvert it,
giving credence to a suspect photograph is a mistake. A contradictory
photograph should be suspicious rather than the statements. Their observation
becomes a fact."(18)
If a number of eyewitnesses describe a wound of exit
towards the back of the President's head, Livingstone says, then "the
photographs and X-rays showing the back of the head [intact] are false and
cannot possibly be correct."(19)
BK:
Livingstone is a conspiracy theorist who believes weird things, like Fester and
Reitzes, but the observations of those who saw a large grapefruit sized hole in
the back of JFK’s head (Parkland doctors, SS Agent Hill) are supported by the
evidence of the Harper Fragment, and cannot be easily dismissed as faulty
eyewitnesses.
Similarly, radiation oncologist David W. Mantik,
M.D., Ph.D., argues:
The legal principle is that eyewitness testimony has
priority over photographs. This principle was turned upside down by the
battalions of lawyers who worked for the House Select Committee on Assassinations
(HSCA) and for the WC [Warren Commission]. For them, against all legal
precedent, the assumption was always the reverse: if the witnesses disagreed
with the official view, it was assumed that they were in error or even lying.
On the other hand, the photographs (and the X-rays, too) were
assumed [sic — see below] to be immutable monuments to truth. In a
real trial, no competent judge would have permitted this illegal approach.(20)
BK: Dr.
Mantik is a responsible and serious critic, unlike the others you are fond of
quoting.
"It is curious," attorney Milton Brener
once observed, "that among the career critics of the [Warren] Commission
there are few who qualify by training or experience as investigators, and fewer
yet whose lives have been spent in the evaluation of evidence."(21) This
lack of training and experience can be detected in the conspiracy theorists'
reliance on eyewitness testimony and handy dismissal of the physical evidence
that contradicts their hypotheses.
BK: How about the training and experience of former Philadelphia DA Richard Sprague, who successfully prosecuted the assassins of the president of the United Mine Workers, and was chief counsel to the HSCA until he was removed for trying to solve the case? How about Robert Tannenbaum, former NYC DA who also believes a conspiracy was behind the assassination of JFK and the removal of Sprague? Joshia Thompson, twenty five year Private Detective who has solved hundreds of cases? What are Dave Reitzes training and experience compared to these guys? Zilch.
Things get even more confusing when people come
forward with strange, unverifiable tales of conspiratorial goings-on.
Journalist James Phelan writes:
There are certain sensational cases that have a
fascination for unstable people and fetch them forth in droves. A classic
example was the "Black Dahlia" mutilation murder of playgirl
Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles. Over the years, dozens of people came forward
and confessed to this crime, which still remains unsolved. Celebrated cases
also attract witnesses who are not psychotic, but who falsely identify key
figures out of faulty memory or a desire to lift themselves out of dull
anonymity into the spotlight. Chief Justice Frankfurter once commented that
eyewitness testimony is the greatest single cause of miscarried justice. In a
sensational case, a careful prosecutor often spends more time winnowing out
false witnesses than he does working with authentic ones.(22)
BK: Yes the eyewitnesses who blame Oswald for being the Sixth Floor Sniper are wrong.
A minor movement of sorts was launched in 1998 with
the publication of Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death
of JFK, edited by James H. Fetzer, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. The book was intended, Fetzer writes,
"to place the investigation of the assassination of JFK on an objective
and scientific foundation."(24)
But not a single "objective and
scientific" contribution to the book ever passed muster with a
peer-reviewed, scientific journal. Instead, the editor decides who qualifies as
an "expert" and what constitutes an "objective and
scientific" study.
In one chapter, historian Ronald F. White, Ph.D.,
offers what might be construed as an explanation of sorts, warning that historical
research published in scientific journals must always be treated with a healthy
dose of skepticism. Scientists simply are not trained in the basics of
historical research and therefore are not likely to be very critical of their
sources. For the study of the Kennedy assassination, gullibility can easily
poison one's research. To make matters worse, the peer review process in
scientific journals becomes distorted when the reviewers, who are themselves
non-historians unfamiliar with the details of the assassination, serve as
referees. Unlike historians who are trained to carefully scrutinize the
authenticity of the primary evidence, scientists and physicians tend to limit
their professional critique to issues of methodology. Therefore, science
journals are notorious for producing bad history.(25)
Historians would do a better job, White suggests,
because they take into account issues important to "assassination
experts," such as eyewitness testimony, hearsay, and lay interpretations
of forensic evidence.(26)
The legacy of this kind of reasoning is a
bewildering array of theories that multiply with each passing year, and no end
in sight.
BK: The number of theories may increase, but as we learn more and more from the once secret files we can narrow down what happened and determine what did happen.
"One unerring mark of the love of truth,"
John Locke wrote in 1690, "is not entertaining any proposition with
greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant."(29) This
thought was echoed by David Hume some decades later: "A wise man
proportions his belief to the evidence."(30)
BK: Yes, and the evidence indicates the man Reitzes accuses of killing JFK was not on the Sixth Floor at the time of the shooting so a wise man would consider that evidence in his evaluation.
BK: Yes, the extraordinary accusation that one man alone killed JFK should tested, but when the SS tried to recreate the assassination if Oswald had done what he is accused of doing, they stopped at the Second Floor Landing and Lunchroom where they realized Oswald was not the shooter.
It makes one wonder what evidence of conspiracy has
been tested so thoroughly and successfully to allow James Fetzer to
categorically state that "anyone sincerely interested in this case who
does not conclude that JFK was murdered as the result of a conspiracy is either
unfamiliar with the evidence or cognitively impaired."(32)
BK: That statement - quote may have been repeated by Fetzer, but it is rather the tag line of another conspiracy theorist, not Fetzer.
Jim Garrison wrote, "For the government and the
major media to have acknowledged what virtually everyone knew (that Kennedy had
been fired at by a number of guns) would have put an end to the sacred pretense
that the President's assassination was a chance occurrence."(34)
But there is nothing "sacred" about the
idea that a lone gunman killed the President; it's simply the conclusion that
flows most logically from the evidence.
BK: But that conclusion does not flow most logically from the evidence, though the theory is sacred to a small minority of people who refuse to consider all of the facts and evidence.
The burden of proof lies with the person making the
extraordinary claim. It is not enough for conspiracy theorists to pick at the
"official" conclusion, as creationists do with the theory of
evolution.(36) As
with evolution, the case for Lee Oswald's guilt is constructed of neatly
interlocking, mutually corroborative pieces of hard evidence.(37) Chipping
away at one facet cannot falsify the whole, nor can this method validate an
hypothesis of conspiracy
BK: The burdon of poof lies with the prosecution who must prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the suspect and accused is guilty, something that no one has done against Oswald.
Perhaps you've heard that Jack Ruby (the strip club
owner who gunned Oswald down during an abortive police transfer two days after
the assassination) was hired by the Mafia to silence the assassin. Or that
Oswald was a secret agent. Or that the President was killed by the CIA, which
he had reportedly threatened to splinter into a thousand pieces after the Bay
of Pigs disaster. Or that the military-industrial complex murdered him to keep
him from withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. Or that the same forces
responsible for JFK's death also took out Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. There is no factual basis for any of these stories.
BK: If you read the HSCA reports on Ruby you see who he was meeting and talking to in the weeks and months before the assassination, and they are most certainly connected mobsters. As for RFK and MLK, they would never have been murdered the way they were if the JFK case was properly investigated and prosecuted.
Michael Shermer observes, "Many people are
overconfident enough to think that if they cannot explain something,
it must be inexplicable . . ."(40) Shermer
is referring to the natural world, but it applies equally well to historical
events.
BK: JFK said that problems (crimes) created by man can be solved by men, and it is not true that the unanswered questions related to his assassination will forever remain a mystery. We have answered many of the questions Reitzes believes are unanswerable.
Conspiracy theorists commonly demand answers to
questions that are impossible to answer conclusively from the available
evidence. For example, if Oswald did it, what was his motive? (We don't know;
he never confessed.)(41)
BK: As any crime investigator knows, Motive is one of the three elements of the crime and without it the crime is not solved. Oswald only had a motive to kill JFK if he did in fact kill him, but if he didn't then what is the motive for the Patsy?
But
if he wanted to become important or famous or to accomplish something for a
political purpose, why didn't he confess? (Fair question, but Oswald's still
not talking.) Why are there discrepancies — sometimes seemingly minor,
sometimes perhaps not — between the many different reports, photographs, and
other items of evidence in the record? (Practically every criminal or
historical case has loose ends or discrepancies. Would it ever be possible to
explain every conceivable detail to every critic's satisfaction?) Just because we don't have explanations for
everything hardly invalidates the evidence we do have.
BK: Not true, as Joshia Thompson, who has worked hundreds of cases, there comes a point where one piece of new evidence or fact is the piece of the puzzle that makes sense of all of the other pieces, and then it all comes together and there are no loose ends, except that didn't happen with Oswald. There is an explanation for everything even if Reitzes doesn't understand it.
One of the key tenets of many conspiracy theories is
that President Kennedy was fatally shot from a patch of land to the President's
right, commonly known as the grassy knoll, not from the Texas School Book
Depository building behind him. One argument frequently advanced in support of
this hypothesis is that eyewitnesses at Parkland Memorial Hospital who
attempted to save the President's life (but did not examine his wounds) tended
to describe an apparent exit wound on or extending into the back of the head,
consistent with a shot from the front. There are ways of testing this
hypothesis.
BK: Just look at the Zapruder film and determine for yourself from what direction the head shot came from.
For example, one can examine the photographs and
X-rays taken at the President's autopsy, as numerous experts have done —
including a panel of nine forensic pathologists retained by the House Select
Committee reinvestigating the assassination in the 1970s — and confirm that the
photographs display a small, beveled wound of entrance on the rear of the
President's head and a large wound of exit on the right side, forward of the
ear. The photos and X-rays show no large defect in the rear.(43)
BK: The Parkland doctors and SS Agent Hill - the closest living witness to the head shot said there was a grapefruit size hole in the back of JFK's head and the Harper Fragment supports those views.
One of the expert pathologists consulted by the
House committee was Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., then coroner of Allegheny County,
Pennsylvania, a nationally prominent expert on forensic pathology, and long one
of the most vociferous critics of the Warren Commission. In 1967 Wecht had
noted the critical importance of the autopsy photos and X-rays (which were
controlled by the Kennedy family and inaccessible to researchers at that time),
stating that the X-rays "might help us decide whether or not the President
was struck more than once in the head."(44)
Given the opportunity to study these materials a
decade later, Dr. Wecht was the only one of the nine-member HSCA Forensic
Pathology Panel who dissented from the conclusion that President Kennedy had
been shot only from the rear. While conceding the evidence for a second head
shot from the President's side to be "Very meager, and the possibility
based upon the existing evidence is extremely remote," Wecht insisted that
the evidence was insufficient for him to rule out the possibility of such a
shot.(45)
BK: Wecht is the foremost forensic pathologist in the nation and if he says there is not enough evidence then there is not enough evidence.
When asked why his eight co-panelists, whom he
agreed were eminently qualified in the field of forensic pathology to render an
expert opinion, would take the position that the original autopsy report's
conclusion of a single head shot from behind was accurate, Wecht speculated
about possible government affiliations that could taint his colleagues'
integrity.(46)
BK: They all worked for the government either directly or through government contracts and pensions. They knew what they were asked to do and who they were working for - the government.
When the photos and X-rays fail to support
their hypotheses, conspiracy theorists commonly assert that some or all of them
must be forgeries. The House committee's panel of expert photographic analysts
subjected the films to careful scrutiny utilizing state-of-the-art methods, and
uncovered no evidence of forgery;(47) but
since the release of the committee's report in 1979, theories postulating
forged evidence have multiplied rather than declined.(48)
BK: Review the HSCA and ARRB testimony of the X-Ray techs who took the x-rays and the autopsy photographers who didn't recognize their work and claimed to use a different type of film. What do you make of that without speculating too much?
It is commonly believed that Jack Ruby killed Oswald
on behalf of the Mafia, but there is no evidence for this. It is often pointed
out, however, that Ruby made several phone calls to Mob-connected individuals
in the months prior to the assassination. Is this evidence that the Mafia
ordered Oswald's murder?(50)
BK: No, but there is evidence that Ruby was connected to the Chicago and New Orleans Mafia families and knew their leaders personally and communicated with them in the weeks and months before the assassination, that was not a mob hit but as Dr. Wecht has classifified it a coup d etat.
"Correlation does not mean causation,"
Michael Shermer reminds us.(51) Just
because one event follows another does not mean they are related. In fact, a
great deal of testimony indicates that the phone calls in question were related
to Ruby's professional grievances with the American Guild of Variety Artists
(AGVA), which represented the strippers he employed at his nightclub. The AGVA
"was riddled with corruption and compromised by its mob connections,"(52) so
anyone dealing with the AGVA could have been rubbing shoulders with the Mob,
whether they realized it or not. There is no evidence that Ruby had any
significant relationship to organized crime or that any of his phone calls or
actions were related to a conspiracy.(53)
"In the paranormal world," Shermer observes,
"coincidences are often seen as deeply significant."(55) By
the same token, coincidences play a vital role in the world of conspiracy
theories.
For example, New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison thought
it highly significant that a phone call was placed in September 1963 from a New
Orleans attorney's office, where an alleged Oswald associate named David Ferrie
(more about whom below) was employed, to a Chicago apartment building where a
woman named Jean Aase (and many other people) lived; Jean Aase would later be
connected to a sporting goods salesman named Lawrence Meyers, who would visit
Texas and socialize with Oswald's assassin Jack Ruby on the evening prior to
JFK's assassination.(56)
BK: That phone call went from G. Ray Gill's New Orleans office to the Chicago hotel where Larry Meyers was, and Meyers then visits Dallas on the weekend of the assassination and associates with Jim Braden who then travels to New Orleans to an office on the same floor next door to Gill's office, a clue that cannot be denied, and not a coincidence.
Political scientist John McAdams writes:
Thus, David Ferrie had a (very tenuous)
"connection" with Oswald, and a tenuous "connection" with
Jean Aase. Aase, in turn, had a real connection with Lawrence Meyers who had a
real connection with Jack Ruby who had a real connection with Lee Oswald: he
shot and killed him.
Given that each of these people had equally close
"connections" with at least dozens, and sometimes hundreds of people,
there had to be hundreds of thousands, and probably millions, of people with as
close a connection to Oswald as Ruby had through Meyers and Aase and Ferrie.(57)
It is Gill the mob attorney and the oil office next door that should be investigated, not Ferrie and Aasie, who I believe are innocent bystanders or like Oswald, patsies.
"We forget most of the insignificant
coincidences and remember the meaningful ones," observes Michael Shermer.
He writes:(59)
We must always remember the larger context in which
a seemingly unusual event occurs, and we must always analyze unusual events for
their representativeness of their class of phenomena.
BK: The class of phenomena we are analyzing is the assassination of a president, not the silly theories that Reitzs wants to discuss endlessly, and mudy the waters with the Bermuda Triangle and UFO Bullshit. That's Reitzes muddy mind confused by silly BS when he should just take a class in logic and reason or CSI.
In the case of the
"Bermuda Triangle," an area of the Atlantic Ocean where ships and
planes "mysteriously" disappear, there is the assumption that
something strange or alien is at work. But we must consider how representative
such events are in that area. Far more shipping lanes run through the Bermuda
Triangle than its surrounding areas, so accidents and mishaps and
disappearances are more likely to happen in the area. As it turns out, the
accident rate is actually lower in the Bermuda Triangle than in
surrounding areas. Perhaps this area should be called the "Non-Bermuda Triangle."(60)
One of the most durable bits of folklore surrounding
the JFK assassination concerns the "mysterious" or
"convenient" deaths of assassination witnesses. In 1967 Penn Jones,
the editor of a small Texas weekly newspaper, publicized a list of eighteen
deaths he claimed were related to the assassination. In a widely reported
blunder, The Sunday Times in London used Jones's list to conclude
that the odds against all eighteen dying within three years of the
assassination were one hundred thousand trillion to one. But
the Times had not taken into account the tremendous number of people
involved with or tangentially related to the Warren Commission investigation
(for example, Jones's list included the cab driver who gave Oswald a ride
shortly after the assassination, journalists who wrote about the case, and the
husband of one of Ruby's strippers), and discovered, after publishing its first
edition, that its calculation of odds was nothing more than "a careless
journalistic mistake."(61)
BK: Forget the strange deaths and just look and investigate the murders and homicides of important witnesses - Oswald, Tippit, Roselli, Giancana, et. al.
In cases involving the paranormal,
BK: The JFK case does not involve the paranormal, except for those who believe Oswald was a magician and could do everything he is accused of by himself.
Shermer
concludes, one "would be well advised to first thoroughly understand the
probable worldly explanation before turning to other-worldly ones."(62) One
should also give full consideration to non-conspiratorial possibilities before
assuming that a conspiracy is required.
Missing Links
Thousands of conspiracy-oriented claims have been
advanced about the Kennedy assassination, but examining them calls to mind
acclaimed astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan's conclusion about his
youthful interest in the extraterrestrial hypothesis of UFOs: "All in all,
the alleged evidence seemed thin — most often devolving into gullibility, hoax,
hallucination, misunderstanding of the natural world, hopes and fears disguised
as evidence, and a craving for attention, fame, and fortune."(63)
On that same subject, Sagan notes:
Everything hinges on the matter of evidence. On so
important a question, the evidence must be airtight. The more we want it to be
true, the more careful we have to be. No witness's say-so is good enough.
People make mistakes. People play practical jokes. People stretch the truth for
money or attention or fame. People occasionally misunderstand what they're
seeing. People sometimes even see things that aren't there.(64)
Other observations of Sagan's regarding belief in
extraterrestrial visitors seem relevant as well:
I've found that the going-in attitude of many people
is highly predetermined. Some are convinced that eyewitness testimony is
reliable, that people do not make things up, that hallucinations or hoaxes on
such a scale are impossible, and that there must be a long-standing, high-level
government conspiracy to keep the truth from the rest of us. Gullibility about
UFOs thrives on widespread mistrust of government, arising naturally enough
from all those circumstances where — in the tension between public well-being
and "national security" — the government lies.(65)
BK: No, the widespread distrust of government stems directly from the Warren Report's Whitewash and not UFOs, that were used by the military to cover the U2 and satellite surveillance technology.
Here Sagan has isolated two causes that apply
equally well to JFK conspiracy believers: belief in the reliability of
eyewitness testimony and mistrust of the government.
With the coming of the Atomic Age and the Cold War,
the U.S. public was vulnerable to fears of threatening technologies and insidious
infiltrators around any corner. With the unexplained death of the President in
1963 followed by growing discontent, both in the domestic and international
arenas, Americans became increasingly prone to conspiracy theories. As Senator
Joseph McCarthy vividly demonstrated in the 1950s, such a climate can be
exploited to devastating effect.
In the right environment and with a little
fortuitous help, pseudoscientific or paranormal movements can catch fire due to
the efforts of as little as a single person. For example, hairy wild men
roaming the Pacific Northwest were little more than a legend until a prankster
named Ray L. Wallace reportedly strapped on some 16-inch, wooden
"feet" in 1958. Thanks to the tracks found at the construction site Wallace
was managing in Humbolt County, California, "Bigfoot" became a
national craze.(66)
BK: Retizes could folow Bigfoot's trail right to Oswald's doorstep.
Writer John A. Keel likewise attributes much of the
credit for the widespread interest in UFOs to Raymond Palmer, whom Keel dubs
"The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers."(67) Ray
Palmer was a science-fiction writer who, as editor of the pulp
magazine Amazing Stories in the 1940s, boosted sales with yarns about
bug-eyed monsters and other visitors from outer space, occasionally decorating
the covers with circular, saucer-like spaceships. Such phenomena, Palmer
strongly suggested, were real.(68)
The Coming of the Saucers
As writer Martin Kottmeyer observes, the term
"flying saucers" came into being in a rather ironic fashion. On June
24, 1947, businessman Kenneth Arnold was piloting his private airplane over
Washington State's Mount Rainier when he saw what he described as a series of nine
somewhat crescent-shaped, flying objects. The way they flew, he said, was
"erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across the water."(69)
The objects Arnold reported "were not
circular" like saucers, he would clarify, but "flying saucers"
is what they were dubbed by the national press. "Soon everyone was looking
for these new aircraft which according to the papers were saucer-like in
shape," Kottmeyer writes. "Within weeks hundreds of reports of these
flying saucers were made across the nation."(70)
In the words of writer Lionel Beer, "Possibly
no one was more surprised by Kenneth Arnold's 1947 story, regarded as the UFO
sighting that triggered off the 'modern era' and certainly gave the phenomenon
its first popular name — flying saucers — than Ray Palmer. Palmer's fiction had
become a reality!"(71)
BK: The association of UFOs to the JFK assassination is much deeper than that and should be explored more throughy, as I have tried to do elsewhere.
The D.A.
By his own account, New Orleans District Attorney
Jim Garrison saw no reason to question the findings of the Warren Commission
when they were announced in 1964. A chance conversation in 1966 sparked his
interest, however, and he launched headlong into a study of the 26 officially
published volumes of evidence and the handful of books that had appeared to
question or attack the commission's findings. Oswald had spent the summer
before the assassination in New Orleans, so Garrison wondered whether there
could be a local angle.(72)
BK: The New Orleans Secret Service were the first to seriously investigate the New Orleans connection, especialy SAIC John W. Rice.
Then, just as Kenneth Arnold's story had ignited the
kindling arranged by Ray Palmer, something happened that forever altered Jim
Garrison's fortunes: David Ferrie died of a stroke. The District Attorney
handily brushed the coroner's verdict aside: "The apparent suicide of
David Ferrie," Garrison declared, "ends the life of a man who, in my
judgment, was one of history's most important individuals." "Evidence
developed by our office has long since confirmed he was involved in events
culminating in the assassination of President Kennedy."(77)
And as the national and international press
descended in droves upon New Orleans, Jim Garrison's pronouncements grew even
bolder. "My staff and I solved the case weeks ago," he proclaimed.
"I wouldn't say this if I didn't have evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt.
We know the key individuals, the cities involved, and how it was done."(78)
In fact, Garrison had absolutely nothing, not even a
live suspect.(79) Except a New Orleans attorney, Dean Adams Andrews, Jr., had
testified to the Warren Commission that he was telephoned the day after the
assassination and asked to fly to Dallas to represent Lee Harvey Oswald by a
mysterious "Clay Bertrand." He would admit under oath in 1969 that
there was no truth to the story, but when Garrison asked him about it in 1966,
Andrews was pleased enough to repeat the tale. He was shocked when Garrison
informed him shortly thereafter that he had identified Bertrand as a prominent
local businessman named Clay Lavergne Shaw. "One, Bertrand is
homosexual," Garrison had told members of his staff — and Shaw was rumored
to be gay. "Two, Bertrand speaks Spanish" (or so Garrison gathered);
Shaw spoke fluent Spanish. "Three, his first name is Clay." Shaw fit
these criteria therefore Shaw was Bertrand.(80)
BK: If you are familiar with the Houma Bunker raid, you will realize that these bozos and Yahoos were not capable of pulling of the Dealey Plaza caper and that it was a much more sophisticated covert intel op that included the psychwar aspect to blame the event on Castro, something that Oswald, Ferre and Shaw were incapabe of doing.
On March 1, 1967, the New Orleans District
Attorney's office arrested Clay Shaw and charged him with conspiracy to
assassinate the President. Though the CIA was one of Garrison's prime suspects,
it was Shaw's homosexuality that the D.A. initially believed to be the key to
the businessman's motive. Shaw, Ferrie, Oswald, and Jack Ruby were all gay,
Garrison claimed to select confidantes; so while the CIA and anti-Castro Cuban
emigrants provided the guerrilla team in Dealey Plaza, it was the kick of a
homosexual "thrill-killing" that attracted his suspect to the plot.
All that remained was to somehow link Shaw to the CIA.(82)
Three days later Paese Sera, a
crypto-Communist, Italian newspaper known for its anti-American slant,
sensationalistic style, and propensity for "imaginative" stories with
"made-up," "synthetical" details, launched a series of
articles linking Clay Shaw to the CIA. Paese Sera would later be
identified as a vehicle for Soviet disinformation, and reputable news media
steered clear of its claims, but other left-leaning newspapers around the world
picked up the story. A March 8 issue of l'Humanité, the official
newspaper of the French Communist Party, came to Garrison's attention, with the
headline: "Clay Shaw a travaillé â Rome pour les services U.S.
d'espionnage" ("Clay Shaw Worked in Rome for U.S.
Intelligence").(83)
BK: Max Holland wrote a lenghly article for the CIA inhouse newsletter that deals with this issue, and the bottom line is Shaw was connected to the CIA, though I don't believe he had anything to do with the Dealey Plaza operation.
There it was in black and white: like Ray Palmer's
flying saucers, Jim Garrison's fantasies were becoming reality.
BK: It is Dave Reitzes fantazies we are dealing with here.
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