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[Joffrey van de Wiel]

Gentlemen,

I have a question regarding the authenticity of the backyard photographs. Marina testified she took the photos on the instructions of, and aided by, her husband. But since she has credibility issues, many people believe she lied about this, as she did on many other occasions, because she was threatened with deportation back to the USSR. This was in 1963-1964.

Yesterday I watched an interview with Marina Oswald-Porter as she is now known - apparently she remarried. In it, she told reporter Jack Anderson that she took the backyard photos. The interview was done in 1988. In a conversation she had with Governor Jesse Ventura for his tv program Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura she reaffirmed this statement, although not directly on camera. Unfortunately I can't find the segment no more and am therefore unable to determine the year it was broadcast, but it was well after the 1988 Jack Anderson program.

So is she still lying? What possible reason could she have? She has reversed many of her past (1963-64) statements and has not been deported as far as I know.

Thanks in advance for your considered reply

[Walt Cakebread]

Gentlemen,

I have a question regarding the authenticity of the backyard photographs. Marina testified she took the photos on the instructions of, and aided by, her husband. But since she has credibility issues, many people believe she lied about this, as she did on many other occasions, because she was threatened with deportation back to the USSR. This was in 1963-1964.

Yesterday I watched an interview with Marina Oswald-Porter as she is now known - apparently she remarried. In it, she told reporter Jack Anderson that she took the backyard photos. The interview was done in 1988. In a conversation she had with Governor Jesse Ventura for his tv program Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura she reaffirmed this statement, although not directly on camera. Unfortunately I can't find the segment no more and am therefore unable to determine the year it was broadcast, but it was well after the 1988 Jack Anderson program.

So is she still lying? What possible reason could she have? She has reversed many of her past (1963-64) statements and has not been deported as far as I know.

Thanks in advance for your considered reply

[Michael T. Griffith]

For now, I am bracketing the issue of the meaning of the "12" that appears after the city and state on the postmark on the envelope to Klein's. I do not buy the theory that it is the number of the cancelling machine that processed it. That makes no sense to me at all, especially since some postmarks show a number-letter instead of just a number, and I don't think any such machines would have ID numbers of 3A, 3B, etc. For that matter, I've never heard of any kind of a machine being given a number/number-letter ID of just two characters.

I have confirmed from USPS sites that when zip codes were implemented in April 1963, they were placed after the city and state in the postmark, so it makes sense to me that postal zones would have been the logical predecessor that was placed after the city and state before then. However, I cannot account for the 2B entry on Johnson Exhibit 17. I finally found a 1963 postal zone chart for Dallas, and it shows no number-letter zones, only numbers. I can imagine a scenario where a large/busy zone was administratively divided into, say, 2A and 2B, but I can't find any evidence of this.

In any case, I think the attempts to explain away Oswald's Jaggars-Stovall timesheet are unconvincing and implausible, given the nature of Oswald's job there and given the WC testimony about Oswald's work environment. I think his timesheet proves he did not buy the money order.

I also think that the evidence that the money order was not cashed is compelling. The idea that any money order in 1963 could have gone through a major bank and the Federal Reserve System and ended up in Virginia without a single stamp/mark/notation that it was cashed is far fetched, just unbelievable.

I think David Josephs has answered all of David Von Pein's arguments regarding the money order. 

The deposit statement that Klein's submitted to the WC to try to establish that the money order had been deposited is not credible and is more evidence of fraud.

Beyond this, if you take a step back and look at this logically, the rifle-purchase evidence is far too pat and far too implausible to take seriously from the outset. Oswald was many things, but he most certainly was not stupid. Yet, we are asked to believe that Oswald was so utterly brain-dead that, instead of just buying a rifle at a local gun store in Dallas, he left a glaring paper trail straight back to himself by ordering a rifle by mail with a postal money order and using a false name, and then shot Kennedy while carrying a fake ID card in the same name he had used to order the rifle and never bothered to discard the fake ID before he was arrested. I mean, come on. . . .

[Tim Nickerson]

For now, I am bracketing the issue of the meaning of the "12" that appears after the city and state on the postmark on the envelope to Klein's. I do not buy the theory that it is the number of the cancelling machine that processed it. That makes no sense to me at all, especially since some postmarks show a number-letter instead of just a number, and I don't think any such machines would have ID numbers of 3A, 3B, etc. For that matter, I've never heard of any kind of a machine being given a number/number-letter ID of just two characters.

I have confirmed from USPS sites that when zip codes were implemented in April 1963, they were placed after the city and state in the postmark, so it makes sense to me that postal zones would have been the logical predecessor that was placed after the city and state before then. However, I cannot account for the 2B entry on Johnson Exhibit 17. I finally found a 1963 postal zone chart for Dallas, and it shows no number-letter zones, only numbers. I can imagine a scenario where a large/busy zone was administratively divided into, say, 2A and 2B, but I can't find any evidence of this.

In any case, I think the attempts to explain away Oswald's Jaggars-Stovall timesheet are unconvincing and implausible, given the nature of Oswald's job there and given the WC testimony about Oswald's work environment. I think his timesheet proves he did not buy the money order.

I also think that the evidence that the money order was not cashed is compelling. The idea that any money order in 1963 could have gone through a major bank and the Federal Reserve System and ended up in Virginia without a single stamp/mark/notation that it was cashed is far fetched, just unbelievable.

I think David Josephs has answered all of David Von Pein's arguments regarding the money order. 

The deposit statement that Klein's submitted to the WC to try to establish that the money order had been deposited is not credible and is more evidence of fraud.

Beyond this, if you take a step back and look at this logically, the rifle-purchase evidence is far too pat and far too implausible to take seriously from the outset. Oswald was many things, but he most certainly was not stupid. Yet, we are asked to believe that Oswald was so utterly brain-dead that, instead of just buying a rifle at a local gun store in Dallas, he left a glaring paper trail straight back to himself by ordering a rifle by mail with a postal money order and using a false name, and then shot Kennedy while carrying a fake ID card in the same name he had used to order the rifle and never bothered to discard the fake ID before he was arrested. I mean, come on. . . .

Oswald's handwriting on the money order proves that he bought it. The money order was cashed, as is evidenced by the File Locator Number on it. David Josephs has done nothing but flop about and present nonsensical arguments, as he always does. You guys don't know how to look at it logically. You never do. Klein's shipped the rifle to Oswald's PO Box. Do you really think that they would have never bothered to cash the money order?

[John Iacoletti]

Oswald's handwriting on the money order proves that he bought it.

No it doesn't.  First of all, you don't have to buy a money order in order to write on it.  Second of all, handwriting "analysis" is unscientific and biased.

Klein's shipped the rifle to Oswald's PO Box.

Too bad you don't have any evidence that such a package ever went through the mail and was delivered there.

Do you really think that they would have never bothered to cash the money order?

You can't even connect the money order found in Virginia to any specific Klein's order.

[Michael T. Griffith]

Gentlemen,

I have a question regarding the authenticity of the backyard photographs. Marina testified she took the photos on the instructions of, and aided by, her husband. But since she has credibility issues, many people believe she lied about this, as she did on many other occasions, because she was threatened with deportation back to the USSR. This was in 1963-1964.

Yesterday I watched an interview with Marina Oswald-Porter as she is now known - apparently she remarried. In it, she told reporter Jack Anderson that she took the backyard photos. The interview was done in 1988. In a conversation she had with Governor Jesse Ventura for his tv program Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura she reaffirmed this statement, although not directly on camera. Unfortunately I can't find the segment no more and am therefore unable to determine the year it was broadcast, but it was well after the 1988 Jack Anderson program.

So is she still lying? What possible reason could she have? She has reversed many of her past (1963-64) statements and has not been deported as far as I know.

Thanks in advance for your considered reply.

Soon after the Secret Service and the FBI started interviewing Marina, they made it clear to her that she would end up back in Russia if she did not "cooperate." This was not an implied threat, but a clearly stated, expressly worded threat. They did not mince words. She clearly feared deportation for many years after the WC concluded.

During the 1980s, she began to insist that her husband was innocent of the assassination. During one of the interviews Marina gave in the 1990s, she was asked about the backyard photos, and she said they were not the pictures she took.

During the WC investigation, Marina was pressured into saying all kinds of incriminating things to corroborate evidence that was later exposed as fraudulent, such as Oswald's alleged attempt to shoot General Walker and his alleged 11/9/1963 letter to the Soviet embassy in DC. The Walker tale has been so thoroughly refuted that there's no need to reinvent the wheel here about it.

As for the phony Oswald letter to the Soviet embassy in DC, we now know that the Soviets concluded that Oswald did not write the letter, that it was faked in his name as part of an effort to plant a phony evidence trail that could be used to implicate Russia in JFK's death. The Soviets noted that the letter was "totally unlike" previous, undisputed letters that they had received from Oswald. Yet, Marina obligingly said, "Oh, yeah, I saw that letter before he mailed it."

Incidentally, the fake 11/9/63 Oswald letter to the DC Soviet embassy also reveals Ruth Paine's role as a CIA asset in helping to frame Oswald, as James Douglass discusses in JFK and the Unspeakable (pp. 319-324). Apparently, the CIA tasked her with coming up with an alternative version of the letter that would be far easier to innocently explain, and the WC uncritically gobbled up her obviously faked version. Paine's fraud was exposed when the actual letter that the Soviets received was made public--her version is markedly different from the letter the Soviets received. But the fact that the Soviets concluded the letter was fake was not revealed until 1999 when Anatoly Dobrynin's report on the letter was released with a bunch of other assassination-related documents.

All of which is to say that it is very hard to believe anything Marina said while there was any chance that she would be deported. I hesitate to judge her because she was a single mom with two kids who was scared to death of being deported back to Russia.

[Joffrey van de Wiel]

[Michael T. Griffith]

[Link to documentary snipped.]

It is too bad that Newsmax was not aware that several of the people whom Posner claimed to have interviewed later said they never spoke with him, including Dr. Boswell, whom Posner falsely quoted as having changed his mind about the location of the rear head entry wound. When Dr. Aguilar spoke with Dr. Boswell and asked him about Posner's claim, not only did Boswell adamantly deny changing his mind about the rear head entry wound but he insisted that he never even spoke with Posner. If Newsmax had known this, I wonder if they would have still included Posner in the documentary.

As usual, Posner makes several claims that have been debunked for years. And I see he repeats his yarn that if there was a grassy knoll gunman, he must have missed the entire limousine. Posner knows that the vast majority of conspiracy theorists do not believe this, but he keeps saying it anyway. It is too bad that the interviewer did not ask Posner about the wild miss that he proposes to explain the Tague wounding: Posner theorizes that his alleged lone-gunman not only fired a shot while his view of the limo was obscured by the oak tree, but that this ridiculous shot hit one of the tree's branches and sent a fragment streaking toward Tague.

Posner felt compelled to offer this theory because he at least recognized that the WC's theory--that a fragment from the head shot caused the Tague wounding--was even more ludicrous (yet we have several lone-gunman theorists in this forum who still defend it).

I was glad to see the documentary mention the fact that we've known for many years that the Kennedy family does not buy the lone-gunman theory. We know from released Soviet files that barely two weeks after the assassination, RFK and Jackie sent a close family friend to tell the Soviets that the Kennedys did not believe the Soviets were involved but that they believed JFK had been killed by a large "right-wing conspiracy."

Overall, this is a reasonably balanced documentary. It is much better than the pure-propaganda documentaries done by PBS and other major networks over the last 10 years.