A few days ago, a WC apologist named John Mytton made the following comment in a reply to me:
So Griffith, instead of sweeping the very depths of the sewers in your search for unqualified anybody's that dispute the official findings of the many qualified Experts of the Warren Commission and the HSCA and etc. etc., perhaps you better start embracing these fine upstanding Pillars of Society who have the words TRUTH and Justice emblazoned as their middle names!
No, I am not kidding. If you think I have misquoted his words, you can read them in their original context in Reply #235 in the thread “LNers Can't Explain the Two Back-of-Head Bullet Fragments.”
Given what we have known just about the Warren Commission (WC) for at least two decades now, it is astounding that anyone would make such a comment. Also, given the many pro-conspiracy findings of the HSCA experts, it is puzzling that anyone would make such a comment.
Let us start with a few of the facts that have come to light about the WC and its members:
-- The driving force on the WC was former CIA director Allen Dulles. This was the same Allen Dulles who ordered and/or directed the assassination of several democratically elected foreign leaders while serving as CIA Director in the 1950s and early 1960s.
JFK fired Dulles in autumn 1961 largely because Dulles had egregiously misled JFK about the Bay of Pigs invasion. Dulles privately made no secret of his intense dislike of JFK.
Dulles showed up at the WC’s first meeting and handed out a book that argued that all previous assassination attempts against U.S. presidents had not involved conspiracies (apparently forgetting that in 1865 the U.S. Government officially found that Abraham Lincoln was killed by a conspiracy and that the government prosecuted and executed several of the alleged conspirators).
Dulles withheld vital information from the WC, such as the CIA’s working relationship with the Mafia, the CIA’s assassination of democratically elected foreign leaders, the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the CIA’s frightening mind-control program.
He was hardly a “pillar of society.”
-- Another major player on the WC was John McCloy. McCloy was an anti-Semite who shared a box with Adolf Hitler at the Berlin Olympics. During World War II, McCloy used his position as Assistant Secretary of War to veto requests to bomb the rail lines leading to the Nazi death camps, offering the obscene and utterly bogus excuse that such air operations were “impractical” because they would require “the diversion of considerable air support” and would be of “doubtful efficacy” even if they were carried out.
McCloy was the driving force behind, and was primarily responsible for, the illegal internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans during the war. FDR and SOW Stimson delegated the matter to McCloy, and McCloy decided, against all evidence to the contrary, that internment was justified and necessary. One of the tragic results of this unconstitutional action was that thousands of Japanese Americans were unable to regain ownership of their homes and other property after the war.
After the war, McCloy played a key role in pardoning, coddling, and hiring convicted German war criminals. The details of McCloy’s disgraceful conduct in this regard have been documented by several historians, especially by historian Dr. Kai Bird in his book
The Chairman: John McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment (Simon & Schuster, 1992).
Is this anyone’s idea of a “pillar of society”? Or, are we to believe that the WC's experts were pillars of society but that the WC members themselves were not?
-- We now know that three of the seven members of the WC—Senator Cooper, Senator Russell, and Congressman Boggs—rejected or harbored strong doubts about the single-bullet theory (SBT) and the claim that Oswald had no accomplices. Cooper and Russell outright rejected the SBT and the no-conspiracy scenario, while Boggs had strong doubts about them.
Russell was so adamant in his rejection of the SBT and the no-conspiracy claim that he forced a special meeting of the WC to vent his views and demand that a dissenting opinion be included in the final report. At the meeting, he was promised that his dissent would be noted in the Commission’s report, but the Commission broke this promise and said nothing about Russell’s dissent in the report.
This means that 29% of the WC rejected its two key findings (Russell and Cooper), and that 43% rejected or doubted those findings (Russell, Cooper, and Boggs).
-- We have known for many years that several of the experts consulted by the WC rejected the SBT, including Dr. Joseph Dolce, who was the U.S. Army's chief wound ballistics expert, and Dr. Robert Shaw, who was the surgeon who operated on Governor Connally's chest wounds. We have also known for years that the SBT was cooked up because the WC's experts recognized that the Zapruder film shows that the non-fatal wounds of JFK and Connally occurred too closely in time to have been caused by a single gunman firing two shots. We have further known for years that the WC's experts recognized that the Zapruder film shows JFK's movements becoming jerky/irregular before Z207.
-- Since the WC first presented the lone-gunman theory, its defenders have been forced to disregard major aspects of it and to change it in the face of contrary evidence. Some examples:
They’ve gone back and forth about whether the first shot or the second shot was the miss. They’ve offered wildly conflicting theories to explain the Tague curb strike and wound. They’ve had to move JFK’s back wound down by at least 1 inch, yet magically the SBT still “worked,” even though for years they insisted the bullet traveled
downward from the “back” wound to the throat wound. For years they awkwardly had to move the rear head entry wound up by a whopping 10 cm, even though this made the autopsy doctors look like complete idiots, yet now many WC apologists realize that the proposed higher entry site, the cowlick site, is bogus. For years, they claimed that JFK’s shirt and coat bunched up so much that they covered the collar, but, faced with clear photographic evidence that JFK’s collar remained visible, they shifted to claiming that the coat and shirt magically bunched in a perpendicular manner, i.e., straight upward from the surface, and did not cover the collar. Etc., etc., etc.
Now let us turn to the HSCA and its experts.
The HSCA officially concluded that JFK was probably killed by a conspiracy, that there were two gunmen, that there were four shots, that a shot was fired from the grassy knoll, that Ruby had extensive Mafia ties, that Ruby lied about how he entered the police basement, that Ruby probably had help getting into the police basement, that Ruby lied about why he shot Oswald, that Ruby lied about the reason for some of his many phone calls to Mafia contacts in the months leading up to the assassination, that Silvia Odio’s account was credible, and that some individual Mafia leaders and anti-Castro Cubans may have been involved in JFK’s death, among other conclusions.
However, as all credible scholars recognize, the HSCA is a mixed bag, and the HSCA experts were “a house divided.”
-- The HSCA supported the SBT (although a very different version than the WC's version), identified Oswald as one of the gunman, and accepted the backyard rifle photos and the autopsy materials as genuine. The HSCA also supported the WC's claim that Oswald shot Tippit.
-- Some HSCA experts were apparently unaware of the findings of other HSCA experts, while some HSCA experts simply disregarded the findings of other experts (in some cases, even the findings of their own expert consultants--this was especially true of the Forensic Pathology Panel, thanks to the machinations of Dr. Michael Baden and Dr. James Weston).
We now know that Dr. Baden egregiously distorted evidence, suppressed or ignored contrary evidence, and even misrepresented what some of the consulting experts concluded. This was not the last time that Baden would engage in unethical conduct. Questions and complaints about his competency and conduct have dogged him throughout his career. He hardly behaved like a "pillar of society" as FPP chairman.
-- The actual members of the HSCA, i.e., the 12 Congressmen who constituted the Select Committee, voted 9-3 for the findings of a probable conspiracy, four shots, a grassy knoll gunman, a non-fatal hit on JFK just before Z190 (which destroys the Z224 SBT), the acoustical evidence, Ruby’s Mafia ties, the rejection of Ruby’s story of how he entered the basement and why he shot Oswald, etc., etc.
-- We’ve known for years that the HSCA’s Oswald-Mexico City investigators, Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway, became firmly convinced that someone was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City in the fall of 1963.
-- The HSCA experts made a number of findings that destroy the lone-gunman theory. Some examples:
The HSCA’s photographic experts acknowledged that the Zapruder film shows that JFK was hit at or before Z190. The admission of the Z186-190 hit was historic because the sixth-floor gunman’s view of JFK was obstructed by the oak tree during those frames.
The HSCA’s photographic experts also determined that the autopsy photos could not have been taken with the alleged autopsy camera and its accompanying lens.
The FPP acknowledged that the back wound was at least 1 inch lower than where the WC placed it.
The FPP acknowledged that the bullet struck the back at an upward trajectory, that the tunneling inside the wound indicated that the bullet traveled upward after it entered the back, and that there was cortical damage to the brain not described in the autopsy report. This confirmed the 1975 finding of Dr. Werner Spitz of the Rockefeller Commission’s medical panel:
There is no doubt that the bullet which struck the President’s back penetrated the skin in a sharply upward direction, as is evident from the width of the abrasion at the lower half of the bullet wound of entrance. The term ‘sharply upward direction’ is used because it is evident from this injury that the missile traveled upwards within the body. (Report of Werner Spitz, 4/24/75, p 1, Rockefeller Commission papers, see https://websites.umich.edu/~ahaq/correspondence.pdf)
The FPP’s consulting forensic anthropologist, Dr. Lawrence Angel, determined that the triangular skull fragment is frontal bone and that there was a gap between the missing frontal bone and the missing parietal bone.
One of the FPP’s consulting radiologists, Dr. David O. Davis, recognized that the high fragment trail is actually 5 cm
above the proposed cowlick entry site and that it ranges
downward from its highest point in the back half of the skull.
Another one of the FPP’s consulting radiologists, Dr. Gerald McDonnel, detected a previously unknown bullet fragment to the left of the 6.5 mm object 1 cm below the alleged cowlick entry site and lodged in between the galea and the outer table. This was a stunning discovery that provided further evidence that the ammo that hit JFK’s head was not FMJ ammo. The HSCA FPP acknowledged the McDonnel fragment but made no effort to explain how in the world it could have gotten on the back of the head and 1 cm below and to the left of the 6.5 mm object.
Thanks to John Hunt’s research, we also know that Dr. McDonnel disagreed with the FPP majority regarding what the skull fractures indicated about the direction of the shot.
The HSCA’s wound ballistics consultant, Dr. Larry Sturdivan, to his great credit, told the HSCA that the jet-effect theory was impossible as an explanation for the headshot sequence seen in the Zapruder film (Z313-318). (Sadly, Dr. Sturdivan floated the equally absurd neuromuscular-reaction theory to explain JFK’s violent backward motion, which he pretended to support with an irrelevant film of a goat reacting to a headshot—anyone can watch the film and see that the goat’s reaction bears no resemblance to JFK’s headshot reaction.)
The HSCA’s six acoustical experts determined that the Dallas police recording from an open microphone on one of the police motorcycles contained at least four gunshot impulses of shots that were fired in Dealey Plaza during the shooting.
The HSCA’s polygraph experts determined that the GSR responses in Jack Ruby’s polygraph contradicted the FBI’s claim that Ruby told the truth when he answered No when he was asked if he was involved in the assassination.
-- Two of the dissenting HSCA members, Edgar and Sawyer, created the myth that the Committee’s final report was drastically revised at the last minute because of Weiss and Aschkenasy’s acoustical findings (which confirmed and clarified the BBN acoustical findings). To this day, WC apologists repeat this myth, even though the HSCA’s chief counsel, forcefully refuted it in several interviews following the release of the HSCA’s final report.
Blakey explained that the draft to which Edgar and Sawyer referred, and which David Belin and other WC apologists cited, was not the intended final draft of the report but “a contingency draft written by the staff, never reviewed by the Committee and of no significance” and that it was later rejected by most of the Committee members when it was presented to them. See, for example, Blakey’s debate with Belin on William Buckley’s show
Firing Line:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1siKlkeCfx8 (from about 23:00 through 28:00).
