(Edited to correct brain fart pointed out by DVP)
An individual on my dreaded Not Worth My Time (NWMT) list has chimed in with what we shall call the Tomlinson Deflection (or the Wright Deflection, as the case may be). Not content with my entirely CT-oriented stipulations, he has added the wrinkle that CE 399 was not planted at Parkland at all. At Parkland, employee Tomlinson actually found a pointy-headed .30 caliber bullet that he showed to employee Wright and that Wright gave to SS agent Johnsen. Ergo, CE 399 was fabricated by the conspirators at a later stage. (According to he who is NWMT, the pointy-headed bullet might have been evidence of a second gunman or even entirely unrelated to the JFKA – i.e., just a bullet from some other shooting. In either case, CE 399 was fabricated outside of Parkland.)
The Tomlinson Deflection is, of course, old news, dating back at least to Tink Thompson’s
Six Seconds in Dallas (I have a signed copy!). See
https://history-matters.com/essays/frameup/EvenMoreMagical/EvenMoreMagical.htm.
When Tink met with Wright in 1966, the latter said the found bullet was pointy-headed. This in itself seems problematical, since it would suggest the found bullet was pretty much as pristine as CE 399! Somewhat weirdly, or so it seems to me, Wright pulled a pointy-headed .30 caliber bullet out of his desk drawer as an example of what the found bullet had looked like! Oh, well, life is full of these little incongruities.
He who is NWMT accuses me of “making a lot of assumptions” whereas I was really only making entirely CT-oriented stipulations for the sake of discussion. Dissatisfied with my stipulations, he who is NWMT now assumes that (1) in his brief handling of the found bullet, Wright formed a sufficiently distinct image to speak confidently in 1966, and (2) when both Tomlinson and Wright said they could not identify CE 399 as the bullet found at Parkland, they did not simply mean “because we have no way of knowing if this is actually the same bullet” but rather “it looks nothing like the bullet we found” (an assumption Thompson also makes). Alternatively, everything Tomlinson and Wright said was true because Tomlinson actually did find a pointy-headed bullet and CE 399 never was at Parkland.
These seem to me like rather critical and dubious assumptions. My guess would be that Wright simply had a failure of recollection, perhaps due to seeing that pointy-headed bullet in his desk drawer day after day, but let’s play along and stipulate that Tomlinson actually found an intact, pointy-headed, .30 caliber bullet and not CE 399. (FWIW, a .30 caliber bullet is a mere 0.044” larger in diameter than a 6.5 bullet.)
The scenario then is: Pointy-headed bullet is found by Tomlinson and shown to Wright, Johnsen or someone else realizes it can’t have come from Oswald’s rifle but could be useful if the found-at-Parkland scenario is made to fit a bullet that did come from Oswald’s rifle, someone fires Oswald’s rifle into a tank of water or cotton wool to generate CE 399, the pointy-headed bullet is made to disappear, a chain of custody for CE 399 is fabricated, the SBT is formulated, and all is well in Conspiracy Land.
Sound good to you, my fellow epistemologically oriented CTers?
1. Knowing Tomlinson and Wright have found and handled a pointy-headed bullet that looks entirely different from CE 399, the conspirators nevertheless adopt Tomlinson and Wright as the linchpins of a CE 399-was-found-at-Parkland scenario and yet leave them free to say CE 399 doesn’t look like the bullet they found? Why do the conspirators do this, why do they run these seemingly insane risks? Who decided this seemed like a good plan?
2. Why do the conspirators need Tomlinson and Wright at all? Why don’t they just say the Tomlinson bullet was unrelated to the JFKA and have a SS agent (Landis!) say CE 399 was found in the limo or fell out of Connally’s pants? How does the Tomlinson-Wright scenario make anything better?
3. Why do the conspirators need CE 399 at all? What does it add to the Lone Nut narrative? Why do they need another bullet from Oswald’s rifle? How do they know how many fragments may eventually be found in the limo or elsewhere in Dealey Plaza? What if CE 399 turns out to make things far worse?
4. Why do the conspirators fire CE 399 into a tank of water or cotton wool? Since they have the luxury of time, why do they generate a bullet as problematical as CE 399? Why not fire into a dead cow or even a cadaver? Fire ten bullets until one looks "just right."
5. Is CE 399 somehow critical to the SBT? Why? Isn’t it more of a problem for the SBT than a help? Had the SBT been formulated at this early date, long before it was even a gleam in Specter’s eye?
6. Why create a chain of custody for CE 399 that includes Tomlinson and Wright at all? Just establish a chain of custody for the pointy-headed bullet and say it turned out to be unrelated to the JFKA. Even if we ignore Tomlinson and Wright, the chain of custody for CE 399 is problematical anyway (as Thompson pointed out). Why would there be
any flaws in the chain of custody if CE 399 had been created outside of Parkland? The conspirators couldn’t even get
that right?
This just goes nowhere – does it, my fellow CTers? It’s just ad hoc to the 32nd degree, isn’t it? We can do better than this – can’t we?
