The rifle Day pulls up from the boxes is no doubt a Mannlicher Carcano.
So, what do you make of Roger Craig's comment that he was stood inches from the rifle when it was given to Fritz and saw "Mauser" stamped on the barrel?
-Excellent gifs by the way
Craig was just a patsy!Ok, just kidding. I have no idea what to make of it, so I just add it to the information that is problematic for the Kennedy case. I think some of his other testimony: the Nash Rambler and the comment reported by Craig that he met with Lee Harvey Oswald and heard him state that the Rambler belonged to Mrs. Paine. Also, his failure to see the rifle bag.
"The most striking inquiries, however, concern the statements in Gemberling's
report by three people whose information the Bureau apparently did not want to
believe: Roger Craig, Arnold Rowland and Albert Bogard (Craig claimed to see
Oswald entering a car at the TSBD shortly after the assassination, Rowland said
he saw a gunman at the southwest 6th floor window of the TSBD, and Bogard
claimed to have witnessed an auto test-drive by the non-driving Oswald.) The
Bureau asked, in effect, that Craig's "reliability" be impugned and that Bogard
be subjected to a lie detector test. To the credit of Dallas FBI, the 12/11
response indicates that in all three cases the men stuck by their stories and
Craig was given an honesty testimonial by Sheriff Decker."
(I found this in a follow-up concerning an article in
The Third Decade, January 1985, "THE PAPER BAG: AN FBI BLUEPRINT FOR REVISED DOCUMENTS
by Edgar F. Tatro. There were later developments. I think this was in an April or later 1985 edition, but I am unsure when, because my copy doesn't say when the quoted text was written or by whom. It's in a PDF that says
Gimberling Report: CD5 proved fake on the paper sack)
Craig does seem:
1) Somewhat reliable
2) Sure that his testimony was modified by the FBI
I'm not sure when he was first recorded as stating his theory on the Mauser, but in his book, it's blamed on the identification of Weitzman (who we take as a rifle expert) and Fritz, who agreed with Weitzman, that it was a 7.65 mm Mauser. By the time the Warren Omission interviewed Weitzman, he is "fairly familiar because I was in the sporting goods business awhile" and that his observation of the rifle was "in a glance" versus the "close examination" characterization of the event by Craig. I don't know how Craig maintained the Mauser label after the other testimonies were adapted to make the Mauser identification an honest mistake due to haste ... except that due to all of the other problems that he experienced with his testimony and how the FBI altered it, Roger Craig got more and more cynical about whether we should trust anything the government did.
If I was to put words in Craig's mouth to defend him,
I think he would say that if the FBI was in the habit of changing* testimony, why not the rifle, too? In his mind, two reliable witnesses a few feet from him had identified the rifle as being a 7.65 mm Mauser.
*I am loosely referring to Craig's unpublished book,
When They Kill a President, 1971.
"Combine the foregoing with the run-in I had with Dave Belin, junior counsel for the Warren
Commission, who questioned me in April of 1964, and
who changed my testimony fourteen
times when he sent it to Washington, and you will have some idea of the pressures brought to
bear."
