After
spending a few paragraphs dismissing—to
his own satisfaction if nobody else's—usual suspects like the Mafia
and the CIA, Reitzes turns his attention to Lee Harvey Oswald. “How
do we navigate a path through the complex morass of claims,
speculation, rumors, and confusion...?” He asks. “We use critical
thinking tools to discern the most reliable evidence” he answers,
right before demonstrating that he has no idea what either critical
thinking or reliable evidence actually means.
Reitzes
writes that immediately after the shooting “eyewitnesses directed
police” to the depository building and the Knoll. In point of fact,
many officers made their own way to the Knoll having either made up
their own mind about the source of the shots or having been ordered
to do so by Police Chief Jesse Curry and Sheriff Bill Decker. (see
21H390-91) Reitzes then makes a point of noting that “no one had
actually seen
a
gunman” behind the fence—again failing to mention the previously
discussed smoke consistent with a rifle discharge—and that a search
of the area turned up “no suspect, no weapon, no spent shells, and
no other evidence of a crime.” This is all undeniably true but,
once again, does not tell the full story.
Firstly,
it is hardly surprising that officers did not encounter a man
standing with smoking gun in hand waiting to be caught. And since the
acoustics indicates that if there was a Knoll gunman he only fired a
single shot, picking up one shell and taking it with him would hardly
have been a taxing exercise. Secondly, and more importantly, officers
did encounter a still unidentified man who was brandishing fake
Secret Service credentials before he disappeared never to be seen or
heard from again. We know the ID was fake because there were no
Secret Service Agents in the area, having all accompanied the
motorcade to Parkland Hospital. (5HSCA589) Commission apologists like
Vincent Bugliosi have tried to explain this away by claiming that
Dallas policeman Joe Marshall Smith, who confronted the fake agent,
was mistaken and probably just “assumed” the man showed him
Secret Service ID. (Bugliosi, Reclaiming
History,
p. 865) But this ignores what Smith himself told author Anthony
Summers: “The man, this character, produces credentials from his
hip pocket which showed him to be Secret Service. I
have seen those credentials before,
and they satisfied me and the deputy sheriff.” [my emphasis]
(Summers, Conspiracy,
p. 36-37) So the very real possibility exists that this man with the
fake ID was, if not a gunman himself, an accomplice who helped one to
escape. And the fact that, after all these years, no one has ever
come forward to identify himself and explain who he was and what he
was doing up on the Knoll with Secret Service credentials supports
that contention.
Although
Smith later noted that the man's appearance “didn't ring true for
the Secret Service” and came to believe that he “should have
checked that man closer”, (Ibid) on the day of the assassination
officers were unaware that no genuine agents were in the area so they
saw no reason to treat him with suspicion. It is understandable,
then, that they soon came to concentrate their efforts on the Texas
School Book Depository where a man with a rifle had indeed been
spotted. Inside the building they found an old, bolt-action,
Mannlicher Carcano rifle and three spent shells. According to Reitzes
“Documentary evidence...established that the weapon had been
purchased through the mail under an assumed name by Lee Harvey
Oswald...” This is not nearly the clear-cut issue he makes it out
to be but rather than waste time on the details here, I will instead
refer the reader to chapter 4 of Jim DiEugenio's excellent book,
Reclaiming
Parkland.
For the sake of argument let us accept the premise that Oswald did
indeed mail-order the rifle found on the sixth floor of the
depository building. That in itself raises some intriguing questions.
Oswald
had never shown much of an interest in guns. His brother Robert
testified to the Warren Commission that he had only ever known Lee
“to own but one firearm in his life” which was a small, .22
caliber rifle that he owned briefly as a teenager before selling it
to Robert for $10. (1H397) His buddy in the Marines, Nelson Delgado,
recalled that Oswald was often getting in trouble for failing to
clean and take care of his weapon and “didn't give a darn” about
keeping up his rifle practice. (8H235) And when he was living in
Russia Oswald apparently joined a hunting club but, as his wife
Marina told the Secret Service, “he never attended any meetings.”
The only reason he had joined the club is because it entitled him to
“free transportation in an automobile which enabled him to go out
of town.” (CD344, p. 22) It is quite clear that throughout his life
guns had held no special fascination for Oswald. So why, in early
1963, would he suddenly decide to purchase a rifle from Klein's
Sporting Goods, of Chicago, and a pistol from Seaport Traders, of Los
Angeles? This mail-order purchase, made using a false name, seems all
the more bizarre in light of the fact that, at the time, he was
living in Texas where it was easy to obtain firearms over the counter
without leaving a long paper trail.
The
above oddities leave open the possibility that, if Oswald actually
did purchase those weapons, he did so at somebody else's suggestion
or request. It is known that at the very time Oswald allegedly placed
his orders, a Senate Subcommittee led by Senator Thomas Dodd was
investigating the availability of firearms through the mail and both
Klein's and Seaport had been named as companies involved in illegal
practices. (Alex Cox, The
President and the Provocateur,
p. 127) Whether or not there is any connection between the activities
of the Dodd Committee and Oswald's alleged decision to break the law
by mail ordering two weapons under a false name is unknown. However,
it is curious to note that Oswald also “defected” to Russia
during the period of time that the CIA was running a fake defector
program, and launched a one-man FPCC chapter that ended up
embarrassing the organization at the same time the FBI and CIA were
conducting their own anti-FPCC campaigns. Perhaps these are all
coincidences. Then again, perhaps not.
Regardless,
the central question is not why (or indeed if) Oswald purchased the
rifle but whether or not he had it in his hands at 12:30 pm on
November 22, 1963. Even by the official account, it was certainly not
in his possession in the two months leading up to the assassination
when it was allegedly sitting in the garage of Ruth Paine—although
nobody actually saw it there. Reitzes writes matter-of-factly and
without elaboration that “Oswald's palm print was found on the
weapon”. But Reitzes knows that this claim is hotly contested. And
with very good reason. The print was supposedly found on the
underside of the barrel by Dallas police lieutenant J.C. Day on the
evening of November 22, 1963. But when FBI fingerprint expert
Sebastian Latona carefully inspected the entire rifle a few hours
later he found “no latent prints of value” anywhere on it. (4H23)
It was not until after Oswald was dead at the hands of Jack Ruby that
the Dallas police suddenly announced they had found his print on the
rifle. Lt. Day claimed that he had “lifted” the print before
sending the rifle to the FBI but could never adequately explain why
he had failed to inform the Bureau of his discovery when he handed
the evidence over. Nor could he explain why he failed to photograph
the print before it was “lifted” in accordance with proper
procedure. To make matters worse, Day later declined “to make a
written signed statement” when the Bureau asked. (26H829)
An
FBI memo that was suppressed until 1978 reveals that even the Warren
Commission was dubious of Day's claims. The memo dated August 28,
1964, states: “[Warren commission general counsel J. Lee] Rankin
advised because of the circumstances that now exist there was a
serious concern in the minds of the commission as to whether or not
the palm impression that has been obtained from the Dallas Police
Department is a legitimate latent palm impression removed from the
rifle barrel or whether it was obtained from some other source and
that for this reason this matter needs to be resolved.” FBI Special
Agent Vincent Drain, who had collected the evidence from the Dallas
police on November 22, 1963, was also highly skeptical when he was
interviewed by author Henry Hurt in 1984: “'I just don't believe
there ever was a print,' said Drain. He noted that there was
increasing pressure on the Dallas police to build evidence in the
case. Asked to explain what might have happened, Agent Drain stated,
'All I can figure is that it [Oswald's print] was some sort of
cushion, because they were getting a lot of heat by Sunday night. You
could take the print off Oswald's card and put it on the rifle.
Something like that happened.'" (Hurt, Reasonable
Doubt,
p. 109)
With
the above in mind one has to ask, is this really Reitzes' idea of
“the most reliable evidence”? Quite obviously, had Oswald lived
to face trial, any defense lawyer worth his salt would surely have
argued that the palm print should be thrown out for lack of proof.
And were it actually admitted, it would most certainly have become
the focus of his appeal. But even if we choose to take Lt. Day at his
word and accept the print as genuine, it still does not place the
rifle in Oswald's hands at the time of the assassination. Why?
Because Day would only say it was an “old dry print” that “had
been on the gun several weeks or months”, (26H831; Summers, p. 54)
a detail which Reitzes and his fellow anti-conspiracy buffs never
fail to omit.
Reitzes
goes from bad to worse when he writes that in addition to the palm
print, “fingerprints lifted from the trigger housing were later
determined to be” Oswald's. Which, quite frankly, is just nonsense.
The partial prints in question were discovered by Lt. Day who could
not identify them as belonging to Oswald. As he told the Warren
Commission, “...in fingerprinting it either is or is not the man.
So I wouldn't say those were his prints...from what I had I could not
make a positive identification as being his prints.” (4H262) The
prints were then examined by the FBI's Sebastian Latona who also
judged them to be “of no value”. (4H21) Another FBI expert,
Ronald Wittmus, agreed with Latona's assessment. (7H590) 15 years
later, yet another expert examined the prints on behalf of the HSCA
and once again they were said to be “of no value for identification
purposes.” (8HSCA248) And in 2003, researcher James K. Olmstead
reported that a new analysis had been conducted using the FBI
laboratory computer software. The computer had failed to find a
match. (Thomas, p. 85)
So
where does Reitzes get his claim that the prints were “determined
to be Oswald's”? Well, if you can believe it, from a TV show. In
1993, the producers of the PBS documentary Who
Was Lee Harvey Oswald?
asked two experts to review the fingerprint evidence. The first,
former head of the FBI's latent print section, George Bonebrake,
reached the same conclusion as every expert who came before him and
stated that the prints were “simply not clear enough to make an
identification”. The second, Vincent J. Scalice, claimed that not
only had he positively matched the prints, but he had found 18 points
of identity! At this point, the real skeptics and critical thinkers
out there might well be wondering how it was that Scalice was able to
see what no other expert could see. And they might find it all the
more bizarre to learn that one of opinions he was disagreeing with
was, in fact, his own since he was the very same expert who had told
the HSCA that the prints were “of no value for identification
purposes”.
So
what had changed between 1978 and 1993? Well, nothing. Scalice
claimed that he was able to reach his conclusion after carrying out
various enhancements on the photographs that Lt. Day took of the
prints on the evening of November 22, 1963. But unlike Scalice, Day
and the FBI experts were not just working with photographs, they were
working with the rifle and the actual latent prints when they
concluded that they were “insufficient” for identification. And
no amount of enhancement, no matter how sophisticated, can bring out
more detail in the photographs than was visible on the actual prints.
Scalice's claim is simply not worthy of serious consideration and not
surprisingly, neither PBS nor Scalice has ever made available a chart
displaying his alleged 18 match points so that they can be
corroborated or refuted by independent experts. It hardly needs
pointing out that by no stretch of the imagination was Reitzes using
“critical thinking tools to discern the best evidence” when he
cherry-picked Scalice's unsupported and highly contradicted
“determination” over that of all the other experts. That he
presented this malarkey to readers as if it were established fact is
blatant dishonesty.
Having
utterly failed to put Oswald in the depository building with a rifle
in his hands, Reitzes next seeks to establish that all of the shots
were fired from the sixth floor window. “The autopsy of the
President...” he writes, “confirmed that the shots had come from
above and behind the limousine, not the grassy knoll.” This, of
course, was the rushed and incomplete autopsy—performed
by inexperienced and under qualified prosectors—that
former president of the American Academy of Forensic Science, Dr.
Cyril Wecht, described as “a botched autopsy, a terrible piece of
medicolegal investigation.” (Wecht, Cause
of Death,
p. 23) This does not worry Reitzes who claims that “Later reviews
of the autopsy photographs and X-rays by panels of forensic experts
appointed by Attorney General Ramsey Clark in 1968, the Rockefeller
Commission in 1975, and the HSCA in 1978 affirmed the conclusions of
the autopsy report.” But once again Reitzes is not telling the
whole truth.
The
first group of experts to “review” the autopsy materials—the
“Clark Panel”—was convened by Attorney General Ramsey Clark in
1968 after he read the proofs of the not yet published book, Six
Seconds in Dallas
by Josiah Thompson. In the book, Thompson used the Zapruder film, the
autopsy report, and the testimony of both the Parkland and Bethesda
physicians to make a case for two shots striking President Kennedy's
head almost simultaneously; one from the rear and one from the Knoll.
He also highlighted a seeming trajectory problem that had gone
ignored by the Warren Commission. In their report, the autopsy
doctors described an entry wound low down in the back of the skull,
“2.5 centimeters to the right, and slightly above the external
occipital protuberance.” To illustrate the trajectory the bullet
took through JFK's head, the Warren Commission published a drawing
prepared according to Humes' verbal descriptions by Naval artist
Harold Rydberg. This illustration showed Kennedy with his head tilted
significantly forward as if looking at the floor of the limousine.
The problem, as Thompson demonstrated, was that at frame 313 of the
Zaprduer film the position of Kennedy's head was nothing like that
shown in the Rydberg drawing. When the head was placed in the correct
position it became clear that the bullet, supposedly travelling
downwards from the sixth floor window at an angle approaching 16
degrees, would have had to have taken a steeply upward trajectory
through the skull.
Maryland
Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Russell Fisher, who led the Clark Panel,
later admitted in an interview for the March, 1977, Maryland
State Medical Journal
that the Attorney General was so “concerned” by what he had read
in the proofs that he created the panel “partly to refute some of
the junk that was in [Thompson's] book”. Clearly, if Fisher and his
colleagues were being told what they had to “refute”, then they
were never tasked with an honest and objective assessment of the
autopsy materials. And they never made one. They did, however,
deliver as promised and found a creative solution to the apparent
trajectory problem by moving the entry wound four inches up the
skull! Quite obviously, the Clark panel claiming the autopsy doctors
were completely wrong about where the bullet entered the skull stands
in stark contradiction to Reitzes' claim that the panel's review
“affirmed the conclusions of the autopsy report.”
In
truth, as Dr. Wecht and others have pointed out, Kennedy's autopsy
doctors did make many errors. However, it strains credulity to
suggest that mistaking the top of the skull for the bottom was one of
them. Even if one wants to argue that the three doctors were so
utterly incompetent that they were unable to do what a child could
do, there were at least four independent eyewitnesses who recalled
seeing the entry wound and fully corroborated them. Secret Service
Agent Roy Kellerman, FBI Agent Francis O'Neil, Richard Lipsey (aide
to U.S. Army General Wehle), and Bethesda photographer John Stringer
all placed the wound low down in the back of the skull. Conversely,
not a single witness recalled seeing an entrance in the top of the
head where the Clark Panel claimed it was. In the years since, a
number of experts including neuroscientist Dr. Joseph Riley,
radiologist Dr. Randy Robertson, and pathologist Dr. Peter Cummings,
have independently identified the same defect on the right lateral
skull X-ray as being the entrance hole. And this defect sits to the
right and slightly above the EOP—precisely where Humes said the
entrance wound was. The Clark Panel's decision to move the wound
upwards clearly had nothing to do with what the evidence showed and
everything to do with “refuting” Josiah Thompson.
The
next socially constructive assessment of the medical evidence was
conducted on behalf of the Rockefeller Commission which had as its
Executive Director none other than former Warren Commission lawyer
David Belin. The make-up of the medical panel leaves no doubt about
its loyalties or the pre-ordained nature of its conclusions. Dr.
Werner Spitz and Dr. Richard Lindenberg were both close professional
associates of Dr. Russell Fisher, having worked under him at the
Maryland State Medical Examiner's Office. Dr. Fred Hodges worked
alongside Clark Panel radiologist Russell Morgan MD at John Hopkins
University in Baltimore. Pathologist Lt. Col. Robert R. McMeeken was
a colleague of one of Kennedy's autopsy surgeons, Dr. Pierre Finck,
at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. And Dr. Alfred Olivier
had previously served as the ballistics expert for the Warren
Commission. (Gary Aguilar, How
Five Investigations into JFK's Medical/Autopsy Evidence Got it Wrong,
Part IV) Is it any wonder that this particular group of individuals
rubber-stamped the Clark Panel's report? Not hardly. As Dr. Cyril
Wecht noted in a telephone conversation with Rockefeller Commission
Senior Counsel Robert Olsen, given their strong ties to the
government and especially to Dr. Russell Fisher, “it was wholly
unrealistic to expect that anybody on this panel would express views
different from those expressed by the Ramsey Clark Panel in 1968...”
(Olsen, memo to file, April 19, 1975) Later, in a public press
release, Dr. Wecht—alongside Professor of Criminalistics, Herbert
MacDonell, and President of the American Academy of Forensic
Sciences, Dr. Robert Joling—charged that the Commission had “set
up a panel of governmental sycophants to defend the Warren Report.”
(Aguilar, Op. cit.)
The
trend continued with the HSCA forensic pathology panel which included
Rockefeller medical expert and close Fisher associate, Dr. Werner
Spitz, as well as Dr. Charles Petty who had spent nine years under
Fisher at the Maryland Medical Examiner's Office. (Spitz
and Fisher's Medicolegal Investigation of Death,
p. 13) In fact, according to researcher Pat Speer, “of the nine
pathologists on the HSCA panel, six had embraced a professional
relationship with Dr. Russell Fisher...” The HSCA panel was chaired
by Dr. Michael Baden who had contributed to Spitz and Fisher's book,
Medicolegal
Investigation of Death.
Baden is himself a controversial figure. He was Chief Medical
Examiner for the city of New York from 1978 until 1979 when he was
dismissed for his “inability to work within the system.” (The
New York Times,
June 26, 1982) In 1995, in exchange for more than $100,000, he took
the stand in defense of O.J. Simpson, claiming that Nicole Brown
Simpson and Ron Goldman were killed by multiple assailants using
multiple weapons. (Ibid, August 11, 1995) In 2007, he testified on
behalf of the defense in the trial of legendary pop music producer,
Phil Spector. Baden's wife, Linda Kenney Baden, just happened to be
Spector's trial counsel. As Journalist Jonathan Turley noted, “...it
was fair game for the Spector prosecutors to challenge the
objectivity of forensic pathologist Michael Baden...and the
prosecution scored points on the issue, particularly after Michael
Baden said he could not define a 'conflict of interest' and
prosecutors asked if he would end up 'sleeping on the couch' if his
testimony did not favour Spector's case.” (L.A.
Times,
September 11, 2007)
In
his book Dead
Reckoning,
Baden wrote that "Physicians
may be the worst witnesses. They are often swayed by whoever asked
them to be an expert. If that lawyer is smart enough to ask their
advice, they conclude, he must know what he is doing. That being the
case, physicians therefore adopt whatever the lawyer tells them as
the facts of the case and become, if only subconsciously, an advocate
for the lawyer rather than an independent adviser." (Baden, p.
89) This is certainly true of Baden himself. According to original
HSCA Deputy Chief Counsel Robert Tanenbaum, when the committee was
being led by dedicated truth seeker Richard Sprague, Dr. Baden was
saying that there had been a conspiracy with shots coming from the
right front. (see this video)
But when the leadership changed so too did Baden's expert opinion.
Once
Baden had decided to back the official story, he and the rest of the
Fisher-influenced panel members went to work denigrating the autopsy
surgeons and affirming the Clark Panel Report. In spite of the
evidence to the contrary, Baden was determined to prove that the rear
entry wound was in the top of the skull where Fisher claimed it was
and not the bottom where the autopsy doctors had observed it. The
HSCA panel claimed that the autopsy photographs of the back of
Kennedy's head showed a “red spot” high in the rear and that this
was the wound of entrance. But when the panel tried to impress this
on the autopsy surgeons—the men who had inspected the actual wounds
on the body—its interpretation was firmly rejected. Referring to
the “red spot”, Dr. Humes stated, “I don’t know what that
is...I can assure you that as we reflected the scalp to get to this
point, there was no defect corresponding to this in the skull at any
point. I don’t know what that is. It could be to me clotted blood.
I don’t, I just don’t know what it is, but it certainly was not
any wound of entrance.” (7HSCA254) Rather than accept that Humes
may have had some idea what he was talking about, the HSCA pressured
him to change his testimony.
When
it came time to illustrate the entry wound, the HSCA did not publish
the autopsy photo of the back of the head. Instead they presented a
lifelike drawing of the photo prepared by professional medical
illustrator Ida Dox. The difference between the photo and the drawing
is that in the drawing the “red spot” has been greatly
accentuated to look more like a bullet wound. At a JFK conference in
2003, Dr. Randy Robertson presented a stunning document from the
newly declassified HSCA files. It was a note from Baden to Dox that
said “Ida, you can do much better.” Attached to the note was a
picture of a typical entrance wound from Spitz
and Fisher's Medicolegal Investigation of Death.
In other words, Baden was actually instructing her to make the red
spot look more like an entrance wound than it really did in the
photographs. Which just goes to show the lengths Baden was willing to
go to in order to push the Clark Panel's more lone assassin friendly
revision of the head wound.
There
is another extremely important point that needs to be made when
discussing these latter day reviews of the medical evidence. Even if
the HSCA pathology panel had not been stacked with Russell Fisher
acolytes and experts for hire like Dr. Baden, it would still have
been hampered by the fact that crucial autopsy materials had long
since “disappeared” from the archive. Photographs showing the
interior of the chest and skull, microscopic tissue slides,
Kodachrome slides of the interior of the chest, and even the
President's brain were all among the items that were mysteriously
missing by the time the HSCA came to inspect the evidence. Is it not
reasonable to suggest that in order to make an accurate determination
about the number and direction of bullets striking JFK it is
important to have all the relevant evidence? Dr. Cyril Wecht, the
HSCA panel's lone dissenting member, certainly believed so.
Dr.
Wecht criticized his colleagues for engaging in “semantical
sophistry and intellectual gymnastics”, for being “slavishly
dedicated to defending the Warren Report”, and noted a
“preconceived bias and professionally injudicious attitude
vis-a-vis this case.” (7HSCA209-11) In his testimony before the
committee, Wecht was asked why he felt his colleagues had taken the
position they had. Apparently with the allegiances to Russell Fisher
in mind, he responded, “There are some things involving some
present and former professional relationships and things between some
of them, and some people who have served on previous panels.”
(1HSCA354) Years later he added that “many of these same people had
a long-standing involvement with the federal government—many had
received federal grants for research and appointments to various
influential government boards. To be highly critical of a government
action could end that friendly relationship with Uncle Sam.”
(Wecht, p. 43-44) Indeed, it is not normally considered a sensible
course of action to bite the hand that feeds.
Reitzes
may pretend or even wish to believe otherwise but scientists do not
operate in a vacuum. As Don Thomas writes, “science is a social
process and...scientific conclusions are in fact, social constructs.
The consequences of the results, as much if not more than the
empirical evidence itself, will often steer the scientist to one
conclusion over the other.” (Thomas, p. 8) The reports of the
Clark, Rockefeller, and HSCA panels are the perfect example of what
happens when genuine experts allow political considerations, as well
as personal and professional biases, to cloud their judgement and
dictate their conclusions.
