Bruce Willis: Conspiracy Theorist (But New Hunt Tape Does Suggest JFK Assassination Inside Job)

TMZ ^ | May 5th 2007 | staff

[Rockpile]

From the security angle one may suppose that the Secret Service keeps track of former Presidents and Vice-Presidents even if not actually guarding them.

For example, where would they have looked for Richard Nixon on November 22, 1963?

[Jack Black]

Here is the debunking of the Harrilson/Hunt/Sturgis three tramps photo I mention above.

Who are the three tramps?

[fight_truth_decay]

JFK in the way?

JFK and thr CIA were in a virtual state of war from the moment of the Bay of Pigs disaster until the day he died.

JFK did not trust the CIA and he reportedly intended to dismantle it after the 1964 election. In Vietnam, the CIA refused to carry out instructions from the ranking American official in the country (4:ix). It also ignored JFK’s orders to stop working with the Mafia. When Kennedy heard the news that

South Vietnam’s dictator Ngo Diem had been murdered by a CIA-backed coup, against his express wishes, he was outraged. Kennedy was no fan of Diem’s, but he did not want to see him murdered. General Maxwell Taylor wrote that upon learning of Diem’s death JFK “leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face” (70:334).

Senator George Smathers reported that Kennedy blamed the CIA for Diem’s murder. According to Smathers, Kennedy said he had to “do something about” the CIA and that the Agency should be stripped of its exorbitant power (70:334-335). On another occasion, Kennedy reportedly said he would scatter the CIA “into a thousand pieces.”

One of the more troubling cases of CIA disobedience to presidential authority was its behavior in relation to Cuba. In September 1963, long after President Kennedy had ordered a halt to the covert campaign against Castro, senior CIA staffers, including the deputy director, Richard Helms, and Desmond Fitzgerald, the head of the Agency’s Cuba unit, approved plans to kill Castro, without seeking presidential authorization. They also continued other covert operations against Cuba in violation of the President’s instructions. Needless to say, these CIA officers did not inform the President of their activities; nor did they inform Congress or the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. They didn’t even tell then-CIA director John McCone, probably because he was appointed by President Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs disaster. In short, as Anthony Summers has observed, “in September and October 1963—a crucial moment politically—CIA officers were acting in a way that gravely endangered White House policy” (14:322).

A key figure linking the Agency to the assassination was CIA man David Atlee Phillips, who was seen with Oswald a few months before the shooting (14:504-519; 61:128-171, 391-400, 408-409).

Among many other things, Phillips was the propaganda chief for the Bay of Pigs operation and later rose to become the chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. In 1954 Phillips worked with E. Howard Hunt and others to overthrow the Arbenz government in Guatemala. Based on his extensive investigation of Phillips for the Church Committee and then for the Select Committee, Gaeton Fonzi believes that “David Atlee Phillips played a key role in the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy” (61:409). Phillips was in charge of the CIA’s Cuban operations in Mexico City at the time of the assassination, so he was strategically positioned to frame Oswald, and it is quite possible, if not probable, that he was involved in the phony Oswald visits to the Cuban embassy (cf. 61:292).

Another former CIA agent who has come under suspicion is E. Howard Hunt. Hunt, a former high-ranking covert operator and a propaganda specialist, was a key figure in the Bay of Pigs invasion. As mentioned, Hunt and David Atlee Phillips helped to overthrow the Arbenz government in Guatemala. According to former (and now deceased) CIA operative Frank Sturgis, who knew Hunt well, Hunt was involved in CIA assassination operations.

Hunt has made no secret of his intense dislike for John Kennedy. To this day, Hunt blames JFK for the failure at the Bay of Pigs. When Watergate whistleblower John Dean opened Hunt’s private safe, he found bogus telegrams that falsely linked JFK with the assassination of South Vietnam’s corrupt dictator Ngo Dinh Diem (16:79).

Where was E. Howard Hunt on November 22, 1963? Hunt has given conflicting accounts of where he was at the time of the shooting. In his 1985 libel trial in Miami, Florida, the jury’s forewoman concluded Hunt was not being truthful about his whereabouts on the day of the assassination.

Several researchers have identified Hunt as the small “tramp” in the famous “tramp photos.” The tramp photos show three supposed tramps who were arrested in the railroad yard behind the grassy knoll shortly after the assassination. The tramps were found in a freight train that had pulled out from behind the TSBD without authorization. The railroad tower controller stopped the train because he knew it did not have permission to depart. The police then searched the train and found the tramps. In the tramp photos the tramps are being escorted by some Dallas police officers who are holding shotguns, presumably en route to the police station.

The tramp in the rear, the third tramp, is the man identified by some researchers as E. Howard Hunt. I have studied several photographs of Hunt and compared them with those of the third tramp, and I am struck by the resemblance between them. In their book COUP D’ETAT IN AMERICA, which was endorsed by Congressman Henry Gonzalez, authors Alan Weberman and Michael Canfield provide photographic overlays of Hunt and the third tramp to demonstrate the marked resemblance between the two. In 1988, experts at 3M’s Comtal Corporation analyzed photos of Hunt and of the third tramp and found a noticeable resemblance between them. All of this does NOT prove Hunt was the third tramp, but it is worthnoting that he bears a strong resemblance to a man who was arrested in Dealey Plaza shortly after the assassination.

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/the_critics/griffith/Suspects.html

[fight_truth_decay]

http://www.geocities.com/zzzpeace/nixon.htm
(The GeoCities web site you were trying to view has temporarily exceeded its data transfer limit. Please try again later.)

Found the same story here..other sites now have missing pictures. Won’t know how long this source will last!

http://surftofind.com/nixon

Cook quoted Harrelson as saying “Listen, if and when I get out of here (prison) and feel free to talk, I will have something that will be the biggest story you ever had” and added “November 22, 1963. You remember that!”. Most of the time, when Harrelson has been questioned with regard to the assassination he has emphatically denied it, but Cook showed the photos of the three tramps to Harrison’s wife Jo Ann Harrelson who was “amazed at the similarities.” Indeed, even aging has not affected the resemblance...

I guess we let sleeping dogs lay....

[The KG9 Kid]

"... For example, where would they have looked for Richard Nixon on November 22, 1963?"

Running a failed campaign for Governor of California, I'd bet. He also appeared playing the piano on the Jack Paar Show that year.

[Eternal_Bear]

I was visiting the LBJ library a number of years ago when someone asked the tour guide if LBJ had killed JFK. She didn’t seem shocked or insulted. She just said “well, some people think so.” Guess it was a commonly asked question. As you know, that library has the assassination limousine proudly displayed. Even weirder is that the UT library Tower has an unobstructed shot into the library. LOL

[Jack Black]

It’s one of the wackiest of JFK assassination theories: the notion that three tramps arrested shortly after the assassination in the train yards adjacent to Dealey Plaza were sinister conspirators. But it’s also been one of the most popular conspiracy theories, enshrined in dozens of conspiracy books and the movie JFK.
Dallas Police Sargent D.V. Harkness described how the issue began to the Warren Commission:

Mr. HARKNESS. Well, we got a long freight that was in there, and we pulled some people off of there and took them to the station.

Mr. BELIN. You mean some transients?

Mr. HARKNESS. Tramps and hoboes.

Mr. BELIN. That were on the freight car?

Mr. HARKNESS. Yes, sir.

Mr. BELIN. Then what did you do?

Mr. HARKNESS. That was all my assignment, because they shook two long freights down that were leaving, to my knowledge, in all the area there. We had several officers working in that area.

Mr. BELIN. Do you know whether or not anyone found any suspicious people of any kind or nature down there in the railroad yard

Mr. HARKNESS. Yes, sir. We made some arrests, I put some people in.

Mr. BELIN. Were these what you call hoboes or tramps?

Mr. HARKNESS. Yes, sir.

Mr. BELIN. Were all those questioned?

Mr. HARKNESS. Yes, sir; they were taken to the station and questioned.

Mr. BELIN. Any guns of any kind found?

Mr. HARKNESS. Not to my knowledge.

The tramps were marched to the Sheriff’s Office via a route that led through Dealey Plaza, and in front of the Texas School Book Depository. Several news photographers shot pictures of the arrestees.

So why did any of this seem sinister?

First, there was a semi-reasonable basis for suspicion. The tramps were clearly under arrest. They were taken to the Sheriff’s office and questioned. But the arrest records — if there were any arrest records — had disappeared. Nobody knew whether they existed, or where they were. Nobody could find them.

Second, conspiracists started looking closely at the photos of the tramps, and becoming convinced that they could identify them. If you take all seven extant photos of the tramps, and get a lot of pictures of (say) E. Howard Hunt — and look real hard — you can become convinced that the last tramp in line (the oldest) is in fact Hunt.

Thus by the late 1970s, conspiracist “researchers” had identified at least five of the three. The first tramp in line was thought to be Thomas Vallee, or Frank Sturgis (of Watergate fame) or Daniel Carswell. The second tramp in line was identified as either Sturgis or Carswell. The last tramp was “identified” as E. Howard Hunt or Fred Chrisman.

The Evidence
Conspiracist researchers have a history of “seeing” things in photos that cooler-headed analysts can’t see, and can even prove to be impossible. The same is true of the “identifications” of the tramps. The House Select Committee on Assassinations commissioned forensic anthropologists to examine the photos of the tramps, and the photos of the (then) top five “suspects.”
Forensic anthropologists have the skills to go beyond merely eyeballing photos. They compare the metric and morphological characteristics of people in photos to see which match, and which don’t. These are the same scientists used by the House Select Committee to confirm that the person in the Bethesda autopsy photos was in fact John Kennedy, and to debunk the notion that there are “two Oswalds” in extant photos purporting to be Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Committee’s experts showed that Hunt, Sturgis, Carswell, and Vallee could not have been tramps. They could not preclude Fred Chrisman being a tramp, noting that he “strongly resembles” the third tramp. However, Committee investigators found that Chrisman had an iron-clad alibi for the day of the assassination. He was teaching high school in Oregon in 1963, and three of his fellow teachers testified that he was in school on the day of the assassination (HSCA Report, p. 92).

Other conspiracy factoids were debunked by the HSCA. For example, the notion that the tramps were “suspiciously well-dressed.” The HSCA noted:

(675) All three men are shabbily dressed, befitting their apparent status as vagrants. Tramp A, however, is the better attired, wearing well-fitting jeans and a tweed-like sports jacket, although this, judged by 1963 styles, was several years out of date. Tramp B is wearing ill-fitting slacks and a double-breasted suit coat. Tramp C, from his battered fedora to his won-out shoes, has managed to achieve a sartorial effect similar to what one would expect had he been fired from a cannon through a Salvation Army thrift shop.

(676) While such clothing might be a disguise, their footwear seems consistent with their classification as vagrants. All three men are shod in worn, low-cut oxfords that appear to be leather-soled. Tramp C’s shoes seem to be several sizes too large for him.

The conspiracists were batting zero for five.

But of course, they not only ignored the HSCA findings excluding the previously “identified” tramps, they continued to add to the roster of “suspects.” Further “identifications” included:

Charles Harrelson, convicted murderer in prison in Texas, and father of actor Woody Harrelson, “identified” as the tall tramp.
Chauncey Holt, a man who “confessed” to being the oldest of the tramps (the last in line).
Charles Frederick Rogers, a man who was wanted in Texas for killing his own parents, and who was “identified” as “Frenchy,” the first tramp in line.

See Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, 1993.

The next big break in the case came when the Dallas City Council voted to release all city records having to do with the assassination. Journalist Mary La Fontaine, who was looking through the recently released records, happened to look at a list of records released earlier in 1989. There she found the arrest records that showed the tramps to be:

Harold Doyle
(links to original arrest records for all three in original link above)

John Forester Gedney

Gus W. Abrams

Were these fellows in fact the three tramps?
Ray and Mary LaFontaine, working for the tabloid TV program “A Current Affair,” set out to find Harold Doyle, whose address was listed on the arrest record as Red Jacket, West Virginia.

The trail led from West Virginia to Amarillo, Texas, where the LaFontaines found one of Doyle’s former neighbors who remembered him talking about his arrest in Dallas. Doyle was finally located in Klamath Falls, Oregon. He told his story on camera (embedded video), and was also questioned by the FBI.

The FBI and private researchers sought the other two tramps. Gedney was located in Melbourne, Florida, serving as a municipal officer, a respected member of the community who had not spoken about former life as a vagabond until interviewed by researcher Billy Cox, and by the FBI. Both Doyle and Gedney told the same story of spending the night before the assassination at a rescue mission. According to Oliver Revell of the Dallas FBI office:

Both commented that they had gotten fresh clothes, showered, shaved and had a meal. They headed back to the railroad yard when they heard all the commotion and sirens and everything, and they asked what happened. They were told the president had been shot.
See The Washington Post, March 4, 1992, and Dateline Dallas, Winter, 1993.

Harold Doyle
Abrams, the oldest of the tramps, was deceased. But researcher Kenneth Formet interviewed his sister, with whom he had lived the last 15 years of his life. She remembered his vagabond days, saying “he was always on the go hopping trains and drinking wine.” When shown a picture of the Dealey Plaza tramps she responded “Yep, that’s my Bill!” (Dateline Dallas, Winter, 1993)

Thus one of the greatest of assassination mysteries sprang from one of the most mundane Dealey Plaza realities. Three hobos swept up in the dragnet produced by the assassination were arrested and released. Suspicious of authority and fearful of being blamed, they remained quiet about their identities until the surviving two were tracked down almost 30 years later.

Never objectively “mysterious” they only seemed that way because the absence of information left room for wild speculation. Thus the tramps are a metaphor for all the broader “mysteries” of the JFK murder case.

---

Release the Files? Why bother?
How did conspiracists respond to the identification of the tramps? While some accepted what the released Dallas Police files showed, many simply refused to believe the documents.

Authors Alan J. Weberman and Michael Canfield issued a new edition of their book Coup D’Etat in America, which insists that the three tramps shown in the arrest records are other tramps, and not the real “three tramps.”
The daughter of Chauncey Holt spoke at the 2000 “November in Dallas” conference, defending the claim that her father was one of the tramps.

In his book The Killing of a President Robert Groden mentions the tramps real names, but continues to repeat conspiracy factoids about the “so-called ‘tramps.’”
The book Murder in Dealey Plaza, released in 2000, touts the “Chauncey Holt” story as authentic.

The unwillingness of the conspiracists to accept the arrest records as authentic shows how farcical their demand “release the documents!” has been. Why loudly demand that the government release documents, when you are not going to believe them when they are released?

---

[RedMonqey]

“How about a plot to cash in on having a famous father who actually did anything,”

Bingo ! We have a winner!

[fight_truth_decay]

It is not really certain whether Harrelson was successful in his mission to kill the President. He could have fired the shot that missed. What is absolutely certain is that he was with Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis at the scene of the crime, that Nixon was evidently an off-site operative and 'Watergate' is merely an act that includes many crimes, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The battle between Nixon loyalists and Nixon targets is still a huge factor in American politics. When Bill Clinton was elected President, Nixon loyalists adopted the mantra "if the press can impeach Nixon, the press can impeach Clinton" and they stuck to it, to provoke the greatest constitutional crisis since Watergate. Nobody blamed the media because former Nixon spies like Lucianne Goldberg are no longer called spies, they are called "the media", and the phony distinction between the "Liberal" media and the "Conservative" media has become a license to distort the truth without the need to act like a treacherous spy. Why pretend to be a journalist to spy on your opponent, when you can call yourself a "Conservative journalist" and lie about your opponent with impunity? In actual fact the media should not be "Liberal" or "Conservative", it should be reliable, but when Richard Nixon was forced to resign, he blamed the liberal media for his predicament and he spent the rest of his life cultivating the power to do the same to his enemies.

The climax of the plot to impeach President Clinton was April 1, 1998, when Dick Morris foamed around the mouth on national television and vehemently condemned what he called, the "Nixonian creep that we have seen in the Clinton White House."

From same source and good way to finish up my posts.

Today we have the same "Impeach President Bush" scenario..with comparisons to Watergate.

"If the press can impeach Nixon, the press can impeach Clinton" and the press can try hard as they might, to impeach President Bush.

[Jack Black]

I posted this in case that link overloads too.

So, what do you think about the three tramps debunking?

[RedMonqey]

"They seemed to know it was a big risk being there. This was LBJ's territory."

That comment was made in the political sense as the next election was coming up and the ticket was in danger of losing.

Could have been said of ANY state in the South at that time Totally meaningless.

[RedMonqey]

Popocatapetl

If the Adminstration could keep Jack’s sexual pecidilloes a secret then how did they keep his inasnity a secret?

Or for that matter the Assassin’s conspiracy?

As have been proven time and time again, nobody can keep a secret, especially a juicey one.

[cmiller623]

Always thought Woody Harrelson’s dad was one of the hit men known as the “hobos”. It was almost like some kind of positive payback that Woody would go on to a movie career with not much talent. Johnson definitely had the motive and note that he had executive orders signed while on the plane ride back from Dallas escalating the Viet Nam War. They were prepared before the shooting.

[restornu]

I always felt after reading somethings about that period that Arlen Spector was an enabler because he was right in the middle of these things as a young lawyer.

[Rockpile]

We might think that they would be concerned with the possibility of multiple co-ordinated murder attempts. I wonder where VP Bush was when President Reagan was attacked.

[fight_truth_decay]

Just find it suspicious we have lookalikes to those who are tied in to the events of that historical time period and who all hated JFK. There was a war between JFK and the CIA.

Who knows....everyone was in the business of being a “professional lier”.

One could spend their whole lifetime trying to uncover what really went down that day..guess we can’t on one days’ thread ;).

[19th LA Inf]

As you know, that library has the assassination limousine proudly displayed

I have not been to the LBJ library, but in 1992 the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn had a Lincoln Continental on display that they claimed was the "assassination car". Could be that the one in the LBJ museum was the one that LBJ himself was riding in, or maybe it's just like the number of "Hitler's cars" or "Bonnie and Clyde cars" that used to pop up.

BTW, as a 5 year old kid, I lived about 12 miles from the scene of the B & C ambush, saw them whiz by our house a day or two earlier, and I was also on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas watching the JFK procession just leaving Love Field. Whatever that's worth.

[RedMonqey]

Again, it was common knowledge at the time, though wrong, that cortisone in large doses would make you insane.


If you want to play the conspiracy game of why he was killed it wouldn't be cortisone.
Think Syphilis
With all Jack's sex partners, especially Marilyn, think he might have picked up a bug or two?
Syphilis could have been the reson Patrick died prematurely and Syphilis induced damage could have shown up in the autopsy and the reason why the Kennedy family prevented any further investigation concerning his brain and why it was destroyed by Robert.

Wheels spinning within wheels spinning within Wheels.

Thats my tin-hat conspiracy theory

[fight_truth_decay]

Spectator known by many of science as the "author of the single bullet thesis (a "coincidence theory")"...Dr. Cyril Wecht, the former president of both COPA and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences scheduled debate with Senator Arlen Spector.

The same group wrote a letter to Katie Couric, IN PART:

I viewed with disappointment your recent interview with Gerald Posner and your presentations about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy under the misleading title "Truth or Conspiracy" as if the two were mutually opposed. Your program studiously avoided the truth of conspiracy in this case, which is very well researched, authenticated and reconfirmed in the recently released documents.

Gerald Posner's disingenous book, Case Closed, filled with factual errors and intellectual dishonesty, represents nowhere near the level of research and academic/investigatory skill or credibility of the real critics of the Warren Commission. His "tons and tons of research" does not compare to the meticulous work of hundreds of ballistic and medical experts, academicians and historians, forensic investigators and indepdendent researchers who have unearthed all the elements of a legal conspiracy in this case.

Your show lacked that balance and continued the disinformation and cover-up that has suppressed open investigation and honest inquiry into this case over the years by NBC and other major media. Do you not note the irony of showing the Zapruder film, the key piece of evidence in this case, on your network for the "first time" now 38 years after the event? Was it not newsworthy?

Posner contends that following the public outcry for release of the Warren Commission records, the actual files do not show a conspiracy and "no one is talking about them". In fact, our organization, the Coalition on Political Assassinations, was instrumental in the drafting, passage and implementation of the JFK Records Act, the largest release of classified documents in history, nearly 5 million pages to date. More files remain to be release, including parts of the Warren Commission files.

Posner has not read all these newly released records, as he himself has admitted. Others have read the bulk of them, or exhausted topic areas in the collection, and have found significant new documentation of conspiracy in the murder as well as government complicity in the case. They have been speaking out and writing about these findings, but have never gotten the sort of coverage the media has given to Posner. Posner's thesis is reassuring to a "free press" that has never honestly investigated the murder, he lets them off the hook.

Here are some of the revelations found in the files, not all of which have yet to be released according to the final report of the JFK Assassinations Record Review Board, which recommended an ongoing search for records, and the forced compliance of agencies like Defense Intelligence Agency, Office of Naval Investigation and Army Intelligence, among others, which failed to comply with the Act:

More at: http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/TruthOfConspiracy.html

[fight_truth_decay]

Whatever that's worth

Worth a lot..you were present where history was in the making.