Permanent tract in gelatin of a 6.5 Carcano after traveling 90 yards. "Cartridges of the World" calls it a good Deer, Antelope and Black Bear cartridge.
Posted on 08/20/2003 6:18:44 PM PDT by new cruelty
Evidence please, no assumptions.
Marina Oswald has always testified that her husband tried to kill General Walker.
If, as you say (where's the evidence) in 1996, she recanted her sworn testimony (about her husband's attempted murder of General Walker) from 1964, and 1978, and her statements in numerous print and television interviews, then was she lying for over 30 years, or is she lying now? The question is not about her changing opinion concerning her husband's role in the assassination of JFK, the question is about her sworn testimony that her husband admitted trying to kill General Walker.
Was Marina Oswald lying when she said (from 1964 through at least 1993) her husband tried to kill General Walker?
You have yet to answer this question:
If Oswald didn't kill Tippit, but he was captured 30 minutes later with the gun that was used to kill Tippit, and the police didn't plant it, how did Oswald end up with the murder weapon?
Several months later, at the request of the Warren Commission, the FBI attempted neutron activation analysis: a non-destructive test in which two samples to be compared are bombarded by neutrons and their radioactive characteristics compared. That can reveal what trace elements--minor impurities--exist, and in what concentrations; and that, in turn, permits a conclusion about the probability of common origin.
The FBI found the results inconclusive. It was not possible to tell, said their expert, from which of the larger bullets any of the smaller fragments might have come.
The critics were suspicious because the existence of those tests was not revealed until the 1970s, and the actual data themselves--FBI Laboratory worksheets--were not released until 1975, after a series of lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act.
Critics believed that if the work was done properly it would immediately become apparent that Warren Commission Exhibits 399 and 842 (the metal from Connally's wrist) were different, and that would disprove the single-bullet theory.
Vincent Guinn was hired to do such tests.
Audrey Bell, the operating-room nurse who had actually handled the metal from Connally's wrist on November 22 and given the fragments to a Texas Highway Patrolman, was interviewed by Dallas Morning News reporter Earl Golz. "She said she recalled seeing four or five bullet fragments being placed in a glass," wrote Golz, who pointed out that only three fragments were supposedly in evidence, according to the Commission. The issue, of course, was whether more metal had been removed from Connally than could have come from the base of bullet 399. Upon hearing this, I asked Golz to reinterview her and ask her about the sizes, because it was often claimed they were no bigger than dust particles. Nurse Bell said: "No, they weren't dust particles because we wouldn't have been able to have taken those out. . . .They were larger than dust particles. They were small fragments. . . .anywhere from 3 to 4mm in length by a couple of mm wide. . . .They were identifiable fragments." Audrey Bell's description was quite inconsistent with the three grains, at most, missing from the base of 399.
With respect to the other fragments in evidence, there was also a problem. In 1969, the Secret Service sent documents to the National Archives that hadn't been released to the Warren Commission. One was an FBI receipt for "a missile removed. . .by Commander James J. Humes . . .on this date." The receipt, dated November 22, 1963, was issued to Capt. John Stover, Humes' superior, and signed by FBI agents Sibert and O'Neill.
In May 1970, shortly after the release of the receipt, I wrote a letter to the FBI requesting an explanation. Back came a reply which didn't answer the question. I sent a follow-up letter. Several days later, I returned to my apartment and was surprised to find a note on the door from an FBI agent: "Please call John Morrison at FBI, Los Angeles. . . ." I called, and had a lengthy conversation noting that this receipt for "a missile" was actually from the two tiny fragments removed from the brain. After that phone call, the FBI sent me a letter stating that in plain English.
Thus, in the case of the brain fragments, there were irregularities associated with the documentation which recorded how they originally became evidence, and Nurse Bell's recollections raised similar questions about the Connally wrist fragments.
Guinn testified his tests showed that the brain fragments came from one of the two missiles found in the car, and that Commission Exhibit 842 came from the bottom of bullet 399, where some lead was missing.
I cornered Guinn in the hallway afterward to question him further. He had testified that the fragments he measured didn't match in weight the ones the FBI had tested in 1964. He also testified that although the FBI had been unable to draw a conclusion from their 1964 data, his analysis demonstrated that those samples, too, supported his conclusion. Guinn said he assumed the 1964 samples were from bullet 399, but he didn't know what had become of them.
I asked Guinn about the legitimacy of the fragments as evidence, and whether he could have been fooled. He admitted: "Possibly they could take a bullet, take out a few little pieces and put it in the containers, and say: 'This came out of Connally's wrist.' And naturally, if you compare that with bullet 399, they'll look alike. I have no control over those things. I have to believe that these are honest people."
Guinn talked about another matter bearing on the legitimacy of the fragments in the sample boxes. He told how he opened one box--Q-15, supposedly metal from the windshield--to find it completely empty. "What did you do?" I asked. He said that he carefully examined the interior of the sample box with a magnifying glass, but nothing was there.
Critics, who got the tests they asked for, now find it necessary to criticize the results of the test because, much to their chagrin, the results support the single-bullet theory, counter to their expectations. Because the test results do not support conspiracy theories, but, in fact, refute the conspiracy theories, critics of the lone-gunman explanation have resorted to criticizing the test and various circumstances surrounding it.
From the link posted in post 514:
In other words, Guinn was saying that the FBI analysts had taken little pieces from the larger fragments, analyzed them, and either filed them away or discarded them rather than returning them to the National Archives. The samples that Guinn received thus all weighed different from the originals, and the actual samples analyzed were gone. Except for Q4,5, Q9, and Q14, which he analyzed in their entirety, he then analyzed new aliquots from the originals.
Conspiracists have seized on Guinn's remarks and proclaimed that Guinn was analyzed bogus samples that had planted. But they didn't think the subject through before they proclaimed. It is very easy to show that Guinn's samples had to have been real.
First, there are good reasons for the weights of the larger fragments to have differed from the FBI's weights by the time Guinn got them—the FBI had removed aliquots for analysis rather than irradiating the entire fragment. This was the responsible procedure to follow. Second, there was good reason for the "little particles"—the aliquots for analysis—to be gone; Oak Ridge National Laboratory simply disposed of them as radioactive trash. This is common practice in analytical laboratories, and although it was a bad decision because they were such important pieces of evidence, it is easy to see how it could have happened in the routine course of things. The problem was likely the number of cooks' hands stirring the broth, so to speak. First there was John Gallagher of the FBI, who actually analyzed the samples under detail to ORNL. As soon as he finished counting their radioactivity, he probably had to hurry back to the FBI's central laboratory in Washington, where is as chief spectroscopist had many other responsibilities. Then there were Juel and Emery, the two employees of ORNL who oversaw Gallagher's analyses but who were one step removed from formal responsibility. They probably put the samples into some kind of storage without giving the matter any special thought. At some later time, somebody had to decide whether to keep the samples, somebody who might well have been yet another person. So it is easy to imagine that the final decision to discard the samples could have been taken by someone at least two steps removed from the original process, and who therefore had little sense of their importance. This is the way of large government facilities. It is also easy to imagine Gallagher himself giving permission to trash them, hardly imagining that there would ever be a call for reanalysis. The fact that they were ultimately discarded implies nothing about any sort of conspiracy.
In fact, it would make no sense to switch fragments between the FBI's NAA and Guinn's, for that would make Guinn's results disagree with the FBI's and the tampering become obvious. Anyone who jumps from Guinn's different weights to switched fragments hasn't thought through this critical point. The only way to justify switching fragments between the two NAA analyses would be if the conspirators would be sure that the FBI's results would be meaningless, and neither they nor anyone else could know that at the time.
The fragments also could not have been switched (or planted) before the OES on the night of the assassination. First, there simply wasn't enough time: Q1 and Q9 were retrieved that afternoon, Q4,5 at autopsy late that evening, and the other fragments from the limousine as it was searched late that night after it had been flown to Washington. Second, the immediate chains of custody were too tight: most of the fragment had gone directly into the possession of the FBI. And third, only a very few people were privy to the list of fragments and their properties. The only reasonable time to have switched fragments would have been between the OES and the FBI's NAA, a period of about six months.
But any kind of planting/switching would have required an all-powerful conspiratorial force, one that could dominate at a minimum the FBI, the National Archives, the Warren Commission, and probably the Executive Branch. That Force would also have to have ensured that all employees in all these agencies would keep the secret, not just of the planting, but also of the larger conspiracy that lay behind the assassination and required the planting. As we know all too well, Washington simply does not work that way.
For those interested in the subject, they can read the report in its entirety, consider the counter arguments, and make their own judgement as to the validity of the NAA test results.
Spectrographic analysis on the bullet fragments was suppressed by FBI Director Hoover and two Attorneys General, Ramsey Clark and John Mitchell. Also hidden were neutron activation analyses by the Atomic Energy Commission.
Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK, ed. James H. Fetzer, Ph.D., Catfeet/Carus, 1998, "The Lone Gunman Theory", Ronald F. White, Ph.D., pages 392-393:
As early as 1964, the FBI suspected that some of the puzzles surrounding the single-bullet hypothesis might be resolved if the various bullet-lead specimens linked to the assassination could be subjected to Neutron Activation Analysis. After conducting these tests, the FBI decided that the findings were inconclusive and therefore never published the results. The fact that these analyses were even conducted was not widely known until 1973, when researchers finally gained access to the report under the Freedom of Information Act.
Vincent Guinn, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine was asked by the House Select Committee on Assassinations to conduct new analyses of the bullet-lead evidence using newer and improved NAA techniques, with Ge(Li) gamma-ray spectrometry.
But how convincing are these "scientific" analyses? First of all, it is important to note that out of more than 30 bullet fragments known to be in the President's head and visible on the X-rays, only two were tested. Therefore, it is sheer speculation to infer that all of the dust-like fragments are of the same composition as CE-567. There are also several serious flaws relating to how Guinn deduced two and only two bullets from his own data. Acually his analyses seem to support the hypothesis that the composition of individual Mannlicher-Carcano bullets are heterogeneous. After testing four specimen from a single bulet, Guinn's own figures show that the antimony content ranged from 363+39 to 667+5 and that the silver content ranged from 8.3+0.3 to 15.9+0.5 (HSCA 1978, Vol. 3, p. 549, Appendix F.). If the individual bullets are not uniform in composition, it becomes that much more difficult to infer identity and difference between bullets. Moreover, although (CE-842) and (CE-399) are supposed to be similar in composition, CE-842 contained 25% more silver and 850% more copper than CE-399. It also contained 2,400% more sodium and 1,100% more chlorine. And finally, CE-842 contained 8.1 ppm aluminum but CE-399 contained none (HSCA 1978, Vol. 2, p. 538, Appendix B.). Therefore, it is difficult to fathom how Guinn could conclude that the two fragments were similar in composition.
Even if Guinn's findings were valid, they would prove only that CE-399 caused Connally's wounds. In order to confirm the single bullet theory, it would also be necessary to link CE-399 to Kennedy's wounds. Since no bullet fragments were found in Kennedy's back and throat wounds, that variable simply cannot be determined. Perhaps the critical flaw in all the scientific hypotheses involving the bullets is that these analyses presuppose that an inviolate chain of evidence was maintained by the Secret Service and the FBI. According to Anthony Summers, the weights of the fragments examined by Guinn do not correspond to the weights recorded by the Warren Commission (Summers 1989, p. 34; Livingstone 1993, p. 54). Since we also know that at least some of the fragments are missing, a healthy degree of skepticism is surely warranted.
Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, Paragon, 1989, page 34:
While Dr. Guinn's work is in itself most impressive, his conclusions must be weighed in the context of the data he had to work with. Assassinations Committee Staff were horrified to discover the slipshod way in which the material evidence--including the bullet fragments--had been handled over the years.
Harold Weisberg, Post Mortem: JFK Assassination Cover-Up Smashed!, Harold Weisberg, 1975, page 490:
Photocopy of Memorandum from J. Lee Rankin to Francis W. H. Adams and Arlen Specter, January 23, 1964.
Note: All of the vital "things" Specter and Adams knew had "to be done" were never done. Thus, in the context of what the Commission neglected to do, this memo is explicit proof that the failure of the official investigation was other than innocent. The "underlying documents and reports related to the rifle and shells," which presumably includes the bullets as well, were never "secured from the FBI." One phase of those underlying documents, the spectrographic and NAA testing, was held so tightly by the FBI I had to sue for them 10 years after Specter and Adams told the Commission they must be "considered." Now the government swears it does not have the records which its expert assured the Commission did exist and would be preserved. (5H69. See also Part IV).
Harrison Edward Livingstone, High Treason 2, Carroll & Graf, 1992, pages 540-541:
As for the so-called atomic testing, I dealt with this in High Treason when I discussed the neutron activation analysis tests. Suffice it to say that the tests were never released by the Warren Commission because they did not prove that the fragments that were found were from the same lot of lead as that of the "Magic" Bullet found at Parkland. The fragments could only be shown to be similar. Milions of bullets might have been made from the same lot of lead, so it would be impossible to prove that they came from a particular weapon. The bullet found at Parkland was clearly a piece of frame-up evidence planted there so that it would connect to the alleged Oswald rifle when found. But the bullet did not actually go through a body or hit bone, or it would not look so perfect.
With regard to the Parkland bullet, the crew that found it made it clear that it was on the stetcher of a small boy and could not have been on Connally's--meaning it was planted there. In addition, the autopsy surgeon, Dr. Humes, testified that the bullet had to have come out of John Kennedy's back, and therefore could not have been the same bullet that struck Connally. Humes also made it clear to the Warren commission that he knew fragments had been found in Connally that prima facie demonstrated that they could not have come from the pristine, nearly undamaged "Magic" Bullet.
Weisberg, 1975, page 602:
Four photos show base and side of CE 399.
These are not Commission or FBI pictures. They were taken for this work. They show that all the metal missing from Bullet 399 was removed by the FBI (p. 226), which did not tell the incurious Commission and joined it in a deliberate deception and misrepresentation indispensable to the faked "solution." The upper pictures of the base and the left-hand one of the side clearly show the cutting off for testing of all the metal missing from this otherwise unscathed bullet. this is but one of the reasons the tests were suppressed and I had to sue for them. They and these pictures destroy the Report and Commission and FBI integrity.
Permanent tract in gelatin of a 6.5 Carcano after traveling 90 yards. "Cartridges of the World" calls it a good Deer, Antelope and Black Bear cartridge.
Yes, Tpaine.
Moreover, I think the 'Single Bullet Theory' isn't so irrational at all: The 'Single Bullet Theory'. I don't see anything particularly magical about it.
We've got NFL quarterbacks that could have hit President Kennedy in the head with a football thrown from the roof of the TSBD, but a USMC-trained marksman can't make a five-inch group at 80-some yards with a decent high-powered rifle with a 4x telescopic sight?
If Oswald would have instead bought a surplus M1 Garand, it would have been over in one round.
It just wasn't a hard shot, and Kennedy and Connally were lined up well enough as shown in the link above. Oswald's only real 'incompetence' here is that he actually missed once, as I see it.
Addressing the comments I made about people being 'irrational', I'm generally talking about posters mentioning 'exploding bullets' and the like. The 'Grassy Knoll' is a crappy place to shoot from. It's a 90-degree deflection shot at the target. The good position is where Oswald shot from.
Yes, Tpaine. Moreover, I think the 'Single Bullet Theory' isn't so irrational at all: The 'Single Bullet Theory'. I don't see anything particularly magical about it.
Nice link. As is typical, it raises just as many debatable questions about the magic bullet as it claims to answer.
Thus, it is not logical on your part to insist that those who acknowledge the existence of major flaws in the SBT are 'irrational'.
We've got NFL quarterbacks that could have hit President Kennedy in the head with a football thrown from the roof of the TSBD, but a USMC-trained marksman can't make a five-inch group at 80-some yards with a decent high-powered rifle with a 4x telescopic sight?
Sure he could have. That's not the issue. The problem is the SBT, and always has been, since the flawed 'report' came out.
If Oswald would have instead bought a surplus M1 Garand, it would have been over in one round. It just wasn't a hard shot, and Kennedy and Connally were lined up well enough as shown in the link above. Oswald's only real 'incompetence' here is that he actually missed once, as I see it.
Yep, you admit he missed once, but you can't admit the possiblity that this miss casts serious doubts on the SBT? -- Who's being irrational now?
Addressing the comments I made about people being 'irrational', I'm generally talking about posters mentioning 'exploding bullets' and the like. The 'Grassy Knoll' is a crappy place to shoot from. It's a 90-degree deflection shot at the target. The good position is where Oswald shot from.
Indeed it is. And there is nothing to exclude the possiblity of another shooter having been there. We simply will never know.
We only know for sure that there are serious flaws in the Warren Report, & in particular in the SBT.
It is illogical to say otherwise.
Why stretch credility to come up with any number of vacant reasons?
The 7 or 8 seconds started with the first shot, then a reload and then two more shots. He missed with the first, reloaded, shot low with the second, reloaded and then almost missed the third by shooting high and to the right.
There's nothing out of the ordinary in the mechanics of the shooting. Bullet count, achievability, time, ballistics.
Millions of words have been written, arguing that exact point ever since the report came out. It is illogical to deny the fact that a serious controversy exists. You are being as irrational in that denial as some of the conspiracy nuts are in insisting that only they can see the 'truth'..
We will never know the truth of this issue, because the Warren report is flawed.
The alternate views don't make sense. Why stretch credility to come up with any number of vacant reasons?
Why blindly insist that a government report that some of its own members admitted was biased, is the only true view of the matter?
It strains credulity indeed.
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