Dr. Philip Melanson (right)
The Coalition on Political Assassinations held its 4th annual conference on the campus of Georgetown University June 13-15th, 1997. This conference was the first held on a college campus. In my opinion, a welcome change. Registrants were able to stay in dorm rooms, which helped reduce the cost of attending JFK assassination conferences. The main reason for going was to hear Dr. William Pepper, the attorney for James Earl Ray, speak on the developments in getting a Ray trial for the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This conference was the smallest one held by COPA. There were less than 100 people there, and I would say less than 50. There were the usual problems with both the audio and visual. Several times the microphone did not work for presenters. Time limits were imposed on some while others kept right on going. COPA's insistence on these time constraints even prevented Dr. Cyril Wecht from speaking! Dr. Wecht did speak at one point but not in a presentation or in a rousing speech.
The first day started with the non-existent, non-working, working panels. These group discussions were held in the book dealer area called the "resource room". There were three circles of chairs. These were named "A", "B", and "C". At 9:00 AM on Friday circle "A" was to discuss Academic Outreach, "B" Fundraising, with John Judge and "C" Medical Outreach.
The person at Georgetown University whom I spoke with on the phone told me that the dorms rooms were all booked up. So I had to stay in a hotel. Unfortunately, I could not find one near the conference for the duration of the conference and inside my budget. So I was out in College Park, thus it was difficult to get there for the morning sessions. However, upon speaking with John Judge I discovered that no, dorm rooms were available. A typical COPA communication screw up.
Upon arriving I talked with the bookseller in the "resource room" who informed me that absolutely nothing transpired in "A", "B" or "C" that morning.
Jim Lesar apparently had an "open house" at his Assassination Archive and Resource Center. This is a good idea and a bad one. This should be held throughout the conference with someone, or a few people, manning the AARC and helping people who will visit it. Having it on one day is not good. Having it from 1-5 p.m. when the press conference is at 2 p.m. is dumb. Most people wanted to be there for the press conference to hear what Dr. Pepper would say. Having people provide their own transportation and having to leave Georgetown University, go to AARC, god forbid find something you want there, like a parking space, and return in under one hour, is another example of poor planning.
The press conference, despite being in a rather small room, was a success. The press actually showed up. Unfortunately, Dr. Pepper did not. C-SPAN aired the press conference. Black Entertainment Television was also there. I understand other reporters from either newspapers or wire services were there too.
Dan Alcorn-"My name is Dan Alcorn, I'm on the board of the Coalition on Political Assassinations, an organization that we founded in 1994 to pursue public release of information about the American political assassinations. First, we were very interested in President John F. Kennedy's assassination, and then the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy and other political assassinations. In the short time that our organization has been in existence we have had quite an eventful period. The Congress passed, unanimously, in 1992 the JFK Assassination Records Act, and that Act has been in implementation during this period of time. There is a federal organization called the Assassination Records Review Board, which has had a two year life and we believe will be extended by Congress for an additional year so that they can continue until September of next year in order to process and release documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
"Quite an enormous amount of material has come out through that process. We are talking 250,000 pages released from CIA files, which was the broadest CIA file release at any time in the history of that organization and dwarfs other releases by that organization and other federal agencies, the FBI has [also] been turning over a quantity of information. That job is not complete because the quantity of information is so large, the federal assassination records board has decided that they need an additional year to finish their work.
"Congress held a hearing, I guess last week, a committee hearing on the topic, it looks like Congress is going to approve an additional year for the Assassination Records Review Board, and we think that that's quite appropriate.
"Also, during the period of time that our organization has existed there has been a lot of public commentary on the topic of disclosure of government information. So we have felt that the past three and a half years that our organization has worked, three and a half is right?, a little over three years that we have been in existence there has been a lot of progress on these issues that we have been concerned about, but there is a long way to go as well.
"A recent disclosure that we think is particularly troubling, and instructive, is the disclosure of CIA documents from the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'etat operation, in which the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala. Sometimes the stories don't pick up on the fact that it was a democratically elected government that we decided to overthrow in 1954. And 1400 pages were released recently, it turns out that these 1400 pages had been retained by the CIA only because they were the subject of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. They would have been destroyed if they had not been the subject of a FOIA lawsuit, as they ultimately announced many other records have been destroyed. But in this, sort of accidentally preserved 1400 pages, there is in it a statement, an admission of a CIA assassination program that was part of the Guatemala coup operation and this program involves the targeting of 58 political leaders in Guatemala for assassination by assassin teams that were trained in conjunction with the CIA. There is discussion in those records of the shipping of silencers for .22 caliber rifles from the U.S. to the assassin team being trained in Honduras for use in the Guatemala overthrow of 1954.
"Now, the reason that this is so important is that the CIA did not inform the Congress of the United States of the existence of this assassination program when the Congress investigated the CIA's involvement in assassinations. So that in 1975 when the Congress made an investigation of this issue they were not informed of this apparatus but we are now finding from 1953 and 1954. And we think that that describes the situation that we are in in terms of achieving full disclosure which we support, which is that we are no where near full disclosure and we are still in the process of actually uncovering what it is that we need to go after for full disclosure.
"We are very disturbed, that it has recently been announced in the New York Times that the CIA has destroyed their records on the Iran overthrow in 1953, despite the fact that two Directors of Central Intelligence committed [themselves] to public release of those records. Robert Gates when he was Director commented in 1992 that the CIA will begin to release data on the Iran overthrow and the Guatemala overthrow from 1953 and 1954, and then when James Woolsey became President Clinton's first CIA Director, James Woolsey announced that he would follow through on that commitment and release those documents on those operations. It has now been announced 5 years after the commitment that the reason they've never been released is that they were destroyed in the early 1960's, and in fact, there were no documents to release, and that the Directors of Central Intelligence who made that commitment were misinformed or uninformed as to what actually existed in the CIA. And this prompted Director Woolsey to make what I think is the appropriate statement which is this is a travesty on the history of our country to have an official of the government go out and make a commitment like that to the American people that public disclosure is going to be made, and that openness is going to occur, and then have the records not to exist and allegedly haven't existed since the early 1960's. And this is the kind of uphill fight that we have when we are trying to get full disclosure. And we really have to be very careful about representations that are made by these government agencies and organizations as to what is going to be released and what exists.
"And so we have a struggle, it is an important struggle because what is at stake is what Director of the CIA Woolsey said in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago which is, 'This is the history of the country that is at stake.' When these records are destroyed then we have lost part of the truthful history of what our country has done around the world and here at home over that period of time. So we think that that makes it very important that we keep our work (going) and (keep) pushing for public disclosure and for full investigation of the documentary record and to try to get as much out as possible.
"There were other things that happened at this time. We had Dr. William Pepper, James Earl Ray's attorney speak at our conference last year. Many of you attended that session and you heard William Pepper talk about the Martin Luther King assassination then. In the intervening time, obviously the media has picked up on the story and it has become quite a major story around the country. Dr. William Pepper will be back at our conference and will be speaking here tomorrow, I believe, and so Dr. William Pepper will update us on the Martin Luther King case.
"Finally, and something that I've had some involvement in, there has been a release of information about the FBI Crime Laboratory indicating that there have been serious problems in the FBI Crime Laboratory for an extended period of time, which is something which is not unknown to assassination researchers. In fact, I first heard of those problems through people who have researched on the assassination cases and told me that the crime lab work didn't look very good in relation to the assassination issues. It turns out, you don't have to take my word for it, or the word of the assassination (research) community, but why don't you look at the report of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice who found systemic misconduct in the FBI Crime Laboratory.
"So we have had some things happen since we founded this organization that we think makes the work of our organization,and the existence of our organization very important, very important in trying to get an accurate historical record of this period in our country, this modern period in our country. And that is what we have been working for, and will continue to work for. Now I am going to introduce, our program chair for our conference, he is going to speak, and will take questions once we've made the presentations, we will be happy to speak, I am going to call at this point Dr. Wayne Smith, he is the program chair for the conference this year, he is a visiting professor of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University, and directs an academic exchange program with the University of Habana, he is also a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, and formerly a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he is a member of the Council for Foreign Relations, he served 25 years with the Department of State assigned to the Soviet Union, Argentina, Brazil and Cuba, was executive secretary for President Kennedy's Latin America task force, and cited as an outstanding foreign service officer by it's chairman, Mr. Berle. He was recognized as the Department of State's leading expert on Cuba. He has published extensively, has several books to his credit, including 'The Rus sians Aren't Coming: New Soviet Policy in Latin America', let me call on our program chair Dr. Wayne Smith."
Wayne Smith-"Thank you very much Dan, let me say that I do not wish to fly under any false flags, I am not one of the researchers looking into the facts of this case. I came to the assassination when I was director of Cuban affairs back at the end of the 70's, and I helped to arrange the trip of the House Select Committee (on Assassinations) to Havana and I became interested in the assassination at that point, started reading about the assassination and was appalled as I got into it to find that the Warren Commission clearly could not have been correct. And so I joined the Coalition on Political Assassinations because I'm very interested and I wanted to be helpful, but I am not one of the researchers, and I have not written any books on the assassination itself.
"We have I think pulled together a very interesting program this year and I would urge you all including members of the press to come back tomorrow for the 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. panel on the Martin Luther King assassination when William Pepper will be here, in addition to others, to talk about that particular case. We are also going to have panels tomorrow morning, on the history and overview of the JFK assassination, some speakers will focus on Lee Harvey Oswald and the mysteries surrounding him; and on the forensic evidence, panel 3 and to some extent panel 5, will be on the forensic evidence, which I would say is the core of the case, the Coalition on Political Assassinations does not base it's doubts or it's rejection, outright rejection of the Warren Commission report on wild, or even well founded theories, essentially it is based on facts.
"I remember an interview that Dan Rather did some years ago when he was asked about the Kennedy assassination and his thoughts on it, and he said well before he had become DAN RATHER, he had been a crime photographer in a small town newspaper and so he always focused on the forensic evidence and based on that he saw no reason to believe that the Warren Commission had been wrong, and that the assassination had not been carried out by a lone gunman firing from behind.
"Well, of course, that depends upon the forensic evidence that you are looking at. As we all know the autopsy report that goes into the Warren Commission Report is not the original autopsy report. The original autopsy report was destroyed by the autopsists, they themselves have acknowledged that, and they also destroyed all their notes, they also acknowledged that. Why did they do that? According to them, they did not want the original report and the original notes to become memorabilia. These are trained doctors, they are supposed to be trained autopsists, no trained doctor would ever destroy his notes and his original autopsy report on that basis.
"What goes into the Warren Commission Report is an autopsy report that is written days later, we really don't know exactly when, when it was written, but certainly after Lee Harvey Oswald had been killed and pointed to as the lone assassin. Nothing coming out of the autopsy room that night substantiates or supports this second autopsy report. The artist's conception that you will see in the Warren Commission Report shows a wound in the back of the neck and the autopsists, of course, now say, or said at the time when they wrote the second autopsy report that the President had been struck in the back of the neck, the bullet went through the neck, exited the throat and struck Governor Connally. But the autopsy diagram they prepared that night shows the bullet not to have struck the back of the neck but to have struck down in the back, six inches down in the back. The death certificate places the bullet wound to the left of the third thoracic vertebrae, or six inches down in the back. The report prepared by the two FBI agents who were in the autopsy room that night also places the bullet wound six inches down in the back.
"What difference does it make? Well, a bullet fired on a downward, from above, on a downward trajectory, striking in the back is certainly not going to exit the throat seven inches above. I suppose there is some possibility that it could strike a rib and do a 90 degree turn and exit the throat, but if so then it exits on an upward trajectory and certainly is not going to strike Connally.
"How have the autopsists explained this discrepancy in their autopsy diagram that night versus the second autopsy report that they wrote days later? Well, they actually never had, they never had to. And one of the reasons that we are waiting anxiously to see what the Review Board produces is because they, at last, have been deposed, the autopsists, that is, have been deposed and we are anxiously awaiting to see what they said. It probably will not satisfy us. I'm sure they haven't said, 'Well, actually we perjured ourselves.' but it will be very interesting to see.
"In any event," Wayne Smith concluded, "the basis of our rejection of the Warren Commission Report rests on many things but most centrally on the forensic evidence which does not bear out the Warren Commission Report. So, I'm glad to see all of you here. We hope that you will be back for all the panels, members of the press as well."
Wayne Smith seemed unsure whether to go to questions or to hand the podium over to Dan Alcorn. Sarah McClendon tried to ask Wayne Smith a question, Wayne seemed to say okay to that but Dan Alcorn wanted Phil Melanson to speak first then go to questions. I heard Mrs. McClendon say, "Okay, then forget it." This appeared to me to have been handled a bit awkwardly. As I was in the room it appeared as though Sarah was mad she couldn't ask her question right away. I don't know if this was picked up on the C-SPAN airing or not, if people could hear it or thought like I did about it. Anyway...
Dan Alcorn-"Our next speaker is Dr. Phil Melanson, he is the conference chair this year, he is a professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. During the past 15 years he has used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, and military intelligence (agencies). These disclosures produced a series of expose's and profiles. He is the author of 9 books and 27 articles dealing with governmental secrecy, political violence, intelligence agencies and public policy issues.
"Melanson has published in such diverse novels as The Nation, Library Journal, Transaction Society, Journal of Politics, World Teacher Newspaper Syndicate, and American Political Science Review. He has lectured widely and appeared or consulted in a number of television productions. His works include, "Spy Saga", a book on Oswald's intelligence connections, and "The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-Up 1968-1991". His most recent work is ShadowPlay: The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, the Trial of Sirhan Sirhan, and the failure of American justice. Let me call on Dr. Phil Melanson."
Phil Melanson-"I am going to try to highlight for you some of the things that we will be doing on the RFK and MLK cases, and we really do have some exciting new information and some very important developments in each of those cases. We will have with us tomorrow Dr. William Pepper who as many of you know is James Earl Ray's lawyer and the dramatic legal and ballistics evidence results that are going on in that will be discussed by Dr. Pepper. As many of you also know some results of the rifle testing for the first time have come back. It is not clear to me what that means or what the legal strategies for reopening the case will be from here on but we will get to hear that first hand from James Earl Ray's lawyer.
"And on Wednesday of next week [THIS TURNED OUT NOT TO BE TRUE DUE TO ADDITIONAL TESTING THAT WAS PERFORMED ON THE RIFLE. EXACTLY WHEN THE TEST RESULTS WILL BE PRESENTED TO JUDGE JOE BROWN'S COURT IN TENNESSEE IS UNKNOWN BUT SUPPOSEDLY WILL HAPPEN THIS MONTH, JULY, 1997] there will be a court hearing in Memphis that will solidify or finalize what is going on with the rifle testing. So it is a very important week in the MLK case.
"I am going to highlight for you some of the developments in the Robert Kennedy assassination. The most dramatic of which is Sirhan Sirhan's parole hearing coming up next Wednesday also, (June 18th, 1997) and that should be a very interesting event and our hope is that it will focus not just on the legal issues but provide some focus on the evidence issues in the case.
"I will also report on a writ of habeas corpus put together by Sirhan's lawyers claiming very forcefully, I think, that he did not get a fair trial to begin with and asking for another trial.
"There is also the (James) Scott Enyart lawsuit that I reported on last year that many of you are familiar with, the young photographer, who took pictures that he alleged showed the actual shooting of Robert Kennedy, and we don't have any such pictures, and a jury awarded him $600,000 dollars in damages implicitly concluding that L.A.P.D. had and destroyed those photos and therefore Enyart was entitled to damages. And that is going to be appealed by L.A.P.D., and I will comment on that.
"Let me put in a plug for the importance of our main conference theme which is full disclosure, one of the exciting things is you will hear the reports of what we are getting in the JFK case thanks to the legislation and the Review Board. I wish things were as rosy in the MLK, and RFK cases. In the RFK case, Sirhan's lawyer, this far from 1968 has just put together the kind of legal brief that had the files been released in '68 or '70 or had disclosure to the defense taken place at the appropriate legal and constitutional level, there would have been interesting appeals that might have changed the legal course of this case. As it is, since the files were secret until a decade ago, it has taken this long for the legal team to put this information together because the files were suppressed.
"In the King case we are still waiting, on those approximately, 300, I think, John, John, in the King case we have, it's about, 600,000 pages classified?
John Judge-"600,000 to 750,000 pages."
Phil Melanson-"600,000 to 750,000 pages of documents are still under congressional seal, as were the JFK records, and those records need to come out, they are important for the history of the case, for reinvestigation, and they are also central to James Earl Ray's legal plight for as long as he's alive, and also for the King family's continuing pursuit of the truth of the murder of their husband and father which will take place whether Ray dies or not, and I think that is a very dramatic and interesting development. But absent those documents, of which there is no apparent immediacy to disclose, it is going to be much tougher for anybody to learn the truth. And C.O.P.A. is committed to the release of those files, as it was to getting the RFK files and JFK files released.
"So I hope you will stick around with us for these dramatic and interesting presentations, there is a lot going on even giving the timeframe after all of these years, and look forward to seeing you, thanks."
Dan Alcorn-"I would, also, before we take questions, I would like to recognize John Judge, who is the executive secretary of C.O.P.A. and we very much appreciate all the work that John does, who really keeps this organization together. So that we can come up here and do this. So, thank you.
"So we will take questions...
audience member-"I wanted to ask Mr. Melanson a question, you know that Sirhan parole hearing, I don't suppose that's a public hearing is it, the parole hearing?"
Melanson-"The parole hearing is semi-public in that it's a very small room but my understanding is that CourtTV will be allowed to have one camera there, the rest of the press pool will be segregated in a different room and CBS is going, and there will be some big cameras there but a lot of them will have to feed off of CourtTV. So, it will be public"
audience member- "I mean that the public won't be allowed to get in though, will they?"
Melanson-"I think it's very limited access. The part that's not public is the deliberations-"
audience member- "Oh.'
Melanson-"of the parole board, and I have to point out that two Sirhan parole's ago the parole board said, 'Let's go and make our decision.' They went into a room that they thought was appropriately locked but the recorder was on broadcasting to the press. They told three off color jokes, joked with each other about whether they stayed in the room long enough and came out and gave their verdict. So the deliberations won't be public but the event should be."
audience member- "Is it going to be in L.A.?"
Melanson-"No it's at Corcoran State Prison in Corcoran, California, about a 100 miles North of L.A. that's in the prison where Sirhan resides."
audience member- "Oh, okay."
Dan Alcorn-"That's really full disclosure, isn't it? Other questions?"
Press- "Mr. Alcorn could you talk a little bit about what other information there may be out there as it relates to James Earl Ray other than the bullet being tested because it is obvious that they are going to need more than just a bullet to reopen this case."
Dan Alcorn- "Right. I'm going to let Phil talk on that too, but I think it is almost important that you not focus so much on the bullet because there is a tremendous amount of other material and information in that case that needs to be looked at. The Book that William Pepper wrote, called, 'Orders to Kill' is really where you need to go to look, 'cause he has put together a tremendous amount of information and the ballistics is only the one piece of it but what he has put together is that there was, we knew that there was U.S. Army surveillance on King until the day before the assassination because the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper reported that in an expose three or four years ago but what William Pepper has done is to take it beyond that. He has confirmed, got in touch with the surveillance team members through the reporter for the Memphis newspaper and they say well, yes, they were also there on the day of the assassination, more than they were there on the day of the assassination, that the U.S. Army military intelligence team, he says, photographed the assassination at that time. They were taking photographs of King, surveillance photographs, and photographed the entire event, and I think it is much more crucial to understanding who did the shooting to try to find those photographs, or any records of those photographs than to rely entirely just on the bullet because the photographs are going to give you exactly what happened. There is a lot more information in 'Orders to Kill' but I can tell you that if such surveillance was there, and took those photographs, the U.S. government should cough that up immediately. I mean, that is the most relevant information that you can ever imagine about that crime, and the fact that we know they were there the day before, and they had surveillance on King for a period of months, they were surveilling him everywhere he went, they bugged his hotel rooms, they put him in the hotel rooms where they wanted him to stay that had the bugs, and sort of made arrangements with the hotels, and they had wiretapping on the telephones, and they had photo surveillance, and I really think the best way to understand that event is to have them divulge all the surveillance that they had.
"Phil do you want to-
Sarah McClendon-"By what authority do they not divulge that?
Dan Alcorn-"Well, there is no authority for them to do that, and in fact if; William Pepper says that the photographs show someone else shooting King, that they show a rifle extending from the bushes outside the back of the roominghouse and the restaurant. If the surveillance photographs do in fact show that, then that is evidence that Ray is not guilty and under the constitutional standard of Brady vs. Maryland, a U.S. Supreme court case, that should have been produced before his trial, at any pendency between now, and should be produced today under the law in the United States, because if the U.S. government has proof that someone is not guilty of a crime the law in this country requires them to produce it, pronto, with no complaining, now if the information, it's conceivable that the information may have existed at one time and been destroyed, that's, you know, a different situation, and we might try to reconstruct what it is but I have a feeling that there is still some of that information in the files."
Phil Melanson-"Yeah, I'd like to emphasize that Ray's lawyer, Mr. Pepper, did not go after the ballistics test because he thought it was the litmus test of guilt or innocence, the most important thing to do. He went after it because it was the only legal avenue available to him at that time under Tennessee statute and he wasn't going to get a trial full blown. The case against Ray would not be proved strong by the match of that bullet to the rifle. It is very, very weak, and I would guarantee that any reasonable jury looking for reasonable doubt, if they were presented with the absence of eyewitnesses, the absence of fingerprints where they should be, the presence of other suspects at the crime scene, and the very weak time and motion attributed to James Earl Ray by the government that, I don't think there is much doubt that they would find that there is reasonable doubt in his case.
"Secondly, the other part of this is who did it if James Earl Ray didn't? And we are not talking about nonexistent witnesses or suspects. Bill Pepper presents a list in his book, I present an implicit list in my book, they overlap a little bit, they diverge a lot, the point is if you want to bring people in under oath who might be suspects or are suspects that might have been involved, or who might know whom was involved, you can do that and it could be a lengthy and very productive process. So we are not just talking about (something, one word, sound like "cantalures"? Is this some kind of ballistic term?) and matches here. The bullet test is important here but it is only the tip of the iceberg in the truth of the King case." Reporter- "If I could follow up, the "Raul" character that Mr. Ray continues to, says was acting in cohorts with him, your speculation on who this "Raul" person might be? Phil Melanson-"Well, I will leave that to Mr. William Pepper tomorrow because we have different theories on this which shows that analysts can disagree. I think there was not one "Raul" but a series of composites that Ray put together. Pepper on the other hand not only thinks that there was one, but he thinks he has found the one, and it is this "Raul" character that Pepper would present to the court if he got the opportunity in a trial among others."
Dan Alcorn-"My understanding is that Tennessee law permits private individuals to bring forward a prosecutor in a criminal case, Tennessee is one of only a few states that permit private criminal prosecutions and that what may happen ultimately in this case if the state of Tennessee does not want to pursue this case, that a group of private citizens may pursue it under Tennessee law."
Sarah McClendon- (getting back to the JFK assassination)"What is the reason for them to destroy the original autopsy on Kennedy?"
Wayne Smith-"Well, I think the reason is because the original autopsy report would show that the bullet struck in the back and couldn't possibly have exited the throat. The FBI agents who were in the room that night wrote a report on this, and they described one of the autopsists as probing the back wound and finding it was only about a finger deep, it was a very light wound, and there not being a bullet, he not having discovered a bullet, he speculated, well, I wonder what happened to the bullet? During the autopsy, word came from Dallas that they had found a bullet on a stretcher, and the autopsists then said, ah, well, that must be the bullet from the back wound, it worked itself out of the wound while they were working on him in Dallas. They did not, they did not examine the wound in the throat at all. They thought that was simply the result of a tracheotomy. They did not even look at it. And yet, a couple of days later you have the autopsists saying that it went in the back of the neck and it exited the throat, the same bullet that that night they said must have worked itself out of the back wound. So if the original autopsy report had gone in it would have indicated that the wound was in the back as their autopsy diagram showed, could not possibly have exited the throat, and therefore, could not possibly have caused the wounds to Governor Connally. And yet, the wounds to Governor Connally were real, they were there, which means that there had to have been another shooter firing from the rear to have caused those wounds. And if the wound in the throat is not a wound of exit then it is most likely a wound of entry, which leaves you with a question as to what happened to the bullet, but given that they performed a tracheotomy and so forth, that is something that could perhaps be explained.
"But the original autopsy report is destroyed because you could not have had the single gunman firing from the rear theory put forward." audience member- "But following up on the "Raul" question, isn't there some indication that the House Select Committee on Assassinations located, or knew about the whereabouts of "Raul" and hid this information?"
Phil Melanson- "That's been suggested, let me say that it's known that there is a lot of information on some of the people that we regard as suspects that is in House Committee files, sometimes they looked at people closer than they admitted in their final report, sometimes they looked at them not hardly at all but there is material there that did not end up in their final report. So we really need that record to sort all that out.
Me- "For Phil Melanson, I saw on CNN Headline News last night a story that they said that the defense team for James Earl Ray is requesting additional tests on the bullet and the rifle saying that they weren't happy with the results so far. Now as far as I know those results have not been made public. Could this be some kind of a leak, or a preemptive strike to like discredit if there is positive proof that the bullet does not match the rifle?"
Phil Melanson- "You can ask William Pepper tomorrow what his theory on that is because the real legal word, the definitive word will not come until Wednesday. How that story got out there I don't know."
Me- "Did you see it?"
Phil Melanson- "I did see it. I frankly don't quite understand it even though I saw it and I'm waiting for Pepper to explain it to me."
Dan Alcorn- "A press question? Yeah,
Press- "As it relates to the FBI and Martin Luther King, obviously J. Edgar Hoover had his reasons for wanting to discredit King and his whole movement. Can you address this whole FBI issue and King and it's wanting to get him and could that have been part of this whole scenario that brought about this assassination?"
Dan Alcorn- "I will turn it over to Phil but when we got the CIA documents that were released in 1993 as part of the JFK release there was a package of documents in there that were related to the Martin Luther King assassination. They were on plain paper, CIA releases, they didn't have a letterhead and they were reports of surveillance of Martin Luther King. And I told Phil about them, and he got ahold of them. (To Phil-) I think they are in that BBC documentary, that will be played tonight?
Phil Melanson- "A couple of them are.
Dan Alcorn- "There is discussion of it. But reading these surveillance reports of King are a harrowing experience to read even now because what was happening was that both the FBI and the CIA were focused on King in the Spring of 1968 as being a threat to national security of the United States because they were receiving informant reports from an informant that had been planted in his entourage, a fellow who turns out to be quite unreliable, because he has a distinct political viewpoint, which he now admits he was embellishing the reports that were being provided to these government agencies, to give basically his opinion, his personal opinion, and he says he never intended them to take his comments as fact. But you can tell from the reports that not only did they take them as fact, they circulated them between the FBI and the CIA, and I'll tell you what the guy was saying, what the guy was saying to them was that Martin Luther King is an agent of Peking, now known a Beijing, but then they spelled it Peking, and that his movement is being controlled by Peking, allright, Communist China. If you talk to that guy today, he says well that was my opinion, you know, just watching what he did, that was what I thought was going on, I didn't mean for them to take that literally, you know that was just my political prospective. Well you can see from these surveillance reports, and the internal memoranda, they took it very seriously, and they were very concerned in the Spring of 1968 that Martin Luther King was going to lead a movement to Washington, called the Poor People's March, it was going to be follow up on the march of 1963. This was going to be the Poor People's March, and they were saying they were going to come to Washington in order to raise the issue of poverty in the United States. And it's clear that the security agencies saw that as a threat in the summer of 1968 to the functioning of the government in Washington. And saw it as an attempt to disrupt the functions of government. They went so far as they had informants in church groups, and they were getting informant reports from the church groups about how the King movement was asking for churches in the Washington area to help put up these people who were organizing this march, and the CIA was getting reports about how, and actually asking one of the church boards to have a dispute about whether to help the march, and I have to give credit to the Unitarian Church in Arlington, they voted 7 to 1 to help the march, you know, and the CIA point of view was out voted 7 to 1, but as you read those reports you realize that in the Spring of '68 from the government's security prospective that they were in a very defensive and I would say paranoid state in the Spring of 1968, and what's even more disturbing to me is that the same unreliable informant was telling them that Robert F. Kennedy is in the same position, and he, his reports are aimed at both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in that period of time."
Phil Melanson- "Yes, I would just like to comment a bit here. I think we miss an important part of our history if we think that J. Edgar Hoover's personal pathology and racism as it was directing the Bureau, was the real problem. It was a real problem, the real problem, the real story is that the CIA, the FBI and Army Intelligence according to their own documents regarded the Civil Rights movement generally, and Martin Luther King very particularly as the ultimate national security Communist threat to the United States. And it's in writing, and we must add the Vietnam war to this equation, that in addition to economic justice, which they read as Communism, now we have Dr. King stridently opposing the Vietnam war the year before his death and the memos going back and forth and saying, 'Now he's really Peking controlled! Look what he's saying now! They've really got his buttons! And this is dangerous to our national security.' So you had a panic situation in which independently, but feeding off of each other these three powerful intelligence agencies were zeroing in on Martin Luther King, and we know that two of them were there at the crime scene, and if the CIA wasn't joining the trilogy I would be very, very surprised. So they may hold the key to the truth of this matter more than any other witnesses.
Reporter- "Do you think that when King repudiated the Vietnam war, do you think that that may have tipped the scales?"
Phil Melanson- "By the memos, it definitively tipped the scales. It went from a worrisome situation of racial animosity, hatred and prejudice and fear about economic politics and racial politics to a major national security issue and that upped the ante tremendously."
Dan Alcorn- "Any other questions? Follow ups? Allright, if not thank you very much we appreciate. We have people here who have additional information about the conference if you would like it so feel free to ask."
At 2-3:00 p.m. there were more nonexistent, non-working working panel discussions. Photographic Evidence in "A", with absolutely no A/V equipment to show any photographic evidence anyway, just as well because Robert Groden did not show up to lead this discussion and Speaker's Bureau in "B" with John Judge who again did not show up. More nonexistent, non-working working panels from 3-4:00 p.m. Ballistics in "A' which did have a lively discussion and was based almost exclusively on developments in the MLK case; Malcolm Blunt held court in "B" on Internationa l Outreach and nothing happened in "C" which was on the topic of Publications, again not hosted by John Judge.
At 9:00 A.M. there was supposedly a trip to Archives II and folks returned from that at 4:00 p.m. I know of no one who went.
4-5:00 p.m had Medical Evidence in "A", Records and ARRB in "B" and Legal Outreach in "C". I recall only interest in the Records and the ARRB with John and I leading that discussion. There was a good crowd for this one.
Dinner was from 5-6. At 6 there was a cash bar. However, with Georgetown a few short blocks away and basically just down the hill with an inviting plethora of restaurants and bars, my friends and I wisely opted to get good food.
We returned before 7:00 p.m. to hear Dr. Wecht speak on the fact that the depositions of autopsists Humes, Boswell and Finck, which we were told by the ARRB would be released last December, still have not been released.
Dr. Wecht- "...that they want to catch fresh without "they" (Humes, Boswell and Finck, and perhaps other medical witnesses) having had the opportunity of having read the depositions of others to which I must express some degree of incredulity. Who doesn't know what Humes and Boswell and Finck have said at least in varying times in their careers? They said one thing when Groden talked to them, when Lifton talked to them, when Livingstone talked to them, when this one talked to them, when my pathology colleague, the editor in chief of JAMA talked with them, they have stated various things at different times, NBC, CBS, for this program with Dan Rather in '67, in another program in '72. The point is are there any virgins out there yet? I don't know. Have they come up with somebody who was there? I just heard from someone earlier today that there is another pathologist who is practicing now in Kentucky, who was a resident or something that was there. I don't know, so maybe there are some additional people to shed some light but whether that is all true and without casting any aspersions or implying anything of a sinister nature and in adopting the most benign acceptance and rationale and explanation for this delay the fact is that it hasn't been released, these depositions, these transcripts, and now if they get another year, will that suffice? Where are we going to be when they do release it? What editorial commentary will be made by them? Must we be on the alert standing by, prepared to go through, analyze, lay these things out and make a list, just think of yourselves back in high school or college, or maybe doing something for a graduate degree paper or so on and really, really getting into these things, as many of us have done in oral presentations as well as in written form to show what each one of them said at various times.
"We have got, as you all know, just going with what they have said, they the pathologists, we have got two bullet holes in the back of the head, forget all of us, the critics, I made this point, which I think is again nothing profound, and yet is lost sight of, we don't, we could just stand back and watch these people saying different things at different times. We've got two bullet holes in the back of Kennedy's head!
"Well, if you were in a court of law, and it was a murder case, you wouldn't present the case if you were the defense. You would be crazy to put one witness on the stand! The judge should throw the case out! And if he were very prosecutorial minded and did not do so your closing argument after not having put anybody on would be to just point this out very clearly for the jury, and they are talking about one man doing the shooting, in X seconds, with Y weapon, and in Z temporal relationship as to when the shots could be gotten off, I don't have the answer, and they don't have the answer, and how could they ask you ladies and gentlemen of the jury to provide the answer, and that's the end of the case.
"Which brings us back to my earlier point, what the hell are we doing about it, and what can we do about it? Our numbers are dwindling, and yet the interest remains, but it's bothersome and it's worrisome. Maybe some of my colleagues are a little bit unhappy that I express these words. I don't mean to do so with pessimism, I am not a pessimist, but I am a realist and I feel that I owe a duty to you, you people who have come here now to our third conference, you have left your homes in the summer and on a weekend and so on, and if not to you then to whom, and if not now then when to paraphrase quite liberally the great ( WHO?)
"So we better start thinking about these things, and give much consideration over the weekend to what can be done. In the meantime we would ask if any of you do have contacts or are letter writers, it would not hurt to write another note, make a call to your Congressman or Senator you want to make sure that the ARRB does get that final year, although I've said that it looks like it is in place, but nothing is for certain in Washington, D.C. as you know.
"Well we do have a good conference and we have a nice lineup of presenters and of discussion and topics, there is one very vital issue, as we meet of course and that relates to Dr. Martin Luther King's case and we will be hearing from Dr. Pepper tomorrow. I have had the pleasure of having dinner with him, I've known Bill for awhile, but we talked while he was in Pittsburgh for the ballistics test and also to the University to see about getting James Earl Ray a liver, and you will find his remarks very, very interesting. And tonight there will be a BBC presentation that will be shown to you in which Dr. Pepper and I think Dr. Melanson and others are participating.
"I want to take this opportunity to express deep appreciation to the three people who have really been key to bringing us together and in making these really nice arrangements here at Georgetown University, Dr. Philip Melanson, who was the program chair last year, and has served as the conference chair for this year, has done a very nice job in pulling everything together, and Professor Wayne Smith, is the program Chairman and Wayne, another one of our stalwarts has worked hard to review the submitted abstracts and to reach out for other people and to put together a very nice crisp program. Our executive secretary John Judge, of course is really the major person without whom we would not be able to function. John has devoted most generously of his time, of his energies, now over the three years plus of our existence, we had an embryonic life before we had our first program, obviously we did not just burst into the world, we had a gestational period too and John has worked all of his time, and again I would share with you the fact that he has done so with damn little money and sometimes no money, and without John it would not have been possible to have continued as we have done. Which, of course, reminds me of another point and that is a very key corollary to the points I made before about maintaining interest, activity and involvement because monies come from memberships and from attendance at these meetings. We don't have any bequests, we don't have any multimillionaires, regrettably, at least that I am aware of who we can even try to prostalitize, and solicit and be nice to, or get married up to some nice 19 year old femme fatale, get a new will signed leaving it all to COPA, whatever, I don't know, if anybody has any idea along those lines please let me know. So we can't work to foundations and a lot of other avenues of a financial nature that other organizations far less legitimate, with far less of a base than we can do for again obvious reasons. So we are most grateful to John for having done this and to the people who have been helping John here, recently, and over a period of time. I also want to thank all of the members of the governing and advisory boards who have spent some time, or made contributions of time effort and money as well as to many of you who are not on the boards but who have been helpful and who have come up with suggestions and who have continued to do what you can in your communities with programs, I met someone just earlier today, an attorney, who has a radio talk show and he does this obviously from time to time and many other people have continued in their local high schools, in colleges and church groups and so on and that is worthwhile. I never turn down a request in Pittsburgh, I don't go out and try to foment and catalyze as I did perhaps 20 and 30 years ago because-
(At this moment the sign behind Dr. Wecht, "Full Disclosure", got so depressed with his rambling that it fell off the wall in an apparent suicide attempt.)
"That was one of the ballistic tests in the Martin Luther King case. You saw where it struck, but I accept all the ones that come in, even sometimes from elementary schools because I feel we got to keep generating and maintaining the enthusiasm that we have been fortunate enough to have over these past three and a half decades and so now having welcomed you and having wished you well for the next couple of days and having urged you to continue your enterprise with imagination and fervor as best you can, and hoping that you will derive a lot more information over the next couple of days than that which you already have acquired over the years that you have been following this case I am now going to turn it over for some additional welcoming remarks to Professor Melanson and then to Professor Smith and then to John Judge who will then go through all of the house keeping things and matters pertaining to schedule, and then we are going to move directly into, not with the 10:00 p.m. time shown but we will move directly into the presentation of the BBC film."
Phil Melanson-"I'm going to be briefer than Cyril was because he said a lot of things that I wanted to say. I'm glad you're all here, welcome. I think this is a very important conference. For one, we have exciting new information in the JFK case. The Review Board has been renewed (Amazing precognizance!) and in the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy cases there are major legal developments. And to me, this is the most exciting conference that we have had in terms of the current developments in all three cases, and I am glad that you are here to share that with us.
"Secondly, I am very proud of this organization, and whatever my affiliation is with it, I know what it is but I mean whatever I have done, or not done, because we are for full disclosure, and that is so important. We may all have different theories of what happened in each of these cases. We all may have different political agendas of how we come here, but full disclosure is something that we all support. And this organization has done more to realize that goal, than anything else that has happened, and continues to even though the task is not finished. And I think it is great that we do call ourselves a coalition, and even though there are difficulties in any coalition, we have come together on that issue as well as others, and it has worked very well. And I think this is a, hopefully, a beginning of the future for COPA, but I agree with Cyril, we really have to think hard about what is going on, where we are, and what we need to do. And let's be realistic about it and let's be optimistic, but realistic, and I hope you will participate in that, as well as the rich agenda of materials that we have for this weekend. And welcome
Wayne Smith-"I'm Wayne Smith and I will be even briefer. John Judge really did all the work, and I did very little except to send a few letters saying sorry but this abstract doesn't fit the bill. There were two or three people whose abstracts were okay but for one reason or another didn't fit or they didn't come in on time. I really, really regret that. But on the other hand these conference were meant to bring us all together to exchange our views and information whether you make a formal presentation or not. I would say that, I think, perhaps, we and the community spend, because we feel strongly about these things, and about our own ideas that perhaps we spend too much time and internecine strife arguing and sometimes more than that with one another about the correctness of our particular theories when in fact what really counts is that the Warren Commission was wrong, that this is a stain on the honor of our nation which should be righted, whether one theory is right or not, and we should all try to keep our eye, our eyes, on the ball.
"I have the uncomfortable feeling that in my role as chair of the programing committee I may have contributed to some extent to that internecine strife, and if so, I will try to make amends to the offended parties. But welcome to you all, I think we do have a good program. And again, I'm sorry, some of these abstracts were really very good, but they didn't get in in time or they didn't fit or something. I am not making any formal presentations but I hope that the conference is a productive and constructive experience for you as well. So thanks to all of you for coming. We look forward to the next two days, John?"
John Judge thanked some people, the board, the person who put up the COPA web page, some staff people, conference workers. He mentioned some media people, one "Radio for Peace" radio program, a shortwave radio broadcast. Some of the worst media news was that The San Jose Mercury News has effectively pulled Gary Webb off his job, the web page is down, the story has been killed. However, the good media news was that C-SPAN aired the press conference and Black Entertainment television aired a special on the MLK case June 30th.
AP, UPI, and the Washington Post were present but, as far as I know, published not a word on the conference.
John then told the audience about a document he got out at Archives II, that is not in the JFK material, but in 1400 of actually 180,000 pages on the Guatemala coup. the best thing was an actual manual that they produced on how to assassinate.
John Judge-"This is 1953, U.S. CIA, telling the Guatemalans how to knock off; these are 58 people that were targeted....but Walter Pincus in the Washington Post tells us none of them were killed anyway so it doesn't matter, never mind the 10,000 that died in the coup, but these quotes I thought you would find interesting.
" 'Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations. It should be assumed that it will never be ordered or authorized by any U.S. headquarters. This reticence is partly due to the necessity for committing communications to paper.'
" 'Murder is not morally justifiable.' And then it goes on about self defense and other things, and the last sentence in that paragraph is, 'But assassination can seldom be employed with a clear conscience. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.'
(Laughter)
" 'The techniques employed will vary according to whether the subject is unaware of his danger, aware but unguarded, or guarded. And it will also be affected by whether or not the assassin is to be killed with the subject.'
" Another section, 'A further type of division is caused by the need to conceal the fact that the subject was actually the victim of an assassination, rather than an accidental or natural cause.' And then it gives some examples of how to take care of that problem. 'It says except in terroristic assassinations it is desirable that the assassin be a transient in the area. He should have an absolute minimum contact with the rest of the organization and his instructions should be given orally, by one person only. A safe evacuation after the act is absolutely essential but here again contact should be as limited as possible.'
"Under techniques, it says, 'the essential point of an assassination is the death of the subject.' This is a training manual so you have to get the points in.
(Laughter)
"Then they give the different techniques, 'Manual - it is possible to kill a man with the bare hands,' it says 'however, the simplest local tools are often much more efficient, a hammer, an axe, a wrench, a screwdriver, a fire poker, a kitchen knife, a lamp stand or anything hard, heavy, or handy will suffice.' (Bigger laughter)
"Here's a paragraph on the best types of assassinations, accidents. 'For secret assassination, either simple,' or they have some categories, but the contrived accident is the most effective technique, 'and successfully executed it causes little excitement, and is only casually investigated.' The most efficient accident in these assassinations is, 'a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface, elevator shafts, stairwells, unrestrained windows, and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable.' It says, 'Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim.'
"Then it suggests assassinations by drugs, 'can be effective'. They suggest an overdose of morphine administered as a sedative. It will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. Then it says, 'if the person is a regular drug user then you may have to use a little more.'
"Edged weapons is another suggestion, and where to poke them. Blunt weapons, firearms, subdivided into machine guns, submachine guns, pistols, which is the best to use, where to hit the person. So they go through a long accounting of all the different methods you can use and how to cover them up."
I hate to admit it but I missed John Newman's presentation on the CIA-Contra-Crack cocaine. This was a morning session and I missed almost all of them. I really wanted to see this too. I saw while vacationing in Canada a program on CNN called "Edgewise", or "The American Edge" or something like that, that basically mocked all conspiracies, wow, how new, and briefly spotlighted the CIA-Contra-Crack story. John was seen, not heard or referred to, walking outside a building, I believe in Washington, picketing with others, and also in a radio studio, though we were not allowed to hear what was discussed as the narrator was much more important.
The next presentation I saw and got on my audiotape was Roger Feinman's which was immediately after John Newman's. Unfortunately, the microphone was not working for his presentation. He began with a rather sad story of a friend of his that died in Vietnam.
Roger Feinman-"When I see an accredited scholar, and former intelligence analyst, John Newman, publish an original and groundbreaking study, concluding that someone, well more than one person, within the Central Intelligence Agency expressed an uncommon, still unexplained interest in Lee Harvey Oswald during the several weeks immediately preceding the assassination of President Kennedy. And I see that none of the newspapers in my town, New York City reviewed this book, and none of the major talk shows in my town reviewed this, and I didn't see him on "Nightline", or "Primetime Live", or "20/20", or any of the major network news shows, though he tells me that he did get some airing in Chicago, and he got some press coverage on some local radio, but when I see him knocking himself out to promote this eminently worthy book which in every sense reaches the ambitions that our late friend and colleague Sylvia Meagher had who worked with the critics of the government's handling of this matter then I know that we are swimming agai nst the tide, the tide is not running in, it is running out on us.
"So we have to think about where we are going and the obstacles that we are facing. I had expected to be able to speak today about the depositions of the medical witnesses that we understand have been taken by the Review Board as part of its investigation of the documentary trail. Unfortunately, as you know by now those deposition transcripts have not yet been made available and we have no idea when they will be made available. Cyril Wecht made a few comments about this last night and I concur, that the explanations that we have been hearing are simply illogical, and fly in the face of our common experience and common sense. When they tell us that they are reinterviewing certain witnesses, that they may have found new witnesses and they don't want everybody to hear what the other witness has to say, well, this case has been going on for thirty years, the Warren Commission testimony, the House Committee testimony and now the behind the scenes interviews are all matters of public record, these witnesses have been interviewed by a number of authors, and for a number of different magazine articles, they all know what each other has to say and in many cases they keep up with the details of this case in the same fashion that you do, and some have enjoyed a measure of celebrity, so what is the big secret here? There is none. There is no excuse for not making these records available, and it is also a measure of how the Review Board has chosen to deal with the critics.
"We expected that these transcripts would be available by the end of last year, or no later than January of this year. If they have run into some kind of a snag in their investigation they have not come to us to consul us, they have not asked us for advice, or assistance. So this is a one way street. And we have to address this problem.
"As you may be aware, just within the past couple of weeks there were hearings in the Congress regarding an extension of the Review Board. This organization, COPA, did not receive any advance notice of those hearings. No opportunity to have an input. You would think that when the subject of renewing the Review Board comes up one of the primary topics would be, 'Well, what have you learned about the assassination that you didn't know before?' That would seem to me to be to be the primary way of justifying the continuing existence of this Board. But the way they chose to go about it was to present the need for an extension in terms of housekeeping, in terms of how they started, not anticipating the volume of the work, and they even had one witness, one of our advisories on this subject, a writer named Max Holland, testify that there really was nothing new coming out in these documents, nothing harmful to the government's case, without any opposition from any of the critics. Now we know that that just isn't true.
"We know, particularly in this area of the medical evidence that a great deal has come out since the initial release in August of 1993 under the JFK Disclosure act."
Roger then said he wanted to focus on what these medical people saw at the time and how they reacted to it, what they said to each other, the job that they did, etc. He called the Sibert and O'Neill report as the primary source for this, a very rich source of information. Feinman summarized what the autopsy team knew at the time was 1.) the President was dead, 2.) he had died by gunfire, 3.) no one was saying anything about the possible sources of the shots, and 4.) and they weren't saying anything about evidence on the body about pertaining to the origin of the shots.
"The wound in the head was described as surgery, the wound in the throat was described as a tracheotomy. It is very interesting, according to Kellerman's testimony, Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, who was in the presidential limousine, accompanied the body all the way back and remained in the autopsy room as a witness, according to Kellerman the doctors that night considered the possibility that when President Kennedy was shot in the head, a fragment, a bullet fragment of that shot may have come out as well and caused a wound. So long as there was a possibility that Malcolm Perry and Kemp Clark, the two Parkland doctors who told the press that afternoon that the wound in the throat was a bullet entry wound, that wound was referred to at the autopsy as a tracheotomy but if there was a possibility that the wound came from behind, it couldn't be a bullet wound. Bullet from the front, tracheotomy, from behind, bullet wound. It may be the first time that a bullet wound has been defined in terms of its source of origin instead of its nature and character.
"And I have spoken before about the throat wound being a story that had been told, the story that the doctors did not know that the wound in the throat was a bullet wound until the body was out of their hands and Dr. Humes called Dr. Malcolm Perry at Parkland hospital the next day. I will come back to that and the reasons why that story is just plain false.
"Regarding the back wound, during the early stages of the autopsy the autopsy doctors apparently did not know about that was until the arrival of Dr. Pierre Finck, pathologist on loan from the Air Force Institute of Pathology, when Finck removed the President's body from the mortuary table table and allegedly discovered this back wound for the first time, and yet in a side memorandum, something that the FBI calls an investigative insert, Sibert and O'Neill reported that before the start of the autopsy, and even before the arrival of Finck, they witnessed a conversation between, the Chief Naval pathologist, Dr. Humes, Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, Dr. George Burkley, White House Physician, and Admiral Calvin Galloway, who was the commander of the entire national medical center complex, in which Dr. Burkley referred to the unfeasibility of doing a complete autopsy to obtain the bullet that entered President Kennedy's back ! The bullet that entered President Kennedy's back!
"Now this places into context a lot more of the testimony of Kellerman before the Warren Commission, whose findings were reviewed with credibility and factual reporting by the FBI agents, okay? Because he does not want the Commission to believe that any reference was made to the back wound before Col. Finck arrived.
"What was happening here? What was it about? I think what it was about was that these doctors were petrified by their superiors in the Navy but also by the Secret Service, were petrified by what they were confronted with.
"Dr. Burkley, was part of the presidential motorcade, arrived at Parkland hospital, arrived in plenty of time to see that throat wound in it's undisturbed state, before a tracheotomy incision was performed, before any obfuscation of that wound was conducted. We know that because it was Dr. Burkley who supplied three 100 milligram vials of hydrocortisone to the first emergency physician on the scene, Dr. Charles Carrico. That occurred before Dr. Malcolm Perry entered the trauma room, the emergency room at Parkland hospital, it was Perry who performed the tracheotomy, Burkley was there before that wound was cut open.
"In addition Burkley consulted with the Parkland doctors, he consulted with Dr. Kemp Clark before leaving Parkland hospital that day, he helped Dr. Kemp Clark fill out a death certificate.
"An FBI document tells us that J. C. Price, er, the administrator at Parkland hospital, supplied Dr. Burkley with early handwritten clinical reports that the Parkland doctors did on the President's emergency treatment and Dr. Burkley carried these back to Washington with him. He knew about that throat wound, and because Dr. Burkley was also in the trauma room where President Kennedy died, and he was in the presence of the orderly and two nurses when President Kennedy's body was transferred from the stretcher carriage to the casket in which it was transported Dr. Burkley also had an opportunity to see that back wound, and he certainly had another opportunity to see it when the President was taken out of the casket at Bethesda.
"They knew about the back wound, they knew about the throat wound, but so long as the FBI agents are in the room they are not letting on that they have this knowledge. And we know as a result of the House Select Committee on Assassinations files being released thanks in large measure to the lobbying efforts of Oliver Stone and many others over the years that there is much more information in the form of witness interviews conducted by the staff of the House Committee indicating that the autopsy team did acquire knowledge that night that there was a wound in the throat. Why, why is this something that they have not admitted to? I think that, whether others were involved, I think there was concern over, not in covering up the truth of the assassination but rather worrying over the possibility a conspiracy and trying to reconcile the trajectories with the emerging official story that one man firing from an elevation in the Texas School Book Depository Building on the 6th floor was responsible for all of these wounds to President Kennedy and Governor Connally, that is not what the autopsy actually showed.
"We have regarding the head wound, doctors claiming for most of the evening that they cannot find any defect in the skull. If you take a look at one of the bootleg autopsy photographs that have been circulating around for a number of years now you see very clearly in the center of the picture a semi-circular notch of bone protruding outward, and you have Dr. Finck...a beveling expert, if you and his Warren Commission testimony he's Dr. Beveling, think, if you and I can see this in that photograph as Blakey does, think of how much more obvious it must have been to a pathologist, even one who didn't have extensive credential experience in homicide cases."
Feinman also went on about the withholding of information relative to the autopsy. He talked of CE 399's history. Officially, Parkland Hospital orderly Darrell Tomlinson found it, gave it to a Parkland security officer who gave it to Secret Service agent Rufus Johnson, a member of the White House SS detail. Johnson carried it on his person all the way back to Washington, D.C. He gave it to Gerald Behn, chief of the White House Detail, who turned it over to SS Chief Rowley at 7:30 p.m. According to Kellerman, he knew nothing about it. Feinman doesn't believe that. He doesn't believe Johnson did not show the bullet to anyone.
Feinman - "Rowley then gave it to FBI agent Elmer Todd at 10 minutes to 9 o'clock that evening, and Todd carried it to the FBI laboratory. At 9 o'clock, Kellerman, still at the autopsy is told by a Navy crewman to call his office, Rowley's office, at 9 o'clock he has a conversation with Rowley and tells Rowley he just gave the bullet to an FBI agent, they got it at their laboratory. What is Kellerman going to do with that information? Does he say anything? Apparently, not, apparently he keeps this to himself, allowing the doctors to probe and probe looking for where this vacuum came from and where the bullet that entered the back went, and it's not until between 11 and 12 o'clock that night when they are just having no success at all, the FBI agents are wondering, 'God, could it have been some kind of exotic ammunition, could it have been an ice bullet that evaporated in the body and left no trace', nobody knows. So the FBI, Sibert, decides to call the FBI laboratory to find out if that's possible. And when he calls the FBI lab he speaks to an agent (Charles) Killion, this is between 11 and 12 that night, and they tell him, 'We got a bullet from the Secret Service two hours ago', and he brings that information back to the autopsy room, and it's at this point that the doctors come up with an explanation, 'Oh, that's it, the bullet must have worked it's way out on the stretcher during the emergency treatment at Parkland hospital as a result of the pressure of cardiac massage.' Now Sibert and O'Neill don't say anything in their report that we thought this was strange, we don't understand it, but that's not their function. They are just reporting the objective facts, and that's what these FBI documents do. They don't make any evaluation. But if you imagine yourself witnessing these strange occurrences through their eyes, what to make of it?"
Feinman commented that we have been through several cycles in the medical evidence wherein the government just could not get its act together. During the Warren Commission the game plan was to exalt the autopsy report and the doctors who wrote it, at the expense of the FBI witnesses who were not called to testify, and at the expense of the Parkland doctors.
The next cycle was to exalt the autopsy photographs and the X-rays, at the expense of the autopsy reports and the Bethesda doctors. Through the Rockefeller Commission nearly to the present day, they exalt these experts who looked at the autopsy materials.
Feinman blasts this crying, if the autopsy photographs, especially with the probes supported the official findings they would have been released and prominently displayed. Hopefully, the ARRB has found them.
Feinman spoke of HSCA records recently released from which we learn that Humes typed a draft of the autopsy report and showed it to his superior at Bethesda on Saturday, November 23, a Capt. Canada.
Finally, Feinman criticized the fact that the ARRB will go away without leaving any mechanism to answer questions that critics will have when they go through the mountains of newly released documents. What will we do when there is no more ARRB? We have to say this is what we now know that we didn't, this is what must still happen. What will thrust forward momentum?
Next was Chris Courtwright with his presentation "Oswald in Aliceland". This was published on p. 11 of The Kennedy Assassination Chronicles" Vol 3 Issue #1. So I would refer people to that.
There were two presentations in the Village C Formal lounge. One by John Judge at 10:00 A.M. entitled, "Strategy on Release of Files", then at 11:00 A.M. by Sarah McClendon entitled, "Media Disinformation and Response". I missed both by staying in the main lecture hall.
Dennis Bartholomew was next with his presentation, "Oswald In Switzerland". I believe this was in a recent Fourth Decade. Again, I would refer people the published work of these researchers. Dennis' article was entitled "LHO on Campus" it appeared in The Fourth Decade volume 4 No. 3. March 1997.
This is an excellent article incorporating relatively recent documents released by the ARRB. I highly recommend it. Judge Tunheim has repeatedly used one of these documents to show the work of the board, previously one document was nearly totally redacted and now only the name of the Swiss Federal police official is redacted. These 5 documents were appealed to President Clinton by the FBI to prevent their release. Dennis' article gives new insight as to why the FBI may have fought so hard to keep them secret.
Next was John Armstrong, John had lost his voice and Chris Courtwright spoke for him. John should have restricted his presentation to whatever new information he has found since the last time he gave his presentation. I am fascinated by John's research but I have heard it three or four times now. I heard it at the last A.S. K. conference, I made a transcript of his work presented at Fredonia. I'm aware of most of his stuff. I think many of us are by now. He should refer people to his earlier work. I believe the A.S. K. presentation was videotaped.
The presentation opened with the story of Gordon Lonsdale who emigrated from Canada to England and was a spy. He passed British defense secrets to Russia. The purpose of this story was to demonstrate that spies need to be able to speak the native language and be familiar with local customs to work effectively. This concept is further applied to Oswald whom John believes was originally the son of Russian emigres who came to America after WWII. These people, many of whom we see in the White Russian community in and around Dallas before and after the assassination of President Kennedy, are right-wingers with intelligence connections.
John hypothesizes that the newly formed CIA had a plan to use the children of these emigres. They would keep their native Russian language abilities by being raised by their original parents and learn from their parents the local customs and culture of Russia. At a certain point they would trade places with an American, assuming that American's name and identity in every way. Now this person has a advantage over a real American defecting for espionage purposes because he already knows the language, customs and culture of Russia that might expose a defector who had to start learning the Russian language and culture in his teens after he got into a branch of the American armed services.
Lonsdale it was quickly discovered was no ordinary spy, he had fake birth certificates, fake passports, and a dual identity. To the surprise of the British he was not a native Canadian but a native born Russian. His real name was Conon Molody. He was sent at age 9 to live with his aunt in California. He went to school here for 9 years and mastered the English language. He was then recalled to Russia and received a commission in the Soviet Navy and was trained in espionage. In 1954 he went to Canada and assumed the identity of a deceased Canadian, named Gordon Lonsdale, a year later he was in England posing as a British businessman.
If the Russians could do what they did with Molody/Lonsdale then why couldn't the U.S.?
John thinks we did with Lee Harvey Oswald. John claims two people were using the name Lee Harvey Oswald when he was only 13, many years prior to the Kennedy assassination. And no, the purpose of this duplicating Oswald at this early age has nothing to do with any assassination plot, but may explain why Oswald was never really investigated after the assassination because a real investigation might reveal this intelligence program.
This early duplication of Oswald can be seen in Oswald's school records. John calls one Oswald, Harvey, the other Lee. Harvey grew up in New York. Lee was born in New Orleans and grew up in Texas. The WC took bits of each boy's background and created Lee Harvey Oswald.
Now most of this we heard already, at John's previous presentations.
John took a good swipe at Blakey's false assertion that Oswald was raised by his Uncle Dutz Murret, Murret was a minor underworld figure in Carlos Marcello's organization, therefore, Blakey argues the mob killed JFK. Bull. First of all, Lee Oswald was raised by his aunt and uncle between the ages of 1 and 2 while his mother worked. At age 3 he was placed in the Bethlehem Orphans asylum until he was removed by his mother and taken to Dallas in the spring of 1944. Mrs. Oswald remained in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area with summer trips to Covington, Louisiana until August 1952. They then moved to New York until 1954. The only time Lee Oswald could have been raised by his uncle was between the ages of 1 and 2. So the next time you hear Blakey say Oswald was raised by his uncle and therefore influenced by the mob, you'll know better.
Robert Oswald told another lie about his brother in his book "Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald". In 1948 the Oswalds were living on the west side of Ft. Worth. Robert wrote that the center of Lee's fantasy world changed from radio to TV when his mother bought a TV in 1948. One of Lee's favorite programs was, "I led three lives" the story of an FBI informant who posed as a communist spy. Robert says Lee watched that show every week without fail. When Robert left to join the Marines Lee was still watching the reruns. This story is often told to illustrate that Lee Oswald had a fantasy life that was out of touch with reality and obsessed with Communism. John found out that this program first aired in September 1953, so it is Robert who is out of touch with reality.
John believes many of Robert's statements about Lee are fabrications including his statements to the Warren Commission including the camera that took the infamous backyard photos.
A Mrs. Jack Tippit of Westport, Conn. was related to J.D. Tippit. Shortly after the assassination she was called by a woman with a foreign accent. This woman had information she wanted relayed to people in Dallas. She said she would not identify herself because she was afraid of being killed. She said that she personally knew Oswald's father and uncle. They came from Hungary and lived at 77 and 2nd avenue in New York. This is Manhattan's German community and commonly known as "Yorkville". They were unemployed, got their money from Communists, and spent all their time on Communist activities. She gave two names, Louis Weinstock, and Emil Cartos (sp?)
Is this supposed to be Lee Oswald's real father and uncle?
John believes that if true this could explain Lee Oswald's early interest in Communism and Marguerite's sudden trip to New York City in 1952.
Okay, the next thing I have is Gary Aguilar's presentation, "Oswald's Guilt: Argument from Authority". There was very, little new information at all here. Gary was kind enough to send along his presentation to me in an email. In that paper he notes that we now know that the first four people in the chain of possession of CE 399 failed to identify it when later shown to them, Darrell Tomlinson, O.P. Wright, Secret Service agent Richard Johnsen, and Chief of the Secret Service James Rowley. The first person who did identify it was the fifth person in the chain of possession, the first FBI agent. Who should have been named in the paper but isn't.
The paper is a rehash of the official story we were told, old evidence we had to prove were lies, then it gets interesting with the new information from more recently released files. This is the strong point and should have been the focus of the paper.
A new finding is that the ballistic experts of both the Warren Commission and the HSCA disagreed with the respective official findings. Warren Commission ballistic expert, Col. Joseph R. Dolce, Chief consultant for the Army in wound ballistics wrote a letter to Senator J. Lawton Chiles, "I have disagreed with many facets of the investigation, especially the one bullet theory." (see RIF # 180-10089-10186, HSCA agency file No. # 00668)
Similarly, HSCA trajectory analysis expert Thomas Canning of NASA wrote, "...I did not anticipate that study of the photographic record of itself would reveal major discrepancies in the Warren Commission findings. Such has turned out to be the case." (See HSCA record number 14258, pps. 1-2. Unfortunately, they don't provide the NARA RIF number)
The strongest case to be made for conspiracy, involving the medical evidence, and the new releases, has to be the witness interviews and statements by Bethesda medical witnesses taken by the HSCA. The HSCA lied in their final report. The Bethesda witnesses did not agree with the autopsy report, they agreed with the Parkland doctors who saw a hole in the back of President Kennedy's head. While it may not be new to researchers it is new since the JFK declassification Act of '92 was passed, and sure as hell is new to the general public.
Gary Aguilar-"The HSCA suppressed - after falsifying - the opinions of the JFK autopsy witnesses it interviewed. It declared that they unanimously endorsed autopsy photographs which showed JFK's skull defect in the right-anterior portion of his skull. By so doing, the HSCA maintained JFK's autopsy witnesses definitively refuted Parkland witnesses who had near-unanimously claimed that JFK's skull defect was right-rearward - an exit location unlikely to have resulted from a shot from Oswald's supposed location behind and above JFK. The HSCA did not tell the truth. The HSCA's own autopsy witnesses not only confirmed Parkland claims that JFK's skull defect was toward the rear - where autopsy photographs show no defect whatsoever - they also prepared unambiguous diagrams showing a rearward defect in JFK's skull. Both the autopsy witnesses' statements and the diagrams were suppressed - both from the public, as well as from the HSCA's own medical-forensic consultants whose responsibility it was to consider this data. The chairman of the HSCA's forensic panel, Michael Baden, and fellow forensic panelist, Cyril Wecht, were publicly shown the suppressed interviews and diagrams in 1994 by the authors (Dr. Gary Aguilar and Kathy Cunningham). Both denied they have ever seen this evidence before."
One of these suppressed HSCA documents is HSCA doc # 002193, An HSCA interview with Curtis Jenkins, by Jim Kelly and Andy Purdy on 8/29/77. Jenkins "said he saw a head wound in the'... middle temporal region back to the occipital;." Jenkins also prepared a diagram that confirms his verbal description of a defect in the right rear of the skull.
Another is HSCA doc# 002191 Jim Kelly and Andrew Purdy's interview of FBI agent James Sibert. Sibert reported, "Regarding the headwound, Sibert said it was in the '...Upper back of the head'. In his affidavit Sibert claimed, "The head wound was in the upper back of the head.' and '...a large head wound in the upper back of the head with a section of the scull (sic) bone missing...". Sibert also prepared a diagram and traced a small wound square in the central rear portion of the skull, slightly above the level depicted for the ears but well below the level depicted for the top of the skull.
Another, Tom Robinson, the mortician who prepared Kennedy's remains for his coffin. In RIF # 189-10089-10178, HSCA agency file # 000661, Robertson described the skull wound as, "Directly behind the back of his head. Purdy asks, "Approximately behind the ears, or higher up?". Robertson replies, "No, I would say pretty much between them. Robinson's diagram depicts a defect directly in the central, lower rear portion of the skull. The diagram is RIF # 180-10089-10179, agency file # 000662)
Another, Jan Gail Rudnicki was Dr. Boswell's lab assistant. She was interviewed by the HSCA's Mark Flanagan. Flanagan reported that Rudnicki said, the "back-right quadrant of the head was missing. See RIF #180-10105-10397, agency file # 014461
Dr. Ebersole, was the attending radiologist at JFK's autopsy. In recently released HSCA testimony, Ebersole claimed, "The back of the head was missing...". This testimony was taken on 3/11/78. When shown the autopsy photographs which show the back of the scalp intact he commented, "You know, my recollection is more of a gaping occipital wound than this...". Ebersole does testify to "a large fragment of occipital bone was received from Dallas and at Dr. Finck's request I X-rayed these." If a piece of occipital bone arrived late during the autopsy the defect had to have been in the back of the head.
Another, Francis X. O'Neill prepared a diagram showing a defect in the right rear quadrant of JFK's skull.
More troubling information on the medical evidence can be found in the recently released testimony of White House photographer Robert Knudsen. He told the HSCA he developed negatives from JFK's autopsy and he saw images that are not in the "complete" inventory he was shown, including an image showing a probe through JFK's body entering the back at a lower position than the throat wound - a shot inconsistent with Oswald's alleged shot from above and behind.
Similarly, every one of the individuals responsible for taking autopsy photographs - including all three of JFK's pathologists and both official photographers - claim autopsy photographs they took are now missing.
The extant autopsy photographs themselves are troubling, for not a single one of the earliest descriptions of JFK's skull wounds, of over 40 witnesses from Dallas to the autopsy in Bethesda, described JFK's skull wound as it now appears in the autopsy images.
Gary Aguilar spent much of his time on the outrageous media coverage on the assassination of President, following the thesis of his presentation "that you can't trust authority in this case". Wow, what a revelation! If the thrust was more on the new information we have which we can now use to refute the lone nutters and the free press ride they get I think it would have been a much better presentation.
One new thing that struck me at the time that Gary pointed out, and he was quoting from Ray Marcus' "The Bastard Bullet", where is the original interview by the FBI and Secret Service of Darrell Tomlinson? Tomlinson said he was interviewed by the FBI in the later part of November 1963, and the SS in early December. Gary may have found one of them. CE 2011 clearly is not either one of these interviews. He found an FBI memo, from the Washington field office, recently released wherein it says, "...neither Darrell Tomlinson, who found the bullet at Parkland Hospital, Dallas, nor O.P. Wright, personnel at Parkland Hospital who obtained the bullet from Tomlinson and gave it to Special agent Richard Johnsen, Secret Service can identify the bullet." So where is the report saying that it bore a general resemblance? It doesn't exist, not that anyone can currently find.
Gary then mentioned the document that Humes, Boswell, Stringer, and Ebersole signed off on when 3 years later they are shown autopsy photographs and are asked to swear that what they were shown was the complete inventory of all autopsy photographs. This document, I think this is the one Gary is referring to, is reproduced in Harold Weisberg's "Post Mortem" see pps. 565-574. This document was prepared by the Justice Department, not by these doctors. Subsequently, all of them said there are photographs they have not yet seen that were taken at the autopsy, they are missing.
Stringer, Humes, Boswell, and a Dr. Carnei, another pathologist at the autopsy testified that they took photographs of the skull wound, the chest wound.
During the HSCA investigation Finck was asked if he particularly wanted a photo of the external aspects of the skull from the back to show that there was no cratering to the outside of the skull. Finck responds, "Absolutely.". When asked if he ever saw such a photograph. "I don't think so, and I brought with me memoranda referring to examination of photographs in 1967. And as I can recall I never saw pictures of the outer aspect of the wound of entry in the back of the head or the inner aspect of the skull in order to show a crater, although I was there asking for these photographs, but I don't ever remember seeing these photographs."
Gary said there is another document in which Finck is even more emphatic that he did take such a photograph, exit wound and entrance wound, so he could show the beveling that is missing.
Kathy Cunningham found out that there is two versions of the document as reproduced in "Post Mortem", with other people's names on it.
Gary also spoke of the Robert Knudsen HSCA testimony that there are more photographs from the autopsy. Both Carnei and Knudsen recalled JFK's body being placed on it's side with probes going through it and it being photographed that way. These photographs do not currently exist.
On the day of the assassination Dr. Perry said three times that there was an entrance wound in the throat. The Boston Globe interviewed Dr. Perry the next day and asked how could this be as Oswald was behind the president. Dr. Perry speculated that the president may have had his head turned sideways or looking back when the bullet struck him. This speculation becomes fact in a LIFE magazine article by Paul Mandel. (See Press conference 1327-C which can be ordered from the LBJ Library. It is in the Special File on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, "November 1963," Box 4, also because it is frequently asked for it a copy is also in the Archives Reference File, "JFK Assassination - Press Releases." This is credited as the first press conference of the Lyndon Johnson presidency. I would also assume it is available from Archives II. I got my copy in 1992.)
Perry has recently backed away from his initial description of JFK's neck wound. A recently released document reveals that a SS agent Moore (sp?) told James Gootchenower (sp?) that he had badgered Dr. Perry to change his story and he, Moore, felt bad about that. He felt that Moore was trying to get Perry to say there was no entry wound in the throat.
Gary mentioned a list of questions that the HSCA created that were never passed on to Dr. Burkley. But Burkley's attorney, a guy named Illig, a friend of Dr. Wecht's, although Dr. Wecht did not know Illig was then representing Dr. Burkley contacted the HSCA and told the HSCA that Burkley had information for them was willing to come forward for them, didn't want any notoriety, and was convinced that Oswald had not acted alone. The HSCA never contacted him. This memo died when Richard Sprague left.
The above could be extremely, extremely important.
Next was Dr. Michael Stroscio, a physicist who wrote an article on the Alverez assertions. Sorry, boring.
Sorry but I'm going to skip ahead to Dr. Pepper. Phil Melanson introduced Dr. Pepper but first spoke of some items of interest in the RFK assassination. He spoke of the Scott Enyart lawsuit. The L.A.P.D. is appealing and according to Melanson, the L.A.P.D. has hired the Robert Shapiro lawfirm to represent them. The senior partner from this lawfirm, hearing that L.A. P.D. might lose and that there was dissension in the jury sought affidavits from jury members while they were still deliberating the case! Melanson said the judge was less than thrilled with that and that their exchange was extraordinary.
Sirhan's lawyer Larry Teator has filed a writ of habeas corpus with L.A. 's supreme court, whom Melanson said will not hear it. During discovery Sirhan's lawyers asked for the audiotapes of Sirhan's interrogation shortly after he was arrested, they were trying to prove Sirhan's diminished capacity, at the trial, the police officers testified that Sirhan was very calm cool and collected, whereas the audiotapes show someone babbling, afraid and incoherent. Was Sirhan impersonated on audiotape immediately after he was arrested at the scene of Senator Robert Kennedy's assassination to make him look like a raving madman? Who did this? It could only have been done with the help of the L.A.P.D.
There is a magic bullet in the RFK case too. Exhibit #47, which is supposed to be the Kennedy neck bullet, it's photographed at the time of the shooting and it's really scrunched down to about half it's size, as one might imagine, the bullet up in the California State archives now looks just like the "magic bullet". It hasn't been hurt by anything in the world. And you don't even have to weigh the grains. You can just see that one's twice as big as the other.
I recommend Phil's book ShadowPlay for more and the latest on the RFK case.
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