From: david@cats.ucsc.edu (David Wright)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk
Subject: Re: Smoke and Mirrors
Date: 8 Apr 92 04:14:29 GMT
Article-I.D.: darkstar.32338
Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz


God, I hope I already didn't respond to this! It seems to similiar
to the original!

In article <1992Apr6.222530.10619@PA.dec.com> grant_jo@ripple.enet.dec.com (Joel Grant) writes:
|
|re: 776 (David Wright)
|
|Interestingly enough, you chose not to answer the very specific
|questions I asked in the posting to which you responded.  Such as,
|what evidence do you have linking any of the Clark Panel doctors
|to any criminal or conspiratorial elements? 

I thought that was a irrelevent question, so I ignored it. I don't
think the Clark Panel was involved in any conspiracy.

| In your posting,
|as is typical for pro-conspiracy buffs, there is an awful lot
|of unproven "they(s)" responsible for various amazing things.

The evidence points in this direction.

|"They" forged a photo of the President's head.  They must have,
|because the autopsy material represents the best sort of criminal
|evidence - static, forensic evidence - and it contradicts the
|worst sort of evidence, namely, heat-of-the moment eyewitness
|testimony.  When you sort through the mess, such eyewitness 
|testimony represents the basis for most pro-conspiracy claims.

Why are you repeating yourself?

|You assert the photograph "showing the rear head of the president
|is a forgery, or a composition."  Well, who did it?  How did they
|manage to insert their forgery into materials delivered first
|to the Kennedy family, and from them to the National Archives?

Who cares who did it?  There is no chain of possesion. Anyone could have done
it just about anytime. Why were the number of pictures crossed out on
a recipt of photos and x-rays. (see Lifton)?

|For years the pro-conspiracy types (among whose number I
|used to count myself) shouted `foul' when the autopsy materials
|couldn't be found.  (The Kennedy family had the materials)
|"Give us the autopsy materials and we will *prove* the second
|gunman theory!"  They got the autopsy materials, it proved nothing
|of the sort, and we now must put up with Son of Autopsy: forgery.

1. I don't have the autoposy materials. Most critics don't have them.

2. What evidence exists now, for Lattimer, for example, is a smaller number
   of photos than was for the Clark Panel. The present collection of picutres
   and x-rays is imprecise and at least one picture is a misleading
   representation of the president's wounds. The complete collection of
   materials is not available, nor is  complete  evidence available. 

However, The photos proved the WR was wrong, and showed that the back wound
was in fact lower than what the WR said it was.  The photos and x-rays tell a 
different story than the WR, and makes the mgbt look nearly impossible,
especially when combined with reasonable postures of the two men. The X-rays
also show that a frontal head shot is possible.

|The evidence doesn't fit the theory, so it must be doctored evidence.

The phyisical evidence does not match the eyewitness corroborated testimony, 
and the evidence has 1) Lost chain of possestion and 2)Are full of missing
materials and 3) clearly at least one of the photos is a reconstruction.

|But to answer your questions: "...why [I] think that the photos
|and X-rays should be as untainted as anything else in the Kennedy
|assassination."
|
|...  Second, aside from whether
|or not other aspects of the assassination are or are not tainted, the
|question of the autopsy materials must be judged for itself. 

I think every single piece of evidence the WR used is in question, the
chain of possesion lost, or suspicions exist to taint the evidence. Since
the autopsy photos are a part of the investigation, it might lead you to
be skeptical about their authenticity.

|The vast majority of the evidence is not misleading.  The ballistics
|matching of LHO's pistol to the shells

This has been questioned by a poster who claimed that such identification is
not possible or highly unlikely: i.e., the pin  marking is not unique.

| and to the slugs in Officer Tippitt are not misleading. 

Oh, and how many slugs was that? And why was there no chain of possestion
established for these? Why were the slugs not reported at once. Why were the 
shells not matched to the number of slugs? Why was there no autopsy available 
in the report etc...

| LHO's possession of that gun at the time of his arrest is not misleading.

Some policemen testified that the gun was an automatic.

| The ballistics match of CE399 to Oswald's gun is not misleading. 

The fact that CE399 could hardly been the cause of so much dammage makes
that meaningless. Laura Penn gave the FBI a shell she found after chasing
neighbors off her yard who were practing shooting. The shell turned out to have
been a M-C 6.5. CE399 could have, and probably was planted, since no bullet
that has undergone that kind of damage would come out that clean, with intact
rifling.

| Howard Brennan's testimony
|is not misleading.  Arnold Rowland's and Robert Edwards and Ronald
|Fischer's testimony is not misleading.  

Brennan's testimony is suspect, and Rowland does not help the WR. Just looking
at Witness testimony, Oswald could not have shot Tippit nor would have
a great deal of time to methodically kill Kennedy.

|What is misleading is the fact that in any real-world event,
|particularly of something so unexpected and spectacular,
|different people are going to see and hear different things.
|So what else is new?

There are rules of evidence. After physical evidence comes, I believe, 
corraborative eye witness testimony. 

|I do not read the Clark Panel as being skeptical of the
|photos.  You are reading a different Clark Panel report
|than I am.  I would estimate the size of an entry wound
|created by a 6.6MM slug to be in the neighborhood of
|6.5MM, rather smaller than a typical finger.  Since the
|concluded it was an entrance wound, indeed firmly concluded
|that both wounds were entry wounds, it is rather a secondary
|point.

I cannot believe you cannot read. I do believe you see what you only
want to see.

|I don't know why the House hired radiologist testify as he
|did.  Perhaps he believes in truly magic bullets, bullets
|that, upon exiting skulls, simply disappear.

The evidence indicates that there was probably more bullet fragment than can be
accounted for with just one bullet.

|Humes's findings were that both missiles traversed the
|President's body from back to front.  The Clark Panel
|and the HSCA medical experts came to the same conslusions,
|though in somewhat different words.  

Humes did not even know of the throat wound until he finished the autopsy. The
Clark Panel cannot see the entry wound of the throat. The backwound could not
be the same as Humes saw. As to the head wound, I have already said that the
HSCA radiologist said the shot could be from the rear or from the front.

|No, the contours of the head being grossly distorted by
|the "extensive fragmentation of the underlying calvarium"
|does not contradict the Panel's (not my) "assertion"
|that the exit wound was in the front.

Then what does this damage look like or what caused it?

|The FBI report was filed by two agents, neither of whom
|had any more than first aid medical training.  Various
|incisions are made, as a matter of course, in the 
|performance of an autopsy.  One of the incisions I 
|highligted when I posted extracts from the Clark Panel.
|The fact that two agents noticed that autopsy doctors
|cut the body during autopsies is hardly startling.

Are you responding to a point? Your lack of quotations is hard to follow. If
you are talking about the FBI report, that is just what it is, a report
of what went on at the autopsy. They reported what was said and done
at the autopsy, and that Humes had said there was surgery of the head area. You
can throw out the FBI report, of course, and you can throw out the autopsy,
but then you must rely photos taken at that same autopsy to reach other
conlcusions. Sounds pretty contradictory to me.

|What is startling is the great leap from that to: post-mortem,
|wound-altering surgery was performed.  And since when do you
|trust FBI reports anyway?  ;^)

I look at all the evidence and come up with conslusions. I certainly trust the
FBI to report what went on over Humes' buring of his notes and being unable to
get something simple like the angle of entry of the back wound. 

|What point is there to argue with the President's body being
|operated upon between the plane and the autopsy?  The body
|was tracked continuously from the time is was put into the
|coffin in Dallas to the time it was interred at the cemetery.

It is clear you do not know what you are talking about. Please read Best
Evidence, by Lifton, he addresses all the points you raise.

|For the nonce, it should be clear to those not a priori
|committed to Rube Goldbergian conspiracy theories that
|the case (taken as a whole) against LHO is open and
|shut. 

What does LHO have anything to do with this?


-- 
   |^^^^^^|      _______________________________________________________
   |      |      |                                                     | 
   |      |      | "Be Prepared for Enormous Fustrations"              |
   | (o)(o)      O         --Kreps, A course in Micro theory, p. 352   | 
   @      _)    o|_____________________________________________________|  
    |  ____\ o o
    |     /   
   /     \                              All comments  are mine---(David Wright)