From: david@cats.ucsc.edu (David Wright)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk
Subject: Re: trajectories
Date: 9 Sep 1992 03:52:15 GMT
Organization: University of California; Santa Cruz
NNTP-Posting-Host: si.ucsc.edu


In article <cortez.715955202@milton> cortez@milton.u.washington.edu (Tom Warner) writes:
|david@cats.ucsc.edu (David Wright) writes:
|
|
|... H. Livingstone does a very *bad* job on
||everything in HTII. Note that when he talks to witnesses he does not
||recognize, for the most part, that he is leading them, and tries to
||bargain with the Dallas people to give them their dignity in exchange
||for interview time. 
|
|.. Just the fact that he prints his
|entire interviews in enough detail that you can see where he may have led the
|witness some puts him a step above many other researchers.

Yes, I certainly appreciate that. But I also would like systematic
summaries.

|(By the way, one thing you may not be aware of is that journalists ask very
|leading questions routinely.

True. But in this example, it is interesting to compare Lifton's
intital interview with Perry and Livingston's. Lifton begins by
pretending he is a student of Liebeler's, doing a medical paper on the
case. He innocently asks what the size of the traechotomy incisionn
Perry did. I think he said 2-3 cm. Instead, Livingston likes to lead
people into saying that the 7-8 cm and later 12 cm Humes testified to
was compatible with both the picture and Perry's memory. 

|But anyway, I don't see where Livingstone has tried to make anyone appear to
|say something they didn't mean. And I think his conference between the Dallas
|and Bethesda witnesses was an excellent thing to do, and really did demonstrate
|how Lifton had taken threads of bad memory here and shreds of real (but likely
|innocent) weirdness there and woven a very fantastic and illogical theory.

But on the contrary, if they previously believed in conspiracy, then
they will talke conspiracy, and vice versa. Consider McCeland, who at
first says the xrays are fake, then on the Nova program, and elsewhere
to a poster on this net that there was a flap, and then later to
Livingston that no flap exists. People at this stage will give just
about any story that backs up their preconcieved ideas. That is why I
liked Lifton and HT I, since it delt or seemed to deal more
objectively with the evidence. Now, sadly, the evidence is changed as
a result of Livingston's actions: witnesses now are fully manipulatable.

By the way, I am not saying Lifton's thesis  of body alternation must
be the truth, however, I thought Livingston did a rather poor job of
analyizing and getting witness testimony to demonstrate Lifton's
thesis was wrong.
-- 
   |^^^^^^|      _______________________________________________________
   |      |      |"There is nothing in the marginal conditions that    | 
   |      |      | distinguish a mountain from a mole hill"            |
   | (o)(o)      O         Kenneth Boulding                            | 
   @      _)    o|_____________________________________________________|  
    |  ____\ o o
    |     /   
   /     \                              All comments  are mine---(David Wright) 
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk