From: cortez@milton.u.washington.edu (Tom Warner)
Subject: Re: David Lifton's Book - anyone read it?
Organization: University of Washington
Distribution: na
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 13:08:44 GMT

bill@turing.toronto.edu (Bill Monhemius) writes:

>I'm currently reading David Lifton's book BEST EVIDENCE.  Has anyone read this
>book and have any comments?

I just made a post responding to a Joel Grant "trajectories" thread on this
subject. Bascially, when you're done reading Lifton, read Livingstone's
High Treason 2. His Kennedy idolatry is nauseating at times, but he shreds
Lifton mercilessly, and deservedly so.

>I find his theory that both the Parkland and Bethesda autopsies could be 
>legitimate if the body was altered in transit very interesting.  Furthermore,
>I find the opinion that the Warren Commission would deliberately falsify
>evidence to cover up a conspiracy hard to believe.  

I agree. But I find it even harder to believe that anyone with the opportunity
to steal Kennedy's body would take such an enormous risk for such an easily
discoverable alteration. Essentially, they would have been trusting the Navy
doctors to turn a blind eye to what would necessarily be an obvious amateur
job, and if they had that much trust, why go to such an extreme risk.

The thing is, the WC never had to deliberately falsify evidence to cover up
a conspiracy. However, I think it is now irrefutable that the WC and staff did
operate with a "convince the public there was no conspiracy" agenda from day
one. They didn't falsify evidence, someone did that for them. They just turned
a blind eye to anything and everything that pointed in a direction they didn't
like -- including, most interestingly, probably planted evidence that pointed
toward Cuban and Russian involvement..

The WC were part of the "not-in-the-know" cover-up. They didn't know who did it
and didn't want to. They were not investigators, they were government pr flaks.

Lifton's criticism of Lane and other first generation critics for imagining
the WC to be almost part of the conspiracy is valid, and his humanization of
the WC through Wesley Liebeler is also interesting. But Liebeler is still a
liar to say the WC staff would have gone after any serious evidence of
conspiracy; obviously, they buried any such evidence as deep as they could.
And compared to Belin, Ball, Specter, Ford, etc., Liebeler was a rogue.

>What Lifton describes is the legal concept of 'best evidence' where evidence is
>prioritized and thus, contrary evidence that is not well substantiated is 
>discarded.  I'm not saying I agree with this concept but this is probably what 
>happened with the Warren Commission - they decided that the Bethesda report was
>the best evidence and that eye-witness reports of a grassy-knoll gun-man were
>unreliable.  This happens all the time in courts - lawyers are not paid to look
>for the real truth, they're looking for a 'legal' truth that they can convince
>a jury of.

It's an excellent point, actually. But the WC's distortions ran far deeper than
the "Best Evidence" theory can make excuses for. The Warren Commission operated
under a different kind of "best evidence" model: that which doesn't lead to
conspiracy is best, that which does is worst.

>I recommend the book.  It has a more personal style than most JFK books out
>there.  The author spent about 15 years of his life to his research.

>-Bill

Unfortunately not as well spent as they could have been. His theory of a stolen
body and repeated entrances into the morgue with two coffins may have taken him
15 years to develop, but it took other conspiracy theorists probably all of 15
days to definitively rule out. Lifton simply runs too far too long on tiny
shreds of evidence, without doing the basic checking out that would show him
where he leaped to conclusions and got off track.

Anyway, read at least the related chapters in Livingstone. Guaranteed to get
you pissed off at Lifton for being such a crappy investigator.
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk