Q-Anon. Sandy Hook. The Lizard Illuminati. Lots of crack-pot conspiracy theories out there.
Michael Shermer, who founded Skeptic magazine, has a new book out about why rational people believe conspiracy theories. I became alarmed the other day when I was listening to my favorite podcast - the Unspeakable with Meghan Daum - when Michael was the guest. He immediately acknowledged that there are, in fact, real conspiracies. How could he not? But later he casually dismissed that there was conspiracy to kill JFK with, essentially, nothing but air.
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| Kennedy on the day of the assassination |
The difference between a crack-pot theory and a real conspiracy comes down to the quality of the evidence. In the case of JFK, the quality of the evidence strongly points to a conspiracy and not a lone-nut.
So, today, on the 59th anniversary of the assassination, I will lay out just a small part of the overwhelming evidence that there was in fact a conspiracy, and the government - for reasons benign or not - covered it up.
This blog post focuses on the witnesses to the fatal brain injury.
After being shot, Kennedy was rushed to Parkland hospital. He was D.O.A., but they nevertheless tried to revive the corpse because, you know, he was the President. There was a large team of doctors (16) and three nurses who viewed his brain injuries and they were all later interviewed or gave testimony regarding what they saw. They all testified that they saw a gaping wound in the right back of the head about the size of baseball with brain matter extruding. (One intern in the room thought the wound was higher.)
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| The wound seen in Dallas |
Clint Hill was the Secret Service agent who climbed onto the limo after the gunshot. He was next to JFK for seven minutes on the drive to the hospital, and he described the same wound. So did Jackie Kennedy.
While the autopsy was supposed to be - legally and ethically - performed in Dallas, the Secret Service commandeered the body to take it - via Andrews Air Force base - to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Beyond the Parkland hospital staff, several more people testified to the same exact condition of the head wound (though others described a massively bigger wound). Among those were the mortician who prepared his body for burial, several secret service men, the autopsy photographer, and the x-ray technicians who all saw what the Parkland staff saw: that there was an exit wound (which is always bigger than an entrance wound), with part of the occipital bone blown out.
In fact, 44 people (out of 46) - both in Dallas and in Bethesda - gave an account of an occipital injury. Read those accounts here.
Only three people also noted a small entrance wound above the ear where the hairline/brow meet. (Kennedy's hair covered that wound so most didn't see it, and it was a small entrance hole.)
Meantime in Dallas, a passerby named Billy Harper found a part of the president's skull on the ground. He brought that fragment (called the Harper fragment) to his uncle at Methodist Hospital. There, three pathologists examined and photographed it, and all opined that it was occipital (back of the head), confirming exactly what the 44 other folks saw.
The body arrived at 6:35 at the morgue. The official autopsy started at 8 pm, with the first incision at 8:15. (Why the delay? Read this and be amazed!) When the casket was opened and the body unwrapped, according to a witness, there were gasps because of the massive injuries to the President's head. At that point FBI agent Sibert reported that "it was apparent that a tracheotomy was performed [that did happen at Parkland] and surgery to the head area." But, nope - no surgery had been done at all. Something clearly rotten was going on!
What the autopsy, performed by Humes and Boswell, described in a nutshell is: the whole damn right side of the brain was clear blown off. The wound described in the autopsy was five times bigger than the wound that everybody saw earlier.
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| The wound described in the autopsy - note the occipital entry point |
No wonder there were gasps. That said, Humes and Boswell did both acknowledge that the wound included the back area initially described. But, what everybody thought was an exit wound had now miraculously transformed into an entrance wound!
Well, cut to the future. The autopsy photos didn't show the wound that 44 people saw (including the guys who did the autopsy!) - no brain extruding, no bone gone. Just hair. Here is the "autopsy" picture from the back of the brain - the official autopsy photographer claims that was not his photo and not how the brain looked.
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Seriously, WTF?
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And the x-rays showed no occipital bone gone.
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| Occipital bone completely intact. Doesn't look like the wound described in the autopsy at all. |
Perhaps, you are thinking, with advanced technology they can go to the evidence at the National Archives and see if there is some way to prove that they were faked or reexamine the existing evidence. How about that occipital bone? Well, guess what? That's gone. In fact, lots of the evidence is gone (or not the original.)
What does not exist at the archive, but once did exist:
the brain - all gone
the bullet fragments retrieved at the autopsy - gone
the Harper fragment (and another bone fragment as well) - gone
the first draft of the autopsy - burned
the real autopsy with signatures - lost
only a copy of the autopsy remains - no original
of the 5-6 x-rays of the body - 3 non-originals remain
many of the original autopsy pictures have disappeared according to the photographer.
Maybe, if the evidence were extant, instead of systematically destroyed or altered; maybe if the body evidence was solid, instead of clearly riddled with fraud and deception and destruction; maybe if JFK's head hadn't snapped back (as we know via the Zapruder film); maybe if Oswald hadn't been assassinated after he made clear that he was a "patsy"; maybe if everyone heard the shots coming from the general vicinity of the book depository; maybe if there was no "magic bullet", well, then you might have - kinda - a fighting chance of shooting down those 44 descriptions as mass delusion instead of what it clearly is: proof that the shot was from the front and that our government systematically covered up the conspiracy to assassinate JFK. Clearly there was not simply a shooter from the back (where Oswald was), but there had to have been at least one from the front. Come on!!
As for the Warren Commission and to the later HSCA of 1978, they chose to believe that the autopsy and physical evidence (photos/x rays/ bullets) trumped all other evidence even though the photos/x-rays actually contracted the autopsy. There is extensive evidence of deception, fraud and just jettisoning of items that couldn't be successfully altered (the bullets, the brain and the bone fragments).
So what the lone-nut theory folks want you to believe is that a whole host of trained professionals can't tell a baseball-sized hole from something five times that size? And that even - after the hole had increased magically in size sometime between Parkland hospital and the autopsy - that the two men doing the autopsy still imagined a back-of-the-head injury that wasn't there? I say this is utter nonsense and the government, playing us for fools, has gotten away with it for 59 years.
If you want to go down the rabbit hole, there are two clear sources. One is the book that discovered the fraud and deception, David Lifton's Best Evidence. The other is the work of Douglas Horne, who was staff at the Assassination Records Review Board. He has put out five volumes of documentary evidence of the fraud and deception in the medical evidence, confirming, clarifying, and extending Lifton's revelations. But you can get the essence in these videos.
Also, I recommend Rob Reiner's new podcast, which is a very good summation of the evidence that the assassination came out of a faction within our Government. The podcast names all the names with clear and compelling evidence.
