Larry Sabato's New Book Does NOT Disprove Conspiracy in the JFK Assassination

"How do we know that our own rational rejections of conspiracy theories are not themselves infected with beliefs so strong that they are, in effect, conspiracy theories too?" - Matt Ridley in 'Maybe We're All Conspiracy Theorists', The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10-11, 2011


As I predicted, the conspiracy naysayers will be coming out of the woodwork for this , the 50 th anniversary of the JFK assassination, on Nov. 22, 1963. I already referenced Bob Schieffer's bollocks, and Tom Hanks' upcoming 13 part propaganda series (based on Vince Bugliosi's skewed theories), now we have Prof. Larry Sabato to join them.

Sabato, a University of Virginia Political Science Prof, in his new book, “The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy.”   insists that the 1979 House Select Committee (HSCA) Investigation concluding a conspiracy in the assassination "has been blown out of the water" by his own book and investigations.

Sabato bases this fulsome claim on some "new" analysis of the dictabelt  recordings, originally analyzed by a team led by Dr. James E. Barger.  (Acoustics analysts Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, of Queens College, reviewed the data and concluded that "with the probability of 95% or better, there was indeed a shot fired from the grassy knoll'.) Based on his version of the analysis, Sabato claims the microphone on a motorcycle cop’s radio was stuck, so it was believed to capture a full recording from the motorcade. They detected four gunshots on the tape, and according to Sabato, the two "academics" (HSCA original acoustic physicists)  "told the committee that they believed one came from the grassy knoll" — not the Texas School Book Depository. (Note that James E. Barger was not part of an MIT team but part of a private research team denoted BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Inc.) along with Scott Robinson, Edward Schmidt and Jared Wolf.)

Actually, it wasn't an issue of "belief" nor was it a matter of "estimation" as Sabato claims. The HSCA original team of acoustic physicists (who had vastly more credentials than the  subsequent Ramsey National Academy of Sciences group which featured NO acoustic specialists) in fact methodically matched specific gun impulses in the acoustic record to the evident impacts visible in the Zapruder film, In the course of doing this, they traced the final (4th impulse)  to the head shot - and that it most plausibly originated from the grassy knoll, NOT the Texas Book Depository (but under political pressure, the HSCA, like the Warrenites, lacked the political courage to say so.).  The conclusion of four separate shots then coincides with 4 impacts visible in the Z-film, and the reactions therein. The acoustic impulses were retested in a 2001 investigation ('Echo Correlation Analysis and the Acoustic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination Revisited' ) by D.B. Thomas and published in the Journal Science and Justice., Vol. 41, p. 21, 2001.   The impulses are shown below, with the four highest amplitude peaks associated with rifle muzzle blasts (an association I will justify subsequently):

Thomas treated both the test evidence and actual data from the original date- aware of the same misgivings that Sabato now claims. Thomas' re- test evidence was obtained in August, 1978 when a test shot was fired in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza to provide a fiducial mark for the putative Grassy Knoll shot – such that it could be compared with the impulse record obtained on Nov. 22, 1963 and also how this mark lined up to events recorded on the Zapruder film. Thus, the test evidence (mainly in terms of echoes and echo delay times received via an echogram from a test shot (See Fig. 1) is essentially used to confirm the microphone recording & positions for the shots made on the actual date, by resort to microphones placed at the same (or approximately so) locations.

The hypergeometric p-function was used for differing weighting factor distribution sets, H{M..N, n, i} to assess significance or likelihood of occurrence. It's based on the no. of echo  'windows'  M,  with each spanning 190msec (total time)  at 2msec width per window and n for assigned impulses in the evidence pattern, with 'i' the "coincident impulses" or those matching the original (11/22/63)evidence and the test result. The question was whether a succession of first impulses of given amplitude could be manifesting a signal or was merely random noise. Thomas found that for a given configuration for 2 motorcycles at designated locations, 1 for (GK) shooter location and one for alignment of muzzle blasts with one pair of echoes, the p -value is 0.000012 or about 1 in 100,000 against the null hypothesis, i.e. that the impulses were from random noise. An alternative way to put this is that the odds are 100.000 to 1 in favor of the impulses comprising actual rifle shots.

For the test shot, using Thomas' sonar model and the muzzle velocity for a Norma 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano (which is very doubtful that the GK shooter used), one arrives at a 171 msec time for the shock wave to take the defined path to the microphone, from a distance of 28.3m. One must add the time taken for the putative bullet to travel the distance to the time for the shock wave. In this case: 126 msec + 45 msec. The first parameter is relatively fixed since the distance from bullet to test microphone is fixed at 44.2m and the speed of sound defined for the sonar model was 350 m/s.  The geometry used by Thomas (op. cit.) is shown below:


The second component will alter depending on the muzzle velocity. A German Mauser, with muzzle velocity not much greater than 760 m/s will have its bullet traverse the 28.3 m distance in 37 msec, so that the time will now be: 126 msec + 37 msec or 163 msec, which is some 8 msec shorter. If the rifle used is now a Remington Fireball with muzzle velocity 825 m/s then the total time becomes: t1 + t2 = 126 msec + 34 msec = 160 msec, or 3 msec shorter still.

In the “analytically determined” schema (e.g. actual data obtained on 11/22/63), all the above values change slightly. For example, the distance to Kennedy (from the GK shooter) becomes 30.5 m, and the speed of sound is 342 m/s given the air temperature was 18  C (64.4 F)  at the time of the assassination. The distance from the (GK) assassin to the nearest motorcycle was 67 m leading to the muzzle blast arriving at the motorcycle some Delta t = [67m/ 342 m/s] = 196 msec, after the shot. When air resistance is corrected for by + 11.5% (from the shooter location) the muzzle velocity resulting becomes 748 m/s (using a starting assumed bullet speed of 672 m/s). Because of a shooter “location uncertainty” of +/- 1.5 m (A<-> A') the muzzle velocity uncertainty is at least +/- 32m/s, so one is left with a range of: 748 +/- 32 m/s. Assuming Thomas’ parameters are correct, then this excludes a Remington Fireball as a possible candidate weapon, but it does permit either a German Mauser or a .30-30 Winchester.

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The bottom line is that Thomas' investigation soundly reconfirmed the original acoustic tests and that the kill shot came from the grassy knoll.   Note, however, as I stated earlier, this diverged from the HSCA conclusion that the shot came from the rear (Texas School Book Depository). Many investigators (e.g. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation) have complained bitterly about this tomfoolery, and that the HSCA didn't want to diverge too much from the WC.  But in examining the actual autopsy photos it's clear the HSCA conclusion of a rear shot is absurd, no matter who said what on what panel (i.e. Clark Panel).  A mere examination of the bogus Warren autopsy photo (below left) and the real one sets the record straight, and exposes the HSCA's own brand of cowardice: you simply cannot physically have the rear of a skull blown out by a rear shot! Rather the linear momentum of a bullet fired from the FRONT will blow out the rear of a skull!


For reference, the Warren Commissioners used (NOT as an exhibit!)  the fake photo without a blown out rear skull, to try to make people believe the shot came from behind, i.e. the Texas School Book Depository. The HSCA - rather than accepting the evidence of the actual autopsy photos, opted to stick with the earlier ones from the WC, and hence arrived at a contradictory conclusion to the evidence. 

Note also, the actual rear shot hit Kennedy in the middle of the upper back. (Bullet hole in suit coat to prove it, but the suit coat was destroyed). It thus seems the HSCA was trying to "square the circle" by finding for conspiracy on the one hand yet unwilling to diverge from the Warrenites' misbegotten fake evidence for the head shot on the other!  (See also my FAQ, Part 8, on the HSCA Investigation and how it was co-opted by the CIA, once G. Robert Blakey succeeded the original chairman, R. Sprague.)

What D.B. Thomas did then, was to rectify the disparity with his own investigation and trace the head shot correctly to where the HSCA ought to have tracked it, had they the courage to do so. (Which, if they'd done this, would also have eliminated Oswald as the killer, since he'd been claimed to have been at the TBSD not the grassy knoll.)

This despite Sabato's claim that: "The long-hoped-for Rosetta Stone of the Kennedy assassination is nothing of the sort. And the much-publicized conclusion of proven conspiracy … was deeply flawed and demonstrably wrong.”

 Actually, the conclusion was not "deeply flawed" or "demonstrably wrong" - but rather those descriptions are more aptly relevant to the pretenders, incompetents and obfuscators who attempted to apply flawed methods in the wake of the original acoustic tests. That includes the NAS team of Dr. Norman Ramsey, which never made its data generally available, and none of whom were even acoustic experts - as the original team had been. Indeed, as per an email from another acoustic researcher, W. Antony Marsh, the Ramsey team even exceeded the claimed errors of the original  team and at a more fundamental level. Thomas himself pointed out their claimed use of a Poisson distribution - which wasn't that at all. And deliberately choosing absurd, unphysical  H{M..N, n, i} sets (for the hypergeometric p-function)  to try to make their conclusion conform to the null hypothesis of random noise.

One example, was counting two distinct echoes as "coincident" - thereby immediately altering the p-value. In this sense, the most venerable principles of good faith scientific testing were violated.  Many researchers, obviously, have wondered about the real purpose of a government-based team, given the government is four square behind the Warren Commission conclusion. (Not surprising, given the government has likely orchestrated the ensuing cover up from the get go with its politically -based Warren farce. After all, why destroy key evidence like JFK's suit coat, as well as have the limo disassembled, if they had nothing to hide? Why plant fake Secret Service agents in Dealey with fake IDs (commission books), to throw people off?)

Let me now address the issue of the nature or signature of the impulses shown in Fig. 1. Are they "noise", motorcycle backfires, or actual rifle shots?  The clue is the steepness of the 4 highest peaks which the original MIT physicists associated with gun shot impulses. The technical term is that each  impulse conforms to a Dirac delta function (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function   ). The point is such extreme profiles would not be confused with any white noise, distant motorcycles or backfires or the like.  It is precisely the timing spaces between these four major impulses in the acoustic record which led the MIT physicists to conclude gun shots  - FOUR in all- and then tie them chronologically to the action in the Zapruder film - leading to four shots fired (the upper back shot - from behind, the missed shot near James Tague, the shot wounding Connally in the wrist, and the head shot). The imprint for the missed (Tague) shot is shown below:

Lastly, for what it's worth, I reiterate Harrison Livingstone's remark that "only an idiot" would accept or believe that the truth or falsity of conspiracy rests exclusively on the acoustic record. ('Killing Kennedy and the Hoax of the Century, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1995  )

There is simply too much supplemental supporting evidence, i.e. including from the ballistics, the additional films taken that day, e.g. Nix film, and the actual autopsy photos, as well as skull radiographs and the negative  test results from the purported Oswald weapon by a team of sharpshooters appointed by the Warren Commission. Not to mention the inordinately improbable deaths of  witnesses, see e.g.      http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/a-probability-analysis-of-witness-deaths-within-one-year-of-the-jfk-assassination/

At least Sabato is honest by admitting: “It is beyond question that the CIA lied to the Warren Commission in 1964 and then again to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s.”

Though he doesn't register Agent Regis Blahut's attempted destruction of the autopsy photos in the HSCA investigation, reported by Gaeton Fonzi (The Last Investigation)

Also, he has admitted (on politico.com) that:

“a conspiracy of some sort … cannot be dismissed out of hand.” But adding that Oswald was:

“at least one of” Kennedy’s assassins. Just because the tape could not prove a conspiracy, does not mean there was not someone on the grassy knoll."

Which is consistent with H. Livingstone's point.

However, nearly all serious researchers dispute that Lee Oswald had any role at all in the hit. More than likely he'd been set up as the patsy to allow the actual perps to escape, by telling him he'd be the one to help expose the plot. But, by the time the head shot had transpired, he knew he'd been played, and he was the decoy - soon to be nailed.  Author James Douglass  (JFK and the Unspeakable) conjectures Lee became the patsy after he likely called the Chicago FBI to expose the earlier (Nov. 2nd) plot that nailed Thomas Arthur Vallee.

Stay tuned.  There's more 'Whack-a-mole' to come!

More on the NAT GEO Explorer "Lost Bullet" Bunkum

On this 48th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, I again pondered the woeful propaganda on offer from the National Geographic channel on Sunday night. My conclusion is that in future they'd be best served by sticking to polar bears in the Arctic, or the antics of Emperor Penguins in the Antarctic, as opposed to dallying in blatant propaganda efforts to prop up a discredited pseudo-investigation by the Warren Commission.

In this blog I examine key evidence and aspects that the National Geographic special chose to ignore, and by the end, hope to convince readers of the extent of this whole charade and why no sane or rational person in this country should ever give any credence to the Warren Commission Report.

We now focus on the Nat Geo's "Bullet B" or what they claim is the single bullet that entered JFK's back then made a throat wound before entering Gov. Connally and making several more wounds. I aim to skewer this horse shit one step at a time.

Using laser firing rifles and an Oswald stand-in, firing from the Book depository, Warren groupie Max Holland (who also professes to be a "physicist") attempts to show that the same bullet that passed through Kennedy's back - near the third thoracic vertebra (according to one Parkland surgeon) also passed into his throat and then into Connally. This is patently impossible, violating all known principles of geometry, trigonometry, physics and biology!

First, examine Fig. 1 which is the Warren Commission (WC) rendition of how the back and throat wounds occurred and essentially what Holland attempted to confirm with his toy laser rifle. The argument being that angles defined by something as precise as a laser beam can't lie. Well, they can, if one isn't faithful to the specific replication! According to Fig. 1, the WC version shows the bullet entering at the base of the neck (bland yellow streak) and exiting near the throat.

The problem here is the wound placement is too high! The next graphic image (right side) shows the actual placement of the back wound during the autopsy. Note it's much further down than the Warren version claimed (and one reason Bethesda autopsist Humes burned his notes and diagrams, to conform to the WC!) In order to have the throat placement where it was (center lower image of graphic) one would need a trajectory such as shown in blue, in Fig. 1. This would allow a congruence between the actual back wound placement and the throat wound but it could not have been fired from the Book Depository! Indeed, one would literally have had to have someone shooting from a manhole cover somewhere to actuate that!

Worse, Parkland surgeon Malcolm Perry (who should know his business given having to deal with multiple Dallasites' gunshot wounds at Parkland) was adamant in declaring the throat wound an ENTRY wound. This means necessarily that another bullet (besides the head shot dealt with in the last blog for 'Bullet C') had to have come from the front. Thus, Holland's demonstration could not be valid IF he was seeking to replicate the actual wound positions, and not spurious ones.

Holland then proceeds to show the same purported "magic bullet" made more wounds in Connally and was the same as WC Exhibit CE 399, or "the magic bullet". This bullet is shown in the second set of graphics, or Fig. 3. Entry (A) is the "magic bullet" which purportedly did all this damage, while (B) is a test bullet, one of several fired by Joseph Dolcet into the wrists of cadavers to compare the degree of damage sustained with that of the WC Exhibit. Readers can see for themselves how the magic bullet, claimed to have made 7 different wounds in two people, stretches credulity to the breaking point!

Lastly, bullet (C) was one of the actual bullets found on the treatment room floor at Parkland, by one of the doctors in attendance. Note immediately the pointed head, compared with the rounded one for the claimed Oswald rifle. As I showed in the last blog, Oswald's Mannlicher -Carcano could not have fired the shots, given the echo patterns.

Now, what we've already exposed is that there have been at least four different shots and putatively from 3 different locations (The Dal-Tex building provides a better angle for the back shot than the TSBD). Let's enumerate them thus far:

1) The Back wound - fired from the Dal-Tex bldg.?

2) Throat wound - fired from the front (GK?)

3) Head wound - fired from the GK.

4) Connally wounds - fired from the TSBD ?

Note also that another reason the magic bullet is bollocks is the fact that, had Gov. Connally been hit at Z-frame 230 (as single bullet adherents posit), he would have had to continue holding his heavy white Stetson for about another second and a half, AFTER being shot in the right wrist. Anatomically this is nonsense. Close examination of the key frames discloses he firmly retains his grip on his Stetson between right thumb and forefinger. It is the ulnar nerve which permits this apposition. But any bullet fired into the wrist (i.e. at Z-230) would have severed that nerve, making any grasp of his Stetson totally impossible!

We now come to "Bullet A" or the alleged, "lost bullet". Of course, the presumption of a lost bullet is also the presumption (erroneous as we've established) there were only three shots in toto- with two bullets identified (B and C) and the third unaccounted for. In fact as I will show, the "lost bullet" (the one that sprayed pavement up and hit witness James Tague standing just beneath the Triple Underpass) is merely one of several more!

Reference is made here to the 4th set of graphics shown which indicates the location where Tague was standing, and the curb where the bullet actually struck - but since paved over and removed. The late, long time researcher Harold Weisberg documented how – when he inquired for the spectrographic evidence associated with the original curb struck by a bullet near witness James Tague- he was told by the FBI that it was “destroyed”. Earlier, the curb itself was paved over - see upper left image- then subsequently removed (by another Fed agency). It was then sent back to FBI HQ in D.C. Why is this so critical? Because it constitutes evidence for a clear and separate shot. This then is Holland's and Nat Geo's "lost bullet" for their purposes.

Not yet reckoned into the mix, is a bullet that struck the limo's windshield frame, with the indentation shown in the lower right image of the "lost bullets" graphic set. Of course, when the limo was sent for re-building, that evidence was destroyed, probably with a lot more!

So we now have this tally of two additional shots:

5) Bullet that struck a curb and sprayed James Tague with metal and concrete (fired from TSBD or the Dal-Tex Bldg.)

6) Bullet that struck the limo windshield frame.

That is SIX bullets in all, which clearly can't be accounted for by one man, even firing over 11 seconds, as Holland insists. In fact since Holland demands "Bullet A" as the first bullet, and no others for 6.4 secs, it would have compressed at least five shots into the remaining 4.6 seconds, impossible with Oswald's alleged Italian rifle which was limited to a 2.33 sec bolt action recycling time. Three shots would have been about the most Oswald could have made in that time marking shot two at 'zero' starting the stopwatch at the 4.6 second mark. Even then it would have been damned near impossible - given the aiming and other flaws of the actual weapon disclosed by the Army marksmen that attempted to replicate it.

In trying to trace the origin of his "lost bullet A" Holland devises another test with his toy laser rifle: this time picking the west end window of the Texas School Book Depository to fire from, and theorizing from his trial runs that - to get near the pavement or curb where Tague stood- the bullet had to have struck a traffic pole extending from the building. This is an interesting hypothesis to make, but essentially useless if one is only using a mock rifle that bears zero similarity to the one actually used by Oswald (which, incidentally, the National Archives evidently won't allow anyone to handle any more!

Even worse, the Archives has evidently refused the calls by some to actually confirm the internal control number on the rifle. According to author H.E. Livingston ('Killing the Truth', 1993, p. 204, Carroll & Graf Publ.)

"The National Archives will not let anyone actually examine the rifle. They wrote Patricia Dumais, who was suspicious that it was a stage prop and wanted to see the 'internal control' number supposedly placed on it by Klein's: 'We cannot disassemble Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle because this action might be destructive to the object.'"

So given this, I suppose we can at least let Holland and his collaborators off the hook for demanding they use the actual rifle (which again, Army experts had to have sights, shims adjusted before they even attempted replication - then had to abandon it for a similar model). But at the very least, Holland - to test his hypothesis - ought to have been able to secure an actual, working 6.5 mm Mannlicher Carcano, had Dallas PD clear the area, then get off at least 2-3 test shots to track the REAL trajectory of real bullets - as opposed to laser beams issuing from toy rifles.

The last graphic set shows a blow up view of the controversial west side of the Book Depository on the 6th floor, and the specific window from which a young African-American boy at the time (Amos Euins) claimed to have observed a moving figure. But, was it really Oswald? Let's leave out for the moment the annoying little fact that the actual sniper's nest found (photographed by Tom Alyea, who was never called by the WC as a witness) was situated at the EAST end window of the Depository not the west end which is visible as one drives up Houston St. (And depicted by me with a circle around it in the last graphic, and in a blown up view.) Let's also leave out the other annoying little fact that as of 12.31 p.m. Oswald was identified by several co-workers on the 2nd floor lunch room and nowhere near the 6th floor. Further, none of his witnesses reported him the least bit fatigued or out of breath - as one might expect- after engaging in a shooting barely a minute earlier on the 6th floor, and racing down 4 flights of stairs to sit quietly in the lunch room!

However, a blown up view of the west end window - with images taken about 10-15 secs apart, clearly shows the empty window then a heavy set person (see lower right inset image). He's clearly in a white t-shirt but the size of his head is definitely not narrow like Oswald's. Also, do we really imagine Oswald to have taken a pot shot out of this west end window- bullet spraying James Tague with concrete, then rapidly racing to the other side of the sixth floor (where the sniper's nest ws found) and taken further shots at JFK and Connally? Give me a break!

One plausible surmise is that the character in the 6th floor window, and the putative actual 6th floor shooter (one of at least three for triangulated gunfire in Dealey Plaza) was actually the heavy set fake Oswald the CIA recorded in Mexico City. (See his inset image, taken with a CIA camera from Mexico City). This was actually the beginning of the other urban assassination legend promoted by the lone nut buffs, i.e. that Oswald had gone to Mexico City and carried on in front of a consulate officer, Silvia Duran. But when other CIA officers on the scene examined the image further, they probably had a shit fit concerning the subject's blatantly divergent appearance from the real Oswald.

Of course, the CIA regularly monitored the Cuban and Soviet embassy compounds in Mexico City, and had photographs of anyone coming or going. A cable dated Oct. 10, 1963 referred to (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 399)

"..an American male, who identified himself as Lee OSWALD, contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring whether the Embassy had received any news concerning a telegram which had been sent to Washington. The American was described as approximately 35 years old, with an athletic build, about six feet tall, with a receding hairline."

It was certainly not Oswald, who at only 5'9" (at most) and slight of build (160 lbs.) possessed a decidedly un-athletic physique. Univ. of Maryland Military Science Professor Newman also makes reference (ibid.) to a note scribbled in the margin of the above cable by a CIA employee with the words:

"Not Oswald! WRONG!"

Subsequently, Duran was arrested by Mexican authorities under CIA instigation[1] and coercively interrogated for eight hours until she broke[2] and gave the testimony they wanted to hear: that the person at the Embassy was Lee Harvey Oswald.

For its part, the CIA withheld original cables and documents from the Warren Commission (probably under Allen Dulles' orders, and recall he'd been fired by JFK as the CIA chief after the Bay of Pigs, and appointed one of the Warren Commissioners by LBJ), offering instead the bogus, coerced statement Duran made, in a desperate attempt to prove Lee Harvey Oswald - the person arrested in Dallas for assassinating JFK - was the same person creating a scene at the Cuban Consul in Mexico City, Sept. 1963 .

But anyone with eyes and ears, and not totally deluded, WC- kool aid drunk (like WC- recyclers Joel Grant and Vince Bugliosi) or batshit crazy, would realize the guy imaged in that graphics set could not be the slim 5' 9", 160 lb. Oswald! Similarly, it was not Oswald seen in the TSBD window by Amos Euins, or Howard Leslie Brennan.

[1] Fonzi, The Last Investigation, Thunders Mouth Press., p. 289.
[2] Fonzi, ibid.; and Newman, op. cit. p. 409.