Investigating Possible Conspiracies and Cover-ups

By Wade Frazier

Why Are There So Many Conspiracy Theories Today?

The Dangers of Investigating Conspiracies and Cover-ups

What about Those American Hostages in Iran?

9/11 – The Mother of all Conspiracy Theories

Is Anything Being Covered up about the Apollo Moon Landings?

The Big Cover-up

Introduction

I was born in 1958, and had a fairly typical middle class suburban American childhood (fan of Gilligan's Island and Star Trek). I was largely raised in Ventura, California; my mother ran the household while my father worked to support the family. His entire career was spent working for the federal government, and all but one year was spent working for the Department of Defense. The nearby military bases employed most of the area’s professionals, so some of my friends’ fathers (as well as several of my father’s friends) also worked for the military. If anything, the political outlook I was raised with was fairly Cold War, but not too pronounced. I was taught that the Soviets were the bad guys, and my family generally supported politicians from the Democratic Party. My father was rather outraged when Nixon won the presidency in 1968, and I was saddened when Reagan beat Carter in 1980. My political outlook was a fairly mainstream one, which means that I was ignorant. I read the newspaper virtually everyday, from age 10 to 27, thinking that I was getting the “news.” I had some spiritual training that came in handy later on, but I was like most people of my age, assimilating my indoctrination. I kept my eyes open to see how closely reality matched my ideals, because I needed to honestly believe in my ideals.

Upon graduating from college, I had a rather rude awakening, and indoctrination and ideals brutally collided with reality. I eventually realized that my profession was virtually worthless, although that full realization was not clear for several years. Then I met Dennis Lee, and was able to live my dreams of trying to bring alternative energy to the world. After meeting Dennis, I had a very rude awakening. That was when my political education began in earnest. Our efforts at developing alternative energy were definitely the targets of conspiracies. Policemen and others committed felonies while pursuing us, leading to the death of one woman. We received offers to buy us out, which culminated in an offer probably in excess of $1 billion, to bribe us to stop pursuing alternative energy. When Dennis rejected the offer made by “European interests,” given through a CIA man, a month later Dennis was thrown into jail with a million dollar bail, on fabricated charges.[1]

As Dennis attained national visibility with his free energy promotion, numerous people approached us who had tried similar ventures, and we were told nightmarish stories of being wiped out by conspiratorial activities. Kangaroo courts, prison and murder; threatening phone calls in the night and hiding from the murderers were common tales, the kind that few Americans hear first-hand. It became obvious that the energy industry has maintained its technological monopoly by using extremely dirty tactics. It is one thing to hear the tales; it is quite another to live through them.

The first alternative political literature I read, other than the Christian Science Monitor (which is only slightly alternative), was conspiratorial literature, from conspiracies regarding instigating our wars, to controlling the banking system, to eliminating the United States’ sovereignty. While Dennis was still in jail, I was introduced to Noam Chomsky and the political left. Ever since, I have studied scholarship such as Chomsky's far more than right-wing scholarship. I consider left wing scholarship superior. They both explain how the world works. Their perspectives can be divergent, but sometimes are nearly identical. It can be hazardous to over-generalize, but right-wing scholarship is often centered on conspiracies, while left-wing scholarship is more interested in the “structural” aspects of our system’s workings. The right sees the activities as more conscious (conspiratorial), while the left sees it as more unconscious (structural, institutional behavior). It probably has something to do with their spiritual outlook, with fundamentalist Christians populating the right, and scientists and rationalists populating the left. Both have their creation myths. The Christian right has the book of Genesis, while the left has the Big Bang and evolution. One was conscious, while the other was a big and unfathomable accident.

Each perspective has its strengths and weaknesses. The right can veer into outright paranoia, seeing a conspiracy behind every bush, ignoring or underplaying the structural aspects of what is happening. The police may throw people in jail for curing cancer, but may not know the real reason they threw them in jail (or even care). They were just following orders.

The left often suffers from what Michael Parenti terms a “conspiracy phobia.”[2] It has a tendency to see everything as a big accident, with institutional forces at play and few, if any, individuals really controlling a situation’s outcome. It seems afflicted by too-often rejecting the notion that people can be consciously malicious and act in concert. Only a small proportion of our populace is devoted to “evil.” In the minds of those devoted to “evil,” they are simply devoted to themselves. They see themselves as good guys, too. The dark path is simply being devoted to one’s self at the extreme, and they have made self-service a science. All the same, conscious evil is a small fraction of how the world works, which even Hitler admitted. The rest is due to people’s actions when they feel threatened with loss, enticed by gain, and so forth. Those on the dark path easily manipulate the herd of average people, who are preoccupied with comfort and survival.

Gary Wean and the JFK Assassination

In early 1989, it appeared as if Dennis had no chance of living to see this side of the bars again. There were a handful of people trying to save him from life in prison, and probably being murdered while he was in there. Although our effort was the target of a wide-ranging international conspiracy, Ventura County was also one of the United States’ most corrupt counties, regularly ranking in the top ten most corrupt law enforcement jurisdictions (it has even been ranked number one). Dennis was far from alone in being raped by Ventura County’s legal system.

In Ventura County, one person in particular was standing up to the corruption. Gary Wean was a sailor in World War II and became an LAPD policeman in 1946. Gary had the kind of career that they make movies about. He moved back and forth between Ventura County and Los Angeles a couple of times in the 1950s and 1960s. While in Los Angeles, Gary was at times a motorcycle cop directing traffic, while at others he was a detective. He worked out of the downtown and Hollywood precincts. Dealing with the escapades of politicians, celebrities and gangsters was simply part of his job.

In 1947, he was pursuing an armed robber through the streets of Los Angeles on a high-speed chase. The suspect crashed his car as it barreled along at ninety miles an hour through LA’s streets. He tried escaping on foot, and Gary cornered him in the dark. The suspect begged for his life. As Gary approached, the man stuck his pistol (which had already killed somebody during the robbery) into Gary’s abdomen and fired. He fired a second shot that hit Gary in his hand. Gary then emptied his pistol into the man, while his partner also fired, killing the robber instantly. Gary’s partner rushed him to the hospital. Although Gary’s abdomen was in great pain, he did not want to unbuckle his Sam Brown belt (a wide leather belt which held his firearm and other police equipment) as they rushed to the hospital, because he thought it might be all that was holding him together. When Gary finally took off his belt, his partner saw that the bullet hit the belt and did not penetrate Gary’s skin.[3] That was a day in the life of an LAPD cop. Below are images from that day.

Click on image to enlarge.

Gary relates many amazing incidents in his book There's a Fish in the Courthouse. Gary was from the old school: he believed in the ideal of law enforcement, and that through a properly functioning legal system there could be a more just society.

When I met Gary in early 1989, he gave me the best advice I could get: no organization in America would help Dennis, either governmental or private. Dennis’ experience was not that unusual. U.S. judicial gangsterism was normal, but nearly always covered up or misrepresented by the media, as they are an integral part of the system. Gary's advice kept me from wasting my time seeking somebody in the United States government to help. Gary’s insight helped lead to Dennis’ miraculous release from jail. In my hour of need, Gary was generous with his time, sincere, and helpful.

The first edition of There's a Fish in the Courthouse was published in 1987, and tells of an incredible meeting that Gary attended in late 1963. One of Gary's friends was Audie Murphy, America's most decorated war hero who became a Hollywood movie star. During World War II, Murphy took on hundreds of German soldiers and six tanks single-handedly near Holtzwihr France, while he was firing a machine gun from atop a burning vehicle filled with explosives. It stands as one of the most heroic feats from any war. Murphy suffered from “shell shock” (now called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome) for the rest of his life.

One of Murphy's friends was Bill Decker, the sheriff of Dallas County. Decker came to California regularly on business, and when he came to town, Gary would arrange for Murphy, Decker, himself and his partner to dine at the Police Academy. About two weeks after the JFK assassination, in early December 1963, Decker was in town and they all had lunch together. The topic of conversation quickly turned to what arms experts across the nation were discussing: how could Oswald have made those shots with that poor shooting position and mediocre rifle to kill John Kennedy? Nobody at that table thought it was possible for Oswald to have made those shots. After they arrived at their conclusion, Decker told them that he knew Oswald had not fired the shots, and that a man in Dallas wanted to talk to somebody about it. Oswald died while being transferred to Decker’s custody. Decker knew somebody who could set the record straight, and wanted to talk to somebody not connected to Dallas or Washington. Murphy was interested, and the next week, Murphy, Gary and his partner were flying to Ruidoso, New Mexico to meet Decker and his friend.

They met at the airport and went to a diner to talk. The man who came with Decker was named John. According to John, Oswald was anything but a “lone nut.” He was a U.S. intelligence agent acting under the direction of E. Howard Hunt. Oswald had been recruited into military intelligence when he joined the Marines. His hanging out in an expensive Tokyo nightclub as a private, his learning Russian at the highly sensitive U-2 base in Japan, his defection to the Soviet Union and other oddities were all part of his intelligence career (which probably began even before his Marine days, when he was a cadet in 1955 in David Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol unit. “Coincidentally,” Oswald began his “fascination” with communism at the same time). Oswald was developing "communist" credentials for his future activities in infiltrating communist organizations. It was a fairly normal American intelligence path.[4]

Oswald was inducted into CIA covert activities and came under Hunt’s direction. Hunt was a major player in mounting the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and he, as with many others in the military and CIA, blamed Kennedy for the failure (Kennedy refused to call in openly American air support). Hunt dreamed up the crazy assassination attempts on Castro that the United States tried. His mission in life was eliminating Castro. Oswald came into his control, and was thrown into the cauldron of the Cuban exile communities in Miami and New Orleans. Oswald did not initially know what his mission would be.

Hunt was paranoid about Oswald's Russian wife, thinking that she might be a Russian spy, so Oswald could tell her nothing about his activities. Oswald’s joining Fair Play for Cuba and his staged “murder attempt” on General Walker were all part of giving Oswald “credentials” that would make his upcoming performance more believable. Hunt had concocted the most bizarre assassination intrigue of all time. Oswald was going to participate in a fake assassination attempt on John Kennedy, and frame Castro for it. Oswald’s apparent visit to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City was part of laying an elaborate trail to Cuba. Hunt believed that if Castro could be implicated in an assassination attempt on JFK, the American people could be riled up into supporting an outright invasion of Cuba.

JFK was not aware of the fake assassination plan, but high-ranking officials in the government and his administration were. Military intelligence, the FBI and the CIA were all involved. Oswald was initially leery of Hunt’s plan, but with assurances and after seeing the high-level people involved, he went along with it. Oswald was to fire his rifle into the air, then go into hiding, and the false trail to Cuba was laid. He could come home to a hero’s welcome and live a normal life after America had finished mopping up Cuba.

But something went horribly wrong. The fake assassination turned into a real one. Somebody had infiltrated the operation, interposed the mission and killed JFK. The real assassins tried killing Oswald after JFK was killed, but policeman Tippit was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was killed. Oswald escaped, to be captured alive. John said that he knew that Oswald would not have shot a policeman under any circumstances.

At the end of his mind-blowing tale, John handed over a thick manila envelope, sealed with wax with a thumbprint on it, that contained the documents John said would prove his story.

Murphy, Gary and his partner went back to California. They knew that the situation was too big and dangerous for them to pursue. John said that if he went public with his story, he would quickly disappear, never to be heard from again. A few days after that meeting, Decker called Murphy. As John was telling his story, the CIA and intelligence community was in shock. They did not know what to do, paralyzed with fear. As they recovered from their shock, they saw themselves facing the firing squad if their involvement in the assassination intrigue became known. The intelligence community decided they would do everything they could to cover their tracks, invoking “national security.” Decker told Murphy that John had given him the envelope of documents in a moment of panic, and that if Murphy did not give the envelope back, he would be “destroyed.” Murphy did some fast thinking and told Decker that they had torn the envelope into pieces and threw them out of the airplane as they were flying back to California.

That is what Gary says he witnessed, and I believe him. In the first edition of his book, Gary hid John's identity. Because John was dead when Gary published the second edition of his book in 1996, Gary revealed that “John” was John Tower, the Senator from Texas and George Bush’s little buddy who he nominated to be the Secretary of Defense.

Gary wrote his book in the early 1970s. New evidence keeps coming to light regarding the JFK assassination. Because of what Gary saw, I knew that Oswald was not a lone nut. The center of gravity of my research into the JFK assassination has been to see how it correlated with Gary's testimony. Every piece of credible evidence I have seen supports Gary’s story, and none contradicts it. Particularly impressive has been the recent revelations of Operation Northwoods, where the U.S. government was going to stage terrorist acts in America to manipulate Americans into supporting an invasion of Cuba. Gary’s story touches upon many facets of the JFK assassination evidence, including Oswald's military intelligence days, his association with the Cuban exiles, the “Texas Connection,” the “Republican Connection,” the oilman connection, the George Bush connection, the CIA connection, the FBI connection and others. Up until now (2002), Gary's testimony has been ignored by virtually everybody involved in investigating the JFK assassination. Gary is the only surviving member of that meeting with John Tower. Tower and Murphy both died in private plane “accidents” that may not have been accidental.

Gary's career ended in Ventura County when he stumbled into corruption that boggles the mind. Gary names names, and I knew some of the people he named in his book, and knew of many of the events. I independently believed his version of some events before I met him. When he encountered the corruption in Ventura, which ended his career, he fought back and survived a murder attempt himself. Those who run Ventura County are judges on the Superior Court, real estate developers, politicians and the like. According to Gary, political murder was common in Ventura County, where judges, lawyers and other people who got in the way or were expendable were murdered, sometimes by private plane “accidents,” mysterious drownings, etc.

Hollywood has made many movies and TV shows about the police and crime in Los Angeles, especially during the 1930s, 1940s and '50s, such as LA Confidential and Chinatown. Gary worked out of the downtown and Hollywood precincts during his days as an LAPD cop. Later in his career, he became an investigator for the LA District Attorney's Office. In the early days of Gary’s career, he was assigned to keep watch on Mickey Cohen, who ran LA’s organized crime operations. Cohen, Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky were Jewish gangsters. Siegel “built” Las Vegas. Cohen ran the LA crime scene for many years. In typical gangster style, Cohen’s hangouts were often boxing arenas, racetracks, restaurants, etc. Gary followed Cohen around as part of his job. One member of Cohen’s entourage, who Gary saw regularly, was an aspiring lawyer who sat on the Ninth District Federal Court for many years. I saw his name in the news a few years ago, and he is still a judge, at nearly 80 years of age in 2002. The man is a gangster, and a federal judge, and the media and establishment has been lavishing praise on him lately, with awards and hagiographic articles.

The connection between Frank Sinatra and organized crime is one of many in the entertainment field (or the CIA, or George Bush, or Joe Kennedy, or entertainment and law enforcement, such as Elvis Presley and the FBI, or the FBI and organized crime). Along with good food and pretty women, first-class entertainment is another gangster perk. Gangsters keep entertainers as their “pets” when they can. The Las Vegas connection and entertainment is a case in point. Cohen was deeply involved in the Hollywood scene.

One of Cohen’s specialties was blackmailing celebrities, such as obtaining compromising photographs of them to use as leverage. The Mafia had the goods on FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a transvestite. Because of their blackmail, Hoover publicly denied organized crime’s existence, and the FBI rarely tried prosecuting them. When Robert Kennedy prosecuted organized crime when he was Attorney General, he was breaking the unwritten rules.

One of Cohen's successes involved Lana Turner. Johnny Stompanato was a good-looking, aspiring Italian gangster, one of the gangster wannabees that filled Los Angeles in those days. The LA hookers said that the Italian Stallion Stompanato was the best bedroom performer in LA, and Cohen arranged for him to meet Turner. The romance flourished. Cohen paid for a deluxe motel suite for the lovers. The bed was wired for sound. Cohen got a recording of Stompanato and Turner going at it. Cohen had two thousand copies pressed of Turner’s squeals of ecstasy. It became a hit at Hollywood parties. Some said that it was one of Turner’s finest performances. It made Cohen a lot of money, as he sold the record for fifty dollars a copy. Turner’s daughter eventually murdered Stompanato, creating one of Hollywood’s bigger scandals. That recording became the “must have” item after Stompanato’s death, and Cohen pressed thousands more records, making big money.

As Gary followed Cohen, sometimes putting him under sophisticated surveillance, Gary met members of Cohen’s entourage. In 1946, Gary saw somebody new with Cohen at the racetrack. In 1947, he bumped into him at a restaurant he was watching. The man knew Gary was a cop, yet they had an interesting conversation. The man introduced himself as Jack Ruby. His real name was Jacob Rubenstein, and he worked with Mick Cohen. Ruby openly told Gary that the mob was focusing its operations on New Orleans and Havana, where the action was. With World War II over, the West Coast was not really the happening place anymore. Ruby murdered Oswald, and Gary presents intriguing evidence regarding the organized crime connection with the JFK assassination.

In 1948, the state of Israel was established. Menachem Begin eventually became Israel's Prime Minister. Begin was a member of the Irgun terrorist group. He helped blow up a hotel, killing many people. When Begin was the Israeli Prime Minister, he could not visit Britain, because he was wanted for murder there. The people who established Israel were extremely violent. Mick Cohen became involved with Begin, and became an arms dealer for Israel, which is not surprising to anybody who has done any digging into the CIA’s alliances. Cohen said that his Jewish blood made him such a fervent supporter of Israel, but he was likely in it for the money, as usual.

In Israel’s early days, their relationship with the United States was not happy, and was particularly troubled during the Eisenhower administration.[5] It was not until the war of 1967, when Israel proved itself a murderously aggressive power in the Middle East, grabbing huge chunks of land from its neighbors, that the United States began its massive and unconditional support of Israel, which is the biggest foreign aid project the world has ever seen. In 1960, the U.S. presidential election was between Nixon (Eisenhower’s vice president) and John Kennedy.

Kennedy was a legendary philanderer, and Cohen and friends tried exploiting JFK’s proclivities. According to legend, John Kennedy met Marilyn Monroe through a connection with Frank Sinatra. Right there is a possible organized crime connection, but Gary says that another member of the “rat pack,” Joey Bishop (who knew Cohen well - Gary says that Bishop even worked for Cohen), came up with the idea of introducing Monroe to JFK, and Gary looked in on Peter Lawford’s (JFK’s in-law) Malibu party where JFK and Monroe were introduced, in 1960, during the Democratic national convention.

As with Stompanato and Turner, Cohen underling Georgie Piscitelli became Monroe’s lover. Cohen got a tape of them in bed together and played it for Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster boss who later received cement shoes from the Mafia, and who was then feeling the heat from Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. They promised Hoffa a tape of JFK and Monroe in bed together (so Hoffa could blackmail JFK into calling off Bobby Kennedy’s efforts), but could never deliver. Monroe was being used as the world’s highest-class hooker.[6] Cohen and friends wanted to know what Kennedy's intentions towards Israel were. Monroe was supposed to elicit it during pillow talk. Monroe was controlled by mobsters and was kept on all manner of narcotic. When she became increasingly uncontrollable and potentially dangerous if she publicly talked about what was happening, she was murdered. Gary had Cohen under surveillance, and caught him and Begin having a conversation in Yiddish in a diner. They were talking about Kennedy, Israel, how much money Kennedy was wasting on the Peace Corps and other programs.

Gary's testimony regarding JFK, John Tower, Marilyn Monroe, Menachem Begin, Jack Ruby and Mick Cohen is just part of his amazing tale, which he published at great risk. The only JFK assassination book I am aware of that even mentions Gary is Final Judgment, by Michael Collins Piper, who heavily relies on Gary’s testimony. Gary thinks that Jewish gangsters were involved in interposing Hunt’s grand scheme. That does not mean that Allen Dulles (the CIA chief whom Kennedy fired over the Bay of Pigs, and who later served on the Warren Commission), J. Edgar Hoover, George Bush and others were not also involved in interposing Hunt’s scheme, playing Hunt for a chump.

Piper is a reporter for The Spotlight, which I subscribed to for years. It has understandably been described as a neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic publication. The culmination of Gary's book is uncovering a vast Jewish crime organization. It is different from the Italian Mafia, as its members are judges, politicians and other public figures. It is a highly intelligent crime organization, using the pen more than the gun to achieve its goals. The most powerful criminals do not break the laws: they make and enforce the laws, to serve their own interests, not the public’s.

Gary has suffered greatly at the hands of Jewish gangsters. Consequently, I believe he has taken his Jewish theorizing a little too far, but it is understandable. During my days with Dennis and the horror I lived through, I thought policeman and lawyers were among the lowest forms of life. I have since revised my views, but I understand how brutal treatment at the hands of Jewish gangsters can lead to overgeneralizations regarding the Jewish people.

The Jewish people have had a very rough ride, especially at Christendom’s hands. The flocking of Jews to Southern California was just one more chapter in their long journeys, trying to find a place in the Christian world where they would not be discriminated against, or murdered en masse. Consequently, Jews entered new industries such as the entertainment industry in Hollywood, and some took advantage of Prohibition, just as Italian criminals did. Cohen, Siegel and Lansky were part of a uniquely American phenomenon. What Gary ran into, a Jewish underworld where the criminals were bankers, judges, lawyers, politicians and others, is an understandable Jewish variation of organized crime. The Jewish gangsters also sought “invisibility,” which is also common in corporate and other power games.

Even though Gary has taken his theorizing about the Jewish people too far, he is correct when he says that Jewish apologists have been using the cry of “anti-Semitism” as a club to prevent anybody from criticizing Israel (and Gary says the same tactic prevents the exposure of Jewish gangster activities). Noam Chomsky says the same thing about how the cry of anti-Semitism is being used to deflect criticism of the Israeli state.[7] So does Native American scholar Ward Churchill.[8] Jewish scholars are definitely guilty of playing up the Jewish Holocaust and its imagined historical exclusivity, to the point where some have denied the Gypsy Holocaust of World War II. Gypsies were subject to the same extermination policies as the Jews were, dying alongside the Jews in the same death camps. All the same, the far-right scholarship that argues that the Jewish Holocaust never happened, or was never intended by the Nazis, is, in the words of Ward Churchill, “tripe.” If one is not familiar with scholarship’s “rules,” the-Jewish-Holocaust-Never-Happened scholarship can appear reasonable. Far right scholarship on the subject is extremely biased, and is often appallingly bad. Typically, they use a few “facts” to establish their arguments, but then liberally add rumor, supposition and fabrication into the mix to construct their hypothesis.

All disinformation has “truth” and “facts” in it (which is what makes it plausible), and to the uninitiated can unfortunately be convincing. Probably the main reason Gary’s testimony is dismissed is because of his fervent writings about Jewish gangsters, and generalizations about the Jewish people that can easily be labeled anti-Semitic. In 1998, I submitted a brief essay about Gary’s testimony to a JFK assassination forum, and the only response was to flame me, call my writing a “fairy tale,” call Murphy a “coward” and Gary a “Nazi.” Yet, Gary’s theories have virtually nothing to do with what Gary says he witnessed. I believe everything that Gary says he saw, including his meeting with John Tower, and Jews do not come up in the John Tower conversation at all.

The surfacing of the Operation Northwoods documents in 2001, however, may make Gary’s testimony vastly more credible, as Tower’s tale is very similar to the plans as depicted in the Operations Northwoods documents. I have spent hundreds of hours looking into the JFK assassination evidence since 1989, and I have never seen any piece of credible evidence contradict Gary’s testimony, and evidence has kept appearing during the past fourteen years that keeps confirming it. The next section will deal Gary’s account of John Tower and JFK, and how it fits today’s evidence.

Assessing the Credibility of Gary’s Story, and How it Fits the Facts

Up until now, Gary’s testimony regarding Tower and JFK has been ignored by, or unknown to, nearly everybody involved in the JFK assassination controversy. This section is written in the hope that the recent Operation Northwoods revelations will spark more interest in Gary’s tale. James Bamford, the author who brought the Northwoods documents to American attention in his Body of Secrets (an Australian work, Jon Elliston’s 1999 Psy War on Cuba, first publicly disclosed the documents, but the book was ignored in the U.S.), wrote that the Northwoods plan “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.”[9] There is plenty of competition for “most corrupt plan” in American history.

George Washington, probably America’s richest man when he became president, whose fortune was anything but “clean,” designed the blueprint to steal the North American continent from Native Americans, by forcing them to cede their lands in treaties that the U.S. government would never honor. Washington’s plan was quickly adopted by the Continental Congress, and was U.S. official policy until there were virtually no more native lands left to steal. Thomas Jefferson told Big Lies to both the British and Spanish ambassadors about U.S. intentions toward North American lands. The U.S. government during the 19^th century was more openly corrupt than in the twentieth century.

The 20^th century began with the U.S. consolidating its theft of the last shreds of Spain’s colonial lands, which began with robber baron William Randolph Hearst whipping up the American people to invade Cuba, to “free them” from Spain (under the false pretense that Cuba sank an American warship in Havana Harbor). The lie of the U.S.’ “noble intentions” was immediately laid bare when it also seized the Philippines, and then engaged in a genocidal attack against the Filipinos when they tried becoming independent of the new imperial overlords. To the Filipinos, it mattered little if the overlords were Spanish, American or Japanese. While the U.S. was still digesting its land grabs from Spain, it engaged in its first experiment in neocolonialism, with the outright theft and fabrication of Panama, separating it from Colombia, and then the U.S. immediately split it with the Panama Canal Zone. The United States invaded Latin America at will after the creation of Panama.

Panama was a free nation in name only. Wall Street lawyer William Nelson Cromwell ran the “free Panama” operation. He was a founder of the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm. In the Panama operation, Cromwell ran a syndicate largely bankrolled by J.P. Morgan, and the American taxpayer was ultimately swindled by their subterfuge, in the biggest single payment the American government had ever made, up to that time. John Foster Dulles inherited Cromwell’s empire. Dulles became Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, and his brother Allen ran the CIA. Both men were partners in Sullivan and Cromwell. Allen and John Foster were particularly fond of Nazi Germany, heavily investing in it during the 1930s. After World War II ended, Allen quickly “rehabilitated” Hitler’s biggest cheerleaders in German banking and industry, and put them right back into the positions they enjoyed while supporting Hitler’s regime.

John Foster Dulles’ behaviors while serving as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State added a new word to the dictionary: brinksmanship. Dulles’ notion of diplomacy with the Soviet Union was threatening it with nuclear attack. The Cromwell-Dulles empire was quite active in Latin America. One of Sullivan and Cromwell’s clients was the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit, which “owned” Guatemala. In 1951, Jacobo Arbenz became Guatemala’s president, and he nationalized some of United Fruit’s unused land, with a plan to compensate them for it. Arbenz was a fan of Franking Roosevelt, and tried building a New Deal-style economy in Guatemala. Citing the “international communist conspiracy” fantasy, the Dulles brothers engineered the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954, and the Guatemalan people were treated to a string of brutal U.S.-puppet-dictators for more than the next thirty years, which took hundreds of thousands of lives, while the entire nation (except for the ruling class) lived in misery. The year before overthrowing the Guatemalan government, the Dulles brothers reacted to Iran’s attempt to nationalize Britain’s oil monopoly by overthrowing the Iranian government. The U.S. began taking over Middle East oil on behalf of the American oil companies, which “coincidentally” also served Rockefeller interests. The Shah’s reign was one of the bloodier chapters in modern Middle East history.

The 1950s also saw the U.S. invasion of Korea, and millions were killed. Those were also the years of the McCarthy witch hunts and the marketing of industrial waste to Americans as “medicine.” So, corruption was far from unknown, especially during that era, and far right, anti-communist hysteria was imbedded in America’s psyche as deeply as any catechism ever was. People such as Ralph McGehee eventually realized what a Big Lie the anti-communist ideology was. It was a smokescreen designed to disguise and protect imperial/corporate prerogatives.

When Castro’s boys finally overthrew a U.S. puppet in Latin America in 1959, the super-hawks in the Eisenhower administration could barely contain themselves. As with most who have been called “communist,” Castro was originally simply an anti-imperialist, and Cuba has long had Latin America’s highest standard of living, ever since the Cuban Revolution (there are no homeless in Cuba, something the U.S. could learn from). The thought that other Latin American nations might follow Cuba’s example and break free of American domination was intolerable, and in the 1960s and 1970s the U.S. overthrew more than a dozen elected Latin Americas governments and installed U.S.-backed dictatorships, some of which were among the 20^th century’s bloodiest regimes.[10] The official reason why America has named Cuba a pariah nation, and led economic warfare against it for more than forty years, is because of its “human rights” violations. The American-puppet governments in Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s make Castro’s Cuba appear saintly on the human rights issue. The same goes for today’s Colombia (earth’s most violent nation), as the Colombian government receives vast sums of arms from the U.S., to “fight terror.” The rationale used to be to fight “communists,” and then “drug dealers” after the Soviet Union collapsed, and now we are fighting “terror” in Colombia. What will the next rationale be? The same peasants are being killed, and the same oil companies are rubbing their hands at the prospects of exploiting the region.

Eisenhower was rather incensed that the Cuban Revolution came during his watch, and asked his military leaders to “think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable” to justify invading Cuba. Eisenhower even harbored those ideas as a lame duck president, soon before JFK’s inauguration.[11] Shortly before Eisenhower left office, he appointed a hawk among hawks, General Lyman Lemnitzer, to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Lemnitzer thoroughly distrusted civilian politicians, and felt that the military should run the American government. Ironically, Lemnitzer’s kind may be just what Eisenhower was warning against when he ominously spoke of the growing power of the “military-industrial complex,” three days before he left office.

The antagonism between the military and CIA goes back to World War II, when Wild Bill Donovan and other Wall Street lawyers and executives founded and ran the Office of Strategic Services (OSS - the direct forerunner of the CIA), and they prevailed in the battle over who ran the U.S. intelligence scene, and quickly hired Nazis to staff the CIA after World War II was over.

JFK came to office as the CIA was about to mount an invasion of Cuba. Lemnitzer knew it would be a disaster, but remained silent. The Bay of Pigs debacle cost Allen Dulles his job, but did nothing to cool the hawks’ ardor. While E. Howard Hunt, who planned the Bay of Pigs operation (and would later plan the Watergate break-in), was devising plans to assassinate Castro, with plans seemingly out of Maxwell Smart’s spy manual, General Lemnitzer and friends devised plans to justify invading Cuba, and Operation Northwoods was conceived. Although some caution is warranted regarding the authenticity of the Northwoods documents, they are in step with the times, and what the Joint Chiefs of Staff were thinking in those days. Not even the establishment-defending mainstream media is disputing the documents’ authenticity. Only some of the far right fringe is disputing them, to my knowledge, and they have yet to make a persuasive case. The documents appear genuine, and only came to light when Oliver Stone’s film JFK inspired the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which was formed in 1994.

An ARRB member allegedly tipped off Bamford as to the documents’ existence, and they might be the only documents like them to survive Lemnitzer’s document-destroying fervor. What kinds of plans are in the Northwoods documents? An early idea was to stage a fake attack on the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. The Northwoods ideas became increasingly extreme, and one plan was blowing up the rocket that John Glenn was about to fly in, and pin it on Cuba somehow. They planned plane hijackings and bombings of American cities. One plan that has received attention from the 9/11 conspiracy theorists was to stage an incident over Cuba with a drone plane made to look like an airliner. The plane would self-destruct over Cuba, to make it appear as if the Cubans shot it down. Lemnitzer reported to John McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defense. Lemnitzer increasingly fell from grace in the JFK administration, and a few days after Lemnitzer tried broaching his grand plan to McNamara, JFK told Lemnitzer that there was no chance of the U.S. ever using direct military force against Cuba. That was in 1962, and Lemnitzer soon lost his job as the JCS chairman, but Bamford wrote, “Even after Lemnitzer lost his job, the Joint Chiefs kept planning ‘pretext’ operations at least into 1963.”[12]

Having the military and government cooking up plans, no matter how insane, bloody or evil they might seem, does not mean they were ever approved or implemented. When McNamara was confronted with the Northwoods revelations, he denied that Lemnitzer ever showed him the plan, which may have been true. JFK’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen also denied such a plan, saying that it would have been “illegal” and “unwise.” Being illegal and unwise has rarely stopped the U.S. government from doing anything, particularly during the current “War on Terror” and impending invasion of Iraq. Before the Soviet Union set off its first nuclear bomb, the U.S. military had a plan for dropping dozens of atomic bombs on the Soviet Union, and then using the U.S.’ Nazi-allies to finish the job. Cooler heads prevailed, thankfully. Similarly, after the U.S. dropped atom bombs on Japan, there were still die-hard Japanese generals who did not want to surrender. The man who designed the kamikaze attack strategy proposed a post-Hiroshima plan to sacrifice about twenty million Japanese citizens in a special kamikaze attack. Once again, sanity prevailed. It is not imprudent to believe that the Northwoods documents are genuine, and that Lemnitzer and friends seriously pondered them.

Whether the Northwoods plan was ever implemented, or capable of implementation, is not the point of this essay. The point is that the Northwoods plan was eerily similar to the tale that Gary Wean reported. The plan that John Tower spoke of seems to have been a CIA parallel to the JCS plan, or perhaps its offspring. The plans are so similar in aims and means, that to not take Gary’s testimony seriously is to ignore the evidence. Not only are the plans remarkably similar, with one targeting the America public for “terror,” and the other targeting the head of state, but it is widely recognized that the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 was either exaggerated or fabricated by the U.S. government, in the spirit of the Northwoods plan, something that was not lost on Bamford in his latest book. I know somebody who worked for the U.S. Navy in 1964, and he told me that some of his work was used by the Navy to fabricate the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The Gulf of Tonkin incident initiated the devastation of Southeast Asia, which killed several million people, and the U.S. government’s motives were obviously fraudulent.

Fabricating incidents to justify invasion is a very old game. The United States initiated/fabricated a border incident to justify the huge land grab known as the Mexican-American War. Hitler probably had his boys burn the Reichstag to “justify” his police state, and Hitler’s lads dressed up concentration camp inmates in Polish uniforms to fabricate a border incident to justify invading Poland, which began World War II. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was certainly no “surprise” to the American military brass, and there is substantial evidence that the American men in Pearl Harbor were sacrificed to lure the isolationist American people into World War II. Michael Ruppert and others have presented compelling evidence that the World Trade Center attacks had prior knowledge by many people, and may have been “allowed to happen,” with foreknowledge perhaps extending to the White House. In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski openly bragged about the U.S. arming and inciting the Afghani “rebels” as a way to lure the Soviet Union into Afghanistan and its “Vietnam.” Brzezinski’s little plan killed and/or devastated many millions of people, as he played his global chess game. Thinking that Hunt’s alleged plan is “too far out” is to be ignorant of history, and/or falling prey to the myth of American exceptionalism, as every nationalist ideology encourages.[13]

Gary wrote most of his book during the early 1970s, as he was trying to survive what the gangsters who ran Ventura County were dishing out, and his wife typed it up. He first published his book in 1987. Gary’s book is more like a diary than anything else, and is certainly not a work of scholarship. Because I know Gary a little, and he and I lived in the same milieu for awhile (bearing the brunt of evil dished out by the same people), and I got to see his integrity and helpfulness in action, I have always believed what he reports as his experiences. Not only did I have experiences like his, I have since come into contact with a man who was a policeman in Ventura when Gary was working there, and he has vouched for some events that Gary described, as he saw them too. Gary’s theories, particularly about the Jewish mob and Jewish people, I have considerable skepticism about. True skepticism, however, means pursuing the truth, not dismissing something out of hand, with a priori reasoning, as the “skeptical” crowd has a penchant for. People who survive Gary’s kind of experiences are not going to publish a book like his in the hopes that it makes a lot of money, or deceives the public, but to tell a story that needs to be told. In that regard, Gary is like Ralph McGehee, Rodney Stich and Dennis Lee, and he will always have my greatest respect for his courage and willingness to face the dark underbelly of our vaunted system, and try to do something about it. There are not many like Gary, whatever extremes of theorizing his arduous journey may have led him to engage in.

Even if Gary’s timing of the Tower conversation is discounted (three weeks after the assassination), or when Gary wrote about it (about ten years later), many details of the Tower conversation did not come into public awareness until after Gary first published his book in 1987. The Northwoods documents and the plans for framing Cuba have not come into public awareness until relatively recently. The revelations of what really happened between the U.S. and Cuba during the 1960s did not start becoming public knowledge until the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and documents began coming forward from the former Soviet Union. Ironically, researchers have often encountered more document availability in the former Soviet Union than they have in the United States. Some revelations have been chilling, such as the fact that during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when JFK administration hawks wanted to invade Cuba, there were already numerous nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, aimed at the U.S. and ready to go. The Soviet commander in charge of the Cuban nukes admitted that if the United States had invaded Cuba, he would have fired the nukes. It is the closest the world has ever come to a nuclear holocaust, and it was only JFK’s overriding his hawks that kept (a very short lived) World War III from happening. In light of those revelations, a plan to frame Castro to justify invading Cuba is right out of Dr. Strangelove.

A significant possible connection between Lemnitzer’s plan and Tower’s tale is General Edwin Walker. Walker was Lemnitzer’s soul brother, Walker being a John Birch Society member, as well as a KKK member. Walker helped initiate a “race riot” in Little Rock in 1961, and handed out John Birch material to his troops. Walker’s antics cost him his career, and a pre-JFK-assassination Senate investigation into Walker suspected that Lemnitzer was connected to Walker’s efforts. Oswald’s “assassination attempt” on Walker sure raises more suspicion than it did before the Northwoods documents surfaced, particularly in light of Gary’s tale. To top it off, they supposedly let Oswald keep the rifle he “shot at” Walker with, so he could “kill” JFK with it. That is one of many astounding irregularities in Oswald’s tale, vis-à-vis law enforcement.

The framing Cuba angle was certainly not in public awareness in 1963 or 1987, and I believe that only with the Northwoods documents, which did not come to American public awareness until 2001, that the framing Cuba angle has become publicly known as government policy. For cautious researchers, it would be most prudent to compare Gary’s book versus what was publicly known in 1987. There is plenty of JFK-associated evidence that has come to light since 1987, which further confirms Gary’s tale, but it will be up to other researchers, not me, to nail down what all those pieces might be. I want to paint a possible picture that accounts for Gary’s reporting, and I have little doubt that the bulk of his reporting of the John Tower conversation is straight as Gary can tell it, with perhaps some minor shading of it, unconsciously, by events that happened after the Tower conversation, and before Gary wrote about it.

If Gary’s tale is true, many people around the “fake assassination” project were unaware that it would turn into a real assassination, especially Lee Harvey Oswald. Up until 11/22/63, America was in denial about a lot of things, and the naïveté of Americans back then was fairly astonishing, with about 85% of Americans having “great faith” in America’s institutions (governments, corporations, churches, etc.), a number that is only about 15% today (or even lower, in these “War on Terror,” priest-pedophilia, Enron days). However, many lived lives of quiet desperation, with American housewives being the biggest customer class of Valium when it was introduced in the 1950s, to keep them doped up so they could try acting the part of June Cleaver; getting the newspaper, dinner, slippers and pipe ready for her husband, as he returned home from the office or factory.

Until the bullets hit JFK, Oswald, Hunt, Tower and quite a few others were probably being played as chumps by whoever pulled off the JFK hit. The fabrication of Oswald’s trail to Cuba, his “commie” credentials and the like were probably not done as carefully as they would be today. That is because the American public was so trusting, they would swallow anything that officialdom told them. Whether that was in fact true, it is reasonable to think that Hunt and friends operated under that assumption. In Hunt’s designs, the trail to Cuba would not be subject to much public scrutiny, and would only be needed until the Cuban invasion and Castro overthrow was complete.

Oswald was seen in the book depository lunchroom soon after JFK’s shooting, and the Warren Commission had to construct an involved scenario to explain Oswald’s alleged movements. The evidence tends to support the idea that Oswald sat in the lunchroom the entire time period surrounding the assassination.[14] If the mission was interposed, Oswald would have certainly not have been in the “sniper’s nest” as a real assassination was being carried out. The likeliest series of events was that Oswald was told to go to the lunchroom and await further orders, or perhaps wait for a phone call. It is hard to say when Oswald realized that he had been set up, but it was probably less than a minute after JFK was shot. The “fake” plan would have called for Oswald to leave the building anyway, as even a fake hit would have brought plenty of attention onto the book depository. Because of the Magic Bullet’s wildly improbable tale, I think it likely that people on the real assassination team set up the “sniper’s nest.”[15]

If Hunt’s operation was infiltrated, it is hard to know just who was on the “inside” and who was not. Even on Oswald’s “team,” it is hard to know who was really on the inside in Dallas, and who was among Hunt’s chumps. The story generally agreed upon is that Oswald left the book depository before police sealed the building, and walked seven blocks to catch a bus. He soon left the bus and took a cab.[16] Depending on what testimony and evidence is believed, Oswald entered the movie theater before policeman J.D. Tippit was murdered, or soon afterward. If Oswald was the intelligence operative Tower said he was, he may have had a “double,” and the double may have been in town as part of the real hit team. Whatever the real events were, according to Tower’s tale, Oswald realized that he was set up, and was doing his best to stay out of jail, and alive. He always referred to himself as a patsy, which is not the stance one would expect for an assassin.

If Tower’s tale is true, Oswald’s trail to Cuba may have been fabricated, perhaps including his trip to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. The photographic record in his military and CIA files may well be fabricated or altered. If Tower’s tale is true, there is little information that came from the FBI or CIA that can be relied upon, which includes nearly all the evidence that the Warren Commission considered, because the “investigators” for the Warren Commission were the FBI and CIA. The Warren Commission accepted at face value the CIA and FBI-produced evidence, with Allen Dulles on the commission (probably a case of the fox watching over the hens).

When Gary said that Tower spoke of Hunt inventing the “exploding cigar” tactic to assassinate Castro, it could have been a slight mis-remembrance by Gary, or Tower had it slightly wrong (those events did not become public until after the Watergate Scandal and the Church Committee began looking into the CIA’s adventures, which was after Gary first drafted his book), as Hunt tried poisoning Castro’s cigar, not make an exploding one.[17] That is a minor quibble with Gary’s work. However, the big picture of Gary’s story - that Oswald was an intelligence agent working for Hunt, to stage a fake assassination attempt to frame Castro - has a rich correspondence with several lines of evidence. Gary’s story fits startlingly with the main lines of evidence and speculation that has cropped up about Oswald, and there is enough uncertainty regarding various details that I have seen no credible avenue of evidence and theory regarding a conspiracy that Gary’s testimony may not fit with. With the Northwoods revelations, the JFK assassination community can no longer easily dismiss/ignore Gary’s testimony, as it has been doing for the past fifteen years. Joseph Milteer’s prediction of the JFK hit has been taken seriously by most JFK researchers, even though he was a right wing, KKK-type of guy. Gary was a policeman and investigator, with a solid career going until he ran afoul of the gangsters that run Ventura County. Does him being Audie Murphy’s friend count for anything, as far as his credibility? If nothing else, the Northwoods documents may end up giving Gary’s tale due consideration.

Gary’s experiences with Jack Ruby, Mick Cohen and the Jewish mob angle also need to be considered, as Ruby assassinated Oswald, and Gary was there in that milieu, even chatting with Ruby in 1947 about the mob’s plans for New Orleans and Cuba.[18]

In 2006, I encountered two Internet forums that were earnestly discussing Gary's encounter with John Tower and Audie Murphy. They were about the first worthy discussions that I had seen of that issue, and I discovered that Gary passed away in 2004. I had rewarding exchanges with one forum, and had some exchanges with an impressive investigator. The investigator told me that he does not know of any piece of credible evidence that contradicts Gary's story, and knows of no reason why his tale would not be true.

There are numerous lines of JFK evidence to pursue, an undertaking that could take the rest of a person’s life. This essay will deal with just one aspect of the JFK assassination evidence in detail, and people can make up their own minds regarding the truth of the issue, and see if it is worth pursuing further.

The Backyard Photos

On the day of JFK's assassination, after Oswald was arrested, the police searched the home where his estranged wife lived. Oswald was accused of murdering the head of state of the world’s most powerful nation, and the investigation was underway. It is difficult to imagine a murder investigation that would have been carried out with more zeal and thoroughness than that one. The Dallas police descended on Ruth Paine’s house on November 22^nd, where Oswald's wife Marina lived, and where Oswald stayed the night before. Ms. Paine let the police come in and search, even though they did not have a search warrant. Oswald's possessions were largely stored in Ms. Paine's garage, which was attached to the house. The police thoroughly searched the premises that day. It is difficult to imagine any significant items of Oswald’s left in that house or garage after they searched it. That place should have been stripped to the walls, and indeed the police seized many items that day.

After the Dallas police thoroughly searched the place the day of the assassination, another search "discovered" two photographs the next day. In the photos, Oswald is shown holding the rifle and radical newspapers. In the two inventories the police made of Oswald's possessions, those photos are not mentioned. Also, detective Gus Rose, the man who discovered the photos, testified that he found two negatives. Only one has ever been produced (a vast amount of evidence disappeared during the JFK investigation, the second negative just one piece of many[19]). To add more intrigue to the photos’ discovery, assassination researcher Jim Marrs talked with Robert Hester, a photo technician who assisted the FBI and police in the assassination’s wake. Hester said he saw the FBI in possession of a color transparency of the backyard photo the day before the Dallas police “discovered” it. Unfortunately, with Hester since passing on, it is only hearsay by Marrs at this time, and always will be, although Marrs says Hester's wife also confirmed the story.[20]

Oswald was shown those photos the day after the assassination, when they were "discovered." What did Oswald say about the photos? He said they were not photographs of him, but photos of somebody else with his head pasted on, and that he had never seen the photos before. Oswald said that he would be able to prove that those pictures were fakes. All Oswald was able to prove was his mortality, as Jack Ruby gunned him down the next day. With Oswald dead and unable to defend himself, the wheels of the government and media turned, and Oswald was eventually pronounced the lone assassin of JFK.

During the Warren Commission investigation those photographs became known as exhibits 133-A and 133-B.

Life put 133-A on its cover in 1964. The negative to 133-A has never been produced. Only the negative to 133-B has been found. If that ended the tale of "discovering" the photographs, it would be enigmatic enough, but the plot gets thicker.

In 1967, George de Mohrenschildt discovered another version of 133-A in his possessions after he moved back to America from Haiti. De Mohrenschildt did not know where the photograph came from, and suspected it was planted there to further frame Oswald. The strange thing about de Mohrenschildt's photo is that it is a clearer picture than the original 133-A, and views area outside the frame of the original 133-A. There is wide-ranging speculation about that situation. How did de Mohrenschildt come to possess a higher quality photo than the original, and how was it developed? Those questions bring up issues of authenticity not easily answered.

To further add to the controversy, another backyard photograph was discovered in 1976 in the possession of the widow of Dallas policeman Roscoe White. That photograph is now known as 133-C. One speculation is that White pocketed the photograph when the other two were found in Ms. Paine's garage. If that is the case, he did not keep the photograph to himself. The position of Oswald in 133-C is markedly different from 133-A or 133-B. In 133-C, Oswald is holding the newspapers up in the air with his right hand, and the rifle in the air with his left. Neither 133-A nor 133-B depict that posture. In 1964, as police were recreating the backyard photos scenario, photos were taken using the same posture as in 133-C.

The Dallas police department obviously knew about 133-C in 1964. The very origin of the photos is in question. What about the camera that took them? The camera allegedly used to take the photographs was an Imperial Reflex camera. How was that camera found? On the day of the assassination, when the photos were not yet “discovered,” the police seized plenty of photographic equipment. The Dallas police discovered a miniature Minox camera, the kind that spies used. It is about the size of a large cigarette lighter. Oswald the starving commie certainly could not afford one of those. Even stranger was the serial number the Dallas police recorded off of that camera: serial # 27,259. Years later, Minox reported that the serial numbers of their cameras sold during 1963 were above 135,000. Oswald apparently had some vintage spy equipment. The FBI tried to get the Dallas police to restate their original report to record seizing a Minox light meter, not a camera. The Dallas police refused to reclassify the camera, and it disappeared during the FBI investigation. The FBI later listed it as a light meter. Gerald Posner claims to have solved that mystery. He says he interviewed Ruth Paine's husband Michael, who said it was his camera, one he had since the 1950's.[21]

That spy camera makes the mystery of the Imperial Reflex camera even more puzzling. Michael Paine did classified work for Bell Helicopter, which might explain his "spy" camera. It might be innocent, but it is one more odd connection with the intelligence community, where a woman married to a man who did classified work for the government took in Marina Oswald. Marina and Ms. Paine met because of Ms. Paine's avid interest in the Russian language, or so it is said. The FBI seized a number of cameras, and the Imperial Reflex camera was not taken in the first search, nor the second, nor even a later one by the FBI, when they came to cart off the rest of Oswald's possessions. The police even seized a camera that supposedly was not Oswald's, but it was up to Oswald's brother Robert to stumble upon that Imperial Reflex camera on December 8^th, 1963, in that magical garage that kept spewing out evidence not discovered in earlier searches.

That Imperial Reflex camera officially became the one that took the infamous photographs. When Marina Oswald was first asked about the photographs, she claimed that she had never taken any. Later she would testify that she remembered one photograph being taken. Later her testimony was amended to say she had taken two photographs, in light of the fact that two photographs were introduced into evidence. Today she says she took all three photographs now known to exist. She may eventually remember more, because the original FBI inventory lists four of them. There was supposedly a photo of Oswald holding the rifle over his head, which his mother found and destroyed.

When asked when she took them, Marina originally said it was in the winter of 1963, nearly a year before the assassination. However, the scene depicted in those photographs shows a yard in bloom. Also, the newspapers Oswald held up were not published until the spring. After more prodding of Marina and investigation by the Warren Commission, it has been determined that the likeliest date for the photographs to have been taken was March 31^st, 1963. That date corresponds to shortly after Oswald mail-ordered the rifle, pistol and papers he displays in those photos. It also corresponds to the timing of Oswald's “assassination attempt” on General Walker on April 10th. Soon after the Walker incident, de Mohrenschildt met Oswald one last time, and they never met again. There is an inscription on the back of the de Mohrenschildt photo in Russian that says, "Hunter of Fascists, Ha! Ha! Ha!" The handwriting has never been conclusively traced to either the Oswalds or the de Mohrenschildts, especially Oswald, because the date written on the photo, April 5^th, 1963, is written in European-style (5/IV/63), which Oswald never did, as far as can be determined.

There are a few problems with the alleged photo date of March 31. March 31 may have been too early in the year for the plants and trees in the photos to be in bloom. That situation might be explained away, although I know of nobody who has. What is more problematic about the March 31 date is that the photographs were taken in bright sunshine, but the weather records for Dallas on that date show that it was cloudy with traces of rain all day. There are a couple more oddities to consider before getting to the actual photo analysis. One is that when the FBI finally received custody of the Imperial Reflex camera in February of 1964, it did not work, and when it was first shown to Marina, she was unable to identify it as belonging to her husband, even though she supposedly used it. The other is that the Oswald in the photos is wearing a black shirt, black pants, and a distinctive wristwatch. After the assassination, the investigators could not find in Oswald's possessions the black shirt, black pants, or the wristwatch, and nobody ever remembered Oswald wearing that wristwatch. Maybe they should have looked in the garage!

While performing the research for producing this web site, I had to delve into many controversial areas. The only way to resolve the issues to my satisfaction was to try ignoring what all sides had to say, and evaluate the primary evidence for myself, and try to become my own expert. For a “one-man-show,” such a task is nearly impossible, so I have often relied on secondary evidence, but I also looked at the broad spectrum of secondary evidence (while correlating primary to secondary evidence when I could, to get a feeling for how reliable certain secondary evidence might be), and tried digesting all the available evidence into something coherent. The JFK issue was no exception.

Jack White deserves credit for his analysis of the backyard photos. White began his investigation with some expertise in photography, and devoted years to analyzing the backyard photos. The reason he did so was two-fold. The main one was that Oswald himself said the backyard photos were faked, with his head pasted onto somebody else’s body. The other was that White asked for and was given advice on how to pursue the JFK evidence, and was told to become expert on just one piece of it, and focus his attention there. White did so, and a fair bit of the evidence produced in this essay relied in some measure on what he discovered. White deserves credit for the work he performed. However, White’s analysis of the backyard photographs is not wholly reliable, because of his limitations as a photographic expert. Specifically, he has no training or expertise in the field of photogrammetrics, and all of his photogrammetric analysis is suspect.

For weeks I watched White post his analyses of Apollo lunar photographs to a JFK forum, to make the case that the moon landings were faked. None of his photo analysis stood up to the slightest scrutiny. To be fair, I have never seen any photo analysis of “faked” Apollo footage that has ever stood up to scrutiny, as far is it proving that the moon landings were faked, and White proved himself badly out of his element in analyzing the Apollo images. Recently, White tried proving that the Zapruder film was faked, and one of his central analyses, which David Mantik wrote produced “robust” data, has failed to impress upon scrutiny.[22]

So, White’s work has its limitations. Proving his photographic analyses wanting, however, does not prove the case that the backyard photographs are genuine. Albert Einstein said that he had little respect for somebody who looked for the weakest spot of a board, and repeatedly drilled holes through it. White’s “photogrammetric” analyses are the weakest parts of his work, and should be taken as such. White’s critics have rarely strayed beyond his lack of photogrammetric expertise in critiquing his work. Even amateurs can stumble forward, as I did when discovering Neil Armstrong’s leap back to the Apollo 11 LM. When a musician felt that he found evidence that disproved the acoustic evidence of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which was the linchpin in its “conspiracy” finding, the “lone gunman” theorists fell over themselves congratulating him on his find. Amateurs have made many of science’s breakthroughs.

Evidence can theoretically stand on its own, no matter who produces it. That is the ideal of the scientific method. The following analysis will focus on the evidence that most strongly argues for fakery in the backyard photos, and will also demonstrate that whatever White’s limitations are, the official investigators for the U.S. government performed incredibly flawed, if not intentionally flawed, analysis, which brings up the suspicion of conscious fraud.

After looking long and hard at the evidence, I think that the most impressive evidence, as far as photographic fakery in the backyard photos is concerned, exists in four areas:

The anomaly of Oswald’s chin;
The nearly identical position of the camera in the photos;
The shadow anomalies;
The anomalies relating to Oswald’s arms and hands, and the rifle and leftist newspapers he is holding, including some shadow anomalies;

Jack White adduced other evidence, such as Oswald’s strange posture in 133-A and evidence of retouching. While the other evidence may provide supporting evidence of fakery, the lines of evidence listed above seem the most impressive, and are also areas where the official explanations sometimes dealt with the evidence in an unsatisfactory manner.

In 1994, Michael T. Griffith, one of the most prominent independent JFK investigators, spent three hours interviewing photographic expert Brian Mee, while examining the evidence. Griffith consulted several other specialists in the field, and their judgments concurred with Mee’s and have influenced this essay. Mee had expertise in exactly the areas that concern the evidence discussed below.

Before beginning this analysis, I will present my opinion of how the photos were probably faked, if they were faked. They were probably faked just as Oswald said, by pasting his head onto somebody else’s body. Also, there are enough strange anomalies with his hands, arms, and the rifle and newspaper he holds, that they may indeed be “special” effects that were also pasted into the picture (or altered), to further incriminate Oswald. The photos in evidence are probably at least one generation removed from the original composite photos, with each succeeding generation having degraded clarity, as with any analog copying process.

A legitimate question, in light of Gary Wean’s tale and the notion that they were trying to fabricate Oswald’s violent reputation, is this: why would they feel the need to falsify the backyard photographs, especially when Oswald was playing along with the game? I have long pondered that question, and I am not sure what the answer might be. Claiming that the backyard photos are genuine would eliminate that seeming contradiction, but for Oswald to call them fakes, and promise that he would be able to prove that they were, is significant. Also, there are so many inconsistencies in how the photographs made their way into the evidence, and conflicting evidence surrounding the photos themselves (such as 03/31/63 being a cloudy day, or how none of them were “discovered” when they should have been, with the 133-C photo’s travels casting grave doubts on the Dallas PD’s investigative effort), that their authenticity must be seriously questioned. It is quite possible that the rifle Oswald ordered is not the one found in the book depository, and may not even be the one in the photographs. Perhaps Oswald had seen the forged photographs months earlier, and knew they had been forged for some reason. There are suspicions that there was an Oswald double, and his trail to Mexico City and Cuba may have been forged. The backyard photos may have been part of an entire body of evidence that was being used to fabricate Oswald’s “violent” tendencies and communist sympathies. There are many scenarios that could have played out, when Hunt’s little plot and the plot-within-a-plot are considered. I acknowledge that faking the backyard photographs can seem initially inconsistent with fabricating Oswald’s violent image, but only those who know the whole story know for sure, if anybody does, and any of them are still alive.

If Oswald’s head was pasted on somebody else’s body, it is legitimate to search for where that might be, and the area that leaps out to even casual observers is Oswald’s chin. There are several pieces of impressive evidence relating to his chin and photographic fakery. The two most impressive pieces of evidence are the shape of his chin and a line that crosses it, from one edge of his neck to the other, looking exactly like a crop line, exactly where one might be expected.

If Gary Wean’s tale is in any way true, nothing in the federal government’s files about Oswald is above suspicion, and with the “double” speculations about him, the photographic evidence of Oswald’s younger days must be viewed with suspicion. In Jack White’s second video about the backyard photographs, he presents several photos of Oswald from the government-produced evidence, and made the case that several photos appear to be composites. I have not seen anybody effectively dispute White’s analysis in that matter. What I doubt can be effectively disputed, however, are the mug shots of the man who was captured the day of the assassination, and who died in police custody. Below are comparisons of Oswald’s chin from his mug shots, compared with backyard photo 133-A, and also a man with a square chin is on the right hand side of the below image.

Oswald transformed from a square-chinned guy in the backyard photos, to a pointy-chinned guy. How? The man with the square chin on the right is Roscoe White, who supposedly stole the 133-C picture. The square chin was a point of contention in the HSCA hearings, with HSCA expert Calvin McCamy trying to convince the HSCA panel that Oswald’s chin was square in earlier photographs. Congressman Fithian was unimpressed with McCamy’s attempts to give Oswald a square chin, and said,

“I did not visually at least identify any other chin that was even approximately as square as the one in the backyard photograph, from all of the pictures that you put up."

McCamy told the HSCA panel that Oswald’s square chin was an illusion, and that a trick of the light, as it was coming almost directly from above, hid his pointy chin. He was not able to provide even one photo of Oswald to persuasively support his point.

McCamy’s performance on the square chin issue was dubious. What was convincing, however, was the HSCA experts’ “Penrose” study, although it was not convincing in the way it should have been. The Penrose study compared several photos of Oswald to the backyard photographs, to determine if the man in the backyard was indeed Oswald. The Penrose method measured and compared the dimensions of Oswald’s face to various alleged photographs of him. The Penrose study concluded that the backyard photographs were genuine depictions of Oswald. The data presented for the Penrose study tells the full tale. For three critical parts of Oswald’s head in the backyard photos, the committee omitted the data. Most importantly, they omitted the data regarding Oswald’s chin. That is extremely suspicious, as the chin was the primary area of contention. At best, such “editing” of the data invalidates the Penrose study. At worst, it brings up the suspicion of fraud. I have not seen anybody even provide a lame excuse.

Lying by omission is by far the most common method of lying. I am a professional in the creation, manipulation and presentation of numerical data. The HSCA experts appeared to have eliminated the data that did not conform to their foregone conclusion. In science, such a method is known as “rigging the data.” In the world of accounting, it is known as fraud (as with Enron and friends). Of all the many criticisms I have seen of Jack White’s work over the years, by all manner of conspiracy debunkers, I have never seen one “lone gunman” theorist deal with that issue, where the HSCA did something that seemed fraudulent.

Also in the images above, note the difference between where the neck, head and bottom of the right ear meet. The man in the backyard apparently had a larger neck than the man who died in Dallas PD custody (as did Roscoe White).

In 133-A, a line can be seen exactly where a forger might have pasted Oswald’s face onto somebody else’s body. The below image shows approximately where the line is.

How did McCamy explain the apparent crop line? He said that it was a water spot. Michael Griffith has yet to meet a photographic expert who has seen a water spot run in a straight line. Spots are just that; spots. They are circular in nature. Mee said during the Griffith interview,

“One thing is the sheer coincidence that this line just happens to fall in the chin area; that this one edge of this one particular water spot is supposed to have left deposits in such a way as to form a line that coincidentally starts at one side of the neck, crosses the chin, and then ends at the other side - right where Oswald's head could have been attached to the body. I mean, this would be a good place to join a head to a body in a composite, in the chin area, and here we have a line in that region, and it's supposed to be a water spot.”

What are the odds that perhaps the only water spot that ever ran in a straight line happened to occur right where one would expect a crop line that forged a chin (that was obviously not Oswald’s) onto his face? How far do we want to stretch coincidence?

The other anomaly that is extremely difficult to explain away, and Jack White is probably on the right track with his work, is that the backyard photos were all taken with the camera in virtually the same position. Marina Oswald was one of history’s most fickle witnesses. The way she was repeatedly prodded to give the Warren Commission testimony about the backyard photos, and had to keep amending it, as more photos cropped up as evidence or other evidence contradicted it, does not inspire much confidence in her rendition of the facts. The Warren Commission and others probably manipulated her. Many years after the assassination, she publicly stated that she believed her husband had been framed. However, Marina had virtually no experience with taking pictures, and when she described how she took the backyard photos, it is reasonable to accept her account. According to Marina, Lee Harvey brought her into their backyard, and had her take the pictures. He advanced the film and had her take a picture. Then he walked over, took the camera from her, advanced the film and handed her the camera back. Then she took another picture, until all four photos had been taken.

The background in the backyard photos is virtually unchanged from image to image. In order for that to be the case, Marina Oswald probably could not have even moved her feet, or changed where she held the camera. It is a highly unlikely scenario, given how Marina said the photo session was performed. The HSCA experts said there were minor differences in the camera’s perspective, which could account for the camera moving between pictures. However, the apparent differences in perspective were so small that the may well have been done on a tripod. Jack White performed experiments with “keystoning,” where the photo was slightly tilted and then photographed, which appeared to cause the slight variations. White says he was able to exactly align the backgrounds by that technique. I would not accept White’s findings until I saw them independently reproduced, but Mee said the concept can easily explain the slight variances, particularly if they are the result of multigenerational copying. In copying 133-A from one generation to another, the slightest change in the planar alignment of the copying camera and photo can produce the differences that can be seen in the backgrounds between 133-A, B and C. I would like to see some quality independent analysis of such a theory before completely endorsing it, but at this time, I have to lean toward the tripod method of taking the images, with slight differences in the backgrounds due to slight planar and lateral differences in making the multigenerational copies.

By examining the 133-A and 133-B photographs above, it is evident that in 133-A Oswald’s head is virtually perpendicular to the ground. In 133-B, Oswald’s head is significantly tilted to his left. In both images, the shadow below his nose falls almost exactly at the midpoint of his upper lips (see the chin close-up above to see where that shadow hits his lips). Because of the tilt of his head in 133-B, the nose shadow should not have hit his lip in the same place. McCamy produced photographs of a mannequin at the HSCA hearings to explain this discrepancy. He provided a novel explanation, where the head twisted and tilted, to keep the shadow hitting the same spot on his lip. The HSCA panel was skeptical of McCamy’s explanation, and when the mannequin achieved the posture where the shadow hit the same part of the lip, it was no longer looking at the camera. Once again, McCamy invoked a fortuitous set of improbable circumstances to explain away an anomaly that suggested photographic fakery. Because the mannequin no longer looked into the camera when the desired shadow was achieved, such an analysis cannot be accepted as explaining the anomaly. What appears more likely is that the same head was pasted onto the different pictures, but the forgery was not sophisticated enough to account for different head angles.

One area of evidence deals with photogrammetrics, and Jack White made the case that the shadows on his body did not fall in the same line as the shadows on his face, for further evidence of fakery. The HSCA investigators performed a sophisticated analysis where they drew lines from the places on Oswald’s body that cast the shadow to where the shadow hit the ground. They performed what they called a “vanishing point” analysis, where the lines all converged on the source of light, the sun. The HSCA panel was also a bit skeptical of the vanishing point analysis, as the lines appeared to converge only slight past Oswald’s head, not at the distant sun. I performed my own crude analysis of the shadows on his face and ground, and from what I could see, the facial and body shadows were not very far from being parallel, not far enough for my crude analysis to catch anything impressive. One area of speculation has been the shadow cast by Oswald’s body in 133-A, versus his nose. In that matter, I have to tentatively conclude that the McCamy and friends may be right, or at least the conspiracy investigators have to do their photogrammetric work better. Contrary to Jack White’s analysis, the shadow cast by his nose is not vertical, but slightly tilted to Oswald’s left (think of minute hand of a clock pointing to a minute or two after the hour). When I shined a flashlight on my face from approximately the sun angle in the photos, I was able to reproduce the shadow “anomaly,” where the left side of Oswald’s neck was lit, while the left side of his neck was in shadow. White’s analysis is not convincing on that matter. At this time, I have to lean toward the HSCA’s analysis regarding the shadows running parallel in their vanishing point analysis, while their explanation with the mannequin is more of their strained logic. The independent investigators will have to do a better job of analyzing those face/body shadow variations if they want to present a convincing case.

The apparent falling off to the right of Oswald’s body shadow in 133-A is partly an illusion caused by his bizarre posture. White thinks Oswald is standing to the right of his center of gravity, which should not be possible. However, still photos catch people who are never quite still, and Oswald could have been shifting his weight as the photo was taken, producing the effect. However, his strange stance, where his right leg is strangely bent inward, contributes to the illusion that the shadow cast by his body falls to his right. It does fall to his right, but not nearly as far as it appears, because of the strange position of his right leg. If you draw lines from his shadow on the ground to the parts of his body that cast them (in photo 133-A), they are nearly parallel to the shadow cast by his nose. Not quite, but close enough in my crude analysis to convince me that most of discrepancy, if not all of it, is caused by his strange posture.

All of Jack White’s attempts to impute measured distances onto parts of the picture were dismissed by the HSCA (and all of Jack’s many critics) because of his limitations as a photogrammetric analyst. So, has anybody pursued what Jack attempted, to reproduce the scene and use sophisticated photogrammetric analysis, to determine what the real height of the man in the photos was, or how long his rifle was? If anybody has done it, I have not heard of it.

I think the evidence is persuasive, however, that from the chin up it is Oswald, and from the chin down it is somebody else. Whose chin might that be? Jack White investigated the Roscoe White connection. Roscoe White was on the same ship to Japan as Oswald during their Marine days. They both may have worked for military intelligence. White began at the Dallas Police Department not long before the JFK assassination. A generation after Roscoe White’s death, his son claimed to find his father’s diary, where Roscoe admitted he was one of the Dealey Plaza shooters. Soon after the son publicly announced the existence of his father’s diary, he said his home was burglarized, and the diary taken. The conspiracy debunkers mainly replied with “how convenient,” and have largely dismissed the son’s testimony. However, the 133-C photo had been taken from White’s widow in a robbery (other accounts say that con men obtained them from White’s widow), and was seized by the FBI. That was how it made its way into the evidence.[23] White’s widow worked for Jack Ruby shortly before the JFK assassination.[24]

There are other correspondences between Roscoe White and the figure in the backyard photos. He had a similar posture to the “Oswald” in the backyard photos.

The 133-A De Mohrenschildt photo is difficult to account for. It is a clearer image than the “original” 133-A, and views area outside the frame of the original 133-A. Brian Mee thought this suspicious, as do I. If the photos were forged as Mee thinks they were, the De Mohrenschildt photo perfectly fits the evidence. If the backyard photos are fakes, the likeliest way to do it was to take the original photos with the highest resolution cameras possible, and perform the forgery work. Then the forged images would be photographed at least once more, as removing the images from their original generation would hide much of the evidence of forgery. The photographs will also lose their resolution in successive generations, and become grainier. Also, in successive generations, the image will often get slightly cropped along the way. The lower resolution and the graininess of the backyard photos (as Mee observed), as well as the cropping between the De Mohrenschildt photo and the “original” 133-A, gives compelling evidence that the “original” 133-A is a generation or more after the De Mohrenschildt image. That is not something one would expect that Oswald did, but fits impressively with the notion that the forgers made a slight mistake when planting evidence in De Mohrenschildt’s belongings.

In addition, the notion that the “original” 133-A is a later generation of the forged images makes some of the HSCA testing of dubious validity. The HSCA investigators performed tests such as measuring the depth of the negative and grain analysis, which would have been of questionable validity if they were generations removed from the original, altered photos.

Those are the main lines of evidence I was the most impressed with, as far as giving evidence of forgery, and where I thought the HSCA performed questionable, if not fraudulent, work.

The last area of evidence that I found compelling, but other investigators often have not, is in the area of his hands, arms and the newspapers and rifle he is holding. Those backyard photos about are the only evidence linking Oswald to the murder weapon. A nitrate test on his cheek on the day of the assassination (to determine if he fired the rifle) was negative. There was a belated finding of his palm print on an inside part of the rifle, after it had been dismantled, which has understandably been greeted with skepticism in the JFK “conspiracy” community. There were no fingerprints on either the rifle or the pistol that were identified as Oswald’s murder weapons.

Oswald had to be an idiot if he was the real assassin. Earlier in 1963, he was arrested for the attempted murder of Edwin Walker, and he obviously would have been suspect number one if he really shot JFK, employed in the building where the shots were fired, with a rifle he not only bought months earlier, but used in another assassination attempt. With all those incriminating circumstances, we are supposed to believe that he carefully wiped his fingerprints off the rifle before he snuck out of the depository? But he also was so stupid that he had no plan of escape, taking a bus and cab before lamely trying to hide in a theater? Far more likely is that the “safe house” plan that Hunt devised for Oswald evaporated when JFK was really shot, and Oswald did what he could, on his own, as the world’s most marked man.

The rest of this backyard photo section will deal with the rifle, newspapers and the hands and arms holding them.

Oswald’s left arm, which holds the rifle, is peculiar. Below his upper arm, the only thing visible is his hand. His entire forearm and elbow are invisible. Jack White tried reproducing the phenomenon, but was unable to.

It may be possible that the way Oswald held the rifle hid his entire forearm, but I think that anomaly bears further scrutiny. His right hand that holds the newspapers is anomalous for more than one reason, and one anomaly is impressive indeed. The fingers on his right hand all appear chopped off, as if Oswald had an accident with the meat cleaver.

The photograph I am using is a pretty good one, from Groden’s The Killing of a President, p. 112. The chopped off look is evident in the photo above. Whatever disparaging comments the critics may make about Jack White, one thing they cannot dispute is that Jack has about the best quality photographs that exist to work with. On the presentation in his video, the chopped-off look of his fingers is even more pronounced. Mee was skeptical. He thought the reflection of light from the papers could have produced an illusion. White calls the chopped-off fingers evidence of retouching. The other anomaly is even more impressive to me.

The shadow issue is highly contested. Oswald has a shadow below his nose, and his eyes are completely in shadow. It appears as if the sun is at a 45-degree angle to the ground. I arrived at that approximate angle by noting that the shadow’s length under his nose is about equal to the distance his nose protrudes from his face. That is only an approximation, and does not need to be more accurate for the point I am about to make.

The HSCA investigation applied plenty of professional aptitude to the backyard photos, and McCamy made the case that the sun was coming in at such a high angle, that the bottom of Oswald's pointy chin was in shadow, creating the illusion that Oswald had a square chin. If one looks at the photo, McCamy's rationale uses strained logic, one the HSCA itself found difficult to swallow, but the point is taken that the sunlight is coming from a steep angle.[25] Oswald is holding the newspapers against his chest at a nearly perpendicular angle; his right hand with the chopped-off fingers is holding the paper. There is something even stranger than the ends of the fingers missing. The nose’s shadow is about the equivalent of how far it protrudes. Using the same logic, his index finger should cast a shadow on the newspaper it is holding, roughly equal to the height of the finger above the paper. Take a good look at the shadow cast by his right index finger.

There is no shadow. That is compelling evidence that the photo is faked, which would prove the case that Oswald was not a lone nut, if it was true. That logic is admitted to by virtually everybody who has studied the assassination. If those are faked photos, they are sophisticated fakes for 1963. It means that somebody went to a great deal of effort to forge the photos, not something that “Oswald the starving commie” would have had the time, resources or motive to do. There is also a complete lack of shadow under the bottom of Oswald's hand and little finger.

The final issue is the murder weapon itself. The backyard photos were highly damning because they showed Oswald posing with the murder weapon. There is compelling evidence that at least two rifles have been in evidence as the murder weapon, and that the rifle in the backyard photos is probably not the weapon in evidence today.

Jerry McLeer has presented evidence of two different rifles in evidence, with one cleverly forged to look like the other. The most convincing pieces of evidence are the numerous discrepancies between the rifle examined by the Warren Commission and the weapon that sits in the National Archives (which the Archives will not let anybody examine). Life Magazine took photographs of the rifle in 1983, and those images provide much of the evidence. There is also evidence that the “murder weapon” is a vintage rifle, not something that Oswald would have been able to mail order.

Of the many discrepancies between the two rifles, what may be the most impressive for a lay audience are the discrepancies in the serial number, which are depicted in the image below.

the ad they presented was a duplicate of the ad Oswald used to purchase his rifle. The original ad that Oswald used was readily available, which made independent investigators scratch their heads. The reason for the Warren Commission’s use of another, later, ad than the one Oswald used became evident. The rifle in the National Archives is a forty-inch rifle. The rifle in the ad Oswald used to purchase his rifle was a thirty-six-inch rifle. The Commission substituted a later ad that advertised a forty-inch rifle. That switch by the Warren Commission to force the rifle in evidence to correspond to the ad is a strange way to perform an investigation.

Another issue lends evidence to the notion that the rifle in the photos is not the “murder weapon” in the National Archives. McLeer’s analysis provides the evidence, although the images in Groden's The Killing of a President are adequate. On the rifle’s stock, about a foot from the barrel’s end, on its underside, is a circular ring about an inch in diameter. It is used to attach a strap. The ring is quite clear in good reproductions of the photograph. The ring is round, and appears on the underside of the rifle stock. The Warren Commission rifle had an oblong ring mounted to the side. The author of A Carcano Homepage theorizes that the ring is part of the bush behind Oswald, a contention nearly impossible to take seriously. Another explanation I have seen is that the rifle that Oswald holds is turned enough to where the oblong ring on the far side of the Warren Commission rifle is visible, providing the illusion that it is a circular, bottom-mounted ring strap. I am skeptical of that explanation also. The rifle appears slightly rotated, as can be seen by looking at the riflescope, but it appears far from being rotated onto its side, especially far enough to make the Warren Commission rifle side ring produce the alleged illusion. The only way to know for sure is to get the “murder weapon” and perform the reconstruction (I will not hold my breath waiting for the federal government’s cooperation on that matter). Also, the cheap rifle strap seen in the backyard photos is markedly at variance with the strap found on the murder weapon, a strap that appears dyed black, as well as the rifle stock itself. It is difficult to imagine a starving commie shelling out for a designer strap for his rifle (which appears to be designed for the rifle, dyed that same color as the rifle’s stock), when he already had one. Here are some images of the controversial strap ring.

One of the difficult-to-explain-away aspects of Oswald’s tale, particularly regarding the rifle, is that Oswald was supposedly a starving commie. In 1962, he come up with enough money to repay several hundred dollars in loans (including a loan from the State Department), while making virtually no money and trying to support a wife and child. The “lone gunman” defenders have never satisfactorily explained Oswald’s finances, particularly during the time leading up to the assassination.[26] Oswald the starving commie and family man somehow paid off loans and bought a rifle, while scarcely making ends meet. It is similar to the enigma to how Private Oswald could have been a regular customer at a highly expensive Tokyo nightclub, rubbing shoulders with the military brass (something way out of line with America’s military caste system). One night at that club cost as much as he made in a month.

The “murder weapon” was so poorly made that government investigators had to fix the sight’s alignment so it could hit what it shot at, and even then, the government’s best marksmen, after numerous trials, were never able to duplicate Oswald’s alleged feat of putting two bullets into a moving target of JFK’s size and distance, in the time the assassination took.[27] Oswald was only a mediocre marksman in the Marines, and there is no evidence that he ever used a bolt-action rifle before November 22, 1963.

The evidence argues persuasively in favor of the hypothesis that the photos were forged and planted, and the camera was planted. In kind, it is nearly identical to the magic bullet’s tale. After the bullet’s highly dubious entrance into the evidence ledgers, Arlen Specter and Gerald Ford concocted one of the most implausible tales ever.

JFK’s autopsy photos are probably also forgeries/composites. Nearly all the medical personnel who attended to JFK at the Parkland Hospital, where he was taken after he was shot, testified that the back of his head was blown out. Large blowouts are exit wounds, not entrance wounds. The back of his head being blown out is inconsistent with a bullet coming from Oswald's rifle. The back of his head being blown out is nearly irrefutable evidence of a shot hitting him from the front, which brings up the legendary grassy knoll gunman.

In light of the backyard photos, altering or forging the JFK autopsy photos (and X-rays) would be consistent with how the entire affair has been manipulated.

There may have been several shooters in Dealy Plaza that fateful day.

The Nature of the JFK Assassination Affair

I have noticed a pattern in the JFK assassination that reappears in other cover-up attempts.

People in power do not want the rest of humanity to obtain information that may disrupt their power base, even if that information could benefit humanity (e.g. free energy, cancer cures, political information) because it would encroach on their power base. Noam Chomsky says that the current institutional ideology ranks hegemony above survival. Another way of stating it is that the elite do not really care if they destroy life on earth, as long as they are in charge (with survival enclaves secured for themselves, however).
Derailing access to this information is within the scope, motivation and resources of the power elite (e.g. the energy oligarchy, medical establishment and U.S. government).
There are often agent provocateurs involved in those obfuscations – an agent who develops fake credentials to allow him/her to infiltrate the ranks of researchers who attempt to uncover the truth of any suspected conspiracy, or propose solutions to the big problems.
The structural composition of the suppression includes prosecutors whose careers are measured by their “kill ratio.” The actual innocence of guilt of those prosecuted makes no difference to those people, who also employ others who are just “following orders.” So people who are just doing their jobs largely inflict the damage (the same dynamic is seen in the cancer racket, where approved “treatments” kill off the patients, while the real cures are suppressed).
Public apathy and lack of integrity of those trying to uncover the truth is by far the most important aspect of these situations. For example, many people suppose that because we do not have free energy, that it does not exist, thereby ignoring the possibility that these resources have been suppressed. Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Diogenes’ quest for the honest man would be as fruitless today as it was in ancient Greece.

Independent investigators of the JFK assassination often discuss how unhelpful the CIA and FBI have been. The CIA essentially works for the Fortune 500, just as the American President does. They call themselves an intelligence agency, but their “intelligence” is usually disinformation designed to fool the American public. Covert action is their main function, and it has contributed to the death and misery of countless millions of people. The FBI has been liberally used to derail social movements in the United States. Outright murder of activists for native rights, black rights and the like has been merely days at the office for the FBI.[28] “Fighting crime” has been one of their minor functions. Those organizations are little different than the Soviet Union’s KGB, except that America’s spooks have caused far more death and destruction than the KGB could have ever aspired to. It is well known that many in the American “intelligence community” were very happy when JFK was killed. On that day, in my father’s office in the Department of Defense, one man walked down the halls, shouting his approval of Kennedy’s murder, saying that JFK got what comes to all “tyrants.”

What is obvious when researching the JFK assassination is that at least some theorists and investigators are provocateurs. A classic CIA disinformation ploy is to flood a certain subject with information, some of it true, and some or most of it fabrication. If anybody tries investigating the information, they will find so much false information that it taints whatever might be true. There are an incredible number of JFK assassination theories. One is that Kennedy was hit accidentally by a Secret Service man riding in the car behind him, whose gun accidentally discharged when Kennedy was under fire, giving him his fatal headshot. There is a bizarre theory that there was more than one gunman, but they coincidentally tried to kill Kennedy at the same instant (the Washington Post cooked that one up). That one invokes odds of trillions-to-one. There are even stranger theories than those. Prominent people, such as mainstream journalists, have concocted some of them. They were probably creating their surreal theories under the influence of the CIA or other spook organization. The CIA has operatives in virtually every major media organization. The circus atmosphere of strange theories has served to discredit all assassination theories besides the official “lone nut” one, and sincere researchers are nearly defeated before they begin.

Again, most importantly, what has hurt the independent assassination researchers the most has probably been the behavior of the researchers themselves. Those who independently spend years of their lives investigating the assassination have a trust fund or other source of passive income, are doing it in their spare time, or try to sell the results of their labors. Not too many people have the trust fund option. Also, those who are independently wealthy or have inherited wealth almost always obtained it through the workings of the system, and consequently are rarely going to have the inclination to challenge that system. I have never received a dime of compensation for this work, and have given up hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost income to pursue it, and not many people can do that.

If people put their JFK research out there with their name on it, the provocateurs and others generally take the tactic of discrediting them, and they are instead put into the position of defending themselves, and the evidence they have produced is not considered. It is a classic misdirection tactic. That phenomenon is not limited to investigating conspiracies. My critics do not want to discuss the merits of my propositions, such as whether we are engaging in genocide in Iraq to control Middle East oil, or that we are putting poison in our water supply and calling it medicine. Instead, they attack me for my style, call me names, and otherwise totally avoid the substance of my work.

I have looked into many areas like the JFK assassination, looking at the primary evidence for myself. I also rely on the work of historians and investigators whose work I have come to respect, through long investigation of their work, such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, David Stannard, Carl Sauer and Rodney Stich, to name a few.

The fact that provocateurs have stirred up plenty of trouble, that independent JFK researchers have not always been pillars of virtue, that they often attack each other, that they become too attached to their theories, should not cloud the question of whether JFK was murdered by a conspiracy. Proving a researcher’s theory wrong does not mean that JFK was not murdered by a conspiracy. The evidence can speak for itself, in those backyard photos.

The JFK assassination brings up extremely uncomfortable issues for Americans. If JFK was killed by a backfired covert operation (as Gary’s story says), and the government acted to cover it up, what kind of government does America really have? Would it really be much more legitimate than ancient Rome’s? I have found that nearly everybody who defends the lone gunman theory of the JFK assassination is also of a white bread political persuasion, with ideas that rarely stray from what officialdom says is so. Defending the lone gunman theory appears in large measure to be an attempt to defend the legitimacy of the U.S. government. Why? I think the cognitive dissonance dynamic explains much of it.

If Gary’s story is true, a lot more than JFK’s death was initiated by that backfired plot to frame Castro. The successful cover-up of JFK’s murder appeared to embolden the intelligence community. The rash of assassinations and attempts after JFK, leading clear to the attempt on Ronald Reagan, all have suspicious connections to the U.S. intelligence community, with a “lone nut” scapegoat served up each time. Hunt eventually got caught with his hand in the cookie jar with the Watergate burglary, which may have far more sinister connotations than just some bumbling idiots trying to derail the Democratic challengers to Nixon. This essay will further deal with those issues of further assassinations and other dirty tricks.

Why Are There So Many Conspiracy Theories Today?

While investigating conspiracies and cover-ups, I wondered if this “conspiracy mania” was happening in America fifty years ago. The push to fluoridate our water supplies began more than fifty years ago. Much of it was a “structural” conspiracy. Scientists working for fluoride polluters would naturally, if largely unconsciously, massage the data to minimize the harm that fluoride caused, and amazingly, produced data showing that fluoride was good for people. Recently, declassified documents show the U.S. government covering up fluoride poisoning, because fluorine was used in the Manhattan Project extensively, and there were industrial fluoride accidents that harmed many people. Even though it turns out that fluoridation luminary Harold Hodge was secretly working to cover-up fluoride damage due to industrial accidents, and was doing secret research on the fluoride ion's effect on the human central nervous system, a lot of it was just doing his job and obeying the rules of “national security.”

I once had exchanges with a college kid who thought that the political “realists” understood the global situation much better than “radicals” such as Chomsky. After reading some “realist” literature, I doubt it. Scholarship that assumes away economic factors is not very realistic.[29] The kid said that the reason why only a few CIA employees have ever written books critical of the CIA is that almost all CIA employees believe that their careers serve their nation. My response was two-fold. One is that serving their nation obviously did not mean serving the interests of those in the nations the CIA helped rape. The other point is that the vast majority of CIA personnel will believe they are doing “good work” no matter how much their eyes tell them otherwise. People will always see themselves as “good guys,” no matter what they are doing. That goes for death camp Nazis killing Jewish children, American “pioneers” killing Native American children, American soldiers bombing Iraq, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and doctors whose cancer treatments kill their patients.

Today, conspiracy theories abound in the media and public awareness. Why? I think it is mainly because of the many shocks the American psyche has endured during the past forty years.

JFK’s assassination marked the beginning of the end of innocence for many Americans. There were definitely dark activities taking place before that, but the American people were largely in denial about them. After the JFK assassination, America had the Vietnam War, Watergate, the scandals of the Reagan-Bush years (Iran-Contra and Savings and Loan scandals), and America's confidence in its institutions and leaders cannot sink much lower.

There is a strange dichotomy, however. On one hand, people are slowly realizing that they are continually lied to. Yet, they are selective in the lies they believe or disbelieve. It may be related to the size of the lies. People will believe the lies that serve their interests, while maintaining a general attitude that they are being lied to. They inconsistently assess the dishonesty in their world, and the powerful fully encourage such inconsistency. For instance, the two biggest “scandals” in the media during the 1990s were the O.J. Simpson murder trial and Bill Clinton’s “zippergate” scandal with Monica Lewinsky. The Savings and Loan scandal will cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, and it is already disappearing into the Memory Hole. Whether O.J. Simpson committed murder or Bill Clinton really had sex with Monica Lewinsky had virtually no bearing on the average American’s life. Yet, those were the big media “scandals” of the 1990s. As Chomsky has said, one of the main purposes of the mainstream media is distracting people from what is really happening. Our murderous oil policies can kill off millions of Iraqi citizens, mainly children, and it barely makes the news or lodges in the public awareness, while O.J. and Clinton’s cigar make headline news. It is not entirely the media’s fault. They are tending the herd, but the herd also desires the tending.

In the end, people suspect something is awry, and the great increase in conspiracy theories is evidence of it. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross performed the seminal research on the psychological aspects of death and dying in the West. She named five stages of the process. They are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This process has been generalized to apply to any grieving process, and can apply to most things people do not want to face. In 1962, about 85% of Americans had “great faith” in society’s institutions, such as the government, corporations, and churches. Today, only about ten percent of Americans have that “great faith” anymore. What has replaced it is anger, the process’ next stage. Acceptance (some may think they are in acceptance, but they instead have apathetic feelings of powerlessness; it is not the same thing), and transcendence appear to be a long way off, but Mother Earth cannot wait that long. Bargaining and depression are stages that humanity has largely not experienced yet. As Americans have been staying in denial, cognitive dissonance has become more evident, particularly after the World Trade Center attacks of September 2001.

The long prophesied “earth changes,” which are happening today, as with global warming, is also going to accelerate the process. Will we wake up quickly enough to prevent our demise by our own hand? Conspiracy theories seem to be incomplete attempts to understand what is happening. What such a mentality seeks is to seemingly relieve us of our responsibility for what is happening, making us the victims of powerful forces, but the only “power” those forces have is what we gave them. Until we learn to accept our responsibility, the fascination with conspiracies will be one more way that we avoid taking responsibility for our lives. Investigating