Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (27 page)

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Authors: Richard Belzer,David Wayne

Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #Political Science, #History & Theory, #Social Science, #Conspiracy Theories

BOOK: Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups
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“The reason I
knew
that Oswald could not have done it, was because
I
could not have done it.”
220
(emphasis in original)

As a professional sniper, Lt. Colonel Roberts knew the moment that he looked at the target angles from the 6th floor window that the shooting wasn’t all done from there.

“I walked away from the window in disgust. I had seen all I needed to know that Oswald could not have been the lone shooter.”
221
“Roberts places at least one shooter on the infamous grassy knoll overlooking Elm, ahead of Kennedy and to his right. He places another in the building across Houston Street from the Book Depository: the Dal-Tex Building, as it was in 1963.”
222

Roberts has also studied the entrance/exit transit of the head shot and has concluded with absolute certainty that the final shot came from the front.

“Some of the supporters of the Warren Commission ... stated that the bullet came from the rear because the eruption of brain matter and blood came out of the front of the president’s skull. I saw something else. In a head shot, the exit wound, due to the buildup of hydrostatic pressure, explodes in a conical formation in the down-range direction of the bullet. Yet in the Zapruder film, I could plainly see that the eruption was not a conical shape to the front of the limo, but instead was an explosion that cast fragments both up and down in a vertical plane, and side to side in a horizontal plane. There was only one explanation for this: an exploding or ‘frangible’ bullet. Such a round explodes on impact—in exactly the manner depicted in the film.”
223
“With his extensive combat experience, Roberts is scathing about the mysterious ‘jet force’ that supposedly blows Kennedy’s head backwards, towards Oswald, in the famous Zapruder home movie of the assassination. ‘In that film,’ says Roberts, ‘we see Kennedy take a shot from the front.’”
224

The alleged rifle was such a piece of junk that it was also very difficult to fire succeeding shots. As former Governor Jesse Ventura, an Expert Marksman and Navy UDT (Underwater Demolition Teams, now known as Navy SEALs), established beyond doubt in a 2010 shooting re-enactment, it is impossible to get off three shots with that rifle in six seconds, as is officially alleged.
225

An exhaustive scientific study that was recently published confirmed Ventura’s opinion; it concluded categorically that the rifle cannot be re-fired in 1.6 seconds, as the government officially claimed. The same study also confirmed that the head snap of the President was evidence of a frontal shot, with autopsy evidence of that as well. It also concluded that the government clearly acted in a pattern that established their need to arrive at a non-conspiracy conclusion, and that Oswald cannot be placed as one of the shooters.
226

So, bear in mind, that’s if Oswald was even
there—as
the Chief of Police said:

“We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle and never have”
227
—Jesse Curry, Dallas Chief of Police

The task of the shooting, therefore, for one lone shooter would have been impossible, even for an expert marksman. And Oswald was nothing close to an expert marksman. His fellow soldiers, in fact, recalled that he was “a relatively poor shot.”
228

Furthermore, Oswald’s rifle wasn’t even
sighted in
(lined up correctly), which means that a person shooting it wouldn’t even hit what was lined up in the sight! As historian Walt Brown puts it:

“It would also have made a difference if the expert rifleman was using an expert rifleman’s weapon of choice, not a piece of war surplus Italian junk whose inadequacies were massively compounded by the conclusion that the weapon was assembled and fired without ever having been sighted in. Ask your friend, the hunter. He’ll tell you
it can’t be done.”
229

TOO MANY BULLETS NECESSITATE MULTIPLE SHOOTERS

“There had to be more than three shots, gentlemen.”
230
—Official testimony of Roy Kellerman, U.S. Secret Service Special Agent-in-Charge White House Secret Service Detail, Dallas trip

 

   TOO MANY BULLETS
   (Official FBI & Warren Commission findings were three shots only)
shot #1
   The first rifle shot missed, hitting the street behind President Kennedy’s limousine and creating sparks. Even the Warren Commission categorizes this as a miss. It is an astonishing feat that the first shot misses and later shots hit the target. Any professional assassin would expect their first shot to be their best. This fact has caused rampant speculation that if Oswald actually fired at all, it was this, as a warning or diversionary shot, in an attempt to throw off the timing of the assassination plot he had penetrated and to save the life of President Kennedy, not take it.
shot #2
   Hit President Kennedy in his throat from the front, just as the emergency room doctors in Dallas described it. The doctors observed the wound and described it as a “wound of entry” which they then utilized in order to make their tracheostomy incision.
shot #3
   Hits at street level, then ricochets, wounding bystander James Tague in his cheek.
shot #4
   Hits Governor Connally in the back, traveling through his chest, cracking a rib and exiting through his right nipple.
shot #5
   Hits President Kennedy in his back, four inches below the nape of his neck and to the right of his spine (fired from the rear of the limousine).
Shot#6
   Shot enters and shatters Governor Connally’s right wrist, traveling through-and-through and then enters his thigh. (When Governor Shot #6 Connally died, investigators attempted to obtain permission to autopsy his wrist, to examine the fragments of metal still lodged within it. Those efforts were denied.)
shot #7
   Strikes the windshield of the President’s limousine, traversing through-and-through. The bullet hole was observed by at least two Dallas Police Officers: Sergeant Stavis Ellis and Officer H. R. Freeman, as well as journalist Richard Dudman, while the limo sat parked near the emergency room at Parkland Memorial. The bullet hole was”just left of center” in the front windshield. Sergeant Ellis testified that he observed what he determined was a bullet hole in the windshield; that it was not chipped glass: “You could put a pencil through it.”
231
shot #8
   Hits President Kennedy in the back of his head from the rear. This shot was only milliseconds prior to the final head shot, causing Shot #8 the slight forward motion in the President’s head which is clearly visible before the final shot (see the full examination by Dankbaar at
www.jfkmurdersolved.com
.
shot #9
   Hits President Kennedy from the front, entering at his right temple, Shot #9 causing a massive blowback exit from the right rear of his skull and forcefully driving his head and entire body backward and to his left.
(Based on the work of Walt Brown, Ph.D., Robert Groden, Douglas Herman, Craig Roberts, and Wim Dankbaar: Groden, 1993, Harvard Science Center; Herman; 2005; Dankbaar, 2006; Roberts, 1994. Also see “The Shots in Dealey Plaza,” William Orchard, 2010.
http://theshotsindealeyplaza.com/?

Ballistics expert Orlando Martin reached much the same conclusions in his 2010 study that has been termed the “Preeminent Ballistics Analysis of the JFK Assassination”:
232

•At least five shots were fired;
•From three shooters in three different locations;
•With bullets that were different loads and weights.
233

It has been scientifically established that
different
bullets were used, meaning that they had to be the product of multiple weapons. While most of the bullets were normal rounds, the bullet from the fatal frontal shot was clearly a “frangible” bullet, known as a “hot load” or exploding ammo. Physics,
not
the Warren Commission,
proves
conclusively that it was a bullet of this type that struck President Kennedy’s forehead. The lack of copper in the bullet that missed the motorcade and hit the curbstone, also indicates that a weapon other than Oswald’s alleged rifle
had
to have been used that day.
234

Professor James Fetzer is also a former Marine Corps officer who supervised recruit training and marksmanship instruction at the same rifle range and depot where Oswald took his training. His 2000 study of the science of the assassination brought together an amazing collection of highly qualified research:

“The contributors whose work has been brought together in this volume include the leading authority on the Secret Service (Vincent Palamara); the most knowledgeable student of the Presidential limousine (Douglas Weldon, J.D.); a leading expert on the medical evidence at Parkland and at Bethesda (Gary Aguilar, M.D.); the single most highly qualified person to ever study this case (David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D.); the Senior Analyst for Military Records for the ARRB (Douglas Horne); a legendary photoanalyst who advised the House Select Committee during its reinvestigation (Jack White); a world-famous philosopher who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 (Bertrand Russell); a prize- winning director and playwright, who has produced a brilliant chronology (Ira David Wood III); and a philosopher of science who has published more than twenty books and 100 articles in his fields of expertise (James H. Fetzer, Ph.D.).”
235

That study concluded that:

“An absolute minimum of six shots had to have been fired during the assassination, where the total was more likely eight, nine, or even ten.”
236

There are other very credible reports of additional shots; one striking the chrome trim strip of the limousine’s windshield and one striking the freeway sign on Elm Street (see Roberts; 1994). There were, in fact,
so many
gunshots, that their precise reconstruction proves very difficult. That is why the Secret Service agent in charge on the scene described the event as:

“ ... a flurry of shots”
237
—Roy Kellerman, U.S. Secret Service Special Agent in Charge, White House Secret Service Detail, Dallas trip

A rarely publicized fact is that substantial bullet fragments were retrieved from
inside
the limousine:

“Gerald Posner, writing in Case Closed, wrote that over sixty
grams
of fragments were recovered from inside the limo. That is a hell of a lot of fragments.”
238

The man in charge of the White House Secret Service Detail at ground-level in Dealey Plaza that day was Roy Kellerman. He was riding in the front passenger seat of the Presidential limousine, in front of President Kennedy. In his testimony for the Warren Commission, Special Agent Kellerman was very challenging toward the quickly-conceived conclusions of the Commission. His summary of the event is that they suddenly thought they had driven right into an ambush because they were taking fire from all directions as “a flurry of shells came into the car.” He didn’t
think
there were more than three shots, he
knew
there were:

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