A 40-Year-Old Tall Tale

Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States. I have some prime beachfront property for sale in Yuma, AZ. There was a magic bullet in Lee Harvey Oswald's carbine in 1963. If this is (fair & balanced) nonsense, so be it.

[x SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER]
History buffs, scholars deride JFK inquiry
By ERIC ROSENBERG

WASHINGTON -- A group of historians and researchers marked the 40th anniversary this week of the Warren Commission report by deriding the government's official investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The report, the group said, was so badly botched that most Americans have little confidence in its central conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

The Warren Commission, led by then Chief Justice Earl Warren, "was a complete and utter disaster," sowing only "doubt, confusion and distrust" of government, said Jim Lesar, author and head of the non-profit Assassination Archives and Research Center.

"Why should we believe the Sept. 11 commission report, or for that matter any congressional or governmental report," when the Warren Commission report is so flawed, he said.

Lesar's organization co-sponsored a conference here recently that focused on the likelihood of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

In the four decades since the assassination, Americans have grown increasingly suspicious of the Warren Commission's findings.

A Gallup poll taken in 1963 found that 52 percent of Americans believed Oswald was part of a greater conspiracy to kill the president.

But a Gallup poll taken last year around the 40th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination found that three-fourths of Americans believed Oswald was part of a greater conspiracy. A similar Gallup poll in 2001 found that 81 percent of those polled believed there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

Intoning the view of many Warren Commission critics, David Wrone, a former professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, called the commission's report a work of fiction.

"Historically, it stands up there with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," Wrone told about 100 attendees, referring to the czarist-era forged document that purported to detail a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

Dr. Cyril Wecht, a renowned pathologist who served on a House committee's investigation into the assassination in 1978, said that one of the Warren Commission's greatest failures was in not challenging a poorly performed autopsy of the president.

Wecht said that the attending physicians who autopsied Kennedy at Bethesda Naval Hospital in suburban Washington, D.C., were not experienced in gunshot trauma.

They didn't even extensively photograph the autopsy as is common practice.

The autopsy was replete with "deficiencies, ineptitude and incompetence," he said.

Eight days after the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination, President Johnson established the Warren Commission by Executive Order 11130.

It also included Sen. Richard Russell, D-Ga.; Sen. John Sherman Cooper, R-Ky.; Rep. Hale Boggs, D-La.; Rep. Gerald Ford, R-Mich.; former CIA Director Allen Dulles; and John McCloy, a high-profile lawyer and former president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Ford is the sole surviving member.

After a 10-month investigation, the commission in 1964 concluded that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy from a sniper's lair in the Texas School Book Depository's sixth floor.

The commission concluded in its 912-page tome -- supported by 7,000 footnotes and 26 volumes of exhibits and testimony -- that Oswald fired three shots, killing Kennedy and seriously wounding Texas Gov. John Connally.

The crux of the conclusion that Oswald acted alone rests on the controversial "magic bullet" theory, that the wounds to Kennedy's throat also caused Connally's extensive injuries.

If the commission acknowledged a fourth bullet, then that would be beyond the limitations of the bolt-action rifle Oswald is alleged to have used. Therefore, a fourth shot would have had to come from a second gunman.

© 2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer