American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [19]
Somehow, that one keeps slipping through the cracks. Maybe it’s because the Justice Department never investigated it and came to a real conclusion. As it is, every time a new book comes out that supports the Warren Commission, the big media reviewers tell us this puts all the rumors to rest for good. I’m talking about Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (1993) and then Vincent Bugliosi’s 1,600-page tome, Reclaiming History (2007). Vince is a good friend of mine, and a prosecutor for whom I have great respect, but in this case it’s beyond me how he can buy into the lone-nut scenario. Other new books like Brothers, Legacy of Secrecy, and JFK and the Unspeakable barely merit a mention; anything raising the specter of a plot gets quickly relegated to the stack of books-to-be-ignored.
So let’s start with a serious look at the overwhelming physical evidence that Oswald couldn’t have been acting alone. First of all, what about the so-called “magic bullet” that moved all around and caused seven separate wounds in President Kennedy and Governor Connally? When this bullet just happened to turn up on a stretcher at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, there weren’t any bloodstains on it. Although the bullet appeared to be undamaged, the one that hit Connally left behind some permanent lead in his wrist. According to Dr. Cyril Wecht, former President of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists, these two facts simply don’t add up. Without the “magic bullet,” the idea that Oswald killed the president falls apart.1 (Of course, if you challenge the status quo like Dr. Wecht eventually they’ll come after you, as the Justice Department did. For sending personal faxes and giving students permission to study autopsies, Dr. Wecht found himself facing numerous criminal charges. He was forced to resign as a county coroner in Pittsburgh and spent $8 million on legal fees before the Justice Department dropped most all its charges against him in 2008.2
A total of eighteen witnesses at Parkland Memorial Hospital that day—most of them doctors—all described a bullet wound that blew away where the back of JFK’s head should have been. But somehow, the autopsy photos that got entered into evidence don’t show that wound. Of course, Dr. James Humes, the navy physician who led the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, admitted later that he burned both his autopsy notes and the first draft of his report.3 Somehow, the president’s brain disappeared, too.
What gets me is that John Kennedy’s body was illegally removed from the city of Dallas, where by law the autopsy should have taken place. Texas law in 1963 required that the autopsy of anyone murdered in the state had to take place within its borders. The only exception was a murder that happened in a place owned, possessed, or controlled by the federal government—which wasn’t the case here. In fact, the Dallas County medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, tried to enforce the law when the Secret Service was removing the president’s body from Parkland late that afternoon for immediate return to Washington. Dr. Rose was overruled by the Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade. So did the feds simply come in and say, this is what’s going to happen? Why don’t they have to abide by the same laws as the rest of us? This set a terrible precedent that happened again after September 11, but I’ll get into that later.
As for the famous Zapruder film: anybody can see that JFK’s head is thrust violently backward when the fatal shot strikes him. Despite all the claims to the contrary, this supports someone firing from the front, most likely the grassy knoll. A number of experts say that the film was definitely altered—and we’ve recently learned that it went to a CIA lab run by Kodak in Rochester, New York, the weekend of the assassination!4 When Life magazine published stills from the Zapruder film not long after the assassination, they were printed out of order. Kinda makes you wonder about the media