JFK cover-up, film fabrication
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5772.shtml
By Jim Fetzer
Apr 7, 2010
MADISON, Wisconsin -- Douglas Horne, who served as the Senior Analyst
for Military Affairs of the Assassination Records Review Board
(ARRB), has now published INSIDE THE ARRB (2009), a five-volume study
of the efforts of the board to declassify documents and records held
by the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, and other government
organizations related to the assassination of JFK.
As a former government official, historian, and author, he is
speaking out to disabuse the public of any lingering belief that THE
WARREN REPORT (1964), THE HSCA FINAL REPORT (1979), Gerald Posner's
CASE CLOSED (1963), or Vincent Bugliosi's RECLAIMING HISTORY (2007)
represent the truth about what is known about the assassination of
our 35th president, even remotely! Indeed, in relation to a new
article, "Birds of a Feather: Subverting the Constitution at Harvard
Law", Horne has made a forceful declaration to set the record straight:
I know, from my former role as a government official on the staff of
the ARRB (from 1995-1998), that there is overwhelming evidence of a
government-directed medical cover-up in the death of JFK, and of
wholesale destruction of autopsy photographs, autopsy x-rays, early
versions of the autopsy report, and biological materials associated
with the autopsy. Furthermore, dishonest autopsy photographs were
created; skull x-rays were altered; the contents of the autopsy
report changed over time as different versions were produced; and the
brain photographs in the National Archives cannot be photographs of
President Kennedy's brain -- they are fraudulent, substitute images
of someone else's brain.
Over and beyond the medical evidence, however, Horne -- in Vol. IV of
INSIDE THE ARRB (2009), has also demonstrated that the home movie of
the assassination known as "the Zapruder film" -- and others that
correspond to it, such as the Nix and Muchmore films -- have been
massively edited to remove indications of Secret Service complicity
in the crime and to add other events to these films in order to sow
confusion and conceal evidence of the true causes of death of John F. Kennedy.
There are many proofs that the film has been fabricatedincluding
that the driver brought the limo to a halt to make sure he would be
killed; that his brains were blown out to the left-rear; and that a
motorcycle patrolman accompanying the limo rode forward at the time
of the stop to inform Dallas Chief of Police Jessie Curry that the
president had been hit. But none of these events appears in the
extant version of the film, which has been massively edited. That
these events occurred has been established by more than 60 witness
reports of the limo stop, where the wound to the back of his head was
confirmed by 40 witnesses, including virtually all the physicians at
Parkland Hospital, who described cerebellum as well as cerebral
tissue extruding from the wound. The blow-out to the right-front, as
seen in the film, therefore, is not authentic.
Indeed, in an appendix to Vol. IV, Horne explains that a copy of the
film has now been studied by Hollywood exerts, who found that the
blow-out to the back of his head had been painted over in black in an
amateurish effort to obfuscate the blow out, which can actually be
seen in a few later frames, including 372 and 374. Those who have
persisted in defense of the authenticity of the film have offered
three major arguments -- (1) that the features of the extant film
correspond to those of the original processed in Dallas, (2) that
there was an unbroken chain of custody, which precluded the film be
changed; and (3) that the Dealey Plaza films are not only consistent
with themselves but with one another, where the Zapruder could only
have been faked if the others had been as well.
The following extracts from INSIDE THE ARRB (2009), Vol. IV,
demonstrate that all three arguments are fallacious: (1) there are
five features of the extant film that differ from those of the
original and (2) that different films were brought to the NPIC on
consecutive days, which vitiates the chain-of-custody argument. The
consistency of the films with one another (3) turns out to be an
interesting question, since they all seem to have been edited to
remove the turn of the presidential limousine from Houston onto Elm.
More significantly, there are subtle inconsistencies between the
films and, most importantly, the Zapruder film is not even consistent
with itself, which proves that it cannot possibly be authentic!
Horne's new studies thus confirm the previous research that has
previously been reported in THE GREAT ZAPRUDER FILM HOAX (2003), "New
Proof of JFK Film Fakery" (2007), and "Zapruder JFK Film impeached by
Moorman JFK Polaroid" (2008), where these two articles are on-line.
(1) Five features of the original do not match the extant film
INSIDE THE ARRB, Vol. IV (2009), p. 1292:
Conclusions
In his long essay published in 2007 on the Mary Ferrell Foundation
website, Josiah Thompson [NOTE: the author of SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS
(1967), an early study based on the Zapruder film] told us we should
all trust [retired Kodak expert on celluloid] Rollie Zavada's
judgment and defer to his authority:
"Roland Zavada has a towering reputation in the field and no
conceivable reason for cooking his conclusions."
Now that we have concluded examining his report and Zavada's changes
of mind since that time, it is clear that he has cooked his
conclusions. In particular, he has ignoredtrashedkey testimony:
*That the exposures were not bracketed at the Jamieson lab when the
three 'first day copies' were struck, meaning that the three 'first
generation' copies today should not be bracketed copies;
*That a 'full frame' aperture (picture plus soundtrack) was used when
duplicating the Zapruder film, meaning that the intersprocket images
should be present on the 'first generation copies';
*That the edge printer light was turned off when the original film
was developed, meaning that there a double registration of processing
edge prints in the family scenes on the extant 'first generation' copies; and,
*That the camera original film was slit at the Kodak plant in Dallas,
meaning that the 16 mm wide, unslit black-and-white copies in
existence today cannot have originated from the camera original film,
and are instead indirect evidence that a new 'original' was created
as an unslit 16 mm, double 8 movie (just as Homer McMahon's expert
testimony to the ARRB indicates).
Furthermore, Zavada's opposition to the shooting of a control film in
Zapruder's actual camera in Dealey Plazawhich was inexplicable and
extremely frustrating when it occurred in 1997now takes on a very
different taint, one of possibly intentional sabotage of the
authentication effort by the ARRB staff. An incredible charge, you
say? Not necessarily.
Read more on pages 1292 through 1294 as well as 1243 to 1292. And
this does not take into account that the numbers on the extant film
are not punched in the same location as the original. Read Horne to
appreciate the depth of Zavada's deception.
(2) Different films were brought to the NPIC on consecutive days
Not only has Doug Horne demonstrated that the strips of filmthe
actual celluloid -- of the film that was processed in Dallas and the
extant "Zapruder film" are not the same, but he has demonstrated that
David Wrone has misled his audience and distorted the evidence about
the chain-of-custody, where one filmapparently the original, was
brought to the NPIC on Saturday, 23 November 1963, which was an 8mm,
slit version, the processing of which Bruno Brugioni, Chief of the
NPIC Information Branch, supervised, which even required opening a
camera store to purchase an 8mm projector, which the NPIC did not
possess, while a second, 16mm unslit version, was brought to the NPIC
on Sunday, 24 December 1963, by Secret Service Agent "William Smith,"
which was handled by Homer McMahon and by Ben Hunter, who had not
been present the night before, and a very different film.
INSIDE THE ARRB, Vol. IV, pages 1226 and 1227:
Analysis: First of all, we can now say with certainty that the NPIC
never copied the Zapruder film as a motion picture, even though for
years the NPIC notes had mislead some researchers into believing that
it had. However, Homer McMahon's rock-solid certainty that the film
brought to him was an original, unslit 16 mm wide, double 8 movie --
and that it came from a classified CIA photo lab run by Kodak at
Rochester -- implies that McMahon and Hunter were not working with
the true camera original developed in Dallas, but were instead
working with a re-created, altered film masquerading as 'the
original.' I suspected in 1997, and I am more certain than ever today
at this writing in 2009, that 'Bill Smith' told the truth when he
said that the film he couriered to NPIC was developed in Rochester --
after all, how could he possible make a mistake about something so
elementary, since he brought it from Rochester to Washington, D.C.
himself? He was only lying about one thing: it could not have been
the original film exposed inside Abe Zapruder's camera, because we
know from the Dallas Affidavit trail, and from the interviews Rollie
Zavada conducted with the surviving personnel from the Dallas Kodak
lab, that the original film was indeed developed in Dallas on Friday,
November 22, 1963. If McMahon was correct that he had viewed an
original, 16 mm wide, unslit double 8 movie film the weekend of the
assassination, and if it was really developed in Rochester at a CIA
lab run by Kodak (as he was unambiguously told it was), then the
extant film in the Archives is not a camera original film, but a
simulated 'original' created with an optical printer at the CIA's
secret film lab in Rochester.
The critical information published in the ARRB call and meeting
reports about our interviews with McMahon and Hunter in 1997 was
published in full by Jim Fetzer in the year 2000 in MURDER IN DEALEY
PLAZA, but was subsequently ignored by Josiah Thompson in a 2007
essay posted on the Mary Ferrell website (note 14) and was
intentionally under-reported and misrepresented by David Wrone in his
2003 book on the Zapruder film. This is what many advocates of a
specific hypothesis or a historical position resort to when the heat
is on and their longstanding positions on key issues are threatened
by new evidence: all too often they either ignore the argument of
their opponents as if they do not exist, or they will misrepresent
them, intentionally setting up a false 'straw man,' and then knock it
down. In the case of the serious chain-of-custody implications of the
McMahon interviews, Thompson chose to ignore the problem in 2005 and
again in 2007, while David Wrone has not only
misreported/misrepresented their import, but he has overstated the
case for authenticity, as I shall demonstrate below.
In his 2003 book THE ZAPRUDER FILM: REFRAMING JFK'S ASSASSINATION,
Wrone fails to report the specific content of the Homer McMahon
interviews (nor does McMahon's name even appear in Wrone's index),
and then completely misreports what I have said about them (on page
127), as follows:
Similarly spurious is Douglas Orme's charge (yes, he misspelled my
name, too) that Time, Inc. allowed the film to be altered. In MURDER
IN DEALEY PLAZA, Horne argues that Time, Inc. permitted the film to
be taken by Federal Officials for doctoring. [This statement was
followed by endnote 36, which simply refers to page 319 of MURDER IN
DEALEY PLAZA, without telling the reader what is on page 319. Page
319 is the interview report I wrote of the Homer McMahon interview of
July 14, 1997 at the National Archives.] Like Zapruder, however, Time
knew it had a treasure in the Zapruder film, and it would do nothing
to endanger the flow of revenue it expected from those 26 seconds of
film. [boldface added by author]
Shame on you David Wrone! There are so many things wrong with this
short paragraph that I hardly know where to begin. First of all, and
most importantly, Wrone never mentioned in his text that the Head of
the Color Lab at NPIC, the world's pre-eminent photo interpretation
lab in 1963, claimed that he had [had] delivered to him by the Secret
Service, prior to the President's funeral, a 16 mm wide, unslit
original double 8 film of the Kennedy assassination that was
developed in Rochester, the location from which the courier brought
him the film!!! So David Wrone's first sin is that of intellectual
dishonesty -- hiding facts from his readers which might have
contradicted his own thesis that the extant film in the Archives
today is authentic and unaltered. His second sin is that of putting
words in my mouth: it is simply not true that I said anywhere in
Fetzer's book that Time, Inc. had allowed the film to be altered! The
editor of the anthology, Jim Fetzer, published only my call reports
and meeting reports of what the witnesses told the ARRB staff, and no
one used that language in their interviews with us. So Wrone set up a
straw man here which he attempted to knock down with a private
enterprise profit motive, while all the time ignoring facts about
C.D. Jackson's long standing associations with the CIA and the
national security establishment during the decade of the 1960s. If
Wrone had been intellectually above-board, he would have talked
honestly about the content of the McMahon/Hunter interviews, and then
stated why he did not find these eyewitness recollections persuasive,
if that was the case; instead, he took the coward's way out and
intentionally failed to report what McMahon had said. . . .
Note 14: The name of the lengthy 3-part essay is "Bedrock Evidence in
the Kennedy Assassination," and is based upon a somewhat shorter
version delivered by Thompson on November 19, 2005 at a conference
sponsored by Jim Lesar's Assassination Archives and Research Center
(ARRC) and the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law.
(3) The Zapruder film displays inconsistencies with other films and with itself
INSIDE THE ARRB, Vol. IV, pages 1336 to 1337:
The Alteration of the Zapruder Film was Rushed and Imperfect
Because there are physical limitations to what can be altered in a
film -- particularly on a tight schedule and when faced with time
pressure--the alteration of the Zapruder film was imperfect, and it
therefore had to be suppressed as a motion picture even after its
gross alteration to conceal what the forgers had been unable to
remove. My working hypothesis postulates that because the cabal that
killed the president (and which was feverishly covering up the crime
that weekend) did not yet know, on the weekend of the assassination,
what type of investigation(s) would be conducted of the crime, or by
which governmental bodies, speed was of the essence. By late Sunday
afternoon -- after discussing the limitations to the film's
alteration with the technicians at "Hawkeyeworks" in Rochester --
they would have known that while the car stop had been removed from
the film, and the exit debris leaving the back of President Kennedy's
skull had also been removed, that a serious problem remained: the
so-called 'head snap,' or violent movement of the President's head
and upper body to the left and rear, in response to the frontal head
shots. This was a simple and persuasive demonstration of the law of
conservation of momentum that even a layperson without a physics
degree could viscerally understand, and the public could not be
permitted to see it, or the lone assassination cover story would not sell . . .
The film's imperfect alteration was revealed in other ways aside from
the 'headsnap.' As later discovered by Josiah Thompson, Ray Marcus,
and other researchers, and as written about in scores of books now
and as mentioned in hundreds of lectures, the extant film contains
evidence of a very serious 'timing problem': President Kennedy and
Governor Connally react to separate shots that occur too close
together to have been fired in succession by the rather slow
mechanism of the alleged murder weapon. The Warren Commission staff
expressed great concern about this internally, and ultimately dealt
with it dishonestly by concluding that the same bullet had hit both
men, and that Connally had unaccountably exhibited a 'delayed
reaction' to his very severe and painful wounds. What we do not know
today is whether the 'timing problem' is an artifact of frame
removal, or whether those frames of the film prior to the headshot
were not tampered with, and reflected the true reality of the
assassination farther up Elm Street in the vicinity of the Stemmons
Freeway sign. Either possibility is [better: could be] true. Given
what we know about the robust evidence in favor of alteration of the
Zapruder film, it would be imprudent for JFK researchers to continue
to claim that the 'timing problem' is the primary evidence of
conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination. It isn't. Given the
overwhelming evidence that the camera original has been altered, the
'timing problem' should now be demoted to simply being 'possible
evidence' of conspiracy. Eyewitness and earwitness testimony from
Dealey Plaza alone, and the behavior of the impact debris after the
head shots, are the true 'bedrock evidence' that proves conspiracy,
not the 'timing problem,' which is inevitably suspect now, because of
the overwhelming evidence that the camera original Zapruder film was
altered on Sunday, November 24, 1963.
One final and undeniable mistake by the forgers was their failure to
black out the real exit wound(s) in the posterior skull in all
frames. I believe one of two exit wounds can been seen today, with
proper magnification, in frames 335 and 337 of the extant film [NOTE:
and in frames 372 and 374, where a comparison between David Mantik's
study of "Area P" in the lateral cranial X-rays and the blow-out to
the back of the head can be viewed in "Dealey Plaza Revisited,"
Chapter 30 of JOHN F. KENNEDY: HISTORY, MEMORY, LEGACY (2009), which
can be downloaded here.] The best images of this to date have been
published in HIGH TREASON (the color plate in the cloth edition,
opposite page 387), in [Harrison Livingston's] THE HOAX OF THE
CENTURY: DECODING THE FORGERY OF THE ZAPRUDER FILM (on page 264) and
in [Robert Groden's] THE KILLING OF A PRESIDENT (on page 38). While
the forgers were 'successful' in superimposing rather poor aerial
imaging artwork of an enormous head wound on the top and right side
of President Kennedy's head in the Zapruder film -- a head wound
which is grossly inconsistent with the localized posterior blowout
observed at Parkland Hospital, and only roughly consistent with the
autopsy photos taken after clandestine post mortem surgery at
Bethesda Naval Hospital -- they failed to properly execute their most
basic task, which was to hide all evidence of posterior exit wounds
in the back of JFK's head. Persons in the government were clearly
aware of this problem, for the last frame of the Zapruder film
published in volume XVIII of the Warren Commission's 26 supporting
volumes was frame 334, the frame immediately prior to those which
show one of the two exit defects in the back of the head.
'Coincidences' like this are not worthy of belief, and the fact that
the Warren Commission stopped publishing at frame 334 strongly
implies that someone on the staffpresumably Specter and Rankinknew
they had a problem in frames 335 and 337, and so simply decided not
to publish those frames. For them, discretion was the better part of
valor. . . .
INSIDE THE ARRB (2009), Vol. IV, pages 1317 to 1320 (in part):
If the Zapruder Film is an Alteration, Doesn't This Mean That Other
Films of the Assassination Must Have Been Altered Also? Also, Are
There Inconsistencies Between Other Films and the Zapruder Film?
Absolutelyalteration of the Zapruder film does indeed imply that in
a perfect conspiracy, that other films would have been altered also,
and in the same way as the Zapruder film. If they were not altered
and the Zapruder film was, this would have left undeniable evidence
in the photographic record that "the" pre-eminent record of the
assassination is indeed an alteration. In fact, what we do find in
the evidence is one suggestion of identical alteration; and numerous
indications of disagreement between various Dealey Plaza films and
the Zapruder film.
The Turn from Houston Onto Elm May Have Been Removed from the
Zapruder Film, the Nix Film, and the Muchmore Film
First, let us examine the suggested identical alteration of the
Zapruder film, the Nix film, and the Muchmore film. Neither the Nix
film, the Muchmore film,nor the Zapruder film show the Presidential
limousine turning left from Houston Street onto Elm Street. Orville
Nix told Mark Lane (on film) in 1966 that his film has initially been
'lost' by the processing plant and that when the FBI returned his
film to him, some of the frames had been 'damaged' and were missing.
The originals of both the Nix film and the Muchmore film (taken from
the opposite side of thje plaza from which Zapruder was shooting his
film, and from much farther away) are missing today. How convenient.
The absence of first-frame overexposure in frame 133 of the Zapruder
film suggests, but in my view does not prove, that the limousine's
turn from Houston onto Elm was removed when the film was altered and
recreated, using an optical printer. The fact that the originals of
the Nix and Muchmore films are missing is extremely suspicious; they
may have been removed from circulation to prevent detection of their
alteration -- specifically, removal of the limousine's turn onto Elm
from Houston and of the car stop during the assassination. If ever
found, one of the first things that should be checked is to see if
the limousine's turn onto Elm Street in these two films has been
excised--either crudely, with splices, or via reprinting those films
in an optical printer.
Clint Hill's Interactions with Jackie Kennedy on the Trunk of the
Limousine Appear to be Inconsistent in the Nix Film and the Zapruder Film
There is also significant disagreement between the Nix film and the
Zapruder film. In Harry Livingstone's 2004 book about the Zapruder
film, he discusses differences between the images of Clint Hall and
Jackie Kennedy on the trunk of the limousine in the Nix film, versus
what is shown in the Zapruder film. Livingstone correctly points out
that in the Nix Film, Clint Hill appears to place his left arm around
Jackie Kennedy's right shoulder and push her back into her seat --
where as in the Zapruder film, he barely touches her with his right
hand, and is not seen embracing her with his left arm at all. (See
pages 250-251 of Livingstone for the pertinent Nix frames, and the
MPI video of the Zapruder film for comparison. A projected version of
the portion of the Nix film showing Clint Hill on the trunk of the
limousine can been seen in the 1973 film "Executive Action," and it
can be seen in its entirety in the Groden DVD JFK Assassination
Films: The Case for Conspiracy.)
Is the "Headsnap" Different in the Zapruder, Nix and Muchmore films?
The 'headsnap" in the Nix film appears to be slightly slower, and
less violent than in the Zapruder film; in the Muchmore film, there
appears to be no 'headsnap' visible at all, but this may be
inconclusive because of the camera angle at the time of the
headshot(s) and because the line of sight to the President's head is
obstructed by Dealey Plaza bystanders immediately afterwards. (See
episode 3 of "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" for footage oft he
headshot(s) in both the Nix and the Muchmore films; both films can
also been seen in their entirety in Robert Groden's DVD JFK
Assassination Films: The Case for Conspiracy.) The perceived
differences between the headshot(s) in the Zapruder, Nix, and
Muchmore films suggests that when debris exiting from the back of
President Kennedy's head was removed from the three films, that it
was not done uniformly, resulting in three slightly different
versions of the motion of the President's head caused by the fatal
shot(s). This has not been conclusively proven, but is worthy of
further investigation. . . .
Concluding Reflections
There is much more, but the Addendum, "The Zapruder Film Goes to
Hollywood," pages 1352 to 1363, is of special interest, where highly
qualified experts on film restoration viewed a digital version of the
forensic copy of the Zapruder film obtained from the National
Archives and found that the massive blow out at the back of the head
had been painted over in black, which was a stunning confirmation of
the observation of Roderick Ryan, reported in Noel Twyman, BLOODY
TREASON (1997), that the bulging out of brains -- called the
"blob"and the blood spray visible in frames 314 and thereafter had
also been painted in, where Ryan would receive the Academy Award in
2000 for his contributions to cinematography, where his area of
specialization was special effects.
As of this date, seven Hollywood film experts -- eight, if we include
Ryan -- have agreed that the fakery used to cover up the blow out to
the back of the head by painting it over in black was very primitive
and highly amateurish, a finding that they have based upon a 6k
version of the forensic copy of the Zapruder film obtained from the
National Archives. David Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., has verified these
artifacts using the 4x5 slides created by MPI when it produced a
digital version of the film -- which are archived at The 6th Floor
Museum -- the inadequacies of which are explained in "Which Film is
'the Zapruder Film'?," by me and Scott Lederer, THE GREAT ZAPRUDER
FILM HOAX (2003), page 31. The creation of this visual deception was
an elaborate undertaking, but it contained the elements of its own refutation.
"Chapter 14: The Zapruder Film Mystery" is an astonishing
achievement. For Horne to have assimilated and synthesized such a
complicated and technical assortment of arguments and evidence
impresses me beyond words. This chapter alone is worth the price of
the whole. No matter what reservations or differences I may have with
any other parts of his work, what he has done on the film is
extraordinary. He was my featured guest on "The Real Deal" on
Wednesday, 13 January 2010, archived at
[url]http://radiofetzer.blogspot.com[/url]. It is also archived
[url]http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2010/01/do . . .
b-part-iii.html[/url] as part of a three-part blog on Horne, INSIDE
THE ARRB (2009). Those who want to pursue this historic development
in JFK assassination research are welcome to pursue these leads.
--
James H. Fetzer, McKnight Professor Emeritus, University of
Minnesota, Duluth; Founder, Scholars for 9/11 Truth; Editor,
Assassination Science; and Co-Editor, Assassination Research,
maintains a blog on 9/11 and other "false flag" attacks.
.
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