14-06-2013, 05:43 PM
So after debating with myself, I've decided to chime in on this thread. I guess these days everyone has some sort of take on this question. My reasons for speaking up are purely personal: because my entry into this case was via a reading of Six Seconds In Dallas when I was 12 (in 1967), and the ballistics and medical evidence has been of great interest to me ever since. I have read most of the medical testimony and the analysis done by a good number of researchers. But let me state at the outset that I pretend absolutely no special knowledge or authority concerning this topic, and I make no claims except that what I will express here are opinions which are still in progress, and which are not intended to be contentious.
First, let me state that I (as I am sure, many others) mused upon Lifton's book and kept coming back to it for nearly two decades. I won't belabor here how much of the original hypothesis I think may continue to merit serious attention; I'll just say that for me there are still anomalies in the various descriptions of damage to scalp, skull and brain (or the size of the tracheostomy), and in the witness testimony, which have not been clarified to my satisfaction (yes, I've read Horne's five volumes; I've also read Law). My training is not as a physicist (though I work with them) nor as a radiologist, but as a computer scientist. I certainly don't believe in appeals to authority as method of proof (that's what gets us into trouble in the first place), but I do take it seriously when the likes of David Mantik and Cyril Wecht write (see "Paradoxes of the JFK Assassination: The Brain Enigma", in DiEugenio/Pease, The Assassinations) that the empty area at the front of the cranium in the lateral X-ray might suggest that the brain has collapsed backwards, and that it is further improbable that it would become detached from its supporting structures this way simply as a consequence of gunshot wounding (this problem was further debated in an interesting exchange between Pat Speer -- on his site -- and Manitk, in his review of Speer's work: http://ctka.net/reviews/mantik_speer.html).
But I do agree with Gordon Gray that it is hard to get firm corroboration for anything in this area. JimD is also right: it's an evidentiary nightmare. I think Jim actually wrote somewhere (in his review of Horne?) that the fact that you can argue for at least five different interpretations of the evidence in itself indicates something is terribly wrong. And we've had at the autopsy doctors repeatedly, yet we've never really asked all the pertinent, pointed, technical questions we should have. This seems to have continued beyond Gary Aguilar's and Kathleen Cunningham's "five" investigations which got it wrong.
But I think the question about why surgical intervention would be necessary at all, raised above, also needs to be thought about. I would here presume that such a procedure would be in order to extract identifiable bullet fragments ahead of time, so that they would not be ingested into the stream of evidence, especially by neutral witnesses like Sibert and O'Neill, because, to me, at least, the idea of "trajectory reversal" or that wounds could be faked in such a way as to baffle a trained forensic pathologist has always seemed both problematic and rather simplistic, and even Lifton has to posit "reconstruction" before photographing the head and concede "pressure" being put on the prosectors in order for this all to come out right. But why indeed do this? If it was really planned, it would imply the plotters were willing to take a whole series of risks which could be solved much more simply if they had the situation in hand.. Lifton (using a very narrow kind of logic) dismissed the idea that such an intervention could have been done as a form of damage control. But is this really entirely to be excluded? Could the plot have taken a wrong turn during that afternoon which in some way caused a panic and led to this kind of "unofficial" intervention? Let me ask this question, too: it is not likely the plotters were unaware that murder was the jurisdiction of the state, not federal government, so did what happen (a military controlled autopsy) really reflect the original plan? On the other hand, by now we all know that this hypothesis' most sticky point is when and where this happened, and how JFK's corpse was abducted (if it was). If the latter happened, it must have happened very fast, so you almost have to believe that there were contingency plans of some sort in that case. For me, these are certainly not rhetorical questions. I just think that there is presently no sure resolution to them; but I don't think asking them is entirely fatuous, either.
What I have (belatedly, I confess) come to realize, however, about this illicit surgery issue is that whether or not something like that occurred, it does not ultimately change the configuration of the event for me in terms of who the plotters probably were. And this, to my mind, is the crucial point. Belief that such a scheme was an essential element of the plot is only really compelling if you also believe that the plotters could not rely on help in burying the autopsy via other means (which is in fact largely what happened). Horne talks about Lifton's book as effecting a Kuhnian "paradigm shift". I'm not certain what exactly he means by this, but I'd bet he was thinking about the shock value of the theory; yet if you can contemplate phony ballistic evidence, or doctored photographic evidence, which many early researchers did, it's not really that far, gruesome as it might be, to the idea that the literal corpus delicti could also have been manipulated in some way. If there is a paradigm shift in Best Evidence, in my view it is not this fact so much as its implications for who was fooling whom: according to the most extreme form of Lifton's hypothesis, the official investigation didn't have to lie, because it was hoodwinked! I always found this to be at best an hyperbole, knowing what we know about the disconnect between the Warren Report and the Exhibits and Hearings, let alone the FBI's behavior, etc., etc. It conveniently isolates the plot from the authorities where what we should really be focusing on are the likely clandestine links between them.
First, let me state that I (as I am sure, many others) mused upon Lifton's book and kept coming back to it for nearly two decades. I won't belabor here how much of the original hypothesis I think may continue to merit serious attention; I'll just say that for me there are still anomalies in the various descriptions of damage to scalp, skull and brain (or the size of the tracheostomy), and in the witness testimony, which have not been clarified to my satisfaction (yes, I've read Horne's five volumes; I've also read Law). My training is not as a physicist (though I work with them) nor as a radiologist, but as a computer scientist. I certainly don't believe in appeals to authority as method of proof (that's what gets us into trouble in the first place), but I do take it seriously when the likes of David Mantik and Cyril Wecht write (see "Paradoxes of the JFK Assassination: The Brain Enigma", in DiEugenio/Pease, The Assassinations) that the empty area at the front of the cranium in the lateral X-ray might suggest that the brain has collapsed backwards, and that it is further improbable that it would become detached from its supporting structures this way simply as a consequence of gunshot wounding (this problem was further debated in an interesting exchange between Pat Speer -- on his site -- and Manitk, in his review of Speer's work: http://ctka.net/reviews/mantik_speer.html).
But I do agree with Gordon Gray that it is hard to get firm corroboration for anything in this area. JimD is also right: it's an evidentiary nightmare. I think Jim actually wrote somewhere (in his review of Horne?) that the fact that you can argue for at least five different interpretations of the evidence in itself indicates something is terribly wrong. And we've had at the autopsy doctors repeatedly, yet we've never really asked all the pertinent, pointed, technical questions we should have. This seems to have continued beyond Gary Aguilar's and Kathleen Cunningham's "five" investigations which got it wrong.
But I think the question about why surgical intervention would be necessary at all, raised above, also needs to be thought about. I would here presume that such a procedure would be in order to extract identifiable bullet fragments ahead of time, so that they would not be ingested into the stream of evidence, especially by neutral witnesses like Sibert and O'Neill, because, to me, at least, the idea of "trajectory reversal" or that wounds could be faked in such a way as to baffle a trained forensic pathologist has always seemed both problematic and rather simplistic, and even Lifton has to posit "reconstruction" before photographing the head and concede "pressure" being put on the prosectors in order for this all to come out right. But why indeed do this? If it was really planned, it would imply the plotters were willing to take a whole series of risks which could be solved much more simply if they had the situation in hand.. Lifton (using a very narrow kind of logic) dismissed the idea that such an intervention could have been done as a form of damage control. But is this really entirely to be excluded? Could the plot have taken a wrong turn during that afternoon which in some way caused a panic and led to this kind of "unofficial" intervention? Let me ask this question, too: it is not likely the plotters were unaware that murder was the jurisdiction of the state, not federal government, so did what happen (a military controlled autopsy) really reflect the original plan? On the other hand, by now we all know that this hypothesis' most sticky point is when and where this happened, and how JFK's corpse was abducted (if it was). If the latter happened, it must have happened very fast, so you almost have to believe that there were contingency plans of some sort in that case. For me, these are certainly not rhetorical questions. I just think that there is presently no sure resolution to them; but I don't think asking them is entirely fatuous, either.
What I have (belatedly, I confess) come to realize, however, about this illicit surgery issue is that whether or not something like that occurred, it does not ultimately change the configuration of the event for me in terms of who the plotters probably were. And this, to my mind, is the crucial point. Belief that such a scheme was an essential element of the plot is only really compelling if you also believe that the plotters could not rely on help in burying the autopsy via other means (which is in fact largely what happened). Horne talks about Lifton's book as effecting a Kuhnian "paradigm shift". I'm not certain what exactly he means by this, but I'd bet he was thinking about the shock value of the theory; yet if you can contemplate phony ballistic evidence, or doctored photographic evidence, which many early researchers did, it's not really that far, gruesome as it might be, to the idea that the literal corpus delicti could also have been manipulated in some way. If there is a paradigm shift in Best Evidence, in my view it is not this fact so much as its implications for who was fooling whom: according to the most extreme form of Lifton's hypothesis, the official investigation didn't have to lie, because it was hoodwinked! I always found this to be at best an hyperbole, knowing what we know about the disconnect between the Warren Report and the Exhibits and Hearings, let alone the FBI's behavior, etc., etc. It conveniently isolates the plot from the authorities where what we should really be focusing on are the likely clandestine links between them.