14-06-2013, 07:52 PM
Martin Hay Wrote:"...that the wound was described as larger at autopsy than noted by emergency personnel is not proof it was surgically enlarged. Wounds picked apart during an autopsy examination are often found to be larger than they first appeared to emergency personnel. In Kennedy's case, moreover, Jackie Kennedy testified that she tried to hold the top of JFK's head down while they raced from Dealey Plaza to Parkland Hospital. It is not hard to imagine the possibility that during the time it took the Presidential limousine to get to Parkland Hospital, clot had formed gluing a portion of disrupted scalp down making JFK's skull defect appear smaller to treating surgeons than it later would to autopsy surgeons." (p. 187).
Martin,
First, let me thank you for the very interesting post, and for the reviews of yours I have read at CTKA. I think your reconstruction of how the lines got on the X-ray is quite reasonable. I'm still not sure that the EOP wound was really there (but I don't buy that stuff about it being faked, either), but the lines certainly look likee they were put there for the benefit of the medical artist. The lower one seems to lead to where there was a metal fragment (below the orbit, if I recall correctly). I have also thought that the rear wound might have been created after the front shot, and that the forward motion of the head may have had nothing to do with a separate impulse from behind. Never thought to look at the movement of the others in the car, though. I think Richard Feynman would be smiling here.
As for Gary Aguilar's explanation, it certainly is reasonable, except that I wonder why no one, not even the nurses who prepared JFK's body, had any sense of this. But I'm not an emergency room medic, so I couldn't really say.
However, I don't think it's just the size of the wound in question, but the pattern of the wounding, that still is unclear. We have large scalp flaps with symmetrical tears. Boswell even drew a long laceration from the right eye straight over the top of the skull clear to the top back. What was that? But under that, all kinds of minute fracturing is described. The problem is, it was really poorly described. As Mantik says, if only we had CAT scans of JFK's cranium ... But this has always been perplexing to me. I have yet to see a satisfying explanation for how this kind of pattern of damage can occur, whether using soft-nosed bullets or not. Does it have to do with the relative elasticity of various tissues? And if the skull fragmentation was from pressure built up in the cranium, what did the doctors (it was Humes, I think) mean about fragments falling to the table as they pushed the scalp around? That would imply (at least to me, a lay person) that somehow these fragments were already detached from the scalp which would have been covering them. How did that happen? And then there's the fact that the doctors and several other witnesses testified that very little needed to be done to remove the brain. No peeling of the dura, the falx was completely torn, no cutting of the nerves ... Again, the statements are imprecise and require explanation. And what we need is some evidence that this kind of damage can indeed be caused by bullets. Personally, I find the totality of this damage rather incongruous, but I have yet to see someone who is qualified take on all of these issues and clear them up by offering a comprehensive explanation. Everybody seems to focus on one thing, offer an explanation for it, and leave it at that. But that's just my view.
I think Lifton played fast and loose with all of this too. It's too easy to say, "I won't look for cases where this kind of damage is caused by bullets because if I don't find it, it still would not mean it couldn't happen" (he writes this at one point). Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But what if he looked harder and did find a case like this? Even if he accumulated dozens of cases which did not show this kind of damage under similar wounding circumstances, he could have at least made a stronger probabilistic argument in favor of his thesis. Renouncing this kind of research was rather convenient.
I think Roger Feinman raises some very good questions against Lifton, though I also think he is a little bit too vehement when he calls the book a hoax (in the sense that Lifton had no thesis until the very end). If I remember correctly, there is a paper trail of Lifton's inquiries to the FBI, the Liebeler memo, and his interview with Humes. But Feinman's point that Lifton extrapolates too easily from skimpy evidence and ignores other possible explanations is well taken.
As for the security measure, that's what the escort was told. I don't think this explanation very convincing. Q: did the Kennedys know about this? And security from what? I think we have heard defenses of activities in the interest of security enough for our antennas to go up. But maybe I'm just too suspicious here.
P.S. When I was in graduate school (in 1981) and had just finished Best Evidence, I actually wrote Lifton a letter with my reactions (like "what happened to Connally's wounds?"), but sent it through the publisher because in those days locating an address was much more difficult. I did not get a reply, not sure it ever reached him. Stupidly I did not even retain a copy of the letter.