Chapter 20



Chapter 20

More Offenses Against Scholarship

For all the offenses against scholarship and many others for which, as a professor, Fetzer would be expected to flunk students, those he tries to make most of are the alleged alteration of the Zapruder film to which he added the so-called "blink pattern," of Mike Pincher and Roy Schaeffer (Assassination Science, pages 221 ff) and the alleged alteration of the X-rays.

Neither originated with Fetzer. He merely exploits the existing irrationalities for his own benefit, as he saw benefit.

In plain English, neither makes sense and the unquestionable scientific credentials of David Mantik and for all the seeming impressiveness of what he says he observed on those X-rays, it still makes no sense at all.

Again, their not knowing the basic, established official evidence is a factor.

There would be great risk in altering evidence in the case of the assassination of a President and the risk would be more spectacular if exposed with pictures in particular but also with X-rays, which the media would have reproduced.

To begin with, until there was the must definite and the most certain location of the wounds what alteration was needed in them could not be known. No alteration of the pictures dared be made until there was no question of this in the minds of those who would do the altering. They had to know what to do before they undertook to do it.

Yet this egomaniacal fool is stupid enough to have the alleged Zapruder film alteration begin more than three hours before the autopsy prosectors even looked at the corpse.

When the NPIC would not have had the slightest idea of what alterations it should make or why.

From Lifton, Fetzer's attributed source, to the professor with his bragged-about Ph.D., they had less common sense that a high-school student not to realize this. With Lifton, who was making up all that he did make up, including the impossible body snatch, he was capable of pulling the fraud knowing that it was a fraud. He is neither a dummy nor a fool. Of them all,, he had a better knowledge of the established official evidence than any of them. In fact, however, among his many fabrications is that the autopsy was begun later than the autopsy prosectors testified. Or the doctors, the federal agents there and the fairly numerous observers said it began. Aside from all else that is wrong with this "loathsome" fabrication, given the time the autopsy did begin there was no time at all for any alterations to be made on the body. (And, large as Lifton's book is, he has not a word on who did it or how it was allegedly done.)

None of them ever give thought to what proves their inventions impossible and, tragically, few are aware of that existing and established evidence -- or want to know it.

So, with Lifton, despite his first-rate knowledge of the official evidence, it is not easy to believe that when he invented his fraud of the film being altered beginning before dark the day of the assassination he did not know the facts that proved his fraud to have been impossible. Unlike the subject-matter ignoramuses, Fetzer in particular, while he so obviously ignored it, Lifton knew the facts. Others who knew little of the official evidence refused to believe it when it was cited to them.

Harry Livingstone thought and said in his Acknowledgement in his High Treason 2:

Then there is Harold Weisberg who, having endured a painful triple bypass operation and many serious infirmities of age, puts up with me and the many questions I should know better than to ask. But we must always go to the father to test our sometimes incredible wild or dumb ideas, and Harold is the man to kick them in the ass. I am grateful for his time and great help (High Treason 2, pages 11-12).

After he had finished promoting that book he phoned me to ask what he should look for because he was going to the Archives to study the Zapruder film.

I could not believe that he published two very fat books allegedly on the subject and had written much about that film without having looked at it but he assured me that was the truth.

"What you should look at Harry, you will not want to see," I told him.

When he asked me why I said, "Because it disproves what you are so high on and I'm sure you do not want to know that."

I was referring to his having made a big point out of the back of the President's head allegedly having been blown out. The very back.

"No, I want to know the truth," Harry assured me.

So, I told him about the nine frames of the film that the Commission was to have printed and did not print because Shaneyfelt had omitted them when he made the black-and-white-prints of what was not to be printed in color. Then I told him about my seeing those frames and that, at the very beginning of those that had been withheld by the FBI, the back of the head is clearly visible in two and not a hair seemed out of place. I saw not a trace of blood on it, none on the back of the head, and none on that part of shirt collar, which was clearly visible and, although with the color, the pattern and the material of his jacket one can't be as certain, I did look for blood on the back and I saw none.

Not a drop of blood and not a trace of a wound was visible on the back of the President's head,

I expected a strong reaction but I did not get one.

About three weeks later Harry called me up. He was full of gratitude.

"I want to thank you," are his approximate words, "I saw what you said you saw and although I always believed that the back of the head had been blown out, clearly it was not. I always want the truth, whatever it is, and the film is clear on that. I appreciate your help in this."

But the more he thought about that, with his strong belief that he saw and understood what others did not and could not, the more convinced he became that he is never wrong, whatever the evidence may be, and from this he progressed to the certainty that the Zapruder film had to have been faked.

Anything in the film that was not in accord with his belief was what was faked.

The more he thought of this conviction, the more he came to believe that I had to be some kind of agent. There is no point in repeating all the mythology he created, with the help of those in Texas who saw means of using him for their own ends. The long and short of it is that he came out with a massive and infamous book that libeled many of us. It was a safe libel because, if we could afford it, at our ages and with our health problems we could not think of spending the years into which such lawsuits can be stretched to collect money damages from him and from his publisher who, knowing that those who had been libeled were old and ill, assumed there would be no lawsuits. The publisher, whether or not having

other considerations and interests, seemingly assumed that when one who was accepted as a critic, one who had had extensive exposure on radio talk shows attacked other critics as agents of one kind or another it would sell the book.

How much it sold is illustrated by that publisher contracting no more books supposedly on the assassination, as the many he published, almost without exception, were not. They were the imaginings of those who had no real basis for what they made up.

Simply because I had told him accurately what the back of the President's head looked like in the Zapruder film -- and I examined those original 35mm color slides Life made for Commission – and told him of it what he did not want to hear and did not want to see in it, I evolved, in his writing, and probably in his belief, as an assistant to one of his (imagined) assassination conspirators , the fabulously wealthy and elderly H. L. Hunt.

This digression is to give the reader an idea of how some of these so-called "theories" develop and the kinds of minds that develops them.

Livingstone had a single and obviously prejudiced source he did not check with me, a source out to get revenge on the Hunt sons who had fired him (and not him alone) as a thief, and by then, with the old man dead, and the dead unable to sue, they turned to the existing fiction that H. L. Hunt was one of those who conspired to have Kennedy killed.

They told Livingstone I worked for Hunt, was paid by him, and although there was no truth at all in any of this, it was all he needed to write about me as complicit in the assassination because of my alleged but non-existing relationship with H. L. Hunt, the imagined chief conspirator.

How many times Livingstone's fabrications – lies -- have been believed can only be imagined.

The harm they have done, to those libeled to the quest for truth and to the national state of

mind also can only be imagined. But it is real and it is hurtful.

What should be thought about is the benefit all of this rabid and irrational effort to live a story-book life, all this misleading and misinforming of the people, which is real but for which there is no measure, has the effect of protecting the actual assassins and those who conspired to have the President assassinated. All this wretchedly ignorant intellectual trash dignified by referring to it as theory, provides excuses, for what the government did and did not do. It leads many to believe, and for an errant government to say, that these "theories" typify all criticism of the governments treatment of assassination.

All legitimate criticism is equated with this terrible and misleading stuff and is ignored in and out of the government and in and by the media.

The scope and enormity of some of these baseless conspiracies all of which are made up without the knowledge of the official evidence required to be able to avoid irresponsibility and worse is not possessed by almost all of those who make them up. More, anyone who disagrees with them or whom they imagine might disagree with them becomes part of still another conspiracy to the many who lack rationality along with their lack of knowledge.

When George Michael Evica was a professor in a Hartford, Connecticut college and associated with a monthly publication then calling itself The Third Decade (after the assassination) and with Charles Drago, a Rhode Island advertising man. (Drago had been in touch with me for help on an assassination movie script he visualized), the two of them got their brilliant heads together and decided that I had to be some kind of CIA agent. They sought a scholarly paper for a conference they were to holding in Providence. I'd had no contact of any kind with Evica and only a few exchanged letters, on his initiative, with Drago years earlier. I had before then filed more than a dozen FOIA lawsuits to bring withheld official evidence to light. They yielded about a third of a million pages. From the first I'd given all others free access to all of that. One of those lawsuits was cited by the Congress for its 1974 amending of the Act so that FBI and CIA records, among, others, would be accessible under FOIA.

And to those college-educated ignoramuses, I was a CIA agent!

These self-conceived geniuses had full-time, jobs so even if they had wanted to, and from what little I know of them what oozes from murk of their minds is all the fact and understanding they require, they had little time for real research with more than ten million words published by the Commission, with an initial archive of more than two hundred cubic feet of Commission records in the National Archives. And then the man they alleged was a CIA compelled disclosure of a third of a million pages of records that had been withheld.

Minds gifted as theirs are could easily convert Jesus into Lucifer.

But these are only illustrations. They are not and they are not presented as typical of all critics but to a large degree they do typify the thinking of most critics.

Aside from who are imagined to have been the conspirators -- that cannot be referred to as theories any more than the single-bullet fabrication of the Commission could be because theories, to be real theories, require a factual basis -- of all that has been made up it is probable that these two adopted by Fetzer as his own are widely believed among those who consider themselves critics.

As we have seen, the alleged altering of the Zapruder film was impossible, and none of those concepts had anything that could be called a factual basis.

The Lifton fabrication adopted by Fetzer, as we saw, was so impossible it had the original and a copy of the Zapruder film in Washington long before the processing was completed in Dallas!

There is no shortage of other proofs of the impossibility of that alteration of the film.

The purpose of the imagined alteration was to hide the fact that there had been a conspiracy.

But as we have seen with Zapruder's film and its Frame 202, that film established the fact that there had been a conspiracy. The Commission and the involved federal agencies just ignored that.

It is not the only such proof in the film as it exists, after the imagined alteration of it, that is factual proof of a conspiracy, but this one illustration is all that is needed to make this point.

Can it be believed that anyone, most of all the NPIC, far and away the most experienced and competent in film interpretation, would fake a film only to wind up with alterations that defeat the purpose of making those alterations, with that allegedly faked film "faked" into solid proof that there was a conspiracy?

It makes no sense at all and it did not happen.

Because the film is a graphic, because copies of the version Life gave Garrison were soon available and because of the attention to it by the major media, beginning the Geraldo Rivera show, then at night and on the ABC TV network, more attention has been lavished on the fabrications about it.

The X-rays that Mantik and others say were also altered also refute the official account of the assassination so any alteration of them was at best self-defeating, as with the Zapruder film, and as with the notions that the Zapruder film was altered, those alleged alterations of the X-rays prove that there had been a conspiracy. More, for Johnnie-come- latelies like Twyman, Fetzer and Mantik and those who agree with them, the official proof that the X-rays refute the Warren Commission was published in 1975 and available long before any of them got bitten by the assassination bug. It was also disclosed in the 1969 case in court referred to above so, literally, it has been available since 1969, if not published until 1975.

Unlike Lifton and the Zapruder film, Mantik does not tell us who he believes toyed with those X-rays. However, from the X-rays in the official evidence, those Mantik examined carefully, it is apparent that those who allegedly altered those X-rays were ignorant, ham-handed -- utterly incompetent and entirely unsuited for a the alleged job that required great skill and competence, as well as the most detailed knowledge of the fact of the crime. He or they would have had to know what to get off the X-rays and what to add to them. With those X-rays under lock and key all the time, those who could have done as Mantik says are few and they include no known specialists in X-rays, leave alone specialists in altering them. In what he was making up from the depths of his subject-matter ignorance Fetzer missed one here because it was the Secret Service that had those X –rays all the time, the Secret Service that was to guard and protect the President.

The Secret Service that could not even process color film had the skills, leave alone the knowledge required to doctor those X-rays?

Not likely.

Nor is it likely that, if it knew where those X-rays were, that the CIA could have gotten past the guards and figured out the combination on the then safe, then gotten out past the guards again, and, either with or after the alleged nefarious alteration of the X-rays, and if with the X-rays, then gotten back into the building, again past the guards, all unseen and undetected.

If the alterations were believed to have been made in place, only real experts would know the bulk and the sophistication of the equipment required that that would have somehow been gotten past the guards both ways and then to have avoided attracting any attention while allegedly being used to make those alleged alterations.

None of this is established. All of it is conjecture.

The first Commission knowledge of the first of the disproofs of what it would conclude that is in those X-rays was what the prosectors told it in pre-testimony conferences and is clear in the X-rays. Those doctors later testified to this: there were about forty fragments so tiny they were described as "dust-like."

Now that is absolutely impossible with hardened military ammunition manufactured, as was required, under the standards of the Geneva convention. The whole purpose of that agreement was to eliminate the possibility of military ammunition acting this way. I went into this in some detail and with guidance from inside the Pentagon in NEVER AGAIN! and did earlier in Post Mortem.

Altering the X-rays and leaving this in was also self-defeating. This alone refutes the Warren Report.

The Warren Report that did depend on magic, the magic it attributed to which it attributed an impossible history. That bullet, Exhibit 399, is required to have inflicted all seven non-fatal injuries on the President and the governor . It had to have lurked inside the Governor's thigh (three inches from where it allegedly entered the thigh, as the Commission did not bother history with), and then to have decided to emerge, unassisted and unseen, at the hospital, somehow to have gotten under the mattress of the gurney, and to have decided to emerge from under it when a doctor nudged it when he wanted to enter the men's room. From the career attributed to it, it emerged without a visible scratch and with only an estimated official minuscule amount of its metal missing and all of that little bit from its core of lead alloy. Some of which the FBI removed for testing – more than it needed for testing.

The fact is that the doctors disagreed with the Commission on the possibility of this, as I reported in my 1965 Whitewash in its last two chapters. All three autopsy doctors did not agree with it and all the Dallas doctors who testified and were asked disagreed. The Dallas doctors could and did add to what the autopsy pathologists could testify to. We come to those added details.

This bullet had officially to have entered the President where his neck joins joined his back. One of the major problems with this that those who alleged toying with the film of various kind to eliminate such problems must have overlooked this because the autopsy pictures show that the bullet hole is down on the back, exactly where Boswell's body chart showed it and exactly where the hidden Burkley death certificate located it.

Nobody with any knowledge of the crime and with access to the autopsy film would have failed to alter the pictures because without doing that, in any open and honest account this alone refutes the Warren Report.

The bullet is then required to have passed through the President without striking bone and to have exited the front of his neck, going through the shirt collar and the knot of the tie.

The FBI's pictures, as I reported without any denial or refutation, that it gave the Commission required all the FBI's skills to be as unclear and as meaningless as evidence. However, in the picture of the necktie, even after the FBI played a few tricks with it, even untying and then retying that knot, there is no bullet hole in that tie. Not in the knot, and not anywhere else in it.

If the Commission had a picture of the front of the President's shirt I did not find it in the Archives and the Commission published no such picture. (After all. it had only twenty-seven volumes that it published.) However, it did have a small picture of parts of the collar that the FBI used and its Exhibit 60 to its report ordered by President Johnson the night of the assassination, CD1 in the Commission's files. It was a posed picture for which the FBI had unknotted the knot and posed the tie with an imitation knot to make it appear that there was a hole in it. When I saw that picture I made a FOIA request for them of the FBI, and it did give then Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindeinst, an original print of it and Kleindeinst, seeing no reason not to let me have them as the law required, he mailed them to me. I printed the one of that showed the shirt collar in Post Mortem and the one the FBI was so successful in making close to entirely useless, of the necktie, in NEVER AGAIN!

There is no bullet hole in the shirt collar. There are two slits and those slits do not coincide, as they would have if caused by a bullet. One slit is much longer than the other. One is entirely below the seam by which the collar is attached to the shirt and only the longer one is in both the shirt and the collar.

Nobody wanting to hide evidence in the assassination would have permitted these FBI pictures to remain unaltered. Particularly not J. Edgar Hoover, who Twyman regards as one of the conspirators. These pictures, official pictures, in any honest examination refute the Warren Report, individually and collectively.

It would have been at the least foolhardy to permit evidence refuting the official solution to exist in official hands and files while running the great and dangerous risk of forgery with the X-rays. Leaving this evidence undisturbed eliminated any conspirators' benefit from altering, the X-rays, which had to have been done long before any use was made of them by anybody in any investigation.

Mantik, who is Fetzer's chief authority on the alleged forging of the X-rays and the major contributor to this volume, did have and did cite Post-Mortem. That book is the one that brought to light the fact that Humes testified that he burned his first draft of the autopsy report -- in his recreation room fireplace -- as soon as he learned that Oswald had been killed. Which means as soon as he learned there would be no trial and he would not be examined and cross-examined on the report he would file.

At least Mantik, of those involved in Fetzer's book, was familiar with the contents of Post Mortem. It does not seem likely that he opened a book of six hundred and sixty-two pages and had it open to one page (Post Mortem, page 524), and that he then looked nowhere else in that book. Especially when the page he cites, 524, is the page on which I reproduced in facsimile Burkley's acceptance and approval of Humes' violation of autopsy regulations and all standards which, as I show in NEVER AGAIN!, strictly prohibit the destruction of any autopsy record.

Mantik says at the point where his source note cites Post Mortem. that "The first draft was certified by Humes as burned by him in his home fireplace (Assassination Science, page 114). This refers to the autopsy report.

Only, that is not what Humes "certified," as we saw earlier. What he actually certified is that "I have destroyed by burning certain preliminary rough draft notes . . ." But in his Commission testimony he testified that he held those notes in his hands at that moment and Arlen Specter then stated that they were and would be in Commission Document 371 and Commission Exhibit 387. But as stated above, they were not when I went to the Archives to see them in 1966. What Humes actually testified, and Mantik refers to in what is cited immediately above, is:

In the privacy of my own home, early in the morning of Sunday, November 24, I made a draft of this report, which I later revised and of which this represents the revision. That draft I personally burned in the fireplace of my recreation room (2H373).

What I actually wrote is in a long footnote all of which is relevant, I regret to say, to Mantik's scholarship and dependability:

This in the original of Humes' certificate that he burned a draft of the autopsy report. It is the same as the copy printed by the Commission, 17H48, which does not include the handwritten approval of Dr. Burkley. Indeed, what can be said when the President's physician certifies that he accepts and approves the burning of evidence in the crime! See p. 261.

This certificate has led to the myth, propagated by Arlen Specter, that Humes burned his autopsy notes. "The record is plain," Specter told U. S. News and World Report, 10/10/66, "that there had been a series of notes taken by Dr. Humes at the time of the actual performance of the autopsy which had been destroyed." Specter knew better, since he put this certificate (absent the Burkley endorsement) into evidence and had it confirmed by Humes (2H373). As the certificate on the next page makes clear, the "autopsy notes" were preserved. What Humes burned he alternately described as "preliminary draft notes" (above) and "that draft" of the autopsy report later revised, (2H373).

Having been assured by Humes that the first draft of the autopsy report had been destroyed forever by burning, Specter asked not a single question, not even the simple, indispensable questions: Why? On this the Commission's record is barren. Specter, however, would like the public to believe otherwise. He now claims Humes "explained his reasons (for burning) fully before the Commission" . . . in his testimony.

Before the Commission, Specter was unequivocal, as quoted above, that he had and showed Humes what Humes identifies as his autopsy notes, not his autopsy draft. There is much more on this, with full and direct quotation, in Post Mortem but the purpose is to show that Mantik was familiar with the contents in Post Mortem and to indicate some of the questions he raised in what he wrote in "The JFK Assassination: Cause for Doubt." It is clear that there is cause for doubt about some of the writing supposedly on the assassination. And some about Mantik.

(As we saw earlier, from the Commission's available records and from those it had hidden I was able to print facsimiles of the official receipts for those notes, also described as the autopsy "working papers," from Humes through his chain of command to Admiral Burkley at the White House, all after the Humes burning. That was before his testimony, prior to Specter getting Humes then under oath, to agree that those in CD 371 and Exhibit 387 were his autopsy notes. All of this and more like it is in Post Mortem, which Mantik has. He knew.

What Mantik writes on page 122, just a few pages later, also raises the same questions but again that is not the purpose in quoting it here, where he is trying to make a big thing of the 6.5 mm fragment that, as Mantik does not say, I was the first to report, in Post Mortem, as we saw above. What he wrote is:

After reviewing the X-rays on 1 November 1966, at the National Archives, the autopsy pathologists, the radiologist, and the photographer stated, "However, careful examination at the autopsy, and the photographs and X-rays taken during the autopsy, revealed no evidence of a bullet or of a major portion of a bullet (emphasis added) in the body of the President This statement is remarkable for what these reviewers do not say: they fail to comment on what they actually saw on the film during this review on 1 November 1966!

Mantik has no source note on this and no footnote. He gives no source.

It should be noted that in his sensationalizing of what he got from an unspecified source he says what is "remarkable" is that the doctors "do not say; they fail to comment on what they actually saw on the films during this review on November 1, 1966" (his emphasis).

What is really "remarkable" is that Mantik refers only to the X-ray film, and what is "remarkable" about it he knows from Post Mortem (on page 578).

As stated above, I printed that autopsy prosectors report in facsimile in Post Mortem (on pages 575-579). Aside from what I had in the lengthy and detailed text I annotated some of the several hundred pages of copies of official documents in the appendix. On next the last page of their report, under the heading "NO OTHER WOUNDS," the autopsy doctors state:

The X-ray films established that there were small metallic fragments in the head. However, careful examination at the autopsy, and the photographs and x-rays taken during the autopsy, revealed no evidence of a bullet or of a major portion of a bullet in the body of the President and revealed no evidence of any missile wounds other than those described above.

I commented in a footnote on what they state:

Note the careful game with words under "NO OTHER WOUNDS." Dr. Humes, sworn testimony is that the X-rays revealed no evidence of bullet fragments at any point in the President's body except the head. The official solution of the crime cannot stand unless that testimony is true, for the bullet officially alleged to have wounded the neck, 399, is already impossibly burdened by the requirement that it have produced all of Connally's wounds as well. Here the doctors say only that the X-rays reveal "no evidence of a bullet or of a major portion of a bullet in the body of the President" (as distinguished from the head). What this peculiar language must mean, and as the second panel later confirmed, is that there are indeed "minor portions of a bullet" in the President's body, a negation of the official solution.

Mantik found it "remarkable" that the doctors did not go for what he tries to make a big thing out of and may or may not be that big thing. (Mantik addresses his theory, not any alternatives to it.) It is therefore fair to find it really "remarkable" that in Mantik's contributions to it and in this book supposedly on the assassination itself the book mistitled "Assassination Science" -- that we got another indication of the nature of that "science" when the presence of metal in the President's throat area refutes the Warren Report and those who refer to themselves as "scientists" know it and yet make no mention of it.

The footnote is not a wise crack. It is confirmed in the Department of Justice panel report also referred to above and also in facsimile in Post Mortem's following this report, on 580-595. Instead of the evasive language in which those doctors actually reported seeing metallic fragments in the President's neck area, while pretending not to, the Department of Justice panel was quite specific, not in any way evasive:

Neck Region: Films #8, 9 and 10 allowed visualization of the lower neck. Subcutaneous emphysema is present just to the right of the cervical spine immediately above the apex of the right lung. Also several small metallic fragments are present in this region. There is no evidence of fracture of either scapula or of the clavicles, or of the ribs or of any of the cervical and thoracic vertebrae (Post Mortem, 592).

While there is no reason to believe that Mantik, who is also a doctor, did not understand this language, the footnote I had on that page should eliminate any possible question:

In describing the all too few X-rays of the "neck region" the panel demolishes the Warren Report and the integrity of the autopsy doctors' testimony. Humes had sworn there were no metallic fragments in the neck visible on the X-ray, (2H361) 399 is clearly unfragmented, yet it had to have caused the neck wounds for the Commission case to survive. Thus, the panel's statement that "several small metallic fragments are present" in the neck region, although lacking the detail and precision that might be expected from such eminences, is sufficient to prove that the Report and the autopsy findings on which it was based are irrevocably wrong (Post Mortem, page 592)

Once again the same troubling questions about Mantik and this kind of "science" and about whether he and Fetzer really wrote about the assassination or used the assassination to promote themselves and advance their theories without any real contact with the real evidence or ever really intending any.

Earlier we referred to Post Mortem having brought to light what the panel said about the location of the entry wound on the President's head and about that hundred millimeters of distance between that point and where the autopsy said it was. Remember in reading that excerpt that Mantik had and used Post Mortem -- and that it told him much, very much, that he did not use. Remember also that this was the first public mention of that hundred millimeters that had become known officially and had been kept secret by the Department of Justice:

On one of the lateral films of the skull (#2), a hole measuring approximately 8 mm. in diameter on the outer surface of the skull and as much as 20 mm. on the internal surface can be seen in profile approximately 100 mm. above the external occipital protuberance. The bone of the lower edge of the hole is depressed. Also there is, embedded in the outer table of the skull close to the lower edge of the hole, a large metallic fragment which on the antero-posterior film (#l) lies 25 mm. to the right of the midline. This fragment as seen in the latter film is round and measures 6.5 sm. in diameter. . . . (Post Mortem, page 590).

Elsewhere this large hole in the President's head is described as having ragged edges, not the kind of edge the alleged surgery to it that Lifton made up for making up himself rich and famous as it did.

I did not assume in writing Post Mortem that all those who read it would have Ph.D.s like Fetzer and Mantik (who is also a physician, an M.D.) so in a footnote I spelled out the obvious meaning of this rather large discrepancy when the object no larger than a head:

Here we learn that the entrance wound in the head, never measured by the autopsy doctors who preferred to located it merely as "slightly above" the occipital protuberance, was actually 100 mm. above that point. No silly millimeter here. That is 4 inches higher than the autopsy doctors made out, putting the wound high on the back of the President's head instead of near the hairline as the doctors swore to and depicted on drawings. This in how the Panel "supported" the autopsy report.

It may be difficult for those with degrees representing learnedness to understand that this alone, as so many things we have seen do alone (and we have not here seen all of them), refutes the Warren Commission, but I believe that those not burdened by these advanced degrees, those who depend on plain, old-fashioned common sense, can understand that with the conclusions of the Warren Report based on where it says bullets impacted, what it attributed to the bullet it says impacted four inches lower than the X-rays show cannot be attributed to what that ballet did when it actually hit four inches higher than the autopsy report and the Commission say.

This X-ray, too, refutes the Warren Report.

It therefore, based not on advanced degrees but plain old-fashioned common sense, is not easy to believe that those capable of latching onto the X-rays, unseen and unknown, and capable of making substantive alterations on those X-rays, would be stupid enough, incompetent enough, careless enough to fake X-rays that would do the opposite of what they were allegedly running all this risk for.

It does take advanced and specialized degrees to argue with the learned Dr. David Mantik,

Ph.D. and M.D., about whether his densitometer detected extra thickness of X-rays and whether that extra thickness could have come only from attempts to alter the X-rays, but it does not take all those advanced degrees to conclude that it makes no sense at all for that great risk to be run to alter the X-rays and then have those X-rays, after this imagined alteration, refute the Warren Report when the only reason for those alleged alteration was to make the X-rays support the expected official conclusion, that the dirty deed was by a lone and unassisted man.

As noted above and as reported in Post Mortem and NEVER AGAIN!, the latter supported by research for that book by a friend who was a career officer then assigned to the Pentagon, it is simply impossible for a bullet made in accord with the Geneva convention on humanitarian warfare, as those bullets the Commission said that Oswald used were manufactured, to fragment into a detected forty dust-like fragments -- and that does not include all those that exploded out of the head when the head explodes in response to the explosion of that bullet.

With it certain that the bullet which exploded inside the President's head and left in it these forty- "dust-like fragments" not having been a full-jacketed bullet with the hardened jacket required by that international agreement at Geneva, it is apparent that a soft or a frangible or varminting or hunting-type bullet was used.

What is considered humanitarian for humans is not for animals and what is considered humanitarian for animals is not humanitarian for people, so this kind of bullet that fragments so, which would make a human suffer excessively was not used in warfare under that convention. The convention called for a bullet that would make a through-and-through wound and they are less likely to be fatal, more likely to heal, and the additional military value of requiring the time of many others in the military to care for an injured solider. That extra help required reduces the number of those available to fight the war, a side benefit.

But with animals the concept is that they can linger and suffer from a clean, through-and-through wound so the softer kind of ammunition, bullets that behave as did that one in the President's head, is considered more humanitarian because the wounded animal then has less chance of lingering and

suffering.

All the different kinds of soft bullets require a solid base to fit into the shell that contains the powder that that propels them. It is the rest of the bullet that is "soft," not its base.

With Mantik's extensive and advanced d formal education perhaps not extending into bullets and which some of us with less education might consider to be an essential in writing about them and what they did or could do, he misses what could be a very simple explanation of that six point five millimeter fragment the X-rays show at the very back of the President's head, just barely remaining inside of it: it could be the base of a soft bullet or some kind of frangible bullet. If that is so, then the allegedly altered X-rays, on this added basis, could not have been altered with the intention of supporting the expected lone-assassin official conclusion.

Had this been part of the alteration Mantik says it was, then on still an another basis it refutes the Warren Report. It would have had to have been a bullet fired from the front of the President's head. Oswald is said to have been behind him.

Consistent with this is the pattern of dispersal of those fragments, as I pointed out in Post Mortem -- which Mantik has -- with an authoritative source.

Now where there was an alteration, and a very serious alteration, Mantik did know about because it is-one of the numerous alterations made in the revised autopsy report, the new autopsy report that was written as soon as Oswald was dead and Humes and others know there would be no trial at which Humes and the others would be examined and cross-examined. It is another of those hidden and most basic official records I found hidden in the Archives and reproduced in Post Mortem from those originals, some used by Fetzer without his giving their source and none used by Mantik, who should have included them in his thinking based on which came up with his alteration invention.

Of all that can be quoted, we here limit ourselves to what the entirely improper revised autopsy report, revised after the original one was destroyed, said and that had what it said was changed into.

We do not know what Humes reported as a medical fact when he had to believe that he would be called testify to it and then would be subject to cross-examination about it but we do know that before he burned the original autopsy report he anticipated a trial with Oswald the lone assassin and after Oswald was killed, while Humes still anticipated the lone-assassin official account of the assassination, he knew he would not be examined and cross-examined on that.

In this revised autopsy report, where Humes goes into this wound to the head, on page seven of his holograph, page 515 of Post Mortem, what he originally wrote in his revision and according to his testimony what he handed in, reads after, again Humes' testimony, Admiral C. B. Galloway had him change his description of that wound. Before the change it "is a puncture wound tangential to the surface of the scalp." They were in a hurry and it was not rewritten again. Instead what was entirely improper was done. Admiral Galloway told Humes what changes to make in his revised autopsy and Humes made them. That is strictly forbidden. If changes are necessary, both versions are preserved and if necessary, there is an explanation of the change or changes and the reasons for it or for them.

But here, however, and we are again talking about that hundred millimeter or four inch difference, Admiral Galloway's orders were followed, with the changes visible and what Humes wrote clearly visible underneath the lines drawn through it. That it was an entrance wound, a "puncture" wound is eliminated. That it was tangential to the surface of the scalp," which is hardly at the base of the head, also was eliminated.

All of this was a basic change. It was eliminated, and replaced by a single word, "lacerated."

But before this entirely improper additional change in what the autopsy said, the most substantive change, the autopsy was consistent with what the Department of Justice panel said about that wound, about it being four inches higher than the autopsy report placed it.

That is to say, the altered autopsy report was revised again and none of this showed in the typing of it.

(All uses of the word "puncture" were eliminated from the autopsy report, as first reported in my 1965 Whitewash. But it, too, was of no interest to Twyman, Fetzer and Mantik. They were interested in imagined alterations but not the established actual ones.

And that is what is basic in these two books and in the Mantik contribution to Fetzer's as it is to what Twyman uses of what Mantik says.

Mantik has Whitewash, too.

Because I was forced to be the publisher of the first book on the Warren Report and the assassination and thereafter had to continue to publish to be published, I know who has my books if they were bought from me. As those Mantik has were.

In response to an inquiry from him we sent him, the information about them on January 4, 1993. He then ordered five of them, the four of the Whitewash series and Post Mortem. I mailed them January 26 of that year.

On the card records we keep of books we mail we have his address as "Eisenhower Medical Center, 39000 Bob Hope Drive, Rancho Mirage, California.

Rancho Mirage is where Twyman lives.

So, yes, Dr. David Mantik, Ph.D., like Fetzer, a Ph.D., and, it would seem, the Fetzer kind of a Ph.D., was fully informed, including by having in those books a large selection of what had been hidden and was suppressed by the Commission and a large amount that for his own purposes Mantik also suppressed.

With an enormous amount of official information he simply ignored, despite its relevance to what he was saying.

Much of this official information is only-source information and most of it is original-source information, what scholars usually cite.

Most of us have no way of evaluating what Mantik writes but we do know that from what is stated above that it makes no sense at all and that in order to say what he does say he had to eliminate much, very much.

Which puts him in the class with Twyman and Fetzer.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download