Len
Osanic, the Canadian researcher who produces the Black Op Radio program on the
internet, has also produced a series of 50 Reasons videos with Jeff
Carter, including Reason #47 on my work
on the Air Force One Radio Transmission tapes.
All of the programs are well done, and bring out important aspects of
the assassination that the mainstream media ignores.
The
complete program:
.jpg)
Dr. Cyril Wecht - Host of the Pittsburgh Conference on the 50th Anniversary of the JFK Assassination
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Jeff Morley, who heard my presentation at the Wecht Conference, recognized the importance of the Air Force One radio transmission tapes and immediately blogged about it, and then followed up with a series of articles, including one on the references to Air Force General LeMay and Ed Primeau, the acoustic engineer who produced the combined and enhanced tape we are now working with. The Detroit Free Press is also planning an article on Primeau and his work.
The same week as the Wecht conference Esquire Magazine published "Flight from Dallas" and Washingtonian Magazine published "Angel is Airborne," both long articles that utilized some of the Air Force One radio transmissions, but neglected most of the aspects of the tapes that I included in my Wecht presentation.
Morley also mentioned both Ed Primeau and me and the work we have done on the Air Force One radio tapes in an Op-Ed article published in The Dallas Morning News on the last Sunday in October, 2013.
Morley also mentioned both Ed Primeau and me and the work we have done on the Air Force One radio tapes in an Op-Ed article published in The Dallas Morning News on the last Sunday in October, 2013.
“The government created these recordings.
The editing shows that somebody made decisions about what they wanted the
public to know and hear and what they didn’t want the public to know and hear.”
- Audio engineer Ed Primeau on tapes of conversations
from Air Force One, the presidential jet, on November 22, 1963, the day
President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas.
For more on this story:
“Enhanced Air Force One tape captures top general’s
response to JFK’s murder” (JFK Facts, Oct. 19, 2013)
“What’s
the most important piece of JFK assassination evidence to surface in the past
five years?” (JFK Facts, Oct. 27, 2013)
Listen to the enhanced Air Force One tapes from
November 22, 1963, in four parts, as prepared by Primeau Forensics.
Enhanced Air Force One tape capture a top general’s
response to JFK’s murder
The most complete version
of the Air Force One radio transmissions made on the day President John F.
Kennedy was killed 50 years ago were aired publicly for the first time today at
a JFK assassination conference at Duquesne
University.
The two hour long recording, available online here,
captures the reaction of top U.S. government officials, including
ultra-conservative Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, to the news that JFK had been
shot in Dallas.
LeMay who was harshly critical of JFK’s liberal
foreign policy, once described the people around Kennedy as “cockroaches” who
deserved crushing. The enhanced tape shows that LeMay immediately returned to
Washington on the evening of November 22, raising the possibility that one of
JFK’s fiercest critics attended his autopsy.
While experts debate the
so-called acoustics evidence about whether the sound of the gunfire
that killed JFK was recorded, the Air Force One tapes are another piece of JFK
acoustics evidence that is less disputed and less well known yet perhaps more
important to the assassination story.
The new recording combines for the first time two
different Air Force One tapes that have previously surfaced. The LBJ
presidential library released one version of the tape in the late 1970s. A
longer version surfaced in 2011 when a Philadelphia auction house offered
an earlier generation tape that had been in the possession of the family of
Gen. Chester Clifton, JFK’s military aide, who died in 1991.
The tapes were combined and enhanced by Primeau
Forensics, a Michigan firm that does audio enhancement and voice
identification, at the request of JFK researcher Bill Kelly. The result is a
new piece of JFK assassination evidence.
Bill Kelly, JFK researcher who created the enhanced
Air Force One tapes
The LBJ library has posted the
early, shorter version of the Air Force One tape, which includes LBJ’s
conversation with Rose Kennedy, JFK’s mother. The National Archives has posted the Clifton tape online.
When TV talk show host Piers Morgan reported on
the Clifton tape in 2011, he erroneously said that the Clifton tape was
“unedited.” In fact, the original, complete and unedited Air Force One tapes
have never been released to the public and their whereabouts are unknown.
The new enhanced recording shows that the passages
about Gen. LeMay were edited out of the version released by the LBJ library,
according to Kelly.
The tape captures an aide to LeMay trying to get in
touch with him.
- Right. He is in bound. His code name is Grandson, and I want to talk to him.
- Grandson. Okay sir, we’ll see what we can do. We’re real busy with Air Force One right now.
What Col. George Dorman wanted to tell LeMay is not
heard on the tape. But the enhanced tape reveals that the Air Force sent a
plane to pick up Gen. LeMay who was on a fishing trip in Michigan on the
day JFK was killed. LeMay flew back to National Airport in Washington, arriving
in the early evening of November 22.
JFK’s autopsy took place at Bethesda Naval Hospital
later that night.
Dr. Pierre Finck, one of the pathologists who
conducted the autopsy, testified at the trial of New Orleans businessman Clay
Shaw, that senior U.S. military officers had taken an active part in
proceedings, and implied that they were in charge of the autopsy. Finck
intimated that the pathologists were forbidden to dissect the president’s back
and throat wounds by the generals in attendance.
Another participant in JFK’s autopsy said that one
of the military officers attending the autopsy was smoking a cigar. LeMay was
famous for smoking cigars in his public appearances.
Kelly said that the Clifton and LBJ Library tapes
were copied from the longer Air Force One recordings have never been made
public. The complete Air Force One records remains one of the most important
pieces of missing JFK assassination evidence.
Kelly had previously released a transcript of the
two tapes on his blog, JFK Countercoup.
When audio engineer Ed Primeau learned in 2011 about
a previously unknown recording of radio communications to and from Air Force
One on November 22, 1963, he volunteered his own time and expertise to enhance
the tape for public consumption.
Air Force One on the evening of November 22, 1963
(Mary Ferrell Foundation)
That was the day the President John F. Kennedy was
shot dead on a Dallas street and the new President Lyndon Johnson and First
Lady Jackie Kennedy flew back to Washington with JFK’s body.
“I thought this could really be exciting,” Primeau
said in a phone interview. “I’ve always been fascinated by history and the JFK
conspiracy questions.”
Primeau, known nationally for his work analyzing
recordings heard in the Trayvon Martin murder trial, worked with JFK researcher
Bill Kelly at no charge to enhance the tape.
The result is an important, if incomplete,
historical document, largely ignored by mainstream news organizations on the
50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination.
The tapes illuminate a pivotal moment in America as
the far flung branches of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies responded
to the news that the liberal president had been shot dead in right-wing Dallas.
The new tape revealed that Air Force General Curtis
LeMay, a harsh critic of President Kennedy’s foreign policy, immediately returned to Washington where he may
have attended JFK’s autopsy. LeMay was notorious as an advocate of nuclear war
who thought Kennedy a weak-willed liberal. For his part, JFK thought LeMay was
bellicose to the point of danger.
(See “Enhanced Air Force One tapes capture a top general’s response to
JFK’s murder” (JFK Facts, Oct. 19, 2013)
“People have always wanted to know where was Curtis
LeMay on the day Kennedy was shot,” historian Douglas Brinkley told Piers
Morgan. “There have been mixed messages about it. This tape provides
exactly where he was.”
Cleaning up the tapes
Primeau’s work was painstaking, taking a total of
perhaps forty hours of his time and many more for one of his assistants.
He and his staff applied noise reduction, compression and other
techniques to make the conversations on the tape more audible.
Kelly, a veteran JFK researcher who also blogs about the history of golf, compiled a
transcript of the conversations heard on the tape, including the dramatic
moment when a plane carrying six members of Kennedy’s cabinet turned around in
mid-air over the Pacific Ocean to return to Washington.
Audio engineer Ed Primeau
Primeau and Kelly compared the new tape, which
turned up in a Philadelphia auction house, to a different Air Force One recording,
made public by the LBJ Library in the 1970s. The two tapes have some
conversations in common but the newer tape is longer.
Primeau combined the two recordings to create the
most complete account of the communications between the presidential jet and
the rest of the U.S. government on November 22, 1963.
Primeau also added video from a jet and a scrolling
version of Kelly’s transcript to make for a more listener friendly experience.
(You can watch/listen to the incomplete Air Force
One tape on Primeau’s website here. The Primeau-Kelly recording
is more complete and aurally superior to the version posted on theNational Archives website.)
After close to year of work Primeau concluded that
both of the existing Air Force One tapes came from a longer recording.
He stressed that his view is not a scientific finding, but more of
“a hunch” based on experience.
Audio forensic insights into the JFK story
“When I was an audio engineer recording music or the
spoken word, we always made what we called a safety copy. That was a direct
patch from one reel-to-reel machine to another reel-to-reel machine. I would
suspect that whoever made these tapes would have made a safety copy of these
transmissions before they edited them,” he said.
“Another reason that I don’t think these tapes are
originals is the amount amount of noise, the lack of clarity and the lack of
signal on the tapes,” Primeau added. “That is a clue that they’re not original
recordings.”
Primeau said he detected signs of editing at five to
ten different places on each of the two existing tapes. He is not suggesting
the tapes have been doctored or falsified, but rather they are shorter, edited
versions extracted from a longer recording.
The available tapes are evidence that a more
complete Air Force One tape from November 22, 1963 existed at some point,
“The government created these recordings,” Primeau
explained. “The editing shows that somebody made decisions about what they
wanted the public to know and hear and what they didn’t want the public to know
and hear.”
The missing Air Force One tape
At fifty five years of age, Primeau was a young boy
in Michigan on November 22, 1963.; He recalls hearing a neighbor scream that
Kennedy had been killed. “It was always in the back of mind after that,” he
said.
Primeau says his work with the tapes in the past
year has only raised new questions.
“What were the things that were removed?” he
wondered. “Were there politically incorrect remarks? Were there conversation
about the movements of other governmental officials? Safety considerations?”
If the original Air Force One tape was not copied or
destroyed, he added, it may have deteriorated.
“The anticipated shelf life of analog tape is twenty
five years,” Primeau said. “After that it starts to deteriorate. The metal
oxide on the nylon tape starts to crumble and rust.”
Primeau does not rule the possibility out that a
more complete version of the Air Force One tape could turn up one day.Such a
tape could provide new details about how the U.S. military and national
security agencies reacted to the gunfire that left JFK dead in his arms of
First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and delivered Lyndon Johnson into the seat of
power in the White House.
“It would be wonderful if [the original tape]
surfaced,” Primeau said. “I told Bill, if that should ever happen, count me
in.” A
previously unknown recording of radio communications to and from Air
Force One on November 22,1963, is among the most important new pieces of JFK
evidence.
You can listen to it here.
This reel of tape surfaced at Philadelphia auction
house in 2011. The recording was part of the estate of the family of Gen.
Chester Clifton, a military aide to JFK’s who died in 1991. Bill Kelly, a JFK
researcher, enlisted Primeau Forensics, a Michigan audio engineering firm,
to produce a cleaned up version of the tape.
Kelly’s presentation about the Air Force One tapes at
the recent trailblazing JFK conference at Duquesne Universityconvinced me
of its importance.
I write about the significance of the Air Force One
tapes in piece published in the Oct. 27, 2013, print edition of
the Dallas Morning News.
But don’t take my word for it. Decide for yourself.
Listen to the tape (parts 1,2 3, and 4) as cleaned
up and transcribe by Kelly andaudio
engineer Ed Primeau with a running transcript and visuals from Primeau Productions.
Jefferson Morley: What we still don’t know about
JFK’s assassination
Joseph Kaczmarek/AP
These White House communications tapes were
discovered in 2011, made in the immediate aftermath of President John F.
Kennedy's assassination involving Air Force One in flight from Dallas on Nov.
22, 1963.
By JEFFERSON MORLEY
Published: 25 October 2013 05:12 PM
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy
endures as the pre-eminent mystery of American history. How a popular president
came to be shot dead in broad daylight has never been explained by Washington
in a way that the majority of the American people find credible. A new History
Channel poll finds 71 percent of respondents reject the official story that one
man alone killed JFK on Nov. 22, 1963.
The tragedy in Dallas has been the subject of six
official inquiries over the past 50 years, hundreds of books and dozens of
documentaries. By common consent, the release of 4 million pages of long-secret
documents since Oliver Stone’s movie JFK has clarified some disputes
about the events leading to Kennedy’s death.
Yet the new records also raise new questions.
Secret CIA files: The nature of the CIA’s interest
in accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy was killed is still
shrouded in official secrecy, even after 50 years.
The story the CIA gave to the Warren Commission in
1964 — that Oswald had attracted only routine and sporadic attention — is
erroneous. Documents released by a civilian review panel in the 1990s revealed
that senior CIA officers had monitored Oswald closely between 1959 and 1963.
The officers most knowledgeable about Oswald before
JFK was killed reported to Jim Angleton, a legendary spymaster who headed the
agency’s counterintelligence staff, and Deputy Director Richard Helms, who
would become known as The Man Who Kept the Secrets.
Both are dead, yet their actions are not yet subject
to full disclosure. Last year, a CIA official acknowledged in a sworn affidavit
that the agency retains 1,100 records related to JFK’s assassination that have
never been made public.
These files are “not believed relevant” to JFK’s
death, according to the CIA.
The online database of the National Archives
indicates these records concern the operations of six CIA employees involved in
the JFK story who reported to Helms and Angleton.
The still-secret documents are found in files
generated by:
William K. Harvey, a legendary operative who oversaw
the CIA’s efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Harvey’s contempt for John and
Robert Kennedy cost him a high-ranking position in mid-1963.
David Phillips and Anne Goodpasture, career officers
who monitored Oswald’s movements in Mexico City weeks before JFK was killed. In
the ’70s, they testified that they learned about Oswald’s recent contacts with
suspected Soviet and Cuban intelligence officers in October 1963.
Howard Hunt and David Morales, two swashbuckling
operatives who made statements late in life that seemed to implicate themselves
in JFK’s assassination.
All of these officers knew each other in 1963. All
are deceased.
In the affidavit filed in federal court, CIA
information coordinator Michelle Meeks asserted that the 1,100 documents must
remain secret until at least October 2017 for reasons of “national security.
”
Air Force One tapes: New details about the
Pentagon’s response to JFK’s assassination have emerged in recent years, but a
significant portion of the story is missing.
In October 2011, a previously unknown recording of
Nov. 22, 1963, radio communications to and from Air Force One, the presidential
jet, surfaced at a Philadelphia auction house. The tape was found in the estate
of Gen. Chester Clifton, an aide to JFK who died in 1991.
The recording, donated to the National Archives,
revealed how the Air Force immediately sent a plane to pick up Chief of Staff
Curtis LeMay in Canada. LeMay, a harsh critic of JFK’s foreign policy, returned
to Washington, where he may have attended JFK’s autopsy.
The conversations about LeMay’s movements were
edited out of the shorter version of the Air Force One tape released by the LBJ
Library in the ’70s.
Both the LBJ tape and the Clifton tape were taken
from a longer Air Force One recording, according to Primeau Forensics, an
acoustic engineering firm that worked with JFK researcher Bill Kelly to clean
up and transcribe the recordings.
The available tapes capture two hours of
conversation. Kelly notes that the flight from Dallas to take JFK’s body back
to Washington took almost two hours and 17 minutes, so there should be more
than six hours of radio transmissions, so four hours are missing, or 240
minutes.
So it is virtually certain that there were other
conversations to and from Air Force One that fateful day that were recorded but
have never been heard. Even after 50 years, the real-time response of the
Pentagon to the violent death of a commander in chief is not part of the public
record.
In a new book on JFK, University of Virginia
Professor Larry Sabato writes that it is “irresponsible” to accuse an agency of
the federal government of orchestrating the assassination. “At the same time,”
he argues, “it is impossible to rule out the possibility that a … cabal of CIA
hard-liners, angry about Kennedy’s handling of Cuba and sensing a leftward turn
on negotiations with the Soviets … took matters into their own hands.”
What these unknown chapters from the JFK story might
reveal about the perennial conspiracy question will only be known if — and when
— the CIA and Pentagon produce the missing JFK records.
Jefferson Morley is moderator of JFKFacts.org and
author of “Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA.”
He wrote this for The Dallas Morning News. His email address is
info@jfkfacts.org.
The Democratic Underground Report from Pittsburgh:
JFK Conference: Bill Kelly introduced new evidence -
adding Air Force One tape recordings
As a Democrat, a DUer and as a citizen of the United
States, I was proud to attend the Passing the Torch: An International Symposium on the 50th
Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy at Duquesne University.
One of the many important things discussed there was what historian and
researcher, William E. Kelly, Jr. presented to the conference. He
added new information to the historical record: a more complete record of the Air
Force One radio transmissions made on Nov. 22, 1963. Now a fellow DUer,
please welcome Bill Kelly, should he pop up on a thread.
In his presentation,
Mr. Kelly described the provenance of the new recording -- discovered among the
personal effects of Gen. Chester Clifton, an aide to President Kennedy who was
aboard Air Force One on the trip to Dallas. The new tapes add content to what
was on the version held by the National Archives .
To get as much information as possible from the new material, Mr. Kelly contacted Ed Primeau,the audio expert who had assisted in the analysis of
9-11 recordings in the Trayvon Martin case. Mr. Kelly and Mr. Primeau combined
the tapes and created a transcript. It is available online:
http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/
Interestingly, the more complete tape still does not have information that was, evidently, available in the mid-1960s when authors Theodore White, William Manchester and JFK Press Secretary Pierre Salinger quoted from them in their books. Among the points those authors made that are not on the tapes available: Sections of military personnel conversations from the plane to Washington; President Lyndon B. Johnson was concerned about Soviet involvement in the assassination; McGeorge Bundy was in charge of the Situation Room at the White House; Bundy contacted Air Force One to report Oswald arrested and there was no conspiracy.
To get as much information as possible from the new material, Mr. Kelly contacted Ed Primeau,
http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/
Interestingly, the more complete tape still does not have information that was, evidently, available in the mid-1960s when authors Theodore White, William Manchester and JFK Press Secretary Pierre Salinger quoted from them in their books. Among the points those authors made that are not on the tapes available: Sections of military personnel conversations from the plane to Washington; President Lyndon B. Johnson was concerned about Soviet involvement in the assassination; McGeorge Bundy was in charge of the Situation Room at the White House; Bundy contacted Air Force One to report Oswald arrested and there was no conspiracy.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023981591
JFK's last day: Rochester Hills audio expert's care,
tapes reveal info, hint at more
John F. Kennedy arrived in Dallas on Air Force One
before noon on Nov. 22, 1963. Hours later, his body was being flown back to
Washington, D.C., as radio communications crackled back and forth between the
plane and various officials on the ground.
“The president is on board, the body is on board,
and Mrs. Kennedy is on board,” a voice said at one point, starkly describing
the just sworn-in Lyndon Johnson and the-now dead JFK.
This month, as events, books and TV
specials mark the 50th anniversary of the
assassination, a new piece of evidence with a metro Detroit connection has
Kennedy researchers buzzing.
It’s an 88-minute audio recording of Air Force One
radio transmissions that’s described as the most complete version of those
communications yet.
And it may indicate that a longer version with fresh
revelations is out there somewhere.
The recording is described on the JFKFacts.org website
as among the most important pieces of assassination-related evidence to surface
in the past five years.
It was enhanced for sound quality and combined from
two separate tapes by audio and video forensic expert Ed Primeau and his
Rochester Hills-based Primeau Forensics.
Like anything new about the JFK assassination, the
recording is bound to be pored over by those fascinated by what a majority of
Americans consider an unsolved mystery.
Conspiracy theories still exist that cast suspicions
on everyone from the Cubans and the Russians to the mob and even portions of
the U.S. government.
Primeau said he believes “100%” that there was
editing done to the two tapes that were used in the 88-minute version. And
that’s bound to raise the sort of questions that keep the search for answers
alive.
Expert witness
Kennedy’s death is a 50-year-old case where almost
anything can be viewed different ways by different people. But Primeau’s
expertise is driven by fulfilling the assignment, not furthering an agenda.
“I work both sides,” he said of his past experience
with both prosecutors and defense attorneys.
Primeau, 55, grew up in Detroit and Troy originally
wanting to be a DJ. Instead, he built a career behind the scenes in audio and
video production and
founded Primeau Productions in 1984, which lists Bob Seger and Billy Sims
Barbecue among its past clients.
In the mid-1990s, Primeau started focusing on the
growing field of audio and video forensics. He has been an expert witness for
criminal and civil cases across the country. In 2012, he was asked by the
Orlando Sentinel to analyze the desperate voice overheard in the 911 call in
the Trayvon Martin case, a task that led to appearances on CNN and MSNBC and to
his being named as a potential witness by the prosecution.
Primeau’s conclusion for the Sentinel? It was the
17-year-old Martin who lost his life that night, not the eventually acquitted
George Zimmerman, who was screaming for help in the background.
“Bring the truth out, bring an objective opinion.
I’m a third-party, non-biased person who comes into a case,” he said of his
approach to his work.
Something missing
In fall 2012, Primeau was contacted by author and
JFK assassination researcher Bill Kelly, who wanted technical help in combining
two audiotapes of Air Force One radio transmissions: one released in the 1970s
from LBJ’s presidential library and a longer one that came to light a couple of
years ago from the belongings of Gen. Chester Clifton, a military aide to
Kennedy.
Kelly transcribed the tapes. Primeau, working off
and on starting in about January, spent time enhancing the sound quality,
sharing his progress with Kelly along the way.
“I lowered the noise, equalized the recordings and
added some filtering and brought them up to where they’d be more audible,”
explained Primeau.
Brad Finegan of Primeau Forensics combined the two
tapes in chronological order using Kelly’s transcripts and some overlapping as
guides. In addition, Primeau obtained aerial video footage from a pilot friend
that Finegan and Primeau’s son, Mike, used to create a captioned video version of the Air Force One
recording.
It was Primeau’s idea to use video and captions so
that “anyone who wanted to hear these recordings could actually see the words
and follow the bouncing ball, if you will, of what’s being said.”
Kelly said Primeau took the assignment for free and
did “tremendous work.” Last month, Kelly presented an analysis of the tapes at
a 50th anniversary assassination symposium at Duquesne University’s Cyril H.
Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law in Pittsburgh.
“The Air Force One tapes are sort of like the black
box of the assassination. It has all the basic information there you want to
know of what happened at the highest levels of government in the two hours
after the assassination. And it all should be right there, but there’s some
that’s missing,” said Kelly, whose website is http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com.
“Spine chilling” is how Primeau describes listening
to history come to life on the tapes, which are peppered with code names like
Volunteer (for LBJ) and Lace (for Jacqueline Kennedy) and urgent efforts to
make arrangements for things like a lift to remove the casket from the plane in
D.C.
Generals, Secret Service members and radio operators
can be heard. Locations like the White House Situation Room and the Air Force
command base are mentioned. At one point, the airborne LBJ is patched through
to JFK’s mother, Rose, at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., to offer
his condolences.
Primeau said he believes that the LBJ and Clifton
recordings are what are called safety copies that don’t contain the entire
radio transmissions from Air Force One.
“As I listen to the recordings, I can hear edits. I
can actually go through and pick out spots where I believe there are pieces
that were missing. And there’s lots of theories about why there would be pieces
removed.”
That conclusion raises questions. “What was taken
out, who took them out and where are they?” he asked.
It also points to the possibility that the entire
record of the radio transmissions is somewhere out there, says author and
former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley, who has led the charge to
have the CIA release still-classified material on the assassination.
“It’s not the tape itself. It’s what the tape tells
us. And what the tape tells us is that there was a longer recording of the Air
Force One communications on Nov. 22. That was never known before. What the tape
tells us is there could be, somewhere, a recording of the reaction of the U.S.
national security agencies to the president’s death,” said Morley, who’s
written about the new recording for the site he moderates, JFKFacts.org.
An original source tape with several more hours of
content would be a big historical discovery. “It would be the record of the
government’s response to the assassination itself,” Morley said.
Looking for answers
The Air Force One recording is considered
significant by Morley, Kelly and others still looking for a credible
explanation for the JFK assassination. But new information based on fact, not
speculation, also interests conspiracy debunkers.
“Aside from what I might disagree with Kelly on,
it’s always a good thing to try to get the historical record in better shape,
to clarify the material,” said professor John McAdams of Wisconsin’s Marquette
University, whose JFK assassination website appeals
to those who believe accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
McAdams says there’s probably more material online
about the JFK assassination than any other historical subject — and he stresses
that plenty of it is implausible. His website notes that sophisticated
conspiracy theorists “likely understand that the mass of silly nonsense in
conspiracy books and documentaries does no service to the cause of truth in the
assassination.”
Nationally, those who believe in a lone gunman — the
government-run Warren Commission’s conclusion — remain in the minority, but
their numbers are increasing, according to a 2013 Associated Press-GfK poll. It
shows that 59% of Americans say they think multiple people were part of a
conspiracy to kill Kennedy, but 24% think Oswald acted alone — the highest non-conspiracy
percentage since the mid-1960s.
Morley says there’s no justification for continued
official secrecy about the assassination. “Things are withheld on grounds of
national security, and that’s not very plausible for 50-year-old documents
about Cuba. The secrecy around the subject remains a big problem for public
understanding, and it encourages suspicion.”
Primeau suspects the original source tapes of the
Air Force One tapes may no longer exist. “Will they ever surface? I don’t think
so. I think they’re destroyed, like parts of the Watergate tapes were
destroyed, permanently gone so that nobody could ever find out.”
Even if that is the case, he adds, witnesses could
still be found to speak to what was said all those years ago.
“I think it’s everybody’s hope that this might nudge
somebody, I don’t know how else to say this, (who) is going to be around for a
few more years and doesn’t care about telling the truth now, who might know
something, and it might bring us another step closer to the truth.”
AND FINALLY -? - USA TODAY picks up on the Detroit Free Press story and runs it - as
Echoes of history heard in JFK Air Force One tapes -
www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/echoes-of-history-heard-in-jfk-air-force-one-tapes/3484427/
Though they x-out the last few paragraphs.
AND FINALLY -? - USA TODAY picks up on the Detroit Free Press story and runs it - as
Echoes of history heard in JFK Air Force One tapes -
www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/echoes-of-history-heard-in-jfk-air-force-one-tapes/3484427/
Though they x-out the last few paragraphs.
While investigative journalists & other JFK researchers search for the unedited AF-1 audio tapes, a search for the flight manifest of the cargo plane that flew JFK's damaged parade car from Dallas to (presumably) Washington could lead to locating living witnesses willing to talk about their experience transporting the vehicle out of Dallas, its condition & what they may have heard discussed in the edited portions of the audio tapes.
ReplyDeleteLiving witnesses involved in the airlift of JFK's parade car could throw some light on the issue of if a bullet hole existed in the windshield & possibly provide photos of the damaged car & information if it sustained unreported damage. Thus far no one has been able to publicize who the pilots & the load crew were & if they received instructions the public is unaware of. Researchers investigating JFK post-assassination mysterious deaths thus far know nothing about the post-assassination fate of those people & if they should be added to the 'suspected eliminated by murder' list.
To learn about the people involved in transporting JFK's damaged parade car from Dallas to Washington post-assassination, investigative journalists should focus on the flight manifest paperwork that would have been maintained by the air transporter's air operations chain (copies of which would have been maintained by the pilots of the aircraft involved). The manifest would identify all persons flying on the aircraft (including special handling persons), damage problems with the cargo that would cause flight safety concerns, photos of the damage (if taken & included in the manifest package) plus any waiver instructions & who gave them.
It is not unusual for Federal air transport pilots to refuse to fly with damaged cargo unless a waiver has been given by a higher authority in their chain of command. If any such waiver discussion were on the AF-1 tapes is not known because the audio tapes have been edited. A bullet hole in the windshield that could worsen as the transport plane takes flight would be a safety concern for the pilots & load crew plus the command they worked for. Flying with damaged or unsafe cargo is a top concern for Federal air transporters (replacing aircraft destroyed by air mishaps is expensive & sometimes results in 'heads rolling').
Learning who the people involved were & what happened to them after the ambush could lead to living former federal air transportation witnesses (possibly operating under the restrictions of 'gag order's) no longer working for the government that might be willing to talk about their experience today. It is also possible that some or all of those people met the fate of others suspected of being murdered post-assassination.
If the flight manifest for 22 November 1963 hasn't been destroyed it is possible the Freedom Of Information Act can free it from those withholding it. The aircraft & crew either should have worked for the Department Of Defense in a military, civilian employee or contractor status. The aircraft in question was briefly filmed during live Dallas TV coverage of JFK's arrival in Dallas by TV station KLRD & can be seen in several JFK documentaries.
TV media thus far have not looked into these missing pieces from the assassination puzzle.
Hopefully, these areas will be investigated in the immediate future & the public can answer challenges to 'prove a conspiracy' via living witnesses that have yet to tell their stories.
If the Detroit Free Press is to write further about this , it /they might well consider other "Michigan angles" to the Assassination:Jack Ruby's dealings with Michigan mobsters (and his own brother in Detroit); the destuction of evidence when the Presidential Limo was sent to Dearborn for "repair, improvements and alterations"; and Larry Crafards vamoosing from Dallas to Michigan....
ReplyDeletethe contorversy about LeMay being in Michigan or at a Intelligence Center in Canada as the Coup unfolded.