Doug Horne on Fetter

 Thank you Doug Horne for writing this and saving me a lot of trouble though I will be writing my own review to address other issues Fetter brings to the table.

DOUG HORNE'S REVIEW OF SEAN FETTER'S NEW BOOK "UNDER COVER OF NIGHT"

https://insidethearrb.livejournal.com/2024/01/02/

By Douglas P. Horne, Former Chief Analyst for Military Records, ARRB; and author of the five-volume work “Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.”

This review is primarily a “medical critique” of three major aspects of Sean Fetter’s UNDER COVER OF NIGHT, as well as commentary about his historiography.

(1) Fetter has fully adopted and thoroughly advanced David Lifton’s hypothesis from BEST EVIDENCE that the post mortem surgery to JFK’s head wounds (evidenced in both Dr. Boswell’s autopsy sketch of the severe damage to the top of JFK’s skull, and in the graphic autopsy photos showing the top of JFK’s cranium removed---damage that no one saw at Parkland Hospital) occurred well before the President’s body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital the night of the assassination. In my many telephone conversations with Lifton from 1996-2000, before we largely parted ways with each other, Lifton indicated to me many times that he still believed this to be the case, in spite of the strong evidence to the contrary that I presented to him on numerous occasions. Fetter explicitly states his support for this old Lifton hypothesis when he states the same conclusions, on pages 46 and 52; in summary, in Volume I of UNDER COVER OF NIGHT, Sean Fetter concludes that JFK’s corpse was violently mutilated (namely, that the top of the head was hacked open with a “crash axe,” and his throat wound was torn open); his spinal cord was severed; and his brain was removed from the cranium, all long before 6:35 PM when Kennedy’s body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital. So, as much as Fetter decries Lifton’s analytical abilities, and disparages him personally, he has endorsed THE major hypothesis in Lifton’s BEST EVIDENCE.

And yet, strong dispositive evidence exists that post mortem tampering with JFK’s wounds did NOT occur prior to the arrival of his body at Bethesda Naval Hospital---and that JFK arrived at Bethesda with his head in the same condition that was observed when his body left Parkland Hospital, in Dallas: namely, with a localized, avulsed exit wound in the right rear quadrant of his head, about the size of a baseball or small orange; with the top of the head apparently intact; and with the brain still in the cranium.

Here is my evidence:

(a) Gawler’s Funeral Home mortician Tom Robinson drew a wound diagram for both the HSCA on 1/12/1977, and for the ARRB on 6/21/1996, depicting a wound about the size of a baseball in the back of JFK’s head. The top of the head was intact in his diagrams. On the ARRB wound diagram, Robinson drew dotted lines that were more or less horizontal, below and above the baseball-sized wound. When we asked Robinson what the dotted lines were during his 1996 interview, he said: “Those were saw cuts---that’s where the skull had to be sawed open to get the brain out.” He told both the HSCA staff in 1977, and the ARRB staff in 1996, that he personally saw the brain removed at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

(b) Robinson also told the ARRB staff that the B&W autopsy photos showing the top of the head missing depict “what the doctors did, not what the bullet did.” By “the doctors,” he clearly meant the Bethesda pathologists, not the treatment physicians at Parkland Hospital.

(c) Navy x-ray technician Ed Reed testified under oath to the ARRB in 1997 that he saw Chief Pathologist CDR James J. Humes at Bethesda perform the first stages of post mortem surgery on the TOP of JFK’s skull, by using a scalpel and a circular bone saw to make long, horizontal cuts in JFK’s frontal bone just behind the hairline at the top of the President’s forehead. Significantly, he saw DR. JAMES J. HUMES perform this post mortem surgery---NOT Roy Kellerman! In contrast, Sean Fetter claimed in chapters 17 and 18 of UNDER COVER OF NIGHT that it was Secret Service Agent ROY KELLERMAN who mutilated JFK’s skull, using a “crash axe,” inside the forward luggage compartment of Air Force One, prior to takeoff from Love field in Dallas. (Fetter also appears to imply that this may have occurred between the swearing-in of LBJ at 2:39 PM, and takeoff, at 2:47 PM; very fast work, if true!) Fetter provided no single eyewitness to Kellerman performing this macabre deed, and did not even provide an eyewitness to Kellerman borrowing the AF1 “crash axe,” or even asking to use it!

(d) Significantly, Navy CAPT Robert CANADA (the Commanding Officer of the treatment hospital at Bethesda in 1963) told author Michael Kurtz on March 6, 1968 that he observed a “very large, 3 to 5 cm wound in the right rear of the President’s head, in the lower right occipital region,” and stated that it was “clearly an exit wound,” because the occipital bone was “avulsed,” or exploded outward. [See page 39 of Kurtz’s book THE JFK ASSASSINATION DEBATES. Canada requested that his description of what JFK looked like when he arrived at Bethesda be kept secret until 25 years after his death, and accordingly, Kurtz only published it in 2006.] Significantly, Canada did not describe any bone missing, or any wound, in the TOP of the head---only in the right rear. Like Robinson’s description, the head wound described by CAPT Canada was far too small for the brain to have been removed

(e) Finally, during his 1978 HSCA deposition, Dr. Ebersole, the autopsy radiologist, described an occipital wound (in the right rear of the skull) when he first saw JFK’s body before the autopsy began; he did not describe seeing any damage to the top of the skull at that time.

(f) The “outlier” here is the recollection of Navy corpsman Paul O’Connor, who told the HSCA staff on August 29, 1977 that when he looked into the cranium shortly after 8:00 PM the night of the autopsy at Bethesda, there was no brain in the cranium, only “splattered brain matter.” I have believed for years that O’Connor was exaggerating and misinterpreting the missing brain tissue in the forebrain area (shown as a black void in the lateral skull x-rays) as the “complete absence of a brain.” This was surely a subjective interpretation error by Paul O’Connor. It was the first impression he was confronted with when JFK’s head was unwrapped shortly after 8 PM in the morgue. But O’Connor could NOT have been correct, because Dr. Humes removed JFK’s brain at the autopsy, and Navy corpsman Jim Jenkins infused what was left of that brain shortly thereafter, when it was placed in a bucket of formaldehyde. FBI agent Francis O’Neill recalled seeing JFK’s brain removed at the autopsy during his 1997 ARRB deposition, as well. O’Connor’s time marker of 8:00 PM is significant; he was reporting on the results of post mortem surgery AT BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL in-between the time of 6:35 PM when JFK’s body arrived, and the commencement of the formal autopsy shortly after 8:00 PM. (There WAS post mortem surgery performed at Bethesda by Dr. Humes, to permit access to the brain so that bullets, bullet fragments, and bullet tracks in the brain tissue could be removed before the autopsy began. It was this state of affairs, shortly after that clandestine surgery was performed, that O’Connor was reacting to when he incorrectly inferred that there was “no brain in the cranium” during his HSCA interview in 1977. The removal of JFK’s brain by Dr. Humes, witnessed by FBI agent O’Neill, and the infusion of that brain by Jim Jenkins, prove that O’Connor was merely exaggerating when he said that there was “no brain in the cranium.”)

THUS, Sean Fetter’s conclusion that the post mortem tampering to JFK’s head wounds occurred well before Bethesda, and that his brain was removed prior to the arrival of JFK’s body at Bethesda, is firmly and conclusively contradicted. He has not produced one direct witness to ROY KELLERMAN (the culprit he identified) performing the vicious mutilation he ascribed to him in the forward luggage compartment of AF1 while on the ground at Love Field; Tom Robinson and CAPT Canada and Dr. Ebersole saw the same head wound on JFK at Bethesda that was seen at Parkland Hospital; Tom Robinson and Frank O’Neill saw Dr. Humes remove JFK’s brain at Bethesda; Jim Jenkins infused that brain after Dr. Humes removed it; and Navy x-ray technician Ed Reed saw Dr. Humes perform the illicit, clandestine post mortem cranial surgery AT BETHESDA, which means Sean Fetter’s claim that S.S. agent Roy Kellerman performed it hours earlier, at Love Field in the AF1 baggage hold, is manifestly incorrect.

(2) I also find Fetter’s treatment of the JFK skull x-rays unsatisfactory, for the following reasons:

(a) In footnote 958 on page 366, Fetter states that the use of the “crash axe” on JFK’s skull in the forward luggage compartment of AF1 produced “HUNDREDS” of bone fragments, without producing any witnesses who saw hundreds of fragments; Fetter then goes on to expand “HUNDREDS” to “500 or 1,000” bone fragments---again, without any witnesses.

(b) Fetter concludes that since we only see about 6 large skull fragments in the JFK lateral skull x-rays, that “plainly, the existing official x-rays do NOT depict JFK’s actual skull,” and that therefore the extant x-rays are “falsified images.” But this conclusion of his is based on his personal estimate that there must have been “hundreds,” perhaps “500 or 1,000” small bone fragments after Roy Kellerman did his purported handwork on JFK’s skull with the “crash axe.” Sean Fetter has proven that he has quite an imagination; but imagining something does not make it a fact.

(c) In actuality, the true evidence that the extant JFK skull x-rays are altered copy films is not the imagination, or uninformed opinion, of Sean Fetter--- but rather, the optical densitometry analysis of Dr. David Mantik, MD, PhD, following his 9 visits to the National Archives to view the extant skull x-rays and examine them with an optical densitometer. Mantik’s conclusions about alteration are based on painstaking and repeated empirical scientific measurements, not the fevered imagination of a layman who never actually cited any witness to “500 or 1,000 bone fragments.” And Mantik has not concluded that “500 or 1,000” fragments were somehow covered up, but rather that a “white patch” (the result of light blasting of the original x-ray film in a darkroom) was created to hide the large occipital-parietal blowout seen in the right-rear of the head at Parkland Hospital. The missing tissue (brain and bone) from the exit wound in the right rear of JFK’s head is what was covered up by the optical “white patch,” according to Dr. Mantik. This has been rigorously explained in chapter 5 of my own book INSIDE THE ARRB, as well as in numerous other writings by Dr. Mantik himself.

(d) Sean Fetter’s anti-science approach to the skull x-rays is truly startling. In footnote 958 he wrote: “Thus all the well-meaning efforts by JFK researchers to ‘analyze’ the extant skull x-rays…have been a totally wasted effort. You do not and cannot uncover the truth by granting any credence or ‘legitimacy’ to criminally falsified imagery.” What Sean Fetter does not understand is that the only falsified part of the two lateral skull x-rays is the “white patch” that obscures the Parkland exit wound; and the only falsified part of the A-P skull x-ray is the “fake 6.5 mm bullet fragment” added to that image to implicate the accused assassin. The sinuses and the teeth in the JFK skull x-rays have been verified as JFK’s by an HSCA forensic radiologist. His attitude that nothing can be learned from studying the skull x-rays is unscientific in the extreme, and should be unacceptable to all readers of his book. The attitude he displays in this regard is that of a 19th century “know nothing,” someone who revels in his own ignorance.

(e) Qualified experts who have studied the extant skull x-rays have detected the presence of a partial brain (that is, what was left of the brain after JFK was hit by three headshots) in the cranium. I suspect that this is what is most unacceptable to Sean Fetter about those who want to scientifically study the skull x-rays, for this finding contradicts his theory that the brain was removed from the cranium long before JFK’s body arrived at Bethesda. The finding that some brain is present in the skull x-rays is shared by Dr. Mantik and Dr. Chesser (both well-credentialed JFK researchers who had access to the autopsy materials in the Archives), as well as by the ARRB’s radiological consultant, Dr. Fitzpatrick, a forensic radiologist. Sean Fetter’s anti-science attitude that these experts are not worth listening to is offensive, and does not serve the American people well. This attitude on his part is very detrimental to the legitimacy of his book.

(3) Sean Fetter also stated in UNDER COVER OF NIGHT that he believed all of the shots that hit JFK came from the front alone, and that all of the “wounds” supposedly on the back of JFK’s body [namely, an entry wound in the back, and an entry wound in the back of the skull] were “false wounds,” i.e., were man-made after his death. This is simply a repetition, and endorsement, of David Lifton’s theory in chapter 14 of BEST EVIDENCE, titled “Trajectory Reversal: Blueprint for Deception.” Fetter doesn’t acknowledge this overtly, but it is true. I object to this “false wounding theory” not only because Fetter did not produce any witnesses to such macabre activity, but also for the reasons stated below:

(a) Back (Thorax) Entry Wound: the autopsy determined that there was an abrasion collar around the entrance wound in JFK's back, indicating it was made by a bullet; the bullet holes in JFK’s shirt and coat appear to align precisely; and furthermore, the FBI detected traces of copper (from a bullet’s metal jacket) around the entrance wound in JFK’s suit coat, proving it was caused by an entering bullet.

(b) Skull Rear Entry Wound: all three pathologists at JFK’s autopsy provided convincing descriptions that the entry wound in the back of the skull had the characteristics of a classic wound of entry in the cranium---namely, internal beveling on the inside of the skull, opposite the smaller rear entry site. Furthermore, traces of metal from this entering bullet (from behind) were deposited on the Harper Fragment (of occipital bone) found Saturday, 11/23, in Dealey Plaza---per one of the x-rays taken of the Harper Fragment by the FBI.

The claims by Sean Fetter’s admirers that he has justified every claim and provided evidence for all of his findings are premature, to say the least. He has provided many tantalizing and exciting claims that supposedly come from the mouths of former members of Air Force flight crews that he has interviewed: pilots, co-pilots, flight engineers, stewards, radio operators, and one on-the-ground refueling technician. At first blush, and upon first reading, many of the words and statements he has ascribed to them are quite exciting to read. BUT…and this is a big “but”…unless his claims of what they have said to him are properly established, they cannot be treated as fully credible. Where are the audio tape recordings and/or video recordings, and the transcripts, which support the recorded audio or video? His readers need to see and hear those, before his claims about what they have said are worthy of belief. Without that supporting documentation, unsupported “witness statements” in his book are inherently suspect. The burden of proof for Fetter’s extraordinary claims of what they have said is on HIM. Only when Sean Fetter proves that his witnesses actually said these things that he ascribes to them, can we then began to seriously ponder what their statements might mean.

My final criticism of UNDER COVER OF NIGHT pertains to an outrageous statement made by its author on page 593 in Volume II, in which Fetter cavalierly dismisses the serious historical work of numerous historians over decades of painstaking work:

“…the JFK assassination plot did NOT occur because of fierce intra-governmental disputes over Vietnam, or Communism in general, or nuclear war, or Cuba, or Berlin, or civil rights, or the Federal Reserve, or the CIA---nor because of President Kennedy’s words, policies, actions, or inaction on any subject.”

This was followed immediately by a very revealing footnote, which highlights Sean Fetter’s remarkable hubris and disdain for the work of others, in which he continued:

“Author’s exclusive original discovery. (Anyone who believes otherwise simply hasn’t done their homework; lacks sufficient analytical skill; or has extremely limited contact with reality. Some people, of course, plainly suffer from all three maladies.)”

Summing up my cautionary review, Sean Fetter spends most of Volume II blaming the entire assassination plot solely on his “Beelzebub,” the lone criminal mastermind who (according to Fetter) initiated, engineered, and managed the entire JFK assassination plot: Lyndon Baines Johnson. If you don’t agree with him that LBJ was the mastermind and chief engineer and executor of the plot, he views you as a lightweight lacking in analytical skill that hasn’t done his homework, and who has limited contact with reality.

I am no lover of LBJ, not by any means, and furthermore, I do actually believe that he probably DID have foreknowledge of JFK’s forthcoming assassination (and indeed, welcomed it). But this simplistic view of history expressed by Sean Fetter, which rejects the decades of serious work by accomplished scholars like political scientist (and former Army intelligence officer) Dr. John Newman---namely, Fetter’s attempt to divorce the events of November 22, 1963 from any historical causation other than the machinations of one evil man---is so childish that it is a disservice to the American people, and disrespects the work of scores of serious historians on this subject. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us; even Isaac Newton (the world’s greatest physicist) recognized that. Only Sean Fetter, among all of the JFK researchers I know, doesn’t acknowledge this. This remarkable and stunning hubris---namely, that no one else has properly understood the evidence in the JFK case, and that only Sean Fetter has figured everything out properly---does not serve him well, and makes his book very hard to stomach. END