That is the one to which I refer. I have not seen the Kevin Costner movie, as I find him to be a terrible actor.
The “documentary” presented by Stone is grossly inaccurate and follows a conspiracy theory premise which to my mind places is in there with that “Ancient Aliens” guy.
I found it interesting to watch but unconvincing as a document of the actual incident.
The pristine bullet section 22 minutes in, notes an apparent problem in the chain of custody: FBI agent Elmer Lee Todd signs off as having received it at 8:50 PM, but when he hands it off to FBI lab technician Robert Frazier, Frazier records the time he got it from Todd as 7:30 PM on 11/22/63. This is after it has passed through many hands, starting with the hospital worker who picked it off a stretcher in Parkland Hospital. Maybe this is carelessness on the FBI’s part? Stone shows the actual documents recording the times. Are these forgeries?
There is a further problem with the supposed initialing of the bullet itself. Todd, who said that he initialed the bullet as passing through his custody, does not seem to have initialed it at all. Why is this?
Dr. Gary Aguilar, identified as a clinical professor at UC San Francisco, speaks on camera refuting the WC’s conclusion that the men who corroborated the bullet as having been the one they saw and handled—instead, he speaks of an FBI memo (dated 6/24/64) that Stone shows on camera, submitted to the WC, that says that neither of the Parkland employees who handed the bullet (serially) to the FBI can identify it, the opposite of what the WC claimed.
Aguilar then goes on to claim that an agent who worked in the Dallas office of the FBI, Bardwell D. Odum, was said by the WC to have shown the bullet to the hospital employee for identification on 6/12/64, but Odum denied ever having the bullet in his custody at all. Aguilar quotes Odum as having stated that if he’d ever had the bullet in his possession he would certainly have filed a 302 report (presumably some official FBI form) stating when he’d gotten it and when he’d handed it over to someone else.
This is just the first few minutes of the documentary part of the Stone film, about 21 and 22 minutes into the movie. The next sequence contains the doubts and dissents of WC members Richard Russell, John Sherman Cooper, and Hale Boggs, which never appeared in the final WC Report, as to Earl Warren’s and Richard Katzenbach (ass’t AG) ‘s prejudgment of Oswald as the sole shooter before the investigation got underway.
I’ll stop here, noting that none of this is proof of anything (so please don’t argue by saying that I claim to show proof when I haven’t) but it clearly shows sloppiness at least in the WC report, and probably deliberate omissions as well. Has anyone answered the matter of the screwed-up times in the chain of custody, for example? If so, who? Is there an explanation, or does this apparent impossibility just get filed under “Oh, well, who knows? And who cares—it’s just a bullet, anyway”?
Since you’ve already dismissed the Stone film without having ever seen it, I’ll wait to see what you make of the above before transcribing more of it.
Oh, you found it unconvincing–wow, well, that certainly makes a powerful case. You’ve completely blown me out of the water with that argument. Kudos to you! I certainly can never dare to refer to it as a documentary after reading that. Thanks!
I’m not going further than this in discussion, as you both dispute that I have watched the “documentary” Mr. Stone produced but also accept that I have indeed watched it.
Good luck with that.
Sorry if I was unclear–only the part of my previous below the quote from you refers to you. The long previous section is addressed to @Moriarty, who said that he had not seen Stone’s documentary.
But I am grateful for your pledge not to go further in this discussion. You seem to have nothing to contribute other than your opinion, which I will take for what it’s worth.
You are forgiven.
“Someone wrote down the wrong time” is a perfectly rational explanation. It’s more rational than a theory that government agents organized the assassination and substituted in a false bullet to deflect blame, kept that fact a secret for their entire lives, but botched the evidence logs by writing down impossible times.
Yeah, because it wasn’t important or anything, just your routine chain of custody in a presidential assassination that happened earlier today. Happens to me all the time.
This was just one of a very long series of “Yeah, someone destroyed that by mistake” and “Someone just lost that” and “Yeah, we just never bothered to take down his exact words” and “OK, sure, it woulda been nice to have a corroborating witness, but we thought we already enough witnesses” excuses. If that’s your best strategy going forward, why should I supply this entire string for you? You can just dismiss all of them unseen in advance–save us all a lot of time.
P.S. You missed your first move, which is to challenge me to produce the actual document, and then to challenge its authenticity. Stick to the playbook, please.
I didn’t say it was GOOD, I said it was a rational explanation.
Do you have a different rational explanation? Or, do you have an explanation that requires dozens or hundreds of people to work in concert to: kill the president, assign a fall guy, subvert the most detailed criminal investigation of all time, have exactly zero conspirators speak out for their entire lives, AND make laughably inept mistakes?
As opposed to what? The droolings of a rabid raccoon?
Depending on your parameters of rationality, sure, but it’s also a ridiculous explanation. Taken in toto, these absurd fuckups that were all accepted without quibble by the WC underline a simplistic explanation of the assassination that was preconceived and sloppily thrown together in 26 volumes of bullshit designed to wear out and intimidate its numerous critics.
I dunno, you haven’t told us your explanation yet.
Let’s have it, why are the log times inconsistent with each other?
I’ll accept that the documents are legitimate, although it sounds like Stone didn’t interview the people who made these documents.
There’s a reason why, in a court of law, documents aren’t just produced - they are testified to. It’s not just an issue of provenance; the witnesses might be able to provide crucial context.
“My watch stopped. I didn’t notice until a few hours later.”
“In all of the confusion and chaos, I must have made a mistake. I’ve been in the Service for 20 years and have a great record of reliable work.”
Granted, these are just things I’m imagining; but so is Stone’s claims that this shows either corrupt officers or two bullets.
Notably, though, Stone doesn’t bother to follow through on his assertion. Suppose this mistaken chain of custody does demonstrate that the conspirators brought in a bullet to add to the crime scene.
Why? Ostensibly, the bullet was added to hide the real crime. But how would that work? At this point, so close to the murder, nobody knew where the real bullets ended up. Maybe they are still lodged in Kennedy, or Connelly’s, body. Maybe they are lodged in the limo. Maybe they splintered into a million fragments.
Now somebody adds a bullet to the scene. At best, it creates confusion for the investigators (where did this come from? It doesn’t match the injuries.). At worst, it leads to additional investigation (we must have a second shooter! This bullet didn’t come from the suspect we’ve identified).
And, if the bullet was “pristine”, as Stone (erroneously) says, the strategy makes even less sense. Presumably the conspirators knew what a bullet looked like after it was fired. Why would they use one that was obviously not fired?
Stone doesn’t think he owes us these answers. It’s enough to just point out a discrepancy and then go off wherever he feels is most interesting.
Dr Gary Aguilar is an ophthalmologist. He has no expertise in criminal investigations, and no connection to the case. He’s literally just a conspiracy hobbyist. But Stone presents him as some great authority. He’s not. He’s just some dude who agrees with Stone.
And everything he’s says is hearsay.
These people have opinions. Great. Now tell us the basis for those opinions.
People who accept the Warren Commission report don’t do so because they believe that Arlen Spector or Gerald Ford are unimpeachable. They do so because of the great weight of the evidence.
If you want to negate their conclusions, you have to bring facts, not just names of people who claim facts.
Nothing you have cited leads to a conclusion that anything was deliberate. None.
And if the Commission documented these inconsistencies, it doesn’t show sloppiness. It shows thoroughness. If not for the commission, you wouldn’t even know about this stuff.
What Stone is saying is that the commission was flawed because it didn’t believe every person who came forward and had something to say. But believing all of them would be impossible; it’s the nature of human observation and memory that people will vary in their views, and some will be simply wrong.
Stone, though, is picking out little bits of information to suggest a screwed narrative. To emphasize again, however: He can’t account for all of the know facts.
The fact that there is a “pristine bullet section” when there in fact is no pristine bullet pretty much tells me what I need to know.
Unless the “pristine bullet section” was them apologizing for mentioning the pristine bullet.
These “people” constitute almost half of the WC itself–you make it sound like I’m picking strangers off the street and attributing to them some special insight based on their opinions. Normally, I’d expect an open-and-shut case like the JFK assassination to have all of the members of the investigating committee unwaveringly standing by every word of the final report, not admitting to questioners afterwards, “No, I couldn’t agree with this or that.”
Because there is a disruption of the chain of custody itself?
This is the sort of thing that gets TORN APART on cross-examination.It’s called a “chain” of custody for a reason–any inconsistency or impossibility opens the door to “someone didn’t actually possess the thing he claims he possessed” and so the possibility that something else (a bullet) was substituted for the thing that supposedly was handed from one person to another, and documented. Or that it was conveniently invented on the spot, and hastily thrown into someone’s hand with the instruction “Hey, we found this thing–tell the FBI that you found it and write down the time you found it.” Usually, people are careful to make substitutions plausible, but if they mess up, it can show up in the record, as here.
On cross-examination, we might ask the guy who wrote down that he got the bullet at 8:50 PM and handed it off somehow at 7:30 PM to explain the inconsistency, and we might discover that he was drunk at the time, or that he just guessed at the time, or that–well, almost anything. But by including the data in their report and not noticing (!!) the conflict, despite a staff of hundreds and a year or so to check for inconsistencies or problems of this sort, the WC revealed that at best it was a sloppy investigation they ran, eager to reach its preordained conclusion.
So? The bullet that killed JFK was passed around before landing in the hands of law enforcement, and the record keeping was sloppy rather than rigorous.
Big deal. The only way this rises above a reprimand to FBI agents, is if someone had prepared a bullet prior to the assassination in order to implicate Oswald, and this chain of custody issue is a result of inserting that false evidence.
Is that what you are claiming happened?
You can save time by simply repeating this riposte to any of the criticisms I’ve been asked to supply.
Kind of a waste of energy on my part, innit?
In a very real sense, what you’re asking me to do, reconcile inconsistencies, was the WC’s job that they neglected to do. They suppressed inconvenient or contradictory statements, timelines, chains of custody, occasionally including them but leaving them unaccounted for, and reached the conclusions which one member, Richard Russell, said that Earl Warren was determined to reach at the first assembly of the group, and which (SOOPRISE, SOOPRISE, SOOPRISE, SERGEANT!) was the conclusion they did reach in the final report.
So you’re making an appeal to authority, with out any substantive critique based on what they said.
Again, I believe the evidence supports the conclusion that Oswald acted alone.
It wasn’t “open-and-shut” the way, for example, Ruby shooting Oswald is. Kennedy was killed by a sniper. It took an investigation to prove that.
And I think you’ve set up a ridiculous standard when you use words like “unwaveringly” and “every word” (probably because some of the criticism is minor, or doesn’t attack the ultimate conclusion). These men were prominent politicians with big egos; of course each would want for their opinion to be the most prominent.
And, as I’ve noted, the more thoroughly you investigate something the more you are going to have to address erroneous or bad information. Some of your witnesses are going to be liars, or idiots, or confused or mistaken, and that number obviously increases when you seek out every connection to a world famous murder case.
Like an election in North Korea, you know an investigation is suspect when there’s total consensus. Real life is far messier than that.
So the more nonsense I point out in the WC Report, the more unassailable their case gets? That’s really excellent work there, first-class logic.
I’m not exactly asking you to prove it, I’m asking you to tell me a plausible story that reconciles the inconsistencies about one piece of evidence.
That’s what I did, it took me about 30 seconds to think up after learning for the first time (in this very thread!) that there was a discrepancy in the times logged for this piece of evidence. JFK theorists have had 50 years to come up with one, I just want you to C&P a single plausible theory about this bullet, if you don’t have one at the ready.
QFT, followers of the movie and documentary from Stone should explain why they did say that the bullet was magical and pristine, when it was none of that. Just taking that into account it is really silly to follow sources like Oliver Stone when there is evidence already shown here that shows that Stone and others omit a lot of evidence to get their sorry narrative going.