Big difference between “thinking” and “declaring” my writing to be reliable. My employers from decades ago are mostly dead, I’d imagine, or have forgotten any errors I committed, anyway, while the Warren Commission seems to have no end of faithful adherents standing up on their hind legs and declaring to the heavens how trustworthy the motives, the goals, and the final product is, now and forevermore.
Those few of the faithful who will admit to any errors seem to insist that the WC’s errors are evidence of their humanity, their authenticity, their non-North Korean bona fides. In other words, they’ve structured their argument so that they win either way. If I point out a colossal whopper in the WC, they either deny it’s an error at all or they cite it as proof that WC was committing the normal typos and mechanical errors every human commits daily, but as someone said above “Big deal.”
Never had a stenographer present during an interview/interrogation. That would be bizarre. Audio and/or video recording are now standard practices but that’s a fairly recent development, in fact more recent than most would expect, as @Stranger_On_A_Train noted.
I was not in Dallas in 1963 (I swear! ) but I would be very surprised if they audio recorded interviews or used stenographers in any interrogations.
Let me try this from a different direction, addressed to WC defenders: are there any substantial errors the WC made, from its conception to its practices to its final report, that you believe would have resulted in a product that is more trusted today?
Only because they specifically aren’t evidence of a conspiracy.
Take this time discrepancy, it’s evidence of normal human mistakes because it can’t possibly be due to the actions of a conspiracy.
A couple of data points are at odds, Johnsen is handing over the bullet to Rowley at 7:30, Todd is handing over the bullet to Frazier at 7:30.
If these times were recorded accurately, then clearly Todd is giving a different bullet to Frazier than Johnsen gave to Rowley. If Todd planned to give a different bullet to Frazier, why would he hand it over long before he received the real bullet?
This isn’t complicated, you have a false bullet, people are going to hand you the real bullet, you then hand the next guy the false bullet. What moron hands off the false bullet before receiving the real one? This choice doesn’t serve the purpose of the conspiracy, in fact it escalates the chances of being caught 100 fold.
Maybe it’s a mistake, but when you’re trying to coverup the assassination of the President, and your job is to swap out the bullets, forgetting that you’re supposed to get the real bullet from the Secret Service before handing the fake one to the lab… seems unlikely.
At least it’s unlikely compared to an agent writing the wrong time down 2 months later. That agent isn’t trying to avoid the noose, he isn’t trying to cover up the crime of the century, he’s just presenting what happened that day, and whether it was 7:30 or 9:30 isn’t of critical importance to his testimony.
Or maybe you’re a patsy who doesn’t know that he’s being used by people who know the records won’t be checked for months and months if ever and that apologists will come along to insist that these errors in the record are mere typos, absent-mindedness, or inexplicable problems that don’t really matter much?
He knows 100% that he’s submitting a false bullet as evidence, and 100% that he’s submitting the false bullet before he takes possession of the bullet he’s supposed to be submitting.
Why would he do that? He is literally placing the noose over his neck and daring someone to discover his crime, rather than just submit the false bullet after he takes possession of the real one.
Why would the puppet masters do that instead of just telling him to make the switch after he gets the real one? That seems a whole lot simpler, yeah? Sure, the records won’t necessarily be checked, and apologists will insist it’s a typo, but why risk it just to get the false bullet into Frazier’s hands a couple hours early?
Shit happens. The President’s been assassinated hours earlier, people are scrambling to put the evidence, false and true, in the right hands, sometimes people don’t realize in the confusion who is falsifying what, and duplicating the efforts of others is safer than not slipping the wrong bullet to the FBI lab at all.
My point is that WC should have noticed the seeming contradiction in the written memos and either found a way to make sense of the errors (better than just “Oh, well, nobody will notice”) or admitted that it needs to be looked into further. Instead, they issued a report that just whitewashed the whole thing, and its loyal troops are stonewalling to this day.
Shit happens? The FBI Special Agent plans to submit a false bullet as evidence, to frame an innocent person for the assassination of JFK, and just fucked up by forgetting that there’s a bullet coming up from Dallas about to land on his desk.
That’s the entire reason he’s submitting a false bullet… to replace the bullet from Dallas. He can’t very well submit a bullet to the lab without there being a bullet from Dallas. He didn’t realize that replacing the real bullet with the fake bullet means he should wait for the real bullet to arrive?
That’s the sort of mistake 8 year olds know not to make.
Or is your claim that Todd was SO BUSY falsifying evidence that he couldn’t keep track of the bullet timeline?
Edited to add:
Duplicating falsified evidence is about the stupidest thing one can imagine doing in a conspiracy. Having 2 bullets in the lab when 1 was found in Dallas isn’t covering your bases, it’s laying the conspiracy bare for all the world to see.
It is true that the FBI was embarrassed by this case, since they had been monitoring Oswald before the assassination (to the point that he went to their local field office to complain that they were harassing him and his wife). So they could have done a better job.
And it is true that the CIA didn’t want it know that they had enlisted the mob to go after Castro.
And that’s why that stuff has come out slowly, and reluctantly.
But it isn’t actually material to the case: these are offshoots that don’t answer the question of who did what when.
Does it invite speculation? Sure it does.
But I’d submit that the constant message of “maybe it was the US government” was actually an idea pushed by the Soviet Union to undermine IS confidence in their country.
Remember Mark Lane, who wrote Rush to Judgment? There’s at least some evidence he was being funded by Moscow.
And with that comment, I think you’ve undermined your entire argument.
You keep asking me to do the work that I’m insisting was the responsibility of the WC to do in 1964. I am understaffed here, in the small Calling Bullshit Where I See It department–it’s all we can do to point out the typos, transcription errors, witnesses ignored as we notice them, and for someone else to explain them in a satisfactory way instead of sweeping them under the rug. May I remind you that one of the first revelations that the government was desperate to keep under wraps was the evidence that the U.S was running a damned Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean, as I think Abbie Hoffman or Karl Marx once put it. The CIA alone, which was amply represented on the non-dissenting portion of the WC, had loads of motive to cover up anything but the simplest explanation for anything. If there were a plausible way for the WC to explain the assassination as JFK deciding in mid-parade to shoot himself in the head and back, they would have gone for that, and some of you defenders would be insisting that we really couldn’t see what happened in those seconds JFK was hidden from sight behind that street sign, now, could we?
The surest sign that you have lost the debate is when you start making up ridiculous arguments on behalf of the other side so that you can knock them down and claim some semblance of a win.
Is it possible, just the tiniest bit possible, that someone wrote the wrong time down accidentally?
Is it just the tiniest bit possible that a simple mistake is more likely to have happened than the entire freaking world deciding to put all their competing interests and long-entrenched rivalries aside and cooperate in killing the President?
Let’s say I bought a chicken from your daddy’s store. When I get home, the chicken is rotten and there’s all kinds of little plastic things inside it. I complain to your daddy, and he tells me the chicken smells fine to him, and every product contains a couple of things that don’t belong there, so why don’t I get lost and stop bothering him.
The next few times I come in the store to repeat my complaint, you come out to deal with me. You ask me to explain how the little plastic things supposedly got inside the chicken, and also why don’t I get my smelling tested? I answer, How should I know how the plastic crap got inside the chicken, and you go “Well, if you can’t give me a plausible alternate scenario, why should I even believe that the little plastic things were even there?” and I answer “Because I showed them to you a week ago.” You go, “I don’t remember that, go on, get lost, you conspiracist crackpot.”
I am not responsible for explaining every discrepancy in the Warren Commission Report. I am a consumer of the WC Report, and I am dissatisfied with the shoddy product. You are your daddy’s Customer Service department and your job is to discredit my complaints, as you see it, but to my mind, your job is to check out how the plastic got inside the chicken and why you sold me a chicken that was rotten. The customer is always right.
) but I would be very surprised if they audio recorded interviews or used stenographers in any interrogations.