[Mb-civic] No Closer to Cracking the Kennedy Case - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

No Closer to Cracking the Kennedy Case
Meeting Yields Few Answers on Assassination

By George Lardner Jr.
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, November 21, 2005; Page A13

The conference was optimistically titled "Cracking the JFK Case," but it 
was widely noted that many of the speakers and members of the audience 
had grown gray hair or lost much of it while looking for the answers.

One of the presentations at the three-day session revived doubts about 
the famous "single bullet theory" that the House Select Committee on 
Assassinations thought it had resolved in the late 1970s. Another 
demolished persistent claims that the Zapruder film -- the "clock" of 
the Kennedy assassination -- had somehow been altered or contradicted by 
other photographic evidence. Still another speaker demonstrated how the 
sounds on Dallas police tapes showed that four and perhaps five shots 
had been fired -- meaning that at least one other person besides alleged 
assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had squeezed a trigger.

None of that solved the whodunit, although the conferees could still 
count themselves and like-minded historians and researchers winners in a 
way. Three out of every four Americans think President John F. Kennedy's 
assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, was the result of a conspiracy. Almost 
as many think there was a coverup.

But the proposition that drew about 135 people to a Bethesda hotel this 
past weekend -- that it is not too late "to solve the greatest mystery 
of the 20th century" -- has less traction with the public. According to 
the most recent poll, conducted in 2003 for the 40th anniversary of the 
JFK assassination, 75 percent of the public does not want another 
government investigation.

Washington lawyer Jim Lesar, president of the nonprofit Assassination 
Archives and Research Center, the main sponsor of the conference, was 
undeterred. "The lone assassin theory" -- the Warren Commission's 
conclusion in 1964 that Oswald was solely responsible for the killing -- 
"is more discredited than it has previously been," he said in opening 
remarks.

A key reason, he said, is that the CIA not only withheld crucial 
information from the commission about its assassination plots against 
Cuban President Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders, but it also held 
back other vital information from the House assassinations committee, 
which concluded in 1979 that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a 
result of a conspiracy."

The committee's chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, whose main suspect 
remains the late New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, explained his 
loss of confidence in the CIA in a talk Saturday night. The committee 
had relied on the late George Joannides, a CIA officer called out of 
retirement, to help it find and review CIA documents during its 
investigation. But the agency never told the committee that Joannides 
had been the case officer for a CIA-funded anti-Castro exile group that 
had contacts with Oswald and an ostensible confrontation with him in New 
Orleans before the assassination.

"The agency set me up," Blakey said. Joannides, he recalled, frequently 
blocked the efforts of the House panel's young researchers to obtain 
relevant CIA records, but when they complained to him, Blakey said he 
accepted the CIA's assurances that his aides were being too pushy and 
suspicious. Looking back on it, he said, "I have no confidence in 
anything the agency told me."

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck said the agency had no immediate comment.

Other highlights of the conference included a study by two scientists 
from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who said that bullet 
fragments taken from Kennedy's brain, from Texas Gov. John Connally's 
wrist and from the floor of the presidential limousine were too small 
and too metallurgically complex to be identified as having come from 
only two Mannlicher-Carcano bullets such as those Oswald is believed to 
have fired.

The House committee said neutron activation tests showed it was "highly 
likely" that the fragments from Connally's wrist came from a largely 
intact Mannlicher-Carcano bullet found on a stretcher at Parkland 
Hospital after first hitting Kennedy -- the so-called magic bullet -- 
and that the other fragments came from a second bullet that hit Kennedy 
in the head.

But the Livermore scientists said the fragments could have come from one 
or as many as five bullets and could have been fired by a Remington or 
some other rifle. The neutron tests, they said, were inconclusive and 
new technology has shown them to be unreliable.

Josiah Thompson, author of "Six Seconds in Dallas," a 1967 study 
contending there was more than one gunman, produced a slide show to 
demonstrate that no discrepancy has ever been found in any of the films 
taken in Dealey Plaza.

Prizewinning scientist Richard Garwin offered a long-promised report to 
show that gunshot-like sounds on Dallas police tapes were random noises 
that took place 30 to 60 seconds after the assassination.

He was upstaged, however, by Donald B. Thomas, an entomologist and 
admittedly no acoustics expert, who showed how the noises coincided 
precisely with frames from the Zapruder film and echoes off buildings in 
Dealey Plaza reflecting the gunfire. Garwin held his ground, but said he 
had not studied the echoes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/20/AR2005112000830.html?nav=hcmodule
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