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The Warren Commission Structured the Evidence to Fit Its Pre-Formed Conclusions

The major problems that I have with the Warren Commission are the same problems most others who’ve really looked at it have had. Even some of the people who support the lone gunman theory agree with this assessment:

The Warren Commission, it should be clear, never really conducted an investigation. They began with a conclusion and then worked fairly carefully to ensure that the available facts fit the pre-ordained determination.⁴³⁹

The Warren Commission blatantly and shamelessly obstructed justice. And I’m talking the kind of obstruction of justice that’s a federal offense you’re supposed to be prosecuted for. Instead, these people were rewarded; it was the best thing that ever happened to their careers. Arlen Specter, a mere attorney at that point, on the flying trapeze with his single magic bullet, went on to become an extremely powerful senator. Gerald Ford, then a U.S. representative for his state of Michigan, went from fabricating the placement of bullet wounds all the way to the White House. It was a real career-builder.

Let’s take a quick look at some of their lies.

•   Jack Ruby knew Lee Harvey Oswald.
That’s a hugely relevant point, as I covered earlier. So what did the Warren Commission do about that fact?
They lied about it.

•   They knew that Oswald had connections to U.S. Intelligence.
So what they did do about that fact?
They lied about it.

•   They knew that Oswald couldn’t have done all the shooting.
Because they knew that no one shooter could have done all that shooting. And what did they do?
They lied about that, too.

And here’s another big lie that they got caught in. Gerald Ford—who, lest we forget, went on to become President of the United States after proving he could play ball for the fat cats—got himself caught in a whopper.

Buried in a batch of records that had been kept under lock and key for over thirty years, researchers discovered that the official location for placement of the bullet entry in the President’s back was moved by a few inches in order to conform to the otherwise impossible Single Bullet Theory.⁴⁴⁰

That was the lie that made the ludicrous single bullet theory at least remotely—albeit very remotely—possible for attorney Arlen Specter to even argue with a straight face.

Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed—ever so slightly— the Warren Commission’s key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy’s body when he was killed in Dallas.

The effect of Ford’s change was to strengthen the commission’s conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Governor John Connally—a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.⁴⁴¹

And that was the big lie that gave birth to that ridiculous theory:

‘This is the most significant lie in the whole Warren Commission report,’ said Robert D. Morningstar, a computer systems specialist in New York City who said he has studied the assassination since it occurred and written an Internet book about it.

The effect of Ford’s editing, Morningstar said, was to suggest that a bullet struck Kennedy in the neck, ‘raising the wound two or three inches. Without that alteration, they could never have hoodwinked the public as to the true number of assassins.’

If the bullet had hit Kennedy in the back, it could not have struck Connolly in the way the commission said it did, he said.⁴⁴²

Arlen Specter also had an extremely successful career after his acrobatics with the truth, supporting this crazy theory. I’m not suggesting that he was rewarded for his “services”—or maybe I am. It’s definitely something that should be looked into, at the very least, because that’s how high-level politics seems to operate in this country these days.

Probably even more deceitful than those outright lies were the things that they left out. It was the same scenario as I mentioned earlier in relation to eyewitnesses to the Tippit murder. Only the least credible witnesses were called to testify, because they were the only ones that could be used to pin the blame on Oswald. The best eyewitnesses to the assassination were ignored.

There were so many errors and omissions that historian Walt Brown actually named a book about that topic The Warren Omission!

Then, there were the subtle but very effective methods they used to control what did and didn’t get onto the official record. I’ll explain.

As we now know, the magic act of the Great Arlen Specter could appear to make bullets stop and change course in mid-air. But that’s not all he could do! He was also adept at formulating hypothetical questions in such a way that the truth was nowhere to be found with his semantic genius at work. Don’t believe me? Well, see for yourself:

Historian Walt Brown details the outright absurdities of the Commission in general and of (future President) Gerald Ford and Arlen Specter in particular:

Another common technique . . . was the ‘say now, prove later’ argument. If someone asks you a question based on something they tell you will be proved later, your answer options are limited. Specter asked, ‘I will hand you Commission Exhibit No. 684 and ask you if that is a picture of the reverse side of the coat, which we will later prove to have been worn by Governor Connally, the coat which is before you?’ Dr. Shaw could have answered, ‘Yes,’ or ‘Yes.’⁴⁴³

The ludicrous questioning methods—assuming facts not in evidence—that the Committee adopted literally created the testimony of the doctors rather than facilitating it via questions which would have actually solicited the doctors’ own words. For example, consider the absurdity of the following question that Arlen Specter asked repeatedly to the doctors who had treated the President at Parkland Hospital:

Mr. SPECTER: Permit me to add some fact which I shall ask you to assume as being true for purposes of having you express an opinion. First of all, assume that the President was struck by a 6.5mm copper-jacketed bullet from a rifle having a muzzle velocity of approximately 2,000 feet per second at a time when the President was approximately 160 to 250 feet from the weapon, with the President being struck from the rear at a downward angle of approximately 45 degrees, being struck in the upper right posterior thorax just above the upper border of the scapula 14 centimeters from the tip of the right acromion process and 14 centimeters below the tip of the right mastoid process. Assume further that the missile passed through the body of the President striking no bones, traversing the neck and sliding between the muscles in the posterior aspect of the President’s body through a fascia channel without violating the pleural cavity, but bruising only the apex of the right pleural cavity and bruising the most apical portion of the right lung, then causing a hematoma to the right of the larynx which you have described, and creating a jagged wound in the trachea, then exiting precisely at the point where you observe the puncture wound to exist.

Now based on those facts was the appearance of the wound in your opinion consistent with being an exit wound?’⁴⁴⁴

That’s not how an investigation is properly conducted and it’s pretty freaking obvious that the type of questions like the above are used to control the evidence, not to uncover it.

Here’s how an academic historian weighs the evidence on Mr. Specter’s methods:

From the time of the Truman Committee, through the McCarthy witch hunts, to the Sherman Adams probe under Ike, to Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the 9/11 Commission, the . . . material above is arguably the most vulgar degradation of truth ever uttered in a federal inquiry.⁴⁴⁵

Senator Arlen Specter’s ongoing lie is a massive disservice to a man, an office, and a nation.⁴⁴⁶

Then there was Gerald Ford, who was such a verbal magician that he could take a back wound— that highly credible eyewitnesses assured him was being called a back wound because it was a wound that they had seen in the back—and somehow turn that wound in the back into a “neck wound.” And, just to give you an idea of what was at stake here, he had no problems at all “signing off” on that and defended his action till his dying day.

Roy Kellerman was testifying to a frontal entry wound at a place subsequently sealed with wax by the morticians forced to work at Bethesda . . . [Secret Serviceman Clint] Hill would stay with Mrs. Kennedy when the family was on the seventeenth floor of Bethesda Naval Hospital, but would be called to the basement morgue ‘to view the body,’ upon which he saw a wound six inches below the shoulder, on the right side, which we now know, thanks to Gerry Ford, was in the neck.

Special Agent William Greer . . . like Kellerman and Hill, was clear about the placement of the wounds . . . Kellerman, Hill, Greer—men whose lives were forever altered by a few terrible seconds. One would think it logical that they would remember the location of the wounds that destroyed their careers. But they were all wrong. There was no entrance wound in front of any ear, or in any shoulder. Trust in Gerald Ford.’⁴⁴⁷

A true list of the errors and omissions of the Warren Commission would literally be too long to go into here. But here’s a few of the “highlights” for you:

•  The commission misrepresented the results of its own wound ballistics tests with regard to both the single-bullet theory and the fatal head shot.

•  The commission never even mentioned that in the Zapruder film Kennedy’s head and upper body snap violently backward and to the left when the fatal head shot occurs. In fact, when the commission printed the frames from the film, it reversed two key frames of the head shot sequence. When this fact was made public, the changing of the order of the frames was blamed on a ‘printing error.’

•  The commission accepted Ruby’s doubtful story about how he gained access to the basement of the police department to shoot Oswald. The HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations) rejected Ruby’s belated story, noting that the available evidence overwhelmingly indicated Ruby’s story was false.

•  The commission used faulty logic and unreasonable criteria to reject the accounts of witnesses whose reports suggested or proved a conspiracy was involved. Yet, when it came to witnesses whose stories at least seemed to support the lone-gunman theory, the commission bent over backwards to accept them.

•  The commission erroneously claimed Jack Ruby did not have extensive ties to the Mafia. The HSCA later proved this claim to be utterly false.

•  The commission failed to take testimony from numerous important witnesses.

•  The commission’s questioning of several key witnesses was inept, if not deliberately negligent.

•  The commission failed to establish a motive for Oswald.

•  The commission created the false impression that Oswald was proficient with a rifle and that he had ample practice with the alleged murder weapon.

•  The commission brazenly misrepresented the results of its rifle tests. In those tests, which supposedly proved Oswald could have shot Kennedy in the manner alleged by the commission, three Master-rated marksmen missed the head and neck area of the target boards 20 out of 21 times, and some of their misses were far apart and even missed the human silhouette on the target boards, even though the target boards were stationary, even though the marksmen fired from an elevation of only 30 feet and were allowed to take as much time as they desired for the first shot, and even though two of them took longer than 6 seconds to fire their shots. Those rifle tests showed it was highly unlikely that a mediocre marksman like Oswald could have shot President Kennedy.

•  In its attempt to bend the evidence to fit its conclusions, the commission contradicted itself.⁴⁴⁸

In summary, would you like to hear how President Richard Nixon summarized the Warren Commission? This is straight from his White House tapes:

It was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated.⁴⁴⁹

That should make you angry, because the Powers That Be were obviously well aware—and still are—of all the crap that they have been force-feeding to us all these years.

⁴³⁹ Jim Moore, Conspiracy of One (Summit Publishing Group: 1997), 173.

⁴⁴⁰ Mike Feinsilber, “Gerald Ford forced to admit the Warren Report fictionalized,” July 2, 1997, Associated Press: whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/JFK/ford.html

⁴⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴⁴² Ibid.

⁴⁴³ Walt Brown, Ph.D., The Guns of Texas Are Upon You (Last Hurrah Press: 2005), 200.

⁴⁴⁴ Ibid, 205 (cited from 3H 362).

⁴⁴⁵ Ibid, 205.

⁴⁴⁶ Ibid, 195.

⁴⁴⁷ Ibid, 210–211, emphasis in original.

⁴⁴⁸ Michael T. Griffith, “The Warren Commission’s Failed Investigation,” February 19, 2002: michaelgriffith1.tripod.com/failed.htm

⁴⁴⁹ Kevin Anderson, “Revelations and gaps on Nixon tapes,” March 1, 2002, BBC News: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1848157.stm