Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

With no investigative staff of its own, it relied on the FBI and CIA to do its field work there. At times, the reliance proved embarrassing, as when the FBI report came in stating that President Kennedy and Governor Connolly had been wounded by separate shots. The FBI version of the President's wounds also differed sharply from the commission's version, which later was condemned by the American Academy of Forensic Pathologists as being so incomplete and sloppy as to be no autopsy at all. The FBI's placement of the President's wounds—one in the head, another some six inches below the neck—made the commission's scenario of events untenable. Secret Service men who witnessed both the shooting and the autopsy also placed the back wound well below the neck, as did the autopsy doctors' own diagram. The President's jacket and shirt also showed a bullet hole just beneath the shoulder. Faced with such evidence, the commission chose the only practicable course: it ignored it.

Instead, the commission's junior lawyers came up with their own theory of the assassination, one contradicted by ballistics findings, autopsy results and the testimony of every witness to the actual event. In time, it came to be called "the magic bullet theory."

Simply stated, the commission found that three bullets were fired that day in Dealey Plaza, all from the rear. The final, fatal shot hit the President in the back of the head. The second shot missed completely and struck the pavement, wounding a bystander. The first, the "magic" bullet, struck President Kennedy in the back just below the neck, passed through his neck into the back of Governor Connally, smashed through Connally's rib and out his chest below his right nipple, and continued on to strike his wrist, finally winding up in Connally's thigh. In short, one shot, seven holes.

If there were only one assassin, firing from the sixth floor of the School Book Depository, the commission's the

ory made sense. Indeed, it was the only theory that could account for a long asian, since the alleged murder weapon, a 1940 vintage Italian made Manslcher Carcano, was a clumsy, single shot, difficult to operate weapon. It was conducted by the commission determined that it was physically impossible to shoot and load the Carcano more than three times in the 5.6 seconds between the first time the President was hit and the final, fatal shot.

The trouble began when the commission attempted to duplicate Oswald's alleged marksmanship. First, they found that the rifle was fitted with a left-handed scope; Oswald was right-handed. Then, too, shims had to be inserted to make the scope accurate. Ignoring the fact that Oswald's Marine records showed him to be a

## A petition backing a reinvestigation has collected more than 250,000 signatures on the West Coast alone

poor shot, the commission had three master marksmen from the National Rifle Association recreate the events in Dallas by hitting a level, stationary target. None of them could. Of course, Oswald could have been lucky. As for the one and a half seconds that elapse between the time the Zapruder film shows the President to be hit and Governor Connally bunching up and slumping over, the commission suggested that Connally was merely experiencing a "delayed reaction" to having his chest torn open by a high-powered rifle bullet.

Totally inexplicable is how the bullet that purportedly did all this damage (and was later conveniently discovered on the governor's stretcher in a corridor of Parkland Hospital) emerged so

miraculously intact, virtually under- formed, with only 2.2 grains missing from its normal weight. The commission itself had a similar bullet fired into the wrist home of a cadaver and found that the bullet was mangled.

The most damning evidence, though, comes from the most unlikely source: J. Edgar Hoover. In a letter to the commission not included in the original 26 volumes of evidence and testimony, Hoover reveals that the magic bullet and bullet fragments were subsequently subjected to spectrographic analysis. That test, Hoover reports, was inconclusive. However, there was an additional test, a Neutron Activation Analysis, a highly sophisticated technique that measures the differences in material that has been bombarded with radiation down to parts per billion and sometimes even less. In his letter to the commission, Hoover blandly reports that while "minor variations" were found between the fragments taken from President Kennedy's body and those taken from Governor Connally's body, those differences were not judged to be "sufficient." To the layman, that explanation sounds fine, and certainly the commission did not question it. But the beauty of NAA is that the size of differences between particles are meaningless. Virtually any difference, however minute, is not only "sufficient" but irrefutable. Unless atoms changed their structure that day in Dallas, John Kennedy and John Connally were wounded by separate bullets.

Perhaps the subtleties of neutrons and atoms may have escaped the members of the commission. Incredibly, no mention of the NAA test or Hoover's letter is to be found either in the report or the 26 volumes of evidence (so far the FBI has refused to release copies of the actual NAA findings). Far more graphic evidence, however, was right in front of them: a color film of the assassination itself.

Abraham Zapruder. a Dallas dress

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