MARTIN HAY SAID:
Ah, Howard Brennan[,] the man must be faster than a speeding bullet[,] because he told the Warren Commission he saw Oswald fire his last shot (3H144) and told CBS (September 27, 1964) he saw the President's head explode! .... Brennan told CBS "The President's head just exploded." (From p20 of the CBS transcript, Nov 22 and the Warren Report). .... That's not to mention his incredible eyesight[,] which according to commission counsel Joe Ball (during his Dealey Plaza reenactment) gave Brennan "difficulty seeing a figure in the window, much less identifying someone from the sidewalk." Yep, some super-witness that Brennan.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
And yet Howard Brennan IDed Oswald nonetheless, didn't he?
And your comment about Brennan's eyesight is ridiculous (and you have to know why it's ridiculous), since we know that his eyesight was damaged only AFTER the assassination of JFK. Brennan had an accident which affected his eyesight in January of 1964, two months AFTER he watched Oswald kill President Kennedy. Let's have a look (3 H 147):
DAVID W. BELIN -- "Has there been anything that has happened since the time of November 22, 1963, that has changed your eyesight in any way?"
HOWARD L. BRENNAN -- "Yes, sir."
BELIN -- "What has happened?"
BRENNAN -- "The last of January I got both eyes sandblasted."
BELIN -- "This is January of 1964?"
BRENNAN -- "Yes. And I had to be treated by a Doctor Black, I believe, in the Medical Arts Building, through the company. And I was completely blind for about 6 hours."
BELIN -- "How is your eyesight today [as of March 24, 1964]?"
BRENNAN -- "He says it is not good."
BELIN -- "But this occurred January of this year, is that correct?"
BRENNAN -- "Yes."
Also:
According to some conspiracy theorists, Howard Leslie Brennan knew full well that the man he saw firing a rifle from the Book Depository on 11/22/63 was positively NOT Lee Harvey Oswald, but Brennan later positively identified the shooter he saw as Lee Harvey Oswald ANYWAY.
Basic question for everyone --- What would it take for you, personally, to have positively identified a specific person as a murderer if you REALLY KNEW THAT THE PERSON YOU SAID WAS GUILTY WAS NOT THE PERSON YOU SAW?
Would ANY amount of "coersion" or "strong-arming" (or whatever) be ENOUGH to make you perform such a vile deed (even AFTER the person you are wrongly fingering was killed in a police basement by a local nightclub owner)?
In such a situation, why on Earth wouldn't Brennan have merely remained wishy-washy and said this to the Warren Commission? ---
I got a pretty good look at the assassin in the window, but in all honesty, Mr. Chief Justice, I cannot in good conscience say that the man I saw in the window was positively Lee Harvey Oswald.
Instead, on March 24, 1964, Howard Brennan tells the Warren Commission
this (3 H 148):
DAVID W. BELIN -- "Mr. Brennan, could you tell us now whether you can or cannot positively identify the man you saw on [sic; in] the sixth floor window as the same man that you saw in the police station?"
HOWARD L. BRENNAN -- "I could at that time--I could, with all sincerity, identify him as being the same man."
BELIN -- "Was the man that you saw in the window firing the rifle the same man that you had seen earlier in the window, you said at least a couple of times, first stepping up and then going back?"
BRENNAN -- "Yes, sir."
Conspiracy theorists who greatly dislike Howard Brennan's above Warren Commission testimony would have a much better argument to buttress the notion that Brennan was a liar (or was blind as a bat, etc.) if those three bullet shells from OSWALD'S rifle weren't located underneath the very same window from where that "liar"/"blind man" named Brennan said he saw a man named OSWALD shooting a rifle at the President.
And those same Brennan-bashing conspiracists would also be on much firmer "Brennan Was Wrong About Oswald" ground if that Mannlicher-Carcano rifle (which belonged to OSWALD) wasn't also found on that same sixth floor from where Brennan said he saw the owner of that gun (OSWALD) firing shots at JFK's limousine.
And the persistent anti-Brennan arguments coming from the various conspiracists would most certainly be much more convincing if OSWALD'S very own fingerprints and palmprints had not been found littering the very same small piece of real estate in the southeast corner of the Book Depository's sixth floor from where Howard Brennan said he saw a man named OSWALD firing a gun.
Bottom Brennan Line:
Even if Howard Brennan had NOT positively identified the sixth-floor assassin as Oswald, the sum total of evidence in this murder case is telling any reasonable person that the odds that Mr. Brennan saw anyone OTHER than Lee Harvey Oswald firing that rifle at President Kennedy are so low that those odds could be considered virtually nonexistent.
David Von Pein
April 13, 2009
