ROBERT HARRIS SAID:
It wouldn't matter whether he [FBI agent Elmer Todd] etched his initials into the stretcher bullet or not, because those initials are not on CE399, which was obviously not the same bullet.
Come on, David. Take a course in critical thinking. :-)
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
A much better idea would be for Bob Harris to take a lengthy course in:
"Not Everybody Was Lying In The JFK Case."
ROBERT HARRIS SAID:
You don't use one of Todd's own reports [this one] to prove that he was telling the truth.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Hilarious.
Does the above "Bob Harris rule" therefore mean that I and my fellow LNers are "off the hook" (so to speak) when it comes to police officials saying things in their OWN REPORTS that I don't think are correct? Such as Seymour Weitzman's original affidavit where he calls the rifle a 7.65 Mauser? (After all, how can I possibly know for certain if Weitzman was, indeed, telling the truth when he said "Mauser" there? Maybe he was lying. How can I know? And how can Bob Harris know either, especially when looking at Harris' quote above?)
And does this also mean that the conspiracy kooks of the world will shut up about the lack of an FD-302 report for Odum's 6/12/64 interviews with Tomlinson and Wright?
Or do you have a different set of rules for any reports written by Bardwell Odum vs. the reports written by Elmer Todd?
IOW, even if an FD-302 for Odum's 6/12 interview WAS unearthed, why would any CTer accept that report as the TRUTH, in light of these words spoken by Robert Harris?:
"You don't use one of Todd's own reports to prove that he was telling the truth."
ROBERT HARRIS SAID:
That's like saying OJ was innocent because he wrote a report saying he didn't kill anybody.
[...]
[Replay...]
And...it wouldn't matter whether he [Todd] etched his initials into the stretcher bullet or not, because those initials are not on CE399.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Yes, they are. You just can't see them in the NARA photos.
[2022 DVP EDIT --- Elmer Todd's initials have been found on CE399. Go Here.]
Plus:
Haven't you ever wondered WHY the evil FBI (including Elmer Todd, who you pretty much compared to a murderer named O.J. Simpson in your despicable comparison above) didn't just scratch the initials "ELT" into the nose of CE399 after they planted that bullet into the official evidence pile connected to the JFK case?
Why didn't those evil bastards—who would stop at nothing, it seems, to frame Oswald—perform that easy task of scrawling Todd's initials into that bullet (and Rowley's and Johnsen's too, for that matter)?
Per the conspiracy clowns, Hoover's boys would go so far as to create a totally false document seen in Commission Exhibit No. 2011, wherein they just MADE UP an interview conducted by Bardwell Odum (which could blow up in their lying faces at any time thereafter), but they wouldn't merely scratch some initials into a bullet that is a complete and total fraud to begin with?
They were dastardly enough to fake the bullet itself by placing it into the official record of the case, but they evidently weren't dastardly enough to scribble some initials into that SAME FAKE BULLET?
What was that you said a minute ago about "critical thinking", Mr. Harris?
JAMES DiEUGENIO SAID:
This has now gone beyond absurdity.
Davey Boy, everyone here is still waiting for you to put your money where your mouth is. Something you never ever do. In other words...go to Travelocity, book a flight and a hotel room, and go ahead and do what you have been saying you would do for ages:
Prove John Hunt is a liar [when Hunt said that Elmer Todd's initials are definitely not on the CE399 bullet].
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Yeah, right, Jimbo. Like the NARA is going to allow me to just waltz right in and examine CE399.
Get real.
Fact is: John Hunt DID NOT examine the bullet itself. He examined the same photos that have been posted in this very thread. And those photos (as good as they might be) are not definitive proof that Todd did not mark CE399.
Plus: There are TWO separate (and corroborating) official FBI documents that tell us that Elmer Todd DID mark the bullet (CD7 and CE2011). And CD7 confirms that Todd marked the bullet on the day of the assassination itself.
Spit on those records if you want to; call them fake if you want to (and you do want to, naturally). But I'm not willing to do so. Period.
JAMES DiEUGENIO SAID:
And here you have the same pattern repeated: "I am going to prove all those critics deluded." Well, go ahead and do it then. And if you have no intention of doing it, then please leave. Since it's just more of your empty bombast: Sound and fury signifying nothing.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Pot...meet Pa Kettle.
Reminder: Jim DiEugenio is a person who seriously thinks that Jim Garrison was right regarding the JFK case. And DiEugenio is also a person who is deluded enough to actually think that BOTH Buell Frazier and Linnie Randle just MADE UP the paper bag that each of those witnesses said they saw Oswald carrying on November 22nd, 1963.
Talk about "empty bombast...sound and fury signifying nothing". Jimmy D. and all other conspiracy theorists have a patent on such bombast.
JAMES DiEUGENIO SAID:
Don't ever compare me with you, since my work on this case emanates from the sum total of the evidence.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Jim just keeps getting funnier by the day.
The "sum total of the evidence" somehow indicates, in Jim DiEugenio's bizarre "Guilty Is Really Innocent" world, that Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent of all three of the following crimes:
1.) JFK's murder.
2.) J.D. Tippit's murder.
3.) The attempted murder of Major General Edwin Walker.
Oh, my poor bladder!
DAVID JOSEPHS SAID:
Stay with CE399, DVP, and try to wiggle your way out of the SS's either LACK of proper procedure in creating a chain of evidence for this bullet, OR Rowley perpetrating a crime by replacing THAT BULLET with what becomes CE399.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
In your "switched bullet" scenario which has Chief Rowley being the main criminal, please tell me just exactly how and when the United States Secret Service gained possession of Lee Harvey Oswald's C2766 Mannlicher-Carcano rifle in order to perpetrate this grand fraud and switcheroo of the bullets?
Did James Rowley just happen to have an expended bullet from Oswald's gun sitting in a cabinet drawer in his office in Washington prior to 9:00 PM EST on the evening of 11/22/63?
The fact is....
The silly cloak-and-dagger scenario that has the FBI or Secret Service performing a convenient "switch" of the bullets on November 22 has always been a flimsy and wholly unprovable tale served up by desperate conspiracists in their persistent efforts to paint Oswald as an innocent patsy.
We know that Oswald's rifle remained in Dallas until approx. 11:45 PM CST on the night of JFK's assassination. And we also know that the stretcher bullet was transported from Dallas to Washington aboard Air Force One by SS agent Richard E. Johnsen, with that AF1 flight departing Dallas Love Field at 2:47 PM CST.
So what I want to know is how it was even remotely possible for the FBI (or, as David Josephs suggested above, the Secret Service, led by Chief Jim Rowley) to have even had any opportunity to "switch" any bullets prior to midnight on 11/22/63?
Obviously, there was no such bullet-switching opportunity, because Oswald's rifle wasn't even in Washington until (at the earliest) about 3:30 or 4:00 AM EST on November 23rd. Therefore, nobody in Washington could have had a chance to fire any bullets through Rifle C2766 (in order to start framing Lee Oswald with them) until early in the morning of 11/23/63.
David Josephs will probably now simply say that CE399 was obtained by the FBI at a LATER time and then inserted into the official record of the case.
LEE FARLEY SAID:
There's no credible evidence that [O.P.] Wright had anything to do with finding any bullet.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Richard Johnsen TOLD US that he got the bullet from O.P. Wright at Parkland, via Johnsen's typewritten note that he wrote at the White House on 11/22:
For Pete sake, Lee, where on Earth can you possibly go with the theory that has O.P. Wright never even handling (or seeing) any bullet at all at Parkland on 11/22/63?
Geez, didn't Wright TELL Josiah Thompson in 1966 about seeing a bullet?* Wright said it was a "pointy" missile (of course, as we all know, he was wrong about that part), but you really want to purport that Wright saw NO BULLET at all at Parkland? Good grief, how silly.
You're as bad as Jimmy "Buell & Linnie Mae Made Up The Paper Bag Story" DiEugenio.
Also:
O.P. Wright's 1966 remark to Josiah Thompson (about the stretcher bullet being a "pointed" bullet) is one of the conspiracy-proving lynchpins in the whole case for most theorists, which means that if Wright never really saw ANY bullet at all on 11/22/63, it means that there's one less CTer (Lee Farley) who can now utilize the "pointy bullet" argument in defense of the theory that the stretcher bullets were switched.
Because Farley now wants to say that Wright never saw ANY bullet at all — "pointy" or otherwise. Which would mean, of course, that Wright was lying through his teeth during his interview with Tink Thompson in 1966.* It's very odd that a CTer would want to travel down that road. But Lee Farley has just done it.
* It also means that O.P. Wright was lying through his teeth some more—on national television—when he was interviewed by CBS News in 1967 for the CBS special "A CBS News Inquiry: The Warren Report". Sixteen minutes into Part 4 of that four-part program, Wright talks at some length about how he saw and took possession of the stretcher bullet on November 22. Wright even says he "picked up the bullet and put it in my pocket".
I've reached an interesting conclusion recently....
Time is the worst thing in the world when it comes to the outrageous theories concocted by JFK conspiracy theorists.
What I mean by that is:
Give a JFK conspiracy theorist enough time, and then just sit back and watch the additional theories start to flow like a river from their computers, sans a stitch of supportable evidence to back them up.
Two good examples of this type of behavior have been exhibited just today [October 3, 2012] in this very thread:
1.) David Josephs accused James Rowley of possibly playing fast and loose with the bullets at the White House on the night of the assassination. (Up until today, I had never once heard any CTer accuse Rowley HIMSELF of being part of any conspiracy plot or cover-up.)
2.) Lee Farley now seems to like the silly idea of O.P. Wright never having seen (or handled) ANY BULLET AT ALL at Parkland Hospital on November 22nd.
What will more time bring? One can only imagine.
MICHAEL HOGAN SAID:
Josiah Thompson told Rex Bradford [in this April 5, 2006, interview]:
REX BRADFORD: Can you talk about your visits to Parkland Hospital and what you found out first of all about that bullet which mysteriously showed up on a hospital stretcher after the assassination?
JOSIAH THOMPSON: You bet. We'll have to rewind back until—this was early November 1966. I'd been hired as a consultant for Life Magazine and we were all working on a story that appeared in late November 1966 called "Grounds for Reasonable Doubt," a reappraisal of the Kennedy assassination. By that time, Parkland Hospital was basically an armed fort in terms of journalists and people interested in the Kennedy assassination. Parkland Hospital had really had it. Their security people were keeping the press and other people out. Life Magazine got me and, I think another light-stringer named Patsy Swank into Parkland Hospital, and I interviewed Darrell Tomlinson, who found the bullet, and I interviewed the Security Director, O.P. Wright, who was handed the bullet by Tomlinson, and who subsequently then gave the bullet to a Secret Service agent by the name of Johnsen. I was interested in Wright because as an ex-deputy Chief of Police and a cop for 25 or 30 years, Wright had an educated eye for bullets. So I had brought along for that interview a bunch of photographs of bullets—.38's, the ballistic comparison rounds for 399, and then 399 itself. So I started putting these photographs out and asking Wright what the bullet he found looked like. I put out the .38's, and he said, "eh, I don't—the .38's didn't look like that." And then I put out the ballistic comparison rounds, and he said, "no, no — it was pointed." And then I put a photograph of 399, and Wright said, "no...no you know, can't you hear? I said it was pointed."
REX BRADFORD: (laughs)
JOSIAH THOMPSON: At that point then he reaches into his desk and pulls out an unfired projectile, I think it was a 30/30, with a pointed tip, and he said, "now that's what I'm talking about. It looked like that." And I looked at the 30/30 round, and gulped, and said "look, can I keep this?" And he said, "yeah, sure." So I put it into my pocket and photographed it that night. The photograph is in Six Seconds. That bullet is pointed. And Wright certainly had an educated eye for the bullet, the so-called stretcher bullet, and he had it in his possession for a few minutes in any case. So that raised the whole possibility that the bullet in evidence as Commission Exhibit 399 is not the bullet found on the stretcher.
LEE FARLEY SAID:
Give me a reasonable explanation why Wright would not mention this in his December report. I've told you his background.
Spouting your usual hot-air insinuations about "conspiracy theorists" being idiots is not a reasonable answer.
Bat a damn eyelid for once in your life.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
And why don't you try evaluating the sum total of the evidence--just for once.
Richard Johnsen told us (via CE1024) that he got a bullet from O.P. Wright. And Darrell Tomlinson told Raymond Marcus in 1966 that he gave a bullet to O.P. Wright (page 3 of transcript of telephone call between Marcus and Tomlinson, July 25, 1966).
Given these facts (provided by TWO OTHER PEOPLE), anyone who suggests that O.P. Wright never saw ANY bullet at Parkland on November 22 is just plain cuckoo.
Complete Marcus/Tomlinson Interview Transcript:
JFK-Archives.blogspot.com/Marcus-Tomlinson Interview (7-25-66)
LEE FARLEY SAID:
Do you have a problem understanding what I asked, Dave?
I'm going back to the beginning of the "chain of custody" of this bullet. When it was allegedly first found and who found it. I'm sure even you can understand that.
I don't care, at this point in time, what happened in 1966 or 1967. I don't even care what happened in 1964. I want to know what happened on the afternoon of November 22, 1963.
Now, I'll go reaaaaaal slow for you. On the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, Darryl [sic] Tomlinson allegedly found a bullet on a stretcher. He allegedly told the Personnel Director of Parkland Hospital, one O. P. Wright. O. P. Wright is requested to complete a report, detailing the pertinent events of 11/22/63, in early December 1963 by Charles Price.
That report is part of the Price Exhibit as published in the Warren Commission Volumes. There is no mention, in Wright's report, of him being told of a bullet, finding a bullet, picking up a bullet or passing a bullet onto the Secret Service.
There is also no mention in the report of Daryll [sic] Tomlinson, and Tomlinson does not mention Wright's name during his Warren Commission testimony.
Wright was not brought before the Commission to give any evidence to authenticate either the alleged events of the day or authenticate the bullet. Tomlinson wasn't shown the bullet during his testimony.
Richard Johnsen wasn't invited before the Commission to authenticate events or to authenticate the bullet. The time that Johnsen typed onto his evidence card is exactly the same time that Robert Frazier states (CATEGORICALLY) that he received the bullet.
So back to my original question, DID WRIGHT (30 YEAR DALLAS POLICE DEPARTMENT DEPUTY CHIEF OF POLICE) FORGET ABOUT FINDING THIS BULLET AND PASSING IT ONTO THE SECRET SERVICE WHEN HE COMPLETED HIS REPORT? It's a very simple question, Dave. Was this event not memorable to Wright? Not pertinent enough for him to remember? Was getting Tomlinson's recollections down on paper not important enough?
No more whiff-waff, please...
I understand these are uncomfortable questions for people on both sides of the arguments here, but I'm not going to shirk them.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Lee,
Why are you harping on the Price Exhibit when you've got O.P. WRIGHT ON FILM telling you what happened??
You really think Wright was lying his ass off to CBS-TV in the 1967 video?
And we've got Darrell Tomlinson telling us (via Ray Marcus) that he (Darrell) gave the bullet to Wright.
And we've got Richard Johnsen's report in CE1024, verifying he got a bullet from WRIGHT.
Given the above three things that PROVE forever that O.P. Wright handled a bullet on November 22, 1963, I couldn't care less about what Wright wrote in the Price document. And that's because we don't NEED the Price Exhibit to answer this question (which is an inquiry that only one person on the planet thinks is up in the air):
Did O.P. Wright handle a bullet at Parkland Hospital on 11/22/63?
David Von Pein
October 3-4, 2012
