An Excellent JFK Conference

Two weeks ago, I attended an excellent conference on the Kennedy assassination that was sponsored by the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Cyril H. Wecht, who is now in his 90s, is one of the country’s most renowned forensics pathologists. For decades, he has courteously and heroically stood squarely against the conclusions set forth by the Warren Commission as well as the conclusions arising out of the autopsy that the national-security establishment conducted on President Kennedy’s body on the evening of the assassination. 

Both Cyril and his son Ben ran an absolutely excellent conference, in partnership with another great organization, the Citizens Against Political Assassinations or CAPA. The last time the Wecht Institute held a JFK assassination-related conference was ten years ago, which I also attended. That was where I first saw Oliver Stone in person (who later spoke at two FFF conferences). I also met Mike Swanson there, who is the author of excellent book The War State, which I highly recommend reading. This year, Stone didn’t speak at the conference, but Alec Baldwin delivered a nice talk on the opening evening of the conference. I got a chance to meet him. 

The conference talks featured some of the top assassination researchers in the country, who, not surprisingly, reject the official narrative of the assassination. I don’t know if the Wecht Institute is going to post videos of the conference presentations online.

There were two talks that especially attracted my attention — the ones by Doug Horne and Dr. David Mantik. 

As longtime readers of FFF know, Horne served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. He is also the author of the watershed five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board and the author of FFF’s best-selling book JFK’s War with the National-Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated, both of which I highly recommend. 

Mantik is a radiation oncologist who has examined the Kennedy autopsy x-rays that are in the official record and determined them to be fraudulent. He is the author of The JFK Assassination Decoded: Criminal Forgery in the Autopsy Photographs and X-rays and John F. Kennedy’s Head Wounds: A Final Synthesis, both of which I also highly recommend.

I’ll begin with Mantik’s presentation. Rather than address the fraud in the medical evidence, which is his speciality, he decided to deliver a talk on the CIA’s role in the production of a fraudulent, altered copy of the Zapruder film, which, of course, is the subject of my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story. 

Mantik’s talk was absolutely excellent. It featured a video interview with the two Hollywood experts that are mentioned in my book, Paul Rutan, Jr., and Garrett Smith. It also featured a segment of an interview with renowned CIA photoanalyst Dino Brugioni with Horne and author Peter Janney (author of Mary’s Mosaic) in which Brugioni stated that the original Zapruder film that he closely examined on a top-secret basis on Saturday night, November 23, 1963 (the night after the assassination), was different from the version of the Zapruder film that is now considered to be the original, thereby establishing the fraudulent nature of the extant film. 

One of the highlights of Mantik’s talk — well, at least for me — was when one of his slides showed the cover of my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story (which was the subject of a recent C-SPAN Book TV interview). Mantik then asked me to stand up and be recognized, which produced some applause from the audience.

Horne’s talk also was also absolutely excellent. It focused on the two brain examinations in the Kennedy autopsy, which the Navy pathologists who conducted the autopsy falsely claimed was only one brain examination. Through the use of slides, Horne meticulously detailed how he and the ARRB’s general counsel, Jeremy Gunn, discovered that there were actually two separate brain exams and, even worse, that the second brain exam could not possibly have been the brain of President Kennedy. It would be extremely difficult to find a better example of autopsy fraud than that. 

In one of the few instances where the mainstream press reported on fraud in the Kennedy autopsy, the Washington Post and the Associated Press actually published stories about what Gunn and Horne had discovered about the two brain examinations. Those two stores are here and here. 

Once Gunn and Horne made that discovery, did they conduct a follow-up investigation? Actually, no. That’s because someone had slipped into the JFK Records Act, which the ARRB was charged with enforcing, a provision that prohibited the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the Kennedy assassination. Its mandate was limited to securing the release of assassination-related records that the national-security establishment was determined to keep secret into perpetuity. 

Now, wouldn’t you think that that would be a very unusual provision? After all, if the ARRB succeeded in getting long-secret records released that disclosed criminal culpability, including fraud, wouldn’t you think Congress would want them to investigate it? Well, no. And as Horne details in hisInside the Assassination Records Review Board, the prohibition was enforced on the ARRB staff.

Horne ended up submitting a detailed report on the two brain examinations to Gunn (the ARRB general counsel) as well as to ARRB Executive Director David Marwell. I don’t know whether the governing board of the ARRB, which was headed by a federal judge named John Tunheim, was made aware of Horne’s report but it would be difficult for me to believe that they were not made aware of something that critically important. After all, it’s not every day that military pathologists are caught lying and committing fraud with respect to an autopsy carried out on a president’s body. If Tunheim and the rest of the ARRB board were made aware of Horne’s report, then it is my conviction that they had a moral duty to immediately notify Congress and seek an expansion of powers to fully investigate the matter. Tunheim and the rest of the board failed to do that. To this day, we still don’t know why. Neither Tunheim nor any other member of the ARRB board has ever seen fit to explain their decision to remain passive in the face of obvious autopsy fraud on the part of the national-security establishment. 

In another unusual event, according to a new blog post by Horne, Tunheim recently stated in a podcast that “there is no evidence for a grassy knoll shooter” in the Kennedy assassination and, equally significant, that there is an “absence of any other evidence of a second shooter.”

Those are remarkable statements, especially coming from a lawyer and a judge. Every lawyer and every judge in the land knows that the phrase “no evidence” means exactly that — no evidence. Yet, as the former chairman of the ARRB, Tunheim has to know full well that there is a significant amount of evidence for a grassy knoll shooter — that is, a shooter that was firing from Kennedy’s front. 

Oh sure, it’s entirely possible that Tunheim might feel that, in his opinion, such evidence is not credible. But as a lawyer and a judge, he knows full well that the fact that one finds evidence not to be credible is totally different from claiming that there is “no evidence” of a fact whatsoever.

For example, consider the new documentary on Paramount Plus entitled JFK: What the Doctors Saw, which I highly recommended in this recent article. It details how the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital witnessed a huge blowout-sized exit wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head. Such a wound would necessarily mean that the shot came in from the front. As I detail in my FFF book The Kennedy Autopsy, it also means that the official military autopsy photograph showing the back of Kennedy’s head to be intact has to be fraudulent.

How does Tunheim handle what those Dallas physicians saw? We don’t know. He doesn’t say. But one thing is for sure: The statements of those Dallas physicians constitute evidence of at least one shot having been fired from the front, thereby negating Tunheim’s claim that there is “no evidence for a grassy knoll shooter.” 

It’s also worth pointing out that Dr. Malcolm Perry, one of the treating physicians, stated at a press conference immediately following the assassination that in addition to the massive wound in the back of JFK’s head, there was also a bullet hole in the front of his neck, which Perry emphasized three times was a wound of entrance. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, an entry wound in the front of JFK’s neck would imply a shot having been fired from his front.

Moreover, as Horne details in his blog post, which is rightly critical of Tunheim’s statement, there were numerous witnesses who were certain that at least one shot came from the grassy knoll.

Tunheim knows better. As a lawyer and a judge, he knows that the phrase “no evidence” is different from saying that there is considerable evidence that one might not find credible.