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The government never intended to investigate the murder of President John F. Kennedy. When accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was gunned down three days after the assassination, by nightclub owner and small time mobster Jack Ruby, the official story had to be sold to the public. Within five hours of the assassination, presidential aide McGeorge Bundy notified Kennedy cabinet members, who were flying back to Washington, that the assassin had been apprehended and there was no conspiracy. Rather presumptuous; after all, the suspect hadn't even been charged, so how could an assistant to the president, back in Washington, D.C., have known anything about the state of the evidence? Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach sent his infamous memo on November 25, 1963-one presumes he must have dictated it as soon as the bullet entered Oswald's body-to future media darling Bill Moyers, making things crystal clear. In this memo, Katzenbach explains how "The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the lone assassin" with no confederates still at large. It also declared that "Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off..." This memo was an admission that no other leads would ever be pursued, and indeed they weren't. At this point, no investigating had been done and one marvels at the tone of the memo; shouldn't there have been a vow to find the truth about the events of November 22, especially now that the alleged assassin was unable to stand trial? President Johnson appointed a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the crime of the century. It was named for its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and its intentional bungling and failure to investigate anything probably made any eventual determination of exactly what happened that day impossible. The Warren Report was an 888 page morass of mostly meaningless material, padded with insignificant testimony and exhibits, including things like Jack Ruby's mother's dental charts and pictures of Oswald's pubic hairs. Published along with the report were 26 volumes of Hearings and Exhibits. These volumes were only sold as a set and their cost was so prohibitive that few Americans ever read them, forced to rely instead on the mainstream media, whose reporters also never read them, and their reclycled press releases. The 26 volumes were not arranged in any logical manner and they didn't include an index. Sifting through all this mass was, in the words of critic Sylvia Meagher, "...tantamount to a search for information in the Encyclopedia Britannica if the contents were untitled, unalphabetized, and in random sequence." The volumes of witness testimony were put together in such a way that was best described by critic Harold Weisberg, as being "scientifically disorganized with computer precision." When critics first began the process of matching the conclusions of the Report with the footnotes documenting them, they discovered that the footnotes were often either unrelated to the conclusion or diametrically opposed to it. In one memorable instance, the Commission cited Exhibit 3155 as a footnote, when the last numbered exhibit is 3154. The Commission found time to take the testimony of Mrs. Anne Boudreaux, whose only connection to the assassination was the fact she knew a woman who had been Lee Harvey Oswald's babysitter for two weeks when he was two and a half years old, but never called one of the most important witnesses, Admiral Burkley. Burkley was the President's personal physician and was present in the motorcade, at Bethesda Naval Hospital when the President was taken there for autopsy and was the recipient of all the official medical evidence. They also didn't want to hear from James Chaney, the motorcycle officer closest to the limousine during the shooting, but found time for Mrs. Viola Peterman, who'd been a neighbor of Oswald's mother back in 1941, and who hadn't seen or heard from her in 27 years. There can be no innocent explanation for taking such testimony; consider the resources expended just to locate these kinds of "witnesses." The Warren Commission didn't call at least 23 persons reported to have been present at some time during JFK's controversial autopsy and didn't even take the testimony of FBI agents Sibert and O'Neill, well- known to researchers for their written report on the proceeding. They were among the very few non- military personnel at the autopsy. Mary Bledsoe was an elderly woman who'd rented a room to Oswald for one week in October 1963. Interestingly enough, while Bledsoe kept a meticulous record of all her roomers on a calendar, the lone month missing from that calendar happened to be October, 1963. She testified to seeing Oswald on the bus the Commission claimed he rode after the shooting during his inexplicable trip towards eventual apprehension in the Texas Theatre. She was a confusing and entirely uncredible witness, yet she was permitted to ramble on for far too many pages, and when the WC counsel asked her why she appeared to reading from prepared notes, Bledsoe explained, "because I forget what I have to say." When the elderly woman did have something to say, it bordered on the hilarious. She "identified" the shirt she claimed Oswald had been wearing on the bus thusly: a shirt, Exhibit 150, was displayed for her during her testimony, and before counsel Joseph Ball could ask a single question about it, Bledsoe declared "that is it" several times, and told Ball she'd been shown the shirt by "some Secret Service man." When Ball asked her if she'd seen the shirt prior to that, the elderly lady stated, haltingly, "Well-" and when Ball repeated the question, she came up with this gem: "No; he had it on, though." There were many other witnesses whose testimony would have essential for any real "investigation" of the crime. Due to the nature of some of the exhibits and the testimony of completely unrelated persons, there has been speculation over the years that the written record was purposefully "padded" to add to its bulk. There are many examples of questionable tactics employed by Commission counsel on the witnesses it deposed. For the record, the members of the Commission, among them future President Gerald Ford, attended only a fraction of the sessions of testimony. The overwhelming majority of the work was done by counsel like Arlen Specter, future Senator from Pennsylvania. Many witnesses complained that their printed testimony didn't accurately reflect what they'd said. There were similar complaints from many of those questioned by the FBI. Mrs. Nancy Powell, aka Tami True, who'd been a stripper at Jack Ruby's Carousel Club, actually sent her complaint to Dallas Secret Service Agent in charge Forest Sorrels. She stated that the deposition she'd given to Commission counsel Burt Griffin was in such error that to make corrections she would have to change the questions asked by Griffin. Julia Ann Mercer reported seeing a man leaving a pickup truck on Elm Street and walking up the embankment of the grassy knoll carrying what appeared to be a rifle case, as she drove past Dealy Plaza on her way to work the day of the assassination. She was interviewed by the FBI the following day and was shown a picture of a man with his name written on the back. The name was Jack Ruby. Her statement was changed in several respects by the FBI. It was stated in the affidavit that she'd been unable to recognize the driver of the pickup truck, when she had in fact identified him as Jack Ruby. Her description of the truck was changed, and the FBI claimed Mercer had been shown the photo of Ruby five days after he killed Oswald, rather than on the day before he achieved his notoriety. She later told New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison that her signature on the affidavit was a forgery. S.M. Holland, who is best known for declaring he'd seen a puff of smoke under the trees on the grassy knoll when the shots were fired, said of the corrections he and his lawyer made to the written transcript of his testimony: "We red marked...red penciled that statement from beginning to end." Holland acknowledged that "The statement I made, as well as I can remember, isn't in context with the Warren Commission (hearings)." Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig, who got into hot water early on by being one of the few members of Dallas law enforcement actually attempting to do his job, was first shown his printed testimony in 1968. Craig marked 14 corrections, and in a 1971 interview spoke of the way counsel David Belin had behaved during the testimony. "...Belin was the one who interviewed me-and he started...I made him mad to begin with. He started instructing me before we got a tape recorder and a stenographer there. He told her not to write anything until he instructed her to. He did not turn the recorder on and he started instructing me. He said, 'Now, Mr. Craig, I'm going to ask you this question and I want you to tell me this.' And I said, 'Counselor, just ask me the questions and if I know the answers, I will tell you,' and he became irritated..." A chronicle of Roger Craig's tragic post-assassination existence will serve to illustrate what happened, all too often, to those who veered from the official thesis. Craig first drew notice when he claimed to have observed a man leaving Dealy Plaza in a Rambler station wagon shortly after the assassination. He also testified that he'd been in Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz's office, while Oswald was being interrogated, and identified Oswald as the man he'd seen enter the station wagon. In reaction, he stated Oswald had slammed his fist down on a table and complained "Now everyone will know who I am." Fritz testified that Craig had not been in his office that day, but Craig was vindicated when a photo was published in Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry's book JFK ASSASSINATION FILE which showed Craig standing with others in Fritz's office, with the caption "The Homicide Bureau under guard while Oswald was being interrogated." Craig, a former model deputy who'd been named Officer of the Year in 1960, paid a heavy price for his integrity. Sheriff Bill Decker came to despise him, ordered him to stop speaking with the press and eventually fired him in 1967. Craig went to New Orleans to assist Jim Garrison's investigation and was constantly followed during his time there. Upon his return to Dallas, he was shot at by an unknown gunman. Craig, unable to maintain steady employment and having received death threats, had his car forced off the road in 1973, causing a serious back injury. Several months later, his car was bombed, then his wife left him and in January 1975 he was wounded by a shotgun blast to the shoulder. The Waxahachie, Texas police refused to take the shooting seriously, telling him the wound must have been self-inflicted. In his unpublished manuscript WHEN THEY KILL A PRESIDENT, Craig related how he'd been among the first officers to reach the "sniper's nest" on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. He claimed the three rifle shells found there were neatly stacked against the wall, when photos showed them to have been scattered and lying several feet apart from each other. In addition, he maintained that the rifle found on the sixth floor was indeed a 7.65 German Mauser, as the other officers who found it, Weitzman and Boone, originally swore to. Finally, on May 15, 1975, in constant physical pain and tired of the threats on his life, Craig shot himself in the chest, dying at the age of 39.

Refuting the Warren Commission is simple work; as comedian Richard Belzer once stated, the only people who believe the Warren Report are those who work for the government or the press. It is hard to argue with the logic of Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler, who wrote in a September 6, 1964 memo that "...the best evidence Oswald could fire as fast as he did and hit the target is the fact he did so." If Oswald had lived and stood trial, the witnesses testifying against him would have presented inviting targets for the most inexperienced defense counsel. William Whaley, the taxi driver who allegedly drove the fleeing assassin during nonsensical post-assassination journey, would not have made a very impressive witness. Whaley indadvertently gave out a great deal of information. During his Warren Commission testimony, he described the police lineups, wherein teenagers or well-dressed police employees were juxtaposed against the bruised, tee-shirt clad Oswald. At one point, Whaley stated "But you could have picked him out without identifying him by just listening to him because he was bawling out the policemen, telling them it wasn't right to put him in line with these teenagers and all that and they asked me which one and I told them." Whaley also reported that Oswald had chastised the policemen because "They knew what they were doing and they were trying to railroad him and he wanted him lawyer." With a presumably straight face, counsel Joseph Ball responded to all this information by asking "Did that aid you in the identification of the man?" Whaley summarized things nicely when he declared "Anybody who wasn't sure could have picked out the right one just for that." In yet another session of testimony, Whaley startled counsel David Belin when he reported that "I signed that statement before they carried me down to see the lineup. I signed that statement, and they carried me down to the lineup at 2:30 in the afternoon." Belin responded to this incredulously: "You signed this affidavit before you saw the lineup?" The rattled cab driver replied "...you are getting me confused." Whaley then stated that the police wrote out everything for him to sign but left the space for the number of the man in the lineup blank. Whaley then became confused yet again (a seemingly common state of mind for him), when confronted with the fact he'd signed the affidavit identifying the number 3 man in the lineup, when it was well known that Oswald had been the number 2 man in every lineup. Whaley then contrived a ridiculous explanation that had him counting from right to left and identifying the third man from the right that way, despite the fact there were numbers clearly marked over each man's head. Belin continued to press him, and the man who would have been as hopeless a witness as any prosecution could have, continued to babble out nonsense. In reference to the statement, and whether he had signed it before viewing the lineup, he stated "I never saw what they had in there. It was all written out by hand. The statement that I saw, I think was this one, and that could be writing. I might not even seen this one yet. I signed my name because they said that is what I said." Remember, this man is crucial to the official story's post-assassination timeline for Oswald. The Warren Report claims he identified Oswald. Whaley came up with a brilliant bit of self- analysis came when he told Belin, "I don't want to get you mixed up and get your whole investigation mixed up through my ignorance, but a good defense attorney could take me apart..." The Commission's star witness against Oswald in the Tippit case (J.D. Tippit was the Dallas policeman allegedly shot by the fleeing assassin) was perhaps its most uncredible witness of all. Helen Markham, in a statement to FBI agent Bardwell Odum, had described Tippit's killer as "about 18 years old, black hair, red complexion." Attorney Mark Lane claimed that Markham had described the killer, during a phone conversation with him, as "short, a little on the heavy side, and his hair was somewhat bushy." Obviously, this didn't describe Oswald, but still it was said, and would be continue to be said, that Markham had "identified" the alleged assassin. Markham, when confronted with Lane's statement, denied vehemently ever hearing of Lane or talking with him on the telephone. When counsel Wesley Liebeler produced a transcript of "a tape recording of a conversation that purports to be between you and Mark Lane..." Markham became confused and suddenly stated that she had received a call, but from someone identifying himself as Captain Will Fritz. When Liebeler began playing the actual tape, Markham couldn't identify her own voice and maintained "that's nothing like the telephone call I got-nothing." Liebeler gently reminded her that it clearly was her voice and that the caller could be heard identifying himself as Mark Lane, but the stellar witness stated "And I never heard that lady's voice before-this is the first time." Rambling on like fellow prosecution stars Bledsoe and Whaley, finally Markham said, "That was dirty in that man doing that." To this, the intrepid Commission counsel, instead of rebuking her and her lamebrained testimony, sympathetically replied "Well, I would think that's right." These are the witnesses who would have testified against Lee Harvey Oswald had he lived to stand trial. The mind boggles at what a defense counsel could do with such witnesses. Howard Leslie Brennan, touted by the media as the one man who saw Oswald shooting from the sixth floor window of the Depository building, was another unreliable witness who would have been eaten alive under cross-examination. Brennan had problems with his eyesight, the consistency of his testimony and the significant fact that he admitted seeing Oswald on television before "identifying" him in one of those infamous police lineups. Charles Givens testified before Commission counsel David Belin, who had his original statement in hand, stating that he'd seen Oswald on the sixth floor of the Depository just before noon. The problem was that Givens had, in his initial statement to the FBI the day of the assassination, testified that he'd last seen Oswald at 11 a.m. in the first floor "Domino Room" reading a paper. Belin knew Givens was contradicting his earlier recollection, but he wasn't there to learn the truth; he was there to frame Lee Harvey Oswald, so he didn't confront the witness about it. Years later, Warren Commission apologists still rely on discredited witnesses like Givens. Gerald Posner, the most recent well-known apologist and perhaps the most despicable of the bunch, used the later, contradictory testimony Givens as a source in his ridiculous book CASE CLOSED. Bonnie Rae Williams was another witness who had signed a Dallas police affidavit only hours after the shooting, stating "I didn't see Oswald anymore, that I remember, after I saw him at 8:00 a.m.," but then told the FBI the next day that he'd seen the alleged assassin on the fifth floor at approximately 11:30 a.m., then had gone to the sixth floor to eat his lunch at noon but had seen no one there. In his book, Posner quotes an even later change in Williams' testimony claiming he'd seen Oswald near the sixth floor windows overlooking Dealy Plaza at 11:40. Posner's book is filled with such dishonesty and distortion. At one point, he cites witness Jack Dougherty's affidavit of November 22, 1963 as the source for an alleged elevator encounter with Oswald when the affidavit mentions nothing about an elevator encounter of any kind. But Posner revealed the extent of his scholarship when he quoted the long-discredited canard about Oswald being the only Depository employee missing from a post- assassination roll call. Had he performed even cursory research, Posner would have found that this story came from Lt. Gerald Hill, who evidently had misunderstood what Captain Fritz had told him. It is, of course, well known that at the time of the non-existent roll call, police had already taken Depository employees Danny Arce, Bonnie Rae Williams and Charles Givens into custody, other employees were outside the building when it was sealed and, in any event, supervisor William Shelley had already told employees they could go home. Manager Roy Truly verified that there had been no complete check of employees during his Commission testimony.


The Warren Commission The government never intended to investigate the murder of President John F. Kennedy. When accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was gunned down three days after the assassination, by nightclub owner and small time mobster Jack Ruby, the official story had to be sold to the public. Within five hours of the assassination, presidential aide McGeorge Bundy notified Kennedy cabinet members, who were flying back to Washington, that the assassin had been apprehended and there was no conspiracy. Rather presumptuous; after all, the suspect hadn't even been charged, so how could an assistant to the president, back in Washington, D.C., have known anything about the state of the evidence? Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach sent his infamous memo on November 25, 1963-one presumes he must have dictated it as soon as the bullet entered Oswald's body-to future media darling Bill Moyers, making things crystal clear. In this memo, Katzenbach explains how "The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the lone assassin" with no confederates still at large. It also declared that "Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off..." This memo was an admission that no other leads would ever be pursued, and indeed they weren't. At this point, no investigating had been done and one marvels at the tone of the memo; shouldn't there have been a vow to find the truth about the events of November 22, especially now that the alleged assassin was unable to stand trial? President Johnson appointed a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the crime of the century. It was named for its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and its intentional bungling and failure to investigate anything probably made any eventual determination of exactly what happened that day impossible. The Warren Report was an 888 page morass of mostly meaningless material, padded with insignificant testimony and exhibits, including things like Jack Ruby's mother's dental charts and pictures of Oswald's pubic hairs. Published along with the report were 26 volumes of Hearings and Exhibits. These volumes were only sold as a set and their cost was so prohibitive that few Americans ever read them, forced to rely instead on the mainstream media, whose reporters also never read them, and their reclycled press releases. The 26 volumes were not arranged in any logical manner and they didn't include an index. Sifting through all this mass was, in the words of critic Sylvia Meagher, "...tantamount to a search for information in the Encyclopedia Britannica if the contents were untitled, unalphabetized, and in random sequence." The volumes of witness testimony were put together in such a way that was best described by critic Harold Weisberg, as being "scientifically disorganized with computer precision." When critics first began the process of matching the conclusions of the Report with the footnotes documenting them, they discovered that the footnotes were often either unrelated to the conclusion or diametrically opposed to it. In one memorable instance, the Commission cited Exhibit 3155 as a footnote, when the last numbered exhibit is 3154. The Commission found time to take the testimony of Mrs. Anne Boudreaux, whose only connection to the assassination was the fact she knew a woman who had been Lee Harvey Oswald's babysitter for two weeks when he was two and a half years old, but never called one of the most important witnesses, Admiral Burkley. Burkley was the President's personal physician and was present in the motorcade, at Bethesda Naval Hospital when the President was taken there for autopsy and was the recipient of all the official medical evidence. They also didn't want to hear from James Chaney, the motorcycle officer closest to the limousine during the shooting, but found time for Mrs. Viola Peterman, who'd been a neighbor of Oswald's mother back in 1941, and who hadn't seen or heard from her in 27 years. There can be no innocent explanation for taking such testimony; consider the resources expended just to locate these kinds of "witnesses." The Warren Commission didn't call at least 23 persons reported to have been present at some time during JFK's controversial autopsy and didn't even take the testimony of FBI agents Sibert and O'Neill, well- known to researchers for their written report on the proceeding. They were among the very few non- military personnel at the autopsy. Mary Bledsoe was an elderly woman who'd rented a room to Oswald for one week in October 1963. Interestingly enough, while Bledsoe kept a meticulous record of all her roomers on a calendar, the lone month missing from that calendar happened to be October, 1963. She testified to seeing Oswald on the bus the Commission claimed he rode after the shooting during his inexplicable trip towards eventual apprehension in the Texas Theatre. She was a confusing and entirely uncredible witness, yet she was permitted to ramble on for far too many pages, and when the WC counsel asked her why she appeared to reading from prepared notes, Bledsoe explained, "because I forget what I have to say." When the elderly woman did have something to say, it bordered on the hilarious. She "identified" the shirt she claimed Oswald had been wearing on the bus thusly: a shirt, Exhibit 150, was displayed for her during her testimony, and before counsel Joseph Ball could ask a single question about it, Bledsoe declared "that is it" several times, and told Ball she'd been shown the shirt by "some Secret Service man." When Ball asked her if she'd seen the shirt prior to that, the elderly lady stated, haltingly, "Well-" and when Ball repeated the question, she came up with this gem: "No; he had it on, though." There were many other witnesses whose testimony would have essential for any real "investigation" of the crime. Due to the nature of some of the exhibits and the testimony of completely unrelated persons, there has been speculation over the years that the written record was purposefully "padded" to add to its bulk. There are many examples of questionable tactics employed by Commission counsel on the witnesses it deposed. For the record, the members of the Commission, among them future President Gerald Ford, attended only a fraction of the sessions of testimony. The overwhelming majority of the work was done by counsel like Arlen Specter, future Senator from Pennsylvania. Many witnesses complained that their printed testimony didn't accurately reflect what they'd said. There were similar complaints from many of those questioned by the FBI. Mrs. Nancy Powell, aka Tami True, who'd been a stripper at Jack Ruby's Carousel Club, actually sent her complaint to Dallas Secret Service Agent in charge Forest Sorrels. She stated that the deposition she'd given to Commission counsel Burt Griffin was in such error that to make corrections she would have to change the questions asked by Griffin. Julia Ann Mercer reported seeing a man leaving a pickup truck on Elm Street and walking up the embankment of the grassy knoll carrying what appeared to be a rifle case, as she drove past Dealy Plaza on her way to work the day of the assassination. She was interviewed by the FBI the following day and was shown a picture of a man with his name written on the back. The name was Jack Ruby. Her statement was changed in several respects by the FBI. It was stated in the affidavit that she'd been unable to recognize the driver of the pickup truck, when she had in fact identified him as Jack Ruby. Her description of the truck was changed, and the FBI claimed Mercer had been shown the photo of Ruby five days after he killed Oswald, rather than on the day before he achieved his notoriety. She later told New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison that her signature on the affidavit was a forgery. S.M. Holland, who is best known for declaring he'd seen a puff of smoke under the trees on the grassy knoll when the shots were fired, said of the corrections he and his lawyer made to the written transcript of his testimony: "We red marked...red penciled that statement from beginning to end." Holland acknowledged that "The statement I made, as well as I can remember, isn't in context with the Warren Commission (hearings)." Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig, who got into hot water early on by being one of the few members of Dallas law enforcement actually attempting to do his job, was first shown his printed testimony in 1968. Craig marked 14 corrections, and in a 1971 interview spoke of the way counsel David Belin had behaved during the testimony. "...Belin was the one who interviewed me-and he started...I made him mad to begin with. He started instructing me before we got a tape recorder and a stenographer there. He told her not to write anything until he instructed her to. He did not turn the recorder on and he started instructing me. He said, 'Now, Mr. Craig, I'm going to ask you this question and I want you to tell me this.' And I said, 'Counselor, just ask me the questions and if I know the answers, I will tell you,' and he became irritated..." A chronicle of Roger Craig's tragic post-assassination existence will serve to illustrate what happened, all too often, to those who veered from the official thesis. Craig first drew notice when he claimed to have observed a man leaving Dealy Plaza in a Rambler station wagon shortly after the assassination. He also testified that he'd been in Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz's office, while Oswald was being interrogated, and identified Oswald as the man he'd seen enter the station wagon. In reaction, he stated Oswald had slammed his fist down on a table and complained "Now everyone will know who I am." Fritz testified that Craig had not been in his office that day, but Craig was vindicated when a photo was published in Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry's book JFK ASSASSINATION FILE which showed Craig standing with others in Fritz's office, with the caption "The Homicide Bureau under guard while Oswald was being interrogated." Craig, a former model deputy who'd been named Officer of the Year in 1960, paid a heavy price for his integrity. Sheriff Bill Decker came to despise him, ordered him to stop speaking with the press and eventually fired him in 1967. Craig went to New Orleans to assist Jim Garrison's investigation and was constantly followed during his time there. Upon his return to Dallas, he was shot at by an unknown gunman. Craig, unable to maintain steady employment and having received death threats, had his car forced off the road in 1973, causing a serious back injury. Several months later, his car was bombed, then his wife left him and in January 1975 he was wounded by a shotgun blast to the shoulder. The Waxahachie, Texas police refused to take the shooting seriously, telling him the wound must have been self-inflicted. In his unpublished manuscript WHEN THEY KILL A PRESIDENT, Craig related how he'd been among the first officers to reach the "sniper's nest" on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. He claimed the three rifle shells found there were neatly stacked against the wall, when photos showed them to have been scattered and lying several feet apart from each other. In addition, he maintained that the rifle found on the sixth floor was indeed a 7.65 German Mauser, as the other officers who found it, Weitzman and Boone, originally swore to. Finally, on May 15, 1975, in constant physical pain and tired of the threats on his life, Craig shot himself in the chest, dying at the age of 39. Refuting the Warren Commission is simple work; as comedian Richard Belzer once stated, the only people who believe the Warren Report are those who work for the government or the press. It is hard to argue with the logic of Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler, who wrote in a September 6, 1964 memo that "...the best evidence Oswald could fire as fast as he did and hit the target is the fact he did so." If Oswald had lived and stood trial, the witnesses testifying against him would have presented inviting targets for the most inexperienced defense counsel. William Whaley, the taxi driver who allegedly drove the fleeing assassin during nonsensical post-assassination journey, would not have made a very impressive witness. Whaley indadvertently gave out a great deal of information. During his Warren Commission testimony, he described the police lineups, wherein teenagers or well-dressed police employees were juxtaposed against the bruised, tee-shirt clad Oswald. At one point, Whaley stated "But you could have picked him out without identifying him by just listening to him because he was bawling out the policemen, telling them it wasn't right to put him in line with these teenagers and all that and they asked me which one and I told them." Whaley also reported that Oswald had chastised the policemen because "They knew what they were doing and they were trying to railroad him and he wanted him lawyer." With a presumably straight face, counsel Joseph Ball responded to all this information by asking "Did that aid you in the identification of the man?" Whaley summarized things nicely when he declared "Anybody who wasn't sure could have picked out the right one just for that." In yet another session of testimony, Whaley startled counsel David Belin when he reported that "I signed that statement before they carried me down to see the lineup. I signed that statement, and they carried me down to the lineup at 2:30 in the afternoon." Belin responded to this incredulously: "You signed this affidavit before you saw the lineup?" The rattled cab driver replied "...you are getting me confused." Whaley then stated that the police wrote out everything for him to sign but left the space for the number of the man in the lineup blank. Whaley then became confused yet again (a seemingly common state of mind for him), when confronted with the fact he'd signed the affidavit identifying the number 3 man in the lineup, when it was well known that Oswald had been the number 2 man in every lineup. Whaley then contrived a ridiculous explanation that had him counting from right to left and identifying the third man from the right that way, despite the fact there were numbers clearly marked over each man's head. Belin continued to press him, and the man who would have been as hopeless a witness as any prosecution could have, continued to babble out nonsense. In reference to the statement, and whether he had signed it before viewing the lineup, he stated "I never saw what they had in there. It was all written out by hand. The statement that I saw, I think was this one, and that could be writing. I might not even seen this one yet. I signed my name because they said that is what I said." Remember, this man is crucial to the official story's post-assassination timeline for Oswald. The Warren Report claims he identified Oswald. Whaley came up with a brilliant bit of self- analysis came when he told Belin, "I don't want to get you mixed up and get your whole investigation mixed up through my ignorance, but a good defense attorney could take me apart..." The Commission's star witness against Oswald in the Tippit case (J.D. Tippit was the Dallas policeman allegedly shot by the fleeing assassin) was perhaps its most uncredible witness of all. Helen Markham, in a statement to FBI agent Bardwell Odum, had described Tippit's killer as "about 18 years old, black hair, red complexion." Attorney Mark Lane claimed that Markham had described the killer, during a phone conversation with him, as "short, a little on the heavy side, and his hair was somewhat bushy." Obviously, this didn't describe Oswald, but still it was said, and would be continue to be said, that Markham had "identified" the alleged assassin. Markham, when confronted with Lane's statement, denied vehemently ever hearing of Lane or talking with him on the telephone. When counsel Wesley Liebeler produced a transcript of "a tape recording of a conversation that purports to be between you and Mark Lane..." Markham became confused and suddenly stated that she had received a call, but from someone identifying himself as Captain Will Fritz. When Liebeler began playing the actual tape, Markham couldn't identify her own voice and maintained "that's nothing like the telephone call I got-nothing." Liebeler gently reminded her that it clearly was her voice and that the caller could be heard identifying himself as Mark Lane, but the stellar witness stated "And I never heard that lady's voice before-this is the first time." Rambling on like fellow prosecution stars Bledsoe and Whaley, finally Markham said, "That was dirty in that man doing that." To this, the intrepid Commission counsel, instead of rebuking her and her lamebrained testimony, sympathetically replied "Well, I would think that's right." These are the witnesses who would have testified against Lee Harvey Oswald had he lived to stand trial. The mind boggles at what a defense counsel could do with such witnesses. Howard Leslie Brennan, touted by the media as the one man who saw Oswald shooting from the sixth floor window of the Depository building, was another unreliable witness who would have been eaten alive under cross-examination. Brennan had problems with his eyesight, the consistency of his testimony and the significant fact that he admitted seeing Oswald on television before "identifying" him in one of those infamous police lineups. Charles Givens testified before Commission counsel David Belin, who had his original statement in hand, stating that he'd seen Oswald on the sixth floor of the Depository just before noon. The problem was that Givens had, in his initial statement to the FBI the day of the assassination, testified that he'd last seen Oswald at 11 a.m. in the first floor "Domino Room" reading a paper. Belin knew Givens was contradicting his earlier recollection, but he wasn't there to learn the truth; he was there to frame Lee Harvey Oswald, so he didn't confront the witness about it. Years later, Warren Commission apologists still rely on discredited witnesses like Givens. Gerald Posner, the most recent well-known apologist and perhaps the most despicable of the bunch, used the later, contradictory testimony Givens as a source in his ridiculous book CASE CLOSED. Bonnie Rae Williams was another witness who had signed a Dallas police affidavit only hours after the shooting, stating "I didn't see Oswald anymore, that I remember, after I saw him at 8:00 a.m.," but then told the FBI the next day that he'd seen the alleged assassin on the fifth floor at approximately 11:30 a.m., then had gone to the sixth floor to eat his lunch at noon but had seen no one there. In his book, Posner quotes an even later change in Williams' testimony claiming he'd seen Oswald near the sixth floor windows overlooking Dealy Plaza at 11:40. Posner's book is filled with such dishonesty and distortion. At one point, he cites witness Jack Dougherty's affidavit of November 22, 1963 as the source for an alleged elevator encounter with Oswald when the affidavit mentions nothing about an elevator encounter of any kind. But Posner revealed the extent of his scholarship when he quoted the long-discredited canard about Oswald being the only Depository employee missing from a post- assassination roll call. Had he performed even cursory research, Posner would have found that this story came from Lt. Gerald Hill, who evidently had misunderstood what Captain Fritz had told him. It is, of course, well known that at the time of the non-existent roll call, police had already taken Depository employees Danny Arce, Bonnie Rae Williams and Charles Givens into custody, other employees were outside the building when it was sealed and, in any event, supervisor William Shelley had already told employees they could go home. Manager Roy Truly verified that there had been no complete check of employees during his Commission testimony.




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