Posted on 08/04/2004 5:09:23 AM PDT by BluegrassScholar
WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 - About a year from now, one of the most vexing mysteries in American history may finally be solved: Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?
Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have begun work on a digital scanning apparatus that they believe will be able to reproduce sound from the only known audio recording of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.
The recording was made through an open microphone on a police motorcycle during Kennedy's motorcade into Dealey Plaza, where the president was shot to death. The sounds were captured onto a Dictaphone belt at police headquarters, but scientific analyses of them over decades proved anything but conclusive, fueling arguments about how many people were actually involved in killing the president.
The federal government's official inquiry into the assassination, the Warren Commission, concluded in 1964 that Oswald was a lone gunman, firing three shots from the Texas Book Depository building high above the plaza. But a House committee that investigated the shooting 15 years later concluded that four shots were fired, including three from the book depository and one from another location, giving rise to all manner of conspiracy theories.
Like old 78 r.p.m. records, the Dictaphone belt became worn and damaged through constant replay for analysis using a stylus. When it became property of the National Archives in 1990, the technical staff recommended that no further efforts be made to replicate its sounds through mechanical means.
That left preservationists with a daunting and historically important challenge: How could the sounds on the old plastic belt be captured for posterity, and if they could, would they provide unequivocal evidence of how many shots were fired?
Leslie C. Waffen, an archivist with the National Archives, said he believed not only that the sound could be captured but also that, using digital analysis to map the sounds, scientists could remove extraneous noise like static and distant voices to reveal gun shots.
"This is big," said Mr. Waffen, whose unit has custody of the belt as well as the original 8-millimeter home movie by Abraham Zapruder, which showed the assassination in color but utter silence. "That's why we called the experts in. They came up with a recommendation to do this."
After a June meeting of the National Archives Advisory Committee on Preservation, the job was left to Carl Haber and Vitaliy Fadeyev of the Berkeley laboratory, who have used a digital optical camera to replicate sounds on fragile Edison cylinders and long-play records. The process involves scanning the grooves of the Dictaphone belt electronically to create a digital image of the sound patterns.
Once that is achieved, Mr. Waffen said, the scientists could "clean it up, like peeling layers off an onion to get down to the sound floor" of the recording. And that, he said, could reveal how many shots were fired.
It is a question that has bedeviled government officials, law enforcement agents and historians since the actual event, leading to an array of conspiracy theories involving the mob, Fidel Castro, Lyndon B. Johnson, Russians or, as the film director, Oliver Stone, would have audiences believe, the "military industrial complex."
Among the strongest and most persistent alternative theories to the Warren Commission report has been the involvement of a second gunman on a sweep of land above the motorcade route that came to be known as the grassy knoll. It gained widespread currency after the 1979 Congressional investigation, which relied, in part, on a graphic comparison of the sounds on the Dictaphone belt and a test of gunshots in Dealey Plaza.
They produced evidence that four shots were fired, with indications that the first, second and fourth shots came from the book depository and the third came from the grassy knoll.
But three years later, in a subsequent acoustical analysis, the National Academy of Science concluded that the noise that others ascribed to gun shots was merely static or something else. That was the last time the belt was played.
Once it became the belt's custodian, the National Archives was faced with two questions: What should be done with it? And how could its evidence be accurately captured and made public?
For years, the questions were unanswered, until it became clear that new technologies might produce evidence that was unreachable through older, less sophisticated analytical methods that risked further damaging the belt.
The advisory commission concluded that the National Archives had a responsibility to provide a true copy of the sound, if not enhance it. That, the panel members said, could be left to the researchers.
"People want to know," said Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which opened in the book depository building in 1989. "The Warren Commission said it was one guy. The House Committee said it was Oswald and someone else. There hasn't been any resolution."
Mr. Waffen said it was about time to get one.
"Scientists have studied these sounds for 25 or 30 years and have still reached different conclusions," he said. "But with today's technology, we can get a better reading and answer the question, one way or the other."
It was standard procedure. A law was passed after "JFK" the movie came out that enabled the documents to be declassified and released. They are no longer sealed.
Not ALL of it has been released, however.
Also, if memory serves me at this time LHO took the rifle into the building 2 weeks before Kennedy came to Dallas. No big deal except they didn't announce the route he was to take until the day before his visit, November 21st.
He took it to work that morning.
And to all, if I am or was duped, I will be the first to admit it, how about you?
Most of the claims you made in this thread have long ago been debunked.
One last time - who? Standard procedure or not.
No, the House Committee said there were four shots and that one missed. Nothing about "no projectile".
The Committee was wrong, as a later report from the National Academy of Sciences demonstrated, and more recent work has upheld.
Interestingly the Committee said the shot that missed came from the grassy knoll, and otherwise confirmed the shooting scenario in the Warren Report.
ping
Because it was standard procedure it doesn't matter who, if there even was one person that decided the thing, which I doubt. There was nothing sinister involved and the documents have been released. Whatever tree you are barking up, it's the wrong one.
Okay I'll bite, who and what is the guy in the photo?
Then you don't know, and you're OK with that.
The VAST majority have been. There were some exceptions, yes. For example, Oswald's tax returns were not released because it was up to Marina to release them (they have become available). There is no reason to believe there is anything else hiding in those few documents that are still not public. You can't just assume it.
Persons who have seen ALL the files, like Robert Blakey of the HSCA, say there is nothing there.
Like I said, I don't know that there is such a person. If there was I don't care. It means nothing.
The case is decided by the evidence.
Anyone have a copy?
It was a Karl Rove dirty trick he planned during recess.
I couldn't give a fiddler's fugh about JFK; I do question the unknown authority who decides the American public can't handle the truth for 75 years.
Nobody on this forum has yet to be able to tell me WHO or WHAT decides on 50-75 years after the fact?
What if GWB gets whacked, and after a few months of inquiry, we are told that the records are being sealed for 75 years?
Who decides that?
"I can't accept the "magic bullet" because you could reload it today and fire it. No way it caused seven seperate wounds in my opinion, and remain undeformed on the tip."
Sure. It didn't hit any bones. Not a one. (The rib break was from pressure.)
Oswald's involvement has been proved as much as anything can be. People who don't want to accept it do so on faith--not reason.
If there was a conspiracy it was apart from the shooting, which he did alone. At least he was the one who fired the three shots that are known about.
Whether Oswald was encouraged somehow to do this while he was down in Mexico talking to the Cubans is a miniscule possiblity. It is hard to believe that Castro would have risked such a thing.
Anyone that beleives Oswald acted alone is not dealing with the real world to well.
I have read over 50 books on this subject.
I also have read a lot on this subject including all 747 pages of "Best Evidence". Lifton raised some interesting points such as the questionable competence of Cyril Wecht, but he is not entirely living in the real word either. All of the points he brings up about the nature and meaning of Kennedy's wounds has been refuted by multiple forensic experts now that the actual autopsy data is widely available. Lifton did not even know that the brain was destroyed at the request of Robert Kennedy. His speculation that perhaps the body could have been returned to Washington on an SR-71 is just a joke. None of the evidence of other shooters has stood up to rigorous scientific analysis. Try reading the assassination report by the physicist Luis Alvarez.
No, it doesn't. See #136.
"Six Seconds in Dallas"
Refutes the Warren Commision report.
That is an actual photo of Al Gore during the Viet Nam war. His father was a Senator, and he went over long enough to get his ticket punched for his future political career. He went out for a couple of photo ops, and this one, with him standing in such a way that his rifle was pointing directly at his forehead, was actually posted on his Presidential campaign web site until it became such a joke that they pulled it.
Then you clearly haven't read Posner's "Case Closed" yet. Every aspect of the bullet and the wounds is covered, along with the relevant ballistics and physics. It does a great job of reconstructing the events rather like an episode of "CSI".
The short form is that the bullet passed through the thickness of two torsos (JFK then Connally) hitting only soft tissue, which slowed it down a lot and caused it to tumble. By the time it hit Connally's rib, it was *sideways* (as proven by Connally's exit wound under his nipple, which was "slot"-shaped and nearly as wide as the bullet was long). It hit Connally's rib on its *side*, which accounts for the somewhat flattened look of the final bullet.
It tumbled as it exited Connally's chest and hit his wrist *butt-first*, breaking the wristbone and compressing the base of the bullet.
So given that the bullet's *tip* never hit anything but soft tissue, the good condition of the tip is hardly surprising. And while a full-velocity FMJ bullet will shatter or be seriously deformed when it hits bone, by the time the so-called "magic bullet" hit bone it was traveling less than half of its muzzle velocity. Tests on cadavers reveal that lower-velocity bullets of the same type do indeed resist deformation while still having enough energy to break bone, and on average end up in *better* shape than the not-so "pristine bullet" of the JFK case.
All in all, there's nothing "magic" or even really unusual about the wounds it caused and the condition it was left in.
That's the quick summary -- see Posner's book for far more detail, tests, and analysis.
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