Reclaiming history from Vince Bugliosi
UPDATE as of January 2010: Anyone who finds Bugliosi's book compelling is either ignorant of the facts or lying. There's a reason juries are required to listen to both sides in a case. People who think Bugliosi is doing anything other than a one-sided presentation have been bamboozled.
Jim DiEugenio has written an extensive series of rebuttals to Bugliosi's book over at the CTKA site. Start here to learn why Bugliosi's case doesn't hold water.
Original post begins below.
Vincent Bugliosi, the famed prosecutor of the Manson case, has stopped putting liars in jail and started putting them in print. In his Orwellian-named book, “Reclaiming History,” Bugliosi purports to answer all the questions and shut all the doors to conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy. Long before we get to the question of why he would waste the later years of his life on such an impossible task, the first question we need to ask is this:
Is this an honest presentation?
After just minutes in its pages, I was shocked at how easily I could answer that.
No. This is not an honest presentation of the case.
This is completely one-sided attempt to do the impossible, to wash away the conspiracy and pretend it never happened.
Now I was hoping to come and tell you that while I thought Bugliosi was an honest man, he was simply wrong. He subscribed to Probe magazine for several years. So I know he’s not ignorant of the facts. He’s just incredibly biased in many cases, and in some, he’s flat out dishonest.
He’s wrong too, but everyone can be wrong, now and then, and that is not a crime.
Deliberately misrepresenting history, however, is the highest possible crime to this Real History lover. So I’ll start the ball in motion. A lot of us will be reclaiming history from the death grip Mr. Bugliosi has tried, but spectacularly failed, to put on the JFK case over the next several months.
I turned right to the chapter that most interested me: his chapter on the CIA. After 15 years of research, serious on-the-ground research interviewing people and reading original documents that were never supposed to see the light of day, I’ve come to the firm conclusion that specific people in the CIA were involved in the crime. Of course I’m curious to see how Bugliosi is going to explain all the evidence away.
So how does he open? With a great big lie:
“…not been able to come up with ANY EVIDENCE connecting the CIA to the assassination or Oswald…”
That’s a lie. And Bugliosi, as a prosecutor, knows full well the difference between evidence and proof. I’d be the first to concede that no one has yet proved the CIA was involved in the assassination. But there’s a world of evidence that paints direct ties between the CIA and the assassination.
Let’s start with some testimony from the HSCA, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, formed in the 70s to reinvestigate the crime due to the government’s acknowledgment that the CIA had withheld critical evidence from the Warren Commission during its investigation. The CIA assassination plots against Castro and other foreign leaders emerged, as did their breaking of the law domestically by wiretapping Americans on our own soil, in direct violation of their charter. (These, by the way, are the people whose side Bugliosi takes when faced with believing those liars or the people who gave up a good portion of their time to find the truth about what happened.)
Let’s start with some pretty dang interesting evidence. Former CIA finance officer James Wilcott, who said one of his colleagues told him he’d been drawing money for “Oswald” or the “Oswald project.” Bugliosi tries to shoot this down, noting even the HSCA report writers found Wilcott not credible. But ask yourself. If the CIA was behind the crime, do you think for a second they’d allow the truth to be written into the report? If the CIA is behind the assassination, this same episode, written by Bugliosi to make the case that Wilcott was not credible, can be turned around to make Wilcott ultimately credible. Bugliosi writes:
And why would we expect CIA employees to suddenly tell the truth to a government they felt no subservience to, as evidenced by James Angleton’s famous retort when questioned under oath by the Church Committee in the Senate: “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.” In other words, one of the top CIA officials deemed the CIA above the law. Numerous books on the agency show that opinion was widely held on the covert side of the Agency. In fact, that opinion was so widely held that President Kennedy had famously promised to shatter the Agency. He took the first step to following through on that threat when he created the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. Kennedy wanted to move the rogue CIA covert operations, called “fun and games” by Agency insiders, to the DIA where it would be under the far more accountable military chain of command. Many in the CIA saw this as a direct attack on the Agency. Many of us have speculated that was a key reason Kennedy was killed. In any case, it’s not hard to imagine that when the Agency was under attack by Wilcott, the same knee jerk reaction followed -- protect the CIA at all costs.
Bugliosi, through naïveté or deception, doesn’t even entertain the possibility that Wilcott was telling the truth. But he ends with a lie, no matter how you slice it, by saying Wilcott’s story is not evidence. But of course it IS evidence. It is simply not proof.
In fact, there had been, at one point, so much evidence of the CIA’s involvement with Oswald that it warranted its own section of the HSCA report. In Probe Magazine, Vol. 4 No. 2, I wrote a long article called “Who’s Running the Country? How the Mexico City Report Informs us in 1996.” The “Mexico City Report” was a summary of Oswald’s trip to Mexico and attendant matters, written by Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway. In the article, I quoted Lopez on this point. When Jim DiEugenio had interviewed Lopez about the report, DiEugenio had asked, wasn’t there supposed to be a section about Oswald and the CIA? Lopez was surprised that it was gone, and can be heard flipping through the pages of the report on the tape of the interview. “It’s completely gone,” he said in obvious surprise, adding later, “They [the CIA] hated it -- that section. Totally. They just hated that section.” In other words, a whole piece of evidence our tax dollars paid for was removed. I’ll give you one guess as to who removed it.
How can you produce evidence if your suspect keeps hiding the ball? Bugliosi says if you can’t prove otherwise, there there’s no conspiracy. I say if we can’t prove otherwise, maybe it’s because we’re exactly right about the CIA’s role in the conspiracy.
And how’s this for evidence? In David Talbot’s book “Brothers,” Talbot writes about Ruben Carbajal, a friend of David Morales, a CIA bigwig from the notorious JM/WAVE station in Florida, the CIA’s largest station inside the US, and his information regarding the Kennedy assassination:
In this next example, you have to wonder whether Bugliosi is ignorant, deceptive, or simply criminally naïve! Imagine that Bugliosi had been prosecuting the OJ case. Let’s say OJ wanted to evaluate his own DNA evidence. The Bugliosi we think we know would have laughed him out of court, maybe even adding as OJ slunk out that such a suggestion was itself almost a tacit admission of guilt. But look what Bugliosi falls for here:
How can this be the vaunted prosecutor of the Manson days?
Or maybe, what we don’t know about the Manson case to this day would explain Bugliosi’s bizarre allegiance to the CIA.
After all, it was a Manson protégé that almost became another presidential assassin. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme nearly managed to kill Gerald Ford. (Seventeen days later, Sarah Jane Moore, who had at one time been an FBI informant, would fail in a second attempt on Ford’s life, one that would finally have put a Rockefeller in the White House.) Dr. Louis Jolyon West, who had interviewed Jack Ruby after the JFK assassination and who was a leading force in the CIA’s MKULTRA research from his position at UCLA, was quick to offer his comments on Fromme to Time Magazine after her failed assassination attempt:
I’ve never had time to look into the Manson case, but I’ve often wondered about an MKULTRA link there. Manson was transferred to Vacaville prison in the late seventies. Vacaville had earlier been the site of CIA research on an MKULTRA subproject named MKSEARCH. Manson had been in a variety of prisons most of his life, any of which might also have been sites for experimentation. I’m not suggesting anything here other than that there may be more to the Manson story than we ever know. Goodness knows Bugliosi’s hate-filled diatribe against the “kooks” and “nuts” who speak the obvious, that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, calls into question all his earlier reporting, and makes me wonder what we might have learned had someone more honest taken up the Manson case.
Seriously, every page I’ve flipped to by searching or randomly browsing so far is fraught with lies, errors, and omissions -- the very things he accuses the research community of doing. Is he just an anti-conspiracy zealot, out to defend a world view he can’t afford to have shaken? Or is something more sinister at work? Maybe a look into his past would give us some answers.
I’ll point out other problems with Bugliosi’s book in future posts. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, so it’s not particularly exciting work. But there aren’t a lot of us with a wealth of counter-information to share, and you all know how I feel about REAL history, and the responsibility I feel to the truth.
Before I leave you, I have to remind you that YOUR VOTE may disappear for good next week if you don’t get your butt in gear. You must call your Congressperson and beg them to support HR 811. See this post below for details. I’ll continue to post more information on this bill all this week. It’s much more important than the ongoing deceptions about the Kennedy assassination. The assassination story is about the past, and how it informs our present. But protecting our vote is ouronly hope for the future. Don’t let our vote disappear into the same murky chasm in which Bugliosi has tried to bury the JFK case. Don’t let your vote become a historical relic. I’m quite serious. This issue couldn’t possibly be more important, and the bill is up for a vote as early as next Monday. Your future hangs in the balance. Pick up your phone now so you won’t have to pick up something more sinister later. Visit http://www.house.gov/ to find your Congressional Representative’s contact information and get busy.
Jim DiEugenio has written an extensive series of rebuttals to Bugliosi's book over at the CTKA site. Start here to learn why Bugliosi's case doesn't hold water.
Original post begins below.
Vincent Bugliosi, the famed prosecutor of the Manson case, has stopped putting liars in jail and started putting them in print. In his Orwellian-named book, “Reclaiming History,” Bugliosi purports to answer all the questions and shut all the doors to conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy. Long before we get to the question of why he would waste the later years of his life on such an impossible task, the first question we need to ask is this:
Is this an honest presentation?
After just minutes in its pages, I was shocked at how easily I could answer that.
No. This is not an honest presentation of the case.
This is completely one-sided attempt to do the impossible, to wash away the conspiracy and pretend it never happened.
Now I was hoping to come and tell you that while I thought Bugliosi was an honest man, he was simply wrong. He subscribed to Probe magazine for several years. So I know he’s not ignorant of the facts. He’s just incredibly biased in many cases, and in some, he’s flat out dishonest.
He’s wrong too, but everyone can be wrong, now and then, and that is not a crime.
Deliberately misrepresenting history, however, is the highest possible crime to this Real History lover. So I’ll start the ball in motion. A lot of us will be reclaiming history from the death grip Mr. Bugliosi has tried, but spectacularly failed, to put on the JFK case over the next several months.
I turned right to the chapter that most interested me: his chapter on the CIA. After 15 years of research, serious on-the-ground research interviewing people and reading original documents that were never supposed to see the light of day, I’ve come to the firm conclusion that specific people in the CIA were involved in the crime. Of course I’m curious to see how Bugliosi is going to explain all the evidence away.
So how does he open? With a great big lie:
For years, conspiracy theorists have written books about the Central Intelligence Agency's involvement in the assassination of JFK. And as conspiracy theorist E . Martin Schotz, a mathematician and practicing psychiatrist, puts it, "I and other ordinary citizens know, know for a fact, that there was a conspiracy [to murder Kennedy] and that it was organized at the highest levels of the CIA ."' The fact that Schotz and his fellow conspiracy theorists haven't been able to come up with any evidence connecting the CIA to the assassination or Oswald has not troubled them in the least.Let’s look at that last sentence closely.
“…not been able to come up with ANY EVIDENCE connecting the CIA to the assassination or Oswald…”
That’s a lie. And Bugliosi, as a prosecutor, knows full well the difference between evidence and proof. I’d be the first to concede that no one has yet proved the CIA was involved in the assassination. But there’s a world of evidence that paints direct ties between the CIA and the assassination.
Let’s start with some testimony from the HSCA, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, formed in the 70s to reinvestigate the crime due to the government’s acknowledgment that the CIA had withheld critical evidence from the Warren Commission during its investigation. The CIA assassination plots against Castro and other foreign leaders emerged, as did their breaking of the law domestically by wiretapping Americans on our own soil, in direct violation of their charter. (These, by the way, are the people whose side Bugliosi takes when faced with believing those liars or the people who gave up a good portion of their time to find the truth about what happened.)
Let’s start with some pretty dang interesting evidence. Former CIA finance officer James Wilcott, who said one of his colleagues told him he’d been drawing money for “Oswald” or the “Oswald project.” Bugliosi tries to shoot this down, noting even the HSCA report writers found Wilcott not credible. But ask yourself. If the CIA was behind the crime, do you think for a second they’d allow the truth to be written into the report? If the CIA is behind the assassination, this same episode, written by Bugliosi to make the case that Wilcott was not credible, can be turned around to make Wilcott ultimately credible. Bugliosi writes:
Wilcott 's credibility suffered even further when an intelligence analyst whom Wilcott said he discussed the Oswald allegation with at the post told the committee he wasn't in Tokyo at the time of the assassination, the committee verifying that he had been transferred back to the United States in 1962, the previous year. Finally, the committee interviewed many CIA personnel who had been stationed in Tokyo at the time, including the chief of the post and other personnel who surely would have known if Oswald had had any association with the agency in Tokyo, and all had no knowledge of such an association.If the CIA was behind the crime, it makes perfect sense they’d launch other employees more loyal to the agency at the HSCA to discredit Wilcott’s account. People who work for abroad for the CIA have to lie every day about who they are and what they do. Richard Helms, a former CIA director, famously deemed his perjury charge a “badge of honor.”
And why would we expect CIA employees to suddenly tell the truth to a government they felt no subservience to, as evidenced by James Angleton’s famous retort when questioned under oath by the Church Committee in the Senate: “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.” In other words, one of the top CIA officials deemed the CIA above the law. Numerous books on the agency show that opinion was widely held on the covert side of the Agency. In fact, that opinion was so widely held that President Kennedy had famously promised to shatter the Agency. He took the first step to following through on that threat when he created the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. Kennedy wanted to move the rogue CIA covert operations, called “fun and games” by Agency insiders, to the DIA where it would be under the far more accountable military chain of command. Many in the CIA saw this as a direct attack on the Agency. Many of us have speculated that was a key reason Kennedy was killed. In any case, it’s not hard to imagine that when the Agency was under attack by Wilcott, the same knee jerk reaction followed -- protect the CIA at all costs.
Bugliosi, through naïveté or deception, doesn’t even entertain the possibility that Wilcott was telling the truth. But he ends with a lie, no matter how you slice it, by saying Wilcott’s story is not evidence. But of course it IS evidence. It is simply not proof.
In fact, there had been, at one point, so much evidence of the CIA’s involvement with Oswald that it warranted its own section of the HSCA report. In Probe Magazine, Vol. 4 No. 2, I wrote a long article called “Who’s Running the Country? How the Mexico City Report Informs us in 1996.” The “Mexico City Report” was a summary of Oswald’s trip to Mexico and attendant matters, written by Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway. In the article, I quoted Lopez on this point. When Jim DiEugenio had interviewed Lopez about the report, DiEugenio had asked, wasn’t there supposed to be a section about Oswald and the CIA? Lopez was surprised that it was gone, and can be heard flipping through the pages of the report on the tape of the interview. “It’s completely gone,” he said in obvious surprise, adding later, “They [the CIA] hated it -- that section. Totally. They just hated that section.” In other words, a whole piece of evidence our tax dollars paid for was removed. I’ll give you one guess as to who removed it.
How can you produce evidence if your suspect keeps hiding the ball? Bugliosi says if you can’t prove otherwise, there there’s no conspiracy. I say if we can’t prove otherwise, maybe it’s because we’re exactly right about the CIA’s role in the conspiracy.
And how’s this for evidence? In David Talbot’s book “Brothers,” Talbot writes about Ruben Carbajal, a friend of David Morales, a CIA bigwig from the notorious JM/WAVE station in Florida, the CIA’s largest station inside the US, and his information regarding the Kennedy assassination:
Carbajal does know who killed JFK -- it was the CIA, he said, without naming any individuals. Morales and his close CIA colleague Tony Sforza both told him the agency was behind the Dallas plot. The Kennedys got what was coming to them. Carbajal insisted: “[President] Kennedy screwed up, caused all those deaths at the Bay of Pigs, he pulls off the planes, the men get caught on the ground. You want me to respect a president like that? Or an asshole like his brother?”Is that proof? No. But is that evidence? Heck yeah. If Bugliosi had someone saying that about Charlie Manson when he was looking for evidence to put him behind bars, do you think he would have walked by such a large allegation without investigating it thoroughly? That’s why researchers keep searching the Kennedy case. The evidence of the CIA’s involvement is plentiful. The proof, however, remains elusive, which would also make perfect sense since the CIA has funds that are not available for congressional scrutiny. They can do anything they want. They can lie with impunity. When caught by the House and Senate in separate investigation breaking numerous laws, what happened? Was anyone in the CIA prosecuted? No. The laws were changed to accommodate the Agency. So Bugliosi can spout about their innocence all he wants. But to this very serious, longtime researcher, his explanations ring hollow.
In this next example, you have to wonder whether Bugliosi is ignorant, deceptive, or simply criminally naïve! Imagine that Bugliosi had been prosecuting the OJ case. Let’s say OJ wanted to evaluate his own DNA evidence. The Bugliosi we think we know would have laughed him out of court, maybe even adding as OJ slunk out that such a suggestion was itself almost a tacit admission of guilt. But look what Bugliosi falls for here:
in 1996, the CIA released a study titled "Getting to Know the President, CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952-1992," by the CIA deputy director for intelligence, John L . Helgerson. On a one-year assignment, Helgerson interviewed "former presidents, CIA directors, and numerous others involved" in the nine presidencies covered by the subject period to ascertain the CIA's relationship with the various presidents. On the issue so dear to conspiracy theorists—the CIA's alleged animosity for Kennedy, and hence, its motive to kill him—it is very noteworthy that Helgerson's study reported that "the [CIA's] relationship with Kennedy was not only a distinct improvement over the more formal relationship with Eisenhower, but would only rarely be matched in future administrations."So a CIA deputy director declares, by implication, the CIA’s innocence in the killing of Kennedy. And Bugliosi falls for it! He does this throughout this book, by the way, falling for CIA-sponsored explanations while ignoring the fact that the CIA was the source for the rebuttal of its own guilt! How silly is that? Has he lost his marbles? Did he ever have them?
How can this be the vaunted prosecutor of the Manson days?
Or maybe, what we don’t know about the Manson case to this day would explain Bugliosi’s bizarre allegiance to the CIA.
After all, it was a Manson protégé that almost became another presidential assassin. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme nearly managed to kill Gerald Ford. (Seventeen days later, Sarah Jane Moore, who had at one time been an FBI informant, would fail in a second attempt on Ford’s life, one that would finally have put a Rockefeller in the White House.) Dr. Louis Jolyon West, who had interviewed Jack Ruby after the JFK assassination and who was a leading force in the CIA’s MKULTRA research from his position at UCLA, was quick to offer his comments on Fromme to Time Magazine after her failed assassination attempt:
Trying to explain Fromme's fascination with violence, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, head of the psychiatry department at U.C.L.A., points out that she was part of a group whose members all were paranoid to varying degrees. "They all suffered from a group syndrome," he says. "There was a pattern of holding to false beliefs with even greater conviction and emotional commitment than a normal person's beliefs that are subject to the laws of evidence. They were being victimized by conspiracies and plots coming from very high levels of Government. This affirms the grandiosity of their self-image, and it justifies the violence with which they strike back."Or maybe they had notions of conspiracies and plots because they were the product of them.
I’ve never had time to look into the Manson case, but I’ve often wondered about an MKULTRA link there. Manson was transferred to Vacaville prison in the late seventies. Vacaville had earlier been the site of CIA research on an MKULTRA subproject named MKSEARCH. Manson had been in a variety of prisons most of his life, any of which might also have been sites for experimentation. I’m not suggesting anything here other than that there may be more to the Manson story than we ever know. Goodness knows Bugliosi’s hate-filled diatribe against the “kooks” and “nuts” who speak the obvious, that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, calls into question all his earlier reporting, and makes me wonder what we might have learned had someone more honest taken up the Manson case.
Seriously, every page I’ve flipped to by searching or randomly browsing so far is fraught with lies, errors, and omissions -- the very things he accuses the research community of doing. Is he just an anti-conspiracy zealot, out to defend a world view he can’t afford to have shaken? Or is something more sinister at work? Maybe a look into his past would give us some answers.
I’ll point out other problems with Bugliosi’s book in future posts. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, so it’s not particularly exciting work. But there aren’t a lot of us with a wealth of counter-information to share, and you all know how I feel about REAL history, and the responsibility I feel to the truth.
Before I leave you, I have to remind you that YOUR VOTE may disappear for good next week if you don’t get your butt in gear. You must call your Congressperson and beg them to support HR 811. See this post below for details. I’ll continue to post more information on this bill all this week. It’s much more important than the ongoing deceptions about the Kennedy assassination. The assassination story is about the past, and how it informs our present. But protecting our vote is ouronly hope for the future. Don’t let our vote disappear into the same murky chasm in which Bugliosi has tried to bury the JFK case. Don’t let your vote become a historical relic. I’m quite serious. This issue couldn’t possibly be more important, and the bill is up for a vote as early as next Monday. Your future hangs in the balance. Pick up your phone now so you won’t have to pick up something more sinister later. Visit http://www.house.gov/ to find your Congressional Representative’s contact information and get busy.
posted by Real History Lisa at 10:36 PM - Permanent Link -
23 Comments:
Whether or not Manson was Manchurian. It is interesting to note that Vincent Bugliosi matriculated at the University of Miami during the heyday of JM-WAVE.
Hi Lisa,
I went to see Vincent Bugliosi last night at Cooper Union in New York and my impression is the same as yours. At first I was very intimidated by this 1600 page book with a CD-ROM, but 90% of what he said was either complete rhetoric or "there is no evidence showing that ..." in situation where there is often quite a bit of evidence. I have watched the online video, which is sponsored by the CATO Institute and the CFR, and his talk was VERY similar to that.
He comes across very differently than Posner. Definitely not the bulldog approach. He also said that he would never mislead ("It is just not who I am") when comparing himself to Gerald Posner.
He actually commented on how thorough and complete (I forget his exact words) the Warren Commission was and that all of the members were honorable.
The question I asked him was "Who wrote the Warren Commission Report?" And he said the it was not the Warren Commission members themselves, but the "Fifteen assistant consoles (counsels?)" From everything I have learned from John Judge and Mae Brussell, it was actually Rudolph August Winnaker who is mentioned in Who's Who in the CIA.
In the end I was most angered by his real lack of even trying to understand why we believe in conspiracies (despite that he is trying to come across as the opposite) and it really is only designed to appeal to people who do not believe it in the first place.
Keep up the excellent work Lisa!!
Thanks, both of you, for the interesting info. I wish I knew who people were so I could respond in a more personal manner! But thanks, and keep fighting the good fight!
More info re Bugliosi - from this site (quoting):
No mention of his likely perjury at the TLB Trial. And it isn't hard to find in [the LA Times'] own paper.
No mention of stalking the milkman because he might have screwed your wife.
Who is this guy??
And...
On O'Reilly, Bugliosi stated that Oswald was pro Castro. Wrong.
and that Kennedy was behind the Bay of Pigs. Hello? JFK refused to support the plan with air cover, effectively killing the plan that had been put forth by Eisenhower's team.
In looking through index of his book for certain key witnesses and experts he has taken the prosecutor's brief approach, ignoring or spinning what doesn't fit his theory and misinterpreting or rehabbing what does fit his theory.
One example is his failure to properly highlight the very powerful critique of the single bullet theory by Warren Commission consultant Dr. Joseph Dolce.
Dolce's views, critical of the SBT, were recorded in a 4/21/04 Warren Commission memo.
He then took ammo and shot into cadaver's wrists. The result: severly deformed bullets, with the report summarizing this destruction of the SBT never getting printed by the Commission and withheld from researchers for 8 years.
Dolce made it on to Bugliosi's CD of footnotes, his powerful critique ignored in the text.
Hi Lisa,
Just found your site and really like it. The fact that the CIA needed an "asset" to hit back in terms of recent revelations (and photos) as to Morales et. al. at the scene of the RFK murder is not surprising. Is this the case w/Bugliosi, who knows but the timing is weird and what he says is, in my opinion, garbage.
It's been pretty well documented that LAPD (Gates era etc.) from Bugliosi's time was fairly well infiltrated in the higher ranks with officers w/intelligence related backgrounds, many of which, it is arguable, were involved in the RFK murder and in destruction of evidence thereafter. It would be stupid not to believe the prosecutor's office was also "seeded" with same. Paul Krassner in Ramparts quoted Preston Guillory, a Deputy Sheriff at the time, as being ordered by superiors to leave Manson alone so he could operate on the behalf of others (murdering Black Panthers etc.) http://www.sirbacon.org/4membersonly/groucho.htm
I am a former prosecutor and I have never been impressed by Bugliosi. In my opinion he rode the Manson thing to great fame and, in my opinion, has always been more hat than horse. Although Manson is a twisted disgusting very probably murderous individual, I also believe that he did not get anything near a fair trial as to what he actually sits in jail for these days (they could have put him away for life for many other things that could have been investigated and proven . . .). The whole thing smells very badly . . . the problem is we live in a society seeded, thru black budgets and otherwise, with collaborators who have been bought off to lie for money and a media that is owned by the people who have no interest in the truth. A friend's father worked for the CIA in operations for many years under a front as being employed elsewhere in the government. It was not until my friend was nearly an adult that his father told him what he did. His father became ill and at the hospital a team of agents never left his side i.e. the family was not allowed to be alone w/him for fear of what he might say in delirium or whatever . . . I ask you what type of secrets are those? All my best to you.
Anonymous wrote:
“He actually commented on how thorough and complete (I forget his exact words) the Warren Commission was and that all of the members were honorable.”
Jim Garrison used the quote “These are all honorable men.” To describe the Warren Commission Members. This of course comes from Marc Antony’s speech in William Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar. This is not meant as a compliment by Shakespeare, Garrison or Oliver Stone who uses this quote many times in JFK.
Is Bugliosi ignorant of the Shakespearean meaning of this word or is he dropping a hint he doesn’t really believe what he’s written?
I'm sure Bugliosi knows enough Shakespeare to get the reference. He probably also knows a lot of citizens won't. Glad you do though.
Bugliosi would be embarassed if he ever realized how many CIA sources he's fallen for to tell us the CIA didn't kill Kennedy. I'll take that on at some point. I'm too busy trying to protect our vote, at the moment. Help me? Call your congressperson (find them at www.house.gov) and tell them to support HR 811 right now (if you want your vote to count in 2008)!
Lisa,
It is interesting to note that the theories and books which are,to Bugliosi's thesis,not worthy of serious analysis are relegated to the CD-ROM End note section. Yet he devotes page after page to easy marks like Jean Hill and the less reputable researchers and quick buck operators who have infiltrated the conspiracist ranks.
Part of his shadowy agenda would seem to be to rewrite history with regard to the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Helms and the entire Law enforcement, intelligence. Ultimately, I believe that Bugliosi will be proven to be nothing more than a cypher: Another red herring looking to muddy the waters of American history
The most damning evidence I have seen that Oswald was not the assassin is the video footage available on YouTube, perhaps from the PBS 'Nova' special, of the Parkland doctors and various other individuals who saw JFK's body, all testifying to the massive injury at the BACK of his head, in the occipital parietal area. The doctors all put their hand on their head in this region to show where it occurred. One doctor specifically mentioned having seen the cerebellum at teh base of the brain exposed and almost falling out. You can't tell me they all got it wrong, or that they could forget seeing something as dramatic as that. Clearly it was an exit wound.
Yet the official Warren Commission's report show a photo at the back of the head with a pencil-sized entrance wound.
Come on now, who do you believe, a number of doctors who had been there and who have no reason to lie, or a 'doctored' photo? Apparently the Zapruder film might have been adulterated as well.
I don't know who killed JFK, and truthfully no one else does beyond a reasonable doubt, but clearly it was not Oswald, and clearly some conspiracy was involved.
I found your blog searching for what Bugliosi might have said about Mae B.
I read the whole thing and didn't realise you were a woman writing till I got down to the comments. I love when that happens. For the record I am also female and have studied history and the assassinations and Manson for 33 years. It has become an obsession and one thing that I have learned is that stuff like this book are released when they want to take our eyes off other things for instance this voting issue.
They have no intention of ending the debate as Bugliosi says he wants they dont want that at all, if they can keep us in the debate they can move on to the things they dont want us to notice.
They have the thinkers searching facts and the rest are nullified by mass media entertainment, sports and porn.
In any case we are all properly occupied.
On page 436 of Bugliosi's book, he demonstrates his sloppiness concerning basic forensic and anatomical terms. He refers to a coronal section (for examination of the brain) as ""ear to ear". Unfortunately, he did not even do his neuro anatomical homework because a coronal slice is FRONT to BACK or anterior to posterior. Then he goes on to misrepresent the term "sagittal" by describing that as "front to back" when it is SIDE to SIDE or ear to ear (lateral to medial to lateral). He reverses the two terms and since he is representing himself as the sage and final authority on the JFK assassination, he has already discredited himself with sloppy, uncorrected editing and research. In addition, along with numerous omissions and critically erroneous claims, he refers to JFK's reverse head motion after the head shot as "neuromuscular", in other words, he is trumpeting the same old tired, totally fallacious claim that we are supposed to swallow, concerning the "theory" that JFK's head snapped backwards from a rear shot, defying all the laws of "normal" physics, ballistics, and basic neurophysiology. Years ago I showed the Zapruder film to several of NIH's top pathologists who unfortunately, do not want their names mentioned, and every one described the alleged neuromuscular explanation of the anomalous backward head snap as totally "improbable" and at best, "highly speculative" and even "ludicrous". Their view , at best, described JFK's head shot as being anomalous by all accounts since in addition to his temporal region blowing out, his parietal (top) region, bone and brain tissue, also appears to be blasted out based on the best, grainy evidence available, the Zapruder film. All three described JFK's head shot as appearing to consist of either two impact areas or one tremendously, large caliber, high velocity frangible bullet. They all agreed that only those two scenarios could "adequately explain the massive evulsions of both the temporal and parietal areas of the head".
With that said. I would like to make a point. Professionally paid debunkers like Bugliosi are renown for using one special technique which states the following: Where the absurd, impossible or implausible are acceptable for the anti-conspiracy proponents, they are conversely, suddenly unacceptable for the pro-conspiracy proponents and conveniently ridiculed, debased, dismissed and used to discredit them.
Case closed.
Bugliosi's exgesis defies the one basic premise of science. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
Dear Lisa,
It almost doesn't matter whether the alleged assassin was Oswald, or Dracula - the bottom line here is that the W. Commission (like Bush) would never back down or even give a micron of flexibility toward their contrived theories. The Commission and their apologist airs, have continued to be recalcitrant regarding these pet theories regardless of how implausible or freakish they are in the arena of true scientific investigation -namely the Single Bullet Theory which by all scientific standards is incredulous, basing it's case upon an extremely rare, ballistically implausible explanation and the neuromuscular reaction inducing JFK to snap his head backwards, again another rare scientific anomaly.
The third incredulous explanation by the WC was their steadfast support of the so called Full Metal Jacket bullet allegedly fired by the alleged assassin's Manlicher. In my opinion, here is why that falls apart, further discrediting if not destroying one of the pillars of the WC case. If we are to assume, just for the sake of argument, that the alleged assassin did fire 6.5 mm full metal jacketed rounds, and as described by the WC theorists, the bullet "tumbled" in flight which is why it exploded his skull with such force, then WHY do they also insist that the primary evidence for a rear shot was based upon the autopsy report that revealed a SMALL NEAT "entrance wound" hole on the rear of JFK's head, slightly above and to the right of the occipital protuberance?
They seemed to have overlooked two huge discrepancies on this matter.
1. If the bullet was "Tumbling" then there would have been most likely, a jagged entrance wound NOT a small, neat entrance hole.
2. Based upon reading the ballistic characteristics of full metal jacketed bullets fired from a high powered rifle, they normally DO NOT explode and fragment in a manner consistent with the way JFK's head blows apart with the force of a small bomb! Most credible ballistic and and firearms experts agree that only a frangible or soft nose round could cause such incredible damage upon impact on a human skull.
Does anyone have an opinion on this?
Thank you.
I find your argument very credible, Lisa. Such serious purpose, such thorough argument, such comprehensive presentation! You're completely believable! The CIA was behind it! Run for your life, because if they could kill the president and hire such successful lawyers like Bugliosi to publish hundreds of pages of lies to cover up their most horrendous crime, they're most assuredly going to come after you next to silence your proclamation of truth! Such a martyr you are!
Guy Bannister in the Dallas Jail?
Hi Lisa,
I was reading Groden's book 'The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald' and on page 182 it shows a large, blow up of a photo showing Oswald in the Dallas jail a split second before Ruby shoots him. The same photo, for easy reference is on this site, http://www.dallasnews.com/img/photo/
11-03/oswaldshotthen2.jpg
I am asking if you or any of the JFK researchers out there, will look closely at the man (with no hat) standing next to the wall near the extreme right, top corner of the photograph, slightly in front of the uniformed cop and well behind the two detectives escorting Oswald. You can only see him in the uncropped versions as shown on the website or Groden's book. If you look closely at this man's face, he is a dead ringer for Guy Bannister the infamous ex-FBI right wing extremist who allegedly knew and possibly worked with Oswald in New Orleans.
The man's face compares very well to the official, full frontal photos of Guy Bannister's face. Same facial structure, mouth, etc. and receding hair with gray sides around the temple and ears.
If this man can be verified as Bannister, then you know what that means. Nothing else needs to be said.
In addition, one other observation, since I am an illustrator and notice these things. The famous Oswald photo depicting him holding his rifle in the backyard is usually challenged due to shadows and other inconsistencies, however, nobody seems to mention the most glaring problem with the photo. The problem is, Oswald's legs in relation to his upper torso are totally out of alighment, meaning, he is standing approximately 10 degrees off center. If you try to stand in the exact pose Oswald is shown in, you FALL OVER! Not only is he standing on an impossible angle, if you turn the photo so that the fence and posts are in perfect alignment with a 90 degree vertical, then Oswald is standing at an even steeper angle. Very strange! Take a look.
Good luck
Someone, typically anonymous, sent me a comment that was poorly worded saying that he'd been in law enforcement, had read Bugliosi's book, and believed it. He dared me to post it "if I believed in two sides." (What I just wrote is all the comment had to say, and is more grammatical.)
I don't believe the truth has two sides. I believe the truth has only one side.
This site is about history, not fiction.
Bugliosi's argument may be powerful, and persuasive, but the one thing it is not is an accurate account of history. It is one of the most dishonest, one-sided treatments of the case I've seen yet.
And for all it's length, it's far from a thorough account. His chapter on the CIA, for example, leaves out pretty much all the really interesting evidence of CIA involvement, and only presents the most flimsy items to rebut. One of these days I'll finish my rebuttal of that one chapter, which could easily serve as a model for the book. It's a one-sided argument, pure and simple. And what he leaves out is far more relevant than what he rebuts.
Hello Lisa-
Please pardon my late arrival on the scene. Vince (short for convince) Bugliosi has built his prosecutor career on using the same kind of persecuting bluster since it worked for him in his conviction of Charlie Manson, et als. as a New York City high school then college student at the time of the JFK, MLK, and RFK assassinations and the manson murders, i can recall all of the above events as if they happened yesterday. What we all need to remember that it was not yet an e-world. There was no internet, no dna, no cellular, etc.. So one had to do much manual labor to follow up on a news story. Which is what I did. I spent a lot of time at the above referenced events' locations. One thing that always leapt out to me then and still does now is how little access the public had to evidence and proof of the guilt of lee harvey oswald,james earl ray, sirhan sirhan, and charles manson. The only sure thing was that those four unfortunate characters were "loners and losers" which made them ideal candidates for convictions. From the get go it was made apparent if not obvious that Oswald, Ray, Sirhan, and Manson were guilty. after all, how could they not be - they fit the bill perfectly to the proverbial t as wackos and wierdos. Hoewever,I won't get into my feelings and thoughts about Messrs. Manson, Sirhan, or Ray today. I will limit my comments to just Mr. Oswald. I can still see Lee Harvey's black-eyed face as he appeared to me on TV in November 1963 and I can still hear Lee Harvey proclaiming both his ignorance and innocence. I swear that my first thought was "He sure as hell looks like a guy who got himself stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time". As Friday, Saturday and Sunday came to pass, I kept saying to myself, my family and my friends that either "He's the wrong guy" or "He's not the right guy". Mind you that this opinion of mine was not based on any evidence, proof, or research; which would only serve to add to my belief that Lee Harvey Oswald - like James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and Charles Manson to come - might be a lot of things, but one thing was for certain - that he was not the professional assassin(s) who according to a precision plan delivered the perfectly placed kill shot(s)that murdered President Kennedy in broad daylight in Dallas. In argumentum, as my lawyer friends are fond of saying, let's put Lee Harvey in the 6th floor window of the Book Depository with a mail-order rifle in his hands pointing it out the window and aiming it at JFK's car in Dealy Plaza. Now, we need him to squeeze the trigger - 1st shot, then re-chamber and squeeze the trigger again - 2nd shot, then do it again - 3rd shot - and maybe once more - 4th shot. Well, after that amazing feat, I would be thirsty then, wouldn't you? So, let's have Lee Harvey run down the stairs to either the 2nd floor or 1st floor lunchroom and stop to get a Dr. Pepper before escaping out of the building where we'll have him either take a cab or a bus to his rented flat for a change of clothes - and perhaps pick up his revolver - because our boy Comrade Oswald is not going down without a fight. But wait a minute, what the heck is Officer Tippit doing out of his patrol area? Okay, well, let's have Lee Harvey shoot him too before he runs off and hides out in a movie theatre. Whoops, we forgot to have him buy a ticket. What a screw up that was after a well-executed hit on the President of the United States of America. "Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I, Vincent Bugliosi, the great prosecutor of that satanic scroundrel Charlie Manson do hereby tell you that you know and I know that Lee Harvey Oswald with malice did so fire his rifle on November 22nd as to take the life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, for Oswald like Manson is a natural born killer, which was only further demonstrated by Oswald's heinous slaying of one of Dallas' own, JD Tippit. Therefore, you have but one choice - despite the lack of proof positive - and that is to convict Lee Harvey Oswald of murder. The People rest, Your Honor". Having said that, here's what I think happened. Oswald, as he said, was indeed a patsy. Perhaps he was told to bring his rifle to work with him for some after work hunting. He did not put 2 + 2 together about JFK passing right under his nose, until it suddenly dawned on him what the real deal was. So he high-tailed it out of the Book Depository and Dealy Plaza. Maybe the movie theater was familar to him as a pre-set meeting place. Whatever. The evidence points to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was duped somehow, someway by someone due to the fact that he was made for the role of the unwitting fall guy. I think that Tippit was gunned down by the real assassin(s) so that Oswald would be shot on sight instead of being captured alive. Nice try, VB, close but like Posner before you no cigar.
Vincent Bugliosi has written a book to help cover up an act of treason. In my mind that is a worse thing than what Charles Manson did. Hence, Bugliosi is an evil man. He claims he could have convicted Oswald. I think he could if Oswald were dead, but I doubt that he could have if Oswald was alive to answer the charges. It isn't that hard to for a slicker to convict an innocent man. That is plainly visible by DNA tests freeing many innocent men every year. In my mind Vincent Bugliosi is an evil man.
Patrick McGuane
Very Interesting. makes oyu wonder what else we think we know!
In my search for truth and justice in southern california regarding the jfk assassination, I have visited hundreds of libraries and bookstores. I have found that this book by Bugliosi is replacing many of the conspiracy books that preceded it. Rewriting history is indeed what many libraries are trying to do. This "Reclaiming History" has become the ultimate source for many young, naive historians. As this trend continues, the public libraries,that once served us well, have become sounding boards for CIA lies and propaganda and are losing their credibility
E Howard Hunt lost his case AND 500,000 dollars in settlements to Mark Lane and Victor Marchetti partially because his 3 children refused to confirm his alibi that he was home on Nov.22. St John Hunt , eldest son of ehh, has since gone on record that he has a 20 minute tape of his fathers confession near his death, that he was involved in the JFK assassination
How could anyone studying the Single Bullet Theory come to believe in such magical feats, is totally beyond my comprehension ????? Bugliosi must have many CIA ties that the public is unaware of to support such nonsense; much like his brother, Guliani
After much research, I have come to believe that the internet is filling the information gap that our public libraries have created. I have also found many of my sources in thrift stores and library discards. Long live the web !!!! and BRASSCHECKTV.COM
Vince Bugliosi has decided that HBO and the 10 part mini-series that his book forms the basis of will probably air on the 45th anniversary. Vince's emphasis will be on educating the American public so that they are able to accept the single bullet theory and Oswald's role as the single shooter without question.
Anyone who has seriously looked into the assassination understands quickly that the evidendce tampering was not just superficial but instead was quite extensive.
So was the brain washing of the public: They believe that we'll never know the truth, a smaller subset believe that something will be released in 2028 (or is it 2043...?).
Who cares, the government spent a lot of money to make this a mystery, but for an insider, the actual truth is that it's a SECRET, not a mystery.
I have a new website about Vincent bugliosi that will shock you.
http://www.charliemanson.info/
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