by Barry Krusch
The first syllogism is as follows:
IF it is in fact true that the confidence level for a proposition or element or sub-element of a case starts at zero until proven, AND
IF it is in fact true that an essential sub-element of The Case Against Oswald is that the Texas School Book Depository shells be identical with those exhibited by the Warren Commission, AND
IF it is in fact true that Day’s is the only testimony capable of linking the Texas School Book Depository shells to the shells possessed and exhibited by the Warren Commission, AND
IF it is in fact true that the “Q” numbers map onto the Commission Exhibit numbers of the shells as the Warren testimony indicated, AND
IF it is in fact true that as a consequence of this mapping, Day’s testimony not only fails to prove the fact for which it is offered, but actually proves the opposite, AND
IF it is in fact true that the only way to escape Day’s testimony is to invalidate it, AND
IF it is in fact true that invalidated testimony has no legal force and effect, as if it had not even existed,
THEN the confidence level for the sub-element that ties the Texas School Book Depository shells to the bullets exhibited by the Warren Commission remains at ZERO.
The second syllogism is related to the entire case:
IF it is in fact true that the confidence level for the sub-element that ties the Texas School Book Depository shells to the bullets exhibited by the Warren Commission is zero, AND
IF it is in fact true that if the confidence level for any essential element or sub-element in The Case Against Oswald is zero, the entire case in effect has a confidence level of zero,
THEN the confidence level for The Case Against Oswald as a whole is ZERO.
Who would’ve thought? All this from a group of marks carved or not carved on empty shells with or without a diamond point pencil.
The logic here is inexorable. If the premises of these two syllogisms are true, then the conclusions of these two syllogisms must be true.
Is there any way out at all for the lone assassin theorists? Well, since the logic is sound, the only way out is to dispute the truth of these premises. For example, these theorists may claim that the confidence level for an unproven allegation is not necessarily zero, but could be some higher number. And, in fact, that may be true outside of the courtroom, but from the perspective of the courtroom, that is how the system functions. It’s a very binary system. As Bugliosi noted, you either prove it or you don’t. Proof counts as 1, and failure to prove counts as 0. 1 = guilty and 0 = innocent, there is no middle ground.
Still, one can possibly understand the reluctance by some to overturn The Case Against Oswald on what others might (incorrectly) term a “technicality.” Regarding this reluctance, there are four points that can be made.
In the first place, the testimony of Day, when it is analyzed, shows that the shells on the floor of the Depository cannot be shown to be the same shells in the possession of the Warren Commission (the ones fired from Oswald’s rifle). Consequently, we are forced to consider the exceptionally strong possibilities that:
There were at least two sets of shells, and
The shells on the floor of the Depository were not fired from Oswald’s rifle (severing the connection between Oswald and the assassination bullets), and
At least one set was — and perhaps both sets of shells were — planted.
The A, B, and C of it is that this is no “technicality” we are talking about; rather, we are talking about framing an innocent man, and if the “technicalities” (i.e. the rules for the admissibility of evidence and the protocols designed to satisfy them) expose a conspiracy, reveal obstruction of justice, save an innocent man from the electric chair, and free us up to pursue the actual murderers of a President of the United States, I say, “Technicalities? Bring ‘em on!”
As to the second point, one would hope that observing the Constitution of the United States, and the laws of due process contained within it, would not give any American pause, nor be seen as a mere “technicality.”
It also should be noted as a third point that the “technicality” would only arise if Day’s testimony was invalidated; if it was not invalidated, Oswald’s innocence would be demonstrated simply by accepting Day’s testimony as legitimate evidence.
Finally, it really doesn’t matter whether or not someone agrees with the rules of the game or not, and what pejorative names they give or don’t give the rules . . . the rules are the rules . . . “three strikes, yer out!”
So much for the legalities of the significance of the chain of custody of the empty shells. A key point, an essential point, and perhaps the most dispositive point of all, because it not only demonstrates Oswald’s formal innocence, it leads us to an important re-visitation regarding (what we originally saw in this chapter) other’s guilt.
Remember the CSS form that showed that the empty shells were turned over to the FBI before any order to do so had been given? There was something fishy about that, but we weren’t exactly sure what. And, remember the fast exodus of the evidence from Dallas by a person who just happened to have a friend in the Strategic Air Command, evidence designated for return to sender less than 18 hours after it was received? Something fishy about that too, it seemed, but again, we lacked the information that would allow us to place it into context.
However, in light of the deductive proof so graciously provided by Mr. Day, we can gain a new perspective on these ominous events. Day’s testimony (coupled with the available documentary evidence) shows beyond any shadow of a doubt that at least one bullet has been planted, and since the chain of custody for all three bullets has been obliterated, all of them could have been. So, because we have this evidence, an idea that formerly some would have seen as “paranoid” can now be re-framed as a possible hypothesis whose primary virtue is that it explains some highly suspect events:
The empty shells which were sent to Washington were not the empty shells that returned from Washington!
In short, the hypothesis is that the trip to Washington on the C-135 was a one-way ticket with a two-fold purpose for the empty shells in Dallas, in a classic case of evidence-laundering. And the purpose of this evidence-laundering? Well, the most likely possibility is that the shells that were originally found were not fired from a Mannlicher-Carcano, and certainly not Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano, a weapon defective in more ways than one, and a weapon no professional assassin would dare utilize. So, those shells (the real evidence that could be traced to the real perpetrators) had to go, and shells that were fired from Oswald’s rifle in a “dry run” had to be swapped in.
Thus, the ultimate purpose: to pin the blame on Oswald so that the real assassins (and more importantly, those who directed the activity of the assassins) could go free.
And if this evidence laundering did in fact occur, it occurred within twenty-four hours of the assassination, which would itself indicate a very high degree of pre-planning and premeditated coordination between certain individuals in the DPD and the FBI well in advance of the assassination!
It goes without saying that if this hypothesis turned out to be true, one or more key officers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (and other bodies as well, such as the DPD) would have committed, among numerous other crimes, TREASON against the United States of America.
Even in light of the evidence we have just seen, this possibility that the shells were intentionally switched in a premeditated manner is just going to be too much for people to cope with, or even believe, but it is a hypothesis that has more than deductive logic on its side: there is actually photographic evidence of the same. For comparison purposes, let’s first take a look at a photo of one of the empty cartridge cases and the live round. CE 543 is all the way on the left, in this photograph from the National Archives, reproduced in the book Hear No Evil (Hear No Evil, p. 132):
But now let us compare the 2 empty hulls on the right in the above photograph to the 2 empty hulls on t
he left (placed by J. Doyle Williams in an upside-down position) in the below photograph taken on November 22 by the FBI (close-up and cropped by author), and see if you can notice any difference in coloration:
There certainly is, not only between the shells in the two photographs, but even between the 2 empty hulls on the left in the FBI photograph (with a more black hue) with the live round on the right (which has the silver tone characteristic of brass in black-and-white we would expect to see). If we were to go simply by appearances alone, we might postulate that the shells on the left were constituted from a different metal than the bullet on the right.
One could speculate that the difference in coloration in the second photo was produced by heat from firing, but why wasn’t that difference produced in the first photograph?
An interesting observation, which could easily be seen as visual evidence of a bait and switch operation. Unfortunately, this observation, which is inductive in character, is not as strong as the deductive verification to which we were exposed over the last sixty or so pages. It is vulnerable to rival hypotheses, for example, that the photo has been retouched or poorly reproduced, or, if not, that perhaps the lighting on the shells on the left was different from the lighting on the bullets on the right, thus leading to what would be an apparent difference in coloration, but not one which existed in reality. And the reply to this would be, perhaps this latter point is so, but given that what we see in this photograph confirms what deductive analysis reveals to be true, we can use the deductive analysis as corroboration for what our initial visual perception tells us.
In light of this, it might have been useful to inquire of the first two people known to have possession after Day, FBI agents Brown and Williams, just what they knew on the subject, but there is no testimony on record from them regarding their role in the chain of custody. That’s not surprising, because their testimony would directly contradict Day’s testimony that he passed the bullets along to Sims of the Dallas Police Department, and not to Brown (and thereafter Williams). Consequently, as far as chain of custody testimony goes, Brown and Williams are the “invisible men,” as shown from an analysis of the page references in the screen captures below from the Warren Commission index (Williams, 15 H 800; Brown, 15 H 757): 67
There is one thing we do know, though. As the possessors of the two empty shells on November 22, as proven by the CSS form and the Williams photograph and memo, the initials of Brown and Williams had to have been on at least two of the shells, a requirement to establish the chain of custody. And, according to the testimony of Day, they were not!
So, if Brown and Williams received the shells as the documents indicated, and scratched their initials on the shells as protocol dictated, and the shells exhibited by the Warren Commission did not have those initials, then we can be 100% confident that the shells that were exhibited in the Williams photograph (the ones that were found in the Texas School Book Depository), were not the shells in the possession of the Warren Commission, which means that these exhibited shells fired from Oswald’s rifle were not fired on November 22, and therefore were not the ones used in the assassination!!
At some point you ask yourself, “how much more evidence do you need?”, and yet it is amazing just how much more evidence there is that confirms what we desperately do not want to believe to be true. Apart from the numerous primary documents indicating only two shells were found, the Day and Doughty issues leading to a deductive proof of a violation of the chain of custody, the issues with Brown and Williams (and the failure to gather their testimony) leading to a second deductive proof of a violation of the chain of custody (as indicated by the absence of their initials), there is even more evidence of an inductive character that at least one bullet was planted, and most likely the others as well.
This relates to a series of ballistic marks created by the Mannlicher-Carcano that were, and were not, found on shells CE 543, 544, 545, and the live round, CE 141. Information regarding these marks can be found from three primary sources, a letter sent from J. Edgar Hoover to J. Lee Rankin, General Counsel of the Warren Commission, on June 02, 1964 (CE 2968; 26 H 449), Paragraphs 133 and 151 of the House Select Committee On Assassinations Report of the Firearms Panel (March 1979) (7 HSCA 368, 371), and information provided by an analysis of the cartridge cases for Life magazine by Josiah Thompson appearing in the book Six Seconds In Dallas, p. 145, published in 1967.
Now, because the material in the primary sources is difficult to understand in its raw form, I am about to present a table summarizing the points delineated in those materials. Readers who want to see the raw data can go to the website supporting this book, and download the “Appendices” document. Here is the URL:
http://www.krusch.com/jfk
The information in the appendix is difficult to understand, as noted, so here is a summary (NOTE: a legend beneath the table defines the initials present in the “Type” and “Source” rows):
You are going to find this table confusing, but no need to worry, you will be able to see instantly, and visually, the problem.
To understand the table, let’s start with a column-centric view, and look at column A, which tells us that CE 543 had one magazine follower mark (the magazine follower is a spring-tensioned lever whose function is to push cartridges up the clip), CE 545 also had one magazine follower mark, and CE 141 had two magazine follower marks.
When we take a row-centric view, we learn that CE 543 not only has one magazine follower mark, it also had three striations on the head, three marks on the base, and a dented lip.
You don’t need to understand what the marks indicate, all you need to understand is the differences in how the marks appear on the shells. Once you understand the table, you can concentrate on your visual impressions to draw some conclusions about what you are seeing, and the first thing you notice is that the marks on the empty shells and live round are all over the map. Is there any consistency at all? No, and some of the inconsistencies are quite telling.
For example, take a look at column B. Only one of the shells, CE 544 has a mark from the bolt of Oswald’s rifle. But wasn’t he supposed to have made three shots? If so, why a mark from the bolt on CE 544 only? And take a look at column A; why does only CE 544 lack the magazine follower mark?
Most importantly, take a look at columns C through F: here we can see quite clearly that CE 543 can be differentiated from the other exhibits along not just one, but four parameters:
The number of striations on the head (543 has 3, the others none);
The number of marks on the base (543 has 3, the others none);
A dented lip (543 has 1, the others none);
Chambering marks (543 has none, the others each have one);
There is something very different about this shell, and considering that it was the one that was supposedly handed off to Fritz (which the deductive proof demonstrates was impossible), that means something.
So, when we consider the issue of the mark on the bolt which is not present on CE 543 and CE 545, as well as the oddities associated with CE 543, including a dented lip, we see that only one of the empty shells, CE 544, has the marks that we would expect to find, which would be a possible indication that at least 2 of the bullets had an origin that requires additional explaining.
This table by itself, not even considering the chain of custody issues, throws doubt on the legitimacy of CE 543 and 545.
Okay, we’ve seen a lot of evidence so far . . . evidence not only of Oswald’s innocence, but of others’ guilt . . . and their guilt can be shown, in part, by the ridiculous story they have concocted and are asking us to believe.
So, before we move to this next phase related to the guilt of others, let’s add up everything we’ve seen, categorizing the evidence by topic . . . fasten your seatbelts!
TESTIMONY/TESTIMONY CONTRADICTION
In his initial testimony, Day said he placed his initials on 2 hulls: in subsequent testimony, he stated that he placed his initials on 3 hulls.
In his initial testimony, Day said that Doughty’s initials were to be placed just on the 1 shell said to have remained in Dallas; in his subsequent testimony, Day contradicted himself and said that Doughty’s initials were placed on 2 shells because they were going to be sent to Washington.