There are two types of evidence in criminal cases — direct evidence and circumstantial evidence. Direct evidence comes in the form of things like confessions, admissions, or eyewitness testimony. Circumstantial evidence comes in the form of indirect evidence.
For people who believe only in direct evidence, they will never accept the fact that the U.S. military-intelligence establishment orchestrated and carried out the assassination of President Kennedy. That’s because there is no direct evidence that has ever surfaced establishing the guilt of the national-security establishment in the assassination. Such people will always fall within the group of people who lament, “Golly, I guess we just will never know who killed JFK.” People in this group will spend their lives scoffing at the “conspiracy theorists” who have arrived at a different conclusion.
On the other hand, for people like me who believe in the validity of circumstantial evidence, there is now no reasonable doubt but that the U.S. national-security establishment orchestrated and carried out the assassination of President Kennedy.
Let me give you an example of direct evidence and circumstantial evidence. Let’s assume that a witness in a court case testifies that he couldn’t sleep and that he saw it raining all night long. That’s direct eyewitness evidence that it rained. But let’s assume that he fell asleep instead. The next morning, it isn’t raining but he states that he saw that water was flooding the streets, the lawns were drenched, water was dripping from trees, and nearby streams were overflowing. That is circumstantial — or indirect — evidence that it rained during the night. That evidence can be admitted into a trial, and it is just as valid as direct evidence.
As a former civil and criminal trial attorney, I was trained to think like a lawyer. The more books I read about the Kennedy assassination, the more I became convinced that the military and the CIA were responsible for JFK’s murder. However, I also felt that there simply wasn’t sufficient evidence — direct or circumstantial — to convict beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the standard of proof used in a criminal case.
There certainly wasn’t any direct evidence in the form of a confession or an admission of guilt in some long-secret memorandum. And while there was a lot of circumstantial evidence of guilt, it simply wasn’t enough, I felt, to convince a jury of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Everything changed for me when I read Douglas Horne’s five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. As I finished reading Horne’s book, I now knew that the national-security establishment had orchestrated and carried out the assassination. No, not by direct evidence but rather by circumstantial evidence.
Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990s, firmly established beyond a reasonable doubt that the military conducted a fraudulent autopsy on JFK’s body on the very night of the assassination. Why does that matter? Because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy being carried out on the body of the president. Once one concludes that the autopsy was fraudulent, one cannot help but conclude that the military-intelligence establishment is guilty of the president’s murder. There is simply no way around it.
I set forth the evidence surrounding the fraudulent autopsy in my book The Kennedy Autopsy, which is essentially a short, easy-to-read synopsis of Horne’s five-volume book. Let me give you just one example of what I’m talking about when I use the word “fraud.”
The physicians who treated JFK at Parkland Hospital steadfastly maintained that he had a massive exit-sized hole in the lower back of his head. They weren’t the only ones. So did nurses who were inside the treating room. So did a Secret Service agent. So did a newsman outside Parkland. In fact, so did two FBI agents at Bethesda Hospital, where the military conducted its autopsy on a top-secret basis. Their evidence constituted direct, eyewitness evidence that there was a massive-exit-sized hole in the lower back of Kennedy’s head. That direct evidence was later corroborated by circumstantial evidence provided by a Navy film expert in Washington, a Navy chief petty officer named Saundra Spencer, who developed, on a top-secret, classified basis, post-mortem autopsy photographs of the president at the Navy photographic center in Washington, D.C. Her sworn testimony before the ARRB in the 1990s established that the autopsy photographs she developed showed a big, exit-sized hole in the back of the president’s head, just as the Dallas eyewitnesses had stated.
A great documentary to watch is JFK: What the Doctors Saw. Or just watch this interview of Dr. Robert McClellan, who was one of the treating physicians at Parkland. Go to 6:05 to watch McClelland describing the massive hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. McClelland is now deceased but for the rest of his life, he never wavered in what he witnessed that fateful afternoon.
Just recently, in the halls of Congress, Dr. Donald Curtis, who I think is now the only physician who treated Kennedy who is still alive, gave sworn testimony before the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. Ironically, Doug Horne gave sworn testimony at the same hearing.
Curtis’s testimony is summarized in an excellent article posted today entitled “The Double Significance of Dr. Curtis” by a lawyer and JFK assassination researcher named Lawrence P. Schapf. Snapf writes, “Dr. Curtis told Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, chair of the the task force, that as he stood next to the president’s left leg, he saw Dr. Clark lift the president’s head and call over each of the department heads to show them the fatal head wound, so that they could see for themselves why he had stopped the resuscitation. Curtis said they all got a good look at the head wound. He remembers Dr. Clark mentioning the cerebellum several times. The cerebellum is inside the lower rear portion of the skull and is key to motor functions.”
So, what’s the problem? The problem is that an official military autopsy photograph shows the back of JFK’s head to be fully intact — that is, no big, exit-sized hole in the back of JFK’s head. Thus, if what all those eyewitnesses stated is true and correct, then that military photograph has to be fraudulent. There is no way around it.
For me, as a lawyer, the direct evidence of all those eyewitnesses, including some of the most competent, honest physicians in the country, is so overwhelming and persuasive that there is only one reasonable conclusion that can be drawn — the military’s autopsy photograph is false and fraudulent.
Moreover, that’s only one part of the overall autopsy fraud. The other parts, including two different brain examinations that were carried out as part of the autopsy that autopsy physicians claimed was only one brain examination, are detailed in my book and Horne’s book.
Once one reaches the conclusion that the military’s autopsy was fraudulent, that necessarily leads to a much bigger conclusion — guilt beyond a reasonable doubt on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment in the assassination itself. That’s because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. None! A fraudulent autopsy is conclusive circumstantial evidence of guilt on the part of the military-intelligence establishment in the assassination of President Kennedy. There is simply no way around it.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
