Douglas Horne, who served as the Senior Analyst for Military Affairs of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), has now published Inside the ARRB (2009), a five-volume study of the efforts of the board to declassify documents and records held by the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, and other government organizations related to the assassination of JFK.
As a former government official, historian, and author, he is speaking out to disabuse the public of any lingering belief that The Warren Report (1964), The HSCA Final Report (1979), Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (1963), or Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History (2007) represent the truth about what is known about the assassination of our 35th president, even remotely! Indeed, in relation to a new article, “Birds of a Feather: Subverting the Constitution at Harvard Law,” Horne has made a forceful declaration to set the record straight:
I know, from my former role as a government official on the staff of the ARRB (from 1995 to 1998), that there is overwhelming evidence of a government-directed medical cover-up in the death of JFK, and of wholesale destruction of autopsy photographs, autopsy x-rays, early versions of the autopsy report, and biological materials associated with the autopsy. Furthermore, dishonest autopsy photographs were created; skull x-rays were altered; the contents of the autopsy report changed over time as different versions were produced; and the brain photographs in the National Archives cannot be photographs of President Kennedy’s brain – they are fraudulent, substitute images of someone else’s brain.
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Over and beyond the medical evidence, however, Horne – in Vol. IV of Inside the ARRB (2009), has also demonstrated that the home movie of the assassination known as “the Zapruder film” – and others that correspond to it, such as the Nix and Muchmore films – have been massively edited to remove indications of Secret Service complicity in the crime and to add other events to these films in order to sow confusion and conceal evidence of the true causes of death of John F. Kennedy.
There are many proofs that the film has been fabricated – including that the driver brought the limo to a halt to make sure he would be killed; that his brains were blown out to the left-rear; and that a motorcycle patrolman accompanying the limo rode forward at the time of the stop to inform Dallas Chief of Police Jessie Curry that the president had been hit. But none of these events appears in the extant version of the film, which has been massively edited. That these events occurred has been established by more than 60 witness reports of the limo stop, where the wound to the back of his head was confirmed by 40 witnesses, including virtually all the physicians at Parkland Hospital, who described cerebellum as well as cerebral tissue extruding from the wound. The blow-out to the right-front, as seen in the film, therefore, is not authentic.
Indeed, in an appendix to Vol. IV, Horne explains that a copy of the film has now been studied by Hollywood exerts, who found that the blow-out to the back of his head had been painted over in black in an amateurish effort to obfuscate the blow out, which can actually be seen in a few later frames, including 372 and 374. Those who have persisted in defense of the authenticity of the film have offered three major arguments – (1) that the features of the extant film correspond to those of the original processed in Dallas, (2) that there was an unbroken chain of custody, which precluded the film be changed; and (3) that the Dealey Plaza films are not only consistent with themselves but with one another, where the Zapruder could only have been faked if the others had been as well.
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The following extracts from Inside the ARRB (2009), Vol. IV, demonstrate that all three arguments are fallacious: (1) there are five features of the extant film that differ from those of the original and (2) that different films were brought to the NPIC on consecutive days, which vitiates the chain-of-custody argument. The consistency of the films with one another (3) turns out to be an interesting question, since they all seem to have been edited to remove the turn of the presidential limousine from Houston onto Elm. More significantly, there are subtle inconsistencies between the films and, most importantly, the Zapruder film is not even consistent with itself, which proves that it cannot possibly be authentic! Horne’s new studies thus confirm the previous research that has previously been reported in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003), “New Proof of JFK Film Fakery” (2007), and “Zapruder JFK Film impeached by Moorman JFK Polaroid” (2008), where these two articles are on-line.
(1) Five features of the original do not match the extant film
Inside the ARRB, Vol. IV (2009), p. 1292:
Conclusions
In his long essay published in 2007 on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, Josiah Thompson [NOTE: the author of Six Seconds in Dallas (1967), an early study based on the Zapruder film] told us we should all trust [retired Kodak expert on celluloid] Rollie Zavada’s judgment and defer to his authority:
“Roland Zavada has a towering reputation in the field and no conceivable reason for cooking his conclusions.”
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Now that we have concluded examining his report and Zavada’s changes of mind since that time, it is clear that he has cooked his conclusions. In particular, he has ignored – trashed – key testimony:
- That the exposures were not bracketed at the Jamieson lab when the three “first day copies” were struck, meaning that the three “first generation” copies today should not be bracketed copies;
- That a “full frame” aperture (picture plus soundtrack) was used when duplicating the Zapruder film, meaning that the intersprocket images should be present on the “first generation copies”;
- That the edge printer light was turned off when the original film was developed, meaning that there a double registration of processing edge prints in the family scenes on the extant “first generation” copies; and,
- That the camera original film was slit at the Kodak plant in Dallas, meaning that the 16 mm wide, unslit black-and-white copies in existence today cannot have originated from the camera original film, and are instead indirect evidence that a new “original” was created as an unslit 16 mm, double 8 movie (just as Homer McMahon’s expert testimony to the ARRB indicates).
Furthermore, Zavada’s opposition to the shooting of a control film in Zapruder’s actual camera in Dealey Plaza – which was inexplicable and extremely frustrating when it occurred in 1997 – now takes on a very different taint, one of possibly intentional sabotage of the authentication effort by the ARRB staff. An incredible charge, you say? Not necessarily.
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Read more on pages 1292 through 1294 as well as 1243 to 1292. And this does not take into account that the numbers on the extant film are not punched in the same location as the original. Read Horne to appreciate the depth of Zavada’s deception.
(2) Different films were brought to the NPIC on consecutive days
Not only has Doug Horne demonstrated that the strips of film – the actual celluloid – of the film that was processed in Dallas and the extant “Zapruder film” are not the same, but he has demonstrated that David Wrone has misled his audience and distorted the evidence about the chain-of-custody, where one film – apparently the original, was brought to the NPIC on Saturday, 23 November 1963, which was an 8mm, slit version, the processing of which Bruno Brugioni, Chief of the NPIC Information Branch, supervised, which even required opening a camera store to purchase an 8mm projector, which the NPIC did not possess, while a second, 16mm unslit version, was brought to the NPIC on Sunday, 24 December 1963, by Secret Service Agent “William Smith,” which was handled by Homer McMahon and by Ben Hunter, who had not been present the night before, and a very different film.
Inside the ARRB, Vol. IV, pages 1226 and 1227:
Analysis: First of all, we can now say with certainty that the NPIC never copied the Zapruder film as a motion picture, even though for years the NPIC notes had mislead some researchers into believing that it had. However, Homer McMahon’s rock-solid certainty that the film brought to him was an original, unslit 16 mm wide, double 8 movie – and that it came from a classified CIA photo lab run by Kodak at Rochester – implies that McMahon and Hunter were not working with the true camera original developed in Dallas, but were instead working with a re-created, altered film masquerading as “the original.” I suspected in 1997, and I am more certain than ever today at this writing in 2009, that “Bill Smith” told the truth when he said that the film he couriered to NPIC was developed in Rochester – after all, how could he possible make a mistake about something so elementary, since he brought it from Rochester to Washington, D.C. himself? He was only lying about one thing: it could not have been the original film exposed inside Abe Zapruder’s camera, because we know from the Dallas Affidavit trail, and from the interviews Rollie Zavada conducted with the surviving personnel from the Dallas Kodak lab, that the original film was indeed developed in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963. If McMahon was correct that he had viewed an original, 16 mm wide, unslit double 8 movie film the weekend of the assassination, and if it was really developed in Rochester at a CIA lab run by Kodak (as he was unambiguously told it was), then the extant film in the Archives is not a camera original film, but a simulated “original” created with an optical printer at the CIA’s secret film lab in Rochester.
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The critical information published in the ARRB call and meeting reports about our interviews with McMahon and Hunter in 1997 was published in full by Jim Fetzer in the year 2000 in Murder in Dealey Plaza, but was subsequently ignored by Josiah Thompson in a 2007 essay posted on the Mary Ferrell website (note 14) and was intentionally under-reported and misrepresented by David Wrone in his 2003 book on the Zapruder film. This is what many advocates of a specific hypothesis or a historical position resort to when the heat is on and their longstanding positions on key issues are threatened by new evidence: all too often they either ignore the argument of their opponents as if they do not exist, or they will misrepresent them, intentionally setting up a false “straw man,” and then knock it down. In the case of the serious chain-of-custody implications of the McMahon interviews, Thompson chose to ignore the problem in 2005 and again in 2007, while David Wrone has not only misreported/misrepresented their import, but he has overstated the case for authenticity, as I shall demonstrate below.
In his 2003 book The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination, Wrone fails to report the specific content of the Homer McMahon interviews (nor does McMahon’s name even appear in Wrone’s index), and then completely misreports what I have said about them (on page 127), as follows:
Similarly spurious is Douglas Orme’s charge (yes, he misspelled my name, too) that Time, Inc. allowed the film to be altered. In Murder in Dealey Plaza, Horne argues that Time, Inc. permitted the film to be taken by Federal Officials for doctoring. [This statement was followed by endnote 36, which simply refers to page 319 of Murder in Dealey Plaza, without telling the reader what is on page 319. Page 319 is the interview report I wrote of the Homer McMahon interview of July 14, 1997 at the National Archives.] Like Zapruder, however, Time knew it had a treasure in the Zapruder film, and it would do nothing to endanger the flow of revenue it expected from those 26 seconds of film. [boldface added by author]
April 10, 2010
