Don’t Believe What Jack Tunheim Has To Say About the JFK Assassination

Don’t Believe What Jack Tunheim Has To Say About the JFK Assassination
by Douglas P. Horne, former Chief Analyst for Military Records, ARRB
insidethearrb blog
November 28th, 23:45
http://insidethearrb.livejournal.com/2013/11/28/

JFKFACTS.org just published a recent article by U.S. News that quotes the former Chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, Jack Tunheim, as follows—see this excerpt below:

By Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News

The government’s most recent investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy began in 1994. The Oliver Stone movie “JFK” was still fresh in mind, and almost four in five Americans believed in a conspiracy to kill the 35th president.

The investigation, by the Assassination Records Review Board, was aimed at piercing the persistent secrecy that surrounded the crime. The board unearthed tens of thousands of records on the killing that had never been released.

Which makes its chairman, John R. Tunheim, among the most qualified people alive to talk about what happened Nov. 22, 1963. His conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald did it — and no one else.

“I look back to the hard evidence of the case, the real evidence, the evidence admissible in court, and all of that points to Oswald acting alone,” Tunheim, who is now a federal judge, said this week from his chambers in Minnesota.

Fifty years after the shooting at Dealey Plaza, the conspiracy theories of the assassination — variously blaming the mob, the CIA, Fidel Castro, a Secret Service accident, Lyndon Johnson and others — remain just that, theories.

Questions linger, and some records still remain hidden or lost forever. And most agree that the work of the Warren Commission, the government’s best-known investigation into the killing, which blamed Oswald as the lone gunman, was seriously flawed.

But no one has conclusively proved a conspiracy, Tunheim said.

“People just don’t want to believe that a 24-year-old misfit that has had really an awful life, who has these pro-communist tendencies, difficulty navigating life, could publicly assassinate the leader of the free world,” he said.

END OF EXCERPT.

I think that’s enough…surely after reading that much you get the picture.

Beware of Jack Tunheim and what he is doing here. Judge Tunheim is attempting to invoke authority here—to use his status as a Federal Judge and as former Chair of the ARRB to try to tell Americans who are too lazy to read books, or too willing to defer to authority, what to believe about the Kennedy assassination in 1963. He is also telling us that people who are persuaded there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK are simply folks who are incapable of believing that a “little man” killed “a big man.” Nonsense. He is saying here, “I’ve seen the evidence—you can trust me.”

Oh, really? This kind of paternalistic treatment of the American people might have worked in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it is patently unacceptable 50 years after the Kennedy assassination, in the twenty-first century.

I’ve got news for you, boys and girls: anyone who attempts to tell you what to believe about an American assassination, or about how a war began, WITHOUT DISCUSSING THE EVIDENCE, isn’t worth listening to. And if you believe someone who simply tries to invoke authority in this manner, without studying the evidence yourself, then you’re a sucker.

As Jacob Hornberger recently pointed out in a major OPED piece on his blog, this belittling argument that some people just can’t believe that “a little man killed a big man,” doesn’t fly. The people with the emotional problem are actually the 20% or so in our society who can’t bring themselves to believe that “the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes,” and that “the Emperor is really naked”—i.e., that key elements in the national security state cast a veto on JFK’s life in order to prevent his sure re-election, and thereby put a halt to countless foreign policy initiatives of President Kennedy’s that they believed were losing the Cold War, during our own Holy War—our own Jihad—against Communism.

Here is a link to Jacob Hornberger’s recent essay in which he dismantles, once and for all, this disparaging accusation by those who still defend an indefensible position: http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-national-security-states-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy/

And if that isn’t convincing enough, here is a link to my own series of seven (7) essays about “JFK’s War With the National Security Establishment”: http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/jfks-war-against-the-national-security-establishment/

And if that isn’t convincing enough, here is a link to another Jacob Hornberger essay, this one about those who prefer to “defer to authority” rather than study facts themselves and make up their own minds: http://fff.org/2013/06/04/jfk-and-the-deferentials/

And if that isn’t convincing enough, try this on for size—an OPED published by RFK Jr. just two days prior to the 50th anniversary of the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy: https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/john-f-kennedys-vision-of-peace-20131120&sa=D&usg=ALhdy28T2eq6ub2uviP2AusqkTdmuNyJDg

My former boss at the ARRB, T. Jeremy Gunn, told me on at least 3 occasions that NONE of the five Board Members believed there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, or a cover-up in the case. If you are shocked to hear this, you shouldn’t be: all five Board Members were appointed by establishment organs of our society: the ABA, the two different historical societies to which most history professors belong, the professional body representing American archivists, and the White House. And who wrote that selection criteria into the JFK Records Act? Why, G. Robert Blakey did, the man who headed a blatantly dishonest HSCA investigation from 1977 through the end of 1978. Even though Blakey’s final report stated there was “a probable conspiracy” in the assassination of JFK, he and the head of his Forensic Pathology Panel, Michael Baden, went out of their way to back up and reinforce the absurd single bullet theory, and still claimed—as did the Warren Commission—that Lee Harvey Oswald had done all the wounding of the limousine’s occupants. You see, Robert Blakey wrote the draft legislation that was enacted into law and became known as the JFK Records Act. It was the draft legislation he wrote that prevented the ARRB from reinvestigating the assassination, and which ensured that the autopsy materials (the photos and x-rays) and tax and earnings records of various individuals would not be open to the public. It was G. Robert Blakey who was forced by the acoustics evidence into admitting there had been a probable conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, and who, in compensation, attempted to deny all government involvement in the plot and give the American people a “conspiracy they could believe in and still sleep well at night”—the “Mob Did It Theory.” The HSCA’s final report, issued in 1979, stated that there was no evidence that organized crime’s national commission (the “mafia”) had anything to do with the assassination—and yet Blakey, when he ‘spun’ the final report to the national media, told them it was “a simple mob hit.” He then followed up with a horribly written book which made the same claim, in opposition to his own HSCA final report. Huh? Yes, that is the way it went down. His Final Report also made crucial and unsupported statements about the medical evidence, while burying (sequestering) his own staff reports and two deposition transcripts—that contradicted those conclusions—for 50 years. Thanks to Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, those HSCA staff medical interviews, and two key medical depositions that had been suppressed, were released 36 years early, in 1993, and we now know what a dishonest investigation Blakey’s effort was.

Jack Tunheim has been running around for years pretending to be an agnostic about the assassination, and trying to avoid expressing his own opinion. It was understandable why he and the other Board Members would pretend to be impartial, neutral, and without bias, while the ARRB was in session; for to do otherwise, might well have politicized and harmed the ARRB’s efforts. Since the sunset of the ARRB, I have been increasingly frustrated by Jack Tunheim’s continuing effort to avoid giving his own personal opinion about the assassination—but now at least, Tunheim has finally, belatedly shown his true colors.

In the outrageous quote above, the reporter quotes Tunheim as saying that ALL of the evidence admissible in court points to Oswald acting alone. Huh? Actually, most of the evidence Tunheim is probably referring to—especially the autopsy report, the autopsy photographs, and the skull x-rays—would not now be admissible in court, for their provenance is severely tainted, and this can be proven by studying the sworn testimony in the many deposition transcripts emanating from the HSCA’s and ARRB’s efforts—sworn testimony that is “courtroom evidence!” That’s how much we have learned about those basic items of evidence since the time of the Warren Commission—and ironically, especially because of the efforts of the ARRB staff.

If you study the evidence yourself, you will find that the Kennedy assassination is like a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle for which 250 pieces have been thrown away, and 250 pieces from the wrong picture puzzle have been substituted, in an attempt to intentionally confuse everyone. The real reason the majority of the evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy does not come together, is because of fraud in the evidence. By this I mean: (1) a plethora of suppressed autopsy photographs that never made it into the official record; (2) missing skull x-rays, and the sure knowledge that the 3 skull x-rays in the official record today are not originals, but rather are altered copy films; (3) a burned first draft of the autopsy report and a missing first signed version, leading us to the knowledge that the official autopsy report in the Archives today is the third written version of that document; (4) brain photographs in the National Archives that cannot be photos of JFK’s brain because they have been disowned by both the official autopsy photographer who took the real brain photos on Nov 25, 1963, and by an FBI agent who was present at the autopsy. These two key witnesses were deposed, ironically, by the ARRB. (Of course none of the 5 Board Members ever attended even one of the 10 depositions we took of key autopsy witnesses—they didn’t need to, because they already had their minds made up, and had already decided that the Warren Commission had gotten everything right.)

The strongest evidence that there was a medical cover-up in JFK’s assassination is Chapter 10 of my book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. If you only read one chapter in my five-volume book, please read chapter 10, about the two brain exams conducted after the autopsy on JFK’s body, and the result—the placement of false and misleading brain photographs into the official collection of autopsy photographs. It is chock full of “courtroom evidence” which guarantees that the brain photos in the Archives would NOT BE ADMISSIBLE AT A TRIAL, if a trial were held today. Maybe Jack Tunheim should read chapter 10 himself; if he were to do so, he might learn something that would challenge his belief system. But then no—that is the problem. Members of the establishment who want to believe that coups don’t happen in this country, and that it is impossible for our institutions to have all failed us so badly, won’t even study any evidence that contradicts the Warren Commission. They are willfully blind. They want to damn all such evidence without actually studying it—they are in a state of denial, because they can’t handle the truth and do not want their cherished myths about our country, and our government, and our justice system to be overturned. So they keep their heads firmly buried in the sand.

The state of the evidence in the JFK assassination today is so overwhelmingly supportive of a conspiracy, and a massive U.S. government cover-up, that anyone who denies this is the moral equivalent of a Holocaust Denier. Yes, that’s right, I actually said that. In fact, the evidence of a conspiracy in John F. Kennedy’s assassination is surely just as robust as the overwhelming evidence that the Nazis committed the Holocaust. Denying a conspiracy in JFK’s assassination is just as outrageous as denying that the Holocaust actually happened.

Continuing this analogy, if the German people can face up to the Holocaust, and admit that it happened, and take corrective action within their society to prevent it from happening again, then why can’t members of the establishment elite in America (academics, members of the mainstream media, and government officials) admit the truth about JFK’s assassination 50 years ago, and prevent a recurrence by outing the truth and intensively studying how the crime truly occurred, and by revealing how our institutions all failed us in 1963 and 1964? That would be a lot more beneficial and useful than mouthing platitudes every November. The more they continue to do this, the more they corrode our trust in government.

As Galileo once said, “In matters of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” Well, that applies to assassination science, too. Study the evidence yourself, and make up your own mind. We don’t need Jack Tunheim, or Chris Matthews, or George Will, or Bob Shieffer, or Tom Brokaw, or Dan Rather to tell us what went down in 1963. We don’t need to be protected from the truth—the American people can handle the truth, even if our establishment elites act like they can’t. I suspect many of these people don’t truly believe the mealy-mouthed support for the Warren Commission’s conclusions that they espouse every November. I suspect that they feel it is their duty to somehow “support our institutions” by repeating the Big Lie every November. Of course, the corrosive effect of the Big Lie, repeated endlessly by authority, is only continuing to destroy faith in our institutions.

I know someone who was a College Intern at the HSCA during its investigation. This person was pulled aside and privately told by a government official during the HSCA investigation that “Everyone who is anyone in this town knows that JFK was killed by a conspiracy, and NO ONE is ever going to admit it.” Think about that, and what it means. And then ask yourself if your government, and your national corporate media, is really worth a damn.

The lesson here: the next time authority figures tell you what to believe about the JFK assassination (or the RFK assassination or the MLK assassination)—without discussing evidence and being willing to debate the evidence—tune them out, change the channel, or better yet, write a letter to the editor or to the network telling them that you are “mad as hell, and aren’t going to take it anymore.”

Give us a break, Jack. I know you are a smart guy—I worked on your staff for 3 years, and saw plenty of evidence that you were an intelligent, perceptive person. You are selling yourself short by saying things that cannot be true, and you are insulting the intelligence of the American people