There is one indisputable fact in the fight that the FBI is waging against Apple: In the criminal investigation of the San Bernardino shootings, U.S. officials are pulling out all the stops. In a desperate attempt to secure the information on the alleged shooters’ iphone, the feds have even secured a court order commanding Apple to effectively work for the government.
What for? After all, both alleged shooters are dead. What’s the point of getting their iphone information if they’re both already dead?
The point is that the shooters might have had confederates, or to use a term that is popularly used in federal criminal indictments, “co-conspirators.”
As I wrote in my ebook Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, this is how we would expect the feds to operate, especially in a case involving mass murder.
Imagine that all the people killed had instead been federal officers. In that case, no one can reasonably doubt that the feds would be doubling their efforts to ferret out whether anyone else was involved in the crime. That was borne out back in 1979, when the feds were investigating the assassination of U.S. District Judge John Wood. They really pulled out all the stops in that investigation, even to the point of surreptitiously monitoring communications between the alleged conspirators and their attorneys, which most everyone knows is a grave violation of ethical principles under the law.
But that’s not what happened in the JFK assassination. In that case, the exact opposite happened. Rather than pursue the aggressive type of investigation that we would expect the feds to conduct, especially in a murder of a U.S. president, federal officials did everything they could to shut down any investigation into whether JFK’s assassination may have involved a conspiracy.
For example, only three days after JFK’s assassination and the day after Jack Ruby forever silenced Lee Harvey Oswald with another assassination, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach issued a memo that stated in part:
The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.
But how could Katzenbach know for certain that Oswald was the assassin? This was only 3 days after the assassination, after all — hardly enough time to make that type of determinative conclusion.
After all, one possibility is that Oswald was being framed for the crime, which he himself claimed up until the day he died.
Another possibility is that if Oswald really did shoot at the president, he had co-conspirators.
Why would an Assistant U.S. Attorney General be so insistent on quickly shutting down the investigation into the assassination of a U.S. president? Isn’t that enough to at least raise eyebrows?
At the very least, wouldn’t we expect the feds to at least aggressively investigate the second possibility? That’s why they’re going after Apple – to see if they can determine whether other people were involved in the crime. Why not the same aggressive investigation into the JFK assassination?
And, hey, it’s not as though there wasn’t any evidence that shots had been fired from Kennedy’s front. There were the Dallas treating physicians who stated that there was an orange-sized hole in the back of Kennedy’s head, indicating an exit wound. There were the two Dallas treating physicians who held a press conference immediately after the president was declared dead during which they stated that the president had been shot from the front — both through the throat and the head. There were the many witnesses who heard the shots coming from the front as well as those who saw smoke from the grassy knoll area in front of the president.
Shouldn’t that be enough evidence to get the feds at least a little bit interested in exploring whether shots were in fact fired from the front? If so, then why quickly shut down the investigation by pinning the crime on someone supposedly firing from the rear, especially a man who was claiming he was being framed?
Consider all of the unusual activity surrounding the autopsy on the president’s body, as I detail in my book The Kennedy Autopsy, (which has been on Amazon’s list of top-selling books on 20th-century American history for more than a year and is currently ranked #11 and has received 194 comments and a 4-star rating). Brandishing guns, a team of Secret Service agents forced their way out of Dallas’ Parkland Hospital with the president’s body, expressly prohibiting the Dallas medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, from conducting an autopsy, as required by state law.
That’s not the type of thing we would expect federal officials to do in a murder case, is it? In the San Bernardino shootings, they are presumably working closely with state law-enforcement officials. Yet, in the Kennedy assassination, they were threatening to use deadly force on any state law-enforcement official who interfered with their removal of the president’s body from Parkland Hospital.
Why is an autopsy important? Because it can tell the cause of death. It can tell whether bullets have been fired from the rear or from the front or both.
What did those Secret Service agents do with the president’s body? They transported it to Air Force One, where new President Lyndon’s Johnson was waiting for it; aides had removed seats at the back of the plane to make room for it. Then, after the plane arrived at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, the body was secretly transported to Bethesda National Medical Center, where all sorts of strange shenanigans took place, as I detail in The Kennedy Autopsy.
For example, as the Assassination Records Review Board determined in the 1990s, after more than 30 years of military secrecy surrounding the autopsy — there were two separate brain examinations as part of the autopsy.
Why is that unusual?
Two reasons: First, an autopsy ordinarily has only one examination of the brain. Second, the two examinations in the JFK autopsy involved two different brains, one that obviously did not belong to the president. See a 1998 article on this issue by George Lardner Jr. in the Washington Post entitled “Archive Photos Not of JFK’s Brain, Concludes Aide to Review Board.”
Another interesting aspect to the brain-examination mystery is that the photo of the president’s brain in the official autopsy photos depicts a full-sized brain. Moreover, the official supplemental autopsy report depicts the weight of a full-sized brain. Yet everyone who saw the brain taken out of the president’s head at the autopsy said that it was missing at 1/3-1/2 of its mass because of the gun shot that hit Kennedy in the head. At the risk of stating the obvious, a brain does not regenerate itself, especially after a person is dead.
As one reads through all the other strange occurrences surrounding the autopsy, it becomes clear that the last thing any of these military people were concerned about during the autopsy was that they would ultimately have to testify about the autopsy in a trial. It’s as if they knew that there was never going to be a trial at all. Yet, at that point — Friday night — Oswald was still alive.
Let’s not forget role of state authorities in all this. After all, in actuality the feds had no legitimate role in the investigation into JFK’s assassination, including conducting their top-secret autopsy at a military installation in Maryland. At that time, the assassination of the president was a state crime and not a federal crime.
Yet, almost immediately the feds were doing everything they could to prevent state officials from investigating whether the suspect Oswald might have had confederates. When the Dallas District Attorney’s office, for example, began alleging that Oswald shot the president as part of a communist conspiracy, Johnson and his people immediately ordered the District Attorney’s office to stop making that allegation and to simply say that Oswald alone shot the president.
Moreover, on the very day that the president was assassinated, state law enforcement officials could not study the limousine in which the president for forensics evidence. That’s because the Secret Service took it back to Washington on the very afternoon of the president’s assassination, cleaned it up, and immediately shipped it out for repairs.
Perhaps I should also mention that when the official photographer for the autopsy, John Stringer, was asked to identify the official autopsy photos in the official record, he testified that the collection contained photos he didn’t take and omitted photos that he did take. When Navy official Saundra Spencer, who worked in the White House photo lab, was asked by the ARRB to look at the collection of official photos, she testified that those were not the autopsy photos she developed on the weekend of the assassination. For example, one of the photos Spencer developed showed an orange-sized hole in the back of Kennedy’s head while the official autopsy photos show the back of Kennedy’s head to be fully intact. Finally, the official social photographer for President Kennedy, Robert Knudsen, told people that he was the official photographer for the autopsy, and yet Stringer said he was never present during the autopsy.
Of course, the mainstream media looks at all this and sees nothing abnormal. For more than 50 years, they have held that all of these occurrences are absolutely normal, notwithstanding the fact that they would (I think) scream like banshees if the same unusual conduct and passivity were to characterize the killings in San Bernardino, Boston, and others.
In fact, whenever anyone raises the notion that all of these things are somewhat bizarre, the mainstream media immediately responds with their favorite epithet: “Conspiracy theory!” Their mindset is that it is simply inconceivable that the feds were up to no good that weekend. In their minds, it is simply inconceivable that the U.S. national-security establishment was orchestrating a regime-change operation on November 22, 1963.
Of course, I’m sure that there are still people in the mainstream press who also believe that it is simply inconceivable that the U.S. national-security establishment conspired to effect regime-change operations in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1960-1963), Congo (1961), Vietnam (1963), Chile (1970-1973), and others.
Indeed, there are undoubtedly people in the mainstream press who hold that it is simply inconceivable that federal officials conspired with respect to Operation Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, Iran-Contra arms, and even Watergate.
It is simply inconceivable, the mainstream argument goes, that U.S. national-security state officials would ever conspire to do anything bad, even if they determined that it was necessary to do so to protect “national security.” (See FFF’s ebook JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board).